The Journal Of Claude Fredericks Volume Three Part Two: From Maine to Mexico (1943)

Book excerpt: This third volume of The Journal Of Claude Fredericks is his journal for the year 1943, a Wanderjahr that begins with a spring in Cambridge, where Volume Two ended, but with Fredericks, having left studies at Harvard, living now in a room at Maud Bemis’s house on Nutting Road near the Cowley Fathers, seeing various friends from earlier, Brie Taylor, John Simon, Anthony Clark, Paul Doguereau, the George Sartons, and making new friends as well. The summer is spent in a cabin on the shore near Belfast Maine, writing and studying still and coming to know the family that lives on the hill. In September, after spending ten days with Paul Doguereau and Fanny Mason in Walpole New Hampshire on the beautiful Mason estate overlooking the Connecticut and a month in New York living in an apartment on University Place and seeing his friend May Sarton and coming to know Muriel Rukeyser and Julian Beck, he heads with his friend William Quinn to Iowa to live with several friends of theirs who also have left Harvard, in particular Michael Millen and Paul Rail, all of them proclaiming in different ways, as Quinn and Fredericks do in theirs, their objections to America’s part in the war that had begun in December 1941. After two weeks Fredericks leaves to stay with a friend in Chicago, Martha Johnson, and to settle in and write about the troubling events of the previous days and then go on to Missouri, to pay filial pieties to members of his family there and after that go south with his mother to Mexico City for a week and then with her to Acapulco for ten days at Christmas, a spot at that time still undiscovered and with only two small hotels. Finally at the year’s end he heads back east to New York, where he has plans to settle down and live forever, in the city he had always loved the most of any he knew.