Scatterfield Gang

Compared with the tough kids of contemporary fiction, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer were cherubs. But the contrast is more apparent than real; portrayed with James Farrell's pimpled candor, Huck Finn would undoubtedly be just as taboo for adolescent libraries as Studs Lonigan. Well aware of this fact are grownups who grew up in Midwest small towns. But few of them have admitted as much in print.

Inn of That Journey (Caxton, $2.50), the first novel of a 36-year-old Ohioan named Emerson Price, is a sample of such realism--a transcript of back-alley life, swimming-hole conversation, and those other phases of their private lives which sons conceal from their parents.

Soap Dodger Pendleton, leader of the Scatterfield gang, was the junkman's son, a blond, dirty, resourceful brat who spat tobacco juice in the ink wells. He devised ingenious persecutions for teachers' pets and snitches and for most grownups except old German Lew, who gave the gang beer, and old Charlie Heston, a drunken, ironic ex-astronomer who rhapsodized over ugly, muddy Scatterfield, which he called the Roman Empire.

To the preacher who asked him "What might your name be, little man?" Soap Dodger answered, "It might be Jesus Christ, but it hain't." He never whimpered, not even when his old man laid him cold, and he was first of the gang to find out about sex at first hand. Such accomplishments and wisdom ranked high with his followers: Wickie Winters, scabby-faced, half-dressed, half-wit son of a washerwoman; Cockie Werner, whose only talent was catching frogs; Nutsie Doane, also ordinary, except for a crooked arm, the result of having a broken arm re-broken by his drunken old man.

Among this gang Mark Cullen was handicapped by his size and social position. He was a skinny, frail moppet, whose father was rural superintendent of schools. But he had plenty of nerve, and on Hallowe'en night (one of the funniest as well as the least printable episodes in the book), or on their petty thieving raids, Mark was as tough as the rest.

Although Inn of That Journey is far more candidly documented than Huckleberry Finn, it lacks something else for which its candor does not compensate: the literary verve of Mark Twain.

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