The member of his mother’s family who would prove most influential in Thompson’s life was his great-aunt Leita, who had married the second Catholic chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Edward Douglass White. In contrast to Thompson’s mother, Trower describes his great-aunt, known throughout the family as “Aunt Leita,” as a stable, sensible woman. She took a shine to young Dunstan, and when she died in 1934 left a legacy to him that would enable him to live and work as a poet throughout his life without having to hold a job.
Thompson’s childhood followed a pattern of sorts. The family moved whenever his father shifted to a new naval base, and then Terry would be gone on long deployments, leaving the boy to grow extremely close to—and protective of—his mother. There is no evidence that Thompson feared his father or had a fraught relationship with him, other than anecdotes arising out of typical adolescent arguments (for example, over the consumption of alcohol). Still, even in Trower’s lengthy memoir of Thompson, the father remains a rather distant, nebulous figure.
One constant in Thompson’s childhood was the liturgical life of the Catholic Church. A commentator has made much of the family having ties to various Catholic dignitaries, including cardinals and archbishops, but for Thompson the experience of faith had less to do with high-ranking clerical friends of the family than with the sacramental life of the church. From a young age Thompson was an altar boy, often getting up early in the morning to serve at the first Mass of the day. In stark contrast to Thompson’s father’s “French Cistercian” sensibility, Trower calls his mother’s faith “highly colorful and Italianate,” an element of Leita’s disposition the son seems to have shared.
Another formative experience was foreign travel, something that came naturally to Thompson’s father, given his naval career and European upbringing. There were trips to places like Panama, England, France, Belgium, and Germany (where the family attended the Passion Play at Oberammergau and visited the Catholic mystic Therese Neumann, who experienced the stigmata, the wounds of Christ’s Passion, in her flesh). On a trip to Rome they had an audience with Pope Pius XI, who gave them one of his white silk skull caps.
When he was twelve, Thompson was sent to Georgetown Prep in Washington, D.C., at first as a day student but then as a boarder. Perhaps sensing that his long deployments had left too much distance between himself and his son, Terry brought him out to Villanova Prep in the Ojai Valley when he was stationed in California, but then left on another long deployment.
It was at yet another Catholic school—Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut, which he attended for most of his high school years—that Thompson’s literary abilities began to be noticed. One of his teachers, Jimmy Doyle, encouraged him to write poetry. And despite what he would later call his “shyness from my youth,” Thompson also began to demonstrate a genius for friendship at Canterbury. In fact, Thompson stayed in touch with a number of his Canterbury teachers and classmates for many years, some to the very end of his life.
When it came to the choice of which college or university Thompson should attend, there was some discussion within the family. In those days most Catholics were expected to send their children to Catholic institutions such as Georgetown, Notre Dame, or Boston College, but Thompson’s uncle Frederick had long championed Harvard as the pinnacle of higher education in America. And so, being the faithful Catholic family they were, ecclesiastical dispensation was sought for and granted so Thompson could attend Harvard.
By all accounts, Thompson flourished at Harvard in many ways. He gravitated quickly to the faculty who were also poets, especially Robert Davis, Theodore Spencer, and Robert Hillyer. The latter, a High Anglican with a decidedly traditionalist preference for form and romantic diction, was to have the most lasting influence on Thompson. Many years later, in a tribute to Hillyer, Thompson would call him a “gonfalonier of ‘Reaction,’” a critic of Modernists like Eliot and Pound who championed the “gentlemanly” verse of the sixteenth and late nineteenth centuries.3
Equally important were his close friendships with some of the most gifted writers among his Harvard classmates. Two of the most important and longest-lasting were with Harry Brown and Billy Abrahams. Brown, who would go on to write a World War II novel, A Walk in the Sun, which was made into a film starring Dana Andrews, ended up as a Hollywood screenwriter. But in his Harvard years Brown was immersed in literature and poetry. Trower describes Brown as temperamentally the opposite of Thompson, a “typical man’s man, as practical as Dunstan was impractical.”
Abrahams was more like Thompson on a number of levels. Both had a homosexual orientation and valued literary conversation, wit, and repartee. They were “romantic over a rock-bed of realism...brothers in a savage world,” in Trower’s words. Abrahams would eventually have a distinguished career as an editor and publisher. During their Harvard years they would have only one significant falling-out: when Abrahams tried to enlist Thompson’s support for the cause of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Whether because of his Catholic background or an innate sense of moderation in political matters, Thompson disappointed Abrahams when he expressed ambivalence about that cause.
Thompson’s extracurricular activities centered on The Harvard Monthly, a campus magazine originally founded by George Santayana and others that had gone defunct and only just been revived when Thompson arrived at Harvard. He served as contributor, editorial board member, and, eventually, as editor. Among the poems he contributed was “To Hart Crane,” whose poetry had already exerted considerable influence on him.
Thompson’s Monthly essay contributions also revealed a satirical and contrarian streak that would manifest itself in various ways throughout his life and literary career. They included a jeu d’esprit imagining communists taking over Harvard, a piece mocking Isabella Stewart Gardner (the eccentric Boston socialite and patron of the arts), and “Ants on the Ash Heap,” an attack on the Harvard English department that spared only Robert Hillyer.
The one Monthly piece that caused the greatest stink was “Fragrant Futility,” a send-up of the Cowley Fathers, a monastic order within the Episcopal Church. Thompson had visited the monastery in Boston with seemingly benign intentions and was received graciously, but the essay, according to a memoir by his classmate Sanford Gifford, “made fun of their High-Church efforts to be more Catholic than their Episcopal denomination.” As Gifford writes, Thompson’s “own Catholic background made him the perfect critic,”4 but the essay infuriated Hillyer, who forced the young satirist to apologize to the good Fathers.
While his Catholic identity might have provided Thompson with the proper satirical angle for his essay, it is clear that he had lost his faith at some point late in high school or soon after arriving at Harvard. There seems little doubt that this loss of faith coincided with the beginning of his liaisons with men. As the poet Katie Ford notes: “It seems that it was not a crisis of faith that drove Thompson into a ‘lapsed’ period of Catholic practice. Perhaps sexual and social, what was forbidden created a crisis of desire, not of belief.”5 Trower adds that Thompson’s memory of the period was of living in an anguished limbo: he attempted to play the fashionable skeptic, but retained an instinctive sense that belief was vital to human flourishing. And yet he could not embrace the only two grand belief systems that seemed open to him in the late thirties: Catholicism and Marxism.
Perhaps this underlying turmoil contributed to Thompson’s academic troubles, for despite his brilliant literary achievements at the Monthly, he regularly failed to attend classes and pass examinations. To the surprise of his peers, he dropped out of Harvard in 1939 after his third year, a move that Trower believes was intended to forestall expulsion.
Rather than sink into depression and lethargy, Thompson traveled. He had already been going on trips abroad the previous summers, including visits to Ireland, England, and Mexico. In the summer of 1938, he had spent a month in England studying with the poet Conrad Aiken, who was considered a major writer at the time. He returned in the summer of 1939 to spend another month with Aiken, who gave him a personal introduction to T.S. Eliot. Writing to a friend, Aiken described Thompson as the “cleverest” of his students, “a great rattler and improviser, a real gift of the gab, raconteur, mimic, clown, somewhat in a hurry but shrewd too, adaptable and imitative...but honest and psychologically alert.”6
After