Not Ready For Prime Time Class Struggle- Park The Car In Harvard Yard- William Martin’s “Harvard Yard”- A Book Review

Book Review

Harvard Yard, William Martin, Warner Books, New York, 2004

I like a good historical novel as well as the next person but I would not ordinarily read one on the trials and tribulations of college life, even if it is a premier Ivy League college and elite training ground providing the administrative apparatus for the American ruling class, august Harvard University. Except that Harvard University has been a scene of many of my personal political struggles, conferences, debates, marches, demonstrations, and the like, over a long political life. I know where the bodies are buried. So on the advice of someone I respect (who also told me that it was also an informative short course on the history of the university, and it is) I delved into the thing. And I am not sorry I did, although the plot line seemed thin by the end and did not justify the length.

Referring to that plot line it’s about the bird, stupid, (oops, wrong story) no it’s about a book, although not just any book but a play, a sequel to Love’s Lost Labors, supposedly written by one William Shakespeare who gave it to John Harvard in the early 1600s. And from there the adventure takes off as dear John goes to America to bring his talents to that well-known theater-is-the-devil’s-playground Puritan outpost, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Cambridge branch. The fate of the book/play is enmeshed with the tenor of various times (up the near present) from extreme religious intolerance early on to the 1969 Harvard radical minute when the staid decorum of the place went askew and a time that alumni on all sides are still talking about (or talking down and/or around).

Of course, since this is after all a novel, the missing book has to have pursuers, good and evil. On the good side is main character and Harvard alum, rare book seller Peter Fallon (last seen in the Martin novel Back Bay trying to find a rare Paul Revere tea set, apparently the struggle for old stuff never ends), whose efforts rile up many partisans on the other side who wish to find the book merely to sell it to the highest bidder rather than add one more book to the Harvard huge stockpile (some good old boy Harvard alums in the mix, as well, if you can believe that). By the end this now almost four hundred year span as it unravels the mystery of the location of the precious book, however, is just too long a time to keep our undivided attention especially as the plot gets more convoluted as we get closer to the present. Still it was nice to read about those bad boys, the 18th century Mather clerical boys, Increase and Cotton, the Harvard boys who fought for the republic in the American Revolution, and especially those Harvard Unionist boys who laid down their heads for the Republic during the Civil War. Memorial Hall is a fitting tribute to those last named deeds.