The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 17

AUSON ARNOLD GEORGE FKAZIER i 1 Indian art makes debut m. The Plimp, Pusey, et al. The fact that Honest Tom Atkins is now an overseer of Harvard merely proves that anything can happen in that grove of academe. Still and all, it is not without a certain sense of shock and displeasure that one must re ,2 J. i 7 vmpx wWi." 4 I port that George Plimpton failed to be chosen First Marshal for the 25th reunion of the class of '48 which, come June, will put on funny hats and carry on like cut-ups.

Naturally, it has become a bit fashionable to poke good-humored fun at the high-wire and other aspirations of The Plimp, but those who know him recognize that, besides being a consummate showman, he is an extraordinary human being. Not only does he write and edit like a dream, but he is also an unflagging source of encouragement to worthy people in need of a helping hand writers or In their real to have illustrious ances-tori for their debutante daughters, ambitious mothers sometimes send us their family tree. One mother boasted that her daughter was descended from William the Conqueror. Still another proudly mentioned Pocahontas as an ancestor. She'll be glad to know that the American Indian is being honored tonight at a preview of an exhibition for members of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.

The exhibition, entitled "American Indian Art, 1920-1972" will be presented in the Hall of the American Indians at the Museum, 11 Divinity Cambridge. Before the 8:30 opening, museum director Stephen Williams and Mrs. Williams will give a dinner at the Harvard Faculty Club. Harvard guests at the dinner will include Charles U. Daly, vice-president for Government and Community Affairs at Harvard, and Mrs.

Daly, Mrs. Donald Scott, Prof, and Mrs. David H.P. Maybury-Lewis, Dr. and Mrs.

Jeremy and Miss Barbara Chandler, who has been in charge of editing the catalogue and organizing the exhibit. Among others at the dinner will be Mrs. Yvonne Wynde of the Museum's Indian Advisory Committee, Miss Anne Forbes of Shaftsbury, the Robert Rosenthals of Lexington and the Robert Kaufmanns of Belmont. The exhibition will be open to the public from Feb. 28 through March 25.

I'm sure the descendants of Pocahontas will be especially interested. iiiliiiil VJs. irfv i i GEORGE PLIMPTON extraordinary A bright yellow invitation with a drawing of a locomotive and three oars invites you to take the trip of your choice for one night only. The night is Saturday, March 10, and the destination is the Museum of Transportation at Larz Anderson Park in Brookline. You can wear a powdered wig or go as a hooligan or a golliwog.

You can be a vision of the past or you can create a costume from materials available at the door. Beginning at 8:30 you can watch painting projects, buy odd pieces of art at an auction, or dance to jazz, ragtime or rock played by a Dixieland band. And all for the benefit of the Museum of Transportation's education program and the Brookline Art Center's scholarship fund. a Ann i a. a .1 candidates for public office or whatever.

A few years ago when the esteemed Signet Society at Harvard was sorely in need of funds, The Plimp was the first to respond, and with a cheque for, if my memory is correct, $2000. I'm dismayed that his classmates weren't bright enough to honor him. But then, they passed over Anthony Lewis of The New York Times, too. Yet Harvard has a way of acknowledging its errors, and maybe some time soon it will award Plimpton an honorary degree, nor is there anyone else more deserving. Certainly this is one department its honoraries in which Harvard has been practically neolithic.

Its track record is preposterously bad. Though it conferred kudos on Elma Lewis, that saint of this city, and something I've never seen printed was about to do so on the portly person' of Louis Armstrong when he passed away, it has, on the whole, displayed a singular resistance to acknowledging what I suppose one would call the popular arts. I'm not suggesting that it should give a degree, as Princeton did, to Bob Dylan merely that it takes stock of such unsung catalysts of our culture as, for instance, John Hammond, because of whose taste and tenacity American music achieved respectability. And if I'm not being premature, I'd also like to cast one loud and firm vote for Duke Ellington. He is now 74 and I hope to hell that Harvard doesn't dally too long.

On a happier note from Cambridge is the fact that there is an increasing acknowledgement that Nathan Pusey was a far better university president than a lot of people realized. Nor if Derek Bok doesn't improve is it likely to wane. The feeling around such centers of academic opinion as the Faculty Club is that, if Bok is any indication of Stanford style, John McKay wasn't far off the mark when he called that college "the Radcliffe of the West." Bok's an attractive man, but he arrived in Cambridge wearing ankle socks, and, ever since, there has been a growing suspicion that his administration has an ankle-socks mentality. In any event, he appears to be trying to run Harvard as if it were General Motors. A great university cannot be computerized, and the sooner Bok realizes it, the sooner he'll do things instead of just sitting there or carrying a spear or whatever it is that he does.

Indeed, were we able to play the Pusey years over again, there is really but one thing we might change, that being to stipulate that insolent George McBundy or Bundy McGeorge, as the case may be, keep a more civil tongue. Thanks at least in part to David Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest," we know now that little Master McBundy wasn't really either- Pu-sey's chief defect was that he permitted the wunderkind more free speech than he deserved. Still another bit of are a coupxe or 91U single. OLD BEAMS LOOM ABOVE GUESTS AT OLD HOUSE OF REV. JAMES KEITH IN WEST BRIDGEWATER.

(Stanley A. Bauman photo) History receives a parsonage A preview of the 1973 Decorators' Show House sponsored by the Junior League of Boston, will be held Sunday afternoon, from 1 to 5 o'clock. Visitors are invited to see the empty undeco-rated former Stone House, most recently the Cardinal Cushing College in Brookline. The house is located on Boylston street opposite the old reservoir with good bus service and ample parking space. The house with its handsome flying staircase and octagonal breakfast room is imposing without any furniture in it.

Tickets will be on sale for the April 29 opening of the decorated house designed and furnished by Boston's leading decorators. The ell and shed, added in 1837, were removed so the house could be restored on its original foundation. Inside, the flooring, walls, and supporting timbers were treated or replaced; fireplaces were rebuilt; and window glass was provided. While the rooms downstairs were entirely renovated, the upstairs still is being completed. Johnson said there is not enough money right now to finish the project.

The group plans to open the parsonage to the public early this summer. In the meantime, visitors are welcome by appointment. Members of the society are willing to show the house to anyone who calls. President of the historical society and history professor at Bridgewater State College, Dr. Ralph S.

Bates, said the project has been a "labor of love" and the By Mary W. Stohn Globe Correspondent Members of the Old Bridgewater Historical Society were beaming yesterday as they showed visitors around the newly renovated Reverend James Keith House, "the oldest existing parsonage in the United They certainly had reason to be proud as they were showing the results of a twelve-year project to completely restore the salt box as it was when the Rev. Keith there in 1662. Curator of the house, Wallace E. Johnson from Brockton, said the society was fortunate because the house is the most highly documented of any in Plymouth County.

The society, therefore, was able to base the restorations on a great deal of historical data which Johnson said told what every room contained. society simply wishes to share the parsonage with all history buffs. Contributions should be sent to: Wallace E. Johnson, P.O. Box 174, West Bridgewater 02379.

The house is situated in Old Bridge-water, the first interior settlement in the old colony. Captain Miles Standish acquired the property in 1649. The settlers, extremely religious, sought a resident minister almost immediately after coming to Old Bridge-water. A young divinity student from Scotland who was 18 and not ordained, was chosen to fill the post. Upon his arrival in 1664, settlers had the house ready for him.

Rev. Keith served his congregation for 56 years until he died in 1719. During King Philip's War (1675-1678), the parsonage was used as a garrison house. King Philip's wife and her son were given asylum at the parsonage. intelligence quadrangles Charles, is Wednesday the opening "Bewitched from the by the that, come evening and of its show, Bayou," the America's oldest community theater, The Footlight Club, organized in 1877, will present "The Fantastiks," America's longest running musical, in Eliot Hall, Jamaica Plain, March 2, 3, 9 and 10 at 8:30.

Hasty Pudding will honor, as "Person of the Year," Bunny Steinem, a nubile little number who favors equal rights for both women and Bella Abzug. And Shirley Chisholm makes three. Yet, for all its growing consciousness of Feminism, the Pudding is not Without a renewed respect for the old elegance. At its black-tie dance on Friday night I noticed three young men with the high Hamilton, the Brothers' Poetic madness and protective love BOOK OF THE DAY GLORIA STEINEM the Person classic wing collar. Moreover, there grass on the premises, but, instead, wasn't a whiff of such a prodigious But he is not always ill He writes glorious poetry, enjoys fame.

Harvey's position is more complex. He is first of all loyal. And tolerant of Francis's single-minded selfishness. (Francis is often like a large excitable dog who will tunnel through the flower beds.) Above all Harvey endures. It is his sustaining belief that if Francis were to be hospitalized he would become permanently mad, would never again get back into the sunlight.

Why does Harvey continue this relationship which slowly but inexorably becomes a strangling albatross as Francis By Margaret Manning, Globe Staff THE BIRD OF NIGHT, by Susan Hill. Saturday Review Press, 186 $5.95. "The Bird of Night" is a small, beautifully felt novel that springs with pity and terror into the trueness of life. It is a remarkable performance by a talented young English writer, the more remarkable because the story she has imagined is probably just that imagined and not one with which she has had special intimacy. In "The Bird of Night" Susan Hill has written about madness and its wracking effect upon two men.

She begins with Harvey Lawson, an old man now, waiting for death. He is besieged in his country cottage by bright young literary critics and esthetes who want, to suck dry his brains. For Harvey had been the friend and shield of one of England's great 20th Century poets, Francis Croft "The Bird of Night" is Harvey's recollection of the torment and joy of the 19 years he and Francis were associated. Interpolated are some of Francis's letters and pages from his journals. Francis, then a young lyric poet who had achieved a certain celebrity.

Francis was noticeably odd. He was preoccupied with owls, forests, snow-flakes; he kept erratic, insomniac hours; his charm and intellect both attracted and alarmed Harvey, but he soon fell into the role of protector of this child-like creature who so clearly needed him. Francis became the reason for Harvey's life and Harvey became the person who made it possible for Francis to live and work. Throughout the novel Francis's personality vibrates with eccentricity. He may well be a genius.

There is no question, though, that he is insane. He moves in and out of terrifying periods of madness, all conceived with a dreadful authenticity by Susan Hill Francis has of mind that is so intense, tremulous, yeasty, so inward, that a grotesque incident can trigger a -panic He has nightmares, and hallucinations during daylight, in which wild animals and birds hover over him with howling phosphorescent mouths. Blood, death and the putrefaction of the flesh are his portion when he is ilL i consumption of booze that by midnight the vodka had run out and a couple of bartenders were huddled over a bathtub making more. Another evidence of a heightened awareness of style is the number of people who show up with their backgammon boards on Thursday evenings at the as the Casablanca is known. Since I.M.

(Wind Tunnel) Pei, an architect who's big for ventilation, has a certain association with Harvard, it isn't inappropriate here to mention that in writing about him last Friday I somehow neglected to mention what many informed people consider his crowning glory. Harbor Towers and the John Hancock thing may send you soaring, and there can be no doubting that he and his two sons, the Pocket Pei and the Vest Pocket Pei, will achieve even greater gusts. It seems unlikely, though that they will be able to surpass the National Center for Atmospheric Research building in Boulder, Col. It's a masterpiece at sending its occupants on 'their keesters. On a really windy day, in fact, they assemble in the lobby and form a human chain before venturing out to the parking lot.

Once, in a more innocent time, we were counseled to button up our overcoats when the wind blows free. But not since PeL Now when the gusts get going, we make like those Tommy Dorsey singing groups before we reach the vicinity of the John Hancock thing, locking arms and giving the bittersweet close harmony of "I'll Never Smile Again." What say, let's hear it for I.M. Pei and the Pocket Pei and the Vest Pocket Pei make three. is muic auu uiure iiequemiy qui vl His mind? Quite simply because he loves Franci. He depends upon him for his dream, or illusion, of life.

Even when Francis is raving and violent One might perhaps find Harvey exasperating because he is such a doormat. I didn't Harvey is strong, sad, moving and true in Susan Hill's beautiful characterization. It is also about the compulsions and torments of creativity. It Is about love and death and the dark pit of 4 o'clock in the morning. And it is an admirable piece of writing.

SUSAN HILL admirable piece of writing Harvey was a putterer in the British Museum, an Egyptologist, a writer of es-oterica, a man who would appear to be as bloodless as a telephone pole and destined for a dusty life in the stacks. But one house party weekend he met.