The Journal of Claude Fredericks

This second volume of The Journal Of Claude Fredericks extends from the late summer of 1941, when the writer, now seventeen, goes off to Harvard to enter college, through December of 1942. During the first year at Harvard he lives in Hollis Hall and studies Greek literature as well as Chinese and Japanese art and writes the many poems, often wild and untrammelled, that are, with a long series of drawings, all included in the pages of this volume. He spends the summer in New York,...
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This second volume of The Journal Of Claude Fredericks extends from the late summer of 1941, when the writer, now seventeen, goes off to Harvard to enter college, through December of 1942. During the first year at Harvard he lives in Hollis Hall and studies Greek literature as well as Chinese and Japanese art and writes the many poems, often wild and untrammelled, that are, with a long series of drawings, all included in the pages of this volume. He spends the summer in New York, living on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village, for the first month working at Byrne Hackett's Brickrow Bookshop and then, the second month, writing still other poems and other pages of this journal. The fall of 1942 is again spent at Harvard, where he lives in Eliot House and begins the study of Sanskrit as well as continuing the study of Greek. There is in these pages the account in great detail of the many events and vicissitudes a life so variously led arouses. A variety of friendships are formed ones with Anthony Clark, with May Sarton and her father the historian of science and his wife, with John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz, in Boston with Paul Doguereau and Fanny Mason to mention a few of them as well as descriptions of innumerable people casually met and observed. There are accounts of many concerts heard Baroque music and 18th and early 19th Century chamber music in particular and of long hours in museums in Cambridge, Boston, and New York. There is, most of all, a constant study of the wide range of feelings life arouses in the mind of a boy of eighteen who is discovering, for a first time, seemingly the whole world in all its vast multiplicity.