The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

Here one Saturday I watched an extravagant game of baseball between the Tiger and the Harvard Lampoon. There was a keg of beer beside first base and a dipper for anyone who made it safely. The Harvard idiots had brought along a little truck with four wheels, which they strapped on the rear of the base runner. With this contraption the poor fish tried to steal second, and I remember thinking that it must have given him an awful jounce when he hit the ground. The whole thing seemed to me a little disrespectful, so I moved on to the Varsity tennis courts where, squatting on the turf, I watched the singles against Yale.

The Yale game at Commencement was of course the high point. The alumni were back in force, and the class tents brimming with beer and laughter were a wonderful side show for a twelve-year-old who had no business to be there. I had no right there; neither had the beer dogs, those fat, looseskinned, laughing dogs, part terrier, part anything else, that wandered in from the campus and really lapped up the beer.

After lunch the alumni P-rade lined up and the brass bands began trumpeting the huge serpent into University Field. The very old alumni came in first, and then the marshals in their while flannels, blue coats, wearing orange cushions on their heads. The oldest classes had canes and every kind of straw hat, but the younger alumni were in costume —a big brass band, then the class banner, then the pirates and the sheiks and the boys from the Tyrol with outrageous signs that made you giggle. On they came, filling up the bleachers and grandstand. Finally the seniors, a big class, and this was the last you’d see of them.

All the while the Princeton Varsity had been warming up, with the Yale team the first to come to bat, now sitting sardonically in their dugout. The Umps called out the Captains, and you could imagine what they were saying: “If the ball goes into the crowd there, it is a two-base hit, but over the center field, that’s a homer.” And now the Tiger pitcher goes to the mound and takes his warm-up, and you are really trembling. So was the Princeton infield; they always seemed to get the jitters at Commencement. I shall never forget one game in which each of the first five Eli’s to come to bat bunted —and four times in succession the infield threw the ball over first’s head. It was pathetic. But Princeton got it all back with a homer in the ninth. Game over, you drifted out with the happy crowd and trailed along with the band of Scotch Highlanders until it seemed time to eat.

After supper on Prospect you followed the couples on their way to hear Senior Singing. The seniors sat on their benches in front of Nassau Hall (benches which they would burn the night before graduation); and though you had often heard the songs they sang, on this particular night as dark felt and the cigarettes became fireflies and you no longer could pick out the leader or the soloist, the songs seemed to seize you by the throat. They sounded like something deeply fell, those songs — “The Orange and the Black,”“Australian Girls,” “Going Back to Nassau Hall,” “Don’t You Hear Dem Bells?”, “Safe Now in the Wide, Wide World”; all day long one thing had led to another, but this was something you kept.

So at last it broke up, and you went slowly down through Blair Arch to the tracks. There was always a train and it was always late in starting. And now you had to fight off sleep. You remembered those villainous bunts and the homer, and then as the conductor took your ticket you had the sense to say, “ Please be sure to wake me if I fall asleep. I get off at Elizabeth.”

The college spirit one sees at Commencement, a little raucous, sentimental, intense in its loyalty, is an American characteristic exposed for a sunny day in June, but otherwise evanescent or covered up. The college spirit which I knew as a boy thirtyfive years ago has greatly changed in its outward aspect. Gone are the cane rushes, the mud fights, the freshman caps, the hazing and initiation which were thought to be the only way to discipline a freshman; the petting, the gin drinking, the reckless driving which so shocked our parents in the 1920’s, and which Scott Fitzgerald made so vivid in his stories, have moderated at least in the more mature schools.

College spirit today seems more consciously democratic than at any time in the past. Harvard seniors of a year ago elected as their three marshals a Negro, a Jew, and a Yankee; Levi Jackson, the Yale football captain, turned down bids from Scroll and Key and Skull and Bones; an Amherst fraternity in pledging a likable Negro — and standing by its pledge in the face of opposition has caused every national fraternity to reassess its charter.

For all the color, sentiment, and intensily — not to mention the sparking in the coeducational schools—there have been singularly few novels which have caught the true college spirit. For Princeton, Fitzgerald told the story in This Side of Paradise. For Harvard there are two: The Diary of a Freshman by Charles Flandrau, with its authentic picture of the Gold Coast before the world wars (the book, incidentally, which made young Alexander Woollcott determine that he had to go to college), and for Harvard of only yesterday the provocative Not to Eat, Not for Love by George Weller. Owen Johnson, whose books about Lawrenceville, The Varmint and The Tennessee Shad, were as lively and full of character as Stalky & Co., was not nearly as successful when he wrote Stover at Yale—it is, I think, the best novel about New Haven, but there ought to be a better. Percy Marks turned Brown upside down in the days of flaming youth with his two books, The Plastic Age and Which Way Parnassus? And that’s just about the score. Elusive, apparently indifferent, never the same from one generation to the next, college spirit is not easily to be captured.

In Father of the Bride (Simon and Schuster, $2.50), Edward Streeter has pinned down the multiple, fleeting details leading up to a June wedding; he has recaptured every vestige of the gaiety, tenderness, and dismay of the wedding itself in your house or in mine. All parents of married children will recognize themselves in this book; as in a Coney Island mirror, so in Gluyas Williams’s illustrations they will see themselves, only a little more comic than they suspected.

Mr. Stanley Banks is the father of the bride and our hero, a mild-mannered lawyer who commutes to the city from his comfortably modest home in Fairview Manor. When his daughter Kay, the apple of his eye, makes her casual announcement that she will probably marry Buckley Dunstan, Mr. Banks calms down his immediate expostulation and ends the discussion with “O.K., Kitten, I love him already. What did you say his last name was?" But from the night of that conversation, he begins to spin from one crisis to the next, and changes from a logical, well-balanced lawyer to “an unreasoning, anxiety-ridden psychopathic.”

In all this ordeal, Mrs. Banks is no great help. She refuses to worry over the boy’s financial prospects. (The talk on finances between Buckley and Mr. Banks is really a gem.) Mr. Banks had always known that at heart his wife “was a natural-born purchasing agent, although her talents had been somewhat restricted by circumstances,”but now she was in full cry for the trousseau and flat silver, and this expense was the first of many to fill him with gloom.

“Mrs. Banks,” writes Mr. Streeter, “was for a very small wedding to which everyone should be asked.” The house, it was estimated, would hold 150 for the reception at a pinch, and the accounl of how the field is whittled down to a total of 572 would be funny if it were not so true. Then comes the question of the champagne — what price, what vintage, and how many cases; next the question of a caterer and of a marquee in case it rains; the bridesmaids’ dresses and the flowers. Then come the presents — and the acceptances — far beyond expectations, Little Mr. Banks, not much given to alcohol, finds himself slaving as a barkeep for a house filled with strange young. His nerves grow as tight as his cutaway while his bank balance slips away. It’s all here— the excruciating, the unexpected, the affectionate, a rapidly ascending scale of emotions climaxed by the wedding and reception. This is light comedy at its best and you will enjoy it with a lively sense of identification.

There are a number of islands off the New England coast which have long been in the hands of the old families, and perhaps it was the thought of one of them which set Gerald Warner Brace on the trail of his new romance, A Summer’s Tale (Norton, $3.00).

August Island is the setting of this story, a legendary place far beyond sight of ihe mainland, a graveyard of ships, which was first settled in the sixteenth century, and which is presided over today by a family of French extraction who, says the book, have intermarried with Bostonian heiresses and now live with pretensions of royally in a château with walls three feet thick. August Island, like the woods in Dear Brutus, is a never-never island on which all women are beautiful and the most beautiful never wear bathing suits.

Anthony Wyatt, a free-lance writer, had been cruising in a fishing sloop until the fog piled him up on the shore of August Island. He is “hardy and darkly tanned, tough-handed, and well seasoned in the stomach.”He needs to be. For having been knocked unconscious in the wreck and rolled ashore somewhat waterlogged, he is found and revived by June, the most beautiful daughter of the Marquis family, and without a change of clothes or any comptying of his sail water, he goes stright to work to win her hand.

They swim — all of them without suits-in the ice-cold tidal inlet (I should have thought Anthony had had enough of swimming); Mr. Marquis gives Anthony a two-hour talk on the history of the island; they play three sparkling sets of mixed doubles; and Anthony makes an instant enemy of Sam Argall, the descendant of a pirate, who is also after June. Quite a busy day.

A Summer’s Tale takes place on the border line between fantasy and the faintly probable. It is as romantic as a libretto. The descriptions are lyrical, the dialogue in passages plain corn. “You wear your skin like a garment of ice,”says Anthony to June. “Where’s all that savage royalty you’ve got in your blood?" And the injection of a Communist-Fascist subplot seems to me wholly irrelevant. I read the book for its pleasant makebelieve, and with curiosity to see how the author would work out the triangle of Anthony, June, and Sam. “I think the oldest of mortal dreams,”says Anthony, “ is the blessed isle where folk live in peace and beauty, and the women are all fair and no man is deceived. This must be it.”It is.

Prairie Avenue by Arthur Meeker (Knopf, $3.00) is a novel based on recollection, and a very flavorsome and authentic story it is. In a style perfectly suited to the era, it tells of the wealth and assurance, of t he decorum and domestic tumult, of a group of Chicago families who built their fortunes and their comfortable mansions side by side on Prairie Avenue in the 1880’s. It is the story of a period already quaint and glamorous. The picture of these Chicago worthies, of their ambitions, their passions, their materialism, and their manners, comes to us through the eyes of Ned Ramsay, an artistic young nephew who has been educated abroad and who, when taken into their midst, regards them with a fastidiousness and Continental comparison of a young Henry James. Ned is a likable narrator, sensitive and a natural confidant for his elders and contemporaries. The protagonist of the book, his Aunt Lydia Stack, as she grows in his understanding, reminds me of Miss Cather’s Lost Lady. This picture of Chicago wealth in a small society was waiting for the right man: Mr. Meeker has made of it an evocative story less burly than the real thing but entertaining all the way through.