Writing Courses at Harvard

I began to push open the door but stopped at a musty odor that came from the room. I put my face up to the edge of the door and listened.

Zendie was tired then, the girl read aloud. And she felt weak and small sitting at the little white iron table, overlooking the glass-blue lake, high in the Swiss Alps.

The girl sat in a bulky sweater at a great oval mahogany table, around which sat the other members of English HTb. Her nose was severe, her mouth very small, her hair straight and plain. She read in an incisive monotone.

Zendie could feel the little vein on the inside of her wrist pulsing. Felipe sat across from her. "God," Zendie said, feeling his dark eyes on her cheek as she looked out over the lake, "I think I'll never leave this place. Oh, look at the boats, they're like swans; and look at the swans, they're like white-caps. Oh," she read, lighting cigarette and penciling a notation in the margin,

"Now I am reminded of Bouree, and Lotta, and Vieri. And of course I must think of Belasz and Tolespa, and dear little Treyispa: and Grondi and Bartolo. God, Felipe," Zendie said, "those afternoons in the piazza, and the evenings on the Bierenspitzenplatz, and the mornings at La Dolope," the girl read, tapping her cigarette drily over the ashtray. The white-caps are like diamonds, the girl enunciated.

* * * *

But we had blown many joints of pot. We were going to fall up to Marco's room, the young man in the sports shirt burbled assiduously. We went downstairs and out, out into the fantastic American night. The city was a crazy mesh of iron rectangle buildings and neon gargoyles zipping orange in the black air. The four of us flew on the two big Harleys through the wild night streets up to Marco's pad, all under the unimaginable American sky.

The young man's face was bright as he read. He had a motor-scooter parked outside.

"Yes man, yes man, yas, yas!" the big Negro was saying in time to the music as we fell up the stairs and fell in the door. There was action, it was going, we were digging. Marco in his beard in a corner yelling drunkenly and ripping the insides out of the piano. Three people stripped to the waist and wrestling in another corner. And the music roared up in great billows and explosions of sound, washing over all of us, filling the room like a gas, putting us far out, far out.

The young man's face was flushed; he wrinkled his little pink forehead as he read on.

The last weakening glints of somnolent sunlight stepped and tinged the twigged collection of bramble burrowback lines over the etched and mutable prone profile of perpetual hills. The earth darkened and saddened into wraith-like russet, and the chant of cunning melancholy evaporated from the remembering ear and might have materialized in the cinnamon-brown clouds that brushed like a dark breath over the cheek of the softening mocha and amethyst horizon. The east slipped to peace amid a resentment of raddled colors, the sun dipped beneath the great lip of the earth's rim and the landscape dark as an ancient photograph, warm and old as the closed volume of its million passion years, sublimated into the uncomprehending and excellent excrescence of the pale poppy-seed dimension, timeless, in the hand of whatever great essence contains the world in the forests of his brows.

He was a little fellow, skinny and pale, oblivious to his receding hairline. His chin was receding, too, as were his eyes in little chipmunk pits far in his skull. He was very nervous, and twisted the sheets of very thin blue paper from which he read.

From afar, the little guy continued, the Arm of that great essence might be a stupendous cluster of stars viewed against the sleek back of the blank universe, but in the armpit was Elysium....

"As far as I can see," observed a non-reading critic in the discussion afterwards, "the narrator's authority of voice in the first work has no advantage over the conscious semi-abnegation of the possible total event knowledge on the author's part in the third story."

"That's all very well," said a professional colleague, "but what bearing does all this have on the substantive, albeit normative, subversion of the middle-class ethos which we agreed is intended in the second story?"

"Hey, excuse me," I said, and poked my head in. "But is this "Ideas of Comedy 103?"

"Oh, no," they said, and they all shook their heads.