A depraved poet once pointed out that all men kill the thing they love, some with a sword, some with a word. Last week Joseph Carson, Jr., who had loved knowledge but found more of it in the head of his friend than in his own, tried to kill knowledge with his fists, with a shoe, with a dressing gown and a milk bottle.
When Joseph Carson Jr., a mild-mannered boy whose parents live in Manhattan, was voted "most brilliant" and "most intellectual" by his classmates ('21) at Princeton University, few who voted for him knew him save by sight and reputation. He was a scholarly recluse and passed much of his time in the company of a few kindred spirits of whom the leader was Lawrence Buermeyer of Reading, Pa., a graduate student and later a member of the Princeton Faculty. The friendship between Carson and Buermeyer survived their student days. They took it with them and kept it alive in New York City, where Lawrence obtained a position on the philosophical faculty of New York University, Joseph instructing in the same subject at Columbia.
But it was never quite an even friendship. Mr. Carson, the younger of the two, secretly envied his friend's intellectual equipment and attainments. Mr. Buermeyer, though not conceited, was occasionally made conscious of his superiority, real or imaginary, and sometimes adopted his old air of omniscient graduate student talking to callow undergraduate.
One afternoon last week the friends met in Philosopher Buermeyer's apartment and settled themselves to drink a bottle of grain alcohol. They mixed the fiery fluid with water, pursued recondite subjects. With each drink, a more hysterical note crept into Joseph Carson's voice. Jealousy gnawed. To shake it off, he blurted bitter taunts, taunts so childish that Prof. Buermeyer brushed them easily aside until he was bored, then dropped his woozy head and fell asleep. Infuriated, Philosopher Carson shouted at him to sit up and talk philosophy. The alcohol inflaming one mind had, however, quite numbed the other and not even a shoe, which Mr. Carson picked up and hurled, could revive the argument. Transported with drunken rage, Philosopher Carson sprang at the sleeper, raining blows with the shoe upon the lolling head. Prof. Buermeyer slid from his chair to the floor. Mr. Carson, panting, mixed and drank another tumbler of alcohol and water, glared blearily at the body, then fell asleep himself. Hours later he awoke and, without looking to see how his friend fared, staggered home for more sleep.
Next day, still fogged with raw fumes, he made his way back to Buermeyer's rooms. The man lay where he had left him, inert. The sight precipitated fresh mania and Mr. Carson attacked once more, exhorting his opponent to "stand up and take it." Buermeyer was unconscious. He felt nothing during ensuing minutes when his assailant kicked, beat, bashed him with a milk bottle, shoved him around the floor with a broomstick, tried to smother him with a dressing gown. He lay so limp, with blood streaming from ear, nose, jaw, forehead and the base of his skull, that Carson was suddenly seized with cold terror.