No offense intended, but it would never occur to me to look for the best minds in any generation in an undergraduate English department anywhere.

From God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut By John Leonard in 2007.  The subheading is Kurt Vonnegut, who passed away Wednesday, will be remembered for his brilliant, cynical and often depressing humor.

When they were inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1973, Kurt Vonnegut said of Allen Ginsberg: “I like ‘Howl’ a lot. Who wouldn’t? It just doesn’t have much to do with me or what happened to my friends. For one thing, I believe that the best minds of my generation were probably musicians and physicists and mathematicians and biologists and archaeologists and chess masters and so on, and Ginsberg’s closest friends, if I’m not mistaken, were undergraduates in the English department of Columbia University. No offense intended, but it would never occur to me to look for the best minds in any generation in an undergraduate English department anywhere. I would certainly try the physics department or the music department first — and after that biochemistry. Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that.”

Well when you say things like this you do not ingratiate yourself with the sort of people whose racket it is to nominate you for things like Nobel Prizes. You may get to eat at the consulate here in New York, but not at Town Hall in Stockholm with your face on a postage stamp. Once upon a very long time ago I asked him to review a Joe Heller novel for The New York Times. This is how he concluded his essay on Something Happened: “I say that this is the most memorable, and therefore the most permanent variation on a familiar theme, and that it says baldly what the other variations only implied, what the other variations tried with desperate sentimentality not to imply: That many lives, judged by the standards of the people who live them, are simply not worth living.”