Word: prescott
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...Peter Prescott came to Harvard last week to shill his most recent book, A Darkening Green, which purports to be a memoir of the 1950s and the author's freshman year at Harvard. He was very nervous and understandably so, since anyone who writes a book like that has quite a bit to answer...
...first unanswered question is precisely what in Prescott's freshman year, or anyone's freshman year for that matter, is worth reporting to the general public. Like a number of people, Prescott kept a journal while at Harvard. Like most of those journals, Prescott's is spotty and uneven (which means, incidentally, that it does have some good parts). Unlike those other journal keepers, though, Prescott has inflicted his own account of his rites of passage (if freshman year can be so dignified) on an unsuspecting and innocent public...
...public--innocent or otherwise--would be interested in the school life of one 18-year-old prig in the middle fifties passes my comprehension. Prescott claims that his journal is a documentary of a life style of his time, and thereby assumes a social importance beyond that which it possessed intrinsically, but it isn't and it doesn't. Prescott's alcoholic prep-school degeneracy did not, as he himself admits, characterize all Harvard any more then than it does now. His freshman year was a private thing that he went through--and it is a private thing that...
Which brings up the second question: what is such a journal good for? Prescott can hardly be faulted for keeping such a journal if the use to which he has put it is what is dubious...
...Prescott says he wrote his journals with an eye toward their becoming the raw material for a novel, but that he realized that the market was glutted with young-man-grows-up novels, so he sat on the thing for twenty years and then decided to publish it as was, with an explanatory commentary threading the reprinted selections of the journal together. He did not think he could have duplicated This Side of Paradise, which is undoubtedly true, and he used that as an excuse to duck any obligation to turn his book into a novel...