In the April 1951 issue of the Advocate, Begley contributed a page-long, three-part poem entitled “the Crowing of the Cock.”

The free verse examines some of the complicated relationships of a red-stockinged girl and discusses thoughts scribbled on “a scrap of paper yellow as the sweetness of cake.”

And one of his first stories, entitled “Krzysztof,” describes a young cowherd, likely in Poland, who encounters the effects of Nazi occupation. A soldier deduces from Krzysztof’s nervous manner that his identification papers are false, and so the boy must flee through the countryside, seeking refuge in a haystack. The soldier pokes for him with a bayonet:

“The steel did not search him again, and he remained in such a tacit communion with the fragrance he drank, that he feared to move lest he break it. He could not notice when the air which had soothed him became hot and bitter, or the darkness to which he clung turned into a cage of burning wire.”

Chace added that he sees shades of European influence even in Begley’s current writing.

“There is a tone to his books which is also very French,” Chace says, noting particular resemblances to Balzac. “His novels are extremely worldly.”

Andreou, Begley’s editor, attributes this worldliness to Begley’s fluency and comfort in multiple languages and countries.

Chace credits Begley’s work for a law firm he helped make transnational, which also sharpened his understanding of “very very moneyed powerful people, and the way in which they live.”

NOT JOHN GRISHAM

Begley says that he had not planned as a college student to become a lawyer. His father had hoped he would become a doctor—but when he realized that he didn’t enjoy hard science or medicine enough to pursue that path, he found himself without much of a career map at all.

He graduated Harvard summa cum laude, and rather than immediately take a job, decided instead to join the army.

“I didn’t do it because I was bellicose,” Begley says. “I thought [the draft] was a marvelous way to avoid taking any decisions.”

Upon graduating, Begley thought he would advance on the academic track, perhaps to graduate school. But the army gave him some time to think about his next step, and he found that that life didn’t particularly excite him.

“As I thought about this in the army, and I tried to visualize what that would be like, I found it harder and harder to picture myself sitting in my Widener cubicle with all the nice graduate students,” he says. “So what do I do?”

He decided he would try to attend law school, and from his army post cabled the Harvard Law School (HLS) admissions office, who cabled back his acceptance. Immediately after graduation from HLS in 1959, Begley joined Debevoise and Plimpton, and became a partner in 1968.