A GREAT MANY scenes at Harvard seem singularly well suited as backdrops for a novel. The gently rolling waters of the Charles at dusk, with a single oursman sculling past; the Square on a weekend evening, abuzz with music and breathless partygoers; the Yard on a spring afternoon, as sunlight streams through a circle of historic buildings.

But the most extraordinary examples of Harvard fiction have taken as their setting a drab indoor location: the dormitory bedroom. There have been dozens of novels about Harvard over the years: novels about freshmen, novels about seniors, novels about faculty, alumni, and townies, novels that start off at Harvard and never return, and novels that check into Harvard and never leave. And virtually every one of them--as if to observe an unwritten rule of the genre--pauses for at least one bounce on a Buildings and Grounds cot before reaching its conclusion Surely no other segment of the population (with one possible exception) is as sharnelessly obsessed with the sex life of Harvard students as the creators of Harvard fiction.

And what a strange obsession it is. It is not sex the way any hygiene class or best selling handbook describes it that takes place in the Houses and halls of these writers' imaginations. Something altogether different is going on between these sheets, and it deserves a careful examination.

Consider, for instance, a passage from one of the newest additions to the canon of Harvard literature--Splendor and Misery by Faye Levine '65. The scene is 1963, in a Lowell House room, where Levine's protagonist Sarah is taking advantage of the parietal rules' provision for afternoon visiting hours. Levine notes that Sarah's boy friend has given her a copy of the Kama Sutra and she describes the consequences.

And so now, released from fear by a marvelous vision of sacramental lust in a high and cosmopolitan civilization, the sweet dream of a timeless humanity, the lovers became one person again, woman inside turned outside of man. And Sarah rode the motions of her own and Michael's unconsciousness, quiet, submissive, faintly delirious, endlessly, endlessly, endlessly until the fire caught--the Volcano erupted--The Boundaries Dissolved--The Heat Flowed O*U*T!! and she screamed. And she rode the crest of the lava in tumultuous, selfless joy down the side of the mountain until slowly, slowly, she came to an easy gradual rest at the foot of a hill, and there the girlfriend found the boyfriend again.

That's a lot of lava for any bedroom, not to mention a Lowell House single. But Faye Levine is only the latest in a long series of Harvard novelists whose scenes of passion defy all reasonable expectation. Who, for example, ever would have anticipated the peculiar interest several writers demonstrate for one Harvard landmark:

And then he led me silently out of the labs, past the rhinoceros statues and the law school and Mem Hall and across the Yard into Widener, up to the reading room, into the stacks, down the elevator to level D, where it is damp and nobody goes, and we made love on the floor of the section marked Sports and Games.

That's from Native Intelligence by Raymond Sokolov '63 (first published in 1975, now available in a newly released paperback edition or in Widener under American Literature, level 5). What more? Read/Shouldn't Be Telling You This, by Mary Breasted '65, a book that includes this vignette:

I got into Radcliffe, where I had to study too hard to stay in, and even though I was class of '72 and got to partake of the thrilling occupation of Widener Library and to practice fellatio impromptu between the Conrad and Cooper stacks, I felt that the sixties had passed me by before I'd got started.

Is that a coincidence? Is there something about the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library that stirs the groin of any novelist who confronts it?

There is a third explanation, one that Levine's book and the other Harvard novels consistently support. Levine, Sokolov, Breasted, and the rest of this particular school of writers, have conceived of sex at Harvard not as an act of Just of procreation but as an intellectual experience. These novels take place at the nation's most distinguished center of scholarship after all; when their characters become physically intimate, why should they grunt and grind like students at some safety school? This is Harvard, and when a couple feels frisky, they run to the library, or study an ancient Indian religious text.

The Kama Sutra, in fact, figures in no fewer that three incidents of fictional Harvard ecstasy. Sokolov's protagonist Alan is well versed in its wisdom, as his girlfriend notes in a letter to her best friend--a letter that reads as much like a course catalogue as an account of sexual conquest:

Before we finally managed to make it, he had covered wading birds, the pineapple, gypsies and the history of Negroes at Harvard. Occasionally, he would ask me obliquely about Burushaki, the language I picked up in Kashmir...

Driving back, it was dark and Alan recited from Browning's Sordello... The rest is history. I made an honest man of him two days later by the grave of a certain Letitia Forbes (1877-1879). My all but vanished menses made it into a kosher defloration. Alan was a miracle. Five times, Susan! And, naturally, he had memorized the Kama Sutra.

The good book also pops up in Class Reunion, by Rona Jaffe '51, a 1979 novel that follows four women from their years at Radcliffe in the 50s to their 20th reunion. The most adventurous of the quartet is Annabel, who goes on a freshman year date with a young man named Richard, by reputation the most experienced member of the Harvard freshman class: