Harvard

One afternoon in the spring of 1946, O’Hara was lounging in his company barracks in San Pedro with a fellow sonarman, Douglas (“Dippy”) Starr. Their conversation turned, as it often had that season, to the G.I. Bill of Rights, passed by Congress in 1944, providing four years of college education for veterans. O’Hara, unlike most of his fellow sailors, who were singularly pleased with the windfall, was wary. He had been impressed with an article he had read in the Saturday Evening Post by President Hutchins of the University of Chicago claiming that the bill would turn some colleges into “educational hobo jungles.” He also was suspicious of a bandwagon mood in the country that assumed “education is the solution to all problems.” After mulling over the list of schools each was considering, O’Hara shot off a piece of characteristic advice that was to lodge in Starr’s memory for years to come. “It’s not the education that’s important,” asserted O’Hara, with the mature self-confidence that had earned him a reputation on ship as someone to come to with one’s problems. “It’s what you do with it that counts.”

O’Hara’s own plan was to study music, hoping later to teach or compose. His first idea was simply to live at home in Grafton and commute to the New England Conservatory to continue his studies with Margaret Mason. He claimed, quite earnestly, that “For now I like the idea of a small school and few social interruptions.” But as the empty weeks on Terminal Island added up, he had many free hours to begin to consider various music schools connected to larger universities, such as the Eastman School at Rochester (where he feared he might flunk entrance exams in counterpoint, harmony, and theory), Juilliard in New York City, and the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. He even toyed with the notion of apprenticeships with the Koussevitzky Summer School at Tanglewood or the Casadesus group in Connecticut.

Deciding on a school forced O’Hara, briefly liberated by the war from daily family pressures, to deal once again with his parents’ and various aunts’ plans for his future. His father, who had cast the deciding vote in allowing his son to study at the New England Conservatory during his high school years, was adamantly opposed to his pursuit of a degree at such a specialized school. He argued, instead, for colleges with more general liberal arts programs. Russell O’Hara’s first choice for his son was his own alma mater, Holy Cross, a choice that during one telephone discussion caused an outburst between them. O’Hara cleverly pointed out that “Naturally it is out of the question for me because it doesn’t have a music department.” Even more out of the question was the suggestion of his Aunt Mary, sequestered in her convent in Springfield, Massachusetts, who sent her nephew a booklet about vocations and expressed her opinion that he was destined for the priesthood. O’Hara, increasingly unsympathetic with Catholic piety, sarcastically wrote to his parents that “If so, it looks like this is one occasion where destiny loses out. Eh?” The influence of his Aunt Margaret, whom Phil Charron described as “his authority, he quoted her often,” was the strongest. At her nephew’s request she had mailed him catalogues for Rochester, Cornell, Chicago, and Columbia universities, but she had slipped in as well a catalogue for Harvard, her own first choice for Francis’s matriculation. Kay O’Hara, too, liked the notion of Harvard, as much, perhaps, for its social aura as for the sophisticated academics that had attracted her sister Margaret. So she began to lobby at home for her son to attend, if accepted. “I think my father would have preferred that he go to a Catholic school for college,” remembers Philip O’Hara. “My mother did yeoman’s work to get Francis to go to Harvard over my father’s wishes.”

O’Hara was skeptical at first about his chances of acceptance at Harvard as he had been notified by mail that the college was accepting only 10 percent of all applicants that year. “Not much hope there, I suppose,” he wrote home. He did, however, fill out the school’s questionnaires. Harvard’s music department satisfied his own needs, and its more general classical courses, his father’s. While still on board the Nicholas, O’Hara had read and heavily annotated On Harmony, a basic textbook written by Walter Piston, the chairman of Harvard’s music department, who would receive a Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for his Third Symphony.

But O’Hara did not fix on Harvard. He preferred to use his free hours, perhaps because there were so many, to make sometimes fickle calculations on the pluses and minuses of different schools. While in Los Angeles he had also read Paul Hindemith’s The Craft of Musical Composition and A Concentrated Course in Traditional Harmony. He was tempted to apply to Yale, where Hindemith was teaching, but felt put off by its quota system: “Their policies as an institution are odious to me.” Eventually he also “mentally” crossed Cornell “off the list” as it cost three hundred dollars in expenses above government aid; dismissed Teachers College at Columbia as “too specialized”; and even grew suspicious of the Eastman School of Music, which had been “nip and tuck” with Harvard College, when he discovered that “some of the composers on its faculty are practically chauvinistic in their negation of all European influences.” The New England Conservatory fared better in his opinion because of its more “international,” less “emphatically American,” musical allegiances.

Upon his return to Grafton in June, O’Hara did finally apply to Harvard, taking the requisite aptitude tests in early July in which he scored a somewhat dichotomous 700 in Verbal and 483 in Math. He attended a personal interview on July 8 in which his interviewer rated him A, described him as “a very likeable fellow as well as a musician,” and noted that the applicant “was attracted to Harvard always because of Walter Piston in Music.” The only exceptional piece in O’Hara’s otherwise standard application package was his required essay on “Service Experience.” In it he detailed his progress from boot camp, “probably the most depressing months of my life,” through the “ ‘do as little as possible’ attitude the Receiving Stations I had been stationed on had led me to believe was the Navy viewpoint,” to the U.S.S. Nicholas where he found himself assigned duties he felt he could “get his teeth into” as part of a unit involved in the formal surrender, which “instilled a keen feeling about the peace in every member of the crew.” The punch of the essay, though, was its fiery and quite self-assured denouncement of militarism, which gives a sense of the sorts of unorthodox remarks that were making his father increasingly exasperated with his son during this homecoming phase: “Watching the botching of Military Governments, the crippling of the U.N., the ineffectual expediency of our national policies, and the mishandling of the Atomic Bomb, has been a bitter experience for all of us, and almost to a man we all waited for discharge. . . . The months of waiting for discharge in a state of near-inertia served to clarify issues, consolidate standards. It is often necessary to experience to realize fully: my disillusionment with militarism is no longer instinctual, or a matter of principle only, and is a strong spur to achievement in civilian life.”

On July 24, the Committee on Admissions invited O’Hara to matriculate in September, and he accepted. While his attitude toward the G.I. Bill had been idiosyncratic and his bitterness toward militarism more extreme than that of many of his shipmates, O’Hara’s compulsion to seize the day was shared by most returning veterans. He wasn’t interested in acquiring “polish” or “school spirit,” but rather in exhausting the facilities at his disposal to pursue his musical composition and writing: “I must specialize and fast.” It was this unleashed ambition, so evident in O’Hara, that was to galvanize Harvard and many other college campuses across America during the postwar era.

“It is very well to emphasize liberality for seventeeners who can develop a social philosophy and appreciate the classics in a leisurely way,” he wrote to his parents. “But I have a social philosophy of parts and ‘I think I’d better hurry or I’ll be too late!’”

“In 1946, you might as well have been living in an American Legion post as in one of the houses.”

Such was the characterization in the 1950 Harvard Yearbook of the hectic and disorienting situation on campus when Francis O’Hara joined almost four thousand returning veterans filing three-a-minute through a registration checkpoint at Memorial Hall. This sizable influx of veterans, constituting 71 percent of all students and pushing the total enrollment of Harvard College up to a record 5,435, radically changed the appearance of the Ivy League campus that third week in September. The traditional prewar Harvard ceremony of seventeen-year-old beardless youths arriving in the Yard from select preparatory high schools in the Northeast, dressed in white bucks, unloading Vuitton bags from the backs of their convertibles, was lost in a surge of new, and often older, faces searching for their assigned rooms in squat red brick dormitories toward the north end that were reserved for veterans. (Veterans were soon given priority to be moved as soon as possible to rooms in the posher upperclassmen houses located mostly along the Charles River, while nonveteran freshmen were sometimes required to spend two years, rather than one, in the Yard.) Double-deckers were moved into dorms to accommodate extra roommates, although even then a certain number of latecomers were forced to sleep on cots, shipboard fashion, in the Indoor Athletic Building basketball court. Lines formed everywhere—to eat, to cash checks, to receive Veterans’ Administration book authorizations. As the term began, seats on windowsills or in aisles were at a premium at choice lectures. The school newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, predictably kept referring to this turbulence as a “siege” or “invasion.”

The transition from prewar to postwar Harvard was hardly abrupt, however. As so many of its students’ lives had been disrupted by World War II, so the university had been gradually yet indelibly transformed. During the war Harvard had been nicknamed “Annapolis on the Charles” as it played host to thirteen Army-Navy service schools training over sixty thousand officers and enlisted men. Eighty of the university’s science laboratories, policed by solemn guards, were turned over for military research to the Office of Scientific Research and Development of which Harvard’s President Conant was a member. The university converted to a trimester to comply more smoothly with military scheduling, while its civilian students, dwindling in number, were confined to two houses: Lowell and Adams. V-12, a Naval officers’ training program, bivouacked a number of its officers-in-training in Eliot House, including the young Robert Kennedy. Besides moving washers and dryers into the grill, draping P.A. speakers from the courtyard lights, and pruning back a mascot of a willow tree for marching purposes, the Navy transformed Eliot’s formal dining room, formerly staffed by waitresses and purveying the atmosphere of a fairly decent restaurant, into a self-service cafeteria with gray metal trays. This alteration was allowed to stand after the war, much to the displeasure of certain returning students nostalgic for earlier, more gentlemanly dining habits.

The dress of the freshmen arriving that fall was a constant reminder of the transition under way. Jackets and ties were required in the Union, the freshman dining hall across Quincy Street, and so tended to be worn to classes. Yet as white shirts and blazers had been discontinued by most manufacturers during the war, many veterans had to concoct suitable attire by wearing their military-issue khaki trousers, service coats cut down to hip length, and old service shirts with the rank removed. O’Hara blended in with his blue Navy workshirts. By the spring term most veterans had acquired proper Brooks Brothers—style clothing, although one classmate recalls seeing O’Hara often walking about campus in later years in his blue workshirt and tan chinos, by then a statement of nonconformity.

While some returning veterans were disgruntled by what they felt to be a “conveyor-belt diploma-mill” mentality at Harvard, with its new policies of compulsory attendance, roll call, even limited-access cards to Widener Library, these concessions to the postwar crunch seemed more than balanced by the intensity and decisiveness of its added students. “They knew what they wanted as had no other generation in the recent past,” judged the 1950 Harvard Yearbook, an assessment corroborated by Frederick English (Class of ’51), who claimed that “a great exuberance disappeared when the Class of ’50 departed.” Postwar Harvard proved itself to be a seeding ground for important leaders in the next few decades of American political life. Henry Kissinger was a classmate of O’Hara’s. Daniel Ellsberg (Class of ’52), later involved in the Pentagon Papers scandal, while an editor of the literary magazine, the Harvard Advocate, reviewed the first production of O’Hara’s play Try! Try! at the Poets Theatre in 1951. Both Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (Class of ’38), were teaching in the History Department. A highlight of that first fall was a campaign speech by congressional hopeful John F. Kennedy (Class of ’40) delivered in Central Square, Cambridge, from the roof of a beat-up black Ford by the Navy veteran still yellowed with an Atabrine tan and discomforted by a back injury suffered on PT-109. His candidacy was treated a bit flippantly by the Crimson, which headlined its article on the event: “Earnest, Issue-sly, Joe Kennedy’s Boy Glad-Hands Way to Congress.”

Equally charged was the Cambridge literary scene, enough so that O’Hara’s creative writing instructor, the poet John Ciardi, could write a “Letter from Harvard” for Poetry magazine. Among the poets studying at Harvard in the late forties were Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, Donald Hall, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Adrienne Rich. Fiction writers included John Hawkes, Harold Brodkey, John Updike, and Alison Lurie. Richard Wilbur, then a Junior Fellow, and Richard Eberhart were both living in Cambridge, as was Robert Frost (Class of ’01), who tended to make his home there in the spring and fall. Crucial to the sense of poetry as a living concern on campus was the university’s Morris Gray Readings series, which sponsored poetry readings during O’Hara’s four years by Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell, Robert Frost, Archibald MacLeish, and Stephen Spender. Perhaps the best-attended of these events was a reading by T. S. Eliot during O’Hara’s freshman year to an audience in Sanders Theatre so overflowing that most students had to listen to his words as they were piped into other parts of Memorial Hall. Eliot (Class of ’10) felt moved to comment that evening on the postwar mood on campus. “Nobody ever seems to stop working. It was certainly not like that in my day,” he said, suggesting that the students were part of a new “worried generation.” “I don’t mean to suggest,” he added, smilingly, “that there isn’t plenty to worry about.”

O’Hara made his way through this charged atmosphere at first rather quietly and independently, exhibiting the self-reliance he had learned in the Navy. His initial room assignment was Room B-21 in Mower Hall, a three-story red brick dormitory in the north end of Harvard Yard filled mostly with veterans. When asked in his application to specify any qualities he might prefer in a roommate, O’Hara, after filling in the requisite blank as to whether he was “white or colored,” had written in “I have no preference as to religion, race, or section but would prefer a roommate whose interests were somewhat similar to mine.” Given the crowding and chaos at Harvard that semester, not too much attention was paid to careful roommate matching, although O’Hara and one of his roommates, Jim McGovern, were somewhat compatible. McGovern, an aspiring writer from New York City, tended to sit at his typewriter with a cigarette hanging from his mouth knocking out short stories in the style of John O’Hara. Although McGovern never loomed largely in O’Hara’s life, the two did share enough musical interests to sit together on at least one Saturday evening listening to Hindemith, Berg, and Stravinsky on a record player borrowed from a mutual friend, Dalbin Bindra, a teaching fellow in psychology from India. The other bedrooms of the quadruple suite, kept clean by one of Harvard’s maids, were occupied by two other first-year returning veterans—Spiros Paras, a science major, and Arthur Gartaganis, a math major. The four roommates did not mix very often during this intense first semester, described by Paras as “all work and no play.”

O’Hara still found it amazing that he was at Harvard at all. A mere three months before he had been an enlisted man on the U.S.S. Nicholas who, without the G.I. Bill, would never have been able to afford Harvard’s steep fees. Yet not all of the nuances of the school pleased him. O’Hara couldn’t help but feel the pressure of the elitism of Harvard. It was the one drawback he indicated to his parents when he complained, “as if merely going to a place means anything to anyone except snobs.” In his case his Irish-Catholic background pigeonholed him. Although Irish Catholics had been the first minority admitted to Harvard in the 1870s there had always been a subtle rivalry between Protestants and Catholics of which a strong residue remained if only in the form of drinking contests. While the number of veterans on campus clouded some of these distinctions, O’Hara, as a new arrival from a small Massachusetts farm town and the graduate of a parochial high school, would have been considered a bit of an ethnic. One acquaintance described the young O’Hara, on first glance, as having looked “potato Irish, lower class, with pasty skin.” Another, who observed him in a class they took together, recalls him as “this small, thin, angry, sentimental Irish boy from a hick town.” O’Hara was kidded often enough at dinner for coming from “Asshole.” That he saw his Irish Catholicism as somehow antonymous with Harvard is evident in a joking remark he made in Grafton to his childhood friend, Phil Charron. “Oh I’m going to Harvard,” he announced. “They say it’s the death knell of all Catholics.” O’Hara coped with any social fencing he felt to be beneath him by going his own way, as he had in the Navy. In the course of his four years at Harvard, however, he would gradually develop a personal style, using certain arch Angloisms, which became simultaneously an achievement of the WASP culture implicit in some of these traditional attitudes and its send-up.

During his first semester O’Hara’s schedule was filled with the standard introductory courses: English A, the English composition course taught from a basic textbook, Five Kinds of Writing, which he enlivened by writing a two-thousand-word essay on Gertrude Stein, whose Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas he had described to his parents as “one of the most interesting things I’ve ever read by anyone”; Elementary German, a required language course in which a fellow student recalls O’Hara as having “practically died in the struggle, as did everyone who took German as their language requirement”; Elementary Psychology, taught by Professor Boring, who had written servicemen’s psychology manuals for the War Department and had served as Director of the Psychology Laboratories for twenty-five years; Elementary Harmony with Assistant Professor Irving Fine, whom Stravinsky once referred to as “my son” and who had studied with Nadia Boulanger in New York and Paris in 1938 and 1939, showing an internationalism that appealed to O’Hara.

O’Hara worked quite intensively on these courses his first term. This was his chance, after all, to carry through finally on all the ambitious resolutions he had made while lying restlessly on his bunk in San Pedro. As he had written then so decisively to his parents: “No more late nights, postponed studies, disregarded opportunities, or interrupting school with social stuff. Anything that interferes with my work goes out once I get started.” After spending a fall weekend at Wellesley with his attractive, rather eccentric friend from Grafton, Elsa Ekblaw, he had worried to his parents, “I was a little afraid that I should have stayed here and studied.”

Yet O’Hara’s interests—as he listed them in his application, “music, philosophy, literature, psychology, art”—soon led him beyond the guidelines of his own course list. In the Navy O’Hara had been known as a “refined” talker on matters he cared about, especially music, but few of his shipmates could keep up with his pronouncements on the superiority of piano concertos to symphonies. At Harvard O’Hara began to meet friends who could catch his clever references and liked him for making them. One evening he walked over to Mower to discuss music with another student in his harmony class, Marvin Minsky, later to be dubbed “the father of artificial intelligence” for his work with computers. During their talk he noticed that Minsky’s roommate, Jerome Rubenstein of St. Louis, owned a volume of the poems of Federico García Lorca. O’Hara excitedly launched into a quite knowledgeable discussion of the works of the Spanish poet and so earned the casual friendship of an impressed Rubenstein for the next four years.

During fall term, O’Hara’s pent-up curiosity was always propelling him to sit in on courses for which he never officially registered. “This was the age of the bravura lecture,” writes Alison Lurie of Harvard at the time, “and we went to our classes as if to a combination of theatrical performance, sermon and political oration—to be entertained and inspired as well as informed.” The most obvious draw for O’Hara was Harry Levin’s course Joyce, Mann and Proust, considered daringly, even shockingly, modern by some. The young Levin, cultivating a fashionable mustache and dressed inevitably in a three-piece suit, taught, as Lurie put it, with “scholarly brilliance and elegant flair.” O’Hara had already read the three titular authors—he had bought Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in Key West at his Aunt Margaret’s suggestion—but his prime interest remained Joyce so that he confined his book purchases for the course to Levin’s James Joyce, A Critical Introduction as well as an ancillary Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. He had read through Joyce’s Exiles during the summer in Grafton and his Aunt Margaret had recently presented him with Stephen Hero. Levin’s animated lectures, along with the blur of his own readings of Joyce and teenage musical compositions based on Ulysses, were crystallized by O’Hara into one of the three slight poems he wrote that semester, “A Portrait of James Joyce,” which begins as a sort of parody of the style of Finnegans Wake: “riverrun, said jute, oh why the enterrential / faggus?” (The other two poems, “Dialogue for Man, Woman & Chorus of Frogs” and “The Highway” also played with aural surfaces of words from various periods and dialects in a Joycean manner.)

Not since San Francisco had O’Hara been as stimulated as he was during these first few months. Cambridge in the heady postwar days, its lilac-shaded, cobbled streets lined with gray eighteenth-century or Victorian Gothic houses, was indeed filled with some of the same warmth and confusion, the air of suddenly having been benignly invaded, as the wartime San Francisco through which O’Hara had made his way as a Shore Patrolman. There were clubby bookstores such as Grolier’s on Plympton Street where he purchased The Complete Poems of William Carlos Williams and Eliot’s Four Quartets; art movie theatres such as the Exeter in Boston, which that fall screened Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter with Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto as its theme music; and the Fogg Art Museum across from the Yard with an impressive gallery of European paintings and renowned series of lectures, including Professor Post’s art history course on Venetian painting, which O’Hara was to faithfully attend—again not registered—three years later. Clipping his way through the busy neon bustle of Harvard Square with its glaring street-lamps, sizzle of overhead wires, and billboards advertising Royal Crown Par-T-Pak Beverages, O’Hara was always alertly taking note of flyers tacked to bulletin boards or posters glued on the dark brick walls up and down Massachusetts Avenue, searching for leads, as he had in San Francisco when he discovered a folder for the Servicemen’s Arts Center at an art museum he happened to be visiting.

O’Hara’s attention was usually caught first by announcements of musical performances, both in Cambridge and in Boston just across the Charles River. As a music major, he kept up assiduously with concerts given by the Music Club. In letters to his parents prior to his Christmas vacation he informed them that he had attended a performance of Darius Milhaud’s Sonata for Violin and Harpsichord at Jordan Hall, was planning to go to the Music Building to hear two different sonatas for two pianos, one by Stravinsky and another by Alexei Haieff, as well as a new composition by a junior in the department, and that he would be staying on campus an extra few days at the end of term because “Sat. nite I plan to go to the Symphony by hook or crook. Darius Milhaud is here to conduct his Suite Français and Symphony No. 2!” (The Boston Symphony’s importance in current musical affairs was evident from its premiere that October of Copland’s Third Symphony conducted by Koussevitzky.) He followed the Harvard-Radcliffe Choral Society, which had performed at Sanders Theatre and Wellesley in November, and he was planning to return to campus from Grafton in time for an all-Hindemith concert to be given by the Music Club on January 9. The freshman O’Hara, with his boyish, percolating energy, away from home again after a few summer months of trying unsuccessfully to squeeze back into his family’s mold, had finally found a place with enough artistic brio to sustain his high-spiritedness.

This much-anticipated time of expanding his horizons was abruptly cut short, however, never to be resumed with quite the same innocence, by a phone call O’Hara received on the evening of January 22 in Mower Hall where he had returned to study for his final exam in Psychology. His father had died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of forty-eight of a heart attack at the Waskanut Bowling Alley in South Grafton. His Uncle Leonard would be driving up to Harvard Yard to pick him up in the morning and return him to Grafton for the two days of waking to come. O’Hara began to take in bits of the story from his mother, from Mary Guerin, the housekeeper, and from his Uncle Leonard as he drove with him on a cold winter morning over the familiar highway home.

O’Hara heard that his father had gone the previous day to the doctor who had told him he was in good health but added, “Tell Mary to put your food on a plate. Not all out on the table. You’re eating too much.” Russell O’Hara had joked a few hours later at supper, “I’ll have my banana cream pie tonight but then I guess I won’t be having any more for a while.” That night at the bowling alley he had turned, falteringly, to one of his partners, and said, “You take my turn. I feel kind of funny. I’ll get a Coke or something.” On his way to the soda concession he had keeled over, dead. A policeman and a priest had knocked on Kay’s door. She knew something was wrong the instant she saw their grim faces. “When you see the priest you always know,” said the housekeeper with her folkish wisdom. Kay had walked into the bathroom, slammed the door shut, and screamed, “I loved him so much and they took him away from me!” She was taking it all very badly and carrying on terribly. She had called up Madeleine Warren, Sally’s mother, across the street, and cried, “I don’t know what I’m going to tell the children.” Phil, thirteen—the same age his father had been when his grandfather died of a heart attack—discovered what had happened when he walked downstairs at dawn to feed his pets only to find the front room filled with cigarette smoke and adults murmuring in hushed tones around his mother. Phil’s reaction was to race down to the barn where he pulled on his father’s boots and overalls and sat at his father’s desk beneath the painting of the Kentucky walking horse while the farm hands Jimmy and Chili Whitney cried in chorus on two milking stools.

By the time O’Hara walked up the front steps to 16 North Street he could already feel the heavy atmosphere of family tragedy and Irish-Catholic mourning which he would experience for the next three days. The body had arrived at the house at noon, brought by undertakers Thomas Reilly & Sons of Westboro, and was laid out in an open casket on a bier in the front room with a number of tall floor candles burning nearby. The room was perfumed with the sweet smell of the elaborate bouquets of sympathy flowers that had already begun arriving. The music room, where Russell had played piano every evening, had been converted into a smoking room with folding chairs for guests, and the dining room table was kept fully stocked by neighbors with food and liquor. As was the custom, family members took turns sitting with the body, or praying at the tiny altar set up near the bier, through the empty hours of the night. Because of Russell O’Hara’s popularity at Holy Cross and St. Philip’s Church, there were plenty of visiting priests to give a religious cast to the rituals of mourning. “I don’t think there was an hour when there wasn’t a priest there,” remembers Philip O’Hara. “There’d be prayers every so often during the day. I spent a lot of time down there kneeling, or standing and looking at him, not understanding any part of it.”

O’Hara’s own involvement in these ceremonies was odd and unexpected. He broke the news of their father’s death to his little sister with his usual love and big-brotherly compassion. He was there at quiet times to bolster his mother. But given the tendency in his letters home from the Navy to usurp his father’s role in trying to shape and support his family from afar, O’Hara shied away on this occasion from being the strong figure around whom everyone could gather. He showed no interest in sharing his grief with the neighbors, relatives, and priests who were milling about at all hours on the first floor. It seemed he had taken to heart his own observation to his father a year earlier, “It’s odd how soon one can outgrow a place and with it the people one knew there. . . . How do you explain that, Dad?” O’Hara dealt with his mesh of contradictory feelings in a dramatically private manner. “Frank went directly to his room, which was in the back of the house, and nobody really saw him,” recalls his brother. “He went up there and he didn’t come out. I don’t remember seeing him until the next day. Everybody was saying, ‘Where’s Francis? What happened to Francis?’ We would check on him and he was always in his room. Then he just broke out crying. You could hear him from downstairs. He just sobbed uncontrollably.”

The bedroom to which O’Hara withdrew had remained largely untouched since his high school days, its walls covered with posters of paintings by Gauguin and Rousseau, its bookcases neatly crammed with books. The bathroom, used by Russell O’Hara for shaving in the mornings, still contained his father’s long leather strop for sharpening razors. The room, the house, the view of the pine tree through the window, the sounds of adults talking downstairs, all were familiar cues that brought back memories. Certainly, for all his contrariness, O’Hara had been very close to his father. As Genevieve Kennedy, a friend of O’Hara’s from Grafton, explained, “His father was a very kind man. I think that Frank got his kindness and gentleness from his father. And he got his creativity from his mother who was a very high-strung woman.” Russell O’Hara’s death unfortunately came at a moment of high-pitched tension. O’Hara’s decision to go to Harvard, his dismissal of the teachings of the Catholic Church, his flirtations with Communist thinking, and his youthful urge to strike out on his own, an urge made more pressing by his experiences in the Navy and by his unspoken awareness of an even more threatening homosexuality, only exacerbated the traditional father-son conflict. The vociferous tone of O’Hara’s protests can be heard in a letter from San Pedro beginning, “Dear Dad, You and I have a slightly different attitude toward a rather basic thing: the world. . . . As the nuns used to remark, quoting Wordsworth, ‘The world is too much with us.’ But it is our natural habitat and is not rejection of it cowardice or laziness of one kind or another?” His father did not take kindly to such remarks, or perhaps merely to the strident tone in which they were delivered, as O’Hara’s letter home after his Christmas leave of 1945 makes clear: “I sensed while I was at home that my suremindedness on some subjects annoyed you. I hope you have gotten over it by now. I had a feeling that you would prefer my being hesitantly agreeable, rather than sure and disagreeing. Am I right?” That their differences had not been resolved only made O’Hara’s grief more inconsolable.

The drone of prayers and the clicking of rosary beads from the downstairs parlor, which had been transformed into a ghostly ante-chamber to the world beyond, held little solace for O’Hara. Although he had recently described himself as Roman Catholic in the appropriate blank on his Harvard admission application, he had over the previous year been consistently striking a renegade stance toward the Church, based in large part on the attitudes toward death, life, and the afterlife implicit in these funeral ceremonies. Soon after his Great-Aunt Elizabeth’s death in 1944 he had written disapprovingly to his mother, “You’re not going to stay in black, are you, Mum?” The prayers being recited by the priests in the front room to welcome his father’s soul into heaven seemed irritating rather than comforting to O’Hara, caught by this untimely death thinking thoughts about life and death quite different from those taught to him by another group of men in black cassocks at St. John’s.

On Saturday morning, O’Hara, with the rest of his family, rose early and gathered downstairs in the front room for a private ceremony at the side of the casket. They then made their way on the sunny but cold morning, as they had every Sunday morning with Russell O’Hara always at the wheel, to St. Philip’s Church. “Kay looked in another world as she came in supported by Fran,” nineteen-year-old Phil Charron wrote in his diary that day. “Very pitiful and poignant.” Following High Mass, its loveliest moments the boy’s voice of Billy Cahill rendering “Ave Maria” and “Panis Angelicus,” the mourners moved on to St. Philip’s Cemetery for the interment, where prayers were read in Latin beside Russell O’Hara’s grave. Near his freshly shoveled plot on a knoll overlooking Millbury Street rose the gravestones of other members of the O’Hara and Donahue families, including his father, John P. O’Hara (1857–1912), his mother, Mary E. Donahue O’Hara (1858–1940), his Uncle J. Frank Donahue (1869–1931), and his Aunt Elizabeth J. Donahue Reid (1867–1944). With the exception of his brief stay in Baltimore, Russell O’Hara had never wandered far from this clannish fold.

After a buffet luncheon at North Street, prepared by Mary Guerin, Francis made his excuses and departed again for Harvard. It was an awkward moment, but as his mother was supported by such a close group of family members, including Aunt Grace who offered to move in temporarily to ease the transition, O’Hara’s leavetaking did not register harshly. He was diffidently polite to the guests, but the focus of his feelings was obviously elsewhere. A few hours later, having reacclimated himself to the campus, O’Hara was moved by the inner pressure of his loss, as well as by the wintriness of Harvard Yard, its leafless trees like so many tall scarecrows through which only more cold brick buildings were visible, to write “Solstice,” a melancholy poem in which the true subject, his father’s death, was cloaked in a Renaissance conceit trimmed with square quatrains and regular end-rhymes:

The waning star

falls wanly to

the planets are

no vivid hue.

(When O’Hara came to write “To My Dead Father” six years later he again used quatrains, a conservative form he perhaps associated with his relatively conservative father.) O’Hara was more comfortable pouring his grief into this little poem than he had been fielding condolences. As he had once written of his privateness to his parents, “It always amuses me when someone remarks how well they know me; throughout my life my most cherished wishes have been my most secret (simply because to share is to spoil in many cases) ones.” As the following year progressed, O’Hara would start expressing these secret feelings more at his typewriter and less at the piano, so that while he had written only three poems in 1946, he was to write thirty in 1947. Significantly, piano-playing and political discussions, activities so much associated by O’Hara with childhood and his father, began to wane in importance after his father’s death to be gradually replaced by poetry and his new identity as a poet.

The most immediate change for O’Hara as he entered his second term was his reassignment as a veteran, along with three roommates, to Eliot House. O’Hara was pleased to be moved to this great five-story pink brick Georgian building constructed around a hexagonal courtyard, its Greek dome supported by tall white Corinthian columns, its most coveted suites affording slanted views of the airy, if often chilly, Charles River on which they fronted. O’Hara’s room that spring semester was J-21, a corner triple suite cramped by the presence of one extra roommate. Every evening he would join his peers filing past a steam table in their somewhat feudal dining hall with its dark oak paneling and tall windows that looked out on the sawed-off weeping willow in the court, or perusing the volumes in a house library still strong in history and literature after three years of Navy borrowing, or listening to classical LPs on the new LP attachment to the phonograph in the music room in C entry. On rare spring days, the lock on the gate to Memorial Drive was open and O’Hara was able to walk directly down to the river for sunbathing, one of his favorite activities. With the crew practicing their plashing strokes on the river, white clouds passing overhead, and grassy meadows that seemed to stretch endlessly on the far side of Memorial Bridge, the broad expanse between Eliot House and the river on warm days was the most desirable on campus. Indoors, O’Hara’s hideaway was the dusty but magical attic piano room. Located in the tower and reachable only with difficulty by a staggered series of staircases, this room, with its round windows affording views of river, sky, and trees, was where O’Hara practiced and composed for hours on a black grand piano.

During O’Hara’s day Eliot House was a peculiarly lively mix of jocks, aesthetes, scholars, and snobs. The man responsible for picking and choosing was its house master, John H. Finley, Jr., the Eliot Professor of Greek, who had a reputation for being a bit stuffy. As one of his students put it, Finley flaunted a “keen sense of professorial majesty.” He had a predilection for throwing tea parties with exquisite cookies and fruitcakes to which he invited “Eliot gentlemen” he was cultivating with surnames such as Cabot and Lodge belonging to the exclusive “final clubs” along the river. This elitism irked the increasingly sarcastic O’Hara who made many smart comments to his friends at Finley’s expense. But in all fairness it was Finley’s shrewd search for men he felt would be prominent in any field that made Eliot House just the sort of heterogeneous setting where O’Hara could flourish. Finley found accomplished athletes who brought home seven of the eight intramural sports awards. He invited poet Archibald MacLeish to speak at the annual house dinner that spring and kept on Harry Levin, F. O. Matthiessen, and Theodore Spencer as house tutors. When Donald Hall became editor of the Harvard Advocate, Finley rewarded him with a plum single suite outside the doors, which allowed him to invite girls in at any hour. Finley also encouraged the presence of the actors of the Veterans Theatre Workshop. Their student director, Jerome Kilty, staged Bartholomew’s Fair as the 1946 Eliot House Christmas play and, in 1947, The Merry Wives of Windsor in which Finley played the part of a Latin scholar of dubious merits. Eliot House wasn’t particularly scholarly—that distinction belonged to Lowell—but it was intellectually and artistically strong enough that its residents pulled in the most fellowships abroad every year, while its frequent and noisy cocktail parties and all-night bridge games were the envy of the more muted houses such as Adams and Winthrop.

That spring as the elm trees in the Yard turned pale green, O’Hara sat busily in his unprepossessing corner of Suite J-21 transforming himself from a composer into a poet. It was the sea change of his second semester. “I asked him one day why he decided to become a poet instead of staying in music,” recalls his brother, “and he talked about James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Joyce had been O’Hara’s boyhood hero pointing a way out of the dank crucifix-lined halls of St. John’s toward a more exhilarating world where Stephen Dedalus could be called to his vocation as an avant-garde poet while standing on a beach, O’Hara’s favorite landscape. More recently Joyce’s works had come to present more fully to him the possibility of a coalescence of music and literature. From a first book of poems revealingly titled Chamber Music through to Finnegans Wake, Joyce had used language with as much attention to sound and rhythm as to sense. O’Hara knew this tendency intimately, having written a string quartet inspired by Ulysses and a poem inspired by Finnegans Wake. (O’Hara must not have thought his string quartet a success, for he later wrote to his Navy friend, Tom Benedeck, “I believe Ulysses is too intensely and perfectly a novel, as is Portrait of the Artist, to lend itself to another’s music.”) During freshman year, Joyce the polyphonic poet, as well as Joyce the renegade Irish Catholic, was playing on O’Hara’s mind.

Meanwhile O’Hara’s earliest wish to become a composer and concert pianist was fading. His growing desire to be a poet was accompanying an increasing dissatisfaction with the practical hurdles of a career in music. The more academic side of music had always perplexed him, and he had shied away from prestigious music schools such as Juilliard and Eastman because he felt he lacked basics. “I’ve studied and loved some things while passing over the simple bases leading toward them,” he had admitted to his parents. “In too many places I have information but no knowledge.” Irving Fine’s Elementary Harmony course, which he was routinely continuing along with the second halves of his other first semester courses, did little to dispel his misgivings. By its conclusion, O’Hara had sworn off all music courses at Harvard. At the same time he came to accept his limitations as a pianist, a difficult reckoning for a young man who had tackled such complex pieces as Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C Sharp Minor (not the modified version in C minor) in search of ever more impeccable finesse and polish. “Remember to make hammers out of your fingers,” he had advised his brother Philip about his piano practicing. During O’Hara’s senior year a story circulated at Harvard that he had played once for Rachmaninoff at the New England Conservatory and that the Russian pianist and composer had advised him that his hands were too small for ultimate success. O’Hara drew on this story years later when he wrote one of his “On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday” poems:

Good

fortune, you would have been

my teacher and I your only pupil

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Only my eyes would be blue as I played

and you rapped my knuckles,

dearest father of all the Russias.

While such a session may never have taken place, the conclusion that he was physically unsuited to excel at a concert hall career helped to dissuade O’Hara from a career in music.

As a freshman O’Hara was already displaying an ability to dash off poems in longhand, or at a typewriter. “I was never sure how good I thought anything could be that was just tossed off,” observed one neighbor. O’Hara approached poetry much as he had approached the keyboard. His pose was not the lovelorn, anguished, or confessional one adopted by so many young poets. Rather, having already achieved a sophistication in music, he exhibited a relish for virtuosity. O’Hara’s freshman poems tended to be games, tests, exercises, or parodies. Learning about the history and techniques of poetry as he went along, he challenged himself by imitating the styles of Wyatt, Coleridge, or Stein. On February 15, three days after Wallace Stevens read from Harmonium to a crowd of five hundred in Fogg Large Room, O’Hara wrote “The Militarists” in a ballad style similar to Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks.” (O’Hara mixed Stevens’s sensuous high style, though, with the rougher stuff of politics, putting forward the theme of antimilitarism so close to the heart of this fledgling poet who was still as interested in the address to be given by five-time Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas in March at New Lecture Hall as he was in Stevens.) Although he was having trouble with its grammar in German Ab, O’Hara dared himself to write a rhyming poem in the German language, “Das Lied für Der Erwachend.” He wrote three poems in French, the high school foreign language in which he had earned a C+: “Merde,” “L’Ennui,” and “Le Coeur Sur Le Main.” (Interested in translating Verlaine, O’Hara prodded Jerome Rubenstein’s linguist girlfriend, “You just tell me what it says and I’ll put it into poetry.”) In April O’Hara wrote a number of poems based directly on musical models: “Blues Song,” “Nachtstück,” “Quintet for Quasimodo,” “Song.” These poems relied on musical constructions and on such musical values as the alternation of fast and slow tempi for their effect. Like the Renaissance poets he was mimicking that semester in “Homage to John Webster” and “Virtu,” O’Hara was inclined to think of songs as poems. He even kept a separate notebook in which he diligently copied down lyrics of some of his favorite art songs, including “Blues Tempo” from Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny and “Mimi” from La Bohème.

While O’Hara was disillusioned with the Music Department by late spring, he was certainly no less eager to hear new music. On May 1 he stood eagerly in line with hundreds of other college students outside Sanders Theater for the opening of a three-day “Symposium Musicales” sponsored by the Music Department. The hall was filled that first afternoon with everyone from a seemingly lonely Robert Frost to a highly gregarious redheaded young woman from Wellesley, all listening along with O’Hara to E. M. Forster speak on “The Raison d’Être of Criticism in the Arts” followed by Roger Sessions on “The Scope of Music Criticism.” O’Hara whispered condescendingly to a friend that Sessions composed “sewing machine music.” The draw for O’Hara that evening was the premiere of a newly commissioned string trio by Arnold Schoenberg played by the Walden String Quartet. Friends from the Music Department made fun of him for attending a premiere of atonal music, which O’Hara would describe four years later in “The Tomb of Arnold Schoenberg” as a “loud windless blizzard, / pianoforte of celestial hazard.” Composer and Herald Tribune music critic Virgil Thomson (Class of ’23), who was to become a friend of O’Hara’s in New York, spoke the following afternoon on “The Art of Judging Music.” On Saturday night O’Hara attended the festival’s finale, a world premiere of Martha Graham’s “Night Journey” with music by Juilliard’s president, William Schuman. There he was, wrapped along with the rest of the intent audience in the shadows of a modernist piece based on the incestuous union in Greek legend of Jocasta and Oedipus. That this uncompromisingly avant-garde performance, designed as were most of Graham’s dances to reveal “the inner man,” premiered at the Cambridge High and Latin School gives a sense of the sophistication evident in much of the cultural calendar at Harvard in the late forties, as far from the usual college-circuit fare as its more mature veterans were from the usual freshmen.

On June 1 the spring semester officially ended. O’Hara packed his bags and vacated J-21 to return to Grafton for the summer. This was a difficult transition, as he was moving at once backward to the confines of the scene of his childhood and forward to contending with the fallout from his father’s death. The main casualty, of course, was his mother. Eight years younger than her husband, Kay had always remained somewhat the girlish pupil who had fallen in love with her English teacher. Russell had balanced her unstable charms by assuming a paternalistic role in their marriage and handling all of the practical household responsibilities. Kay was now suddenly lost. Her first impulse was to try to draw her oldest son back into the family as a surrogate husband. “She sure did try to depend on Frank,” recalls Maureen O’Hara. “She wanted him to be there. She wanted him to go to dinner parties with her. When he was at Harvard she would always want him to come home. But he was very clear about what he would do and what he wouldn’t do.”

O’Hara, feeling the uncomfortable tug of duty, did step in occasionally to help his mother through a difficult situation. Immediately following Russell’s death his Aunt Grace had moved into the music room with the ostensible motive of helping Kay. Her disapproving presence, however, only cast a further pall over the family. Grace strictly supervised Kay and tried to keep her within the proper bonds of widowly behavior by dressing her in black and discouraging her from going out to parties. Such enforced gloom enraged O’Hara who marched downstairs during one visit home and ordered his startled Aunt Grace to vacate the premises because she was upsetting his mother. “Frank was sticking up for my mother more than she was sticking up for herself,” says Maureen O’Hara. One legacy of Grace’s short stay, however, was Kay’s burgeoning drinking problem. As an antidote to Kay’s sleeplessness, Grace had plied her with hot toddies every evening at bedtime. Soon Kay didn’t need any coaxing. She would sit up nights grieving alone in the front room, playing classical records on the phonograph and drinking sherry. At dawn, as a gray light washed across the room, it took on the look of The Lost Weekend: glass ashtrays filled with squashed cigarette butts and little cups of half-eaten shrimp cocktail scattered across tabletops. An all-consuming alcoholism was beginning to take hold.

O’Hara found himself in a bind. The freedom that he had glorified in his letters from the West Coast and that he had just begun to achieve at Harvard was suddenly at risk. Phil Charron recalls that “Fran became heroic after his father’s death and tried to step in to save the family.” While O’Hara truly did make efforts to hold his disintegrating family together, he also made equal efforts to keep at a distance from matters that were either outside his ken or that he was too busy at school to address. His brother claims that when a family lawyer, Francis X. Reilly, representing at once Leonard O’Hara, Grace O’Hara, and Kay O’Hara, decided on the terms by which his mother was bought out of the Donahue business—a payment of $40,000 with an amount deducted for the worth of their collectively owned house—O’Hara paid no attention to the proceedings. The eventual result of the minimal legal settlement was that Kay would have to work for the rest of her life at odd jobs in bookkeeping, bank auditing, and billing. “I really got very angry at Frank at this time,” admits Philip O’Hara, who was then fourteen. “Even as a kid I knew that something was wrong there, one lawyer representing three families. Frank was too busy at Harvard. From my point of view he’d really taken a walk on the family.”

Making his way anxiously through this labyrinth of family emotions, O’Hara felt his Navy resolutions severely tested, especially his Emersonian resolve to protect his personal freedom. “I should not find it difficult to justify cutting anyone from my life I was convinced thoroughly had no place there,” he had written to his parents from the Pacific. “It might give me pangs for a while but time heals everything and it would still be the lesser of two evils.” This determination, easy enough to express by letter, was to be refined and given weight by his wrestling with the question of his responsibility toward his mother over the next few years. In the acting out of its implications, O’Hara defined a complexity of his character that friends in New York would later either praise as living in the moment or denigrate as emotional ruthlessness.

O’Hara significantly concluded his autobiographical poem about growing up, “Ode to Michael Goldberg,” with a grand paean to the virtues of this liberty, as light and evanescent as a fleece, so tantalizing and yet unattainable during his three summers in Grafton:

for flowing

as it must throughout the miserable, clear and willful

life we live beneath the blue,

a fleece of pure intention sailing like

a pinto in a barque of slaves

who soon will turn upon their captors

lower anchor, found a city riding there

of poverty and sweetness paralleled

among the races without time,

and one alone will speak of being

born in pain

and he will be the wings of an extraordinary liberty

O’Hara dealt with his caged summers in Grafton by staying busy. He worked part-time at the Wuskanut Worsted Corporation in nearby Farnumsville as a millworker, payroll assistant, weaverroom clerk, and warehouse overseer. This textile mill shows up in the novel O’Hara was writing in 1950: “the whole room banging and clacking as frame slammed into frame and bobbins flashed through metal tubes and wooden casings, like so many pistols being fired at your dancing feet.” At night O’Hara would gather with his local friends to play out their group fancies of living on the Quai d’Orsay in twenties Paris or in Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury, entertaining each other by playing charades or throwing dress-up parties with offbeat themes such as “Worms Eating an Apple.” These parties often turned into serious discussions on art and politics, usually instigated by O’Hara who was adamantly avant-garde and pro-labor. An important magnet for the group was the Red Barn Theatre in Westboro where their objective was to lure one of the leading summer stock actors or actresses, often nationally prominent, back to O’Hara’s home for a late-night bull session. All of these self-consciously madcap parties were fueled by drinking, and many a moonlit evening O’Hara would wind up in a car driving recklessly around the curving back roads of Grafton at fifty miles an hour. Almost every teenage boy in Grafton Center lucky enough to be able to use his parents’ car sped wildly on those dirt back roads. As one of the gang, Genevieve Kennedy recalls the essence of those summer soirees, “It was beer, beer, beer, beer, beer.” Kay O’Hara complained in vain about the noise and excessive drinking at her son’s parties, while he in turn was given to slamming doors in annoyance at her own drinking, their trading of accusations a clue to the hidden dynamic of much of the anger simmering between mother and son. For as his mother’s drinking was escalating, so was O’Hara’s, and much of their criticism of each other was made only more emotionally grating by their denial of their own excesses.

O’Hara also gingerly avoided any admissions or displays of his homosexuality. His friends complied tacitly in this discretion although they all felt inklings of O’Hara’s as yet largely unacted upon proclivities. “All the girls in our circle in Grafton were vying for his attentions,” claims Genevieve Kennedy. “But you didn’t get his attention by being sexy but by being interesting. You had to touch his intellect. I sensed that early on. Frank and I did kiss once. But I knew then that there was something different about him from other boys. He didn’t try to make moves. I think he knew that I sensed that and that I still liked him and didn’t judge him and I think he appreciated me for that.” Phil Charron, too, recalls that O’Hara hinted at new desires without ever directly revealing them. One night Charron made a comment about a handsome young man named Billy whom they both had befriended separately. O’Hara looked surprised, then exclaimed, “It’s too bad Billy isn’t here. With his looks and my music we could conquer the world!” “I felt a real attraction there of Frank for Billy,” says Charron. O’Hara also complained to Charron, “Nothing passionate ever happens in Grafton.” Sensing the dangers of any flamboyant admissions in Grafton, but quite adept by now at secrecy, O’Hara remained simultaneously gregarious and private.

A typical party, which had taken place at Elsa Ekblaw’s, was described by O’Hara in a letter to his Navy buddy Tom Benedek. Benedek had recently mailed him a musical setting of part of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which O’Hara and Burton Robie planned to sing at Ekblaw’s “entertain-each-other party.” These plans collapsed, however, as Ekblaw couldn’t persuade her guests to cooperate. When his free-thinking hostess tried to promote further intimacy, “even to giving the female guests orders about ‘whom to work on,’” O’Hara characteristically, as he said, “detached myself to serious drinking and conversation.” He spent most of the party in the kitchen arguing the superiority of James Joyce to Thomas Hardy. “I drank entirely too much,” he confessed, “and didn’t get home until five.” Most revealing was O’Hara’s attitude toward a guest at the party whom he suspected to be homosexual. “One of the girls accused one of the men of homosexuality because he wouldn’t accompany her upstairs,” O’Hara wrote to his Navy friend. “He really is odd—I shouldn’t be surprised if she had unwittingly hit the nail on the head.” Not betraying his own sexuality at the party, and choosing the pejorative word odd in his descriptive account, O’Hara gives a sense here of the sort of fancy footwork he was capable of in Grafton—and, earlier, in the Navy—to deflect attention from his own hidden sexual identity.

Evidence of the underlying drain of these stressful summers, and proof of the strength of their undertow to pull him back to an earlier existence, is the dearth of Grafton poems. The graph of O’Hara’s poetry production during his Harvard years shows a series of radical peaks and valleys as he frantically composed more and more poems each school year only to dutifully pass the summer months at 16 North Street without completing more than two or three.

As his life in Grafton became more weighted and conflicted, O’Hara compensated by growing increasingly flamboyant at Harvard. His main accomplice in this flowering was Edward St. John Gorey. The son of a Catholic Chicago newspaperman and his Episcopal wife, Gorey had shuffled off his initial religious instructions as a Roman Catholic quickly enough to manage to escape his own confirmation and First Communion. Having passed through the “progressive” Frances Parker School in Chicago, and a crash course in Japanese sponsored by the Army at the University of Chicago, Gorey arrived at Harvard at twenty as a precociously full-blown eccentric. Standing over six feet tall, thin and gaunt, Gorey accentuated the towering effect of his presence by dressing in long sheepskin-lined canvas coats and sneakers. Looking like a Victorian curiosity, Gorey invited inevitable characterizations from fellow students who perceived him as “tall and spooky looking” or as a “specter.” The costuming and gesturing, including, as one Eliot House neighbor recalls, “all the flapping around he did,” decidedly cast him as a campus aesthete. “I remember the first day Ted Gorey came into the dining hall I thought he was the oddest person I’d ever seen,” recalls the photographer George Montgomery, an Eliot House resident. “He seemed very very tall, with his hair plastered down across the front like bangs, like a Roman emperor. He was wearing rings on his fingers. It was very very faggoty.”

O’Hara was quite taken with Gorey whom he had met early in their first semester in Mower Hall. Their proximity—Gorey on the first floor, O’Hara on the second—was due to their shared status as veterans. But O’Hara’s attraction was hardly based on exchanging war stories. Gorey represented his first serious brush with a high style and an off-beat elegance to which he quickly succumbed. Gorey dressed, after all, in the same sorts of long fur coats trailing behind him as the Boston Brahmin poet John Wheelwright (Class of ’20), a local legend, who was struck down by a drunken driver in 1940. Gorey was appropriately vague in his pronouncements, especially about his own emotional states, but always spoke in such a way that clichés or commonplaces were given a twist, almost as if he were placing invisible quotation marks around them as he spoke. There was a lilting music in his quiet remarks that somehow implied humor in even the most serious of situations. He made whimsical drawings of endearingly ghoulish Edwardian figures in ruffled collars, smoking jackets, and floor-length frocks, using India ink on scratch paper, figures O’Hara would describe in a student poem, “For Edward Gorey,” as “elegant indifferent” and “busy leisured.”

O’Hara and Gorey soon became a noticeable odd couple on campus. Tall and short, these friends, not lovers, stalked the Yard together, rummaged through dusty book bins, traveled into Boston to catch a ballet at the old Opera House on Huntington Avenue or a foreign film at the Kenmore near Boston University. As an inveterate bookworm who had quickly run up tabs for hundreds of dollars at three local bookstores, Gorey was impressed by O’Hara’s extensive discourses on obscure writers whose works never showed up on the syllabi of any of their classes. “I was reading Ronald Firbank but never had any notion of what was going on,” says Gorey, referring to the eccentric English author of The Flower Beneath the Foot and Prancing Nigger. “But Frank always knew that so-and-so was doing such-and-such. He was great on plot synopses.” O’Hara, in turn, found Gorey’s personal style liberating, especially given his own repressed early years in parochial classrooms and Naval barracks. “I remember thinking that Frank kept himself under wraps the first year at Harvard,” says Gorey. “He was very much involved in the whole lapsed Catholic bit, which obviously disturbed him.” By teaming up with Gorey, however, O’Hara gave his first visible signs of unwrapping, causing some of his earlier friends on campus, friends of convenience rather than soul mates, to grow irritated. “He had friends in the Music Department who actually accused me of having corrupted Frank,” reports Gorey, “like in some turn-of-the-century novel.”

At the start of his sophomore year, twenty-one-year-old O’Hara became Gorey’s roommate in Suite F-13, an Eliot House triple. O’Hara’s room was a small bedroom down a hallway and up a few steps from the suite’s bathroom. The second bedroom was occupied by Vito Sinisi, an Army acquaintance of Gorey’s whom he had bumped into in a History of Religion class freshman year. “He either called himself ‘Vito’ when he was feeling very Italian or ‘Victor’ when he was feeling less Italian,” reports Gorey of the philosophy major whose dealings with O’Hara were cursory. Gorey slept in the suite’s living room where he often sat laboriously designing wallpaper or drawing his humorous Edwardian figures whose “eyes glow gas jets” in O’Hara’s poem, on a largish table near a window looking out on dusty Boylston Street. With a broad range of furniture styles available for rent on Harvard Square, O’Hara and Gorey eccentrically chose white modern garden furniture for their rooms, including several chaise longues. “It was all very sturdy stuff because Ted was quite weighty at that time,” claims one Eliot House neighbor. A slate tombstone taken from Mount Auburn Cemetery served, at one time, as a coffee table. This was only fitting for Gorey, who became well known as an author and illustrator of wistfully macabre drawings in such books as The Doubtful Guest and The Haunted Looking Glass, as well as for his Tony-award-winning set designs for Dracula.

At first Gorey—an authority on bohemian eccentricity—had a more distinctive personal style than O’Hara. Yet O’Hara was always the more talkative and animated. Gorey was shy, if funny, while O’Hara, at ease for once in his new surroundings, displayed an Irish garrulousness expressed either in deeply absorbing personal conversations or in expansively entertaining routines. “Frank talked a lot and Ted never opened his mouth,” remembers poet Donald Hall. “You’d go into the room to talk with Frank and there would be Ted sitting at the desk drawing one of his Christmas cards.” Genevieve Kennedy, who came down from Grafton to act as O’Hara’s date at a few Harvard football games, remembers more occasions of shared animation. “That was where Frank really came into his own,” says Kennedy of the suite where she visited O’Hara and Gorey. “The idea was to lie down on a chaise longue, get mellow with a few drinks, and listen to Marlene Dietrich records. They just loved her whisky voice. At that time Frank got me started on Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Zoltán Kodály. He was very much a modernist. I would then get these funny funny letters from him written in this tone of Oscar Wilde. That’s what happens to young people in college. They decide on their mentor and they go all the way in trying to be like him.”

O’Hara and Gorey were not lovers, but their adopted style was full of the mannerisms of upper-class English homosexual society. The wit, the slightly nasal British intonation, the eccentricity and coolness were borrowed in part from such aesthetes of the 1890s as Oscar Wilde, as well as from the post-World War I generation at Oxford that Evelyn Waugh wrote about in Brideshead Revisited. (Gorey insists that their mimicking of the Oxford generation was carried off only “in a tacky sort of way.”) O’Hara’s readings during 1947 and 1948 of such particularly stylized English novelists as C. Day Lewis, E. M. Forster, Cyril Connolly, Christopher Isherwood, Virginia Woolf, Henry Green, and Ivy Compton-Burnett made him a perfect game-player for the rather precious world into which he had recently stepped. He aped style and tone with the same ease and speed with which he was able, through imitation, to write heroic couplets or French chansons. That O’Hara was quite adept at such chameleonlike transformations is evident in a letter he wrote to Gorey from Grafton in the summer of 1949, at the end of their two years together as roommates:

Mon ange,

I am feverishly upset and hostile to god to know I shan’t see you yet awhile. Do let me know when you arrive East soon by way of encouragement. I have had it, by now, believe me; my heart from the depths of fatigue can only murmur ‘l’angoisse d’été’ and ‘ces souvenirs, va-t-il falloir les retuer?’ Not so much as a stipend of love to allay the pangs!

The contrast between this swooning and quite theatrical note and the more open-faced letters O’Hara wrote home from the Navy is striking. It is a modulation partly explained by his playing to his audience, and partly by the truly radical changes in voice and personality he had managed in the prior three years. Yet Gorey’s style was never entirely appropriate for O’Hara. As one observer at Harvard felt, “It was cool, English. Nothing could get to you. But then Frank was someone who everything got to.”

O’Hara and Gorey soon found that the old wooden classrooms of Harvard’s Sever Hall, where many English classes were taught, paled next to their own ground floor salon. Gone was the earnest studiousness of O’Hara’s first semester. “We had a very frivolous attitude about the courses we were taking,” remembers Gorey, a French major. “Vito was always trapping us into courses. I remember he trapped me into one philosophy course and then dropped out, leaving me behind. I think it was Symbolic Language.” At about this time O’Hara complained to his little sister, probably with some exaggeration, that he had read all the books they were teaching at Harvard. His coursework during this second year did reflect, however, a new resolve to concentrate in English rather than Music, and he officially registered for such survey courses in the English and History departments as Professor Munn’s History and Development of English Literature, Dr. Elliot Perkins’s History of England from 1688 to 1815, and Dr. Salvemini’s The Italian Risorgimento: 1748–1870. He also continued with an intermediate Reading and Composition class in the German Department, in which he worked at translating Schiller’s poetry, including “Wilhelm Tell,” and Hermann Hesse’s “Knulp.”

The only professor able to draw O’Hara and Gorey out of their studied lassitude was the young poet John Ciardi whose English Composition course they both registered for, O’Hara submitting a sheaf of new poems, Gorey a few limericks. Ciardi, still in his early thirties, was a recent firebrand on campus. A Boston-born Italian, he had spent his undergraduate years at Bates and Tufts before moving out to the University of Michigan where he earned an M.A. in English and composed a manuscript of verse, Homeward to America, that won a 1939 Avery Hopwood Major Award in Poetry, the same prize O’Hara was to win in 1951. Ciardi then spent his war years flying B-29s out of Saipan and turning those experiences into a series of war poems, which were published as Other Skies in the fall of 1947. When he read from these poems in a Morris Gray lecture, Professor Theodore Spencer praised him as “one of the younger poets . . . honest and straightforward . . . whose war poetry gives a good psychological account, and physical description.” As the Briggs-Copeland Assistant Professor in English Composition, Ciardi was soon pleading on a soapbox for some of his favorite leftist causes, especially countering the growing pressure to bar teachers with Communist Party affiliations, a movement given some impetus by the Nixon-Mundt Bill before Congress in the spring of 1948.

The mood in Ciardi’s composition course—taught as a writing workshop—was livelier and less formal than in O’Hara’s other classes. Shaggy-browed with slicked-back hair and a black mustache, Ciardi, pipe in hand, criticized his students’ work with the sensitivity of someone having vague misgivings rather than as a dogmatic lecturer about standards and opinions. “The purpose of writing is to be read,” he was fond of saying. While Ciardi’s push for communicative clarity was not particularly exciting to O’Hara, who was more drawn to wordplay and musicality for their own sake, he found the professor’s openness to student comments agreeable. Habitually seated with Gorey in the front row on the left side near the window, O’Hara was not at all reticent about making authoritative remarks. “He was kind of scary because he was elderly, having already been in the Navy,” recalls Donald Hall, a nonveteran freshman in the class. “He was also very funny, very smart, and very effeminate. And that was scary too. Ciardi admired him a lot.” Ciardi was near enough in age, and in war experience, to carry on outside friendships with his favorite students, in this case Gorey and O’Hara, whom he described as having “a lovely sardonic sense of fun,” and George Rinehart, son of the New York publisher. After class these four would often gather at a coffee shop. “It was always one hour of class followed by two hours of coffee,” recalls Rinehart. When Ciardi and his wife needed wallpaper steamed from their attic apartment in Medford, they hired Gorey, O’Hara, and Rinehart as a crew. “They were at it for days as they played a game of killing insults,” Ciardi remembered years later in a letter to editor Donald Allen. “They were beautiful and bright and I have never come on three students as a group who seemed to have such unlimited prospects.”

O’Hara, assured of close readings, was now more industrious than ever. “He really did just toss these poems off,” recounts Gorey. Always endowed with inordinate energy, as evidenced by his many letters home from the Navy, O’Hara was now furiously impelled to create rather than to dwell on his familial conflicts. His impulse was centrifugal rather than centripetal as he used his writing to push out to feelings of nonsense, fun, parody, or beauty, rather than down to confessional utterances. Ciardi occasionally caught some of his excesses in such marginal notes as “word-bog” (at the line “the Count assayed gavotte” in “La Poussière d’une Fleur Précieuse”; “strictly for Tin Pan Alley” (at the rhyming of “arms” and “her charms” in “Poem” (Speeding autos chasing garters), and “Auden does it, but it still seems precious to me” (at the elimination of the article in the line “she wailed at bier” in “The Fattening Nymph”). (A few years later in New York when O’Hara showed his verse to Auden, the older poet said, “You’ve got to be an Auden to get away with lines like that.”) O’Hara paid scant attention to Ciardi’s warnings, typing up many of the poems a few years later without incorporating the professor’s suggestions except in minute cases, as in changing “Tiny autos” to “Speeding autos.” His unwillingness to rework poems according to Ciardi’s reactions revealed his strong desire to push swiftly on to the next poem without looking back, as well as his early confidence in his own work.

During the spring term of the year-long English C, O’Hara concentrated almost entirely on writing rather achingly sophisticated stories in which he attempted to imitate the English novelists whose work he was reading. The opening phrases of a story he read in class—“five mauve clouds like negro fingernails above the horizon”—created enough stir to lodge permanently in Donald Hall’s memory. In “The Detected Shop-lifter” a wrongly imprisoned Mrs. Mildred Holmstead is crawled upon by a talking cockroach, a swipe at Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” The versatile O’Hara even tried his hand at a play, Dig My Grave with a Golden Spoon, concerning the death of a grandfather, which was meant to be performed in front of a giant gilt scallop shell. Ciardi, however, quibbled with the term play to describe the unorthodox scenario. Impressed with his student’s sparking talent and abundant productivity, Ciardi was said to have remarked at the time that O’Hara was writing “like a young Mozart.” Yet he also characteristically expressed reservations about the depth of emotional response available in such blithe Mozartian études. “He showed his brilliance rather than his feelings,” Ciardi observed almost thirty years later, suggesting the drift of his earlier criticism. “That was a point I often made in talking about his writing. I think, in fact, it was when he learned to use his brilliance to convey rather than hide behind that he found his power.”

Tucked away in a tiny block of Plympton Street just off the noisy main drag of Massachusetts Avenue was another favorite hangout of Gorey and O’Hara: the Grolier Bookshop. Founded in 1927 by Gordon C. Cairnie when he and a friend decided to merge private library collections, the bookshop was faltering until Cairnie’s decision in 1933 to stock the first copies of Ulysses in Cambridge while other bookstores were still busily consulting with the Legion of Decency. A small, claustrophobic brown shop, its tall wooden shelves crammed with volumes of poetry and literary novels, Grolier’s in O’Hara’s day was still watched over by the shy and reclusive Cairnie, who kindly allowed his customers to squeeze in at one solid wooden table to read, creating a sort of clubby atmosphere. O’Hara and Gorey passed many afternoons at Grolier’s, where yellowish sunlight filtered through the dust that filled the air of the high-ceilinged but confining space. O’Hara was collecting all the novels of C. Day Lewis. “They were thin,” as Gorey describes them. “I mean they were full-length novels, but they were sort of elegant, a little dull, concerning sensitive young English men in the early thirties.” Gorey, meanwhile, was collecting all the Penguin editions of Ivy Compton-Burnett, whose entire ouevre had yet to be purchased by the Widener Library. “Frank and I couldn’t afford to buy complete editions,” explains Gorey. “So we’d start buying one at a time. Well Gordon would catch on, if we were starting to become interested in one author, and would mark up the prices slowly for that author. By the time we arrived at the last book on the list, the price would be about ten times higher than it was when we started. I always said, ‘If only we had covered our tracks better.’” Although O’Hara’s tastes were decidedly British that year, he continued to keep up with alternate trends in modern poetry by purchasing Hart Crane’s Collected Poems, Ezra Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius and Make It New, and, by Dylan Thomas, who was to give a popular reading at Harvard in O’Hara’s senior year, 18 Poems, 25 Poems, Deaths and Entrances, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.

In the spring, O’Hara’s metamorphosis from composer to writer was marked by the publication of two of his stories in the college literary magazine, the Harvard Advocate. Like Gorey, who claimed that he “always felt a bit removed from Harvard,” O’Hara was not a joiner. His history as editor of his high school newspaper never propelled him toward an editorship on the Crimson, Lampoon, or Advocate. “We looked down on the whole thing,” says Gorey of such extracurricular activities. Yet Gorey’s diffident attitude was not entirely characteristic of O’Hara. Gorey’s own temperament was leading him toward a reclusive eccentricity. O’Hara’s natural gregariousness eventually led him instead to a small circle of poets and writers he knew well. He preferred charmed circles. They were more personal, familial, and manageable than the staffs of college literary magazines. Indeed, throughout his life O’Hara would avoid the traditional literary pecking order, protecting himself from the ups and downs of its cool rejection slips and overheated acclaim. A certain shyness about his writing remained with him always, as did a definite antiauthoritarianism.

Yet if O’Hara had been at all inclined, the Advocate was closest in spirit to his interests as it drew within its somewhat small circle most of the other poets on campus. Bly, Creeley, Ashbery, Koch, Hall, and Ellsberg were among the editors during O’Hara’s years, who sat in the magazine’s offices on Bow Street—the offices from which they had thrown a cocktail party in the fall of 1947 to introduce the actress Elizabeth Taylor to the freshman class—battling heatedly in a gray haze of cigarette smoke over the merits of a single line of poetry. “We used to stay up late arguing whether a poet should get in the magazine or not,” says Hall. “When I went to Oxford right afterwards I was amazed that everybody printed everything. There were about 450 poems printed every year in student periodicals, while the Advocate printed maybe twenty. We took ourselves very seriously. We were sort of pompous.”

By cultivating their own defensive cult, Gorey and O’Hara managed to blind themselves to much of the moral conservatism at Harvard. Advocate editors, for example, had direct dealings with the school’s straitlaced Boston legacy. Having been funded by a group of Old Guard trustees, the magazine had actually been disbanded in the early 1940s because of indications that its editorial board had turned into an exclusively homosexual club. When it was started up again in 1947 with funds from a Boston businessman, an unofficial guideline had supposedly been agreed upon banning homosexuals from the board. While this stricture was hardly taken seriously by its current group of self-consciously sophisticated editors, the threat was always present, if also scoffed at. “This actually almost kept me from getting on myself,” recalls John Ashbery, an Advocate editor who helped to choose O’Hara’s first stories without having met him. “But Kenneth Koch, who was perhaps a bit naive about such things, swore up and down that this was not the case with me, and that if it turned out to be true he would resign from the board. After I got on, I found out that several of the editors were that way.”

When O’Hara’s stories were published in two spring issues of the Advocate, a Contributor’s Note in the back of the April issue described his fiction as “controversial” although the cause of this controversy is unclear. “O the dangers of daily living,” which appeared in March, was a slice of a story, which used script dialogue to tell of a group of shrill people descending a flight of stairs, concluding when its narrator finally “fled into what was soon to be the night.” Ashbery deems that “It’s quite possible there may have been some gay overtones in this,” although such a judgment would have been based on the story’s telltale tone rather than on plot or action. Its title a nod at a Cyril Connolly book owned by O’Hara, his second story, “The Unquiet Grave,” which came out in the April issue, was a horror tale about a buried blond Viking boy named Ho whose suicidal mother arranged to have her lusty blacksmith lover murder her husband. Reviewing this story, the student critic for the Crimson vacillated: “It is good, but not especially so, and certainly not controversial. The idea of the story, which seems to me exaggeratedly picturesque, is generally hidden behind a style which is floridly poetic. Perhaps this concealment is a good thing for the style is definitely the strong part of the piece.” O’Hara was indifferent to such criticism, especially of style at the expense of substance. His current apprenticeship was to Ronald Firbank, who had once boasted that “My writing must bring discomfort to fools since it is aggressive, witty and unrelenting.”

Appearing with O’Hara in his debut in the March issue were Robert Crichton reviewing Frank O’Connor’s The Common Chord, John Snow reviewing Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, and Denis Fodor writing a story about a band of Greek guerrillas. In the April issue O’Hara kept more likely company; his fiction was included with poems by Ashbery and Koch, though he still had not met either of them. Yet the exigencies of magazine editing often led to some weird juxtapositions—most notably the printing of an essay called “Athletics Problems” by Harvard football coach William J. Bingham, ’16, in the September 1950 issue of the Advocate on the page following a story by O’Hara. Both Gorey and O’Hara felt lucky to be free of the need for any such politicking.

“We were giddy and aimless and wanting to have a good time and to be artists,” sums up Gorey of his and O’Hara’s condition at the end of their sophomore year together. “We were just terribly intellectual and avant-garde and all that jazz.”

For O’Hara, the summer of 1948, during which he turned twenty-two, was the blankest of all. No poems survive from those months. His home life became more governed by his mother’s moods. No new friends entered his circle. When he returned to campus in September, though, he serendipitously happened upon an interesting tea party. Suddenly it seemed as if the summer had thankfully never transpired and as if the fall were to be an only slightly restaged production of the giddiness of the spring.

For most returning students, the election was foremost in their minds. The race between Truman and Dewey was being made more interesting by the third-party candidacy of Henry Wallace. (Heat on the third-party issue was intense enough that the Advocate felt it necessary to qualify a story by literary board member George Bluestone titled “The Harvard Political Scene: 1948” by editorializing in his contributor’s bio that “Although purportedly a Third Party man we feel he has maintained a surprisingly objective view in his discussion of Harvard political organizations.”) The buzz on campus subsumed other sorts of political issues as well. That September, for the first time in Harvard Stadium history, women were legally allowed to sit in the College’s traditionally all-male cheering section between the 50th and 28th yardlines. And the taking of attendance was finally made optional in a majority of upperclass courses.

None of these matters was much discussed, however, at the humorously elegant tea party at which O’Hara found himself on his return to campus on an early September afternoon. It was being thrown by Hal Fondren in an Eliot House suite where he had been temporarily housed for the summer semester while making up a course he had failed. A graduate of McKinley High School in Canton, Ohio, Fondren was a veteran who had served as an Air Force gunner stationed in England, an assignment from which he had profited by purchasing T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in separate pamphlets as they were published during the war. He loved displaying these treasures to his guests. His excuse for the party that afternoon was the visit of an English friend of a friend whose background inspired Fondren to playfully plead continual nervousness that his guest would be making “all sorts of invidious comparisons to life at Oxford.”

As Fondren had never met O’Hara, his invitation was to Gorey who then mentioned that his two roommates had recently returned to campus. “Well bring them too,” said Fondren in a melodious stage voice that communicated at once both ebullience and unknown possibility. His was a contrived-sounding, slightly English voice of the sort that would have appealed to the Gorey contingent. And so the residents of F-13 arrived, walking into the usual swirl of a coterie of Eliot House gentlemen rushing back and forth to their rooms to fetch extra cups while Fondren poured hot water from his electric kettle into a constantly emptying tea pot. “It was a great big tea party which degenerated into a cocktail party and then into dinner,” tells Fondren. But amidst all the smoking and chattering O’Hara and Fondren settled into a talk and found much to respond to in each other. O’Hara, who would be registering that semester for Professor Rollins’s English Literature from 1500 to 1603, engaged Fondren in a conversation about Elizabethan literature and was quite struck by the éclat with which Fondren replied, “Really, all I know of Elizabethan poetry is by Herrick and all I can remember of that is, ‘Now the mirth comes / With a cake full of plums,’” at which line he produced from hiding a fruitcake he had transported all the way from Ohio. “Frank seemed to find that sufficient basis for a lasting friendship,” says Fondren, “and I was quite grateful.” Over the course of the coming school year O’Hara and Fondren gradually built up their friendship so that by spring O’Hara had largely abandoned F-13 to spend most of his time in O-22, the suite of rooms overlooking the master’s garden into which Fondren moved with an assigned roommate, Tony Smith.

While O’Hara loved using bits of his learning to carry on conversations such as that with Fondren on Renaissance poetry, his attitude toward his classes erred toward negligence. His paper-writing ability alone saved him. In the second survey course he elected in the fall semester, English Literature from 1603 to the Restoration, followed in the spring with English Literature from the Restoration to 1700, taught by Professor Kenneth Murdock, he earned an A. (“What is English 130?” he wrote indifferently of the course to a friend two years later. “I found on my transcript that it lasted a year and I got two A’s in it but can’t remember the subject.”) In Chaucer, however, taught by the extremely popular Professor B. J. Whiting, dressed in the celebrated three-piece suit and smoking a pipe, he did not fare so easily or so well. Although O’Hara felt strongly enough about the poetry of the Canterbury Tales to copy two lines from the “The Knyghtes Tale” in Middle English into his personal notebook—“Infinite harmes been in this mateere” and “This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo, / And we been pilgrymes, passynge to and fro”—he was not assiduous about Chaucerian scholarship. “Frank wasn’t doing any of the work at all,” recalls Jerome Rubenstein who was also taking the course that semester. “He said to someone, ‘Jerry is working hard and I’m not but we’ll both get the same grade.’ When I got a B and he got a D I was very pleased to say, ‘Aha Frank! Virtue does pay.’”

O’Hara also registered that fall semester for English J, an advanced two-semester English composition course taught by Albert Guerard. An attractive, natty dresser who slicked back his dark hair, wore oval wire-rim glasses, and smoked cigarettes as he taught, Guerard was himself a fiction writer who published his novel, Night Journey, in 1950. Guerard instituted what his student Alison Lurie has described as “one of the best fiction seminars in the country,” and his first students included future novelists Alice Adams, Stephen Becker, Robert Crichton, and John Hawkes. Guerard also served as faculty advisor to Wake, which was named by Hawkes and edited for a while by Creeley, published e. e. cummings, and served briefly as a substitute for the Advocate. O’Hara appreciated Guerard enough that he would register senior year for his course on European literature titled Forms of the Modern Novel, which included intensive readings of André Gide. Gorey took the course, too, but was less enthusiastic, claiming that “Guerard was very tiresome as I recollect because every work turned out to be about latent homosexuality.” O’Hara, though, was remiss about keeping up with the thousand-words-a-week requirement for English J. As the finishing line of the semester neared, he had fallen behind sufficiently in his word count to need to write an extended piece of fiction. Jerome Rubenstein was similarly behind and again had the opportunity to observe O’Hara attempt to play hare to his tortoise. “With three weeks and about nine thousand words to go, I was writing night and day,” remembers Rubenstein of the week in which O’Hara wrote his memoir of Navy life, “Lament and Chastisement.” “Frank was in a similar bind. His solution was to sit down at his typewriter off and on for about a week and bang out a long unstructured piece. Probably with a record playing. And perhaps sipping wine and talking to friends when they came into the suite where he had set up his desk in the living room. I stayed up all night finishing the last of three stories and submitted them the following morning and Frank was there submitting his. I remember he received a written comment from Guerard stating, roughly, ‘You’re obviously talented but you don’t work at your writing. Henry Miller suffers from the same problem.’”

More challenging and absorbing to O’Hara were the cocktail parties in F-13. Sometime during his sophomore and junior years, O’Hara had learned how to inject his naturally fresh intelligence with hidden fury to create a kind of talk that was at once stinging and entertaining. Cocktail parties were a forum for such displays of probing. They were competitions whose laurels O’Hara was much more interested in capturing than the races being run for grades in his classrooms. Having survived kamikaze attacks on a perimeter ship in Okinawa, and the swift and absurd death of his father, he had developed a taste for games of life. At one such party O’Hara and Donald Hall started exchanging quips, trying to be clever at each other’s expense. The fighting, which continued all night, was memorialized by Ciardi the following year as “psychoanalysis by bourbon” in a poem in The New Yorker. “His was a biting, waspish wit but not deeply cruel,” explains Donald Hall. “You’d feel the flick but your head didn’t come off.” Yet Hall continued to be a whipping boy for O’Hara, who was once heard to chant in sing-song fashion, “Mirror mirror on the wall / Who is Donald Andrews Hall?”

Hall and O’Hara fought partly because they felt they belonged in separate camps. Full of highly competitive young men who could be rude and tendentious, Harvard was always being subdivided into rival groups. Among the young poets a civil war had developed between those who favored Yeats and those who favored Auden. Hall was to write his senior thesis on Yeats, while Ashbery in the spring of 1949 was writing his on W. H. Auden. A banner poet for the more traditional Yeatsians was the young Robert Lowell, whose Lord Weary’s Castle had won a Pulitzer Prize for its twenty-nine-year-old author in 1947. Auden made his presence felt by reading at Harvard in December 1947, after which a party was thrown for him by George Montgomery at Eliot House, and by earning a Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for The Age of Anxiety. “Koch and Ashbery and O’Hara loved Auden,” claims Hall, “while Bly and I loved Yeats and Robert Lowell.” As O’Hara was to write in his self-dating “Memorial Day 1950”: “And those of us who thought poetry / was crap were throttled by Auden or Rimbaud.” That these early wars of sensibility continued to matter would be shown years later in an uncomfortable reading given by O’Hara with Lowell at Wagner College in 1962, as well as by his characterization of Lowell to an English interviewer in 1965 as having “a confessional manner that lets him get away with things that are really just plain bad but you’re supposed to be interested because he’s supposed to be so upset.”

As a practitioner of the art of bright conversation and a self-reliant figure on campus, O’Hara managed to conceal his own anxieties. But in October of junior year he suddenly dipped into a strong depression. Rubenstein was one of those who detected signs of O’Hara’s inner bout, a bout that was to last through the winter, although he was confused about its source. “I suspected he was having some sort of crisis before the Chaucer midterm,” says Rubenstein. “Something happened to him. I saw him in the exam room and he’d been up all night and was depressed.” At this time O’Hara began keeping a journal, an uncharacteristic genre for a young man who usually expressed himself in more public forms such as letters or stories and poems. That such confessional turning inward from art and social life felt compromising to him is clear from his own appraisal: “In a journal are the things which would intrude upon the purity of the work.” After January 1949, he never again returned to any sort of diary-keeping or self-analysis, but was poised to burn furiously as a writer. In spite of a guess from a friend that his depression came from realizing he was a homosexual, O’Hara’s crisis was more truly a confrontation with questions of meaning and vocation. Though his homosexuality and his struggles with his mother were undoubtedly darkening this depression, its permanent solution was a decision to commit as a writer who would draw on his own idiosyncratic experience rather than emulate any outside pattern.

Depression shadowed O’Hara for months. Sitting in Eliot House on the evening of October 11 he recorded a spell of “utter depression” as he listened over and over again to Schumann’s Piano Concerto, Piano Quintet, and Second Symphony. A week later he wrote, with black humor, “I often wish I had the strength to commit suicide, but on the other hand, if I had, I probably wouldn’t feel the need. God! Can’t you let us win once in a while?” Sitting in the Waldorf Cafeteria on the morning of October 29 between Sixteenth Century and Chaucer classes he drank coffee, read The Daily Worker, and thought of failure. He dreaded returning to Grafton for the holidays, with its memories of sudden death and the bruise left on surrounding lives: “Holidays coming. Will it happen this year? Will I die capriciously? Or will it be something unexpected.” And yet when he returned in January to Eliot House, taking a chair amid the din and high spirits of the dining hall, his mood was not lifted. Familiarity had bred contempt. “Back at school the same old depression reestablished itself, settling over me like the brown stain of the dining hall’s walls,” he wrote with disdain. “That hall full of people worrying about what anyone else is saying or thinking about them!”

During the fall and winter months, relief for O’Hara always seemed to be accompanied by inclement weather, the rain and snow allowing him to share his melancholy with the impersonal skies, to more fully indulge the pleasing pain of separation. As he walked down Huntington Avenue on October 10 after buying the Scott-Moncrieff translation of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black from a dusty bookstore, he reveled in the residue of the smell of disintegrating books and the damp of a falling rain “lit by store windows.” After finishing reading In Our Time two weeks later, O’Hara went for a walk in the “good and cold and raw” rain along the Charles River while arguing in his head with Hemingway, whom he dismissed as a writer of “short stories which clack along like a sewing machine. . . . I’d rather read someone’s last will and testament.” Returning in January he took an afternoon off to perform silly entrechats and pirouettes in a “dense and comforting” snow on the banks of the river until a strong wind forced him back through the black iron gates toward the lit windows of Eliot House whose residents he stereotyped angrily to himself as “people who are embarrassed by enthusiasm.” Arrogance, solitude, and anger were often his consolations during this night journey phase.

Off-campus, big changes were taking place politically. In Columbia, South Carolina, the previous year Bernard Baruch had announced, “Today we are in the midst of a cold war,” a phrase then picked up and popularized by Walter Lippmann. On November 2 O’Hara cast his ballot. “I voted for the first time today and I’ve been waiting to vote for so many years that I was quite excited,” he wrote. “Maybe I’ll become a social novelist, except that I probably couldn’t think of anything to say, and would never be sure it was right, at that. And I’m not irresponsible enough to be successful at it, really.” He was part of that small minority of Harvard students for the third-party Progressive candidate, Henry Wallace, whose outspoken criticism of the U.S. “get-tough” policy toward Russia had caused President Truman to ask him to resign as Secretary of Commerce in 1946. (In a straw poll in Eliot House, Dewey received 105 votes, Truman 54, Wallace 6.) Wallace’s major campus supporter F. O. Matthiessen, who had compared his candidate to Thomas Jefferson in a speech at Harvard Hall, had received a letter of support from O’Hara the previous spring. “Your letter came at a time when I happened to need that kind of heartening,” replied Matthiessen. No matter how O’Hara cast his vote that fall, he could not help but feel the shifting political winds. When he had arrived at Harvard, liberal students were tending to join cells, and at least one freshman English course offered readings in John Reed. By the spring of 1949, however, Harvard’s President Conant, in alliance with Columbia’s President Eisenhower, was calling for a ban on Communist professors, while the House Un-American Activities Committee was examining, in the glare of television lights, microfilm allegedly discovered in a hollow pumpkin on a Maryland farm, as evidence that Alger Hiss was a Russian spy. At Harvard the bitter climax of the purging of Communist “fellow travelers” came with Professor Matthiessen’s jump to death from the twelfth story of the Hotel Manger in Boston on April 1, 1950, after his name had been included in Life magazine in a spread that pinpointed Communist “dupes” in the manner of Senator Joseph McCarthy. In a suicide note left behind, Matthiessen had written: “How much the state of the world has to do with my state of mind I do not know. But as a Christian and a socialist believing in international peace, I find myself terribly oppressed by the present tensions.”

The core of O’Hara’s own depression was a more private fear of inconsequentiality. Pushed by his father’s death and cut loose from Catholic certainties, he had developed a craving to fill the void. Yet wherever he looked that fall he saw only signs of decay. It was an early inkling of his obsessive theme, the theme of death, which so lightly touches many of his poems. “I historically / belong to the enormous bliss of American death,” he wrote in 1959 in “Rhapsody.” Though he seemed very aware of death, he carefully kept himself from falling into the clichés of self-important morbidness he so detested in Mann’s Castorp. Sitting in F-13 before the holidays he wondered, “Who killed the ivy on the mantle [sic] while we were away last Christmas vacation? Is there a god? Or was it the biddy?”

In January he dove deeper into the discomfort: “The fragility of things terrifies me! However belligerent the cactus, ash from a casual cigarette withers its bloom; the blackest puddle greys at the first drop of rain; everything fades fades changes dies when it’s meddled with; if only things weren’t so vulnerable!” A spiritual heaven was no consolation to O’Hara who rebelliously began to cast himself as a devil or, later, as “the serpent in their midst” of “In Memory of My Feelings.” “I am reading, slowly, St. Jerome,” he recorded in his journal in October, “and I know now that Satan lives, and I have not yet made up my mind which side I am on.” Deciding that “against death art is the only barrier,” he chose a pagan, or Renaissance, solution, making art his bid for fame and immortality, his wing and a prayer against death. “I am romantic or sentimental enough to wish to contribute something to life’s fabric,” O’Hara wrote earnestly at a table in the tile-floored Waldorf Cafeteria on Harvard Square. “Simply to live does not justify existence, for life is a mere gesture on the surface of the earth, and death a return to that from which we had never been wholly separated; but oh to leave a trace, no matter how faint, of that brief gesture! For someone, some day, may find it beautiful!” As Harold Brodkey, whom O’Hara befriended senior year, put it: “Frank was ferocious about his life having some kind of meaning.”

While worrying about making his contribution to art, O’Hara was also making decisions about how to focus. He was deciding which kind of writer he wanted to be. He knew that he didn’t want to be a Hemingway, the sort of popular writer who reduced the complexities of felt life to an “elegant machinery” while his characters pretended to a deceptive lifelikeness. O’Hara wanted rather “to move towards a complexity which makes life within the work and which does not (necessarily, although it may) resemble life as most people think it is lived,” he wrote. “This makes my models Between the Acts, Nightwood, The Tragic Comedians (in a special way), The Waves (most of all, perhaps), Ulysses, and Prothalamium; also in a special way Ronald Firbank’s perfect light tragedies The Flower Beneath The Foot, Sorrow In Sunlight and the less perfect because less light Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli.” O’Hara was still thinking of himself primarily as a fiction writer, a path he would not entirely abandon until receiving the Hopwood Poetry Award in 1951. Yet the predilection he felt for works emphasizing language, style, and complex surfaces, rather than stories built on traditional plot and character development, hint already at his eventual turning to poetry rather than prose. He was coming to poetry by way of poetic prose.

In his final journal entry of January 28, 1949, he wrestled with a comment of Mary McCarthy’s that “the most harrowing experience of man” was “the failure to feel steadily, to be able to compose a continuous pattern.” The notion of steadying one’s feelings was particularly irritating to O’Hara whose father, like Proust’s, had accused him of an inability to assert any willpower over his sentimentality, the supposed weakness later alluded to in “Meditations in an Emergency”: “I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.” O’Hara opposed amorphous “being” to McCarthy’s imposed “pattern.” “I feel steadily but there is no pattern, there can be no pattern, there is only being,” he argued. “The artist is and always loves and always creates and cannot help but love and create; I do not mean that only the artist achieves being; I am not metaphysical, quite vulgarly I mean realization of personality.” In working through his objections, O’Hara not only granted himself implicit permission to perform pirouettes on the banks of the Charles and to behave as abnormally in love as he wished, but also to eventually write poems that depended on aleatory happenings and a jumble of feelings for their inspiration.

O’Hara’s school journal is a tapestry of loose threads. The threads were being tied together elsewhere. In November he wrote “How Roses Get Black,” which was the first poem included in Donald Allen’s posthumous edition of O’Hara’s Collected Poems, an appropriate beginning as the poet’s distinctive voice is heard in its lines clearly for the first time, the poem a knot of an announcement of his poetic beginnings. The tone of the poem is adversarial, witty, engagingly perverse. The adversary is a childish troublemaker who dashes a porcelain pony against a radiator, sets pink roses on fire, and laughs maniacally from the bathroom. The opposing voice is that of the poet: “I / who can cut with a word, was quite / amused.” The poet identifies with the burnt roses as his voice rises up against his alter-ego in mock-prophetic tones from the conflagration:

You are no myth unless I choose to

speak. I breathed those ashes secretly.

Heroes alone destroy, as I destroy

you. Know that I am the roses

and it is of them I choose to speak.

Roses, especially roses damaged in a rebellious and slightly guilt-tinged scenario, were evocations for O’Hara of his father and of a primal scene based on the backyard incident evoked later in “Macaroni”: “when my father knocked me into the rose-bed / thereby killing a half dozen of his prized rose plants.” “How Roses Get Black” was enfolded in the materials from which O’Hara’s poetry was first bred—childhood trauma, a broken relationship with his father, the cry of personal freedom heard in the exclamatory line “Talk about burning bushes!” By mixing this stuff of his own autobiography with a confident diction full of exclamation points, enjambed lines, and a rapid display of surreal and amusing images the young poet had, by late 1948, hit on a voice that was unmistakably his own.

O’Hara’s poetic breakthrough coincided—as such breakthroughs often later would—with the end of his funk. He began “moving onward and upward,” as Gorey somewhat ironically describes his behavior during the spring term of 1949. Having clicked into his own poetic voice, he was also more assured of his social voice. He began spending much of his spare time in Hal Fondren’s suite, impressed enough by Fondren’s witty remarks, sounding so much like his own in tone and sentiment, to copy some of them into his commonplace book along with quotations from Firbank, Baudelaire, and Marcus Aurelius. He records Fondren as quipping on one occasion, “Some people don’t understand about life. That we’re just passing through. These people don’t love you.” And on another occasion, “I’m so well equipped for living that I’ve never learned how to do anything.” Conveniently, Fondren’s roommate, Tony Smith, the tall offspring of a Republican textile mill family in Fall River, began at the same time hanging around more regularly with Gorey so that the four of them performed an unofficial dos-à-dos. “Tony and Ted would go shopping every week at Filene’s Basement,” says Fondren, referring to the Boston department store. “They were always buying things. It was just at the time when those long canvas coats with sheepskin collars became very fashionable and they both wore them. Tony was always embarrassed when Ted wore his sneakers so when they went to Filene’s he always wore shoes. Frank and I could hardly suppress our giggles.” This shifting arrangement was resolved at the end of the term when O’Hara announced to Gorey that he would be moving in with Fondren senior year. “I have to admit I did feel mildly abandoned,” recalls Gorey. Suffering from pressures from his mother on the home front and committed to notions of personal freedom and the importance of personality, O’Hara was reacting increasingly by pursuing his own wishes with a single-minded resolve. This was the trait that would later allow him to abandon himself with a sometimes frightening passion to the openings and closings of human relationships, counseling as he would in “Poem” (Hate is only one of many responses), “you don’t have to fight off getting in too deep / you can always get out if you’re not too scared.”

O’Hara began to flirt during the spring term with some of the homosexual implications of the high style he had so cleverly absorbed. “I felt that after we stopped rooming together that he sort of expanded,” says Gorey. “There was some carrying on towards the end. He would occasionally come back bombed out of his wits.” Such early activities on O’Hara’s part, though, were extremely circumspect and seemed as much involved with flirtation and seduction as with any serious coupling. As in later life, his attractions seemed more wrapped up with the poetry of sex than with any uncontrollable physical drive. At this time he carried on two discreet friendships with actors who lived in Eliot House and were involved with the Veterans Theatre Workshop, which had taken over the Brattle Street Theatre off Harvard Square that year to stage Troilus and Cressida and The Tempest. “It all happened on a Midsummer’s Eve, or so Jerry Kilty described it,” reports Fondren of O’Hara’s theatrical romances.

O’Hara preserved an air of mystery and innocence in his liaisons by often being attracted to young men whose primary orientation was heterosexual. Such tentative romances enabled him to preserve some of the spirit, if not the letter, of the Roman Catholic purity and pining virginity in which he had been incompletely indoctrinated. “Frank made a lot of these instant conquests,” says Fondren. “A lot of them turned out to be in a way sexual. And most of them were with people who were straight, or decided they were straight later on.” O’Hara managed such relationships in part by maintaining a somewhat ambiguous pose. Given the chameleonlike quality of his personality, some observers were struck by his obvious effeminate gestures, while others failed to observe any such signs at all. “He was quiet, not aggressive,” says Arthur Gartaganis, his assigned roommate freshman year. “I know he knocked around with Gorey who flaunted himself much more. Not the sexual part, that would not have happened then. But today Gorey might be the sort who would flaunt it whereas Frank I don’t think would.” Such indecipherability sometimes led to problems. Having double-dated with O’Hara and Elsa Ekblaw at Harvard football games, Jerome Rubenstein was caught by surprise. “I wasn’t aware of his homosexuality and he never acknowledged it to me,” explains Rubenstein. “But once I repeated to him a comment I heard from a mutual friend of ours about someone else we knew. The mutual friend dismissed this other person as ‘that dreary fag.’ Although Frank didn’t say anything, I think I could see immediately I was wrong. I didn’t see as much of Frank senior year and just before we graduated he came up to my room, slightly drunk, and told me I had hurt his feelings with that remark. He said something like, ‘Just because you’re from the Midwest doesn’t give you the right to be insensitive.’ But he forgave me.” The forgiveness was marked by his presenting Rubenstein before graduation with a sheaf of ten poems titled “Anthology,” including a poem dedicated to him, “Morgenmusik,” which ironically concluded with lines sounding a rhythmic battle cry for homosexuality:

practice a falsetto lilt

that’s only partly keen,

appreciate a different kind

of drums and fifes made out of shins,

confess things to each other,

dance the Männerdämmerung un-

prejudiced, with discipline and taste.

O’Hara’s discretion at Harvard was as practical as it was temperamental. In some ways Harvard after the war practiced an enlightened tolerance so that Donald Hall was nonplussed to see O’Hara brazenly walking hand-in-hand with Fondren, who was not a lover of his, down a path winding among the houses. But there were also occasions, during and shortly after O’Hara’s time, of authentically threatening repression. A black acquaintance of Hall’s had been expelled when discovered by a maid necking with a white man in one of the nooks of the Eliot House library. Another rather wealthy Eliot House resident was expelled for illicit activities with a student in his NROTC program. “Two very good friends were thrown out of Eliot House for a scandal that deserved nothing more than a yawn if you could find the energy to yawn over it,” corroborates Frederick English, a writer friend of O’Hara’s. “But it was a horrible tragedy because one of them eventually killed himself. To me it left a cloud over Harvard that I never really recovered from.”

Spring term, much of O’Hara’s public social life began to center on the Mandrake Bookstore at 89 Mount Auburn Street. Opened by the wives of two English A instructors in December 1948, the Mandrake was a cozy bookstore with a large front window, which O’Hara had taken upon himself to decorate quite effectively with fishnet, a green ball, a few shells, and a handful of sand to advertise the Brattle’s production of The Tempest in May. The store’s interior was arranged like a sitting room, and each afternoon Mrs. McCormick and Mrs. Parrish would serve a light tea to customers reading in chairs among the comfortably arranged books. “It became a salon,” says Fondren. “I had an account there because I wanted every Henry Green novel. It was at the time they were bringing out all of the novels of Evelyn Waugh and Elizabeth Bowen as well. Ivy Compton-Burnett, of course, was the patron saint of that group with Ted Gorey as her chief acolyte. We were all dying over the latest Ivy Compton-Burnett. You can’t imagine the excitement it created.” Given the tendency of Harvard’s young literary types of accentuate their differences, the Mandrake quickly took on a cliquish cast that distinguished it from nearby Grolier’s. “The Mandrake was more homosexual,” explains Donald Hall. “The theatrical people from the Brattle went to the Mandrake. There were probably more copies of Firbank there. I don’t mean anything heavy, though. I was at the two stores about equally. I remember turning around in the Mandrake one time and seeing Richard Wilbur walking in followed by Howard Nemerov and Howard Moss. This was 1949. They were the young poets in their thirties. Everybody had published one book. We were the kids who wanted to publish books of poetry.”

At the Mandrake a few weeks before the end of term O’Hara finally met the poet John Ashbery. The occasion was a party celebrating an exhibition of watercolors by Edward Gorey, and the tiny store was overflowing with an animated crowd of young students smoking, drinking, and, above all, uttering sharp, fast comments. In the din, Ashbery heard a flat, nasal voice, sounding much like his own, making an offhand pronouncement that he could imagine himself making in one of his more tendentious moments. “Let’s face it, Les Sécheresses is greater than Tristan,” O’Hara was exclaiming, referring to a vocal work by Poulenc recently performed at Harvard. “I knew instinctively that Frank didn’t really believe that Les Sécheresses was greater than Tristan,” Ashbery later wrote in a reminiscence, “and that he wanted people to understand this, but at the same time he felt it important to make that statement, possibly because he felt that art is already serious enough; there is no point in making it seem even more serious by taking it too seriously.” Pleasantly provoked by hearing O’Hara voicing an aesthetic attitude so close to his own, Ashbery pushed his way through the crowd. “Hi, I’m John Ashbery,” he said by way of introduction. “I’m interested in what you said.” O’Hara was immediately drawn in by his invitation to discuss twentieth-century music, a difficult topic at the dawn of the LP era with so few pieces recorded, and made more difficult by the snobbish attitude he had come up against in Harvard’s Music Department, which refused to take Poulenc or any other modern composer except Hindemith, Piston, and Stravinsky seriously.

Neither was a total stranger to the other. Ashbery, an editor on the Advocate, who had clear blue eyes, brown hair, and hawkish features and dressed in the proper Ivy League uniform accessorized on occasion with a vest or umbrella, was already known to O’Hara. Donald Hall had often urged them to meet. But Ashbery was much further along in his involvement with poetry and Harvard’s literary community than O’Hara. He had grown up as an only child on a fruit farm in Sodus, New York, and studied painting as a boy at a museum school near the University of Rochester where his grandfather taught physics. He had already turned to poetry seriously enough by his prep school days at Deerfield Academy to publish in Poetry magazine. It was Theodore Spencer who, upon his arrival at Harvard in 1945, had encouraged him by singling out one of his poems for praise in a freshman creative writing class. Sophomore year Ashbery published a poem in the first issue of the newly revived Advocate, titled “A Sermon: Amos 8: 11–14,” in which hints of his own meditative voice can already be detected in an uncharacteristic sort of T. S. Eliot format:

Let the cool martyr, whose distant head

Now seems a swimming dog’s, explore,

Sustained in a vast disinterest.

Dedicated to Auden, whom he considered to be the consummately modern poet, Ashbery became enchanted as well at Harvard by Wallace Stevens. He began to read Stevens seriously in F. O. Matthiessen’s Twentieth-Century American Poetry course for which he wrote a paper on Stevens’s “Chocurua to Its Neighbor.” Supported in his candidacy for an Advocate editorship by Kenneth Koch, Ashbery was soon actively engaged in the heated undergraduate politics of poetry board meetings, though like O’Hara, he felt somewhat distant from most of the traditional poems being written around him.

O’Hara remained a more inveterate outsider, a mysterious figure on the fringes of the scene. “I seem to remember Kenneth Koch once saying, ‘I wonder what it would be like to know O’Hara,’” says Ashbery. While O’Hara’s considerable energies had been absorbed in finding his way from music to poetry and coping with death and depression, his following of a path diverging from that of the Advocate poets had accidentally endowed him with an aura of mystery. “There was a sort of legend about Frank,” says Ashbery. “That he was this brilliant young writer who talked sassy. Someone who looked like he was going to be famous someday.” Yet from a distance Ashbery found O’Hara’s “punk angel” demeanor a bit intimidating: “He didn’t look like a very friendly person. He had this pugnacious look with a broken nose. He wasn’t someone one thought one could just go up to and say ‘Hi’ and start chatting with. In fact that was completely misleading as it turned out. He was exactly that type of person.” Robert Bly, too, felt that O’Hara was somehow exotically different. “Frank had an air of fate around him, as if he had come into the world to be an earl or a count,” says Bly, remarking as well on O’Hara’s seeming “willingness to be joyfully walking around in the forest rather than sitting in the castle at the center.”

Surprised by O’Hara’s friendliness, Ashbery determined to spend as much time as possible with him during the few weeks remaining before his own graduation in June. Shortly after their first meeting, he ran into him in Widener Library carrying a stack of books by various unknown writers including Samuel Beckett, Jean Rhys, and Flann O’Brien. An insatiable reader, O’Hara introduced him soon afterward to the novels of Ronald Firbank. “I had known about Firbank but thought he was too silly to bother with,” says Ashbery. “Frank taught me that (A) nothing is too silly to bother with, and (B) it was just a completely erroneous opinion.” The first novel of Firbank’s that Ashbery read that summer was Vainglory, which he described as “obviously greater than Tom Jones” in a letter to O’Hara in the excited and precious tone they tended to adopt with each other in those days. In their discussions of poetry that month they both agreed on the importance of Wallace Stevens, whose The Auroras of Autumn would be published in 1950, while mutually downplaying T. S. Eliot. “One day I ran into John and Frank on Massachusetts Avenue and they started saying that Stevens was a more important poet to them than Eliot, who was a huge influence on half the professors at Harvard,” recalls Harold Brodkey. “They wanted to abandon Eliot for Stevens and they wanted me to go along with them. They were very superior about being over Eliot’s kind of exaltation and incantation and upper-level meaning. It made me feel very stodgy.” Anxious to share some of his more obscure musical discoveries, O’Hara soon led Ashbery up to the music room in Eliot House, where he played for him pieces by Satie, Krenek, Sessions, and Schoenberg in the percussive style that was then in fashion. “It sounds like ‘There’s a long long trail awinding’ with a sort of a foxtrot,” explained O’Hara as he played a short suite by Krenek. He also performed one of his own compositions, which he described as “a sonatina that lasts three seconds.” Both O’Hara and Ashbery mixed their interests in avantgarde poetry and music with a love of popular American culture, particularly film—an interest first aroused for O’Hara in the movie theatres of Worcester—and so they didn’t hesitate to travel into Boston to catch a double bill of Howard Duff and Ida Lupino movies. O’Hara claimed a great fondness for Duff, who was typically cast as a tough hero or cop in grade B action films such as Brute Force and Johnny Stool Pigeon. The new friends then spent hours discussing all of their enthusiasms while sunbathing on the banks of the Charles.

While the tone of these talks was flawlessly casual and hilariously witty, the range of their content was actually quite new and important. O’Hara’s and Ashbery’s innovation was to be able to pass with each other from the high to the low, to gather in their net such disparate fascinations as French Surrealist poetry, Hollywood’s “guilty pleasures,” Japanese Kabuki and Noh, Schoenberg’s twelve-tone compositions, Leger’s geometric paintings, Looney Tunes cartoons, and Samuel Beckett’s spare prose. Ashbery credits O’Hara with having been the leader in instilling such an original, and almost impossibly inclusive, esthetic into his group at Harvard. While such pluralism became a striking trait of American culture in later decades, at the time such a dynamically eclectic approach to art—at once casual and profound—was unheard of, especially at Harvard. But it was in the air. And soon enough, thanks in part to the range of tones in Ashbery’s and O’Hara’s poems, and to their ceaseless championing of both popular and difficult music, art, literature, dance, and film, such an attitude would become pervasive rather than strange. Their springtime chats on the bank of the Charles, especially as they inspired the two poets to continue their accumulating and collaging of voices, contributed to what later became thought of as the “postmodern” attitude.

The immediate effect on Ashbery of their meeting was a relief similar to what he had felt when he first met Kenneth Koch in the fall of 1947 after submitting poems to the board of the Advocate. “This was the first time I knew a real poet who had read my things and liked them and with whom I could discuss poetry,” says Ashbery. “So Kenneth and I became very good friends.” In Ashbery, O’Hara, too, had found a poetic accomplice. Given to casting his friends in romantic settings drawn from the history of art, he was soon well on his way to the tender characterization of his friendship with Ashbery in his 1954 poem “To John Ashbery”:

I can’t believe there’s not

another world where we will sit

and read new poems to each other

high on a mountain in the wind.

You can be Tu Fu, I’ll be Po Chu-i

and the Monkey Lady’ll be in the moon,

smiling at our ill-fitting heads

as we watch snow settle on a twig.

That summer, Ashbery moved to New York City to work at the Brooklyn Public Library. He kept up a correspondence with O’Hara, continuing a friendship, always lightly tinged with rivalry, that would have been platonically described as like “sisters” in the homosexual slang of the 1940s. It was kept alive by a constant exchange of hot tips on music and books (Ashbery recommending Jane Bowles’s novel Two Serious Ladies and Prokofiev’s ballet Cinderella) as well as the crucial swapping of their latest poems for critical response.

O’Hara’s final summer in Grafton was more productive than usual as he spent much more time writing in his garret room. He continued to work at the textile mill, his shift commented on in a letter from Lyon Phelps, an Eliot House writer who wore his hair long in the style of the nineties poets and founded the Poets Theatre the following year. “As for the mill, I am glad to hear it is not so bad as might be expected,” wrote Phelps. “Blake has a few appropriate words about mills of another kind—this one may be a valuable contrast.” O’Hara read and loved Henry Green’s newest novel, Concluding, as well as two plays of Seneca’s (Thyestes and Phaedra) and George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways. He also viewed, and thought excessively about, a Warner Brothers cartoon, Dough for the Dodo, alternately titled Porky in Wackyland. “Some people can’t seem to get it through their heads that a surprise is funny if it’s funny not because it’s a surprise,” he delineated in a letter to Gorey. “Porky Pig next to limp watches à la Dali and bodyless pedestrians à la Artzybasheff is not funny in the same way D. Duck among bathing beauties is not funny.” He concluded that the cartoon, “an attempt at being surrealistically comical,” was “terrifyingly inept.”

Surrealism, as well as most other qualities of French poetry from Baudelaire through Prévert, was very much on O’Hara’s mind that summer. His readings in French poetry were beginning to keep pace with those in experimental English fiction, so that between 1948 and 1950 he purchased Les Fleurs du mal and Le Spleen de Paris by Charles Baudelaire, Poésies and Un Coup de dés by Stéphane Mallarmé, Choix de Poésies by Paul Verlaine, Illuminations and Oeuvres by Arthur Rimbaud, Anabases by St.-John Perse, Poèmes & Paroles and Figures et Paraboles by Paul Claudel, Paroles by Jacques Prévert, and, in English, Selected Writings by Paul Valéry. O’Hara was increasingly discovering in French poetry much of the same attention to beautiful surface, witty wordplay, and playful nonsense that had attracted him to his favorite English novelists, as well as an openness to darker and lusher methods and themes that was to greatly increase his own poetic range. O’Hara was soon to outgrow certain of the preciosities of his Anglophile phase, a turn signaled in a letter he wrote the following summer to a friend who had sent him a prose poem for his appraisal. “I can see certain tendencies in you which we all have to get rid of,” he wrote. “With me it was Ronald Firbank, with you it looks a bit like the divine Oscar (have you read that PRETTY poetry!). We americans are all more lonely for glamour than for each other, and until we learn to find it in each other and around us, that is to say in something which we can comprehend, relax with, and use, glamour is just an elder brother’s cast off exoticism.” French poetry, though, was an influence that O’Hara was never to outgrow.

O’Hara’s chief fascination during the summer of 1949 was Arthur Rimbaud, the nineteenth-century French poet who at the age of sixteen had claimed that a poet transforms himself into a seer only through a long and prodigious “dérèglement de tous les sens.” O’Hara copied into his commonplace book a positive assessment by Henry Miller from The Time of the Assassins, his study of Rimbaud’s visionary poetics: “Of what use the poet unless he attains to a new vision of life, unless he is willing to sacrifice his life in attesting the truth and splendor of his vision?” He copied as well his favorite lines from two of Rimbaud’s poems, “Mauvais Sang” and “Vies,” and parodied the first line of Rimbaud’s “Voyelles”:

A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green

(Rimbaud)

A red, E blue, I yellow, O white, U green

(me, 49)

From June until August O’Hara worked on eighteen pastorals titled “Oranges,” which were his attempts to write in the style of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, a series of prose poems that Rimbaud had originally titled simply Poèmes en prose. (The following summer O’Hara would write to a friend that the prose poem was “perhaps the most difficult prosodic form.”) O’Hara’s resulting poems are often antipastorals, emphasizing the excrement as much as the beauty of the farm landscape of central Massachusetts in which he had grown up, a tactic suggested as well by Rimbaud in his own antipastoral poem, “Ce qu’on dit au poète à propos de fleurs.” Obviously working at digesting this French poetry, O’Hara disorders his senses from the first line of “Oranges” on: “Black crows in the burnt mauve grass, as intimate as rotting rice, snot on a white linen field.” Caught at the crossroads of poetry and prose, and always prone to flirting in his poems with the flat rhythms and long lines of straight prose, O’Hara had found in Rimbaud’s prose poetry a naturally appealing model.

On the weekend of September 17, the final weekend before O’Hara’s return to Harvard for his senior year, he visited John Ashbery in New York City. It was their first reunion since Ashbery’s graduation in June. Ashbery had been turned down by Harvard’s graduate English department and was preparing to study for a master’s degree in literature at Columbia University instead. (The irony of Harvard’s decision was to become obvious forty years later when Ashbery, as one of America’s most celebrated poets, was invited to deliver the university’s prestigious 1989–90 Charles Eliot Norton lecture in poetry.) At the time he was living with a fellow library worker at 21 Jones Street in a sort of My Sister Eileen Greenwich Village basement apartment, the legs of passersby always visible through its living room window. In honor of O’Hara’s brief visit Ashbery threw a party in the spirit of the crowded late-night alcoholic fetes filled with young men and women passionately discussing art, as well as the proper ratio of gin to vermouth that had become O’Hara’s element both in Cambridge and Grafton. Many of those attending were regulars at the Phoenix Bookshop on nearby Cornelia Street, a literary store along the lines of the Mandrake, where Ashbery had befriended John Lynch, an expert on the construction of mobiles. Late in the evening O’Hara caused a stir among the smashed party-goers by appearing wrapped in a lavender feather boa he had discovered somewhere in the apartment. “I dimly remember some story where during the party John Lynch wanted to show Frank the Phoenix Bookshop,” says Ashbery. “I’m not at all sure this is an actual memory of mine and if it is it undoubtedly couldn’t have happened, but something somehow sticks in my mind. They walked around the corner and Frank was, I think, wearing his feather boa. He said a woman with a little boy came up to him and said, ‘This is my son. Please take him and teach him your ways.’”

O’Hara’s first taste of life in New York City was tantalizing enough for him to think about living there someday. His excitement from this first visit inspired a whimsical poem titled “Song” written on a return visit a year and a half later that opened “I’m going to New York! / (what a lark! what a song!).” O’Hara’s dreamy description of Manhattan in the poem’s closing stanza as “hung with flashlights” marks the beginning of his poetic fascination with the city that was soon to become his muse.

The last week in September 1949, Hal Fondren took a train from his mother’s home in Canton, Ohio, to New York and then to Springfield, Massachusetts, where O’Hara met him. They had decided to room together, and Fondren was planning to spend a night in Grafton before traveling with O’Hara to Cambridge. The visit, however, turned out to be more unsettling than the pleasant detour he had anticipated.

When O’Hara met Fondren at the Springfield train station he nervously cautioned his guest, “Whatever you do, don’t ask for a drink at home. We’ll go out and have a drink.” O’Hara had never informed Fondren of his mother’s alcoholism, and Fondren was a bit puzzled by the warning. “That was a big stumbling block for him,” says Fondren. “I certainly would have been understanding if he’d said ‘Mother is an alcoholic.’” Instead of explaining, O’Hara mysteriously proceeded to take him on a whirlwind tour of local bars and friends’ houses, where they drank Indian Pale Ale, described by Fondren as “the local champagne,” on the pretext that a guest required lots of drinks. “I think it was probably more his problem than mine,” says Fondren. At dinner Mrs. O’Hara nagged them in a very dramatic voice, “Aren’t you boys drinking a great deal too much?” Afterward O’Hara took Fondren to a summer production at the Red Barn Theatre in Westboro from which he left at curtain call to drive the leading lady back to her motel while Fondren went off with someone he had met at the theatre’s bar. They agreed to meet in the town square of Grafton at midnight.

Fondren arrived at the Common with its empty bandstand and silhouette of the statue of Jerome Wheelock, but O’Hara never showed up. After waiting in the deserted square until 1:30 a.m. with no sign of his friend, Fondren set off in the dark to try to recognize the vaguely Victorian outline of the O’Haras’ home. After quite a while, he arrived at 16 North Street, where he was greeted by a worried Mrs. O’Hara who explained that her son had arrived home earlier, badly injured, after wrecking his Aunt Grace’s car. He was upstairs sleeping. At about six in the morning, O’Hara came downstairs looking very battered, with a black eye and blue bruises, asking Fondren if he remembered what had happened. O’Hara, it turned out, had drunk so much that he had entirely blacked out the evening and the events surrounding the accident. “That morning his mother was making it quite difficult,” recalls Fondren. “She turned on the radio. She was listening to the local news, expecting unidentified bodies to be turned up all over, news of a hit-and-run driver. By this time we were thoroughly alarmed. We tried to retrace the route he must have taken. There weren’t any houses knocked down, or hedges. We couldn’t see any place where there was any damage.” Toward noon they dropped the car at a garage in Worcester and took a bus back to Cambridge. Fondren was now privy to a view of some of the darker landscape his discreet roommate had been concealing—especially the specter of alcoholism as it was moving down from mother to son with its obviously destructive potential. The accident O’Hara couldn’t remember must have brought up haunting memories for his mother of the death of his Uncle Joe in his soda van over twenty years before.

Back at Harvard, the incident was characteristically left undiscussed as O’Hara and Fondren set their undergraduate lives in motion again, their sense of freedom heightened by their status as seniors. The best accommodations of O’Hara’s student career were in Eliot House’s O-22—a two-bedroom suite with a living room and fireplace overlooking the master’s garden, with its own private entrance outside the courtyard. Nicknaming their quarters Fall River Suite in deference to the Fall River furniture left behind by Fondren’s previous roommate, O’Hara and Fondren added a decidedly bohemian air to the rooms by constructing bookcases out of lumber and bricks on which Fondren displayed his original editions of Gertrude Stein and Evelyn Waugh near living room windows hung with heavy dark red curtains. O’Hara, who had so admired Calder’s mobiles while stationed in San Francisco, contributed a mobile of stones and chains of his own design, which he hung in front of the fireplace, as well as a large reproduction of Picasso’s Harlequin. In these rooms they often carried on all-night discussions in which they fancied themselves offspring of plantation society from their respective birthplaces of Maryland and Kentucky, a fanciful game alluded to by O’Hara in “A Note to Harold Fondren” written that year:

The sky flows over Kentucky and Maryland

like a river of riches and nobility

free as grass. Our thoughts move

steadily over the land of our birth.

A record player that O’Hara had brought from home figured importantly in entertainments they would occasionally devise for each other while having drinks before going down to dinner. O’Hara’s specialties were singalongs to an old recording of Marlene Dietrich’s cabaret performances, during which he sometimes applied blue lipstick to his full lips for effect. Fondren matched these excesses by performing a Charleston to the accompaniment of a recording of Cole Porter’s “Why Shouldn’t I?” Theirs was a form of cross-dressing burlesque more prevalent as acceptable entertainment in their World War II days than at Harvard. “Anyone passing by would have thought we were balmy,” says Fondren.

O’Hara and Fondren fed each other’s exaggerated lack of concern for schoolwork. Both headed out excitedly for the first lecture of Associate Professor H. C. Baker’s Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, to which they never again returned, mostly due to the course’s scheduling at 9:00 on Monday mornings. For the final hour exam, they overslept and arrived a half hour late. “I swear that everyone gasped,” remembers Fondren. “We walked in silently and picked up our blue books and sat down and started writing. I think Frank got a C– and I got a D+. They were general questions which, if you’d ever been to the theatre or read a play you could extrapolate in the way that Frank did. He needn’t ever have seen one of the plays or even heard of them.” Undoubtedly similar was O’Hara’s treatment of Professor Sherburn’s English Literature from 1700 to 1798.

While shirking the required courses for which they were being graded, O’Hara and Fondren were busily attending various courses in the Art History Department that caught their fancy. O’Hara had assimilated most of the offerings of the Music and English Literature departments and was growing increasingly interested in art, evident in his readings that year of Max Ernst’s Beyond Painting and Paul Klee’s On Modern Art. They attended an entire series of lectures on Venetian painting at the Fogg Museum. They audited as well an introductory art appreciation course, which consisted mostly of the slide projection of a thousand university prints of masterpieces of painting and sculpture, which students were required to commit to memory. “There were some hilarious moments in that course,” says Fondren in the cool and detached tone he and O’Hara and Gorey had perfected. “The very idea of being able to snap off the titles of these masterpieces as they flash by! We were afraid to take any courses for credit in that department because all the people were eager beaver future museum directors and they were really serious.” Such an attitude was ironic for Fondren who became a director of the Poindexter Gallery, and O’Hara who would make his mark as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art.

The course to which O’Hara was devoting his full energy was the year-long upper-level English G, Composition: Poetry workshop taught by Ciardi during which O’Hara composed about two dozen poems. One of Ciardi’s favorites, which he graded A, was a formal rhymed poem in quatrains, “[White and casual, how the breath].” But most of O’Hara’s poems were more surreal, humorous, exotic, and derivatively French than this traditional and more immediately comprehensible play of variations on the simple theme of breathing. More numerous were such richly and purposefully dazzling efforts as “The Muse Considered as a Demon Lover,” a Baudelaire-like vision in heavily exclamation-pointed couplets about the visit of an angel muse who “burned all over the sheets”; “Poem” (At night Chinamen jump), which opened jauntily with the aggressively rhymed couplet “At night Chinamen jump / on Asia with a thump”; and “Poem” (The eager note on my door said, “Call me”), a Surrealistic black comedy published in the Advocate the following September in which the poet rushes over to discover his note writer “there in the hall, flat on a sheet of blood that / ran down the stairs.” While the pejorative sense of the term French sums up most of these willfully clever poems, even the most precious, such as “Today,” which opens, “Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!,” mixes what Ashbery has described as its “Parisian artiness” with a pragmatic American feeling for the solidity of objects, concluding “These things are with us every day / even on beachheads and biers. They / do have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.” “I never thought that I was a Surrealist and I doubt that Frank would have either,” says Ashbery, qualifying Octavio Paz’s reductive assertion in his 1971 Norton Lectures that Ashbery and O’Hara were the first American Surrealists. “But we were certainly very much influenced and were ‘fellow travelers’ of Surrealism. There were people like Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler in the thirties and forties who wrote rather heavy-handed approximations of French Surrealism. And there were undoubtedly others who I think actually wanted to be thought of as Surrealists.” For O’Hara, French Surrealism, described by André Breton in his first Surrealist manifesto in 1924 as “pure psychic automatism,” was mostly a foreign discovery that helped him to write unusual poems that remained contentiously outside the bounds of the traditional academic poetry of the 1940s. “Much of the poetry we both wrote as undergraduates now seems marred by a certain nervous preciosity,” Ashbery wrote years later, “in part a reaction to the cultivated blandness around us which also impelled us to callow aesthetic pronouncements.”

By senior year O’Hara had met Violet R. Lang, nicknamed Bunny, the other poet whose friendship was as important to his development as Ashbery’s. “I first saw Bunny Lang . . . at a cocktail party in a book store in Cambridge, Massachusetts,” O’Hara wrote in a memoir in the Village Voice in 1957, most likely referring to the Mandrake. “She was sitting in a corner sulking and biting her lower-lip—long blonde hair, brown eyes, Roman-striped skirt. As if it were a movie, she was glamorous and aloof.” The young lady O’Hara was talking to only increased his curiosity by remarking, “That’s Bunny Lang. I’d like to give her a good slap.” Many of the literati of Cambridge knew who Lang was and had strong opinions about her. Like O’Hara, she had been endowed with an aura of mystery and idiosyncrasy. The last of seven daughters born to a Social Register family, Lang lived with her father, Malcolm Lang, a King’s Chapel organist for many years, in a four-story brownstone at 209 Bay State Road overlooking the Charles River. The house was largely deserted since the death of her mother, Ethel Ranney, in 1949, and the marriages of her other sisters. Lang had graduated from the Hannah More Academy, came out in 1941, and spent her life restlessly shimmying out of the constrictions of her Boston Brahmin upbringing. Bored after two years at the University of Chicago and too young at age eighteen for any of the American women’s organizations, Lang had enlisted in the Canadian WACS during World War II. After the war she returned to the University of Chicago and edited the Chicago Review in 1948 before returning to Boston, where she worked on an uncompleted historical novel with Jack Rogers, a friend who became one of the actors of the Poets Theatre, Roger Jackson. Lang was a serious writer with a mania for constant rewriting. During 1949 and 1950 she published four poems in the most prominent of the little poetry magazines at the time, Poetry of Chicago: “The Suicide,” and “Philosopher King” (both in May 1949), “At the Meeting of Two Families” (November 1949), and “The Pitch” (February 1950). She was an unwavering disciple of Auden, and most of her poems emulate at least faintly the elliptical Anglo-Saxon–derived Audenesque diction of the opening triplet of “The Pitch”: “Spring you came marvelous with possibles / Marvels sparked everywhere burning from bracken / Lichen leapt crackling, and long grass.”

Much of Lang’s magnetism, like O’Hara’s, was ascribable to her presence—her larger-than-life personality and her sharp and uncommonly witty tongue. She had a plump, pretty face set off by bleached blond hair and underlined by a full sensual mouth and was known for extremely quick-shifting moods. In addition to being a poet, she wrote, directed, and acted in plays. “She had a mournful clown’s face,” says Ashbery who was later introduced to her by O’Hara. “Her sort of Walter Keene expression would constantly be interrupted by a giggle or a joke.” Lang satisfied some of her desire for role-playing by filling her drawers and closets with various exaggerated clothes, almost costumes, which she would wear in constantly shifting arrangements: huge fur coats, black cocktail dresses, men’s navy cotton jerseys, torn blue sneakers, white strapless piqué dresses, an old brown trenchcoat, a long white nightgown, bulky sweatshirts. Though Lang was always bankrolled by her father’s money, she further added to her mystique by taking up an inconsistent string of odd jobs, from bridal consultant for Fabian Bachrach to commission saleswoman for a Your Child’s Lifetime Photograph plan, to cover short-term debts. Her most famous gig was as a chorus girl barely covered by red sequins and wearing spiked heels and a tall feather headdress at Boston’s Old Howard burlesque theatre—the experience served as raw material for her 1952 verse drama, Fire Exit, a retelling of the Orpheus myth set in a burlesque house in Union City, New Jersey. These excesses, and the confusions and insecurities behind them, could place heavy demands on her friends. “You meet Bunny and you love her so much you want to carry all her packages for her,” commented George Montgomery at the time. “So she puts them into your arms and as you go along you find that they get heavier and heavier until you are ready to drop with fatigue.” “Bunny was definitely one of the great sacred monsters,” says Gorey. “I always felt she gave short shrift to the likes of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Like, ‘Oh you haven’t been through anything, honey.’” John Simon, the theatre critic who was serving as Harry Levin’s reader while a teaching fellow at Harvard, put it another way: “Bunny Lang was a fag hag. She was an exaggerated, overdone parody of femininity who cultivated around her a retinue of homosexual men who liked her for her outrageousness and outspokenness.”

While O’Hara’s friendship with Lang was often played out in public, a significant sector was private and intimate. Given to vague romances with arty women, such as Natasha whom he had met at the Servicemen’s Arts Center in San Francisco, O’Hara and Lang defused any sexual tension by casting themselves imaginatively as brother and sister, often claiming that they traded identities. The love they felt for each other was focused on their kinship as lovers of poetry and art. A few weeks after their meeting at the bookstore, they met again for a fencing period during which they sounded each other out for hours over beers. They both loved Rimbaud and Auden, although Lang felt O’Hara loved Rimbaud too much and he felt the same about her obsession with Auden. As strongly opinionated as O’Hara, Lang claimed that she simply couldn’t like Cocteau and couldn’t bear Ivan the Terrible. “It’s so black,” she argued. “I don’t believe a minute of it!” “And we then began our ‘coffee talks’ which were to go on for years, sometimes long distance,” O’Hara wrote in his memoir. “At 11 each morning we called each other and discussed everything we had thought of since we had parted the night before, including any dreams we may have had in the meantime. And once we were going to write a modern Coffee Cantata together, but never did.”

Their usual meeting place was Jim Cronin’s, a popular quick beer stop-off in Cambridge, which the 1948 Harvard Yearbook described as a “somewhat incongruous combination of the intimate booth system with a square footage ample enough for an airplane hangar.” Students taking late-night study breaks squeezed into straight-backed wooden booths, seating four to six persons, for eighty-cent hot roast beef sandwiches and Ballantine on tap. O’Hara and Lang were always crowded in a booth as their fast dialogue attracted a regular group of friends who, it seemed to Robert Bly, were part of “an astonishing collection of intense maniacs.” One of these nightly companions was George Montgomery, a quietly enigmatic poet and photographer who was often compared to the harlequin of Picasso’s blue period hanging over O’Hara’s fireplace. Ashbery described him as “a glamour boy. He worked out a lot which you didn’t see much of at the time.” Lyon Phelps was also a regular. The aspiring Yeatsian playwright was sure enough of his own ascendent fame that he had balked at addressing invitations for his sister’s wedding, afraid his handwriting would later be identified as having executed an unartistic task. O’Hara’s and Lang’s socializing sometimes spilled over to other Cambridge locales, though without much variation in its decidedly crazy spirit. “I once saw Frank and Bunny dance on the tables of the Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria,” says Harold Brodkey. “They did a Fred and Ginger routine. It was marvelous. But they did it as a form of incest. It wasn’t romantic.” With the help of Lang, O’Hara had begun to indulge senior year in this sort of communal café nightlife, the kind he would later thrive on at the San Remo and Cedar Tavern.

O’Hara liked to write in public and often scribbled poems at Cronin’s, including a collaboration one night with Montgomery, who contributed the leading line, “Oh for a faithful sailor!” Lang, however, was a more solitary poet. She hid away in her big room at the top of her Boston house, staring out at the Charles River and ignoring her two noisy Siamese cats who always seemed to be in heat, while she typed up her poems over and over, sometimes as many as forty times, in contrast to O’Hara who revised quickly and sparingly. Here Lang and O’Hara sat together writing joke poems, collaborating on alternate lines, or correcting each other’s work so that it was difficult to tell whose was whose. The inclusion of a poem actually written by Lang in O’Hara’s Collected Poems—“Words to Frank O’Hara’s Angel,” which concludes “Protect his tongue”—was an understandable editorial error, especially given its similarity to O’Hara’s own poem written at the same time and dedicated to V. R. Lang, “An 18th Century Letter,” which begins “To you who’s friend to my angels (all quarrelling).” (When a Poetry editor rejected “Words to Frank O’Hara’s Angel” in the fall of 1950, Lang’s reaction in a letter to O’Hara was “The NERVE of him sending back your Angel.”) O’Hara’s poems to Lang were always personal communications filled with inside jokes, a familiar tack for the poet whose poems, as he would describe them half-seriously in his 1959 manifesto “Personism,” were simply unmade telephone calls. O’Hara used his Cambridge poems to Lang to poke teasingly at weak spots in her character, especially what he regarded as her self-important seriousness. As he wrote impishly in “V. R. Lang”:

You are so serious, as if

a glacier spoke in your ear

or you had to walk through

the great gate of Kiev

to get to the living room.

Theirs was a complex and symbiotic friendship that would stimulate both of them enough to put up with its fluctuations over the next several years.

As he became more involved with the extracurricular scene at Cronin’s, O’Hara was even less inclined to sit through classroom lectures. The only new offering that inspired his regular attendance second semester senior year was The Symbolist Movement, taught by Renato Poggioli. Its effect on O’Hara far outstripped that of his two other electives: Edwin Honig’s Allegory and Associate Professor Walter Jackson Bate’s English Critics. An Associate Professor in Slavic and Comparative Literature, Poggioli was recognized as an authority on Russian writers and thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and had recently written an article on “Theory of the Advance-Guard Art.” For O’Hara, the appeal was Poggioli’s syllabus, which included extensive readings in the French Symbolist poets—Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Valéry and Mallarmé. The work of these poets overlapped almost perfectly with O’Hara’s own interests of the moment. O’Hara was charmed, too, by Poggioli’s easy European manner, so distinct from the predominating stern and proper Anglo-American sensibility of the English Department. Whenever Poggioli was lecturing his face always moved, as he paused, into a smile. As he explicated a problem he would often announce, “Eet’s a seem-bol.”

O’Hara met a fellow student in this course, Lawrence Osgood, with whom he had one of his first romantic affairs in which the feelings were somewhat reciprocal. A nineteen-year-old nonveteran member of the Class of ’50 from Buffalo, New York, Osgood had served as a sophomore on the board of the Advocate, dropped out of school for a year of self-examination, then returned in the spring of 1950 during which he roomed with Lyon Phelps in Eliot House. During his year off, Osgood had spent a year in psychoanalysis in Philadelphia because of fears of his homosexuality. At Harvard that spring Osgood continued his analysis by seeing a university psychiatrist. While O’Hara was still in the Navy, he had been briefly fascinated with the writings of Freud, but by senior year at Harvard he had grown mostly uninterested in undergoing any of the forms of psychoanalysis that were to become increasingly fashionable among his fellow artists and intellectuals in the fifties.

One evening Osgood joined O’Hara’s circle at Cronin’s for a night of the usual drinking. Osgood, O’Hara, Phelps, and Fondren then returned to O-22 to continue the party with a bottle of Southern Comfort. Fondren went off to bed, while Phelps stayed on playing O’Hara’s favorite Marlene Dietrich records on his phonograph. When O’Hara and Osgood began dancing together, Phelps finally tottered off to his own room. “As soon as I started to dance with Frank, I knew exactly what I wanted to do,” says Osgood, “which was to go to bed together.” Knowing that Osgood had never been to bed with a man before, O’Hara sweetly kept asking, “Are you sure you want to do this? Are you sure you know what it means?” “I may have appeared to him as a one-night stand,” says Osgood. “It wasn’t like that for me at all. I really had no experience in that kind of thing. But afterwards I instinctively pulled every kind of trick to keep Frank interested in me that one can pull under those circumstances, being the person who wants to continue an affair when the other person may or may not want to.”

O’Hara’s affair with Osgood, who later became a playwright and Arctic adventurer, fit a pattern that he would follow in many of his future romantic involvements. The seduction of younger, inexperienced young men, with the special interplay of power, initiation, adolescence, innocence, and corruption involved in such scenarios, held a powerful attraction for O’Hara. He felt exceedingly comfortable in the role of the big brother that extended in these relationships well beyond the bedroom, often their least significant aspect. “From some distance I’ve come to realize that he was in fact very fond of me,” judges Osgood. “As a lover, physically. But also as a more innocent person than he was. It was sort of a younger brother-older brother relationship. I think he found that charming. He guided me into a world of certain attitudes towards literature and music. Frank formed quite a bit of my thinking in those respects, or helped significantly.” That this sort of seduction continued on apace later in New York, especially in its most blatant form in the seduction of heterosexual men with little or no homosexual experience, is attested to by the poet Richard Howard. “Frank was always convincing straight people that they could sleep with him,” says Howard. “That was an interest of his. But a lot of us felt that that wasn’t an interest of ours. To colonize in that way.”

Because of his intimacy with O’Hara, Osgood witnessed some behavior that was hidden from his other friends. He was especially aware of the toll of the crisis at home, which was peaking for O’Hara during this year. “There were times at Harvard when Frank would go into absolutely black black black depressions,” recalls Osgood. “Not many. But I can remember when he would lie down on the couch in the room he and Hal Fondren had, draw the shades, and stay in darkness for several hours. My feeling about those times was that they had a lot to do with his mother, and that he was really working out of feeling responsible for her. I can remember him saying things which were hostile and unfeeling about his mother in order to distance himself from the hold that she had been trying to exert on him. That’s when she was beginning to drink and he could see himself being drawn into having to spend his life coping with that. During the spring of 1950 he did talk about her some, mostly in terms of how ill-equipped she was, how he was just going to have to get away from her, and how he was not going to let her tie him down.”

Typically O’Hara worked out his conflicts between mother and art, Grafton and bohemia, in a poem, “Memorial Day 1950,” written at the end of his last semester at Harvard and later judged by Ashbery “one of his most beautiful early poems.” As O’Hara was famously careless about keeping copies of his work, the poem exists only because it was copied out by Ashbery in a letter to Kenneth Koch. Most of its irregular stanzas, similar to indented paragraphs of prose, are filled with quick references to the poets and artists who were inspiring him. Beginning “Picasso made me tough and quick, and the world,” the poem constitutes a catalogue of his enthusiasms while at Harvard: “I had a lot to say, and named several last things / Gertrude Stein hadn’t had time for”; “even when you’re scared art is no dictionary. / Max Ernst told us that”; “we were all busy hoping our eyes were talking / to Paul Klee”; “Fathers of Dada! You carried shining erector sets / in your rough bony pockets”; “O Boris Pasternak, it may be silly / to call to you, so tall in the Urals, but your voice / cleans our world.”

O’Hara challenges authority figures from his past, especially his mother and father, with these new, thoroughly avant-garde poems. Like Rimbaud in “Les Poètes de sept ans” his tone is one of adolescent rebelliousness, his images bright, dirty, and provocative. O’Hara’s attitude toward his parents is strident and contrary:

My mother and father asked me and

I told them from my tight blue pants we should

love only the stones, the sea, and heroic figures.

Wasted child! I’ll club you on the shins! I

wasn’t surprised when the older people entered

my cheap blue hotel room and broke my guitar and my can

of blue paint.

These “tight blue pants” held special resonance for O’Hara who had been asked recently by a patron of the Silver Dollar, a gay bar in Boston that O’Hara frequented, about his tight-fitting blue jeans, “How’d you get into those? With a shoe horn?” At the end of the poem O’Hara opts, not surprisingly, for the artist’s life in his garret, a fanciful reproduction of his attic room in Grafton:

Look at my room.

Guitar strings hold up pictures. I don’t need

a piano to sing, and naming things is only the intention

to make things. A locomotive is more melodious

than a cello. I dress in oil cloth and read music

by Guillaume Apollinaire’s clay candelabra. Now

my father is dead and has found out you must look things

in the belly, not the eye. If only he had listened

to the men who made us, hollering like stuck pigs!

As the poet who wrote two poems that year revolving around the fantasy of orphanhood—“Gamin” and “Autobiographia Literaria”—O’Hara created for himself in “Memorial Day 1950” a lineage of artists rather than of O’Haras and Brodericks. It is the Rimbauds and Apollinaires who made him, he claims, and not he himself. Like the cubist Picasso of whom he writes

Once he got his axe going everyone was upset

enough to fight for the last ditch and heap

of rubbish

O’Hara was creating by destructively rearranging.

Commencement Day finally arrived on Thursday, June 23. O’Hara and Fondren got up that morning with terrible hangovers just in time for the arrival of both their mothers: O’Hara’s drove in from Grafton, Fondren’s was staying at the Ritz-Carlton. Putting on their rented black and white caps and gowns, they both took generous slugs from a bottle of scotch they had set on their coffee table, fashioned from an old sewing machine. “I waved the bottle at my mother, knowing full well that she wouldn’t dream of having a drink of scotch whisky, let alone at ten o’clock in the morning, without ice, on a hot day,” recalls Fondren. O’Hara’s mother, however, replied with surprising alacrity, “Yes, I’d like a drink too.” “That was the beginning of the end of that day,” says Fondren, whom O’Hara had still not informed of his mother’s alcoholism. “I thought nothing of it. But it was too late. I mean Frank should have warned me, which he never did.”

At 9:30 a.m. O’Hara and Fondren joined the rest of Harvard’s seniors in front of Holworthy Hall where, preceded by the band, they passed in front of the statue of John Harvard to form a double line along the path leading to the grassy space between Memorial Church and Widener Library, filled with rows of wooden chairs and transformed yearly into the “Tercentenary Theatre.” The opening of Harvard’s 299th Commencement for the conferring of 3,021 degrees, including those of the doctoral candidates in their bright pink gowns, was marked by the appearance on horseback of the Sheriff of Middlesex County dressed in eighteenth-century garb. Governor Dever arrived escorted by the scarlet-coated National Lancers of Massachusetts. After the seating of President Conant in a historic Tudor chair, a student began solemnities almost three centuries old with an oration in Latin. Soon the graduating seniors were called by President Conant to rise to their feet as their representatives ascended the steps of Memorial Hall to join “the fellowship of educated men.” Honorary degrees were awarded to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, whose resignation had recently been requested by Senator Joseph McCarthy, and to General Carlos P. Romulo, president of the fourth session of the U.N. General Assembly. It was O’Hara’s first brush with such pomp and ceremony since his witnessing of the formal surrender in Tokyo in 1945, and it marked the passing of the last of Harvard’s classes predominantly made up of veterans, the gradually mythologized Class of 1950.

Following the ceremonies, the O’Haras and Fondrens returned to O-22 where the two graduated seniors braced themselves with a little jigger of whiskey each. Mrs. O’Hara also continued to drink, enough so that when they arrived at Hopewell Farm in Concord for lunch she momentarily lost her equilibrium. “Frank noticed it and was very concerned and embarrassed about it,” recalls Fondren. “He never talked about his mother. You had to worm any information out of him. But that day he then admitted to me that his mother was an alcoholic and that it was a terrible problem.” The problem for O’Hara was not simply concern for his mother’s well-being, but concern that she would use her sickness, as she had used her weaknesses and hypochondriacal illnesses in his boyhood, as a means of trying to control those around her. That summer he reported on his conversation with Fondren in a letter to Larry Osgood who was working as a stage manager with a musical theatre troupe in San Francisco: “I was telling Hal the other day that I have the awful premonition that my Mother will do something foolish and terrible which will involve me and destroy my liberty. Dear god I hope I’m not right. People always try to make their attempted tyrannies seem like reminders of your responsibility.”

O’Hara began vacating O-22 the following afternoon, moving to a rented room in Cervin Robinson’s family house on Beacon Hill where George Montgomery was also residing. As he left Eliot House, his mood was decidedly different from that of most of his peers, with whom he had been so synchronized four years earlier when he had written to his parents, “I think I’d better hurry or I’ll be too late!” He as yet had no specific future plans and was certainly not anxious to join the ranks of the majority of Harvard seniors moving ambitiously on to graduate and professional schools or to positions waiting for them in the job market. O’Hara had unconsciously echoed his earlier freshman sentiments in his pivotal student journal of 1948, though shifting his meaning at that time more aggressively into the context of art: “One must live in a way; we must channel, there is not time nor space, one must hurry, one must avoid impediments, snares, detours; one must not be stifled in a closed social or artistic railway station waiting for the train; I’ve a long way to go, and I’m late already.” By the time he graduated, his energy and anxieties had become centered solely on writing, and on living his life as if it were art. He was the same but different.

This development can be felt in his attitude toward his name. Before O’Hara arrived at Harvard he was accustomed to being called Francis, a name shortened by students at St. John’s and by Navy buddies to Fran or Frannie. During his first semester at Harvard, when he met Edward Gorey and coped with the death of his father, whose name he carried as his middle name, he began to prefer to be called Frank, known to him most intimately as the preferred name of his bachelor uncle and the family czar, J. Frank Donahue. During his four years at Harvard, O’Hara was split, being called Frank in person while continuing to sign papers and published poems and stories as Francis. This split was reflected in the issues of the Advocate in which he was published. In the April 1948 issue in which “The Unquiet Grave” appeared, the story was credited to Francis O’Hara while the Contributor’s Note referred to him more personally as Frank O’Hara. In the September 1950 Advocate in which the “The Drummer” and “Poem” (The eager note on my door said, “Call me,”), as well as a story, “Late Adventure,” were published, he finally signed his stories Frank O’Hara, though he was listed by the editors in the Table of Contents as Francis O’Hara. In all future publications, beginning with the February 1951 Advocate in which “A Prayer to Prospero” was published, he would always appear on the page as Frank O’Hara. Frank, with its direct, flat, smacking sound, appealed to O’Hara’s poetic ear, and he loved using it in his poems, either directly and self-dramatizingly as in “And if / some aficionado of my mess says ‘That’s / not like Frank!’, all to the good!” in “My Heart,” or punningly when the Sun announces, “Frankly I wanted to tell you / I like your poetry” in “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island.” At Harvard, O’Hara had accomplished the transition privately and publicly from the Francis of his childhood to the Frank of his future poetry.