Poisoned Pen

THERE IS NO chance that any of the readers of the editorial columns in this newspaper will take seriously the reporting of drug usage at Ivy League colleges in The Poisoned Ivy. Even the stodgiest member of the class of 1943 sitting alone at night in his Straus Hall reunion suite will spot a rush job when he sees it and chuckle with disbelief at both the title of the book and chapter headings like "New Desire Under the Elms."

William Surface (the name is just too much joy) is conducting a small battle in class warfare. It is the author as a tough and experienced, yet fair and just police sergeant trying to cope with a misguided upper class of intellectuals. He repeatedly slurs them with the label "elite", a word that implies unfair competitive advantage and caste-like social separation.

The man is a terribly inaccurate and dishonest reporter. He gets his message across by implication and by recounting incidents which are heavily contrived to fit his message and lifted out of context to maximize sensational effect.

He uses the words "pseudo-intellectual", "bearded, and "Negro" as derogatory expletives. He's the only person I've seen use the first term since George Wallace gave it its new meaning of small town paranoia. The author throws in that a drug user is bearded over twenty times in his book when giving no other physical description of the person or of any other people he mentions.

And finally his use of the adjective "Negro" to connote crime and degeneracy reveals some ill-concealed white racism. The hypodermic needle he describes as "the tool of the Negro slums". He describes seeing a "pretty girl with straight blond hair" meet a "goateed Negro" in Harvard Square, talk about drugs, and then disappear together into a Harvard building--none too subtly hinting at miscegination.

It is easy enough for a reviewer to dig enough dirt out of William Surface's book to put him under ground (not underground) forever. The Poisoned Ivy is ludi-crously poorly organized, pieced together with the kind of choppy incoherence that insures no reader will be able to read this book for ten minutes without having to put it down.

But we should be grateful to The Poisoned Ivy for two precious anecdotes it has left us: (1) Detectives bust an instructor at Yale. One says: "Christ, look at this psychedelic pad. Look at it, would you?" Another says later: "Christ sakes, you sure as Hell go for this pothead stuff in a big way, don't you? What's it do for you, huh?"

(2) The author introduces Joe Catale, a narcotics agent working out of suite E-311 in the JFK Building in Boston: "Catale is in a pleasant mood because of the numerous convictions that have just resulted from his investigations."

Surface rarely attributes quotes to speakers and strings together endless quoted phrases lifted out of their context. He calls students "irrational" (p. 12) without ever explaining or implying why he thinks they are unable to reason. And finally he asserts that drugs have superceded civil rights, which shouldn't be believed, and that they are more popular than sex, which can't be believed.

The author deserves to have the gist of his expose commented upon. Yes, (yawn...), many people at Harvard and elsewhere are dropping and shooting all kinds of funny things.

*****

William Surface's jacket-portrait reminded me of the face of an Alabama State Trooper I once watched block a quiet, unpublicized attempt at school desegregation by young children. I had been working for The Southern Courier; it was the last thing I remembered from the South; and it happened only three days before I started my freshman year at Harvard. Surface has the same single-minded resolve as the trooper to enforce laws arrogantly for the law's sake.

People like the author of this book are the unthinking modern literary entrepreneurs who have adapted them-selves to "what works" in a big-corporation, big-media society. They are people concerned with "making it" in a life whose morality is outlined by television serials and legal codes. They pick up the style, the technique, and the rhetoric of already outdated reporting without seeking a truth, a meaning, an intelligent purpose for the books they write.

Surface is just cynical (he is completely intimidated by what he calls the "tradition, wealth, and influence" of the Ivy League--something he can't have). And he writes as if the whole weight of human morality and the righteousness of every established institution were behind his opinions. When I think of the hate and self- righteous anger that some readers of this book will feel toward people with beards, black people, and intellectuals, I find no reason to be surprised at the most horrible things that American society does to its best people.