IN THE autumn of 1916 I was slowly drowning as a student of mechanical engineering at Cornell; in my courses in calculus and physics I had the feeling that I was going down for the third time. I had just squeaked through my freshman year, held on perhaps because I weighed 94 pounds and was one of the last crop of coxswains to hear Coach Courtney's high, rasping commands. Now as a sophomore I was on probation, and it was evident that my time as an engineer was limited. I looked for an honorable exit, preferably one that would get me away before the final examinations in the spring of 1917, and I found it as a volunteer ambulance driver in the French Army. We were expected to pay our passage across the Atlantic, and although our luggage was severely limited, it seemed perfectly reasonable to pack in my diminutive trunk a Slazenger tennis racket which I hoped to use on leave.

The S. S. Espagne will always float in my mind as the most glamorous ship in the French Line. This was my first trip abroad; Ithaca was the farthest I had ever been from my home in New Jersey, and every impression was as fresh as red paint. I was nineteen, I was shy, and in my gawky, ill-fitting uniform I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible in what was evidently a very gay company.

There were French officers in their sky-blue and scarlet kepis; a detachment of American nurses, all trim and a few very pretty; pilots returning to the Lafayette Flying Corps, some wearing their decorations; there was a long, emaciated Belgian officer stretched out in his steamer chair, a victim of one of the first gas attacks, now returning from Tucson, white and without hope; there was Cole Porter, with his harmonica on which he played his latest hit, "I've a Shooting Box in Scotland, I've a Castle in Touraine"; there was a bosomy Red Cross worker who seemed to enjoy life after dark in a lifeboat; and, youngest of all, were the several hundred of us volunteers in the American Field Service, on our way to drive ambulances or ammunition camions as the French Army would decide.

I was painfully conscious of my uniform. I had always been neat about my clothes, and now here I was decked out as a caricature in khaki. My father's shirtmaker was to blame. Dad had taken me up to be measured for four khaki shirts of the warmest flannel; but the shirtmaker had got drunk, and instead of remembering my small dimensions, he made them to fit Dad, who was a six-footer with a 15-1/2-inch collar. The results were appalling. I had to double the cuffs back, and the folds of extra cloth made my tunic bulge and my neck gape. I knew I could remedy all of this as soon as I got to Paris. Meantime I suffered acutely even when standing in the shadow.

Our ship was unescorted, and when we came within range of the U-boats we all went on the alert. There were lifeboat drills, and at night every porthole and companionway was blacked out. Those of us who patrolled the deck were cautioned against lighting cigarettes, and we were ordered not to wear luminous wrist watches. We strained our eyes to scan the dark, heaving water, and it seemed just a shade theatrical; we all knew of the sinking of the Lusitania but we were too determined to believe that it could happen to us. We were going to France.

There was something strange and toylike about Bordeaux harbor as we looked down from our high deck, but when we marched ashore, the people who paused to watch us smiled and obviously meant us well in their incomprehensible French. I remember the hard wooden benches of the third-class compartment, and the chocolat Menier and the tough, crusty bread which we munched as we jogged along; I slept, and awoke as we entered the vast trainyards of Paris, and then a bus swept us into the full-bloom beauty of the city itself, which we glimpsed on our way to the Parc at Rue Raynouard.

We signed all the essential documents, were addressed by A. Piatt Andrew, our Colonel, and were then given the rest of the day off. I parked my tennis racket at the University Club and made for an English tailor where I ordered a whipcord uniform and light cotton shirts (sitting in my underwear in the shirtmaker's dressing room while the first of them was stitched so as to be free at last of that cursed hot flannel); I had my first dinner and my first champagne at the Hôtel Continental, and afterwards, with Harry Crosby and Tote Fearing, I spent my first evening at the Follies. The uniforms, the fantastic women, the color and vitality of the stage where the argot was quicker than we could follow, the bar during intermission where I had my first drink with an Australian ("Hi, digger, what'll you have?") --- this hypnotic experience of sound and sex and laughter was bound together and made real by a sense of exhilaration, by the feeling that we were all in this show together.

We were assigned to the Moroccan Division; 1st and 3rd Zouaves; 1st and 3rd Tirailleurs, and the Spahi cavalry. Here the French educated us in many things: to speak French (since they manifestly had no intention of speaking English); to eat horsemeat, which was our main ration at the training camp; to drive our ambulances with a respect for shattered men; to pause and check the shelling before committing ourselves to any crossroads within range of the Germans; and at Verdun, where we served that July and again that November, to do our work by night over roads deep in mud and wrecked beyond belief.

Our real instructors were the brancardiers, the stretcherbearers, men in their gray fifties who had been pulled out of the infantry and assigned to the tender but hazardous task of conveying the wounded in their pousse-pousses from the front line to the poste de secours. These men were old enough to be our fathers, they had seen more than they wanted of death, and yet they were endlessly patient in their teaching of us raw Americans, to whom a pile of stiffs under a tarpaulin in the shed behind the poste was still a curiosity to be stared at. The brancardiers taught us their card games and how to enjoy pinard at their popote. They taught us the humor and irony of the French newspapers; they taught us tenacity and, in their handling of the wounded, the meaning of mercy. And finally, in those perilous days of March 1918, when the Germans had broken through at St. Quentin, they showed us the anguish which is in every Frenchman's eyes when his country seems dreadfully in peril.

Clemenceau and Foch and "Papa" Joffre were the revered leaders then, but the men who imbued us with France, and whose lessons after forty years I still remember, were those weary but tenacious old bleus.

My first permission occurred after a spell of duty before St. Quentin and a second at Verdun. In September I picked up my racket in Paris, bought a few books at Brentano's --- Sonia by Stephen McKenna, Lockhart's Napoleon, and Le Feu by Barbusse --- and with a fellow driver, Dick Salinger, boarded the night train for Nice. It took us thirty-six hours, for we were sidetracked all the way down to let through the French troop trains which were coming to the rescue of the Italians on the Piave. We had been offered the most exquisite villa overlooking the harbor of Villefranche, a sanctuary into which French destroyers escorted their convoys at dusk, with much signaling and tinkling of bells. The house --- General Pershing was to occupy it a month later --- was luxurious, with long French windows looking out over the terraces to the Mediterranean. A marvelous chef, delicious wines, and no one at home but ourselves. As a contrast to Houdainville and Carrière-Sud, our mucky and most unpleasant poste de secours, it was almost unbelievable. We lay abed until nine, had our breakfast --- I remember the great fistfuls of heavy purple grapes --- in the sunlight before the open French windows, and at half-past ten I took the tram for Nice. The secretary of the Nice Lawn Tennis Club was Monsieur Lenglen, father of the famous Suzanne. He it was who provided me with white flannels, tennis shirts, and a guest card. And for five mornings in a row I rallied and played a set or two with Suzanne. My service began to come back, and in time I was able to take a couple of games a set from her. Suzanne was a brunette, no beauty but soignée. She played in white, pleated skirts above the knee, and over her dark hair she wore a white bandeau. Her footwork was sure as a ballet dancer's, and her ground strokes, forehand and backhand, were hit with superb length and accuracy. On Sundays at Monte Carlo she took part in exhibition matches for the Red Cross with the best three men available, and she passed them at the net far more often than they could pass her. Only her serve was vulnerable by our standards. The pity was that she had not come to America in 1913 when Dick Williams --- R. Norris Williams, her hero and a member of the Davis Cup Team --- urged her to. No woman in the country could have beaten her then, I feel sure. When she did come after the war it was too late, for she had passed her peak.

On my last day of leave, I played with her until an hour before train time and in one set won three games (tenderness?). Later, as I was rushing to change, I managed to leave my wallet behind in the borrowed flannels. But we had exchanged addresses --- I had to if I were ever going to convince the Section that I had met her --- and Suzanne's scrawl on that bit of white paper was as valuable to me as the wallet itself which contained fourteen francs and which came back in a package of her wrapping.

There were five Harvard men in my Section: Richmond Fearing, Philip Shepley, Stuart Kaiser, Dick Salinger, and Harry Crosby. I was amused by their flat "a" and impressed by their quiet confidence. Tote Fearing and Stu Kaiser spoke French fluently. Dick Salinger had already made his first attempts at playwriting under Professor George Pierce Baker, and twice in that summer of 1917 it surprised me to find him writing sonnets for the American Field Service Bulletin. Among the six of us were four books which we circulated in the Section and gnawed at when we were en repos. Harry contributed the Oxford Book of English Verse, and Stuart Pickwick Papers; I can't remember who owned Apollo: The History of Art, and my offering was Lockhart's Napoleon.

Of the five, Harry Crosby was the most impulsive as he was the most generous. We had made friends on the Espagne coming over, and when the ambulances were assigned to us, two men to a Fiat, Harry and I became driving partners. It was a lucky partnership for me in many ways: Harry was a fast and confident driver --- fast perhaps is not the word for those heavy lumbering Fiat ambulances --- and as co-pilot I began to observe his competence. Harry also set me a pace in his writing, for he was the swiftest and most spontaneous letter writer I have ever known. I can see us now, sitting side by side in the tail of the ambulance, half in sunlight, half in shadow, while he sprinted through note after note to Sister, Ella, Kitza, Beanie, his friends back home on the North Shore, Harry now talking to them, now talking to me, as I slowly and conscientiously composed a letter to my family. He wrote as he talked, and his infectious, staccato letters brought him five times the correspondence the rest of us had.

On my return from leave I found Harry in a highly nervous state. His ambulance had received a direct hit at the very instant he had arrived, empty, at a forward poste. He was still at the wheel and the fountain of the explosion which enveloped him, and totally destroyed the car, had carved his silhouette on the backboard but had nicked him only in the little finger. I have never known a closer shave and the shock of it was plain to see.

Our Christmas was celebrated in the Vosges. The ambulances were parked two feet deep in snow on the grounds of a château at Darney. Our Moroccans lived hermetically sealed in Moslem warmth in barns and barracks, and we twenty Americans were concentrated in a brick toolshed, lit by one window, heated by one potbellied stove; here we waited for the Christmas letters and packages that never came. How could the French postal service know where we were, how could they care? But they came on January 1; a French camion crunched up the driveway and when the tail was lowered out poured bag upon bag upon bag of mail, parcels, love in familiar handwriting. This was the day. The lieutenant secured permission for us to dine in the conservatory of the château, the native Vouvray was brought up from the village and a detail helped Leonard, our cook, prepare the steaks and pommes frites. Meantime in the candle-lit toolshed, seated on our stretchers, we were deep in paper, opening, ejaculating and comparing. Johnny Mungan said how would it be if we all chipped in twenty francs each, ten to go to the guy who got the goofiest gift, ten for the goofiest letter --- and the pot was collected. After the dinner, after the toasts, after the singing and during the cognac, the judging began. Now I had five aunts and as I was their only nephew overseas they had all been knitting for me. From their gifts I selected three entries: a khaki knitted helmet with no face, a pair of giant woolen bootees to be worn over one's rubber boots, and a narrow knitted band of camel's-hair wool with cord ends. "This, my dear Ted," wrote Aunt Liz, "is what they call a Cootie String. We are told that if you tie it around your waist the little rodents are attracted by the body's warmth and when they have gathered sufficiently in the wool, you go off by yourself, detach it, and hang it on a tree." I was awarded the first prize for gifts, but there were those who said I should have had both.

The French war rations agreed with me and, as a late-starter, I was to grow six inches and put on thirty pounds during my two years overseas. The fact that my war letters drew the favorable comment of a New York editor also left its seed of hope. Gradually, I was acquiring a feeling of self-possession.

When men are hard-driven, as in war, they will sleep anywhere: in an abri or foxhole or sitting upright in a bucking plane or jeep. Napoleon's officers, those who still had horses, must have slept in the saddle on the long bitter retreat from Moscow, and so too Jeb Stuart's cavalry walking their horses once they were inside the Virginia lines after a raid. I fell asleep twice while driving my ambulance, once at Verdun and again at the time of the German breakthrough in March 1918. In each case the ambulance was empty, and I was returning to the front after a long, torturing drive with seriously wounded men who cried out and beat with their fists against the side of the ambulance. When at last they were unloaded at the field hospital, one dead, two living, I was given a shot of la gniole, French white mule, and a mug of scalding coffee, and then with my sheepskin collar up about my ears I started back to the lines in the pre-dawn cold. No lights, and the little Model T Ford, so much more limber and maneuverable than the Fiat, clicking off the kilometers. We had no windshields, and the wind was so penetrating that I stopped to bunch a blessé blanket around my shoulders. I could feel the doze coming, and to fight it off I kept banging my head with my tin hat. For a split instant I was back with the family in the library at "1279," with Mother singing, and then I was flung awake as the Ford rocked over tree roots, plowed through the roadside ditch, and hung itself halfway up on the muddy bank. From which as the sun rose we were extricated by the crew of a French 75; the radiator had boiled over and the rubber connection jerked loose, otherwise no damage to the Model T.

But what remained in the back room of the mind, stored away like an unhung painting, was not the comedy of that smoky dawn, with the artillery putting me back on the road, nor the fact that in swerving off the road I had missed colliding with a tree by the narrowest margin. What remained and is still there is the inescapable anguish of the drive in: leaving the poste de secours at midnight with the living load, edging into low gear through the slithering mud of the sunken road, lurching in and out of the water-filled shell holes while the voices behind me cried Doucement! doucement!" --- past our batteries which made the whole car shudder when they fired, past the crossroads, past the ghostly Indo-Chinese who were silently filling in the worst of the craters, and then the long grind up the hill which was in clear sight of the Germans by day. Not until we had topped that rise with its walls of tattered camouflage could I ease the pressure on the left pedal and let the Ford into high. It was probably not more than forty minutes from the forward poste to that point, but in terms of vicarious suffering it felt like infinity.

On one run, in the summer of 1918, I carried a French colonel who had been dreadfully wounded and was bleeding internally. He was clearheaded, very pale, and calm, and he smiled at me as they were loading his stretcher into the holders. All through the early torture I could hear the priest who was riding with him talking in a low voice. We came to the long hill, and as we neared the top I suppose I let up on the low pedal too soon. The Ford bucked and stopped; and at that instant, so the priest told me afterwards, the colonel died. Had I driven better, could I have got him back alive? The question kept recurring in my mind long after the Armistice, when I was in college and suffering from insomnia. Again in my dream I would be lurching through the mud, grinding up the hill incapable of averting what was to happen. Insomnia is a form of self-examination, and perhaps it is just as well that those who have been to war should be left with such reminders of guilt and compassion.

IN THE summer of 1919 I applied for my admission to Harvard with the cocky assurance common to all discharged veterans. I was twenty-one, I had been decorated with a Croix de Guerre, I had plenty to write about, and I saw no reason why I couldn't qualify for a major in English within a year, or perhaps a year and a half. The Dean of Admissions thought otherwise. He pointed out that my grades in mechanical engineering at Cornell were either just passing or flat failure. He said that Harvard rarely granted anyone a degree in less than two years, and since I was transferring to a new field, I should be admitted as an unclassified student and advance as rapidly as I was able.

Cooled off but still cocky, I arrived in Cambridge the day college opened and after registration I went out to search for a room. As the hours lengthened, the prospects seemed less and less encouraging: each involved three or four flights of stairs ending in a small room under the eaves. I worked my way along Mt. Auburn Street (known as the "Gold Coast," though I didn't know it) and eventually came to a pie-shaped brick building with an odd but discernible face on its rounded front. This, as I was to learn later, was the home of the Harvard Lampoon. At the moment its janitor, a tough little number in a dusty derby, sat picking his teeth on the steps.

"Know of any good rooms around here?" I asked. He looked me over for the fish-out-of-water that I was. "Well," he said, indicating a handsome stone façade halfway up a side street, "why don't you try up there? They might have something for you."

So over I went and rang the bell, and when a white-coated steward opened the door, I inquired if they had any rooms to rent.

"This is the Delphic Club," he said, and shut the door firmly in my face.

When I turned back, my helpful guide had disappeared. Somewhat chastened, I continued on into the less collegiate part of Mt. Auburn Street.

Opposite the new Catholic church was a humble frame building and in the window the beckoning sign ROOM FOR RENT.

Miss Phelan, the landlady, as Irish as she was genial, showed me what she had: a bedroom and study on the ground floor. The price was more than I thought I could afford, and while I was hesitating, she led me upstairs. "Here is the bathroom," she said, "and these are our prize rooms" --- indicating the suite directly above mine. "They belong to Mr. Hillyer, the poet. He teaches in the English Department."

Prize rooms they certainly were, with waxed hardwood floors, a fireplace with birch logs, chintz curtains at the windows, old prints (two of them, I noticed, of Queen Elizabeth), bookshelves to the ceiling, and in the corner a tea table with what looked to be old china.

Robert Hillyer's room was the luckiest thing that happened to me that year. It was so attractive, after the bare, grim cubicles I had been inspecting, that it made me want to stay; and my acquaintance with Bob, which grew into friendship, added an extra dimension to my education. He was enough older to be my mentor, and his knowledge and love of English were contagious.

This was in the age of Prohibition when cocktails were deviously concocted. My father occasionally supplied me with New Jersey applejack, and this I shared with Bob and his friends. They were a remarkable group: Foster Damon, who was working on his book on Blake; Stewart Mitchell, the managing editor of The Dial; Charles Brackett, who had just sold two stories to the Saturday Evening Post and was about ready to quit the Law School; Malcolm Cowley, in his last year as an undergraduate; John Dos Passos, who was working on his Three Soldiers, and good-natured Ronald Levinson, the classicist, who kept the peace when temperaments clashed. Foster and Charlie Brackett had a natural antipathy for each other. They were both fencers, and lacking foils they would lunge at each other using their right arms as weapons and with enough thrust to imperil Bob's old teacups.

I am gregarious by nature, and what saved me from going too social was the talk and intentness of this group. They lived for writing and they were nourished on books. Secretly I was appalled by how much more they had read than I; now I was trying to catch up, and I remember how surprised I was when Bob remarked casually that his book learning was behind him. He had done it in his years at Kent and Harvard before he went into the service. He had done it; it was in his mind and stored away.

Naturally what Bob did was to share his familiars with me, freshening my understanding of Spenser's Faerie Queene and Hakluyt's Voyages, and strange books like Arthur Machen's The Hill of Dreams and W. H. Hudson's Green Mansions and always the Elizabethan poets.

In English A, where I did a good deal of writing about the war, my instructor was Allen French, the Concord historian. He marked my papers with enough A's so that in November I was promoted out of the class. He also invited me to his home in Concord, and on our walks though that village and to Walden he gave me a picture of the Alcotts and Hawthorne, of Emerson and Thoreau I have never forgotten.

The panoramic course in English literature was a larger arch. Here we were lectured to by the big men in the Department, the most remarkable galaxy of English scholars in any faculty here or abroad. F. N. Robinson with his mellifluous voice introduced us to Chaucer; George Lyman Kittredge, the most picturesque professor in the Yard --- white beard, immaculate gray suit and sparkling eyes --- made us respect the rigorous discipline with which he examined each line of Shakespeare. George Pierce Baker, who had been developing young playwrights like Eugene O'Neill in his 47 Workshop, lectured to us on the Elizabethan stage and on Restoration comedy. John Livingston Lowes, a tiny man to hold such a sepulchral voice and such vast scholarship, spoke to us on Milton; Charles Townsend Copeland on Johnson and his circle; and Bliss Perry, with his charming smile, and in phrases still with the dew fresh on them, deepened our appreciation of the Romantic poets. The terse and brilliant insight they gave us of their chosen fields removed my blinders and left me with the humiliating realization that I knew so little.

I returned home Christmas vacation grimly aware that it would be years before I made up for lost time, and asking myself whether the degree was worth the long pull or whether I would be happier going straight to work. Mother said to hang on and that I would know the answer by June.

BY JUNE of 1920, the end of my first year at Harvard, several things had become undeniably clear to me. My love for English, for reading, and for writing was no mere whim: this was something to which I could devote myself, though I did not know exactly in what way, for the rest of my life. Secondly, I was appallingly ill-read. It humiliated me to realize what vast stretches there were in English literature about which I knew little or nothing. To begin to fill in these lacunae would require at least two more years of college, and since my father was having a very rough time in the textile business and since I was the oldest of six, five of whom were of school age, I should have to find some way of earning my keep if I was to continue at Harvard. In this, as in so many other ways, Dean L. B. R. Briggs helped to steer me. He nominated me for the William Meeker Scholarship, a scholarship for an undergraduate showing aptitude in English, which had just been established in memory of Bill Meeker who had been killed in the war. This took care of my tuition; and a war veteran, who was still being treated for his wounds and who felt unequal to the struggle in Cambridge, turned over to me a job which was to pay for my room and board for the next two years, the assignment of covering Harvard for the Boston Evening Transcript.

With these two assets in hand, I knew that I could re-enter in September, but the pressing question was where could I earn the most in the three months of summer vacation. The newspapers that spring had been publishing stories about the bumper wheat crop, larger even than the war crop of 1918, and placards had been posted in Cambridge reading HARVEST HANDS WANTED! SEVEN DOLLARS A DAY AND KEEP. FOLLOW THE THRESHER FROM OKLAHOMA TO CANADA! Well, why not? I thought. Ninety days' labor multiplied by $7 would pay my round trip and leave a tidy surplus. The placard said that applicants should present themselves at the Boston Chamber of Commerce, which I did, and there was given a small voucher reading that "to the best of our knowledge the undersigned is entitled to serve as a harvest hand . . ." I was told to present this at the Kansas City office of the Chamber of Commerce, where I should find my assignment. The voucher had been multigraphed on carbon paper just about as flimsy as my qualifications, I thought, for up till now I had kept at a respectful distance from farming of any kind. The only implement I knew how to use was a snow shovel.

The cash left over from Harvard was enough to buy my ticket to Kansas City and leave me a $20 margin. With this and my precious voucher and an overnight bag I made the trip. At Kansas City I found an army surplus store where I bought overalls, three pairs of socks, blue denims, heavy shoes, and a wide-brim straw hat. I then repaired to the men's room in the basement of the Muehlebach Hotel. There I changed my identity and emerged in the regalia of a harvest hand. At least it was what a lot of other people in Kansas City were wearing. But the clerk behind the wicket to whom I presented my slip at the Chamber of Commerce seemed less than excited by the prospect I offered. "Let's see," he said as he consulted a large map on cardboard, "they're harvesting right now in the vicinity of Colby. If you'll present that slip of yours to Mr. Lauterbach---he's head of the bank there---he'll tell you what to do." "Colby! " I said. "I thought the wheatfields were here."

"Brother," he said kindly, "you've got to go a hundred and sixty-five miles farther west before that bit of paper is worth a nickel."

The following morning at 6 A.M. I stepped down off the train at Colby, then the center of the migrating labor for the wheatfields. I had no breakfast, only a plate of soup the night before, and I was down to 23 cents; hungrily I inquired the way to Mr. Lauterbach's house, a neat, white-frame dwelling not far from Main Street. It was Mrs. Lauterbach who came to meet me, smiling and German. She must have seen that I was famished, for soon I was seated on the porch step gorging myself on a plate of ham and eggs and chips. Then her husband appeared and to him I surrendered at last my priceless voucher. He read it without quivering an eyelid. "Go back to Main Street," he said, "and sit down there on a curb with the others. That's where they'll sign you on. Good luck!" And we shook hands.

They had been digging up the pavement on Colby's one thoroughfare, and on the facing curb with their feet in the dust sat two long rows of tanned, big-fisted men. I joined the end and listened. Most of them, it seems, had been harvesting for the past fortnight on the sections 20 to 25 miles to the south. Now, as in a big checker game, they were passing through ---leaping over, as it were, the men who were presently employed in order to get the next jobs to the north. The man beside me, who had been sizing me up as an Easterner, said kindly, "When you get paid off, Slim, don't carry your money. Buy an express check. There're too many guys who'll work you over when you're asleep." Even as we were talking, Fords in clouds of dust came rattling in at either end of the street, and from them stepped a farm owner or foreman who walked down the line in quiet scrutiny. The rugged and competent guys were signed up before 10 o'clock, and by noon the choice had gotten down to the smaller apples, and to me.

I was employed by a Mr. Carpenter, one of three brothers who had married sisters and whose farms adjoined each other ten miles from town. Mr. Carpenter was harvesting two sections and a half, and for that purpose he needed four harvest hands, two for each header-box, a "stacker" whom he found in old Pops, a 71-year-old pioneer neighbor, and the threshing machine which he rented and operated.

I have never lived as long on any single day as I did on that header-box. My partner, a high school student five years my junior, was born to the pitchfork, and he played it as rhythmically as if he were playing a violin. I played mine as if it were a snow shovel, digging, jerking and heaving at the in-pouring wheat in a series of convulsions that raised blisters on my hands and thirst in my throat. We had a stone crock full of water at the head of the wagon, and during the twenty minutes it took us to empty the box I could hardly wait until the jug was uncovered. I had neither the rhythm nor the accuracy of the native; had I been able to ease the tension of the work, stretching it out for an hour longer each day, I think that by the end of a week I should have been able to carry my share --- but this was harvest labor at harvest wages. We slept in the haymow, awoke at 5 and caught the horses in the corral. We had our breakfast and were in the fields by 7, worked straight through until noon, ate a huge lunch with grease gravy and sour pork, lolled in the shade until 1:30, and then went at it again until after 5 o'clock. Full of hope at sunrise, I was burnt to a crisp by 11 and literally limp as a wet rag when the evening wind began to cool us off. After supper, which came out of cans and was just as heavy as lunch, the local boys took turns wrestling the stranger in our midst, a cowboy from Wyoming, while I lay on the ground, propping my head up, watching but too weary to cheer.

The cowboy was a stranger, but of course I was a freak. They called me Slim-Fats, Heavy, Slim are the obvious labels if no more familiar nickname is available --- and almost everything I did had for them its amusing side, which they accepted, for the most part, with solemn and kindly attention. The boss invited me one morning to hitch the team on my header-box. The horses were patient and I did exactly as I thought I had been told, except that somehow when the last trace was in place, the entire contraption --- wagon tongue, leather traces and all --- had sunk to the level of the horses' hocks, a bare six inches above the earth. I was puzzling over this, wondering what I'd left out, when the explosion of laughter poured in from every crack and crevice where the other members of the crew had been watching the performance. On Saturday after work my partner and I followed old Pops across the fields and through the bed of a dried-up creek (where for one brief instant I almost stepped on a sunning rattler) to see the sod house in which Pops, a little bald eagle who might have been painted by Grant Wood, and his sweet-faced, gentle wife had lived during their first decade in Kansas. That meager little hut, half underground, with its floor of hard-packed earth, gave me a clearer understanding of pioneer homesteading than ever I had had from a book, just as the wind rustling the corn and the wheatfields under the full moon with the sound almost of running water gave me the sense of the space and beauty of these endless plains.

Threshing, as anyone knows, requires perfect teamwork.

The field is divided in half, and each of the two teams must fill and empty its header-box of wheat in the same space of time, in order that the threshing machine need never halt in its pendulum progress. It soon became evident that my inefficiency was putting too much work on my partner and was slowing down our team and thus the action of the entire crew. By midafternoon, the threshing machine would be waiting for us to unload. The evening of the seventh day in friendly agreement the boss paid me off, and next morning I trudged back to town, the bills in my socks lest I be stuck up by one of the other jobless hands.

Back in Colby, for the first time in life I faced the acute question of self-support. Up one side of Main Street and down the other I went looking for work. There were three jobs open. The painter needed an assistant, but to qualify I had first to join the union, which would require both time and money. Roadbuilding was going on, and the foreman offered me a job with the "other Mexicans," provided I could stand the sun --- in the heat of the day it was well over 100 degrees --- and the digging. My blistered hands and the memory of the fields disqualified me. But in the window of the Athens Cafe was a sign, DISHWASHERS WANTED. I applied and was accepted. Terms: bed (shared with another man, the cook) ; board (such as I had the stomach for) ; and two dollars and a half a day. The pillow was so grimy that I used to spread my one clean handkerchief over the square of it I expected to sleep on. The cook, not much given to baths, got drunk on Saturday nights on Ed Pinard's hair tonic which did not improve either his odor or his esprit de corps. Saturday night was a time to endure, and since I was on too familiar terms with the food we were serving, I used to blow myself to a dinner at the other restaurant in town with which we were competing but about whose food I still had some illusions. We did our biggest business over the weekend, and I remember coming down one Saturday morning at 6 just as the cook opened the door of the big old-fashioned icebox. He drew his head back in dismay. "Boy! Smell those sausages. They sure won't last till Monday." And without a change in his voice he said, "Slim, chalk up on the board 'Special Today---Wheat Cakes and Sausage.'"

The work was dirtier than any KP I was ever sentenced to in the army, while the temperature in the kitchen was enough to blister even a Harvard veneer. My hours were from 6 to 6. Breakfast started briskly at 6:30; t was served table d'hôte and called for five (granite) plates and one cup to the order. The staple was buckwheat cakes, and when cold they served me admirably as swabs for syrup or gravy. Midmorning and afternoon I drew my day's supply of hot water from the bakery next door. Other times I used a tin scraper, bent from a can, and bread crusts to enforce my cold rinse. It was not a finicky business. During my time eight men and one woman worked and talked beside me at the sink. The men, going north to new jobs, would put in for a day for the sake of three square meals. The woman, with her husband, a Swedish carpenter, was working her way East. She could engineer the job far better than I, and while she was there I surrendered the lead to her. So I washed dishes for two weeks ---and never broke one! (It would have taken a hammer.) Then I headed East, poorer and wiser. But the experience, something over a month in all, was as valuable to me as the money I made in succeeding summers as a tutor.

I came back to Harvard with more to write about, and write I did, three times a week for the Transcript and every weekend for my course in composition under Dean Briggs. I wrote a dozen short stories for him and a bundle of essays, and the A he gave me in English 5 at the year's end was the grade that meant most to me in college. One of my stories, a love affair in the Blue Ridge Mountains entitled "Ink," won a contest sponsored by the Harvard Advocate. A prize of $25 in cash had been announced, but the Advocate was hard up those days and instead of paying me they elected me to the staff, no money changed hands, and everyone was satisfied.

As the assistant editor of the Advocate, I soon discovered that our circulation was limited to members of the freshman class and to the parents, aunts, and uncles of the editors. Indeed we were so short of cash and advertising that under the prodding of our business manager, Roy Larsen, we decided to produce a special issue, an issue which would satirize some well-known New England institution. The Lampoon had sold out several editions in Boston and New York of its parody issue of the Transcript, and as we looked over the field it was clear that the Atlantic Monthly was our nearest and most available target. There were five editors of the Advocate: we familiarized ourselves with the twelve issues of the Atlantic for the previous year, 1920, and then divided up the contents by five.

In that year Ellery Sedgwick, the Atlantic's editor, had published at length a sentimental, somewhat questionable diary by Opal Whiteley. So for our leader Stedman Buttrick contributed "The Journal of a Bleeding Heart" by Isette Likely. Mr. Sedgwick seemed to have a fondness for articles written by inmates of American prisons who had different reasons for objecting to their board and lodgings; so in second place we ran an article entitled "Prison Cruelty in the Harvard Yard." The Atlantic of 1920 was concerned about the morals of the Younger Generation, and to ridicule this alarm I wrote a paper on babies, "Babes I Have Known." From the twelve issues we picked out four poems, which we reprinted with slightly lubricous alterations, giving them in each case what seemed to us a more appropriate title. Roy Larsen had no trouble soliciting advertisements for this issue of the Advocate, and on the cover we superimposed a replica of the Atlantic's buff-brown table of contents so that at a distance we looked like a somewhat thinner brother of the famous sheet.

When the advance copies came off the press, William Whitman, the president of the Advocate, and I went in to see Mr. Sedgwick. I remember with what trepidation we entered his big high-ceilinged office on Arlington Street (the room I have occupied since 1938), and how I screened our presentation copy behind my back as we approached his desk and shook hands. When we were seated and he asked us what he could do for us, I solemnly laid the copy before him. His face was expressionless as he skimmed the table of contents; then with a snort he began reading in and out of the opening pages. When his snort turned into laughter, our case was won. We left with an order for 1000 copies which he intended to distribute to the colleges using the Atlantic in their English courses.

As a senior editor with a paying job in journalism, I had come to know the abler writers then in college. There were two freshmen whose work we were publishing in the Advocate:

Walter D. Edmonds, who came from upstate New York and had already begun to write about the Canal country, and Oliver LaFarge, who with his high cheekbones and jet-black hair looked like one of the Indians he was later to dramatize, and whose nickname "Inky" could have come either from his hair or from the ink on his fingers. These two, together with Berry Fleming, who lived across the hall from me in Hollis Hall, were our three best in fiction. Bill Whitman, my roommate, and David McCord of the Lampoon were the best of our poets; John Finley, Jr., then as now was the leading classicist; and in my class with Dean Briggs was a short, fastidious man from Kansas City who rather shocked the Dean with his allusions to sex and who gave evidence of being a good critic. His name was Virgil Thomson.

Fair, with a Scopas profile, John Mason Brown was the best talker of us all; he had an outrageous wit and he emphasized his points with his chin, lifted when he was in earnest, lowered when in doubt or in mirthful acknowledgment that he had been scored on. He had come to Harvard to study English literature and, more particularly, the theater. With Donald Oenslager to design the sets, he became the leading spirit in the Dramatic Club, and with Philip Barry he became one of the shining lights in Professor Baker's famous 47 Workshop (of which President Lowell did not approve). Since he hailed from Kentucky and was master of every variation of the Southern accent from Lady Baltimore cake to the sugar cane of Louisiana, he was constantly being cast for Colonel-Massa parts and as constantly walking out of them into something better in G. B. Shaw, Sheridan, or Galsworthy. The Signet Club table was never happier than when he was at the center of it, and the mischief he made with Louis Allard, Wheeler Williams, and Dave McCord I grin to remember. When he graduated summa cum laude in 1923 and went abroad to study theatrical production in Scandinavia and the Continent, John was at the point of his career when he could have been actor, author, or dramatic critic. But not for him "the road not taken." He has lived to be all three.

I have a memory for details, and there are certain scenes at Harvard which I like to sort through. I remember Professor Kirsopp Lake lecturing to us in his Oxford accent about the Old Testament, and how the big lecture hall would hush as with tears in his eyes he talked about Moses and the Promised Land; square-cut Charles Homer Haskins, the historian, called the "Iron Duke," and what a different, vital world he opened for us in his discussion of the medieval mind; and little John Livingston Lowes reading to us from manuscript the chapters of his new book, The Road to Xanadu. In my first seminar with him I came to discuss the subject of my long thesis. "I thought, sir," I began confidently, "that I would like to write about the love influence on the poetry of Byron and Keats." (All this in three months!) Lowes never cracked a smile. "Isn't that rather a large assignment, Mr. Weeks? Wouldn't it be better to concentrate on one?" he queried. "Which would you suggest?" I asked. "Keats," he said gravely, and the matter was settled.

Professors were more accessible then than they are now. Dean and Mrs. Briggs used to have open house every Thursday, and a wide circle of graduates and undergraduates would form about her rocking chair where she sat knitting as Jonathan, the cat, played in and out of her skirts; it was a pleasure and lesson to hear the Dean direct the talk so that everyone got his word in and no one monopolized. And I remember Copey's beautiful candle-lit rooms in the south entry of Hollis, with books from floor to ceiling, and on the floor undergraduates packed as close as their hunkers would permit, listening to Copey read aloud, or meeting for the first time a great editor like Max Perkins or hearing Dr. Morton Prince expatiate on automatic writing --- a subject, as he told us, on which Gertrude Stein had written a thesis for William James when she was at Radcliffe.

Dean Briggs was my mentor, and I worked for him as for no other. Once a month I climbed the three flights to his office under the eaves of University Hall, and as we went over my compositions I received his friendly guidance, and those bits of wisdom and stimulus which so endeared him to students. Always I meant to ask him whether he thought I was justified in pursuing a literary career, but somehow the question was never put into words. He never let it be; instead he would ask how I was sleeping made curious, no doubt, by the dark circles under my eyes, for I lived with a good deal of insomnia those days; and hearing my candid reply, he prescribed a glass of milk and a few pages of Thomson's Seasons which he said was the most quieting poem in the English language. He urged me to try for the Boylston Prize in Public Speaking, and when I won it with my recitation of Kipling's short story, "Wee Willie Winkie," he was pleased, and said that with my memory and lack of nervousness I should continue to speak when I had the chance.

THERE are advantages in crossing the Atlantic on a cattle boat out of Montreal, the most obvious being the free ride for a scholarship student, outward bound for graduate work at Cambridge University. I can think of two others: the musical Scottish dialect you hear on the Clydesider and the down-to-the-heels hunger which will assail you when nine days later you arrive in Glasgow, as I did. I had not been a success with a pitchfork in Kansas, but I had come to Montreal on the advice of a Canadian friend who was quite positive that I could do what was expected of me on the cattle boat. At the station I checked my luggage and then went down to the dockside to sign on. I wore an old gray suit and a brown felt Harvard hat with a hole in the crown. At the office on the docks I introduced myself to a hefty Irishman in his fifties, who smelt strongly of rum. He was the foreman of the cattle hands, and he stipulated the form of our contract: to get my berth it was understood that I would turn over my pay of $36 to him. I wrote this off on a small slip of paper and now all I had to do was work my way across the Atlantic.

In the office I met the other cattle hands: a big rawboned Australian veteran who had been harvesting in Canada, and who, as it turned out later, had served in the same sector with me before Amiens in 1918; a Cockney waiter who had been fired from the Canadian Pacific hotels, and a wizened English sheepherder from Calgary. Our Irish boss, an ex-prizefighter, pointed out the ship and told us to be aboard by 1 o'clock; we'd be sailing on the outgoing tide that afternoon.

I went back to the station and collected my luggage which a taxi driver deposited on the pier as close to the gangplank as he could --- steamer trunk, suitcase, and portable typewriter. There lay the ship, fresh painted, 9000 tons and riding high. A railroad spur ran out on the pier and leading from it like a high-arched bridge was a wooden ramp which would pour the steers from their freight cars into the waist of the vessel. The cattle train from the West had not yet arrived, and for the moment all was serene. Looking down at me from the rail were a half dozen of the crew, dark-haired, red-cheeked Scots, smoking and spitting into the crevasse between the ship and the dock. They considered me without comment.

The trunk was too much for me to handle by myself, so I went up the gangplank as casually as possible and attached myself to the end of the group at the rail. Silence settled on us all. At last the Scot nearest me turned my way.

"We'el," he said, in a brogue too rich to reproduce, "an' I suppose ye write for the papers?" I nodded.

"Aye. An' you'll be looking for local color?" Again it seemed easier to agree.

"We'el," he said, "you'll find it and it'll all be brown." With that priming he condescended to give me a hand.

We cattle hands were not treated as part of the crew: we had no rights in the forecastle, and were never allowed in the mess. We slept and ate, the four of us, in a tiny, hot deckhouse right over the propeller. The foreman kept aloof. Our food, the salt fish or stew, with bread thrown in on top and a pannikin of tea, we had to fetch from the galley and carry staggering back to our cubby across the pitching deck. It was all much too close.

The cattle train was late, so late that the captain had begun to show his impatience on the bridge. The delay gave our Irishman an opportunity to go ashore with the result that his rum content was higher now than it had been in the morning. When at last the cattle cars were shunted into view, it was plain that the steers would have to be poured aboard in short order if we were to sail on the tide. Each steer, some of them seeming to me of formidable heft, carried a headrope around his neck. Customarily the cattlemen from the train were responsible for tying them up. But there wasn't time for that, and when the last protesting animal had clumped down the runway we cast off with our entire herd, 280 steers and 11 bulls, milling about in the closed-in runway which encircled the ship like a racetrack.

Luckily, our passage down the St. Lawrence to the Straits of Belle Isle was smooth, for hour after hour our four-man squad and the foreman struggled to tie up the beasts. This was our technique: the Australian would isolate a steer with his pitchfork and start him down the runway by twisting his tail. Inside the runway --- and I thought at considerable peril --- stood our rummy foreman waving his arms. He was supposed to stop the express train, and when the steer swung toward the stanchion, I, on my knees, reached up, jerked free the knot in the headrope, quickly passed the end of it through the hole in the stanchion, and made it fast. This worked all right for the first three, but the fourth steer didn't stop. He plowed right by, stepping hard on the foreman's right foot. The Irishman was hurt, and he retired, cursing, to his bunk. That left four of us, and it was another two and a half days before we had the last of the herd lashed down. There was one little black bull, wily as the devil, who kept slipping out of his headrope and who roamed free longer than any other.

By this time we were in high seas. The October gales were making up and we were all seasick in varying degrees in our stuffy little cabin which rose and fell like an elevator. The Cockney swore that he was too weak to work, and since the foreman was still nursing his wounds, we pallid three had to tend the steers by day. We shouted at the Cockney that it was his responsibility to keep night watch, and showed him how to jerk the headrope free for any steer who might be thrown to his knees. Until I had got my sea legs, food had lost all charm (there wasn't much in what came to us from the galley), and I did without it. Then one evening while off duty I gave the cook a dollar for a slice of mutton as thick as a leather sole. This I gnawed away at for the next forty-eight hours. It was like swallowing fiber, but it started some juice flowing and it stayed down.

The steers did not enjoy the motion any more than I, but they had too many stomachs to be spectacular in their sickness; they simply became mad with thirst. Twice a day Digger, the Australian, and I would heave our wooden buckets out of the high wooden tuns, which held the water, six buckets to a beast --- and the one we hadn't got to would always knock over at least one bucket in his eagerness.

On this long voyage I had two consolations. One was H. M. Tomlinson's superb collection of sea essays, Old Junk, which I read in the sunny afternoons, lying on bales of hay. The other came on the ninth day: a green and golden moment of dawn as we passed the bell buoy at the mouth of the Clyde and I, standing in the bow, half shivering in the cold, saw the sheep on the distant uplands, the shipyards in the distance, and realized that we were close to Glasgow.

I landed in Scotland hungrier than I had ever been in my life. The purge of that nine-day voyage during which I had subsisted upon that slab of mutton, bread, and strong tea had left me ravenous. I took a room at the Queen's Hotel, and for the next two days did little else but eat. After a hearty lunch I would take a bus to the art museum or go for a ramble through the busy streets, but after an hour or two the feeling of repletion would be gone and the sight of a Scottish tearoom with its scones, fruitcake, and cherry tarts would bring me to a stop. I couldn't pass that window. In I would go to relish that fourth meal --- the thin-sliced bread and butter, the hot scones, the strawberry jam with berries as big as your thumb, then the pastries and the tea, cup after cup. I had so much and so often that when at last I stopped at Cook's to purchase my train ticket for London, I discovered that I did not have enough English money left to pay for it.

I showed the clerk my letter of credit on Baring Brothers. "But, sir," he explained patiently, "this is only good when you deposit it in person in London."

"But how am I to get to London without a ticket?" I asked.

"You should have thought of that before, sir," he said reprovingly. But after a rather searching look he added, "Even though it is against regulations, I'm afraid I shall have to lend you the funds out of my own pocket."

I took down his name and address while he made out the ticket.

It was a long run from Scotland, and when at midnight we arrived in the black cavern of the King's Cross Station in London I found that my Scot had figured my allowance with a nicety, for I had exactly a shilling left --- this and my letter of credit.

I appealed to the bobby who was directing traffic outside the station.

"Officer," I said, "is there a house nearby where I could find a room for the night?" And I told him of my plight.

"Why, certainly," he said. "Come along." And he led me down a side street to a brick house that still showed a light. "'Ere's an American, Mrs. Hopkins," he said to the landlady. "Can you take him in for the night?" And she did.

She had a boiled egg and sausage ready for me the next morning; then, leaving my suitcase and portable with her as hostage, I went down to Baring's to deposit my letter of credit. Now with cash in my pocket I could breathe easier.

My next call was at the London bureau of the Associated Press. I asked to see Robert Collins. "Mr. Collins," I said after we had shaken hands, "do you plan to have a correspondent at Cambridge University for this year?"

"Cambridge? Why, I don't think we've had a correspondent there since, let me see, since 1914. Have you had any experience?"

"Yes," I said, "some. I covered Harvard for the Boston Evening Transcript these last two years."

"Well," he said, "there is no reason why we shouldn't try you on space. You keep in touch with the Americans who are there, mail us your copy, and anything we wire home will be paid for at the rate of a shilling a line." With that verbal agreement as an incentive, I took the next train to Cambridge.

Cambridge is a medieval little town, set in the midst of the Fens country, and although much of the fens (or marshes as we would call them) have been filled in, the Lady of the Fens, a dank mist with a cutting edge, infiltrates the towers and courts at nightfall, and during the winter months is seldom penetrated by the sun before 10: 30 in the morning.

My first impression, even in October, was of being unbearably cold. I was cold when I shaved (in my unheated room in the morning), and I stayed cold, and when I went to bed at night it was like sliding in between panes of glass. The English students never thought of wearing overcoats. The cap and gown worn carelessly over their tweeds seemed their only protection. They obviously had a warmer insulation than any I had brought with me from America, and on the second day I bought some for myself --- woolen underwear half an inch thick, and a heather-colored tweed cut with the nap so long that the hair seemed to grow on it overnight.

The cap and gown is a college uniform to be worn at all times --- to classrooms, at meals, in the library, and when calling on your tutor. I had not realized this when I paid my first call on my tutor at Trinity College, Gaillard Lapsley, an authority on English constitutional history, an American who had lived so long in England that he had acquired the manner and accent of an Etonian. We shook hands and then with that diffident cough of his he reminded me that he really could not receive me until I was in statu pupillari, that is to say in a Trinity cap and gown. So I went to the nearest haberdasher on Trinity Lane, purchased the dark blue knee-length gown and the mortarboard, and then went back for our talk.

Harvard had granted me the Fiske Fellowship and there were no strings to it. Mr. Lapsley asked me what I wanted to study, and I told him that I really hadn't made up my mind. I knew that I had to do a certain amount of journalism for my keep, and for the rest I wanted to fill in the gaps in my reading, and not be worried too much about examinations. "My dear Weeks," he said, "I want you to read as much as you please; you will find the long vacations very happy for that, but while you are here in term I suggest that you attend lectures on subjects you couldn't conceivably have worked out for yourself. I mean, for instance, the lectures on English constitutional history, which will show you the long struggle men had to gain their legal liberty here before the States came into being. I won't expect you to write papers, or to take the examinations, but I do think you will be rewarded if you attend the lectures and follow some of the required reading on this subject."

He was right, and so I did: I attended his lectures on English constitutional history and those by Kenneth Pickthorn and I plowed through the required reading in Bishop Stubbs. I followed other leads too. Arthur Quiller-Couch, the University Professor in English, was to deliver some ornamental talks on Dickens and Thackeray, and I enjoyed them. I also put down for a course with him on Aristotle's Poetics, a discussion group which met in his library at nine in the evening. I went to hear Dr. Shepherd, later the Provost of Kings College, talk on the Greek dramatists, and watched spellbound as in the enthusiasm of his words he would thrust his hands down into the pockets of his gown and then, forgetting he had them there, suddenly bring his arms up shoulder high, giving him the momentary appearance of an umbrella inside out. I listened to Clapham on economics, and to Walter de la Mare, who gave the Clark lectures on literature, and who was melodious and poetic.

The English colleges at this time were an incomparable bachelordom. The undergraduate lived alone, in beautiful quarters, well served and well fed; the "bedders" built your morning fire in the study and did not rap on your bedroom door until the kidneys and fried eggs under the pewter covers had been brought in and placed before the coals. Trinity had a famous kitchen, and the dinners served in our rooms by a private waiter were famous for their mutton with its thin edge of crisp fat and the crème brûlée, a delectable dessert.

Life in Cambridge was a series of concentric circles to which the stranger was admitted on friendly if temporary terms. Francis Hopkinson, whose door was opposite mine on Great Court, was Whip of the Trinity Beagles, a "blood," gay and exquisitely dressed, a collector of ancient spurs and a giver of hilarious dinners, above whose din one heard the bleating of the beagles' horn. George Kitson-Clark, Patrick Duff and Stephen Runciman were scholars marked for high place with whom it was stimulating to have tea after Hall. ("Have you brought your shooting irons with you?" asked Runciman, only half facetiously, one evening.) The rugger and rowing Blues were marked men with their Hawk's Club ties, and George Tregoning, a fine oar from Harrow, and Arthur Young, the scrum half, went out of their way to be hospitable. As a wiser man has said before me, the ideal society is one in which the dividing line between the exclusive and the excluded is painless.

It was my livelihood, and in a way my privilege, to keep track of fifty-two Americans who were rather widely distributed among the five thousand British and colonial students at the university, and to file with the A.P. such stories of their activities as might interest the home-town papers. Arthur Goodhart, a don of Corpus, helped me with this. Harry Atkinson, a class ahead of me at Harvard, had won his Trial Cap and was one of the two leading contenders for the bow oar in the varsity. Reddy Key, who later made a distinguished record in the State Department, and Everett Case, the present President of Colgate, were on the university tennis squad which was captained by Jimmy Van Allen of Newport. So, incidentally, was I, though only good enough for a Fenner's blazer. Ted Hilles, now a professor of English at Yale, was the best miler in Trinity and might win his Blue against Oxford. Ed Pulling, headmaster and founder of Millbrook, and Arthur Gardiner, who is in our Embassy in Saigon as I write this, were playing varsity golf, and what Bernard Darwin wrote about them in the Times, I relayed home. I kept track of them all, even Anson Phelps Stokes, now the Episcopal Bishop of Eastern Massachusetts, but then our youngest, who had come over fresh from boarding school to get a head start on his studies at Yale.

Morley Dobson, poet and scholar of Corpus Christi College, formerly of Poughkeepsie and Harvard, was my companion on many a bicycle trip, and together we rode more than 2500 miles through the English lanes with their hawthorn banks or on old Roman roads. We cycled with the intent of finding and of reading the English authors in their own environment. Thus we followed Chaucer's pilgrims from Southwark southeast to Canterbury to the shrine of Thomas à Becket; we traced Pickwick through London and to his adventures in Kent; we spent a heavenly Easter vacation climbing and reading with Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt and Coleridge through the Lake Country. And now in May I was thinking of Thackeray as on spring evenings he gambled away the patrimony he had not yet inherited, in the room catty-cornered from mine in Great Court; of Byron as he vaunted his swimming; and of Rupert Brooke who had defined so attractively the loves of this university town only a decade before I was tasting them.

My fellowship could have been renewed for another year, but I was twenty-five and ambitious and in love. It was time I began to dig in, and I knew it. Entertaining my American cousins Alice Duer Miller and her son Denning, my classmate who was then studying at Christ's College, passing them fruitcake in our huge study above the Queen Anne's Gate, with the windows opening onto the beauty of Great Court, I caught myself thinking, "When the money's gone --- what do you think you'll be doing just four months from now?"

It was by the happiest chance that I shared the beautiful tower rooms with an Englishman, H. R. Creswick. Our study occupied the whole square of the tower and measured twenty-nine by thirty-two feet, the black walnut paneling went back to Charles II, the fireplace had seats on either side of it, and in one corner where we kept our tea things was the circular staircase which still led up to the parapet. Dick Creswick, who like myself had not come straight from school, was even then a connoisseur of rare books. He showed me where to find the bargains at David's bookstall in the Market Place, and many of the leather backs now in my library were procured on his advice. Dick's natural proclivity was to lead him on into library work, and he is one of the few men in library history to have served successively as Deputy Librarian of the Bodleian at Oxford and then as University Librarian at Cambridge.

Dick is and always has been my closest link with England, and when I flew over in July 1943, it was he who conducted me through the treasure rooms and fireproof vaults of the Bodleian, of which he was then in charge. That same weekend we took tea with Mr. and Mrs. John Masefield in Abingdon, and Dick modestly mentioned the Friends of the Bodleian and their hope that the library might be entrusted with one of the poet's manuscripts. Masefield flushed with pleasure and, after consulting with his wife, suggested Reynard the Fox. A long pause, and then the poet shyly cleared his throat. "My good friend Thomas Hardy and I corresponded regularly for twenty-five years," he said, "and after his death Mrs. Hardy returned my letters. I wonder if you would care to have that correspondence too?" Dick smiled and nodded, and I had a momentary vision of the keepers of treasure rooms back home who would envy such luck.

IN THE autumn of 1923 three of us set up bachelor quarters in Greenwich Village: Eliot Cabot, who had a good part in White Cargo, Berry Fleming, who was contributing to Life and Punch and writing his first novel, and I, who was working as a book salesman for Boni & Liveright. The Village was convenient and inexpensive; it had an assortment of gaily decorated basement restaurants with thumb-worn menus in French and Italian; a French bakery where one could get croissants and large square rolls crusted and split, with poppy seeds on top, two for five cents; one-man bookstores run on a very personal basis where you just might bump into Sherwood Anderson or Maxwell Bodenheim; Webster Hall, where the costume party on New Year's Eve was the nearest thing to the Beaux Arts ball; Washington Square, where you could loaf in the sunlight of a Sunday morning; the Provincetown Players on MacDougal Street, where I was to see Desire Under the Elms; and it had walk-up apartments in old brownstone fronts such as a thirty-five-dollar-a-week man could afford. The cheapest were those whose windows gave on the Sixth Avenue El.

I did the housekeeping, and it was a Box and Cox arrangement, for Eliot seldom returned from Broadway until long after we were asleep, and he was never up by the time that I had to leave for the office. I only saw him Sundays when we breakfasted late. Breakfast was my dish and it never varied. On my way home I would pick up the big square rolls at the French bakery. Next morning after I put the coffee on, I'd heat them in the oven with a chunk of butter melting in the center. On top of this I would introduce a three-and-a-half-minute egg, with paprika to taste. All on one plate and very good.

We came to gradually on Sundays, and in bathrobes ate a lazy breakfast, shared our gossip, and afterwards Berry, if urged, would show us the sketches he was preparing to submit to Oliver Herford, one of the Life staff, on Monday.

Our apartment was the top floor of an old brownstone which trembled each time the Elevated roared by. Our landlord, a mysterious Greek doctor, conducted an enormous, silent practice on the first floor. The second floor was occupied by a fading Italian countess and her professorial husband who had been reduced to serving as a translator at the nearby municipal court. Their rooms were heavy with ancient velvet portieres, massive gilded furniture, books on shelves and on the floor, and dust everywhere. She cooked their meals on a gas ring on the windowsill. The third floor was ours and, as we had an extra cot, we were a last resort for friends looking for a free bed.

I took the Sixth Avenue El uptown to reach Liveright's office on West 48th Street, where I was beginning to know --at least by sight --- some of our more famous clientele. I recognized dour Theodore Dreiser with his ponderous manner, and Ludwig Lewisohn, bright-eyed and animated, whose Upstream had been a sweeping success and who was now about to publish his novel Don Juan. I must have been out selling books when Eugene O'Neill called; we were publishing his one-act plays that autumn, but if he had any business to transact, it was probably down at the Algonquin where the more desirable authors were entertained. I did see Sherwood Anderson, who was Mr. Liveright's latest acquisition and a legend in the Village. Anderson had soared into our thinking with his Winesburg, Ohio, and his short stories were acclaimed even in London, where they were published by J. C. Squire in The London Mercury. Mr. Liveright coveted his future books, and he got an option on them by the simple expedient of tracing Anderson to his lair in the Village. All we knew at the time was that Horace had returned with a signed contract and a smile on the face of the tiger. The other side of the story was told to me by Mr. Anderson years later, when he was a guest on my radio program. The furnished room on the third floor back where he received the publisher was threadbare, and Mr. Liveright, a born gambler when it came to advances, lost no time.

"Mr. Anderson," he began, "I'm a great admirer of your work, and I want to make it easier for you. What I propose is to send you a check for one hundred dollars every Monday, and regard this as an advance against the royalties on your next novel."

"Every Monday?" said Sherwood, thoughtfully. "One hundred dollars?"

"Every Monday," said Horace, and the deal was made.

"That next Monday," continued Sherwood, as he reminisced, "I couldn't wait for the postman. I was down there in my bathrobe when the letters came through the slot. Sure enough, there it was. The check. I certainly ate well that week, took some friends out and we had steak. The checks kept right on coming. But somehow it would get around towards Friday, and I wouldn't have done even as much as half a new chapter of Dark Laughter. By the end of the month I knew this couldn't go on, so I went up to see Horace at 48th Street.

"'Mr. Liveright,' I said, handing him back the contract, 'I don't want this any more.'

"'Who's offering you more?' he asked.

'No, it's not that,' I said. 'I just can't work that way. You'll get the book, but give me back my poverty.'"

I was confronted by my own more modest decision in the Christmas season of 1923: should I accept Ellery Sedgwick's handwritten offer to join the editorial staff of the Atlantic at the princely sum of forty-five dollars a week, or should I continue as I was going in Manhattan? Mr. Liveright when I told him did more than match the Boston offer, and I knew that I was working in keen and friendly competition. Julian Messner, under whom I had been selling the Liveright line, was a man of integrity whose judgment was respected throughout the trade. Dick Simon, who had given me my early instruction in salesmanship and who was now leaving to form a firm of his own with his friend Max Schuster, would continue to help me, although I think he had already concluded that I might be better at editing than on the business side. Bennett Cerf had just moved uptown from Wall Street and had the desk next to mine on the third floor of Liveright's. These were friends and, with Manuel Komroff, who was in charge of the manufacturing department and Beatrice Kaufman, the wife of the playwright, who was our head proofreader, they were taking a personal interest in my development. Beatrice had evidently been talking about me one day at lunch, and as I came within earshot I overheard her say --- "and he'll be making his twenty thousand a year before long." To a forty-five-dollar-a-week salesman that confidence of hers was something breath-taking. Would I be jeopardizing all this if I went to work for the Atlantic? My father thought I would, and he spoke plainly. "The salaries in Boston are low," he said, "and Mr. Sedgwick has a reputation for changing his assistants every three years. Why take the gamble?"

Is there something in the Anglo-Saxon blood which is aroused by the odds-against bet and was there something in my New England experience which now compelled me to come back? The pay I knew would be less, and it might be decades before I reached that figure which B. quoted so blithely, but this I knew: that I would be bound to grow in Boston, and that the chance of working on Atlantic manuscripts under Mr. Sedgwick would give me more latitude and a harder test than anything I could expect under Liveright's editor, C. R. Smith. So I decided to take the long shot.

ELLERY SEDGWICK, to whom I presented myself the Monday after New Year's in 1924, was in his prime, and one of the ablest magazine editors in the country. His office, which I remembered from my previous visit, was flooded with light from the windows overlooking the Public Garden and from those to the west on Marlborough Street. The open fireplace, the marble bust of Charles Eliot Norton, and the portrait of James Russell Lowell, the Atlantic's first editor, hanging above the mantel, gave the place a traditional aspect very different from the exotic flamingo panels in Mr. Liveright's sanctum, one of which concealed a bar and the other a shower bath. I was attracted at once by Mr. Sedgwick's engaging black eyes and by the charm of his voice. His hooked nose and the muscles in his jaw spelt decision, and with his crisp dark hair, graying at the temples, his heavy lower lip and ruddy complexion, he had a Spanish buccaneering look not without distinction.

He put me at my ease and we talked for a little about Thomas Wells and Fred Allen of Harper's and my work in New York; it was clear that he had no recollection of our earlier meeting at the time of the Advocate parody. He explained my duties as a "first reader" and he then introduced me to his second in command and my immediate superior, Miss Florence Converse, with whom I was to share an office. Miss Converse was a short trim little woman in tweeds behind whose steel-rimmed spectacles dwelt a critic who was also a poet. A Wellesley graduate and a protégée of Miss Vida Scudder, Wellesley's famous scholar-teacher, Miss Converse had done her first professional reading under Bliss Perry. She handled manuscripts with sensitivity and with dispatch, and when she was operating on a book manuscript, cutting out and tying together the excerpts for a two- or three-part serial, or when she was removing the superfluous and purple passages from an overwritten descriptive essay, no surgeon with a scalpel was ever more swift or sure. Our desks were adjoining and at a V angle to each other with the light at our backs; at such close range I came to appreciate the checking, the sandpapering, and the rewriting that went into every issue; I learned to respect "F.C.'s" judgment and I tried to emulate the firmness and the consideration with which she dictated her letters of rejection. Mr. Sedgwick trusted her absolutely, and when he was away from the office on his annual trip to England or on longer voyages to South America and to Japan, she made up the issues and her decision was final.

The office we shared was a large high-studded room with windows giving on a fire escape where the Common's pigeons nested and cooed. In the center of the room on a large circular mahogany table stood three tin breadboxes. They held the daily inflow of manuscripts and were labeled respectively Today, Yesterday, and The Abyss of Time. When Miss Converse was with me we polished off an average of a hundred and sixty manuscripts a day, and by 5 P.M. there would be only a few left in one box. When she was away, and I was on my own, I lived in the Abyss. We two did all the reading.

Every place has its scuttlebutt which tells the juniors what they need to know about the high command, and I soon got my bearings. Mr. Sedgwick, whose family had long been the squires of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, had entered publishing in New York after his graduation from Harvard in 1894, and after teaching for a year at Groton. He had worked for D. Appleton, one of the old-line book publishers; he had served briefly as an assistant to S. S. McClure before that meteoric editor burned himself out; and most notably he had revitalized Leslie's Monthly Magazine, running it on initiative and bank loans at a time when the magazine had been given up as dead. He actually made money out of Leslie's, and a reputation that extended as far as Boston.

In 1908 the circulation of the Atlantic Monthly had declined to something less than ten thousand readers. I cannot find the true figure and it doesn't matter. What does matter is that the proprietors, Houghton Mifflin and Company, had lost confidence and were trying to decide whether to sell the periodical or to convert it into a limited circulation, limited to ten thousand readers who would pay ten thousand dollars a year for their exclusive privilege. It was at this point that Mr. Sedgwick stepped in and made an offer. His bid was accepted; what he paid I have never known, but it is fun to guess, and I should put the figure at approximately $50,000. Rumor has it that Mr. Mifflin authorized the sale feeling confident that Mr. Sedgwick would go broke in two years and that the property could then be picked up by its former owners and a trial made at that limited subscription.

But when Ellery Sedgwick brought his powerful personal magnetism to bear, the magazine began to respond as it had under Walter Hines Page in the late 1890's. The two men had much in common: each believed in our expanding destiny as a world power; each was a profound admirer of England and drew as much as forty per cent of an issue from English writers; each fought strenuously for higher standards in American education, and each, incidentally, was a Democrat. Instead of failing, the circulation doubled in two years. The Atlantic had thirty thousand subscribers by August of 1914, and under Sedgwick's truly brilliant editing it nearly trebled its growth during the First World War.

I had never been a fast reader in college, indeed I could seldom travel at faster than thirty-five pages an hour with those solid volumes we were required to read in the Widener Library. But now I had to step up the pace. By narrowing my gaze to the center of the page and reading straight down, I found I could get a glancing comprehension at double the speed. What was equally important, I arranged the day's reading as if it were a diet. I would begin with the hardheaded articles, the papers on economics, foreign policy, the scholastic theses, in the morning when I was fresh. At eleven I would switch to short stories. After lunch I would make penciled notes for those rejections which merited more than the printed slip. Sometimes I wrote just a single line of hope in pencil at the bottom of the rejection slip; sometimes I went into constructive detail in a separate letter, with the result that the manuscript would almost certainly be revised and returned to us in ten days.

No day's reading is ever the same. A cool perceptive essay by Agnes Repplier or Willa Cather could give a brightness to the morning very different from the feeling which overcame me if by bad luck I chanced on a succession of papers by cranks. Over a six-month period I kept a tally of the "nut" manuscripts and found that they divided fairly evenly between California and New York City. Theosophists, the writers who talked familiarly to God, and those who took themselves seriously as the New Messiah, gravitated naturally to the land of Aimee Semple McPherson. There they found supporters, founded their temples and held forth. Lower Manhattan, on the other hand, was at this period the homeland of free verse, much of it splintered prose which, as it was subdivided in short staccato lines, looked like what the Chinese student called "goggerel." Poems would begin like this:

and run on for two more pages, single-spaced. I have always suspected that H. G. Wells's Outline of History was a formative influence here. Among the traditional versifiers were a surprisingly large number of women who belonged to "The Samarkand School"; these were possessed with the desire to wander off with "gypsy lads" and "open hearts" along roads which always led to Samarkand for the closing rhyme.

A first reader becomes hypersensitive to those words which are being overworked in the popular vernacular, and some which used to make me wince were "opalescent," "plashing," "realistic," "sensed," "convincing," "reaction," "intriguing" ---there were times when it took forceful restraint not to check them. But we did not leave our marks on manuscripts that were going back.

As a veteran I felt no lack of confidence in judging the articles, personal documents, and stories that had to do with the war. For short stories I had an insatiable appetite, and on my own I wrote to those whose work I most admired. It was too late to try for Katherine Mansfield, but we did secure one of the last by Rudyard Kipling, and I was much excited by Rudolph Fisher, a Negro X-ray technician who wrote powerfully and most knowingly about the Harlem and West Indian Negroes and who would have done some fine books for us had he lived. F. Scott Fitzgerald's generation was mine, and I laughed at and partly resented the fussy, overly nice criticism which the Atlantic used to publish about our Flaming Youth (read, as a sample, "Cornelia Discusses an Eligible Young Man" by Stuart P. Sherman, in the Atlantic for September 1924). I noticed that there were three areas of controversy which kept appearing and reappearing: Prohibition, anti-Semitism, and the influence of Roman Catholicism in a democratic society. As a Wilsonian Democrat I welcomed material about the League of Nations. I read with respect what Dean Inge, Samuel McChord Crothers, and Rufus Jones had to say about the spirit. And I wondered about our poets, so many of whom were genteel and so few of whom were young. While I was at Liveright's we had published a long poem, The Waste Land, by an American in London named T. S. Eliot, but for reasons I have never fathomed he was neither invited nor published by the Atlantic of the 1920s.

There were certain unwritten laws in the Atlantic office which were conveyed to me either by Miss Converse or by our head proofreader, Miss Caroline Church. The word "nigger" was not to be used if it could be avoided nor were the four-letter words, and as for "bitch" or "bastard," they were suggested either by "b------"or by "S.O.B." Our fastidious readers, so the saying went, were "our permanent and valuable core"; they were swift to voice their displeasure, and they always had been. In 1869, when the magazine published Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's spectacular article protesting the indignities endured by Lady Byron ("The True Story of Lady Byron's Life," September 1869), fifteen thousand of our most fastidious canceled their subscriptions within a period of twelve months, an example not lost on later editors.

I remember in the spring of my first year we received from Miss Amy Lowell a poem entitled "Fool o' the Moon," a poem which, as she explained to Mr. Sedgwick in the accompanying note, had been most warmly received when she read it aloud. In details somewhat explicit for a spinster it described the love affair between the poet and Lady Moon, ending with the curtain line, "I have lain with Lady Moon." Mr. Sedgwick accepted the challenge and the poem, but I noticed that it was held in the icebox for some months, in fact was not actually published until July, when the schools and colleges which used the Atlantic in their English classes were dispersed and there was small likelihood of protest from their professors.

We were the first magazine of national circulation to publish a story by Ernest Hemingway. "Fifty Grand" told of a professional boxer, the welterweight champion, who was training for a title fight. He is past his prime, and so sure he is to be beaten that he bets $50,000 with the professional gamblers that he will lose. The climax of the fight, when the professional gamblers try to double-cross him, is as rugged and punishing a piece of prose as we have ever published, and I was proud that we took it without question or change. None of us had any way of knowing that "Fifty Grand" had already been declined by Ray Long, the editor of Cosmopolitan, by the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's, and that Max Perkins had tried to cut it for Scribner's and had given up. No one would think of objecting to it today, and because the writing had such force and authority behind it, few did then. We accepted it in midwinter and printed it in July of 1927

I knew when Mr. Sedgwick had the manuscript of "Fifty Grand" in his hands, seated as I was in my room with both doors between us closed, for he let out a crescendo of short explosions, "oh-oh-Oh-Oh . . ." --- and whenever he did this it was a sure indication that he had found something exciting. But when some long-promised beauty turned out to be a lemon, he could be heard moaning, beginning on a low note and swelling in volume, "Ohoooo Oh," which told F.C. and myself what we had already suspected --- that he had a dud.

Like every young editor I was keen to bring into our columns the work of my friends and of writers I admired, and within limitations I was encouraged to do so. The poems of Robert Hillyer, John Crowe Ransom, Theodore Morrison, Morley Dobson, and William Whitman; a paper on hunting, "The Ibex and the Elephant," by Douglas Burden, and another fine pair, "Tiger, Tiger" and "Elephant," by his white hunter in Indo-China, a Frenchman, J. M. DeFosse; stories by Manuel Komroff, and essays from three Englishmen who impressed me at Cambridge, J. B. S. Haldane, H. M. Tomlinson, and Walter de la Mare.

As a book salesman in New York I had the chance to skim through some of the new volumes by our competitors, and one day at The Sunrise Turn, a personal bookshop uptown, I stood absorbed for forty minutes with a new book entitled The Cabala by an unknown named Thornton Wilder. Now I wrote to Mr. Wilder on Atlantic stationery telling him of my admiration for his first book and suggesting that if he had a new one in progress we might like to consider it for serialization. He replied that he was working on a novel about South America, was three-quarters finished, and that he would send me the carbon copy. So we were presented with a preview of The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It was beautifully episodic, and even without the ending --- the bridge had not yet collapsed --- it seemed to me clear that this would be a great attraction for new readers. My two superiors, however, thought otherwise and I was left to write a very difficult letter of rejection.

A first reader is no good unless he is outspoken, and I was not always tactful. The treasurer of the Atlantic was MacGregor Jenkins, a genial, loquacious gentleman with a streak of sentimentality a yard wide. His anecdotes ran on forever, and I found myself keeping away from his open office on the third floor, for once entrapped you had to listen. I had very little liking for his short bucolic essays, sometimes about Amherst, where he had spent his boyhood and seen Emily Dickinson over the back fence, sometimes about his barn and its inmates in Dover. It seemed to me that his cows and chickens had no place in the Atlantic, and I was too young to respect the generosity in the acceptance. Each time they presented themselves I denounced his manuscripts and two months later there they were in the new issue.

I chafed under such restraints but not for long; I was learning fast and I did not miss New York. To be a junior on the Atlantic's staff in those days was to be borne along on a powerful current. Sedgwick had a flair for social criticism, and he found those who could probe for him with authority, and deep. He found William Z. Ripley, the Harvard economist, who in three devastating articles, "Main Street to Wall Street," "Stop, Look and Listen," and "More Light and Power Too" (January, September, and November 1926), laid bare the malpractices of high finance, the fabricated reports to the stockholders, the interlocking directorates, the scandal in public utilities which were lazily winked at in the boom. In this case Ripley's probing laid the groundwork for the S.E.C. Sedgwick persuaded a New York lawyer, Charles Marshall, to write an Open Letter to Governor Alfred E. Smith questioning whether the Governor's faith as a Roman Catholic disqualified him for the Presidency. The issue was hot and sensitive, especially in the South, and it is greatly to Sedgwick's credit that the Governor took the challenge seriously and published his historic reply in the Atlantic's columns. Again, it was Sedgwick who diverted away from the New Republic and into the Atlantic the 16,000-word investigation of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial in which Felix Frankfurter, then a professor at the Harvard Law School, proclaimed the innocence of the accused. These were just a few of his ten-strikes, and they explained why, after twenty years, the magazine was solidly in the black and no longer a "kept" journal as it had been at Houghton Mifflin. We were a small team who assisted a great editor, and there were three in particular who contributed mightily to this transformation: Donald B. Snyder, the assistant publisher who came aboard the year after I did; Teresa S. Fitzpatrick, who under the signature of "Christine Lowell" invited the subscribers; and Daisy Zanck, who was our entire manufacturing department and who handled the costly details of printing and paper and advertising make-up with incredible economy.

"Don't overedit," Mr. Sedgwick once wrote. "By so doing you will estrange your writers and rob the magazine of its indispensable variety." But the temptation to overedit is insidious.

One of our elderly proofreaders simply could not cope with profanity; left to herself she would have removed every word of it, and after one or two angry run-ins with young contributors we wisely shifted her to our textbooks. The genteel tradition of the Atlantic was what Henry L. Mencken had in mind when in the early edition of The American Language he wrote: "All the more pretentious American authors try to write chastely and elegantly; the typical literary product of the country is still a refined essay in the Atlantic Monthly, perhaps gently jocose but never rough --- by Emerson, so to speak, out of Charles Lamb."

When Mencken took upon himself the editing of the American Mercury, I was surprised to learn that he was overediting in his way just as much as we were in ours. As a first step we always corrected the spelling and punctuation in accordance with "Atlantic usage," and our cutting and rewriting was the second step, depending on how much we thought the manuscript needed. In general our tendency was to lean down the material whereas Mencken fattened it. He had his pet glossary of adjectives and epithets, and these he imposed upon the text of his contributors: a professor was referred to as a "bunkum professor"; ministers were "high priests" and political commentators were "soothsayers"; for politicians "the Honorable" became a term of contempt; these and similar endearments were bestowed upon the other members of Mencken's "booboisie" even though it may never have occurred to the author to do so when he wrote his piece. I remember how surprised I was when I first saw a manuscript which had been accepted by the Mercury and then returned for the author's approval with such additions written in. If the Atlantic by its overediting achieved a genteel sameness, Mencken by his achieved a rowdy sameness. With his magnificent prejudices he himself was never at a loss for fresh satire --- Billy Sunday, the revivalist, was "America's celebrated pulpit-clown." But when his habitual glossary was imposed upon his contributors they came to sound as if they were Mencken's younger brothers, and the magazine lost its difference.

For four years I read in that back office, and if my father's warning was accurate, my time in Boston was nearly at an end. Yet when the summons came I was not ready for it. I sat across from Mr. Sedgwick on that rectangular Italian chair on which so many contributors had squirmed with discomfort before me; I looked out at the Public Garden thinking "Here falls the ax" --- but that was not exactly what he was saying. He was saying something about making a permanent place for myself in the organization, editing the Atlantic books which grew out of the magazine. He was saying that a contract had been drawn with Little, Brown & Company, who would manufacture and distribute our books, and that as the Director of the Press I should deal directly with Alfred McIntyre, their President, and Roger Scaife, who handled their manufacturing. I was to be on my own . . . I said I wanted to think it over.

I had seen Dick Simon regularly ever since that day in 1925 when he came to Boston to sell the first Simon & Schuster list. He used to dine with us in our apartment, and I remember his taking out of his suitcase the dummy copies of the first crossword puzzle book, and of a larger volume by a writer called Will Durant. "You remember him," said Dick. "He used to write the introductions for the Haldeman-Julius ten-cent books. He's cut down all their philosophers for them. Quite a man!" That, of course, was the beginning of The Story of Philosophy. With Dick I had talked over the possibilities of coming back to New York, but on the other hand, if I stayed on here in Boston, I would be my own boss, with my own list of authors to build up, and a staff consisting of one secretary, the loyal Frances Bates. Sure to be fun and it might pay off. I decided to stay.

It was a hurtful shock to me that we lost our most profitable author, James Truslow Adams, within months of my taking over the Atlantic Monthly Press. It could not have come at a crueler moment, for Mr. Adams's most popular book, The Epic of America, was at the top of the best-seller list when without a word of warning he decided to transfer his future writing to Scribner's. The reasons were human enough --- and none of us had anticipated them. As an undergraduate at Yale, Mr. Adams had majored in history, and on his graduation he had confided to his favorite professor that he wanted to write, and as a first step should he take his Ph.D.? No, said the professor, not if you want to write history; go down to Wall Street, save just as much money as you can for fifteen years, and then if you still want to write get out on your own. Adams did just that, and fifteen years later he retired from the market with a competence which enabled him --- as a bachelor --- to research and to write about colonial America. The Atlantic published his essays in the magazine and it also published the early books, The Founding of New England and Revolutionary New England, which established his reputation as a historian. Mr. Sedgwick had given him the idea for his The Epic of America, and it seemed to me rank injustice that he should quit us in the high tide of his success. What had made the difference was his marriage. When Adams married in midlife, he wanted to be assured of steady royalties --- his savings were no longer enough; and when Scribner's approached him with an editing and writing contract which offered him and his wife security for years, he took it without question. I felt he should have divided his books between the two houses, but I knew that we had been remiss in not gauging his concern for the future. I did not recognize it as such at the time, but this was my first lesson in underediting.

A second instance of underediting occurred in the following year and this had to do with a dear friend of mine, Walter D. Edmonds, of whose work I was intensely proud. Walt Edmonds in college was one of the most clearly developed young writers I have ever known. He spent the summers at Boonville, close to the Erie Canal country; he had sold his first short story about the Canal to Scribner's shortly after graduation, and the plans for his first novel, Rome Haul, were already in part on paper. Mr. Sedgwick had persuaded him to send his work to us, and in time we were to print all of his historical novels: Rome Haul, Erie Water, Drums Along the Mohawk, The Big Barn, Young Ames, and last but not least that superb collection of his short stories, Mostly Canallers. It had never occurred to us that these short stories which had been written for an adult audience could with a very few adjustments be converted into delightful illustrated books for children. When Dodd, Mead and Company invited Walt to turn one of his stories into a juvenile he politely declined and referred the suggestion to us. Alfred and I showed no enthusiasm --- we felt it would distract him from his novels.

A year later Dodd, Mead renewed the offer and this time Walter accepted with the result that today they have nine of his books under their imprint, and young readers the country over have relished them. This again was a costly instance of underediting.

These two errors of omission coming so early in my experience as an editor of books made me realize, dimly at first but with increasing clarity, that the editor's relations with his author can never be the same year in year out. They must be resilient and subject to the swiftest change. At the outset the editor, the publisher, has the authority and the young author coming to him is eager for every bit of advice, every bit of editing, every bit of support that can be given. But the moment that author has become established this relationship is altered. Now it is the author who has the authority and in many cases he no longer needs or wants the advice which had earlier meant so much. Thomas Wolfe, who accepted so eagerly all the editing which Maxwell Perkins devoted to Look Homeward, Angel, no longer had need for such close attention when he was writing Of Time and the River. Now it was Thomas Wolfe who had the authority, and this I suspect was something which Max Perkins overlooked.

Sinclair Lewis, who revered Alfred Harcourt as a publisher and loved him as a friend, wrote his best novels for Harcourt Brace and was eager to invest his small savings in that firm at its inception. But after Elmer Gantry and Dodsworth, somehow the old familiarity induced a complacency toward the new book that Lewis resented. The advertising wasn't enough, so the letters say, and by inference neither was the solicitude. Alfred Harcourt had been guilty of underestimating the perpetually new needs of a writer. He had been guilty of underediting.

In the years of editing that lay ahead of me I was to realize that whether I was editing books or the magazine, my relationships with every writer who was dear to us had constantly to be redefined. What is true of friendship is true of editing: the understanding must be continually refreshed. Over the years I have edited 317 different volumes for the Atlantic, and I hope there are more to come. Each has presented its individual problem, as these next chapters will show, and in each I have tried to remember that it was my job to help when the author needed it, to reassure him, to call out of him his best, but always to bear in mind that the final decision was his.