Tuesday, June 4, 2019

Forget the glowing Wikipedia entry for gay classicist Claude Fredericks of Bennington College, he preyed on students


NICHOLAS DELBANCO: A strange fellow, Claude Fredericks. He dropped out of Harvard because he refused to take the swim test or something like that, but he was a genuinely learned person, an autodidact. Knew Latin, Greek, Japanese. Punctilious in his self--presentation. And he had an avant-garde printing press, quite famous at the time, called Banyan Press. It published people like Gertrude Stein and the poet Jimmy Merrill, who’d been Claude’s lover early on. ...

MATT JACOBSEN: It was never unfriendly between me and Claude, but as I fell more deeply in love with Liz [Glotzer, Jacobsen’s girlfriend and eventual wife], I saw less of Claude. I realized it was kind of ridiculous to hang out with him, cool as he was. And he wasn’t going to get what he wanted from me, so he moved on to greener pastures, started fooling around with another guy who’d been his student. At the end of the day, Claude was driven by a—you know—perverse interest in me. And that was wrong. I’m a geezer now, and I understand how wrong he really was.