Books: Only Gliding

NOT TO EAT, NOT FOR LOVE—George Anthony Weller—Smith & Haas ($2.50).

“Went yesterday to Cambridge and spent most of the day at Mount Auburn; got my luncheon at Fresh Pond, and went back again to the woods. After much wandering and seeing many things, four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see—not to eat not for love, but only gliding. . . .” Thus patly comes a passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Journal to supply a title for a novel about Harvard. Good novels of U. S. college life have been rare since Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. More comprehensive, less pointed than its Princeton predecessor Not to Eat Not for Love would be a notable achievement for any old grad, is an extraordinary accomplishment for an author not four years out of Harvard.

Author Weller’s compendious calendar starts in September, with a Lampoon editor coming back early to get out the Freshman number; it ends with a senior, reluctant to move out at the end of the college year, barricading himself in his room against the janitor and his minions. Between are 421 closely printed pages, a kaleidoscopic camera’s eye that picks out almost every type of individual and circumstance to be found in a big modern university. The book’s coherence suffers from its multiplicity of interests and characters which mingle but never really meet. What story there is is held together by the reappearing career of one Epes Todd, an undergraduate whose passion for football is gradually sublimated into books, redirected into a love affair. Harvard indifference (“a term never used at Harvard”), the baby deans, the Crimson, the Widener Library, athletes, tutors, students, socialites, exams, waiters-on-table, the clubs, lectures, Harvard’s golden mean (“Three C’s and a D and keep out of the newspapers”), its buildings, traditions, dreams—all these and more Author Weller has pasted up in his college scrapbook. Harvard readers may not like some of his pious preservations, may grow misty-eyed over some. Other readers will admit that whether or not Author Weller’s Harvard characters have been gliding to any purpose, their performance, to non-Harvard eyes, has been impressive.