4. The Art of Self-Education (1942–1943)
1. JA Diary II, January 1, 1942, JAPC.
2. JA Diary II, January 12, 1942, JAPC.
3. JA Diary II, August 10, 1942, JAPC.
4. JA Diary II, January 5, 1942, JAPC.
5. Author interview with JA, July 15, 2015, Hudson, NY.
6. JA Diary II, February 13, 1942, JAPC.
7. Letter JA to MW, February 14, 1942, MW Letters.
8. Author interview with CRD, January 10, 2012, Rochester, NY.
9. JA letter to MW, August 6, 1942, MW Letters.
10. “Syringa,” Houseboat Days (1977, reprint New York: Library of America, 2008).
11. The film had been released in a limited fashion in 1940 but had arrived in the area only recently.
12. Author interview with JA, November 27, 2013, Hudson, NY.
13. JA Diary II, September 1, 1942, JAPC.
14. JA Diary II, [September 10, 1942], AM6, Box 31, JA Papers. At the beginning of September 1942, John lost his diary for several weeks and started to write on loose-leaf pages, which he dated more haphazardly, by days of the week. This date is a likely guess.
15. In the late 1940s, a few years after John was her student, Miss Klumpp attended Bread Loaf for several consecutive summers, to study with Robert Frost.
16. Author telephone interview with Betty Lou Burden Warrington, June 13, 2011, Pinellas Park, FL.
17. In my correspondence with two of Anson’s four sons in 2011, they shared the assignments she had kept, including a book report. She kept a few of John Ashbery’s written assignments from her class in a safe, with her most important family papers.
18. These loose pages of the diary are in AM6 Box 31, JA Papers.
19. JA Diary II, October 25, 1942, JAPC.
20. JA Diary III, January 3, 1943, JAPC.
21. JA Diary II, October 27, 1942, JAPC.
22. JA Diary II, October 26, 1942, JAPC.
23. JA Diary II, January 15, 1943, JAPC.
24. JA Diary II, May 22, 1942, JAPC.
25. JA Diary II, February 17, 1942, JAPC.
26. JA Diary II, March 5, 1942, JAPC.
27. JA Diary II, October 24, 1942, JAPC.
28. JA Diary III, January 28, 1943, JAPC.
29. “The New Spirit” (1970, reprint New York: Library of America, 2008), 255.
30. Alvin Levin, Love Is Like Park Avenue, ed. James Reidel, preface by John Ashbery (New York: New Directions, 2009), quotation from p. viii. In 1942, New Directions promised another installment of the story, but it was not published until 2009.
31. JA Diary III, February 25, 1943, JAPC.
32. Typewriter Paper Box, JAPC.
33. JA Diary III, February 28–March 2, 1943, JAPC.
34. JA Diary III, May 27, 1943, JAPC.
35. JA Diary III, March 3, 1943, JAPC.
36. JA copied the poem into his April 13 diary entry. He also won a copy of this anthology in a current-events test competition on May 20, 1943. He discovered that he had won a “5 dollar book” on May 25, 1943. Untermeyer’s anthology was one choice, which he received at the class day awards ceremony on June 21, 1943. In interviews, JA remembers discovering modern poetry from Untermeyer’s book and attributes his interest in modern poetry to winning that competition, but in fact he already had been reading the book for two months when he received his copy. That night, he wrote in his diary, “The book is swell. I regret that Hermann Hagedorn’s ‘Doors’ is not in it, though.” (The copy at the library was the 1943 edition and the copy he took home was the 1939 edition, with notable poems missing.)
37. JA Diary III, January 18, 1943, JAPC.
38. JA Diary III, April 16, 1943, JAPC.
39. JA Diary III, April 15, 1943, JAPC.
40. Author interview with JA, September 12, 2015, New York.
41. JA Diary III, April 8, 1943, JAPC. No copy of the poem exists, though Ashbery might have reshaped it at that time into “The Ocean: Midnight.” Spiral Notebook, JAPC.
42. Author interview with Marie Wells, Mrs. Wells’s daughter-in-law, February 29, 2012, Rochester, NY.
43. John McPhee, The Headmaster: Frank L. Boyden, of Deerfield (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966).
44. Handwritten letter from Mrs. Margaret Wells to FB, February 6, 1943, JA Alumni File.
45. Mr. Boyden’s offer, though quickly made, was significant and suggested how much he respected Mrs. Wells’s recommendation. In the fall of 1944, for example, the class of 150 students was chosen from more than 1,000 applicants. From an essay on “Deerfield Academy in a World at War” (dated August 1, 1945). Boyden Wartime File, Deerfield Academy Library, Deerfield, MA.
46. JA Diary III, April 21, 1943, JAPC.
47. JA Diary III, April 30, 1943, JAPC.
48. Letter from Chester Ashbery to FB, May 18, 1943 (handwritten on Ashbery Farm stationery), JA Alumni File.
49. Letter from FB to Mr. Donald Fenn, Unitarian Service Committee, February 13, 1942. Boyden Wartime File, Deerfield Archive, Deerfield Academy Library.
50. Letter from FB to Chester Ashbery, May 26, 1943, JA Alumni File.
51. From HEL to FB, May 11, 1943, JA Alumni File.
52. Author interview with JA, March 17, 2014, New York.
53. JA Diary III, April 28, 1943, JAPC.
54. JA Diary III, May 4, 1943, JAPC.
55. JA Diary III, June 11, 1943, JAPC.
56. JA Diary III, January 9, 1943, JAPC.
57. JA Diary III, May 6, 1943, JAPC.
58. JA Diary III, June 11, 1943, JAPC.
59. JA Diary III, May 10, 1943, JAPC.
60. JA Diary III, May 11, 1943, JAPC.
61. “In the Time of Cherries,” Where Shall I Wander (New York: Ecco Press, 2005).
62. Author interview with Malcolm White, April 22, 2012, Palo Alto, CA. Several interviews were also conducted on the telephone between 2011 and 2016.
63. JA Diary III, June 12, 1943, JAPC.
64. JA Diary III, July 28, 1943, JAPC.
65. During the spring of his freshman year, just before being drafted and leaving Amherst for good, White beat his Amherst classmate, future poet James Merrill, in a recitation competition. The Gazette of Amherst College, June 2, 1944, 1: “White is Kellogg Poetry Reading Contest Winner”: “Malcolm White ’48 [sic], Amherst, Mass. was the winner of the poetry reading contest for the Kellogg Prizes, held at the Jones Library, May, 26. White read End of the World and Epistle to Be Left in the Earth, by Archibald MacLeish. Second place went to James I. Merrill, ’47, who read an original poem entitled, Theory of Vision.… [J]udges of the contest were Mr. Clyde W. Dow and Dr. Maxwell H. Goldberg of Massachusetts State College and Professor Robert Dewey, of Smith College. Professor Lee Garrison presided.”
66. Author telephone interview with JA, December 1, 2011, Hudson, NY. Author interview with Malcolm White, April 22, 2012, Palo Alto, CA.
67. JA Diary III, August 7, 1943, JAPC.
68. JA Diary III, August 4, 1943, JAPC.
69. JA Diary III, August 8, 1943, JAPC.
70. JA Diary III, August 13, 1943, JAPC.
71. They never saw each other again. Beginning a few months after I contacted Malcolm White for an interview in 2012, they began corresponding by letter and phone.
72. JA Diary III, August 31, 1943, JAPC.
73. JA Diary III, June 21, 1943, JAPC.
74. JA Diary III, July 2, 1943, JAPC.
75. Philip Horton’s Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet (New York: Viking Press, 1937; reprint New York: Compass Books, 1957), 80–81.
76. Author interview with JA, July 15, 2015, Hudson, NY.
77. JA Diary III, August 7, 1943, JAPC.
78. JA Diary III, August 17, 1943, JAPC.
79. JA Diary III, September 4, 1943, JAPC.
80. JA Diary III, July 14, 1943, JAPC.
81. My ellipses. Letter from JA to MW, July 9, 1943, MW Letters.
82. JA Diary III, May 22, 1943, JAPC.
83. JA Diary III, June 28, 1943, JAPC.
84. Although JA has discussed that he discovered while at Deerfield that Mrs. Wells had paid for his tuition, the school’s records indicate clearly that the tuition check came directly from Chet Ashbery and not Mrs. Wells. See especially letters dated 5/18/43, 5/26/43, and 9/20/44, Ashbery Alumni File, OAL.
85. JA Diary III, September 9, 1943, JAPC.
86. JA Diary III, September 14 and 20, 1943, JAPC.
87. JA Diary III, September 21, 1943, JAPC.