U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [220]
That winter Ned was drunk every evening. Dick made
the Monthly and The Advocate, had poems reprinted in The Literary Digest and The Conning Tower, attended meetings of the Boston Poetry Society, and was invited to dinner by Amy Lowel . He and Ned argued a good deal because Dick was a pacifist and Ned said what the hel he'd join the Navy, it was al a lot of Blah anyway. In the Easter vacation, after the Armed Ship Bil had passed Dick had a long talk with Mr. Cooper who wanted to get him a job in Washington, because he said a boy of his talent oughtn't to endanger his career by joining the army and already there was talk of conscription. Dick blushed becomingly and said he felt it would be against his conscience to help in the war in any way. They talked a long time without getting anywhere about duty to the state and party leadership and highest expediency. In the end Mr. Cooper made him promise not to take any rash step with-out consulting him. Back in Cambridge everybody was dril ing and going to lectures on military science. Dick
-95-was finishing up the four year course in three years and had to work hard, but nothing in the courses seemed to mean anything any more. He managed to find time to polish up a group of sonnets cal ed Morituri Te Salutant that he sent to a prize competition run by The Literary Digest. It won the prize but the editors wrote back that they would prefer a note of hope in the last sestet. Dick put in the note of hope and sent the hundred dol ars to Mother to go to Atlantic City with. He discovered that if he went into war work he could get his degree that spring without taking any exams and went in to Boston one day without saying anything to anybody and signed up in the volunteer ambulance service.
The night he told Ned that he was going to France they got very drunk on orvieto wine in their room and talked a great deal about how it was the fate of Youth and Beauty and Love and Friendship to be mashed out by an early death, while the old fat pompous fools would make merry over their carcasses. In the pearly dawn they went out and sat with a last bottle on one of the old tombstones in the graveyard, on the corner of Harvard Square. They sat on the cold tombstone a long time without saying anything, only drinking, and after each drink threw their heads back and softly bleated in unison Blahblahblahblah.
Sailing for France on the Chicago in early June was like suddenly having to give up a book he'd been reading and hadn't finished. Ned and his mother and Mr. Cooper and the literary lady considerably older than himself held slept with several times rather uncomfortably in her double-decker apartment on Central Park South, and his poetry and his pacifist friends and the lights of the Esplanade shakily reflected in the Charles, faded in his mind like paragraphs in a novel laid by unfinished. He was a little
-96-seasick and a little shy of the boat and the noisy boozing crowd and the longfaced Red Cross women workers giv-ing each other gooseflesh with stories of spitted Belgian babies and Canadian officers crucified and elderly nuns raped; inside he was coiled up tight as an overwound clock with wondering what it would be like over there. Bordeaux, the red Garonne, the pastelcolored streets of old tal mansardroofed houses, the sunlight and shadow so delicately blue and yel ow, the names of the stations al out of Shakespeare, the yel owbacked novels on the bookstands, the bottles of wine in the buvettes, were like nothing he'd imagined. Al the way to Paris the faintly bluegreen fields were spattered scarlet with poppies like the first lines of a poem; the little train jogged along in dactyls; everything seemed to fal into rhyme.
They got to Paris too late to report at the Norton-Harjes office. Dick left his bag in the room assigned him with two other fel ows at the Hotel Mont Thabor and walked around the streets. It wasn't dark yet. There was almost no traffic but the boulevards were ful of strol ers in the blue June dusk. As it got darker women leaned out towards them from behind