Pointing out that ‘College advisors’ had gone along with Tom’s choice of courses that demanded much outside reading, his father, loyal to the son he loved, tried to excuse his offspring’s waywardness. But the concluding paternal sentence was potentially more forbidding: ‘When he comes home for the holidays I will discuss it with him.’22 On the brink of failure just months into his Harvard career, Tom made the long rail journey back to St Louis in December 1906 preparing himself for awkward conversations.

Discussions ensued. It was time for new year resolutions. Tom returned to Mount Auburn Street in early 1907 resolved to avoid a repeat of his first-semester predicament. Released from the surveillance of his parents and Mrs Chase of Milton Academy, he had been enjoying the freedom to do as he pleased. ‘Loafing’ was Henry’s word for such behaviour, and Tom later confessed that for his first two sessions at Harvard he ‘loafed’.23 Yet returning for his second semester he did make efforts to work a mite harder. He also took part in a disciplined university activity: rowing. Even if the weather was wintry, it was just a short walk from his lodgings to the boathouse on the Charles. The daily Harvard Crimson published an editorial in its 11 February 1907 issue, hoping ‘that the call for Freshman crew candidates will meet with a prompt and hearty response’. Tom’s response was prompt enough: his name appeared in a list of aspiring freshman crew members published the following day. After many summers’ boating at Gloucester, this seemed a good idea, but Tom was not selected. He was five feet eleven inches tall, but rather skinny, and probably his physique was against him; all those years free of competitive team sports could not have helped. Later he did take up rowing in a wherry – traditionally a gentleman’s rowing boat – and finally worked up to a single scull.24 So, as he rowed, he remained alone, more disciplined and fitter, but not quite a team player.

Though still loafing, he did at least manage to come through his first year with an overall B in Greek, followed by overall Cs for Government, History and the German Elementary Course. Some lecturers, like Professor Briggs, were inspirational; others were not. Regarded as compulsory in an era when there was much discussion at Harvard of the German university system, Tom’s course German A was, complained one of his three hundred or so classmates, a ‘Horrible routine of fairy stories and trivial sentences – “Where are the old shoes of my grandfather,” etc.’ Like so many other Harvard literati, the instructor, Assistant Professor Heinrich Conrad Bierwirth (whose Beginning German Tom had read in 1905), had an interest in Dante, but when it came to German he failed to inspire; his assistants only made things worse. ‘Instructor might as well have been a phonograph’, wrote one unimpressed listener. Undergraduates complained their teacher ‘deliberately antagonized’ students in a course variously described by Tom’s classmates as ‘useless’, ‘an absolute waste of time’ and ‘a slaughter house’.25 Tom put up with it. He chugged along at a level which at least kept him above that ‘unsatisfactory’ D grade, but he remained attracted to stylish loafing, and still stayed somewhat aloof.

Later he made friends with an immigrant Manhattanite classmate. William George Tinckom-Fernandez had been born in India, about which he wrote occasional poems. He was one of the very few in Tom’s year not to have a permanent address listed when the Crimson published its ‘Directory of Freshmen’ in October 1906; possibly this was because the itinerant Tinckom-Fernandez was spending so much time in New York. He seems to have been the person whom Tom recalled as a ‘man whose principle of choice of courses was that the lectures should all fall on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with no lecture on Saturday: thus he was free to spend four days a week in New York. I should add that he did not follow even this course of study with sufficient application to qualify him for a degree’.26 Given that it took several hours to travel from Boston to New York by rail, this was not quite loafing of the conventional sort; but it did have style. Tinckom-Fernandez wrote considerable amounts of verse, read contemporary poetry and was already publishing in the Advocate while he and Tom were freshmen. Tom, whose avid interest in poetry was not quashed by his academic mishaps, published far less. His student friendship with ‘Tinck’ blossomed later, but literature and a sometimes cavalier attitude to academic work was something they both relished.

When they recalled Tom, ‘shy’ is the word fellow students regularly associated with him. Some also thought him clever, despite the loafing, and even perceived that, beyond his shyness lay a capacity for companionship. An early college friend was Leon Magaw Little, who came from a New England family brimming with Harvard connections; Tom’s brother had collaborated with Edward Little on Harvard Celebrities. As a freshman Leon lived near Tom, sharing a suite of rooms with a fellow first-year at 133 Westmorly Court. A recently built Gold Coast private hall (now part of Adams House), Westmorly charged some of the highest rents, but boasted excellent plumbing, and even had its own ornate private swimming pool.27 As an old man, Leon Little remembered the impression Tom made from his first year onwards; he mentions a companionability and academic accomplishments less evident to others.

As a freshman T. S.