He read many books, played bridge, played tennis, and boxed at a local gymnasium. He wrote a novel, and it was not really such a bad novel as the critics later called it, although it was a very poor novel. He was fairly happy, except that, like many people living in Europe, he would rather have been in America, and he had discovered writing. During two years and a half I do not believe that Robert Cohn looked at another woman. During this time Robert’s mother had settled an allowance on him, about three hundred dollars a month. The lady who had him, her name was Frances, found toward the end of the second year that her looks were going, and her attitude toward Robert changed from one of careless possession and exploitation to the absolute determination that he should marry her. During these three years, the first spent in travel, the last two in Paris, Robert Cohn had two friends, Braddocks and myself. They came to Europe, where the lady had been educated, and stayed three years. When this lady saw that the magazine was not going to rise, she became a little disgusted with Cohn and decided that she might as well get what there was to get while there was still something available, so she urged that they go to Europe, where Cohn could write. She was very forceful, and Cohn never had a chance of not being taken in hand. He had been taken in hand by a lady who hoped to rise with the magazine. He was sorry when the magazine became too expensive and he had to give it up.īy that time, though, he had other things to worry about. It was his money and he discovered he liked the authority of editing. By that time Cohn, who had been regarded purely as an angel, and whose name had appeared on the editorial page merely as a member of the advisory board, had become the sole editor.
The review commenced publication in Carmel, California, and finished in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In California he fell among literary people and, as he still had a little of the fifty thousand left, in a short time he was backing a review of the Arts. The divorce was arranged and Robert Cohn went out to the Coast. As he had been thinking for months about leaving his wife and had not done it because it would be too cruel to deprive her of himself, her departure was a very healthful shock. He was married five years, had three children, lost most of the fifty thousand dollars his father left him, the balance of the estate having gone to his mother, hardened into a rather unattractive mould under domestic unhappiness with a rich wife and just when he had made up his mind to leave his wife she left him and went off with a miniature-painter. He took it out in boxing, and he came out of Princeton with painful self-consciousness and the flattened nose, and was married by the first girl who was nice to him. He was a nice boy, a friendly boy, and very shy, and it made him bitter. No one had ever made him feel he was a Jew, and hence any different from anybody else, until he went to Princeton. At the military school where he prepped for Princeton, and played a very good end on the football team, no one had made him race-conscious. Robert Cohn was a member, through his father, of one of the richest Jewish families in New York, and through his mother of one of the oldest. He had often wondered what had become of him. I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together, and I always had a suspicion that perhaps Robert Cohn had never been middleweight boxing champion, and that perhaps a horse had stepped on his face, or that maybe his mother had been frightened or seen something, or that he had, maybe, bumped into something as a young child, but I finally had somebody verify the story from Spider Kelly. They did not even remember that he was middleweight boxing champion. I never met any one of his class who remembered him. In his last year at Princeton he read too much and took to wearing spectacles. This increased Cohn’s distaste for boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose. He was so good that Spider promptly overmatched him and got his nose permanently flattened. Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five or two hundred and five pounds. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.
Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.
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