Veritas Between the Sheets

A GREAT MANY scenes at Harvard seem singularly well suited as backdrops for a novel. The gently rolling waters of the Charles at dusk, with a single oursman sculling past; the Square on a weekend evening, abuzz with music and breathless partygoers; the Yard on a spring afternoon, as sunlight streams through a circle of historic buildings.

But the most extraordinary examples of Harvard fiction have taken as their setting a drab indoor location: the dormitory bedroom. There have been dozens of novels about Harvard over the years: novels about freshmen, novels about seniors, novels about faculty, alumni, and townies, novels that start off at Harvard and never return, and novels that check into Harvard and never leave. And virtually every one of them--as if to observe an unwritten rule of the genre--pauses for at least one bounce on a Buildings and Grounds cot before reaching its conclusion Surely no other segment of the population (with one possible exception) is as sharnelessly obsessed with the sex life of Harvard students as the creators of Harvard fiction.

And what a strange obsession it is. It is not sex the way any hygiene class or best selling handbook describes it that takes place in the Houses and halls of these writers' imaginations. Something altogether different is going on between these sheets, and it deserves a careful examination.

Consider, for instance, a passage from one of the newest additions to the canon of Harvard literature--Splendor and Misery by Faye Levine '65. The scene is 1963, in a Lowell House room, where Levine's protagonist Sarah is taking advantage of the parietal rules' provision for afternoon visiting hours. Levine notes that Sarah's boy friend has given her a copy of the Kama Sutra and she describes the consequences.

And so now, released from fear by a marvelous vision of sacramental lust in a high and cosmopolitan civilization, the sweet dream of a timeless humanity, the lovers became one person again, woman inside turned outside of man. And Sarah rode the motions of her own and Michael's unconsciousness, quiet, submissive, faintly delirious, endlessly, endlessly, endlessly until the fire caught--the Volcano erupted--The Boundaries Dissolved--The Heat Flowed O*U*T!! and she screamed. And she rode the crest of the lava in tumultuous, selfless joy down the side of the mountain until slowly, slowly, she came to an easy gradual rest at the foot of a hill, and there the girlfriend found the boyfriend again.

That's a lot of lava for any bedroom, not to mention a Lowell House single. But Faye Levine is only the latest in a long series of Harvard novelists whose scenes of passion defy all reasonable expectation. Who, for example, ever would have anticipated the peculiar interest several writers demonstrate for one Harvard landmark:

And then he led me silently out of the labs, past the rhinoceros statues and the law school and Mem Hall and across the Yard into Widener, up to the reading room, into the stacks, down the elevator to level D, where it is damp and nobody goes, and we made love on the floor of the section marked Sports and Games.

That's from Native Intelligence by Raymond Sokolov '63 (first published in 1975, now available in a newly released paperback edition or in Widener under American Literature, level 5). What more? Read/Shouldn't Be Telling You This, by Mary Breasted '65, a book that includes this vignette:

I got into Radcliffe, where I had to study too hard to stay in, and even though I was class of '72 and got to partake of the thrilling occupation of Widener Library and to practice fellatio impromptu between the Conrad and Cooper stacks, I felt that the sixties had passed me by before I'd got started.

Is that a coincidence? Is there something about the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library that stirs the groin of any novelist who confronts it?

There is a third explanation, one that Levine's book and the other Harvard novels consistently support. Levine, Sokolov, Breasted, and the rest of this particular school of writers, have conceived of sex at Harvard not as an act of Just of procreation but as an intellectual experience. These novels take place at the nation's most distinguished center of scholarship after all; when their characters become physically intimate, why should they grunt and grind like students at some safety school? This is Harvard, and when a couple feels frisky, they run to the library, or study an ancient Indian religious text.

The Kama Sutra, in fact, figures in no fewer that three incidents of fictional Harvard ecstasy. Sokolov's protagonist Alan is well versed in its wisdom, as his girlfriend notes in a letter to her best friend--a letter that reads as much like a course catalogue as an account of sexual conquest:

Before we finally managed to make it, he had covered wading birds, the pineapple, gypsies and the history of Negroes at Harvard. Occasionally, he would ask me obliquely about Burushaki, the language I picked up in Kashmir...

Driving back, it was dark and Alan recited from Browning's Sordello... The rest is history. I made an honest man of him two days later by the grave of a certain Letitia Forbes (1877-1879). My all but vanished menses made it into a kosher defloration. Alan was a miracle. Five times, Susan! And, naturally, he had memorized the Kama Sutra.

The good book also pops up in Class Reunion, by Rona Jaffe '51, a 1979 novel that follows four women from their years at Radcliffe in the 50s to their 20th reunion. The most adventurous of the quartet is Annabel, who goes on a freshman year date with a young man named Richard, by reputation the most experienced member of the Harvard freshman class:

He brought her a single red rose when he picked her up. An upperclassman who had known Richard at St. Martin's had lent him his rooms in an upperclass house, a suite, which was safer and more relaxing than where Richard lived, where the presence of any woman at all was strictly forbidden. There was a bottle of chilled champagne and a copy of the Kama Sutra.

And before long, well-trained scholars that they are, Annabel and Richard have embarked on new pathways of scientific inquiry:

They experimented with various positions and tried oral sex. She liked it better when he did it to her than when she had to do it to him, but she felt fair was fair.

FOR SOME SPINNERS of Harvard tales, sex is so cerebral that the act becomes almost unrecognized, submerged in a sea of ponderous figurative philosophizing. Pays Levine, the volcano queen, is one such scribe; another is George Anthony Weller '29, whose long novel Not to Eat, Not for Love appeared in 1933. At the end of the book, an undergraduate named Epes Todd goes all the way with a girl named Ellen in his Fine Arts tutor's apartment, but it requires a real piece of textual analysis to figure out what is going on:

He felt her lips grow softer and farther from any turning back and he heard his own will, as hers receded before him, crying on, on and on. But in the midst of the maelstrom, a tiny vortex began to shape itself. It grew, it gathered, it took form, it slowed the storm, and bit by bit it robbed away his power.

Why not? he cried... Do we not love enough? Is that what we need?...

The query of pain melts away and there is only peace in the visage, peace, like a plate upside down. And presently the head is bowed again, and soon it is lost in the dark heads of the millions marching...

It was dark when he awakened. Her hair was spread over his shoulder in a wave... She turned to him... "I believe in love," she said. Her face hung over him, "Do you?"

"Yes," he answered. They slept again.

This vision of Harvard-sex-as-mystical-brain-noise has a latter-day proponent in the form of Nicholas Gagarin '70. In a loosely autobiographical novel called Windsong, published during Gagarin's senior year, the narrator spends a considerable amount of time in bed with one Radcliffe woman or another, and each encounter produces a new disquisition on what it all means:

It is always beautiful to spend the night with a girl in a little narrow bed. Because you have to squeeze rather tightly to fit, and neither of you can get very comfortable or sleep very well; but that is the way it should be. Because you are not there to be comfortable and sleep well. You are there in order to come for a moment into this person's life, to reach out in whatever way you can, and to be together. And if the bed is narrow and you have to squeeze, well, that's just the way it is.

Gagarin doesn't need the Kama Sutra for sex to become a learning experience--he's got strong enough vibrations coming from his own head:

It was good, very good for us to be able to touch each other and hug each other, very good to be able to express emotions that had been building up for months. We laughed and we cried, at nothing in particular, only for the sheer joy of laughing and crying. We held each other very tight, and for the first time I understood the word "trip."

The consummate example of Harvard sex intellectualized into gobbledy gook comes in a 1973 short story called "Innocence," by Harold Brodkey '51. As the story begins a Harvard senior named Wiley looks at the object of his lust and states, "To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die." Naturally, when Wiley lures this apparition into his room and under his covers, it is the occasion for a summa cum laude display of erudition:

I saw myself (stupidly) as a Roman trireme my tongue as the prow, bronze, pushing at her; she was the Mediterranean. Tiers of slaves, my god, the helplessness of them, pulled oars, long stalks that metaphorically and rhythmically bloomed with flowing clusters of short-lived lilies at the water's surface.

For 30-odd pages, Wiley and his love, whose name is Orra, stroke away in this manner. The story line that emerges concerns Wiley's ambition to bring Orra to sexual climax, an occurrence that eventually comes about along the following lines:

Something pulled her over; and something gave in; and all three pairs of wings began to beat [Wiley has proposed this metaphor earlier in the proceedings]: she was the center and the source and the victim of a storm of wing beats; we were at the top of the world; the huge bird of God's body in us hovered; the great miracle pounded on her back, pounded around us; she was straining and agonized and distraught, estranged within this corporeal-incorporeal thing, this angelic other avatar, this other substance of herself...

Prospective Harvard novelists could profit from their forebears' achievement by taking close note of one love scene that breaks the pattern. It is a scene in which a Harvard man and a Radcliffe woman enjoy each other's company far from any library, with no preliminary required reading, and without a play-by-play narration of every general-education epiphany. Moreover, as it happens, it is far and away the most celebrated and financially successful love scene in the history of Harvard fiction:

I threw down my book and crossed the room to where she was sitting.

"Jenny, for Christ's sake, how can I read John Stuart Mill when every single second I'm dying to make love to you?"

She screwed up her brow and frowned.

"Oh Oliver, wouldin please?"

I was crouching by her chair. She looked back into her book.

"Jenny--"

She closed her book softly, put it down, then placed her hands on the sides of my neck.

"Oliver--wouldin please."

It all happened at once. Everything.