Vanitas Vanitatum

Before I entered Harvard in the Autumn of 1928, I had spent the previous six years at the Roxbury Latin School where the roar of the Twenties scarcely penetrated. Roxbury Latin was a shabby grey school in the shabby grey lodging-house section of Roxbury, an ancient wooden building with low soot-stained classrooms, fireplaces that burned cannel coal, and from the second floor a view of the Custom House tower and the somber near-reaches of Boston. There I learned Latin and Greek after a fashion, but as for the modern world that frothed and bubbled and revolved outside, I might as well have been in a cloister. Dr. Daniel Varney Thompson, our headmaster, was the compiler of the anthology, British Verse for Boys and Girls, and for this his alma mater, Amherst, had created him a Doctor of Humane Letters. British Verse began with the prelude to the Canterbury Tales and ended with Sea Fever, and in the introduction Dr. Thompson spoke of those two rising young poets John Masefield and Alfred Noyes. That was modern poetry for us. The Wasteland was not even on the map. In our last year in English, under Dr. Thompson’s tutelage, we read Macbeth and three modern novels: Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop; a novel by some one about Goldsmith, called The Jessamy Bride; and another about Paul Revere, the author and title and substance of which I long ago forgot.

But at Harvard I at last moved into my century when I met my friend Irvine from Andover. Andover was a school that by comparison with Roxbury Latin was very sophisticated indeed. For Irvine talked knowingly about Ambrose Bierce, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Mencken, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Jurgen, and above all The Sun Also Rises. A year later he would have moved on to Ulysses and would refer sneeringly to “little boy Hemingway,” but at the time I met him The Sun Also Rises was the book. I couldn’t make much sense out of Jurgen, and though I read Hemingway with at least surface understanding, my Thompson-trained mind found his habit of stringing sentences together with “and” as disconcerting as a hiccup. Besides, six years of Roxbury Latin left quite a gap between me and the lost generation. Nevertheless, by a process of osmosis I was on my way to becoming a sophisticate. I did not really complete the job, however, until Irvine introduced me to the magazine Vanity Fair. I had seen it fleetingly on the stands but somehow until then had thought it just another female magazine like the Woman’s Home Companion.

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Francis Russell

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Before I entered Harvard in the Autumn of 1928, I had spent the previous six years at the Roxbury Latin School where the roar of the Twenties scarcely penetrated. Roxbury Latin was a shabby grey school in the shabby grey lodging-house section of Roxbury, an ancient wooden building with low soot-stained classrooms, fireplaces that burned cannel coal, and from the second floor a view of the Custom House tower and the somber near-reaches of Boston. There I learned Latin and Greek after a fashion, but as for the modern world that frothed and bubbled and revolved outside, I might as well have been in a cloister. Dr. Daniel Varney Thompson, our headmaster, was the compiler of the anthology, British Verse for Boys and Girls, and for this his alma mater, Amherst, had created him a Doctor of Humane Letters. British Verse began with the prelude to the Canterbury Tales and ended with Sea Fever, and in the introduction Dr. Thompson spoke of those two rising young poets John Masefield and Alfred Noyes. That was modern poetry for us. The Wasteland was not even on the map. In our last year in English, under Dr. Thompson’s tutelage, we read Macbeth and three modern novels: Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop; a novel by some one about Goldsmith, called The Jessamy Bride; and another about Paul Revere, the author and title and substance of which I long ago forgot.

But at Harvard I at last moved into my century when I met my friend Irvine from Andover. Andover was a school that by comparison with Roxbury Latin was very sophisticated indeed. For Irvine talked knowingly about Ambrose Bierce, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Mencken, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Jurgen, and above all The Sun Also Rises. A year later he would have moved on to Ulysses and would refer sneeringly to “little boy Hemingway,” but at the time I met him The Sun Also Rises was the book. I couldn’t make much sense out of Jurgen, and though I read Hemingway with at least surface understanding, my Thompson-trained mind found his habit of stringing sentences together with “and” as disconcerting as a hiccup. Besides, six years of Roxbury Latin left quite a gap between me and the lost generation. Nevertheless, by a process of osmosis I was on my way to becoming a sophisticate. I did not really complete the job, however, until Irvine introduced me to the magazine Vanity Fair. I had seen it fleetingly on the stands but somehow until then had thought it just another female magazine like the Woman’s Home Companion.