Blake Wigglesworth

Blake Wigglesworth enters Richard Ellsworth Savage’s college life as the handsome younger brother of the man who has arranged to meet him. Dreamy-looking, with pale blue eyes and fluffy light-gold hair, he barely looks at Richard when they shake hands, though his mouth turns into a lopsided smile. Soon the two are companions: Richard calls him Ned, and their intimacy gives Richard a sense of belonging at college. Blake’s charm and easy sociability coexist with a persistent refusal to take politics seriously, a refusal that becomes a source of affection, irritation, and conflict.

Introduction and College Friendship

Blake first invites Richard into the circle around a candlelit reading, where a small gathering listens closely to Kipling’s “The Man Who Would be King.” Richard decides there that he will become a writer. In his sophomore year, Blake is often in Richard’s room at Ridgely, and Richard discovers that he likes college after all. The two spend afternoons over tea, talking about books and poets; poems by Richard appear in The Advocate and The Monthly that winter. Blake’s companionship is thus part of a period in which Richard’s literary ambitions become real and his weeks seem to pass more quickly.

Their friendship also rests on an economic imbalance that Blake’s generosity partly bridges. Richard has no pocket money after paying for board, tuition, and rent, while Blake’s comparatively liberal allowance covers their shared pleasures. The Wigglesworth family invites Richard to Sunday dinners at Nahant. At the family home, an Italian marble fireplace and a painting believed by the family to be by Botticelli signal a cultivated, prosperous world; Blake’s father, a retired art critic, insists that a contrary attribution to Botticini is merely malicious. The disagreement gives their artistic surroundings a lightly comic note, while underscoring the cultural confidence and resources into which Blake has been born.

Shared Pleasures and Divergent Priorities

On Saturday nights, Blake and Richard eat at the Thorndike in Boston, drink sparkling nebbiolo, and go on to the theatre or the Old Howard. Later, they share a room in a Garden Street house and join friends interested in English and fine arts. Their afternoons stretch into candlelight, cigarette smoke, incense, tea, and cake, with a bronze Buddha Blake has bought in Chinatown among the room’s furnishings. These scenes establish him as a maker of sociable, aesthetically charged spaces, but they also show the limits of his engagement: when conversation turns to politics or war, he closes his eyes, throws back his head, and dismisses it with a repeated string of nonsense syllables.

The difference becomes unmistakable during the presidential election. Richard is absorbed in the campaign and in Hiram Halsey Cooper’s work for Woodrow Wilson, while Blake is more interested in sailing. The friends have privately imagined buying a small yawl or ketch after graduation and following the coast to Florida and the West Indies, passing through the Panama Canal, and continuing into the Pacific. Blake has even bought a navigation book and begun to study it. On election night, however, Richard keeps wondering aloud how the states will vote, and Blake grows sore at his inattention to their sailing plan. After supper, Blake drinks more wine and shouts at people gathered around the Boston Herald’s election bulletin board. When a passerby rebukes him, he answers with his familiar dismissal of serious talk. Richard pulls him away to avoid a fight, still anxious to see whether Wilson is winning.

A Breach and Its Repair

The evening separates the friends for a time. Richard lets go of Blake’s arm and walks back to Cambridge alone, angry, exhausted, and close to tears; he spends a cold, sleepless night. The next morning Blake appears fresh and rosy, teasing Richard about Wilson’s election and the lost prospect of military finery. He tells Richard that the man they encountered, Barney, was a boxing instructor with a weak heart, and that the two ended up in a Turkish bath. Richard, who had feared the consequences of Blake’s drunken behavior, leaves the counter abruptly rather than continue the conversation.

That dusk, Blake is waiting in Richard’s room. He sways with his hands in his pockets and asks Richard not to be sore about what men do when drunk. He asks for tea, and Richard puts the kettle on over an alcohol flame. Richard protests that picking up a sailor in Scollay Square is too risky; Blake laughs and turns the accusation back on Richard, who had called him a Back Bay snob. Richard no longer feels angry, but sits trying not to cry as Blake lies on the couch and lifts his legs above his head. The apology is not solemn or fully explanatory. Its force lies instead in Blake’s return to the shared room and the ordinary ritual of tea, which allow their closeness to resume without resolving their difference.

Drinking, Politics, and the Friendship’s Limits

That winter Blake is drunk every evening. Richard’s literary prospects are advancing: his poems are reprinted, he attends Boston Poetry Society meetings, and Amy Lowell invites him to dinner. Yet the friends argue because Richard is a pacifist while Blake says he will join the Navy, treating the whole question as more of the same meaningless chatter. His earlier dismissal of politics has become more consequential as the prospect of war and military service presses on Richard’s conscience. Blake’s breezy posture does not make the disagreement disappear; it sharpens the contrast between Richard’s moral urgency and Blake’s inclination to drink, sail, or wave away the subject.

The surviving episodes leave their intended voyage unrealized in the account and do not show how Blake responds when Richard ultimately signs up for the volunteer ambulance service. What they do establish is a friendship that is neither simply harmonious nor merely antagonistic. Blake offers companionship, money, literary conversation, and a shared imaginative horizon of sailing; he also frustrates Richard through drunkenness and political indifference. His movement from the beautiful, aloof boy at the first meeting to the companion who returns, asks forgiveness, and makes tea possible gives him a capacity for attachment beneath his habitual evasions. At the same time, the repeated dismissal of public affairs marks the boundary of what the friendship can make them share.