78
PARTISAN REVIEW
poverty when the cash was all spent. And the literary
life-the
room at the Lafayette or the small apartment without a lease,
the long summers on the
Cape,
the long afternoons and the social
evenings-began to weary him. His writing filled his mornings
and should perhaps have filled his life, yet it did not. To the
amusement of his friends and with a certain sense that he was
betraying his own freedom, he had used the last or'his
legacy
for a year at Harvard. The small but respectable reputation of
his two volumes of verse had proved useful-he continued at
Harvard on a fellowship and when he emerged as Dr. Howe he
received an excellent appointment, with prospects, at Dwight.
He had his moments of fear when all that had ever been said
of the dangers of the academic life had occurred to him. But
after a year in which he had tested every possibility of corruption
and seduction he was ready to rest easy. His third volume of
verse, most of it written in his first year of teaching, was not
only ampler but, he thought, better than its predecessors.
There was a clear hour before the Bradby dinner-party
and
Howe looked forward to it. But he was not to enjoy it, for lying
with his mail on the hall table was a copy of this quarter's issue of
Life
and
Letters,
to which his landlord subscribed. Its severe cover
announced that its editor, Frederic Woolley, had this month
COD·
tributed an essay called "Two Poets," and Howe, picking it up,
curious to see who the two poets might be, felt his own name
start out at him with cabalistic power-Joseph Howe.
As
he
continued to tum the pages his hand trembled.
Standing in the dark hall, holding the neat little magazine,
Howe knew that his literary contempt for Frederic Woolley meant
nothing, for he suddenly understood how he respected Woolley
in
the way of the world. He knew this by the trembling of
his
hand. And of the little world as well as the great, for although
the literary groups of New York might dismiss Woolley, his name
carried high authority in the academic world. At Dwight it was
even a revered name, for it had been here at the college that Fred·
eric Woolley had made the distinguished scholarly career from
which he had gone on to literary journalism. In middle life he had
been
induced to take the editorship of
Life
and
Letters,
a literary
monthly not widely read but heavily endowed and in its pages he
had carried on the defense of what he sometimes called the older
