Eventually published in 1912, it deals with the authors covered in Tom’s course. These ranged from Corneille and Racine to the nineteenth-century writers de Musset, Sainte-Beuve and Rostand.

Wright was an assiduous scholar. His critical vocabulary included the terms ‘dislocation’ and ‘impersonality’, but his tastes show him to have been just the sort of critic that Tom, especially when discussing modern French literature, would come to attack. For Wright, de Musset, ‘perhaps the most characteristically French poet of his century’, was far more attractive than the Baudelaire who, influenced by Poe, had helped give a questionable ‘vogue to Symbolism … and decadents who built their theory of poetry on the element of suggestion and the relations between things and the soul, precisely as they professed to see in the music of Wagner’. Sainte-Beuve was to be lauded as ‘one of the greatest of critics’, a man preoccupied with the literary examination of ‘personality’, even to the extent of becoming ‘a Peeping Tom, especially of women’. Rostand, though he achieved a ‘high level’ in the ‘long and rambling’ Cyrano de Bergerac, had fallen away in his more recent, fashionable Chantecler with its ‘evanescent modern Parisian wit, often sinking to the commonest slang’. Wright’s French 2a stopped with Rostand. He disliked Symbolist poetry as ‘obscure’, ‘unintelligible’ and ‘freakish’ – just the sort of line that his most famous student would soon react against with creative vehemence.45

‘C’ was pretty much Tom’s average grade throughout session 1907–8. Though he managed Bs in Fine Art and the more literary of the Greek courses, he got a C for Greek Prose Composition. Having chosen also two Philosophy courses, in one he got a ‘C’, in the other a B. Yet, set against his D in German, this run of marks made him an undistinguished student. His loafing contributed, but there was also a sense he was not yet finding quite what he needed. For an undergraduate so grounded in literature, the philosophy courses in Emerson Hall were a new departure. Taken together, Philosophy A (History of Ancient Philosophy) and the matching introductory course B (History of Modern Philosophy) were surveys providing a general overview to which students might add depth later. Tom was selecting courses that let him read around freely, indulging a taste for roaming across cultures: from ancient Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages to modern English, French and German. No one who has embarked on Goodwin’s Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb could argue that he chose only the easiest options; but he was hardly an academic star.

He had left Mount Auburn Street in his second year, but had moved no further than around the corner to a purpose-built Gold Coast residential hall. There he shared a suite of rooms with his former Milton school friends Howard Morris and John Robinson. While a freshman, nineteen-year-old Morris had lived nearby in sumptuously appointed Westmorly Court, sharing a suite with another friend from Milton days, twenty-year-old Californian Welshman Evan Cyfeilwig Evans, Jr, and his younger brother Harry Llewellyn Evans. Morris lost his two room-mates when their mother died and the Evans boys left Harvard after just a year, returning to San Rafael, California. Big, heavily built, Morris had comparatively little interest in literature, but was easy-going, enjoyed music and liked to eat and drink. Also, he was used to fraternising with people he had known from Milton. He spoke with Tom and John Robinson about sharing a suite of rooms in another of the Gold Coast’s swanky privately-run residences, Russell Hall, very close to Westmorly.

Tom knew he could get on with Morris and Robinson so they signed up for accommodation during 1907–8 at 22 Russell Hall. This substantial five-storey building stood at the corner of Plympton Street and Bow Street. Now demolished, it was replaced in 1930 by another Russell Hall, today part of Adams House. A surviving photograph shows that the earlier building’s design featured bow-windowed towers at its street-front corners. Each student in suite 22 had a separate bedroom, but they shared a large sitting room in one of these tower-like extensions, with three windows looking out over the street and a semicircular, cushioned window seat beneath them. In the fashion of the day, the windows were equipped both with blinds and lace curtains. Occasionally, in true student fashion, Tom and his flatmates drew their blinds half down in daytime. Hardwood-floored, their sitting room had dark woodwork, but its atmosphere was softened by an elaborately patterned carpet in the centre of the room. Furniture was à la mode: ‘the general tendency is towards “mission” morris chairs’, a 1907 Harvard Advocate article ‘On the Decoration of College Rooms’ had remarked, noting that as well as such recliner chairs with their wooden arms and cushioned leather seats, ‘some steins’ (ornamental beer mugs) and ‘plaster casts’ were desirable.46 If you could afford the substantial rent, 22 Russell Hall was not a bad place to loaf.

A photograph of Tom and Howard Morris in their sitting room was perceptively if a little speculatively described in the 1970s by the journalist T.