Dangerous Season

WINTER TERM -- John Harriman --Howell, Soskin ($2.50).

Winter term is the danger term in any boarding school. John Harriman's top-ranking New England prep school is no exception. His third formers, all about 14, are also at danger term. They start with talk about a hunger strike against the saltpeter in the mashed potatoes, move on into persecution of a weak, homesick child named Emery. As their pubescent restiveness mounts they are caught up in a wave of sadistic evangelism and in their efforts to spread the gospel of "cleanness and hardness," strip the weakling before an open window, force him to repeat the Apostles' Creed. Other developments: abortive homosexuality; a movement to crucify a boy who is suspected of being a Jew; ruinous invention of rumors about English Master George Toppan's misconduct with the headmaster's niece.

With this childish underworld the teachers are unable to cope. The headmaster is enslaved to "the good of the school." Old Harbon, Coach Brittling and Mr. Feetling represent those faculty constants, the living corpse, the bullnecked coward, the moderately well-meaning ass.

Even Toppan, the best of them, can scarcely establish connection with the most intelligent of his boys. The implied conclusion: boarding schools, as an environment, are favorable chiefly to dolts and safe-players.

Author Harriman, son of Broker Oliver Harriman, prepped at St. Mark's, Southboro. Neither dolt nor safe-player himself, in 1930 he announced from a jury box that under no circumstances would he vote for conviction in a prohibition case. The unnamed school in this, his first novel, need not be St. Mark's. His Winter Term need not be compared to such first-rate treatment of adolescents as Gide's in The Counterfeiters. But it is intelligent, humorous, sympathetic, in spots if not in toto should ring chapel bells for former inmates of the hundreds of institutions he suggests.

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