Two Smart Boys:
The Record of a Friendship 1953–1965

Picture
David Jenness
Raymond Oliver

Paperback:
Perfect bound, 200 pages, 5-1/2" x 8-1/2" 
ISBN 978-1-938288-91-3
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About the Book

Two Smart Boys is a record of letters between two educated, thoughtful, sensitive—and self-absorbed—boys as they matured into successful, engaged young men. Those letters, written in a style that seems almost quaint today, paint a fascinating portrait of two individuals coming of age and growing into the world of ideas as they shaped both their own lives and each other’s.

Preview

I was really delighted to get your letter just when I did—and that’s no you-know-what. I had just begun to toy with the idea of writing you a bitter—well, fairly bitter—letter of chiding, something to the effect of: don’t throw me off like you’d push away a cocker spaniel puppy, even when the latter does wet on your trouser leg or worse.…

As you can see, I am cheating and writing you this while at work. I just finished writing several letters, in French, to the Université de Paris (Sorbonne) concerning some interlibrary research projects we are doing here. One of them concerned a subject on Nigeria, and so I had to compile a bibliography in Nigerian, or rather in Yoruba and Iwe Itan. Quite a job, let me tell you. I have before me a slim volume entitled A Short Yoruba Grammar, by J.A. de Gaye, F.L.S., F.E.S, Inspector of Schools, Nigeria. This grammar is in French and since I am not used to using a French typewriter (which I had to use for my letters—this gets more and more involved, no?) I had to retype most of my correspondence. All in all, a lousy, confused tri-lingual day. Which is why I am now relaxing and doing something I want to do: write you.…

A.E. Housman once wrote that he could tell when a line of poetry was great, because when he read it he felt a prickling up and down his spine. I don’t think enough of him to attach any great significance to the statement—to be sure, he is a “good” poet, or is he? yes, he is—but I have a similar automatic response to very good poetry. It’s the same feeling as the one I get when I am just beginning to get aroused sexually: a sort of sick feeling of turbulence in my abdomen, a pressure that has to expand somewhere. When I am getting hot over a woman it travels south, natch; when it is poetry it goes up and I have to say the poem out loud and announce to the air its excellence. Well, your Requiem for the Original Sin did this to me. I know it’s good because of its tension, its spring, the way it draws on your mind and eye in one rush, the way it reverberates after I have read it. The image is so good: it appeals to the conscious and subconscious awareness. It is expressive and yet economical; filtered and cerebrated and yet pure. In short, it excites me, and I think it is splendid. I admire its precision, and yet will ask one rhetorical question: on re-reading it, do you think it too explicit?…

About Author David Jenness

David Jenness, after earning bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees from Columbia University, had a long and successful career organizing and funding research projects for major private foundations, learned societies, and government. He was the author of Classic American Popular Song: The Second Half-Century. He passed as this book was going to press.

About Author Raymond Oliver

Raymond Oliver, a retired professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is a graduate of Oberlin College, the University of Wisconsin, and Stanford University. In addition to publishing several hundred poems, he is the author of Beowulf: a Likeness and To Be Plain, a book of verse-translations from Greek, Latin, French, and German.

Praise for Two
Smart Boys

This book really is extraordinary, unlike any other I know. The authors are funny, fluent, frank, and brutally insightful. And they are sincere in the most honorable sense of the word. Their quest is universal: to find the art and goodness in everyday life and to know their truest selves.
—William deBuys, author of A Great Aridness and River of Traps
__________

Compelling . . .  a pleasurable and stimulating read. I loved the back and forth of it, the language plays, the loyalty, the exuberance.
—Steven Feld, Senior Scholar, School for Advanced Research