Big-City Documentary

TOMBOY (215 pp.) -- Hal Ellson --Scribner ($2.75).

Life in the Harps, a teen-age Manhattan slum gang, was as rigidly hierarchical as in a primitive tribe. When the president wanted to issue a command, his personal stooge called the gang to attention by shouting "Time! Time!" If a fellow had his initials scratched on the arm of a deb (a girl member), no other Harp was allowed to touch her until she formally declared that she was through with him. Modeling themselves after such movie heroes as Alan Ladd ("The way he beats his women! He stomps them"), the Harps treated their debs with elaborately casual brutality.

During the hot, muggy summers the Harps never knew what to do with themselves. They wandered the streets at night, robbing stores and jumping drunks. They fought with neighboring gangs, ostensibly because their territory had been invaded, but mostly because they were bored and unhappy. All the while they lived by the code of the adolescent lower depths: never show fear, always act tough.

"That Stuff." This is the gruesome world of Tomboy, a novel with the stiff and one-dimensional authenticity of a social worker's report. Every incident in the book, says Author Ellson, is true, based on material he collected while working as a "recreational therapist" with young delinquents in New York City.

At the center of Ellson's novel stands Tomboy, the leader of the girl Harps. On the surface she is hard and violent, able to beat up many of the boys in the gang, slick at robbery and negotiating with fences. Actually, she is a confused and wounded child. She hates her home because her father drinks and her stepmother scolds. She resents being a girl, she mistreats the other girls when they attract the boys, she scorns love movies because "that stuff gets me sick all the time."

Tomboy's one friend is Mick, the most timid boy in the gang. When he is killed in a robbery, Tomboy is left alone in a world of fear and violence. At the novel's end, she is hopping a freight car to get away from the police.

Miniature Mobsters. Despite its fascinating subject, Tomboy is no great shakes as a novel. Its surface action is credible enough, but when Therapist-Novelist Ellson tries to explain what makes his little hoodlums run, he is much too pat and predictable. Unlike such other slum novelists as James T. Farrell (Studs Lonigan) and Nelson Algren (The Man with the Golden Arm), he lacks the gift for individualizing his miniature mobsters and thereby arousing sympathy for them. The chances are that Ellson, who is a better reporter than novelist, would have done just as well to turn his notes into a straight, big-city documentary. The reader, if he likes, can do that as he reads.

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