And my father, for the first few weeks, allowed me to have all I earned, to do with as I wished. Later on he made me save two dollars a week.
Each Saturday I went down to Newark and bought books ... very cheap, second hand ones, at Breasted's book store.
Every decisive influence in life has been a book, every vital change in my life, I might say, has been brought about by a book.
My father owned a copy of Lord Byron in one volume. It was the only book he cared for, outside of Shakespeare's Hamlet, together with, of course, his own various books on Free Masonry and other secret societies.
At first, oddly enough, it was my instinct for pedantry and linguistic learning that drew me to Byron. I became enamoured of the Latin and Greek quotations with which he headed his lyrics in Hours of Idleness, and laboriously I copied them, lying on my belly on the floor, under the lamp light. And under these quotations I indited boyish rhymes of my own.
Then I began to read—Manfred, Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus—the Deformed Transformed ... The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, The Prisoner of Chillon.
The frontispiece to the book was a portrait of Byron with flowing tie and open shirt. Much as a devout Catholic wears a gold cross around his neck to signify his belief, with a like devoutness I took to wearing my shirt open at the neck, and a loose, flowing black tie. And I ruffled my hair in the Byronic style.
"I see you're discovering Byron," my father laughed.
Then he slyly intimated that the best of the poet's works I had evidently overlooked, Childe Harold and Don Juan. And he quoted me the passage about the lifted skirt above the peeking ankle. And he reinforced his observation by grinning salaciously.
From that time on I searched with all the fever of adolescence through Byron for every passage which bore on sex, the mystery of which was beginning to devour my days.