The Songs We Know Best by Karin Roffman

Author:Karin Roffman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Barbara “Bubsy” Zimmerman (later Epstein), John, Bob Hunter, and Sandy Gregg walk in Concord, Massachusetts, 1948. Photograph taken by Chet Ashbery.

Bob Hunter, John, and Sandy Gregg outside Dunster House, fall 1948. Photograph taken by Chet Ashbery.

After they left, there was still no word from Fred. A week later, John and Bob Hunter attended Moore’s reading together. Unlike other readings, which were held in huge auditoriums, for this one Moore was introduced by F. O. Matthiessen in Sever Hall, a regular classroom, and the audience was small. Moore loomed so large poetically that John was shocked to see a tiny, sixty-one-year-old woman in “a frumpy old suit and white collar.”68 She spoke of her admiration for the boxer Joe Louis, read for less than twenty minutes, and then sat down again.69 John had hoped to see Fred in the audience, but he did not appear.

By early February, John felt so depressed he could not concentrate. James Munn, his Old Testament course professor, was “compassionate” when John “nearly flunked my Old Testament final exam. I was supposed to write an essay and couldn’t.” Munn asked him, “Are you by any chance in love? You have not done very well but just do the best you can.”70 On February 7, the first day of spring classes, John saw Fred by chance while standing in line for tickets to an all-Stravinsky concert at Sanders Theatre. They decided to go together.71 This incident brightened John’s mood for the next few days. The concert with Stravinsky conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra was “wonderful,” as were their conversations afterward—until Fred suddenly became furious. He snapped at John for being too “importunate” and declared that he did not want to see him again.72

John’s depression worsened. He moved to a nearby single (H-41) because Bob Hunter was graduating early and moving off campus. John’s evenings felt strange and lonely without Bob, who was busy with a job in the newly opened Lamont Library and excited about arranging plans to teach overseas and travel. John stayed in his dorm room alone and hardly got out of bed. He ignored his classes and read Keats’s “great poem, ‘Isabella, or The Pot of Basil’” in his room.73 Forcing himself at least to attend his Twentieth-Century American Poetry course, taught by F. O. Matthiessen, he appreciated the professor’s “very conscientious and insightful” teaching.74 Still, the course did not change his opinions: “(Something there is that doesn’t love Robert Frost),” he noted to himself one afternoon during Matthiessen’s enthusiastic lecture.75 He wrote papers on three of his four favorite modernists, analyzing Stevens’s wordless sounds in “Chocorua to Its Neighbor” and creating an imagined anthology of Auden’s and Moore’s poetry.76 Matthiessen liked John’s Stevens essay but felt his student was “more squarely on the mark in dealing with Miss Moore” than with Auden.77 This criticism was disheartening because, after recently changing topics from a study of Henry James’s novels, John was struggling to write his senior thesis on Auden’s poetry.

Because of his depression, he had already procrastinated too long.

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