The Long Way Home

FISH FLYING THROUGH AIR [31 I pp.)

Roswell G. Ham Jr.--Putnam ($3.95).

A fellow's sister was sort of sacred when Frank Merriwell went to Yale. There have been changes since. Cramming on summer vacation from Hawley School, A.D. 1935, future Yaleman McGough, G. F. turned to future Yaleman Baxter, C. K. and said: "Now, about this sister of yours, Baxter. Which does she prefer, rape or seduction?"

In the course of making clear that Louise Baxter prefers seduction, or thinks she does, Novelist Roswell G. Ham Jr. makes clear a lot of other things. In Britain, by long tradition the novelist cuts his teeth on the old school in order to bite the hand that birched him, but the school novel is a comparative rarity in U.S. letters. A British boyhood is a Spartan affair which leads the long-suffering young to literary self-defense against their elders; while in the U.S. the young are coddled and it is the elders who must display Spartan fortitude.

At Hawley, a medium-posh Connecticut prep school, the thoughts of youth are wrong, wrong thoughts, and the masters are "worn and cynical far beyond their years." Pupils are not, as at nearby Hotchkiss, "under oath" to abstain from smoking; Hawley's "deadly droops" (a Hotchkiss epithet) are merely forbidden this pleasure. For characters like Baxter (an outcast because he arrived from the West Coast, of all places, in a brown suit and porkpie hat) and for McGough (who suffers the crippling handicap of being the headmaster's son), there is only one thing to do at Hawley--defeat Hawley. They nearly succeed. A pipe is shot from the mouth of a bird-watching master, the dorm-to-chapel sprint record is broken, and the "discriminatory practices" of the old against the young in the matters of sex and summer are defeated. As the two cronies weasel their way to Yale and through the R.C.A.F., there emerges a portrait of that very special generation, not lost but somehow mislaid between the Depression and World War II.

Taps for George. The special quality of the book lies in the character of George McGough (pronounced McGoo), archetype of all overprivileged rebels without a cause. His doctrine is personal survival. They're out to get us; boy, one and all ... They fill the air with boomerangs. It's up to us to see they miss, no matter how." His personal style is unmistakable, reaching in places to the wonderful idiosyncrasy of J. D. Salinger's hero of The Catcher in the Rye. He has youth's uncertain arrogance ("Girls drool over me") and its superstitions (a jigger of beer drunk at 15-minute intervals will make you drunk) and its wisdom: "It's what you call things that matter to families."

McGough's comic skirmishes in the war between the sexes and the generations are climaxed by a ritual hatred of Skull and Bones--to him a mausoleum in which is embalmed the spirit of Yaledom. His career at Yale ends on the great day that Edmund Wilson hymned in a parody of Yaleman-Poet Archibald MacLeish:

There were elms in that place: and

graven inflexible laws:

Men of Yale: and the shudder of

Tap Day . . . Winning a way through the door in the

windowless walls . . .

George batters that door with a sledge hammer and is tapped out of Yale.

Paradoxical Moral. Author Ham, 38, seems to have followed his own life closely in the book--he too is the son of an educator (his father is president of Mount Holyoke College), he too bounced in and out of Hotchkiss, Yale and the R.C.A.F. As a result, much of the book has the charm, but sometimes also the limited private meaning, of reminiscences over the third martini between balding alumni. But. apart from being on the whole immensely amusing, the book carries a paradoxical and completely unpreachy moral: the longest way around is the shortest way home. Those who at first appear to be against God, Country and Yale in the end do well by all three. At one time it appears as if the only letters McGough and Baxter are likely to win in life are four-letter ones, but Baxter (like Author Ham) becomes an insurance salesman and McGough winds up amid semi-rustic bliss in Westport, Conn. There is a suitable epitaph on the abortive revolt of the generation of the '30s when the once-terrible McGough asks: "You want to see our cow, Baxter?'' Where are the sledge hammers of yesteryear?

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