‘shan’t exist for me’.11 A story from the same year depicts a fashionable freshman trying to decide what pictures (presumably prints) to hang on his wall; he swithers between an image of a Cardinal or a ‘nervy and spiritual’ portrait of St John by Andrea del Sarto. Freshman bookshelves reveal what looks like ‘the inevitable set of Stevenson’, but turns out to be ‘a French edition of du Maupassant in a false binding’. Two students return from a theatre visit, bringing ‘a pail of raw oysters’. Meanwhile ‘A warm spring breeze blew the window hanging to and fro, and up from Mt. Auburn Street came the familiar evening sounds, – the tramp of feet, the slamming of club-house doors, the calls for various heads to appear at upper windows and the shrill screams of muckers, fighting and playing.’12

Though starting university offered Tom an opportunity to reinvent himself as more outgoing, he seems not to have been particularly close to any of his immediate freshmen neighbours, and soon among classmates he acquired his customary reputation for shyness. Still, like other freshmen, he observed and sometimes participated in undergraduate pursuits. Harvard favourites ranged from consuming ‘several Coca-Colas’ or spending a morning ‘drinking rum punches’ to calling on a society hostess ‘on Beacon Hill’, the most genteel area of Boston.13 Such visits were a way to meet women, perhaps including some from Radcliffe; if undergraduates were organised enough to invite girls to a polite tea, it was expected that they would arrange a chaperone. One student advised that while ‘you might tastefully display a number of books by prominent authors in your sitting room to show that you are fond of good literature’, nonetheless ‘on general principles you had better remove all saucy pictures from the walls’; in Henry’s day fashionable prints to display had included ‘the more recherché ladies of Burne-Jones’.14 Yet for most of his undergraduate years, apart from contact with members of his family including cousin Eleanor Hinkley and his sister Ada, Tom’s shyness with girls appears to have remained inhibiting.

Educated almost exclusively among boys, and now at what was in many ways a single-sex university (Radcliffe had its own separate arrangements), Tom seems to have been assimilated into a predominantly masculine milieu where clubbableness might mask underlying insecurities. Before reaching Harvard, he would have heard from his brother about characters to look out for. While a student, Henry had written verses for an illustrated volume, Harvard Celebrities, and had sent a copy back to St Louis, inscribing it to his mother. One of the celebrities was among Tom’s lecturers in English 28, a half-course he took as a freshman, and which outlined the history and development of English literature. Sketched by Edward Revere Little of the Class of 1904, Professor Barrett Wendell, a renowned historian of American literature who venerated Hawthorne and saw New England literary tradition as having declined, stands nattily dressed in fedora and checked suit. Smoking, he carries a stylish cane and gloves. Henry’s accompanying verse suggested that Wendell’s dress sense conjured up ‘The atmosphere of London … instead of Harvard Square’: Wendell was the ‘guiding star’ of Harvard, his mission ‘To edify the vulgar, and abash the unrefined’.15

Another edifying local celebrity was Professor LeBaron Russell Briggs, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. Also dandyish, this lecturer impressed Freshman Tom in English 28. Almost a quarter of a century later he remembered how ‘Professor Briggs used to read, with great persuasiveness and charm, verses of Donne to the Freshmen’, though he confessed that ‘I have now forgotten what Professor Briggs told us about the poet; but I know that whatever he said, his own words and his quotations were enough to attract to private reading at least one Freshman who had already absorbed some of the Elizabethan dramatists, but who had not yet approached the metaphysicals.’16 Donne, a poet important to Harvard literary culture during this era, would matter greatly to Tom. Probably spurred by his mother and by quotations in Poe, as well as by his schooling in literary history, he had a good knowledge of Renaissance drama before he entered Harvard College. There, as he read Donne, Professor Briggs’s enthusiasm set the tone, and in Tom’s second year one of his classmates, Clarence Dewey Britton, won a prize for writing on ‘The Temperament of John Donne’.17 Though Gold Coaster Tom was inspired to read Donne in ‘private’, he almost lost the opportunity to pursue his undergraduate course. Only months after his Harvard career began, it nearly came to an end.

For all his wide-ranging recreational reading (and perhaps in part because of it), he was not working hard enough. His poor performance was noted by the Assistant Dean E. H. Wells. Trepidatiously, Tom wrote to his father in St Louis, letting him know that, though he was doing well in English 28 (for which, eventually, he got an A), this half-course would not count when it came to overall consideration of his progress. He warned Papa what was coming. Shortly afterwards the Assistant Dean informed Tom’s father that ‘Thomas’s November record is so unsatisfactory that the Administrative Board will place him on probation.’ His work in English appeared ‘satisfactory’, but in several courses he had received ‘unsatisfactory’ D grades.18 These included Greek B, a literature course that moved from Plato and Xenophon to Euripides’ dramas Medea and Iphigineia among the Taurians. In some ways Tom was living the life of that caricature slacker Goldkoastides, who advised in 1906 that ‘You mustn’t miss taking Greek B, / You’ll at least get a D or an E’.19 Unfortunately, freshman Eliot was also awarded a D grade for Charles Homer Haskins’s introduction to Medieval History; for the elementary course German A; and for Government 1, Constitutional Government, whose lecturers included Professor Abbott Lawrence Lowell, soon to succeed C. W. Eliot as Harvard’s president.20 Tom’s performance was embarrassing: even in a subject like medieval history which had interested him from the days when he read Malory’s Arthurian tales, wrote about Sir Lanfaul and created his ‘Fable for Feasters’, he was not pulling his weight. The Assistant Dean’s letter stated that unless there was marked improvement ‘Thomas’ could be sent away from Harvard without further warning. ‘Will you kindly co-operate’, Henry Ware Eliot, Sr, was asked, ‘in encouraging the boy to raise his record to a satisfactory standard?’21 The father of ‘the boy’ replied speedily, emphasising that Tom was ‘sufficiently concerned’.