Eliot was of the type that welcomes friendships but is too reserved to seek them. However, his scholastic brilliance and his charming personality quickly brought to him a circle of friends of two quite divergent types, the intellectuals on the one hand and, on the other, many of those who were not considered in that category. His requirements seemed to be a reasonable amount of brains but above all a happy, keen sense of humor. Within the circles of these friends he was a very gay companion.28

In late February 1907 Tom received another letter from Assistant Dean Wells: the Administrative Board was taking him off probation. This brought relief, not least to his parents. Tom had hardly become a ‘grind’ – a student devoted to his studies – but he had bought more time to come to terms with what Harvard had to offer.

He was enrolled at America’s oldest university. In 1886, six years after the future United States President Theodore Roosevelt had graduated, Harvard had celebrated its 250th anniversary. That milestone encouraged intensive fundraising. New buildings went up across the campus. Still aligned to the older Calvinistic or Unitarian values of New England, Harvard was increasingly an academic centre of national and international renown. Its faculty were effortfully cosmopolitan. So, for instance, Tom’s Professor Wendell was not only a historian of American literature. He also authored The France of Today (1907), while Anglophilia was evident alike in his tailoring and in his knowledge of seventeenth-century English literature, on which he delivered the Clark Lectures at King’s College, Cambridge, England. Years afterwards, so did Tom.

Leading American intellectuals such as philosopher and psychologist William James (Henry James’s brother), fellow philosopher Josiah Royce and polymathic cultural critic Irving Babbitt – another Francophile – were distinguished figures around the campus. Under the ambitious leadership of President Eliot, arguably the most widely known academic in America, Harvard had attracted outstanding tenured and visiting faculty, and it went on doing so. Tom would benefit in a later year from the presence of Bertrand Russell as a visiting philosophy professor; and during his second semester the famous young classicist Gilbert Murray, formerly professor of Greek at the University of Glasgow and soon to move to Oxford, delivered in Harvard’s capacious new Fogg Museum of art a series of lectures on ancient Greek poetry.

Editor and translator of Euripides (his Medea appeared in 1907) as well as an enthusiast for Aristophanes, Murray was associated with interdisciplinary thinking that linked literature to anthropology. Admired by several Harvard faculty members, an emergent intellectual movement connected poetry and plays to more ancient rites. Murray’s History of Greek Literature had spoken up for ‘the Greek of the anthropologist’.29 Tom, fresh from studying Medea and hearing freshman lectures on Greek literary history, would study Aristophanes the following year. Not only were his teachers excited to host Murray, but Murray’s lectures were reported regularly in the Crimson. His interest in linking literature to rituals was attuned to that student imagination which, spoofingly, had so recently brought together in the Harvard Advocate rituals of the freshman life of ‘Goldkoastides’ with the forms of ancient classical drama, ‘Parodos’, ‘Choros’ and all. Later Tom criticised Murray as a translator of Greek drama, but in his own ‘Aristophanic Melodrama’ ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ and elsewhere, he would fuse modern-day life with Classical scholarship that invoked anthropology. At Harvard Murray argued that the Iliad’s ‘originality’ lay precisely in the way it took materials ‘ready-made from older books or traditions’ and so registered ‘an intensity of imagination, not merely of one great poet, but the accumulated emotion of generations’.30 Such ideas were being discussed around Tom while he studied Greek.

‘Abeunt Studia in Mores’ read one of the inscriptions in Harvard’s Memorial Hall: ‘Our studies breed our habits’.31 Tom’s studies were magpie-like, and the Harvard of his day, with its ‘elective system’ which allowed students to assemble their degree in piecemeal fashion, encouraged that. Though in his second year he studied Aristophanes, Aeschylus and Sophocles, he did not major in Greek or in any other single subject. Between 1906 and 1910, when he graduated Master of Arts, he took twenty-five courses (some, to be exact, were designated ‘half-courses’) in ten subjects: English, Latin, Greek, French, German, Comparative Literature, Philosophy, History, Fine Arts and Government. In modern parlance, one might say that his undergraduate work was substantially in comparative literature. The elective system let students follow their instincts, with the result that, as one of Tom’s lecturers put it in 1908, ‘Boys drift.’32 Generously bankrolling his son’s student years, that was what Tom’s father worried about.

As he loafed around Harvard Yard, Tom observed buildings familiar today, but his Harvard, smaller and less driven than now, was also subtly different. Including summer school participants, there were just over 5,000 students; across the whole institution the staff–student ratio was roughly one-to-twelve, and in Tom’s part of the university, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, there were a little over 2,200 students, most expecting to reside for three or four years.33 Lecture audiences could number nearly four hundred in big courses like Government 1, and over three hundred for History, German and English; instructors and assistants led smaller group discussions and helped with grading.34 Some undergraduates, including members of Tom’s own Class of 1910, thought the university had grown excessively large, and that it was too easy for students to avoid notice. Yet, though the red-brick dormitory of Forbes House had prepared Tom for the look of Harvard Yard, after St Louis Cambridge was very small. One of his friends, who arrived in 1907, recalled it as ‘a village’, albeit an atmospheric one: ‘Lilacs, white picket fences under elms, horse-drawn water-carts to lay the dust in the blindingly dusty streets of summer, board-walks put down on the pavements every winter and taken up every spring, sleighs and pungs [sleighs with box-shaped bodies] in the snow, and the dreadful college bell reverberant over all.’35

Though a few rich Harvard men brought with them those newfangled machines, motor cars, most, including Tom, did not. Cambridge was walkable.