My Harvard Book
Background:
Yes, there really is something called The Harvard Book. Compiled by a fittingly hyphenated Harvard man named William Bentinck-Smith who ran the Harvard Alumni organization in the late 1940s. The edition shown above was his brainchild and went on to transform what had been a tradition into an institution. It has its own Facebook Page to this day, the point of which is to describe the venerable crimson volume as a prestigious book prize distributed by approximately 2,000 secondary schools, as follows:
<<The Harvard Book Prize is awarded to an outstanding junior year student selected by the faculty of each participating high school, based on unmistakable excellence in scholarship, exceptional strength of character and significant contributions to school and/or community. Each winner receives a personally inscribed copy of "The Harvard Book," a Prize presented annually in nearly 2,000 high schools around the world. It is at the discretion of the secondary school to determine the recipient of a Prize. Selection cannot be done through an application process. The Harvard Book Prize program was originated by Harvard alumni in 1910.>>
I got mine when I was 15 and subsequently went to Harvard. (They were truthful about the personal inscription page in inked calligraphy.) That’s my connection to this eccentric publication. Frankly I was shocked to find the FB page. It seems incredible that they haven’t tossed out the 1953 version in favor of some fashionably woke compendium of the writings of social injustice victims empowered by their time at Harvard. You see, the Harvard Book has to be one of the most supremely solipsistic anthologies ever assembled, consisting as it does of “Harvard men writing about Harvard.”
Even the book’s introduction is turned obsessively inward, a disquisition about what it means to “write like a Harvard man.” Elegance and all that. One of the purveyors of used copies elected not to provide an abstract but a sample of the Harvard man writing it contains:
The Book of Ira, Ch. 15, 1-17 & Ch. 16, 22-35
The Book of Swarthmorons, Ch. 5.1-11
John Upcreek & Text
Steven J. Goop & Text
Al Bore & Text
George Walkman Bush & Text
Gloria Hyman & Video
Shuteye Nation:
A lot of Harvard men (and women) become famous. Shuteye Nation contains a Who’s Who (several in fact) in which many of them are treated with the deference they deserve. Unlike the site itself, this software can’t point to individual names, so here are the people to look for in the list: Jonathan Auger (Alter), William Bannitt (Bennett), Tommy Tee Bones (Jones), Al Bore (Gore), George Walkman Chevy Snaffle Adidas Bush XIV (“W”), Mutt Demon (Damon), Alan Dirtiwitz (Dershowitz), Liddy Dull (Dole), Barney Frog (Frank), Billion Gates (Bill), David Gurgle (Gergen), Alan Keese (Keyes), Doris Goodgod Korns (Kearns), Bill O’Really (O’Reilly), Norman Muler (Mailer), Laurence O’Dingle (O’Donnell), Janet Rambo (Reno), Jeffrey Toobless (Toobin), John Upcreek (Updike). That’s 20 of more than 250 entries. Is 8 percent a lot? Well, I didn’t choose them because of where they went to school. So it does seem like a lot.
Who’s Who in the New Amerian Age of Civility 2001
None of this happened overnight. It’s been a long time building. My time at Harvard took in the years when the transformation of a religiously founded university broke with its past and turned against what it had always exalted and defended.
What does all this add up to? Harvard is a part of my identity, but Harvard did not define me. It was rather a necessary experience for my development as a person and a writer. It was just something that had to be for some reason, for both good and ill. I might have been what the world calls happier if I had gone somewhere, anywhere, else. But I would have missed out on an opportunity that simply isn’t available anywhere else. I acquired much of my education there. Eminent professors like Edwin Reischauer, Benjamin Schwartz, Walter Jackson Bate, Mason Hammond and Wendell Clausen, and an inspired set of distribution requirements that enabled me to be an English major while taking courses in Chinese, Japanese, Roman, and German history, Einsteinian physics, Latin poetry and drama (in Latin), art history in overview and in closeup, as well as an extraordinarily comprehensive tutelage in the entire history of English literature, most of Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Anglo-Saxon poetry, the modern novel, and the Age of Samuel Johnson. I was not a devoted student by then, but I kept the books and syllabi even after finals and eventually wound up reading what had been assigned. This is all irreplaceable stuff you probably couldn’t duplicate today, even at Harvard.
Yet it would be absolutely untrue to say that Harvard was the most or even the completion of my formal education. By the time I arrived there as a freshman/sophomore, I already had the equivalent of a liberal arts baccalaureate degree, courtesy of my elementary schooling and the Mercersburg Academy, where I was also offered sophomore standing when I applied as a 12 year old eighth grader. My Dad wisely said no to that, but the reality was approximately the same as the offer. I started language courses in French 2 and Latin 2, the “A” track in English, as well as the standard starters in history and Algebra. English was no problem; ast. John’s Day School had skipped me over the second grade and I was writing book reports when I was seven and in-class essays and other reports when I was 9. Latin and French were a huge problem though. St. John’s had started teaching us both in the early grades but the approach was conversational and absent grammar. I’d had a French tutor to prepare for my Dad’s transfer to France when I was 9, but that was also primarily conversational, although my pronunciation and aural comprehension were not bad. The result was that I got away with the mistake. With the help of a great teacher and his best student, I learned the bulk of Latin grammar in six weeks and commenced reading Caesar on schedule. In French I just got lucky. Our teacher was an easygoing French-Canadian hockey player and I was able to outperform the others, catching up on the grammar at a more relaxed pace, just in time for one of the greatest (oh so many) teachers in my life, whom I had for French IIIA-IV, French V-AP, and an Independent Study in Dante, whom Mr. Miller showed me could be read for understanding in Italian by a student who had completed AP courses in both French and Latin. That year I also took an introductory course in Greek.
I said earlier that Mercersburg was not Exeter. True but misleading. For about a quarter of our class, Mercersburg was probably as good or better than Exeter, because we lived in an “A/AP” track of the best students in every subject. For a subset of us, that meant coursework in multiple AP subjects in small classes with gifted teachers. Our Chemistry department famously had such an outstanding teacher that his AP students failed him if they got less than an 800 on the Chemistry SAT Achievement test (only one ever did that I knew of, a humiliating 798). I didn’t have him for Chemistry, but I had AP courses in English, French, Latin, American History (as in “Problems in..”), and Modern European History (all of it). Most importantly for an intended English major I had two superlative teachers in that subject, one who taught us the skills of textual analysis in 10th grade (his 1st semester final exam consisted of a short story with the instruction “Analyze”) and in 11th grade one who engaged us in depth for weeks on Moby Dick, the short stories of James Joyce (omg “The Dead”), and a critical cross-examination of the Freudian interpretation of Hamlet. Justas important was the literary exposure that issued like a tidal wave from Mr. Miller. A one-time naval,officer and polymath (owning six radar patents) he had already given his fortunate students an extraordinary immersion in French literature, including Voltaire, Pascal, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Corneille, Racine, Stendhal, Flaubert, Balzac, and the mythic “Contes de Perrault,” “Tristan et Iseut,” and “Manon Lescaut.” We read some books for understanding, and some chapters for in-class testing in the form of oral “literary” translation (grades ranged from “fair” [7] to “top drawer” [10]). A pause,or verbal stumble along the way reduced Top Drawer to Very Good Indeed and so forth, Along the way he taught us what he felt like teaching us, including a detailed explanation of the “concept of the square” in Modern Art. Once he slapped a copy of Camus’s “L’Étranger” on top of his book stack, told us it was on the AP required list, but he refused to teach trash. We could read it if we wanted. I read it only years later.
My standardized test scores showed the quality of my instruction. Why I entered Harvard as a sophomore. I also had the benefit of a minor course requirement that included Art History, the Bible, and Music Appeciation, each taught for two days a week in their turn. They were real, well taught courses I still remember, some of the art history text we had, for example, more valuable in hindsight than the massive text we had at Harvard.
All this may make it seem like Harvard and I were a perfect fit, and my eventual matriculation there an inevitability. But this is not so. Everything was against it. Mercersburg was the wrong place. (The only literary reference to it I’ve ever found was in a John O’Hara novella, a man drunk in a bar softly singing to himself, “I’m only a Mercersburg Boy”). My mother wanted Princeton. My Dad hated Harvard. His thing about not liking any of them. Entering my senior year, I had met five boys who went to Harvard, only one of whom I liked and he was a champion swimmer, smart but no prodigy. The others I thought jerks, and I wasn’t alone in that assessment. Back home I knew good men from Yale and Princeton, admirable and charming. That social circle included no one from Harvard. There was nothing necessary about Harvard in terms of being successful, civilized, and worthy of emulation. Only an extraordinary set of circumstances could have made Harvard ultimately desirable to me.
I’d seen both Yale and Harvard not as an applicant but as a visitor on campus to graduates I’d met at least. These were reconnoitering expeditions involving several of us getting an inside look at accommodations and routines. The Yaley was the brother of a friend of mine, cordial enough but not warm. The Harvard guy was another swimmer, bragging about his sex life, which he said included a Kennedy girl, believable enough because he was built like a Greek god, though he was an utter asshole in every personal respect. I had also seen the Princeton campus, on crutches, on a rainy day, and never got to behold the loveliness of the place, which might have convinced me it was the perfect choice, being the home of my favorite American writer and only an hour and a half by automobile from home.
But I didn’t get to see beautiful Princeton. Only the cold, wet, painful backdrop for a humdrum interview. Looking back, one wonders about such things. Despite the asshole, Harvard was shockingly impressive to the eye and somehow seemingly located at some kind of center of things. Compared to Harvard Yard, Yale had no Harvard Yard. New Haven had no Harvard Square, that burstingly vital triangular artery connecting to Greater Boston beyond the Charles River, urban Cambridge, and the twisty boutique environs of Harvard-related emporiums around the Brattle bend. You could get run over in a heartbeat just trying to cross Harvard Square to or from one of its opposite shores, under the magisterial purview of the walls and upper floors and cupolas of the adjoining Yard. Compared to Harvard, Yale was only Mercersburg writ large, fine buildings surrounded by a small town of whatever size. Harvard was big. Yale and a Princeton were just not as…
This was a subtext for a more important, more direct change factor. My best friend and roommate for my last two years at Mercersburg was a force of nature named Howard. Everyone knew Howard from the day he arrived in school as a freshman. Say the name “Howard” and everyone knew who you were talking about. Odd in a culture where boys obsessively referred to one another by last-names-only except inside their various cliques. That first year he lived in the other of two freshman dorms, the smaller one that housed the bigger boys who might have found the little guys awaiting that first real growth spurt annoying and incompatible. Howard was, at 14, 5’-9” and dramatic looking, with thick cork-screwed hair, a heroic nose, and big lips to boot. He liked playing the clown and he was good at it. In thise days I was 5’-1” tall with big feet and shy with people I hadn’t spent much time with. We became friendly. Howard was observant. He noticed my grades after the first marking period. If your General Average (G.A.) was 90 or better, they posted it in plastic numerals inside a glass case located in the basement lobby of the dining hall for everyone to see. I had somehow managed to extract a 90 G.A. despite my French and Latin panic, and he was impressed. We became friendly.
By junior year we had grown close enough to become roommates in ’88 dormitory, the most ramshackle of the accommodations on campus. What we had in common: We were both voracious readers of books not on our assigned reading lists, we were both complete slobs, we shared a penchant for observing, even studying, the mysterious scoundrels of the teenage boy universe, and we were both dedicated to making ourselves the best possible college candidates. It was Howard who first surfaced the subject of Harvard. He sneered at even the mention of Princeton. “You have to go to Harvard,” he told me, as if he had received some directive from above. “You’re perfect for it. You’re the only one who doesn’t see that.”
He won.
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