Ok. I understand we're talking eighty-five years ago. But that eighty-five years is significant. Sure, the players are all dead now and nobody alive today would weep with embarassment becuase their grandparents or great-grandparents had a shipboard romance that ended with debarkation in New York. We are all but immune to flings, tell-alls and tabloid romances and today a relationship like this would be interesting to the parties involved and maybe to their loves waiting on the dock. Nobody else would really care.
In 1926, this might have been a big deal. Women were socially ruined by unsavory romances and these things were kept pretty close to the vest. Aaron Gottfried published this work under his initials only. I assume he did so not to protect himself as Princeton is a pretty small place now and was smaller in 1926, but to protect his romantic partner.
This begs the question "why publish this at all". I doubt it was a best seller even on an all male campus. It has no wild scenes of reckless abandon designed to titillate the undergraddies and its poetic merits are slight. Did Princeton routinely publish little tomes of their students' poetry? Or could Gottfried have been on the university's payroll, perhaps even working for the University Press?
And if the relationship was so private and special, why not keep your poems in a little box under the bed until you are sick of thinking about your loss or until your wife tosses them after your funeral.
Did Aaron publish his poems out of some sort of revenge? The number of young people who were able to afford this sort of cruise in 1926 was probably small and exclusive.
Perhaps the members of the passenger list would be pretty well known to his Princetonian cohort? Maybe there was a desire to embarass the lady's family or to shame her into going public with this romance.
I will never know. But I do know 1926 was not 2011 and a telling book of poems was probably an unusual thing.
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