14 Plympton St.

O great, incomparable, and never-to-be-surpassed Crimson! What have you done? What have you not done? What will you do? You are a microcosm of the universe.... --from "Ode to The Crimson" circa 1880

The Crimson? It's like cornflakes. I eat it every morning, then forget about it.   --Harvard student circa 1981

O CRIMSON, light of my life, fire of my loins, wrapper of my fish, what are you, really?

You are five in the morning, a newsroom of rubble, an endless metronome of wire-machine clattering to no one, a sea of crumpled paper and broken typewriters, a resting place for tradition that stares down from the peeling yellowed walls, womb of a thousand dreams and careers and distortions and corrections and insights, a repository for the mediocre and the brilliant and the misfired and the passing-through and the incorrectly pasted up, O Crimson, you are a line on a resume and a way of life.

You are cleaned up every morning by a coughing old man named Kenny who has been coming in since God knows when to bring order into our chaos. Of us, he knows only the photos on the walls and the misfits who sleep on couches.

O Crimson, every day you think you capture the reality of an unreal world, set it in 9/11 sc type, and proclaim it to the universe, every day you turn people into profiles, life into leads, death into obits. Existence is your weather pic. You break big stories and powerful men, and big men and powerful stories. You are the powers that will be flexing young muscles; you are the turning points of the corridors of power; you dare to misspell the names of the famous and little-known alike; you valiantly rise above the blue books and problem sets and open letters and no interhouses and $20 dollar late fees and ad board hearings, and cry out "I will be read!"

Sometimes you are delivered.

You are the slimy and the courageous, the forgotten and the forgetful, the vicars of Washington and the viceroys of Vermont, you are the churner of words to fill the spaces between ads, and you also buy the ads. You are Pat Sorrento, the shop man who tells us stories of "the good old days." You are David Rockefeller '36 and Caspar W. Weinberger '38 and Franklin D. Roosevelt '04 and John F. Kennedy '40 and David L. Halberstam '55 and Bill Lee (Red Sox pitcher, honorary) and David Riesman '31 and F.A.O. Schwartz '24.

Walter Lippman '10 and John Reed '10 thought you were too stuck up and clubby, and you probably were. Now you are consciously, sub-consciously and unconsciously racist and facist and sexist and communist (or Marxist-inspired) and incestuous and pederastic and homophilic and homophobic and wishy-washy and contentious and anarcho-syndicalist and autocratic and authoritarian and libertarian and middle-class and upper-class and naive and snobby.

Worse, sometimes you are inaccurate.

O Crimson, every year you are taken over by a bunch of well-meaning ambitious types who think they are going to set you on fire and make your pages glow and glitter and sparkle and grab readers by the eyeballs and pull them into your embrace until they moan and beg for more. Every year you will be remade in their image, and you give some and take some, but keep your basic shape until another like-minded team starts rubbing its palms in anticipation.

You get better and you get worse, but you can never know if it matters. O Crimson, you are future and you are past, and your present is a fleeting spark for us; you are a great friendly whore who takes us for our one-night four-year stand and barely stirs when we depart, for the line outside you door is never-ending.

O Crimson, you are the woman I desire but can never possess, who traps me but does not fulfill me, who makes me hate and love, who is burned into my brain for no damn good reason in the world except that nothing else is, and because, after all, she must be sincere when she tells me she really does like me.

You are also a waste of time. Maybe. We're not sure yet.

NOW, WHERE DOES The Harvard Crimson Anthology fit into all this?

A skeptic might say that, like the Who's Who of American High School Students, it exists for the purpose of listing all our names at the end so we'll buy it and make someone some money. Yeah, that is what everyone here presumably checked first, and heads threatened to roll when a past Crimson president heard that his name was left out in the galleys.

But there is more. It's too bad that Greg Lawless (or 'GFL,' as Crimson tradition would have it) didn't put together a collection of the best Crimson pieces ever instead of the representative sampling he tried to assemble. Still, there is some good stuff in these 374 pages, even if you don't have 14 Plympton St. on the brain. Not 17 dollars worth, to be sure, but enough to waste an hour or so in Lamont with if you're too lazy, or more likely unmotivated, to investigate Harvard's past through a direct look-over of volumes.

In his introduction, Anthony Lewis '48, former Crimed and now New York Times op-ed pager, describes this collection of Crimson news stories, essays, editorials, letters, cartoons and whatnot as "...more than a book about The Crimson or about Harvard University over the last hundred. It is I think, a piece of social history."

Sure, why not? Not every piece--in fact, very few--describes occurrences so mundane as a CHUL meeting or the ever-popular event described by the clever Crimson headline "Long Weekend Arrives: Some Leave, Others Stay." There are some serious and insightful articles in here which are no less legitimate because they appeared in a "college" newspaper. John G. Short '70, who made a habit of covering events by participating first and writing later, delivers a long and impassioned account of running with the Weathermen during the Days of Rage in Chicago in 1969; Jody Adams '69 writes movingly about the University Hall bust--"Inside, With Arms Linked, the Kids Awaited the End"--with fire and anger and sadness. "The Quest for the Cocktail Soul at Princeton," written in 1960, effectively reveals the sadism and bigotry of Princeton's "Bicker" process by which sophomores are elected to private eating clubs.

The book--divided into eight sections, including the University, college life, politics, and "wit and wisdom"--is littered with information that will surprise or amuse you, pique your anger or imagination, or perhaps make no impression whatsoever. You will discover things that you may or may not wish to know, like the genesis of the tradition of shouting "Rinehart!" and the goldfish swallowing fad, which was originated in the Harvard Union on March 3, 1939 by Lothrop Withington Jr. '42. If kiosks, unionizing shuttle bus drivers and the proposed Third World center make you wonder what passed for controversy at Harvard in generations gone by, The Crimson Anthology will give you a taste.

As far as the writing goes, it varies, as one would expect. In its first half-century or so, The Crimson--founded in 1873 as The Magenta--focused primarily on football games, with class schedules, ads and listings rounding out its scrawny pages. After a stint as The Harvard Summer News during World War II, the paper came of age, during the '50's with reasonably comprehensive coverage of the McCarthyiteonslaught on academic freedom. But the late '60's were when the growing Crimson began to bristle with the emotion and turmoil of the anti-Vietnam War movement (although its editorial position, as the book shows, wavered back and forth on the issue before climaxing with a full-blown statement of support for the National Liberation Front in October 1969). And as the politics and the society shifted over the decade, its changes, to whatever degree, were reflected in The Crimson, as the meticulous, somewhat stolid style of earlier years gave way to openness and experimentation. And for those who have noted the later careers of writers like Timothy' Crouse '68 (Boys on the Bus), Frank Rich '71 (now chief New York Times drama critic), Halberstam, J. Anthony Lukas '55 (Times Pulitzer prize-winner), Mike Kinsley '72 (The New Republic), James Fallows '69 (The Atlantic Monthly) and numerous others, it is interesting to see what they wrote before "maturing" into the realm of slick publications and even slicker editors, when they wrote purely because they felt a need to, without contracts and glossy ads and people to feed.

What shows up in the Crimson each day--despite an elaborate system of editing and proofreading--is often very raw; the product of panic and deadlines, hurried phone calls and illegible notes. It is sometimes bad, usually pretty bland, but occasionally very good and once in a while it manages to be very very good. There is something for just about everyone in this book, though it is unfortunately short on politics, the subject which has driven Crimson editors to many of their best pieces over the years. It won't really tell you what The Crimson is all about--just as reading The Crimson won't tell you what Harvard is all about--but it will supply an unusual perspective on the last hundred years just the same.