Goin’ Back to Princeton Town with Day Edgar ‘25

The book sat on a shelf for years after I bought it for pocket change at a library sale. A glance at the contents showed a writing style so antique that I kept delaying a serious scan, despite the compelling title: In Princeton Town.

As part of my occasional downsizing efforts, I marked the book as something I could donate to Goodwill. First, however, I owed it to myself to read it as a member of the Princeton Class of 1980. I knew I should read it just to feel its resonances, decades later.

And so I did, and I’m glad I did. Written by Day Edgar ‘25, the book appeared in 1929. Once I got into the rhythm of Edgar’s sometimes convoluted prose, I enjoyed the stories. They depict a Princeton that’s both utterly familiar—the Chapel, the Daily Princetonian, the Freshman Herald, houseparties, Reunions, precepts, the Dinky to Princeton Junction, the Honor Code—and foreign, with the all-male student body, the relentless attention to the fashionable clothing, raccoon coats, telegram deliveries, young women with bobbed hair picking up students in their “roadsters,” complete with rumble seats, and, looming above all, the existentialist terrors of bicker to gain entry to the “right” eating clubs of Prospect Street.

Edgar’s clever conceit is that the book only mentions “Princeton” in its title. The stories talk about campus locations and institutions in a nameless sense, except for the Bric-a-Brac annual, the Triangle shows and the Freshman Herald. Even the University is called, well, the University. The book’s fun comes from recognizing essential parts of Princeton without them ever being explicitly named. Triangle must have merited a mention because Edgar co-wrote and performed in Triangle Club’s “Scarlet Coat” show, according to his memorial in a September 1970 edition of the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

Edgar’s stories stand as independent units, although a few characters pop up across the book, including the firm, forbidding but often humane “Dean” in the administration, and sophomore Stumpy Frothingham. Most stories are light in tone, usually involving an obsessive need to meet a young woman or finagle connections with the in-crowd (athletes or class leaders) to ascend to the right eating club. The behavior toward women borders on what we would today consider stalkerish, combined with boorish he-man advice on how to convince women to go on a date. 

Class divisions, both in economic status and in the literal sense of whether you’re an underclassmen or upperclassmen, run rampant. The story “Snob’s Progress” involves two sophomore cousins rooming together, with one strongly objecting to the arrangement. Andrew MacDonald, the club-obsessed one, talks over the problem with his former roommate, Schuyler Browne, who dropped out of Princeton after his freshman year. Here, they’re discussing the economically strapped cousin-roommate, Lawrence East:

For a long time the two friends were silent. Browne extended a gold case from which MacDonald took a straw-tipped cigarette. Leaning back in his chair, Browne wrinkled his eyes behind a veil of smoke.

“As I see it,” he began, “you can’t get out of rooming with him, and you’ve got to take him as he is. Now here’s the question: What’s the best course to follow?”

“Exactly,” agreed MacDonald, anxiously watching the other’s face.

“Unquestionably the thing for you to do,” continued Browne, “is to keep on as you’ve started. Simply going about your affairs, I mean, and take no responsibility for East. Let it be understood around campus that you don’t expect to drag him into a club with you. After all, everybody’s got cousins—I’ve got two myself that are fairly crude citizens—and it isn’t your fault that East happens to be what he is. Always keep well-dressed, and above everything else never be seen with anybody but the right sort of fellows.”

“I’ve been very careful about that.”

“Stick to the policy you and I started out with,” advised Browne. “It’s a shame they ruled cars off the campus. Otherwise, I’d say send for that new roadster of yours and keep it here—as long as your family has money you might as well let it be known. Make the most of your acquaintance with Danny Wharton, because he’s practically going to run that bicker committee.”

“The Kind Women Like,” describes Reunions from the 1920s, with visions of costumes that would be reviled as “problematic” by today’s standards. The P-rade sketch, however, rings true and shows the continuity of Princeton traditions over a century and more:

In the forefront marched two color-bearers holding aloft the Stars and Stripes and the silken banner of the University; next—the first graduates of the procession—walked several erect members of the class of Sixty-two; and following them, ranked according to the year of their graduation, came other classes. As the white-haired classmates in the lead came abreast of the stands a loud handclapping rose; and this, breaking out afresh, followed their progress around the field. Similarly, applause and cheers led by a nimble undergraduate greeted reach class passing in review while the parade, like a great, multi-colored serpent, slowly drew its length in through the gate. The forepart of the serpent moved placidly enough; but the portion nearing the tail seemed troubled with a species of St. Vitus’ dance, for the younger classes showed an increasing desire to skip and desire to skip and cavort upon the green turf.

“Oh,” exclaimed Anita, “it’s just too divine!”

Edgar keeps a tight focus on a certain slice of students from the Roaring 20s: mostly wealthy or upper-middle class, often Southern (a character in “The Last Patrician” is named Lee Barber, after Robert E. Lee) and obsessed with their social standing. Some students fall outside the magic circles, such as the poor cousin Lawrence East, the most likeable character in the book. Especially striking is the rampant lack of interest in academics. Cutting classes is common and being studious comes across as subversive. Learning stands more as an obstacle than a goal, something to cram in at the end of a term rather than zestfully pursue. Career goals are also a rarity, other than one Big Man on Campus, Thomas Griffith Pendleton, who, in the last story, “Spotlight,” plans to attend Columbia Law School, although a romantic obsession with a Broadway star puts him far along the path to flunking out.

Inside the cover, a view of the Graduate College.

While mostly comic in tone, the stories hint at a darker side of Princeton. The teenaged “Princeton Men” can come across as depressed, lost or barely functional outside the comfortable home environments. Hearty false fronts are a common personality trait. Relations between the sexes in the hothouse of an all-male campus are fraught, leading to poor decisions and self-defeating behavior (coeducation would not arrive for another half-century, a few years before I arrived on campus in 1976). Several stories have an O. Henry-like twist at the end, as characters escape disaster, learn life lessons and, in one case, ruefully acknowledge the power of the Honor Code.

The stories led me, naturally enough, to think about the Princeton of the 1920s in reality. As luck would have it, the day I finished In Princeton Town I watched the DVD of The Catcher Was a Spy, a fictionalized film based on the life of Morris “Moe” Berg ‘23, the astounding linguist, Major League Baseball catcher and OSS operative in Europe during World War II. The film was solid enough, with reat period costumes, and a scene set at what must have been the Princeton Club in New York after Pearl Harbor, tuxedos all around, with a performance by an a cappella group, with the stirring line, “I ask you, gentlemen of Princeton, to join me in singing, ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’”

According to an article in PAW in 2012, when a baseball collector donated Berg’s papers to Princeton:

Berg straddled several worlds without being completely at home in any of them. The child of Jewish Russian immigrants, he was a social outsider in the WASPy Princeton of the early ’20s, but he was a true student-athlete who knew Sanskrit and a half-dozen other languages and was a star shortstop on the baseball team. The Brooklyn Robins signed Berg less than a month after graduation and put him in their lineup the next day.

Being Jewish and possible gay must have placed Berg on the far outskirts of the Princeton scene. But I wondered, he overlapped with Edgar for two years at Princeton; would they have have known each other? Was sports a connection? The inscrutable Berg kept his thoughts to himself.

Based on his PAW memorial, Edgar found his creative zest at Princeton and kept right on writing. He was on the editorial board of the Daily Princetonian, and was named “wittiest” and “most original” member of his class as a senior. He worked for an advertising firm after graduation and taught at Temple University. He then spent 20 years as an editor of the Saturday Evening Post, overseeing the “Postscripts” humor column among other duties. He edited the 1963 volume The Saturday Evening Post Reader of Sea Stories.

(And now, let's take a break to play a thrilling round of the six-degrees-of-Princeton-separation game. To start, one of Edgar's most esteemed classmates was George Kennan '25, the U.S. diplomat and author. According to one account quoted in Wikipedia, "Unaccustomed to the elite atmosphere of the Ivy League, the shy and introverted Kennan found his undergraduate years difficult and lonely." He served in diplomatic posts in Lisbon, London and Moscow at the same time Berg was attending to OSS matters in Europe. Kennan went on to have a monumental impact on U.S. foreign policy at the start of the Cold War. I'm bringing up Kennan because in September 1976, right after I reached Princeton, I attended a seminar on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, I think on the topic of "Solzhenitsyn as a Historian of 1917." That summer of 1976 I had been reading Kennan's books, owing to a blossoming interest in Soviet affairs, so I knew about him and recognized him. He asked some good questions. This fleeting brush with a world-historical figure who was a classmate of Day Edgar's remains one of my favorite Princeton memories.)

In Princeton Town merited extended comments in PAW’s issue of October 4, 1929, a few weeks before the stock market crash. Written by Julian Street, Jr. ‘25, it gives ample evidence that Edgar suffered the same academic perils as his characters:

His friends were my friends, his icebox was my icebox, and when he gave up cigarettes, as he did every day, the economy, what there was of it, was mine as well as his. . . . when, as a Senior, he emerged from the Midyears’ exams with the incongruous record of three First Groups and one abysmal flunk, imperiling his diploma, his anguish was my anguish. However, he managed to survive, and so did I, and when at last he clutched the precious sheepskin we shared a common joy . . . As Dean Gauss wrote from his summer home, “Day Edgar certainly knows his campus. He has picked his characters so engagingly and yet left them so human and so real that I might as well have been back on Nassau Street or in Nassau Hall.”

Street closes his remarks by saying that “In Princeton Town is sure to delight graduates of the University, and I believe it will also delight undergraduates, even though it makes them squirm a little. At all events, it will enable undergraduates to test their own appreciation of themselves.”

After finishing Edgar's book, I started researching other fictional portraits of Princeton. Other than seeing A Beautiful Mind, about mathematician John Nash *50, and Risky Business with Tom Cruise and Rebecca de Mornay, I haven't read or watched other entertainment about Princeton (my friends and I still quote to one another the Risky Business line "Princeton can use a guy like Joel," although we substitute our own names in there). The long orange-and-black line of fiction goes back to His Majesty, Myself, set in the 1840s and published in 1880 by William Mumford Baker 1846. In a precursor of Edgar's story "Snob's Progress," the book involves two cousins rooming together in Nassau Hall.

Inspired by Edgar's underappreciated look at the University, I might check out some novels to see how others look at the place and its quirks, charms and intrigues. This list gives an updated set of books and movies with a Princeton angle. And who knows, I may decide to try my hand at Princeton-flavored fiction, something along the lines of A Reunions Romance, with smoldering glances stolen under floppy orange-and-black hats during the P-rade.

Or maybe Tigers Against Robots, a sci-fi epic chronicling humanity's last stand against the self-replicating grey goo accidently unleashed by, um, the world's richest man (really, it was a good idea that just got out of hand and then self-delivered itself at no charge to consumers worldwide!). From a secret command center in the basement of Nassau Hall, a global brain trust led by George Schultz '42 along with an iron-willed Senator from Texas, a charismatic former First Lady, several Supreme Court Justices, the coach of the Super Bowl champion Dallas Cowboys, a couple of Nobel Prize winners, a beautiful and brainy actress and model known for her Calvins, the world's greatest author of chick lit, a retired FBI director looking for his next gig, and the holographic reincarnations of John Nash, Moe Berg and George Kennan plan a devastating but environmentally and culturally sensitive response using STEM concepts discovered in Woodrow Wilson School conference reports.

Together, they pool their superpowers to counterattack the unstoppable nanotechnology rolling up Route 1 from Trenton. In the climactic scene, they don their orange-and-black Kevlar beer jackets and matching bermuda shorts, climb into their armor-plated tiger-striped Reunions golf carts, set their plutonium phasers on "Beat Yale," make final donations to Annual Giving and bequests to the 1746 Society, and then roar into the ultimate conflagration while screaming, "Three cheers for Old Nassau!"

So, I'm glad I scooped up In Princeton Town when I had the chance. You never know from where inspiration may come. Thanks, Day Edgar '25.