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commanding, with chalk dust on a habitual blue suit. He was in the habit of correcting term papers while listening to the radio. It would be hard to say exactly what one learned from him. In addition to history he instructed in a version of anthropology, personal hygiene, and morals. “Never swallow it” was one of his admonitions—he was speaking of phlegm, but the wiser boys in back tittered. This brought up what he knew was a constant preoccupation. “Keep your mind off the subject as much as possible” was his droning advice; “disease isn’t worth it. The worst thing is the books,” he cautioned. “They’re much worse than the pictures.” His classroom was on the side of the building facing the athletic field where early in the morning, before class, we played a game without rules, often damaging to clothes, called rip-ball, one against all, one darting hare against the trailing pack until he was exhausted or brought down. It was the field on which I recall Kerouac in shoulder pads and cleats, stocky and hard-running ingames against Peddie and Blair. In football uniform, short-legged, he seemed a kind of thug. He would drop back to handle punts and, catching them, go like the wind.
    The school, Horace Mann, was in Riverdale, the northern suburbs of the city. Its tone was essentially Anglo, there were only boys, and the overriding ethic was that we were responsible for our own destiny and for fulfilling our obligations to society. There was none of Büchner’s or Ibsen’s determinism, the doctrine that acts have resistless causes. We were not what unknown forces made of us but rather what we made of ourselves. In the mornings, in the auditorium, we sang “Men of Harlech”—“would you win your name in story?”—and, as the school was affiliated with Columbia, “Roar, Lion, Roar.”
    What effect this had, I cannot say. I was a decent student and lagging athlete, an unknown at track and substitute on the football team. I remember a youth of friendship and no foreboding, though miles away, in Europe, war had already started. Not far from where we lived, in Yorkville, they were showing German propaganda films, Sieg im Westen, and later, Feldzug in Polen, and women in the lobby of the theater held out cans collecting for German War Relief. Battle’s distant sound. We sympathized with the British, naturally, and read with excitement, in newspapers that no longer exist, of the trapping by British cruisers of the pocket battleship Graf Spee in a South American estuary. Inspired, we invented our own warship game, brilliant as only schoolboys could make it, with complex rules for movement, engagement, damage, and resupply, maneuvering fleets of slender model ships on the bare wooden floors of apartments in endless fights, often with diagrams and accounts written up afterwards, word of it passing down, so that years after, people who had never seen but only heard of it asked to have it described.
    Kerouac was only one of the postgraduate students, “ringers,” brought in every year to man the school teams. Older, less fine,with faces already showing the shadows of manhood, they were the heroes of the school and at the same time outsiders. I never spoke to any of them; there was nothing to say. A year or two ahead of us, they drank beer, carried their books carelessly in one hand, and knew how to drive. Kerouac astonished us by submitting stories to the literary magazine, for a ringer an utterly unconventional act. He never came to the magazine’s offices, however. That would have been too out of character.
    The athletes had girlfriends, usually back in the small towns they had come from. We had girlfriends ourselves or, rather, knew girls. Some attended the sister school, Lincoln, some were their friends, a loose coterie of New York girls, well-off for the most part, closely watched over by their parents. They lived in the Seventies, Eighties, or Nineties, some more distant, one beauty in a building with an