More Loneliness

By John Skow

A GOOD SCHOOL

by Richard Yates

Delacorte; 192 pages; $8.95

Richard Yates is a good but doleful writer who once, titled a short-story collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. The stories were first-rate, but the title showed a kind of perverse bravado: You think you're miserable? Listen, I know more kinds of loneliness ... Well, he did and he does, and he adds a couple to the list in this impeccably written but rather dispirited novel of life at a mediocre Connecticut boys' school.

The time is 1943, and the knowledge that each senior class at Dorset Academy will be graduated to war unsettles schoolboy life, an uncertain state made even less secure because the school is in financial trouble. The most perceptive masters feel a sense of unreality about the place: Is this a real school, and are we really educating boys? Or is it all a halfhearted pretense? There is a certain staginess to the place; the grounds and buildings, donated by a rich and eccentric old lady are too grand for the modest faculty and student body. In addition the donor has imposed some peculiar conditions--evening dress must be worn at supper, for instance--that have never matured to become traditions. Boys and masters repeatedly assure one another that Dorset really is a good school.

There is material here for comedy, but laughing at the wretchedness of boarding schools is, as Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy indicates, an English literary tradition. Good writing by Americans about prep schools--The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss and A Separate Peace by John Knowles--is very serious indeed, perhaps because Americans are less comfortable with the idea of a separate, elitist education for the upper middle class. It is this sober-faced genre that Yates follows, at a distance. The tone of his novel is that of a man looking back wearily from middle age and thinking, "Ah well, it can't have been so very bad. We all survived, didn't we?"

What Yates provides is a very cautious and narrowly limited range of realism, but within that range he is expert. He describes the anguish of a lumpy, unathletic student who later redeems himself by becoming editor of the school paper, after he has been stripped and abused sexually by a gang of healthy fools: "Grove was set free and ran to his room, and for hours after that, alone in the darkness, he lay wondering how he was going to live the rest of his life." This is acute and poignant; so is the author's evocation of the gulf between the sexes, in a scene where the philandering French instructor realizes that he has grown tired of his mistress: "Did women realize how vulnerable, how pitiable that most prized and secret part of them could make them look, at moments like this? Probably so; they probably realized everything."

The reader senses an insufficiency, however. Staring unflinchingly at bad nerves and loneliness is admirable, but fearing to look at any other sort of human condition is not, and the cautiousness of Yates' writing comes very close to fear. -- John Skow

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