'Princeton Stories': A Forgotten Classic
The canon of popular books set in Princeton is small, but nevertheless well-read by students so jonesing for the thrill of recognition that they'll happily slog through dozens of pages on game theory (or obscure Venetian manuscripts) for some passing references to campus landmarks.It turns out that Princetonians have been engaging in this kind of literary navel-gazing since even before the days of F. Scott's This Side of Paradise -- if anything, our self-obsessive tendencies were worse back when there were no cars or phones connecting Princeton to the real world.This, at least, is the conclusion I draw from Princeton Stories, an 1895 collection of largely mediocre, absolutely fascinating short fiction from Princeton's own Jesse Lynch Williams '92. (You can, and should, read the whole thing here -- thanks, Google Books!)There's something really charming about the idea of a scrappy, marginally talented young alum becoming a bestseller (by 1906, Princeton Stories had gone through 10 printings) on the strength of Princetonians' willingness to read any and all manner of dreck -- so long as it was connected to their school.Williams's Princeton is one of broad-backed football stars and the wide-eyed freshmen who worship them, of Glee Club gentlemen and Newark society gals, of teatime at the eating clubs and bonfires on the green. His stories basically read like a series of disjointed "Remember that time..." reminisces, and almost all go on for about five pages too long. Standout tales include "The Hazing of Valliant," "Fixing That Freshman," "The Scrub Quarter-Back", and the instant classic, "When Girls Come To Princeton."Whatever its flaws, Princeton Stories does succeed in transporting contemporary readers to a bygone era where the buildings look familiar but the language sounds almost foreign. Seriously, I had no idea what Williams was talking about half the time; I've never felt so delightfully lost on my own campus.Here, for example, is his take on freshman hazing:
In the glorious old days of untrammelled class activity when everyone recognized that there were certain duties owed the freshman by the sophomore class...you had only casually to drop word to a freshman on the way to recitation to wait for you when night came, back of Witherspoon -- as you would bid a classmate come to a spread in your room -- and he would turn up promptly and smilingly, take his little dose meekly and cheerfully, and go to bed a better boy for it and brag about it every time he dined out on Christmas holidays.
What does that even mean?Maybe I'm being too hard on Williams's writing, when the fault actually lies with my own uncomprehendingly modern self. Williams, after all, went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1917. Or maybe Williams really did start out as a hack and only improved in the years after this collection was published. I'm not sure, and I don't really care -- all I know is that Princeton Stories has already staked its claim as my favorite book of 2010.