Love and the 'System'

When the steely yellow sun sets over the Yard on a late November afternoon, janitors set the radiators to their winter-long knocking and windows slam down tight till spring comes again. Inside their dusty rooms, freshmen dig into whatever they dig into, possibly books, and during the cold nights they dream of silken nymphs on friendly faraway isles.

Jonathan Kozol's book, published today, is a book for those freshmen and us other adolescents who figure sometimes we're not getting the most out of life. Now Mr. Kozol, despite his current tenure of a Rhodes Scholarship, is no Norman Vincent Peale selling deodorant in the locker-room. Indeed, his skillful fantasy, like most recent Harvard fiction, will not notably amuse the accountants over at the 'Program for Harvard College'.

His fantasy concerns release from stentorian academics and their positive ways. His fantasy is the satisfaction of an appetite, and everyone knows that a gentleman never over-eats. If Harold Brodky's piece in the New Yorker a while ago (I think it was called "Adams House Confidential") hurt the feelings of the boys in the tweed vests at University Hall, Kozol's excess may make them faint of heart.

For Kozol is talking the language always learned and sometimes spoken by young people who don't get into bed often enough. He speaks quickly, with excitement and wonder, and it takes you no time at all to get from the snugness of a snow-dusted Maine cabin to the open opulence of a swank hotel in Barcelona.

Kozol carefully jots down every sentimental object you associate with discovery. In Maine, it was "great plaid comforters and wooly blankets and white flannel sheets"; in Cambridge, it was the landlady who "did our linens for us and brought them up in a wicker basket"; in Barcelona, it was the linen and "a mountain breeze wafted the curtains into the room." The talk is violently expressive, sometimes so hysterical that lines, such as:

"The immense green stretches of vista, the tall poplar rows iridescent against the sky, the sensual green of the sunbathed leaves--and, then, the sudden blue swathe of the indescribable Loire, broad and slow and stately--moving with easy grandeur through the ancient terrain" seem hard to read. His lovers often speak in terms of "Whooooosh," "Buffle, Buffle," and "Squuunch," which are things you would have overheard through thin bedroom walls in the hotels of New York, Paris and Barcelona, had you followed their jet-paced trek.

But gratification is not love, the golden pair find after 146 pages of satisfying themselves. "It was as though, for the first time, we saw what we were doing. It seemed that we were not merely lying locked in that hard merciless embrace of pain and love. But we were also standing above somewhere, watching. We knew what we would do; we did it; we looked back upon it. We had never had to love with perspective before. It spoiled it."

When the tower of desire topples over at last, Kozol realizes you can't be a Harvardman and pretend you're not: "Thinking you could escape a system, and then finding out it had hold of you all along, and feeling it pull you back." Love probably implied forgiveness, and Kozol's Harvardman, who has a profitable insurance office in his future, cannot bring himself to forgive.

As evil fates dance faster and faster above their heads, Kozol denies Wendy her lover because, the fellow observes carefully, "how can we leave our friends?" The Harvardman recognizes "there was some kind of vicious stupidity flooding through me, rising up like a sordid ugly mist to obscure the things that were golden" and their desire dies.

Kozol doesn't develop what love in "perspective" is; how the "stupidity" of the "system" reaches out across oceans to pull back its victims; who is a likely victim and who is not. He has spent the greater part of his time rejoicing in discovery. His rejoicing is good and sexy, stylish, sometimes overdone but good. In his next book I'd like to read more about the "system" we so often feel and so seldom really see.