The College of the City of New York at that time occupied an old brick building on Twenty-third Street and Lexington Avenue. It gave a five years’ course, leading up to a college degree; but the first two or three years were the same as high school years at present. The boy went there, not because he knew anything about it, nor because he knew what he wanted, but because that was the way the machinery was built; he was turned out of the grammar school hopper, and into the city college hopper. In his earliest days it had been his intention to become the driver of a hook-and-ladder truck; later on he had decided to follow his ancestors to Annapolis; now he had in mind to be a lawyer; but first of all he wanted to be “educated.”
Most of the students in this college were Jews. I didn’t know why this was; in fact, I hardly knew that it was, because I didn’t know the difference between Jews and Gentiles. They came from poor families, and most of them worked hard; they lived at home, so there was little of what is called “college life” about our education. There were feeble attempts made to get up “college spirit”; now and then a group of lads would run about the streets emitting yells, but their efforts were feeble, and struck me as silly. In the course of time one of the better dressed members of my class came to me with mysterious hints about a “fraternity.” I didn’t know what a “fraternity” was, and anyhow, I had no money to spare; I was living on four dollars and a half a week, and earning it by writing jokes and sketches for the newspapers.
I took six or eight courses each half year at the college, and as I recall them, my principal impression is of their incredible dullness. For example, the tired little gentleman who taught me what was called “English”; I remember a book of lessons, each lesson consisting of thirty or forty sentences containing grammatical errors. I would open the book and run down the list; I would see all the grammatical errors in the first three minutes, and for the remaining fifty-seven minutes was required to sit and listen while one member of the class after another was called on to explain and correct one of the errors. The cruelty of this procedure lay in the fact that you never knew at what moment your name would be called, and you would have to know what was the next sentence. If you didn’t know, you were not “paying attention,” and you got a zero. I tried all kinds of psychological tricks to compel myself to follow that dreary routine, but was powerless to chain my mind to it.
Then there was “history”; first the history of the world, ancient and modern, and then the history of England. I remember the tall, stringy old gentleman who taught us lists of names and dates, which we recited one hour and forgot the next. Here, if you were caught not paying attention, it was possible to use your wits and “get by.” I remember one bright moment when we were discussing the birth of the first prince of Wales. Said the professor: “How did it happen that an English prince, the son of an English king, was born on Welsh soil?” The student, caught unawares by this singular question, stammered, “Why—er—why—his mother was there!”
Also there were the physics classes; rather less dull, because they included “experiments,” which exhibited the peculiarities of natural forces—sparks and smoke, and noises of explosions major or minor. But why these things happened, or what they meant, was never understood by anyone, and whether an explosion was major or minor was entirely a matter of luck. I remember composing a poem for the college paper, dealing with the effect of physics upon a poet’s mind:
He learned that the painted rainbow,
God’s promise, as poets feign,
Was transverse oscillations
Turning somersaults in rain.
And then there was drawing. We sat in a big studio, in front of plaster casts of historic faces, and we made smudges supposed to resemble them. On this subject, also, I wrote some verses, portraying the plight of a student who forgot which cast he was copying, and paced up and down before them, exclaiming: “Good gracious, is it Juno or King Henry of Navarre?”