Tom would benefit from Jewish critics and publishers, and during World War II would go out of his way to call attention to and denounce what was happening at Auschwitz. When directly confronted with the charge of anti-Semitism decades after his childhood, he denied it.

 

3

Schoolings

LIKE most people, Tom had not so much a schooling as schoolings. He learned from vacations as well as from classrooms. His home reading was as important as any set texts. Decades afterwards, when he thought back to his fellow Smith Academy pupils, he called them simply ‘acquaintances’. Apparently he had lost track of them. Half jocularly he remembered disliking ‘my only contemporary in St. Louis who has become famous: Gerard Lambert, whose family flourished by the manufacture of “Listerine”. He was rich, he was good at mathematics (which I was not) and he was an athlete and won cups.’1 When Tom was nearing sixteen, not just the World’s Fair but also the Olympic Games came to St Louis. On 14 May 1904 Lambert won the pole vaulting competition, as well as coming second in ‘running broad jump’ and ‘running high jump’ during the Olympic Interscholastic Meet (State of Missouri) in which Smith Academy finished second overall.2 Tom played no part in such success, though he did have a ticket for the World’s Fair, one of whose principal displays covered ‘Anthropology and Ethnology, including the Philippine Islanders’. As well as displaying live ‘Aborigines’ from America, Africa and Japan, there was a vast ‘Philippine Encampment’ featuring ‘the most remarkable display of a people held at an exposition’. Here in lake encampments were ‘Savage Moros’ and ‘Head Hunters’ (described as ‘all savage’) and Viscayans (‘civilized and devout Catholics’) – who had come from ‘Luzon and the surrounding archipelago’.3 If all this seemed a world away from Smith Academy, Tom did publish the following year a story in his school magazine about a sea captain shipwrecked among Polynesian tribesmen – some ‘beating bhghons (a sort of cross between a tin pan and gong) and chanting monotonously’, but others converted by French missionaries and therefore ‘quite civilized and uninteresting’.4 His interest in juxtaposed cultures and religions interpreted through anthropology is rooted in the world of his schooldays.

To an English friend he wrote in 1939, ‘As for other of my childhood acquaintances, they were more mixed in origin than any of your playmates, I am sure. Butch Wagner, Pat Sullivan, Snowball Wolfert, Elephant-mouth Hellman, Gander Giesecke: what has become of them?’5 Tom’s schoolfellows were boys from ‘good families’ who did well and often went on to good universities; Milton ‘Elephant-mouth Hellman’ progressed to Yale.6 Yet such ‘acquaintances’ were not trusted confidants. During his last years at Smith, Tom was part of a small group of five boys distinguishing themselves in the Classical Course. Standing in their midst for his formal class yearbook photograph, he looks hunched and a little uneasy. He seems not to have been very close to any of them: his fellow Classicist Lawrence Tyler Post, who had some talent for verse, penned the ‘Class Song’ for Tom’s year, before going to Yale. As for the other boys on the Classical Course, Charles Hills Ryan proceeded to Longfellow’s alma mater, Bowdoin College; wealthy banker’s son Walker Moore Van Riper chose Yale, and later hymned the St Louis Mortgage Bond Co. in What Every Investor Should Know (1913); Frederick Clinton Lake, Jr, too headed for Yale, returning afterwards to the St Louis dry goods business.7 These classmates were among the twenty-five chosen to participate in the school’s preliminary speaking contest in February 1905. The organiser was Tom’s admired English teacher, Mr Hatch; but Tom was not selected for the finals.8 At times his best friends were his books.

Principal Curd’s New Method of English Analysis was a set text. It offered tiny extracts from famous writers as examples of common English constructions. The chosen authors included Shakespeare, Pope, Poe and Byron – all important to Tom – but Curd also cited stylists including La Rochefoucauld and Seneca. Tom would mention La Rochefoucauld in his first book of poems, and would later write about Seneca, but more generally the bookish habit of deploying tiny quotations from other writers became second nature to him. Tom himself (then, much later, John Soldo and Jayme Stayer) identified his schoolbooks.9 In its choice of such texts for study as The Vicar of Wakefield, The Merchant of Venice, Silas Marner, Carlyle’s Essay on Burns, Tennyson’s Princess, James Russell Lowell’s Vision of Sir Launfal and Burke’s Speech on Conciliation with America, Smith Academy’s literature curriculum used works commonly set for admission to leading colleges.

Tom’s curriculum was also tied to the contents of Composition and Rhetoric for Schools by Chicago educators Robert Herrick and Lindsay Todd Damon. Working through this text, he found mention of The House of the Seven Gables (which became a favourite novel), Captains Courageous, and frequent references to Kipling and Stevenson. He imitated these last two authors in stories for the Smith Academy Record. Herrick and Damon also cited J. M. Barrie, that fashionable chronicler of hesitant masculinity whose Sentimental Tommy Tom later joked about. Tom encountered, too, the writerly advice of G. H.