The Bulldog Breed

WHO TOOK THE GOLD AWAY by John Leggett. 468 pages. Random House. $6.95.

There are two sides to the generation gap. Just as there are graybeards over 30 who don't know where it's at, there are peach fuzzes barely 20 who haven't the foggiest of where it used to be. Take the traditional college experience, for example. The fiercest barricades used to be social, not political--because the politics were personal, not ideological. It was more important to get in with the right people than get on with the struggle against an unjust world. The results, in those days, were relationships that were both sturdy and slightly sick.

Consider the case of Ben Moseley and Pierce Jay. Both are Yalemen, both class of '42. Ben is a scholarship student from a public high school in Providence, Pierce a cosmopolitan product of the church school system. Ben is quiet, competent, dullish; he studies and plods and runs the campus laundry. Pierce is flamboyant, brilliant, a dazzler in every way; he downs his drinks with gusto, drives fast cars and is the spunky campus cutup.

As sharp opposites, Pierce and Ben naturally attract each other. They become roommates, try out together for the News, join the same club (Fence). But like so many good friends they are also bad friends, out to destroy as much as to enhance each other. Ben secretly ruins Pierce's chance to become chairman of the News. Pierce makes clandestine love to Ben's virginal girl friend.

Domestic Explosion. All of this is literally the stuff of an old-school novel. Author Leggett (class of '42) remembers prewar Yale, from a Tap Day at Branford Court to any day in the heelers' room of the Oldest College Daily. He tells it with marvelous class and considerable spit and polish. He also manages to launch his dual heroes upon a Marquandish stream of life.

After separation in the war, the destructive bonds of friendship are renewed when the two marry girls who know each other. Domestic explosion conies during a cruise off the rocky shores of Maine, when Ben--almost inevitably--beds down with Pierce's wife.

The remarkable creation within this workmanlike and well-modulated narrative is the character of Pierce. Steadfastly carrying a belief in the heroic pattern of life "like a shiny coin in his pocket," he represents a Hemingway-esque hero as seen through a Fitzgerald lens. His relationship with Ben is something far more complex than a simple boy-meets-boy story. As Pierce's wife observes to Ben just before the denouement: "What a curious pair you are, you two. I used to think the relationships between women were complicated, but they're nothing to what goes on between a couple of old Blues, are they?"

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