Vonnegut observed.

Beck, John

ONE OF THE MORE VENERABLE institutions that cling like barnacles to the vast bulk of Harvard University is the Signet Society, which fosters literary achievement and the liberal arts in general. The club occupies an eighteenth-century house at the corner of Mt. Auburn and Dunster streets where it offers lunch and conversation to members throughout the academic year. There's also a Christmas party, at which everyone gets tipsy and sings carols off key, and an annual affair called Strawberry Night, which is much too complicated to explain. There are likewise teas and receptions for various visiting lions and lionesses.

When I was an undergraduate member, back in the 1950s, membership was strictly male, and remained so into the 1970s, although on one occasion Adrienne Rich (invited to read) stormed out in high feminist dudgeon at an ill-considered anecdote about a stripper. Today the organization has achieved gender parity.

By far the most gaudy Signet ritual is the Annual Dinner, an event presided over by The Toastmaster. It includes (besides comments from various officers), a reading by The Poet, presentation of the annual Signet Medal for literary achievement to The Recipient, and a speech (or reading) by The Speaker.

In 1971, to celebrate the centennary of the society, the planners of the dinner assembled an unforgettable combination: The Toastmaster was Erich Segal, The Poet was Allen Ginsberg, The Recipient was John Updike, and The Speaker was Kurg Vonnegut.

By the 1960s, these dinners had outgrown the clubhouse, and this one was held in a banquet hall on the top floor of the Holyoke Center--recently completed--on Massachusetts Avenue. Somehow, Harvard had acquired a number of immense, brooding paintings by Mark Rothko and--evidently for want of any place more appropriate to hang them--had put them into this room. The ceiling was so low (or the artwork so large) that the paintings reached almost to the floor, and there were already signs of damage from chairs rubbing against them. [They also turned out to be almost ephemeral: Rothko had used cheap enamel from Woolworth's that quickly faded. They have now lost most of their brilliance and been placed in permanent storage.] In any case, the paintings provided a remarkably gloomy backdrop for what was intended as a convivial occasion.

The four distinguished guests were dotted along the head table. Vonnegut, to the left, wore a respectable dinner jacket, but he had that remarkable gift of making anything he wore--no matter how fresh when he put it on--look as though he'd been wearing it for a week. Segal, to his left, was elegant in black velvet. Next to him, Ginsberg was appropriately natty, although he had forgone a tie (who could tell behind the beard?). At the right end, Updike maintained the values of an earlier day with a wing collar and brocade vest.

With dinner finished and everyone well lubricated, the speeches began; and the evening turned into a Segal roast. The burden of all these jibes was that brilliant young Harvard classicists who had rapidly achieved tenure at Yale were not expected to write saccarine novels. And if they had the dubious taste to do so, they shouldn't have the downright bad taste to appear on every talk show in the country and earn such large piles of money that they would never need to work again. (Did I detect a certain note of envy in all this?)

This raillery began with the obligatory speeches by officers and reached its climax with whoever introduced The Toastmaster. Erich himself came across as modest, earnest, and a bit chagrined at being the object of so much attention. He got a break when Ginsberg spoke, since the poet stuck to his own schtick, revved up his prayer wheel, and soon had us all chanting "Om ... Om ... Om...."

In receiving his medal, Updike was appropriately diffident and wry, but he couldn't resist pointing out that all his books to that point (respected though they were) had collectively failed to achieve the total sales of Love Story.

Finally, it was Vonnegut's turn. He spoke at length about values and the human condition but somehow did so in a way that had us all laughing uncontrollably. His digression into the Segal issue put paid to all further discussion: "To shoot Erich Segal for writing Love Story would be like putting a man to death for baking a chocolate eclair."

I later learned from an acquaintance with whom Ginsberg had stayed that Erich had been so nervous that Allen held his hand throughout the whole evening to steady him. And so it goes.