My Young Life by Frederic Tuten

Author:Frederic Tuten
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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11THE BEINECKE LIBRARY AND ME

E. J. Beineke was one of the founders of the Beinecke Library at Yale, where, many years later, I did research for my doctoral thesis on James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Bravo, set in eighteenth-century Venice.

Art Deco Eden

Mexico City DF, Calle Michelet, 1956

My 1956 ID card for summer school at the University of Mexico. Studies apart, there were many adventures.

In the summer of 1956, I was nineteen and my whole world up to then had fit inside the boroughs of New York City, from Pelham Parkway to the Bronx Zoo or the Bronx Park or Arthur Avenue. I had taken the subway to City College of New York at 138th Street and Convent Avenue, and sometimes even to the downtown reaches of Manhattan, to the Museum of Modern Art on Fifty-Third Street, to Greenwich Village and coffeehouses like Le Figaro on Bleecker and Rienzi on Macdougal Street, or to my beloved bookshops and stalls along Book Row on Fourth Avenue. I must not forget that I also roamed the movie houses around Forty-Second Street, where, to hide my shame, I went only under the shadow of night, and so saw nothing of normal life in the course of the day.

But now I was in Mexico City, studying pre-Columbian art and mural painting at the University of Mexico’s summer program. A schoolmate from City College and I shared a furnished apartment in a beautiful art deco building on Calle Michelet, in a serene, tree-lined bourgeois neighborhood. Hyman had found this Eden for me through his countless networks of favors given and received, and because of him I came to live in a solid and well-kempt quarter for the monthly rent of one hundred and eight dollars. I understood Hyman, for all his crudity, wanted me to taste the life of a gentleman of some ease.

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