"It was funny to see Rocco the big Italian guard from Bridgeport, Conn., conversing seriously with little Rodney Mason the president of the Philolexian Club (probably about exams) — and in the school paper they would write it this way: 'Buddies Moose Rocco and Rod Mason seen talking over old times on quad—' which would convulse the entire school. 'Flash Mason and The Moose.' It was the funniest thing anyone had ever heard, it was dark and daemonic with furious glee, and in the old dorms at night in the creaking halls there was wicked, ravenous, brooding joy."

I found this new Law-giver all unknown except in the back numbers of a Cambridge quarterly Hound & Horn, just defunct. I haunted on Sixth Avenue until at 15¢ apiece or 25 I had all 28 numbers & had fired my followers at Philolexian & Boar's Head with the merits of this prophet. My girls suffered during this month or so, so did my seminars & lectures & my poetry even. To be a critic, ah, how deeper & more scientific.

"Is this Josh's party?" I asked one of the other guys we'd walked in with. "I guess, if he's in Philo, dude," he told me, and I gave him a look like, Huh? "Philolexian Society," one of the girls said. "They're like a literary and debating club." "Oh, right," I said. From the looks of the party, it didn't matter if I knew what club was throwing it or not. Skylar grabbed my hand and dragged me through the crowd. We walked down the suite's hallway and looked into some small single rooms where students were drinking beer, listening to playlists, and watching TVs. No sign of Blake.

Others, of course, drew their sustenance from teachers in different disciplines or of different temperament. Columbia was then, and must be now, full of teachers who made the enjoyment of learning both intellectual and visceral. What I wrote is personal to me. It is of a piece with that equally personal recall of John Jay's Fourth Floor where extracurricular activities resided: the mock rivalries of Jester, Review, and Spectator — and Eugene Williams sad-faced among the paste-pots; Ben Hubbard, who understood us far more than we liked to believe, seeing that our editorial exuberance did not get us into trouble with Dean Hawkes; the ear-shattering tympani concerts in the tiny offices — with Bob Lax on filing cabinet, Tom Merton on overturned wastepaper basket, Bob (Ain't Goin' Nowhere) Smith on desktop, and the rest of us, whether juniors or seniors, pounding whatever else made a noise; the amateur throat-cutting over editorial posts, ending in a solemn hearing before Student Board at which Herb Rosenthal won a Jester associate editorship; the jazz, poetry, and cheap-wine sessions of Philolexian; and all the attempts to be at once Stalky & Co. and Scott Fitzgerald. This we enshrined, along with our infantile leftism, our Popular Front demonstrations, and the girls we kissed but did not marry. But we had little enough time to look back. Before we knew it, history was shifting into high. Careers barely started, the glow still bright on love and marriage, and our maturity not yet dry behind the ears, we were faced by the conjunction of communism and fascism in the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the outbreak of mankind's last "conventional" war, and the certainty that like our parents we would know the call of military duty.

December 18. . . . After dinner to anniversary (66th) of the old Philolexian Society at Academy of Music. Crowd. Large percentage of fresh young girls, as pretty as possible, and all in high giggle. Stayed out two or three "orations." I thought them creditable — healthy and manly in tone, or at least far less crude and sophomorical than I expected, and clothed in very fair English. A horrible doubt occurred to me whether they were not perhaps privily and fraudulently polished up for public display by outside expert?!

I believe what I found was a whole man, a serious man — a man who cared about the world's pain, yet was also determined to fulfill his own dreams . . . He loved wholly, he dreamt wholly, he opened himself totally to those he loved and trusted: his friends, his teachers, me . . . He was heroic in his unlimited commitment to living, not self-serving — unlike ambitious students who flaunt their erudition, like their profiles, to be admired — an unlikely hero to the serving of whose genius I dedicated myself all those years ago. Through him I entered a stimulating new life within the campus literary group of young poets and writers. We were all dreaming of making a name in the world of words and moving literature forward. When we were all hanging out in the Philolexian office, arguing about the significance of Wallace Stevens's latest poems, with my own poet sitting beside me, his arm around my shoulders, I felt I had the best of all worlds. Then I'd go home on the subway, change trains twice, finally trudge down 167th Street or ride the trolley to the iron gates, while the exuberance faded into fatigue, joy into loneliness, and the long months stretching before me, holding only drops of happiness in an ocean of drudge, would drop my heart into my shoes.

January 24. Wednesday W. H. Auden's trick: radio-announcers: parody of banal radio announcements — parodying trivialities of commercials and musical comedy songs, etc. Done well enough for once in The Dance of Death and yet not too well either. Since then, done to death. The complete and uninteresting and flat and stupid banality of On the Frontier. Dull as could be. I only dipped into it, however. But it sure looked awful. Ostuia — Westland. "I see where it says in the paper that our leader . . ." "Hello T. J. now about this contract, this shipment of munitions from your country to mine although we are at war, ha! ha! . . ." Maybe it is a bad trick or maybe Auden just does it badly. Lax does it better than Auden: I guess a whole lot better. Maybe Auden is just a dull stupid dope after all. I guess The Orators is as good as anything he did, and then, what's so good about that? One night Melville Cane (or Cain) came to Columbia to read some of his poems to Philolexian in a little social room in Hartley. He sat in a chair and read his appalling stuff for a while, and appealed to us for comments on this pleasant light trash, and I guess I remarked on the way he kept talking about spiders in his poems. I didn't even say it was effective although it was giving me the creeps. I don't know whether spiders was the image or not. Something like it. Maybe rats. Anyway he finally folded up the last triumphant morsel from The New Yorker and looked around the room with a sort of feeble expression of challenge you might expect from, say Irwin Edman, and then asked if anybody in the room liked Auden, Spender and Day-Lewis. And I who had just been reading some Lewis said Yes, I liked them. Not much of an argument developed. I think he didn't want one, anyway. I suppose if Melville Cane was to repeat the question to me this minute I'd give back the same answer. On the other hand I believe if W. H. Auden was to walk in the room and dare me to like the works of Melville Cane I would stand up and like them fine. No I wouldn't, I was just fooling.