The Journal Of Claude Fredericks Volume Two Part One : Cambridge (1941-1942)

About the Book

This second volume of The Journal Of Claude Fredericks extends from the late summer of 1941, when the writer, now seventeen, goes off to Harvard to enter college, through December of 1942. During the first year at Harvard he lives in Hollis Hall and studies Greek literature as well as Chinese and Japanese art and writes the many poems, often wild and untrammelled, that are, with a long series of drawings, all included in the pages of this volume. He spends the summer in New York, living on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village, for the first month working at Byrne Hackett’s Brickrow Bookshop and then, the second month, writing still other poems and other pages of this journal. The fall of 1942 is again spent at Harvard, where he lives in Eliot House and begins the study of Sanskrit as well as continuing the study of Greek. There is in these pages the account in great detail of the many events and vicissitudes a life so variously led arouses. A variety of friendships are formed—ones with Anthony Clark, with May Sarton and her father the historian of science and his wife, with John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz, in Boston with Paul Doguereau and Fanny Mason to mention a few of them—as well as descriptions of innumerable people casually met and observed. There are accounts of many concerts heard—Baroque music and 18th and early 19th Century chamber music in particular—and of long hours in museums in Cambridge, Boston, and New York. There is, most of all, a constant study of the wide range of feelings life arouses in the mind of a boy of eighteen who is discovering, for a first time, seemingly the whole world in all its vast multiplicity.

About the Author

Claude Fredericks was born in Missouri in 1923. He attended Harvard College in the early Forties, where he studied with Langdon Warner, John Finley, and Walter Clark, and later, in New York in the late Forties, he founded The Banyan Press, where for many years, in New York and in the country in Vermont, he printed by hand in limited editions unpublished work by Gertrude Stein, John Berryman, James Merrill, and many other writers. Plays of his were performed in New York by Julian Beck and Judith Malina at The Living Theatre and by Herbert Machiz at The Artists Theatre as well as by other groups elsewhere. For many years he taught Greek, Italian and Japanese literature, at Bennington College. He is, at present, with the collaboration of Marc Harrington, engaged in editing for publication in its entirety the long journal he has been writing almost without intermission since he was eight years old. The manuscript of this journal, some fifty thousand pages in length, makes up part of the vast archive of the papers of Claude Fredericks at the Research Institute