The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

WHAT is learned in high school,” writes EDGAR Z. FRIEDENBERG in his sympathetic study of adolescence, COMING OK AGE IN AMERICA (Random House, $5.95), “or for that matter anywhere at all, depends far less on what is taught than on what one actually experiences in the place.” When, a few pages later, he alludes to “the hostility to ‘teen-agers’ and the anxiety about their conduct that abound in our society,” I was hooked. How, f began to wonder, do the attitudes and conditions which he is measuring in his inquiry compare with what I experienced in the Battin High School, from which I graduated in 1915?

I remember three of my teachers, all of them women: Miss Maude Emery, who taught senior history so well that we enjoyed it; Miss Kate Warner, the disciplinarian, who drilled us in the discipline of syntax; and third, my teacher in German, Miss Elise Degenring, whose agitation increased through the year as she felt our hostility rising toward her foster country.

But Mr. Friedenberg is right; it was not so much what I learned as what I experienced at Battin that made the difference. For I remember the school as a friendly community which made me welcome despite the odds: I was a runt and of no use whatever in athletics; what is more, I was a transfer, coming to Battin as a senior from its bitterest rival, Pingry, a private school from which I had every expectation of graduating until my father’s business went sour. All through that fall as the emotions mounted for the big game on Thanksgiving Day, my classmates knew where my sympathies lay — I would have been manager of football at Pingry — and it never seemed to matter. After the game, in which Battin was defeated, I began to move up in the high school community, compensating, as runts will, for what they cannot do in sports. I played the part of a wizened hypochondriac in the school play and was surprised by the laughs I got. I was surprised again when I heard myself being elected one of the presiding officers of the school assembly. (This was one of our pleasantest diversions. We pledged allegiance, we sang, and we listened to visitors, such as Wally Trumbull, Harvard’s football captain, whom I introduced.) I wrote the only short story to be published in our yearbook, and on graduation I was praised for being the school comedian. The year had begun with bitter disappointment; it ended with my being grateful for the way they had taken me in.

I realize that in the age of innocence I am describing, when girls wore dresses and boys wore neckties every day, there were very few broken homes, and the school did not stand as it stands today, in loco parentis. There was no need of supervision in the corridors when we changed classes. It never occurred to us to deface the school; as for sex, there was one Romeo who boasted about his prowess on the fire escape, but no one seriously believed him. In my remembrance of that school community, there was latitude and a minimum of repression. The student could plug away for his college scholarship. A neat dresser like myself, who went in for striped ties, was tolerated. The Woodruff brothers wenpopular because they were good guys as well as good athletes. The pressure to conform was applied to us by our parents far more than by our teachers.

The high school society which Dr. Friedenberg has been exploring, together with his collaborators, Carl Nordstrom and Hilary Gold, both professors at Brooklyn College, differs sharply from what I recall. The trio selected nine high schools, all but one coeducational, two in the South, and only one strictly suburban. One of the nine had an enrollment about 70 percent Negro, and another served what the author calls “a fashionable exurb.” From these schools, students were drawn by lot from the three upper classes and were paid to comment on a series of fictitious episodes which were supposed to have occurred at LeMoyen High, a school comparable with their own. Some of these Gallup-poll stories are fairly simple, as, for instance, the fourth a king of a

country the size of Denmark is coming to visit LeMoyen, and the problem is to choose, from a dozen leading seniors, each carefully described, the two or three best qualified to meet him. Others are rigged with too much subtlety: the story of the LeMoyen basketball tram is so deceptively simple that the kids gave jl a natural, healthy answer and went on to the next, while the story about Alan Slade and his friends, with its implication of homosexuality, would have passed right over the heads of my generation, as it did over the heads of most of those questioned.

In his search for the values which adolescents of today hold dear, Dr, Friedenberg is repeatedly dismayed by “the averageness and well-roundedness” which they esteem. But I wonder if this is really any different from what seniors in 1915, whether at Baltin or at Yale, would have had in mind when they voted for the Man Most Likely to Succeed. Again, I think he underestimates the tendency of students in the face of awe-inspiring sociologists to cover up and to give the safe answer rather than the daring one. As in the Kinsey Report, one must season these findings with one’s own salt. Dr. Friedenberg is forthright and at times naive in proclaiming his own values. He postulates die desirability of having a more aristocratic standard in the school, which is all very well, but his citation of modern gentlemen is absurdly limited. When he says, dogmatically, that “schools are not primarily instruments for the redress of social and economic grievances,” he protects himself with “primarily” but seems to overlook what the high school has become ever since we began filling the melting pot.

Even so, there are plenty of shocks in this book for the conscientious parent, and not least from the interior picture of the high school which emerges. It is appalling to think of so much repression and regulation: the steel cage that descends on the cafeteria, lunch over, through whose gate at the sound of a buzzer the students file to their classrooms, the almost punitive locking up of the toilets, and the snooping for any trace of tobacco or sex; the rules devised for the convenience of the teacher rather than for the improvement of the pupil. All this cannot help breeding defiance, I do not share the Doctor’s fear that automation will exterminate the middle class, but on his evidence I quite agree that the American high school is a poor substitute for good parents.

NOTES FROM A SEA DIARY: HEMINGWAY ALL THE WAY by NELSON ALGREN (Putnam’s, $4.50) is a disarming title for what is really a diatribe within a narrative. The voyage described is, I take it, a synthesis of several, taken on a freighter by Mr. Algren as the only paying guest among what is — to say the least - a motley crew. The author’s companions include Mr. Manning, the mysterious purser; Crooked-Neck Smith, thirty-eight, an extraordinary seaman who runs the crooked poker game, suffers from boils and the clap, and is never without a woman ashore; Chips, the ship’s carpenter, who has had thirty years of exposure to Southeast Asia; and Sparks Concannon, the radio operator whom the author is almost ready to trust. The voyage begins in the 1950s, stops at Havana, where the author pays a visit to Hemingway, and then meanders on to Korea, Kowloon, and into the heat of India.

Mr. Algren writes a prose that can be biting, bawdy, disgusting, and hilarious, but never dull. His dialogue is as tough as it is funny, and those passages in which he takes off Quong, the Chinese deckhand, or Crooked-Neck Smith in one of his deadpan fantasies bring tears to the eyes. Woven in and out of the doings aboard ship or in harbor is Algren’s affirmation of Hemingway: he holds that Hemingway was the finest writer of our time, with which I agree, and that the detractors, especially the academic critics, show themselves as pygmies in their effort to cut Hemingway down. With Dwight Macdonald, whom he calls “a domestic peacock,” with Leon Edel, Burton Rascoc, and the others, he quotes first the critic and then some finer passages of Hemingway’s, and with a powerful blast of ridicule, he shows up the inaccuracy and the spleen of the critics.

There are plenty of good things in this book, some of them flavored with the bouquet of the Old Master himself. They go ashore at Kowloon to buy Japanese transistors, and the scene opens just as it should: “When we stepped onto the Public Pier, the heat hit us straight out of the airless vault of a Chinese slum - and straight down into that vault we went.” I only half believe in Crooked-Neck Smith, but his poker games, the account of how he fought under his own Marquis of Kingsbury rules, and bis adventures in semi-pro ball are worth reading aloud. The description of Calcutta has power and smell and tawdriness, and I continually look forward to those passages in which the author unabashedly affirms his faith in the American writers that matter.

There are plenty of irritants too, most noticeably the bars and the brothels which the crew visit and of which in time I become tired.