I was at Exeter for two academic years, but I took three years to do it. I didn't flunk, finally, but in my second year I took sick... I was very, very unhappy there. By this time, I was not so frightened of flunking out, but socially it was just awful, and I had no friends and felt very solitary, and of course I do realize I provoked the... my isolation, and cherished it, but I was unhappy.  And in January, perhaps, I began to have a migraine headache every day. I'd begun to have migraines a little in the fall, and then I had some pain in my head, sometimes all day, sometimes for 10 minutes, every day, and it was accompanied by a low grade fever, and that was in the infirmary for weeks and then the school asked my parents to come up and take me home.  So they did, and I was restored to my mother.  And she went down to the Yale Co-op and bought me books and I wrote a novel while I was in bed - it was wonderful. I did spend a week in New Haven hospital for observation - they tested me for brain tumors, and, oh, glandular problems, and so on. I think it was psychosomatic probably... depression, desire to get away... desire to be restored to the mother. She... she was a great nurse, took great care of me. But at any rate, at the end of the... when they couldn't find anything wrong with me, somebody finally said, throw... throw the thermometer away, and gradually the headaches stopped, and when I finally took my temperature again it was normal, and I went back the following year. But I did write a novel that year when I was 17. I remember, now I think it still exists somewhere, but it will be a terrible day if it ever gets printed. It was terrible, and I wrote another one when I was 19 actually, which was probably worse. And at that point, by the time I was 19, I decided, well, no prose for me. I'm no good at it. It'll be just poetry. But... I went back to Exeter for my senior year, and there were a lot of veterans there - there were 12 or 14 guys who had been in the army, the navy, the marine corps, who needed a postgrad year before college, and they changed the sense of the place for me. Two of them became the people I saw most often, and they were more grown up, and not - so much of Exeter came from... they were boys from prominent families in the Midwest, but an awful lot of Episcopal day school kids from New York, and... who came from rich families and so on, and it was just totally alien to my background.  And they all had brothers and sisters, I was the only child.  But when the veterans came back, I hung around with a couple of them, one of them is still my friend by correspondence, and that made the last year a lot easier, and it kind of changed the tone of the place as a whole. The sort of leaders before were in the presence of these people who had been firing guns in the Pacific 12 or 13 months earlier, and it sort of chastened them, I think. And I got into Harvard, and everybody got into Harvard from Exeter at that time. Not everybody, but an enormous number of people. It's hard now, but I got to Harvard and there I... I feel that I came home to my generation for the first time in my life.