False Gods by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online

start at a disadvantage. He had taught me, above anything else, even things of the spirit, to be a realist.
    At Yale that world indeed revealed itself, but for the first two years I was too proud—and too cautious—to expose myself to its sting. I worked hard for the high marks that I continued to obtain and confined myself largely to the company of those friends from my New York academy who had gone with me to New Haven. But I noted everything that went on on that campus, how men dressed and talked, what fraternities and societies were the most cultivated, what careers were looked forward to. And I think what most prompted me at last to seek to enlarge my social scope was the remark of a Harvard professor of philosophy, a superb old Boston snob, whose passion for the subject he taught had prevailed over his prejudice to induce him to visit my parents in Rye. When I told him, in response to his polite but perfunctory inquiries as to how I spent my time in New Haven, that I largely studied, he replied with a nod: "So wise of you. If you had cared for undergraduate frolics, you had done better with us. No Yale man, you know, is ever quite a gentleman."
    Now the odd thing about this fatuous remark was that I thought I could see some truth in it. I
had
observed that there was a rackety, "boola-boola," not so disarmingly boyish aspect to even the elite of my class that contrasted unfavorably with the more languid, more disdainful airs of the sons of Brahmins whom I had observed on a visit to Harvard Yard. Of course, it was all nonsense. But it was a nonsense with which I was beginning to see it should not be insuperably difficult for me to cope.
    My first step in junior year was to elect William Lyon (Billy) Phelps's course in British nineteenth-century poets, with its heavy, its almost exclusive emphasis on Robert Browning. All the golden youth flocked to this. I had my eye in particular on two first cousins who were also roommates in Vanderbilt Hall: Gurdon and Horace Aspinwall. They came of an old Manhattan clan; they had gone to Groton School in Massachusetts, and they knew everyone in the group on which I had fixed my eye. Gurdon, I had heard, was supposed to be "snotty," but Horace had a reputation of amiability, and when I took a seat by him in class he responded affably to my overtures.
    "Do you really like Browning?" I asked, as we crossed the old campus after class.
    "Of course! Isn't he the greatest of the great?"
    "Which of his poems do you prefer?"
    "Oh, the love ones, don't you? 'Evelyn Hope' and 'The Last Ride Together.'"
    "But are they really love poems? Aren't they too unilateral? Evelyn Hope is only a dead little girl. And the reason it's the last ride is that he's been turned down."
    "But that's just my trouble, you see," he admitted with a grin that was half sheepish, half almost proud. "Unrequited love." He paused to sigh. "I trust that won't happen to you. Which poems do you prefer?"
    I had to think. "I suppose the Renaissance ones. Those about coldhearted villainous Italian nobles. Like the murderous duke in 'My Last Duchess.' Or Guido in
The Ring and the Book.
I feel they're the real Browning."
    "You mean he
wanted
to be like that?"
    "He wanted power. Like so many artists. And they know they're never going to get it. So they enjoy fantasizing about it." I shrugged. "Maybe I say that only because
I
do."
    "That's very interesting. Why don't we have lunch and discuss it? Come to my frat."
    I accepted. I knew he belonged to Psi U. I think he would have said "fraternity" to one of his Groton friends. But as so frequently happens in college life, a friendship was established that same day. I found myself a welcome visitor in the rooms he shared with his cousin Gurdon.
    Horace was much handsomer than Gurdon, though I don't know why I say that, because Gurdon wasn't really handsome at all, despite a balding, gleaming, eye-snapping, big-nosed desire to appear so. Perhaps it was because you didn't realize that