Segal the Scholar

Erich Segal, facile author of Love Story, is currently dashing off two movies and a Broadway musical. The writing that most concerns him, though, is strictly academic. Because he still lacks tenure as a Yale professor of comparative literature and classics, Segal, 33, is toiling to polish the image of his less celebrated alter ego, Segal the Scholar.

Segal's Yale colleagues have mixed envy of his worldly success with insinuations that he is neglecting scholarship, or at least scholarly dignity. Stung, Segal flew to Florida last week to join a group of classics professors in a solemn symposium on "The Spirit of Comedy." He also booked himself for a panel discussion on the problems of translation to be held in early April at the American Comparative Literature Association's annual meeting at Yale. This week he declined an invitation from no less than Queen Elizabeth to attend a Royal Command Performance of the film Love Story in London. The date conflicted with the regular Monday lecture in his jammed introductory course on ancient comedy.

Franks and Beans. "I am what I always was--an academic," Segal insists. "It's the most important thing I do. Hell, is it a crime to appear on television?" After writing the Beatles' movie Yellow Submarine, he says, "I became financially well-off and could have spent the rest of my life around a Hollywood swimming pool writing screenplays. But I didn't. No dolce vita for me. I even still cook my franks and beans after my evening seminar in my own cubbyhole of a kitchen." Segal carries a full load of graduate and undergraduate teaching and keeps up his scholarly writing. His specialty is another pop playwright, the Roman Plautus.

Professor's Price. In the past three years, Segal has written several book reviews for scholarly journals, edited a collection of critical essays about Euripides, translated three plays by Plautus. and finished proofing the galleys' of his new work, a study of comedy that sweeps through 24 centuries from Aristophanes to Beckett. In the works: an analysis of Terence, ancient Rome's second most popular author of comedies.

Segal's prolific publishing is probably more than enough to keep him from perishing when the faculty votes on his tenure next summer. Still, he declaimed heroically last week, "If the price of being a professor is never daring to write another Love Story, I will pay the price. I won't write another word of fiction until June."

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