Harvard as Hallucinogen

ON PAGE 36 of her largely autobiographical novel Splendor and Misery Faye Levine '65 sounds its death knell.

The talk turned to novels about Harvard. The one from the 1930s was appealing but too long. Another was about being Jewish-and the main character was unfortunately rather unpleasant. Then there was, of course, the one about professional suicide.

The conversation between the Harvard student and then-Dunster House tutor Erich Segal continue until Segal offers his formula for the Harvard novel "A preppy and poor but beautiful girl: she dies."

The reader can well imagine Levine deriving her literary equation for Splendor and Misery in much the same fashion and, in the end, her prescription bears a likeness to Segal's. In fact, her book resembles that other Harvard novel on another, more basic, level Love Story is not a good book either.

Levine's heroine Sarah Galbraeth is not a preppy but an energetic low a ingenue who takes Harvard y storm in the early 60's. At that time Radcliffe student lived apart from Harvard, but Sarah breaks into the male domain when she comps for The Crimson.

She quickly becomes the darling of the Crimson staff and a campus celebrity. Sought after by a pack of editors, Sarah settles down to a wholesome college romance with the paper's managing editor. But this golden life is interrupted by a fall from grace and one of the most incongruous, trite endings ever to hit the printed page.

The difficulty lies not so much with the novel's plot as in its self-proclaimed intention to be "A Novel of Harvard." Levine tries to capture the essence of Harvard without recognizing that the University presents a different face to everyone who comes in contact with it. Almost no page escapes some mention of the Harvard aura in all its exhilarating manifestations. A typical passage comes early in the book as a starry-eyed Sarah arrives on campus.

Sarah Galbraeth was standing for a moment across the street at the gates of Widener Library, from which spot she could glance up at t balcony where the Porcellians sat. She could see the tall, handsome boys etched like goads against the darkening sky, the latest generation bred to nobility, silent. She could try to fathom what was in their hearts. And, like them, she could dream of the ineffable values of Harvard, and try to embrace them, for a moment.

One could almost dismiss this passage as a sarcastic denunciation of the "Harvard Mystique." But the same adulation resurfaces again and again, even in the most peripheral descriptions of Cambridge weather or shops. Eager to recreate faithfully each joyous image of Harvard life, Levine crowds her sentences with painstaking and pained observations noting each character's clothing or the color of trays in the dining room. Thus the reader learns that Sarah and her boyfriend first make love "in Cambridge, in Mather Hall (sic), in the bottom bunk of a double-decker, his tie on the doorknob to warn away roommates..." And not don't even close to the end of the sentence.

The excessive descriptive detail is especially disturbing because it complements an absence of any substantive character development. Other figures flit in and out of the novel without any identity of their own. They are props-roadmarker measuring the progress of Sarah's intellectual, journalistic and sexual development. Carolee, a Radcliffe student "with a delicate bone structure and the strength of a bull," exists almost exclusively to feed Sarah appropriate feminist readings and political views.

Splendor and Misery does successfully convey some of the turbulence of the early 60's, particularly the emergence of a large-scale drug culture and the sexual revolution. But ultimately even these attempts at verisimilitude fall flat, and the contrived historical references rest on the pages like so many sore thumbs. Levine introduces some world events by abruptly creating new characters. Others she simply deposits in the middle of the text, as in the one-sentence chapter announcing Ted Kennedy's election to the Senate.

The novel's reference to Harvard events appear equally self-conscious. Each professor is a "great," each incident a "milestone." Some allusions, such as the thinly veiled representation of an actual incident involving two drug distributing psychology professors, are intriguing; others merely smack of Harvard "vanitas." Consider Sarah's revelations-or hallucinations-in the field of chemical engineering:

Taking refuge from the storms of competitive Cambridge, in a small and modest white frame house an Appian Way, an English scientist named Francis Crick is handing across a rickety formica a kitchen table to Harvard scientist James D. Watson a many-times of initials are scratched, chart like, in pencil. It is the DNA code.

Sarah Galbraeth, noticing, asks Watson what the last problem science will solve is "Love," replies Watson, and asks to see her home.

Even Sarah's watch on Plympton Street from the balcony of the Crimson building turns into "Professors on Parade." "Then the famous political theorist Stanley Hoffman walked by with a green book bag over his shoulder, his figure fine, meticulous, strong."

Occasionally Levine's imagery does hit the mark, such as her description of an awkward new couple who, "having chewed through the enamel of their date," find only "the raw nerve hanging in the air before them." Unfortunately, however, such insights are few and far between. More often, Levine's ideas collapse under the weight of her evident reverence for Harvard. Levine went to school here, She should know better.

Levine's mistake is making Harvard the centerpiece rather than the backdrop for her novel. The result is an ambiguous, often pretentious, and (still more often) inane jumble of Harvard trivia, the diary of any student at the College would be at least as insightful. Those seeking to capture, or recapture, "the Harvard experience: are advised to invent their own Crimson ties aside, veritas must prevail Splendor and Misery is entirely the latter.