He brought her a single red rose when he picked her up. An upperclassman who had known Richard at St. Martin's had lent him his rooms in an upperclass house, a suite, which was safer and more relaxing than where Richard lived, where the presence of any woman at all was strictly forbidden. There was a bottle of chilled champagne and a copy of the Kama Sutra.

And before long, well-trained scholars that they are, Annabel and Richard have embarked on new pathways of scientific inquiry:

They experimented with various positions and tried oral sex. She liked it better when he did it to her than when she had to do it to him, but she felt fair was fair.

FOR SOME SPINNERS of Harvard tales, sex is so cerebral that the act becomes almost unrecognized, submerged in a sea of ponderous figurative philosophizing. Pays Levine, the volcano queen, is one such scribe; another is George Anthony Weller '29, whose long novel Not to Eat, Not for Love appeared in 1933. At the end of the book, an undergraduate named Epes Todd goes all the way with a girl named Ellen in his Fine Arts tutor's apartment, but it requires a real piece of textual analysis to figure out what is going on:

He felt her lips grow softer and farther from any turning back and he heard his own will, as hers receded before him, crying on, on and on. But in the midst of the maelstrom, a tiny vortex began to shape itself. It grew, it gathered, it took form, it slowed the storm, and bit by bit it robbed away his power.

Why not? he cried... Do we not love enough? Is that what we need?...

The query of pain melts away and there is only peace in the visage, peace, like a plate upside down. And presently the head is bowed again, and soon it is lost in the dark heads of the millions marching...

It was dark when he awakened. Her hair was spread over his shoulder in a wave... She turned to him... "I believe in love," she said. Her face hung over him, "Do you?"

"Yes," he answered. They slept again.

This vision of Harvard-sex-as-mystical-brain-noise has a latter-day proponent in the form of Nicholas Gagarin '70. In a loosely autobiographical novel called Windsong, published during Gagarin's senior year, the narrator spends a considerable amount of time in bed with one Radcliffe woman or another, and each encounter produces a new disquisition on what it all means:

It is always beautiful to spend the night with a girl in a little narrow bed. Because you have to squeeze rather tightly to fit, and neither of you can get very comfortable or sleep very well; but that is the way it should be. Because you are not there to be comfortable and sleep well. You are there in order to come for a moment into this person's life, to reach out in whatever way you can, and to be together. And if the bed is narrow and you have to squeeze, well, that's just the way it is.

Gagarin doesn't need the Kama Sutra for sex to become a learning experience--he's got strong enough vibrations coming from his own head:

It was good, very good for us to be able to touch each other and hug each other, very good to be able to express emotions that had been building up for months. We laughed and we cried, at nothing in particular, only for the sheer joy of laughing and crying. We held each other very tight, and for the first time I understood the word "trip."

The consummate example of Harvard sex intellectualized into gobbledy gook comes in a 1973 short story called "Innocence," by Harold Brodkey '51. As the story begins a Harvard senior named Wiley looks at the object of his lust and states, "To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die." Naturally, when Wiley lures this apparition into his room and under his covers, it is the occasion for a summa cum laude display of erudition:

I saw myself (stupidly) as a Roman trireme my tongue as the prow, bronze, pushing at her; she was the Mediterranean. Tiers of slaves, my god, the helplessness of them, pulled oars, long stalks that metaphorically and rhythmically bloomed with flowing clusters of short-lived lilies at the water's surface.