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.
