Tales out of School

Not all men remember their "good old golden rule days" as either golden or good; but almost all seem to love to tell about them. In an anthology out last week, two longtime schoolmasters--ex-Headmaster Claude M. Fuess and Teacher Emory S. Basford of Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass.--have made a scrapbook collection of the tales some 100 famous men have told, over the ages, out of school.

Unseen Harvests: A Treasury of Teaching (Macmillan; $5) covers everything from Confucius' China to James Thurber's U.S.A., in poems, essays, snitches from novels and snatches of conversation ("There is now less flogging in our great schools," complained Sam Johnson, "but then, there is less learned there; so that what the boys get at one end, they lose at the other"). But most of the chapters are rather unhappy reminiscences.

"Od's My Life." Charles Lamb was sent to Christ's Hospital, a London charity school. Thirty-five years later, he wrote of a headmaster: "He had two wigs. The one serene, smiling, freshly powdered, betokening a mild day. The other, an old discolored caxon, denoting frequent and bloody execution. Nothing was more common than to see him make a headlong entry into the schoolroom and with turbulent eye, singling out a lad, roar out, 'Od's my life, Sirrah, I have a great mind to whip you,'--then, with as sudden a retracting impulse, fling back into his lair, and after a cooling lapse of some minutes . . . drive headlong out again . . . with the expletory yell--'and I WILL too'!"

At Godolphin School in Hammersmith, Irish Poet W. B. Yeats was known among his English classmates as "mad Yeats." The school, he wrote, "was an obscene bullying place, where a big boy would hit a small boy in the wind to see him double up, and where certain boys, too young for any emotion of sex, would sing the dirty songs of the streets. . . ."

"Awful Geniality." To Novelist Max Beerbohm, going back to school after a holiday was a perennial nightmare. "Those drives [to the station] have something, surely, akin to drowning. In their course, the whole of a boy's home life passes before his eyes." But worse yet was arriving: "The awful geniality of the House Master! The jugs in the dormitory! Next morning, the bell that woke me! . . ."

Historian Edward Gibbon considered the 14 months he spent at Oxford "the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life." And Henry Adams thought little more of Harvard: "Four years at Harvard College . . . resulted in an autobiographical blank, a mind on which only a watermark had been stamped."

Judging from the samplings in Unseen Harvests, students weren't the only unhappy ones. Stephen Leacock, who put in eight years as a Latin teacher before becoming an economics professor, recalled the unexpected meetings with former students ("Do you remember me," they always seemed to say, "You licked me at Upper Canada College"). More exasperating were pupils whose parents did their lessons for them: "I used to say to them: 'Paul, tell your father that he must use the ablative after pro.' " But there was always a bright spot, wrote Leacock. "It is the last day of school. . . . If every day in the life of a school could be the last, there would be little fault to find with it."

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