What Did the Cat Do to the Bathtub Down the Hall?

MY FIRST or possibly my second week at Harvard, a proctor on the floor beneath mine gave a party, which I did not attend. An assistant dean came to the party one of my roommates told me afterwards, to answer freshmanly questions and try to explain the Harvard experience. By one or two o'clock after he had had a lot to drink the assistant dean was ready to really explain the Harvard experience. "You are the best," he explained slurredly. "Never forget that you are the best. You should be proud that you are the best. Pass me another beer."

This is the official line of Harvard, or as close as there comes to being an official line. I began to unlearn it immediately, naturally, and I recently decided that many of Harvard's better features are suggested in some lines of Ezra Pound about a tradition that there can be honesty of mind without overwhelming talent. My first encounter with Science at Harvard, for example, came during my first and pretty nearly my last bridge game there. It came a few weeks after the assistant dean's explanation, which it seemed to call into question, if not to contradict. The bridge game was in Thayer South, a dormitory which is the past has often housed many pre-medical students, and this may account for the fact that there was an experiment going on when I came in, with 20 or 25 people standing around watching its progress or if they were too short for that, the backs of the people in front of them.

It appeared that someone had just fed is goldfish some LSD, and everyone was naturally curious about how they would react. Since goldfish are not articulate it was difficult to tell. Some people thought the fact that the goldfish were swimming in rapid circles indicated that the found the LSD stimulating and pleasurable. Others thought indicated that the goldfish were losing their minds, having swallowed an overdose, and that in any case it was cruel and improper to vivisect goldfish in this manner. Still others said, in effect, that swimming in rapid circles is to goldfish what lying is to Mr. Ehrlichman: they may not do it well, but they do it often, and probably better than they do anything else. Therefore, these skeptics suggested, it was probable that LSD, at least in small quantities, has no effect on goldfish at all. At the time I was even less interested in goldfish than in bridge (last spring I discovered a whole school of large and beautiful goldfish swimming in the Charles, a river I had thought was inhabited only by aquatic rats and pontoon bugs, and this increased my regard for goldfish to no end), so I went back to my own Hall, Pennypacker, without learning the experiment's conclusion, but nevertheless, suspected that despite the assistant dean's assurances, better experiments could be devised.

LIFE in Pennypacker was somewhat different from life in Thayer South. Just as Harvard had crowded a predominance of premeds into Thayer South, according to the conventional wisdom, so it had crowded a predominance of misfits and lunatics into Pennypacker. One piece of evidence for this belief was the fondness of many of Pennypacker's residents for scaling the building's outside wall, balancing on the inch-wide fourth-story fire-escape railing, and them chinning themselves onto the roof. The main attraction of being on the roof, as far as I could tell, was the opportunity it afforded for climbing down again. Sometimes I would sit on the fire-escape for an hour at a time, pretending to study and wondering whether or when someone would fall, and whether it would upset the Elks in the lodge across the street when he did. No one ever fell. Whenever I asked anyone why he liked to climb to the roof, he would generally explain that he enjoyed it, which I thought was an excellent explanation.

Nor was this all the fire-escape was good for. The cat found it invaluable, for instance. The cat followed one of my roommates home one night when he was with a girl named Lucy, and so the cat was named Lucy even thought it was a male cat. The cat lived on Pizza crusts, my roommate's marijuana plant. which he mistook for catnip, catfood, and silverfish, which are little bugs that come out of the radiator in the bathroom. The cat would have been indispensable as a silverfish-catcher if we had wanted the silverfish caught. He would sit patiently beside the radiator like a panther in the jungle, waiting for a silverfish so small it could hardly be seen to come out so he could pounce. It was really a very nice cat, and when a bewildered-looking man from Buildings and Grounds came checking for pets--pets are strictly forbidden in Harvard buildings, a rule slightly less ridiculous than the signs against the presence of women in the billiard rooms of some of the once all-male Houses--we told him we were keeping the cat overnight for a cousin who was out of town, or some such story. I doubt that he believed it, but he pretended to quite well.

THE ONLY thing wrong with the cat was that he often shat in the bathtub instead of the litterbox, and even this wouldn't have been so bad if he hadn't taken to climbing out on the fire-escape and then in other people's windows so that he could try out their bathtubs too. Eventually he tried out the bathtub of the person down the hall, a character who had borrowed my roommate's tennis racket a week or so before. When my roommate gave him the racket, he looked at it disdainfully.

"Haven't you got a metal racket?" he said incredulously.

"No," my roommate said.

"Well," he said grudgingly, "I'll take this one, then." A couple of days later he accused someone three rooms down of stealing his bar of soap. Pennypacker is one of the few freshman dormitories with bathrooms in each suite, so stealing the bar of soap would have entailed breaking and entering first. Since this is how my roommate ultimately got his racket back, however, maybe it wasn't as far-fetched as it sounds.

This individual down the hall was extremely angry at the cat, as indeed he had a right to be. "Come see what your fucking cat just did in my bathtub," he suggested. We could guess what the cat had just done in his bathtub, of course, but that wasn't enough for him: he wanted it cleaned up as well, as I guess was only right. Eventually my roommate became moderately friendly with him and halfway through exam period they even got stoned together, in an evening which climaxed when my roommate marched indignantly into the Underdog, a restaurant which was already doing a surprisingly thriving business, and demanded that the owner immediately divest his store of its pinball machine, as his contribution to suppressing the Mafia. My roommate claims that the Mafia has a usufruct on all pinball machines and devotes most of the profits from them to hooking ghetto children on heroin, but even if this is true I suspect that he was also influenced by the amount on money he had lost playing pinball the week before. So maybe the cat was finally forgiven his trespass, but that was later on.

At the time, we decided to get rid of the cat, so we put an advertisement in Boston After Dark and a nice lady with a cat of her own came and took him away and renamed him Benjamin, just like the lady in The Sound and the Fury. The cat was so affected that he never molested the lady's bathtub, but on his first day in his new home, he began to claw the furniture. Thereafter he was well-behaved. Even though he had almost certainly never read any Ezra Pound, apparently, he had become so imbued with the Harvard atmosphere that he didn't want to be taken in on false pretenses of perfection. He was credit to his race and a good cat.

AFTER WE got rid of the cat it was time for the Spring demonstration. There was no Spring demonstration last year, but before that there had reportedly been one every Spring since the great strike of 1969, when President Pusey called in the police, and if we are lucky maybe there will be a demonstration again this year, hopefully not because of anything like the mining of Haiphong, which provoked the one I am describing. There was a huge mass meeting of several hundred people, sponsored by The Crimson and all the radical groups that were not yet completely moribund and also several that were, and everyone adopted a set of demands and voted to go out on strike. The main controversy at the meeting. I believe, was over whether one of the demands should be the release of Russian Jews, but this demand was voted down after several speakers pointed out that even though most of the people who opposed Russia's detaining Jews also opposed spitting on old ladies and beggars, and they did not advocate including an end to this practise in the list of demands. Aside from an immediate end to the mining of Haiphong, the main demand adopted by the meeting was that Harvard not call in the police to evict a group of black students who had seized Massachusetts Hall that morning and insisted that Harvard sell its stock in Gulf Oil, as a protest against that company's payments to Portugal, which was (and for that matter still is) suppressing several African revolutions.

After the meeting everyone adjourned to march around Massachusetts Hall. It was exciting. A group of people were playing bongo drums and chanting slogans--"Quang Tri! An Loc! Do the same to Derek Bok!" was the most memorable slogan to come out on the strike--and the occupiers were shouting speeches from the windows. "This is really very exciting," I said to one of the people marching in front of me. "Yes," he agreed, "but I'd still rather be making it with someone." I didn't fully appreciate that exchange 'til I had more of a standard of comparison, but its honesty of mind might well be labeled brutal.

AT BOSTON University last spring, by way of contrast, there was a demonstration to keep a Marine recruiter from recruiting. By three or four in the afternoon few but the most dedicated reporters and the most dedicated radicals were still around, and so as a putative member of the first category I occupied myself by listening to the putative members of the second, who were running around trying to convert one another. Finally three of the most dedicated missionaries--one an unaffiliated rad; one from the Socialist Workers Party, which is the oldest Trotskyist organization in the United States; and one from Progressive Labor, which took over SDS a few years back and which used to be Maoist but has now decided that Mao is a tool of the bosses--bumped into each other, smack in the middle of Bay State Road where there were no cars to duck behind.

They stared at each other apprehensively, but the guy from the SWP tool the plunge. "How much political reading do you do a night?" he demanded. The guy from PL yawned delicately.

"Oh," he replied, "about an hour and a half or two hours." The Socialist Worker turned pale. "What about you?" he said finally, turning to the unaffiliated rad, who I guess he hoped would either top the guy from PL or suggest that he was a liar, in either case letting the questioner off the hook.

"I don't do it by time," the unaffiliated rad said loftily, suggesting by his intonation that anyone who did so had absorbed the work ethic of monopoly capital as to be worthless for whatever revolutionary purpose he professed to serve. "I do it by length. Thirty-three and a half pages a night. I count pictures as half a page." One-upsmanship goes on at Harvard, too, and this conversation would not have been impossible at a Harvard demonstration. But it might have been less likely, just as there were probably fewer people at Harvard than in many other places who denounced demonstrators for their violence when they broke windows in an attempt to stop the presumably nonviolent Indochina war.

ONE OF THE things I found most difficult to accept at Harvard was that someone could be a scholar, maybe even genuinely a scholar and not just an assistant dean gone wrong, and yet not be an attractive person. My first term I audited an English class whose professor, when he found he had not used up as much time as he'd intended, fell back on quoting large chunks of Oedipus at Colonnus in the original Greek; but I decided I didn't like him anyway. It was disillusioning. Similarly I have taken a class by one Nobel prizewinner, and the single moment I enjoyed most in his course was his discomfiture when the rap session into which he had self-consciously turned one of his classes got out of his control. As a baldingly rationalist would-be hippie should, he had set himself to prove that those of his students who professed to believe in God and those who professed to disbelieve actually shared the same belief, presumably some sort of Siddharthian, soothing idea about the unity of the universe, so he had picked out five atheist and five theist volunteers.

"Now," he said fussily to the first theist volunteer, "What do you mean when you say you belive in God?"

The first theist volunteer, whom I knew slightly because he also came from Pennypacker, took a deep breath. "I believe that Jesus Christ the Son of God came down on earth for the redemption of the sins of the world," he explained," and I know that this is true because He has told me so."

THE PROFESSOR looked a little dazed. "Well," he hazarded, turning to the first atheist volunteer, "probably you would not agree with that statement." The first atheist volunteer allowed that this was so. It was moments like this, I am convinced, that led Herry Adams to say that "disappointment apart, Harvard College was probably less hurtful than any other university then is existence." Disappointment apart, it is possible that it still is. At least by the beginning of my second year I no longer felt compelled to tell myself, when for example a dedicated member of the Harvard-Radcliffe Young Republicans assured me that the President was a highly moral man because he probably hadn't slept with Pat in ten years, that I thought all points of view merit equal consideration and are equally valid. Maybe they do and are, but as Robert Frost once said, it didn't seem as if. I doubt that this is clear, so I am going to stop after one more story, and since I started with a drunk I guess I will end with one as well.

This happened at one of the last Ford Dinners held in Kirkland House last year. A Fore Dinner is funded by the Ford Foundation and includes a famous visitor, and I believe all the Houses have them or something like them. In the course of the year I missed any number of Ford Dinners at Kirkland House. Among the famous people I did not see were B.F. Skinner and Leonard Bernstein. For the last dinner of the year the guest was to be I.A. Richards, a famous literary critic, none of whose books I had ever read or knew anything about. Despite my ignorance, it seemed to me it was about time I went to a Ford Dinner, so I asked several people who I thought would know about I.A. Richards to tell me about his theories. I even offered to read one of his books in advance of the great day if they would recommend one which was interesting and important.

None of the people I asked had read any of I.A. Richards's books, and none of them knew much about his theories. They all assured me, however, that he was a very famous literary critic whom it would be an honor and a pleasure to see--a few of them were planning to attend themselves--so I compromised by not going to the Dinner, which was oversubscribed anyway, but going to the reception afterwards instead.

I.A. Richards turned out to be a highly entertaining talker, and although I must still confess that I have not read any of his books and know nothing about his theories I have no doubt that his reputation is well deserved, Eventually be began to talk about a friend of his, whose grandmother used to recite peotry when she wanted to make him sleep. The conversation had touched on Sir Walter Scott's chapter headings, or something of the sort, and I.A. Richards was discussing the transformations folk ballads undergo.

"So she would recite," he said, leaning back and beginning to speak from his full chest (I had no idea so deep and resonant a voice could come from so small a man)--

"White was the sheet that she laid for her lover..."

But before he could begin the second line, a student began to wave his arms and shout, "I know a poem like that." After a moment the student subsided, and I.A. Richards went on.

White was the sheet that she laid for the lover.

White was the sheet, and embroidered the cover.

But far whiter the sheet, and the canopy grander.

When she lay down to sleep where the wild wolves wander.

The company sat quietly, absorbing the lines. "Quite a poem to have your grandmother read you," someone remarked, and someone else nodded piously. "I know a poem like that," the drunken student repeated and as everyone stared at him in amazement, he began to quaver a song:

Bla-a-ack is the color of my true love's co-o-ffee, White is the lump of su-ugar on her spoooooon...

"Ah, well," I.A. Richards observed tactfully, "you're right, of course, about the colors." And, of course, he was right about the colors. I.A. Richards wouldn't have said it if he hadn't believed it was true, any more then the theist or atheist volunteers of for that matter the cat who would not refrain from clawing the furniture when he thought that was in the nature of cats. So I decided and still decide that I liked I.A. Richards, and I liked the theist an atheist volunteers, and I liked the cat, and with all its failings I even like Harvard. And if this still isn't clear you will have to try it for yourself, because this is the best that I can do.