Love in the Summer School

The body of literature about the Harvard Summer School is small and, alas, not particularly distinguished. It consists, in fact, of one book--a light romantic novel, written in 1899 by one Arthur Stanwood Pier and called The Pedagogues: A Story of the Harvard Summer School. The Pedagogues has understandably failed to earn for itself a lasting place in American literature; it is an inconsequential tale about various romantic misalliances in a Summer School English composition class populated by small-town high school teachers. It has very little sweeping design or extraordinary depth or memorable character-portrayal or that sort of thing.

Perhaps all this should greatly concern Summer School administrators; perhaps their institution lacks whatever it is that inspires novelists, and that may be something to worry about. At any rate, judging from The Pedagogues, the place hasn't become much more or less inspirational in the last 75 years. People in The Pedagogues a spend a lot of time walking around Cambridge buying things, sitting around in the Yard, and going to the nineteenth-century equivalent of mixers, just like they do now. The people are a little different in The Pedagogues--mostly older than college age, or else Harvard students trying to extract themselves from the academic straits their excesses during the school year have brought them into--but the ambience seems the same. Cynics in The Pedagogues are constantly worrying about whether they are seeing the real Harvard or just a watered-down version, with all the big-name professors being on vacation and so forth.

"Now, at last, I've found myself able to come here to Harvard, that grand University," one of the heroes of the novel complains bitterly. "I've come here from, Ohio, from Peru, Ohio, and what do I find? Do I find myself studying under one of those professors who make Harvard what it is, one of those professors I am spending time and money to study under? No, I am put under a young boy, a man no older than myself, a mere dude. Do you suppose he is competent to teach me anything?"

The story is only superficially about pedagogy, however. It follows two Ohio high school teachers--George Groch, a sullen, conceited would-be poet, and his flighty and impressionable fiancee, Jessie Deagle--through six turbulent weeks here. They are both enrolled in an English class, Groch because he wants to come into full poetic bloom and Deagle because she wants to be near Groch. But their teacher, a scholarly and enormously self-centered young dandy named Alfred Honore Pallantine, comes between them. Jessie, taken with his polish and crudition, falls in love with him, ditches Groch and spends most of her time chasing Pallantine around, squandering money on clothes and generally making a fool of herself. Groch, meanwhile, fills into a deep depression that centers around Pallantine, who has stolen his sweetheart and failed to recognize his artistic talent. And Pallantine, no less miserable himself, falls in love with a high-society girl who spurns him. The characters interact in the worst imaginable way, each bringing out the others' most obnoxious facets. Jessie excites Pallantine's self-adoring garrulousness and makes Groch bitter and insulting; Pallantine makes Jessie ingratiating and Groch makes her haughty. Underneath, it's clear, they're all good people, kind and with intentions that are generally noble, but the chemistry between them is all wrong.

None of this is to say that The Pedagogues is a compelling character study, because it isn't. The dialogue is wooden and the action, after a while, predictable--everyone falls in love with the person they should rightfully fall in love with in the end. What touches of sophistication and subtlety The Pedagogues does have comes in the way Pier refuses to make his characters all good or all bad. Each acts out of understandable motives and therefore has our sympathy, but the reasons they don't like each other are just as understandable.

The message of it all is what you would expect from a middle-class comedy of manners: people who put on airs run into trouble. People in The Pedagogues are forever getting carried away with their own pretensions. Groch decides he is a genius because he writes lines like

The battle rose and rages, but through

The fettered fathoms of the air,

Shrieking, the bird heroic flew

To him who did the standard bear.

and Jessie's prodding leads Pallantine to say things like "The university man, learned in the lesson of blissful inactivity, should be superior to the sordid problems of bread-winning."

They are, when you come down to it, a pretty unbearable bunch, these characters; only in the end, when they all leave Cambridge, do they become loveable again. The real villain is Harvard. It brings out the worst in everyone, forces people to try pathetically to be more than what they are, excites and stimulates their ostentatiousness. The airs people put on, and that lead to their downfalls, are unmistakeably Harvard airs.

It's curious how badly Harvard comes off in The Pedagogues, since like most books about Harvard it appears to set out to be adulatory and in fact to use Harvard as an attractive gimmick to make people read what would be an otherwise dull book. Pier is constantly going to great lengths to have his characters say how much they enjoy their six weeks in Summer School, how glamorous and exciting Cambridge is, how sincere and diligent they are about their studies. At the end practically everybody agrees that they have just finished the most blissful summer of their lives. Pier must have intended to make fun of his characters by showing how, despite their pretensions to the contrary, they are unable to handle a great educational experience like Harvard. But the impression that emerges is exactly the opposite--the characters are good, and if Harvard has managed to bring out the worst in each of them it's more Harvard's fault than the characters.

What makes the Summer School a good setting for this kind of observation about Harvard is that it is short and attracts a wide range of not-especially-Harvard types, people who come here from very different settings to which they will quickly return. Not given the chance to adapt, they go through the kind of rude clash between their non-Harvard selves and the University that is usually reserved for first-term freshmen here (and their malaise is different anyway, having to do more with the painful adjustment to being average).

Whether The Pedagogue holds, then, a valuable lesson that no Summer School student should miss is a moot question. In the concrete sense it's unlikely that anyone has profited much from The Pedagogues since as far as I can tell nobody but me has checked it out of Widener in the last 75 years, and Summer School students seem still to be surviving without the benefit of the book's wisdom. It's also hard to convince anyone even now that Harvard is just a regular old place, though things may have gotten to a point where it's no longer anything to break engagements over. But it's a safe bet that the Summer School continues to affect people the way it affected them in The Pedagogues, and that reading the book would only teach you that real life unfortunately isn't as simple as light turn-of-the-century novels.