From the Shelf Three Thirty Four

THERE'S no easy way to describe Three Thirty Four, the 1970 Harvard Yearbook. It is a wildly uneven product, amusing and profound in some sections, abysmally poor in others. This probably makes it better than many of its predecessors, which didn't achieve even the scattered excellence that Three Thirty Four can boast. But the pattern of the work is still puzzling. You can't escape feeling that about four group of editors worked in strict isolation on different portions of the Yearbook, and then slipped their work secretly to the printer, who gave the whole volume the only unity it can claim its thick red binder.

One problem is that the Yearbook still feels obligated to give elaborate coverage to those traditional Yearbook highlights-sports, theatre, new buildings, etc. Some of this is fine, even necessary, but somewhere along the line the demands of the genre bury all sense of proportion. Three Thirty Four gives 26 pages to fail sports and over twenty to the Harvard Producing Organization's presentation of Bartholomew Fair. But all the year's radical activities are dismissed in five pages, as a preface to a rather tedious eight page interview with four prominent faculty and administration figures, who deal in disjointed and abstract fashion with all the changes rocking Harvard today. The Yearbook never mentions the Center for International Affairs. The painters' helper issue is referred to only in passing. You don't have to agree with SDS, NAC, or the Weathermen to feel that these groups deserve at least a paragraph each in a 225 page account of Harvard in 1970.

This oversight hardly seems deliberate, for Three Thirty Four gives extended and sympathetic coverage to the demands and actions of Harvard's Black Community and to Women's Liberation. Both sections suffer from the mediocre camera work which plagues the entire Yearbook, but the printed pieces combine sensitivity with enough militance to sound authentic.

There's more to Harvard than politics, of course, but Three Thirty Four is just as unpredictable in its mood and culture essays. A photographic study of Harvard's "face" presents a few portraits of lugubrious winter spaces-all very familiar and unexciting. But a study of coeducational living-which opens with a startling and unexplained picture of mixed, nude bathing-is one of the best sections in the Yearbook, though here again the writing soars above the photography.

THE YEARBOOK'S editors have relied heavily on interviewing this year to get across substantive issues, and the result should warn them against repeating the technique next year. Most of the interview texts are way too long-particularly a multi-page monster with Laurence Senelick, director of HARPO. The book opens with a few pages of comments by Adam Ulam, professor of Government, and Reuben A. Brower, professor of English, who are asked to compare today's students with their ancestors of the early sixties. Their replies produce little of interest, but some of Brower's remarks are worth looking over, if only for what they tell of the incredible nostalgia which seems to grip some faculty at Harvard. Brower notes wistfully;

When I think back to the earlier sixties or there abouts, I suppose that it was a very high time, probably until '66, in Adams House for the Arts. That was the time of our great drama revival, lots of theatre and so on, painting and sculpture... One didn't have to suggest things-one spent most of one's time trying to find out how to pay for the things that people wanted to do.

A selective reading of Three Thirty Four can produce revealing or entertaining nuggets like this one. Prospecting, however, can be a pretty dull business.