Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge, Massachusetts, first appears as a place Richard Ellsworth Savage approaches with expectations shaped by books and conversations, then discovers as a social world whose rules he does not know. During his college years, it becomes the setting for a consequential change: an isolated freshman finds a literary community and begins to imagine himself as a writer, before the war redirects him from campus life toward France.

Arrival and Disorientation

Richard Ellsworth Savage comes up to Cambridge a week before college opens to repeat Geometry and take Advanced Latin for extra credit. He travels from South Station by subway, carrying a certified cheque for deposit in a Cambridge bank and wearing a new grey suit and felt hat. As the train crosses the bridge, the redbrick city of Boston, the State House’s gold dome, and the slate-colored Charles recall the foreign places he and Hilda had discussed visiting. The prospect of those imagined destinations gives the journey an air of promise, but the college-bound train stops at Harvard Square, and the sign directing him out to the College Yard sends a chill down his spine. Before two hours have passed, he recognizes that his new felt hat ought to have been brown and old, and that taking a room in the Yard has marked him as a freshman who has made a serious social mistake.

Cambridge’s geography thus introduces Savage to a code that is not posted on its signs. The Yard is physically central to his arrival, yet socially the wrong place for him: he later learns that, according to Freddy Wigglesworth, nobody lived there except seniors. The error helps explain his early sense of exclusion. He meets two socialist Jewish students in the first-year law class, a Midwestern graduate student studying Gothic, and a chapel-going Y.M.C.A. enthusiast from Dorchester. He tries freshman rowing but makes none of the crews, and rows alone in a wherry three afternoons a week. At the boathouse he exchanges greetings with other students, most of whom live on the Gold Coast or in Beck, but the brief hellos do not develop into a place in their circles. He attends football rallies, smokers, and beer nights, yet usually arrives with one of his few acquaintances and does not meet the socially prominent students he hopes to know.

Finding a Literary Circle

A meeting with Freddy Wigglesworth in the Union, where they sit down to breakfast, gives Savage a new reading of his situation. Hearing whom Savage knows and what he has been doing, Freddy urges him toward The Monthly or The Advocate and regrets that no one advised him earlier about the customs of college life. The encounter makes Cambridge’s literary institutions seem like an alternative route into belonging: Savage has not found his way through the expected social channels, but his writing might give him another entrance.

That possibility becomes vivid when Freddy brings his younger brother Blake Wigglesworth to meet Savage. In the early-summer dusk, they cross the Yard while students lean from windows calling out and grackles make noise in the elms; streetcar wheels screech from Massachusetts Avenue. Inside a low-ceilinged, candlelit room, a small, unassuming man reads Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King to an intent group seated on the floor. The room’s quiet concentration contrasts with the noisy campus outside. Savage decides there that he will become a writer: Cambridge has not simply supplied an academic setting but shown him a community organized around listening, books, and literary ambition.

In sophomore year, Savage and Blake begin spending their time together. Savage lives in Ridgely, and Blake is often in his room; the weeks begin to fly, and Savage finds that he likes college. The Advocate and The Monthly each publish one of his poems that winter. Their afternoons of tea and conversation about books and poets, often by candlelight, give his literary aspirations a daily setting. Though Savage remains signed up to eat at Mem, he and Blake hardly go there anymore. Savage has no pocket money after paying board, tuition, and rent, while Blake’s more generous allowance helps support them both. Visits to the Wigglesworth family for Sunday dinner at Nahant further expose Savage to Blake’s more comfortable circumstances: his friendship with Blake brings companionship and literary encouragement, but it also places their differing finances in view.

College, War, and Departure

Cambridge continues to offer Savage a growing literary life even as the political atmosphere changes. One winter he becomes a regular presence in The Monthly and The Advocate; his poems are reprinted in The Literary Digest and The Conning Tower, he attends Boston Poetry Society meetings, and Amy Lowell invites him to dinner. At the same time, he and Blake argue over the war. Savage is a pacifist; Blake says that he would join the Navy and dismisses the larger dispute as nonsense. Their friendship therefore contains a real difference about what the war demands, even as their shared conversations and evenings continue.

During Easter vacation, after the Armed Ship Bill passes, Hiram Halsey Cooper tries to find Savage a job in Washington, arguing that a talented young man should not endanger his career by joining the army when conscription is already being discussed. Savage tells him that helping the war in any way would violate his conscience. Their extended discussion of duty to the state, political leadership, and expediency reaches no resolution, though Savage promises not to act rashly without consulting Cooper. Back in Cambridge, students drill and attend military-science lectures. Savage is completing a four-year course in three years, but his studies seem increasingly meaningless to him; he nevertheless finds time to polish a group of sonnets, Morituri Te Salutant, for a Literary Digest prize competition. After it wins, the editors ask him to add a note of hope to the final sestet. He makes the change and sends the hundred-dollar prize to his mother for a trip to Atlantic City.

The decisive break comes when Savage discovers that war work will allow him to graduate that spring without taking examinations. He goes into Boston without telling anyone and signs up for the volunteer ambulance service. That night, back in his room with Blake, the two drink orvieto wine and speak bleakly about Youth, Beauty, Love, and Friendship being destroyed by early death while older men prosper. At dawn they sit on a tombstone in the graveyard at the corner of Harvard Square, passing a final bottle and, after each drink, softly repeating the same nonsense syllables. The scene turns the familiar college surroundings into a place of farewell: the room and graveyard hold the intimacy of their friendship, while the tombstone gives physical weight to their talk of mortality. When Savage sails for France on the Chicago in early June, Cambridge recedes in his mind alongside Blake, his poetry, his pacifist friends, and the lights reflected in the Charles. Its part in his story ends not with a resolution of the arguments that shaped him, but with his departure from the campus life in which he had discovered both a vocation and a close companion.

Narrative Significance

Cambridge is a setting of uneven access. Savage’s first experience of it is governed by small markers of status: the wrong room, the wrong hat, and his distance from the students who occupy the recognized social circles. The same place also contains routes beyond those circles. Publication in The Advocate and The Monthly and his friendship with Blake allow Savage to acquire a literary identity through work and conversation rather than through the social ease he initially lacks. The city’s changing meaning—from an intimidating arrival, to a productive college home, to a point of departure—tracks the short-lived balance Savage finds between personal ambition, friendship, and pacifist conviction before the war carries him toward France.