Place Tripping The Beard and the Braid

The Beard and the Braid, Drawings of Cambridge.$6.95.

IN HER own introduction to her newest collection of watercolor drawings, The Beard and the Braid, Barbara Westman promises to show us "pictures of different worlds called Cambridge." And since the book's jacket further explains that Miss Westman is herself a current resident of this city, one looks for a sympathetic treatment of the often antithetical communities that provide Cambridge with its constant tension and occasional vitality. But what do we get? Dunster House, quite early on a spring morning. The corner of Mt. Auburn and Holyoke Streets. The Lampoon. The Episcopal Theological School and the Busch-Reisinger Museum, inside and out. Sanders Theatre under the soothing light of a winter moon, three views of the Square, another three of the Charles, two charming sketches of the one and only Harvard Yard, the second of which done up in lacy valentine. If you have the tenacity to carefully undo the book's binding quite a few of its pages could even be said to be all too suitable for framing.

Let there be no mistake about it. When Barbara Westman says "Cambridge" she is really talking Harvard. Her book never wanders any farther east than Quincy Street, which is why she can cozily insist that "Cambridge is like a small town really-not like a city." As a result her collection is not only myopic, it is also alarmingly ingenuous. Before presenting her drawings, Miss Westman tells us:

In our very busy ordered lives we're pushing and pushing to get somewhere or to get something done and we don't stop to stare at or wonder at some really beautiful things. Artists do. Children do. I guess it's up to artists and photographers and children to help busy people see what's around them.

But for all her Wordsworthian resolve, all she can serve up are two dozen scenes of Harvard pretending to be Cambridge, scenes that any starry-eyed tourist on a one-day visit might see for himself. O-K Dad, put the Polaroid through its paces, first a picture of Jimmy over there by the statue, and then, quick, one of Mom in front of that enormous library before one of those Japs with his goddamn Nikon gets in the way. Miss Westman may live in Cambridge, but she looks at it through the eyes of a tourist.

NONETHELESS, her drawings do have a charm of their own. Although not enough of it to hide the underlying calculation. She presents Harvard at its best-in early spring, before oppressive heat and dirt set in; on winter nights, before the new-fallen snow has had a chance to curdle into muddy rivers of brown. Although she expertly captures the plethora of traffic signs-many of which simply read "No, No, No"-that channel us through the Square, traffic is reduced to a stylistic minimum. One notes an occasional piece of litter, but hardly enough to suggest that, out of the city's neglect and our own apathy, littler here is the norm. Her people-most of whom resemble busy little dwarfs with sly little smiles-all hurry toward their destinies with a real sense of direction. American flags fly from the buildings.

One searches in vain for the peddlers, the panhandlers, the frightened and the lost. (There is one boy, arm-outstretched, that could be taken for a good-natured hitchhiker.) But no such human derailments are allowed in to question the general satisfaction and industriousness that Miss Westman sees as characterizing the Harvard community. Around the turn of the century, writers used to visit the slums of New York in similar fashion; off they would go in search of the picturesque, the strange and the quaint, and finding it, they would entirely ignore the poverty and disease with which it struggled. Miss Westman, however unwittingly on her part, offers justification to those who would have the city and its universities drive out the poor and transient in hopeless attempts to return to simpler, pleasanter times. Or worse, she suggests such problems do not even exist, thus making our irresponsibility in such matters all the easier.

Miss Westman does pretend her book is about people ("You can see ANYTHING in Cambridge. You can see a Chinese and a Finn moving a chest of drawers across a street, one yelling Chinese and the other Finnish, and you wonder how they ever got across the street."), but she can't hide the fact that her real love is buildings. ("One of the nicest times in Cambridge is about five o'clock in the evening. There's always a sunset over the Sheraton Commander if you look hard enough.") Not surprisingly, the warmest picture of the lot zooms in on Design Research, glowing brightly as snow falls on a near deserted Brattle Street. "Design Research," she writes, "makes your heart happy with all its bright colors." But once you start seeing this place through its buildings, there's simply no stopping. For that's the building where Thoreau lived, and that's the building they built because the Titanic sank, and that's the one the kids occupy every year. And in that theatre they show Bogie flicks and in there you can get those gigantic sundaes....

Meanwhile, as for Barbara Westman, she's on a perpetual Crimson Key trip, and, if The Beard and the Braid is any indication, it doesn't look as if she's coming down for quite a spell.