The Hopkins fall term did not open until the third and sometimes the fourth week of September. I arrived a few days ahead of time to complete registration, look around and settle in. At Baltimore's Pennsylvania Station I found a cab, and had the cabby run down my steamer trunk--then a standard part of student travel--and with it strapped to the rear bumper set off, in a manner befitting, I fancied, my station and class, for the Homewood campus and Alumni Memorial Hall, the single dormitory Johns Hopkins then operated.

My arrival was not lonely. A dozen other cabs bearing a dozen other students and a dozen other steamer trunks clogged the tiny parking lot, and as soon as one pulled away another pulled up. The two black porters, Gene and Charles, worked steadily dollying trunks to their proper entryways. Hopkins' urban setting ensured an abundance of rental rooms, apartments and basements on every side, besides which a dozen or more fraternities maintained houses within a few blocks; and in any case approximately half the sixteen hundred undergraduates were Baltimoreans, as required by the Hopkins legacy, and lived at home. Dorm rooms remained precious, however, to the half who hailed from elsewhere, like me, and no bed at the dorm went begging. All but the smallest rooms had gone from single to double occupancy because of the postwar crush, and the ground-floor suites, once coveted for their parlors, bay windows and fireplaces, were now ordinary student warrens cramming in as many as decency allowed....

That note of restless excitement and dead-cert decisiveness was to prove characteristic of my first year at Hopkins, when I and most of my fellow veterans behaved a lot like inmates unexpectedly freed from long prison terms. We were a visible majority of the student body, and in any case probably would have dominated campus life by virtue of our age and our inclination, reinforced by the war, to bully our way to whatever we wanted. Few of us, bringing odd lots of transfer credits for a quarter, semester or year somewhere else, had much idea when we'd graduate, nor did we much care--the G.I. Bill would pay the freight. We intended to howl while we could.

It was fun to be back at the books, and for a variety of reasons, among them relief from the stress of war, intellectual adventure, the company of peers; and like almost every veteran attending college under the G.I. Bill I took an unfamiliar satisfaction in being a student again. College after the war, it became clear, was nothing like college before. I no longer regarded my education as an inevitable privilege, something to which the good fortune of birth entitled me. I had seen too much to indulge that fantasy. Courses were not simply unpleasant chores to be done, well or poorly, in order to rise another rung; they were windows on the world, on life, and they helped explain how the world and life worked, or else sought to. Learning was good in itself, not a duty but a revelation, and instead of a clock needing only occasional oiling a mind turned out to be a bottomless reservoir requiring constant replenishment. Meanwhile, however, I was a sophomore with academic "obligations" to discharge besides English, history and chemistry: two years of French in addition to my transferred German; math through differential calculus; a semester each of political science and political economy. The important difference, a result of war and age, was that I anticipated performing my "obligations" with a pleasure education had never given me before....

It helped that almost weekly one of the senior professors in the English Department--or now and then, when it was appropriate, another department--lectured us. Raymond D. Havens, who'd devoted a lifetime to Wordsworth, delivered a moving account of the creation of "The Prelude," lingering with calculated emphasis on the line, "And never lifted up a single stone"; and Don Cameron Allen, who specialized in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature and thought, lectured on Milton. Kemp Malone, whose international fame rested on his scholarship in Middle English, appeared one day to talk sharply but surprisingly on Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, not in those days a novel that usually got much academic respect; and a man named Einarsson, who specialized in Old Icelandic, lectured us on Beowulf. Especially memorable for me were the appearances of two outsiders: Elliott Coleman, the poet who ran Hopkins' new writing program, read The Waste Land, which was rapidly becoming the bible of my literary generation, and did it with such authority no one clapped, spoke or even moved after he'd uttered the final "shantih"; and Charles Singleton, whose swarthy, bearded countenance gave him the air of a medieval Italian ruffian, lectured us on Dante's Commedia, ending with a reading of canto 26 of Inferno and the last voyage of Ulysses that sent me scurrying through downtown Baltimore for a copy of my own and, as Singleton recommended, Santayana's Three Philosophical Poets. I could not know that Singleton himself soon would be regarded as one of the two or three preeminent Dante scholars in the world.

I was not the first young man to find himself besotted by literature, but--beyond an affection for this work or that--I could not say why it had happened....Edward Norris was but the catalyst, though a welcome one, for something that may have been happening to me since boyhood.... Wisely or unwisely I said farewell to medicine and informed the English Department I intended to become a major in the fall. I knew better than to inform them of my pretentious parallel intention to make my living as a writer.

Veterans dominated the campus, dominated American life, and the sight of us seemed automatically to confirm the country's most optimistic hopes for its future. We were everywhere, and instantly recognizable by the ruptured ducks or miniature ribbons in our lapels, as well as, less happily, by missing arms and legs or grotesquely scarred faces. Older people smiled and nodded in deferential courtesy, and small boys--not infrequently including freshmen, to whom we condescended with what we hoped was Hemingwayesque disdain for the uninitiated--followed us around.

We were a roughneck lot to be college students, still wearing our G.I. boots and o.d. shirts and trousers as well as battered A-2 flight jackets, tank jackets and field jackets, all mixed with elaborate forethought both to impress professors, freshmen and girls and to thumb a nose at the canons of proper military dress. It was comme il faut to attend early class unshaven and in a ragged fatigue shirt, preferably of abandoned style, from which the sergeant's or corporal's stripes had been meticulously stripped to show the shadow. Stan Seiden, a friend from "A" entry, was the master of such costuming, invariably evoking a pained matutinal look from George Boas, professor of philosophy and a Hopkins luminary of the first rank, who was in fact a veteran of both world wars but, well past such shenanigans, always dressed with the fastidious perfection of a French diplomat.

These were harmless hijinks. A more sinister note was sounded when a friend from "D" entry who'd foot-slogged his way across Europe brought his introductory German class--and, as the story spread across Homewood, the rest of the Hopkins campus--to an awed halt. The instructor, an impeccably Prussian blond brute complete with dueling scar who was, unknown to us, an anti-Nazi refugee from the early thirties, heaped scorn on my friend's oral work, bringing his harangue to its apogee by saying, in an accent worthy of Erich Von Stroheim, "Young man, I have failed better students than you"; whereupon my friend, as if wrapping up a particularly nasty piece of house-to-house combat, rose, threw his textbook through the open fourth-floor window, said, "Yes, Herr von Glockenspiel, and I have killed better Germans than you"--and stalked out of the room.

It could be risky to cross a veteran; I knew several, even within the gentlemanly precincts of The Johns Hopkins University, who, especially after a few beers, were all too easily ignited. Some resented wounds, some imprisonment, some obscure slights or losses army service had inflicted or caused. Sudden absurdly unnecessary fistfights were uncommon but not unknown. This suggests an atmosphere of festering hostility and bellicosity that did not exist, however. Most of us were too happy to be alive and safe to want to fight anyone about anything. My guess, though it is idle to psychologize, is that we were releasing emotions the war had aroused in us for which we were not prepared. War had taken us unawares, as little more than boys still cozily lodged in the immense innocence and security of the isolated America in which we'd been born and grown up; in every theatre not only the nightmare of combat but the discovery of unanticipated human frailty, cruelty and even bestiality had piled horror upon horror, and the revulsion and fear they aroused had gone on too long, proved too exhausting. Perhaps what a later generation would tart up as "posttraumatic stress" afflicted us too (though without the benefit of counseling centers), and our sometimes exaggerated eagerness to conceal the extent to which we'd been hurt and disillusioned was a way of reentering what we devoutly hoped was "normal" life. The key word was tough; being tough became an ideal of behavior--not the toughness of the street but the toughness embodied in the movie portrayals of Humphrey Bogart, whose acrid on-screen cynicism revealed a bitter unwillingness to be deceived but did not keep him from being tender if honestly touched.... The highest praise we could give a campus friend or figure was to call him "tough-minded."

If this was an affectation the toughness of Hopkins itself was not. It was a toughness of fibre rather than style and it ran to the heart of nearly every feature of campus life.... The university had no "dean of students," and on the rare occasion when official disciplinary action was required the mild, agreeable dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, G. Wilson Shaffer, did what was necessary--generally, in his benign view, very little. Hopkins declined to act in loco parentis; campus and dormitory rules scarcely existed; students kept whatever hours they liked; class rolls were never called. Perhaps this sounds permissive, but in practice it had the intended effect of focusing undergraduate attention on what Hopkins regarded as its sole purpose: scholarship.

A Boy No More can be ordered through John F. Blair, Publisher at 1-800-222-9796 or send e-mail: blairpub@aol.com.

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