Peace Breaks Out

...He is a liar and a manipulator, a witch-hunting ideologue who, as editor of the Devonian, as part of his campaign to protect Devon from foreign "isms," maneuvers the student body into dedicating a stained glass window in the chapel to the alumni war dead-then secretly smashes it himself to shift blame onto a boy with a German name...

...Although Knowles, in another departure from A Separate Peace, tells the story from the point of view of the omniscient observer and we therefore know a little more than Hallam about what goes on in the students' minds, he serves as the author's limited interpretive window into this remote world where small events assume large proportions...

...When the god-like Phineas died we were allowed to weep...

...But, on another level, it tried to say something about the effects of the war in 1942 on the otherwise isolated behavior of boys who, within a few years, might lie dead on Anzio or I wo Jima sands...

...Clearly Knowles has made his victim a Nazi rather than a sympathetic leftist because he wants us to deal with his case abstractly-as an example of what American respect for the free individual requires...

...In one sense, the story centers on Hallam, a fugitive from his broken marriage and his memories of the war...

...It is clear to their masters and a number of others that the boys are lying about what happened...

...And, like the beaten veterans in Henry James, Hemingway and Mailer, he carries his wound-a still-painful shrapnel-shattered left leg, symbolic of the continuing destructive moral impact of the war on a civilian society which might otherwise seem to have survived...

...Here is the ultimately stunning power of Knowles's book...

...This time Knowles would have us believe that the boys are disoriented not by fear of death but by guilt over not having faced death with the classes who had graduated during the past four years...

...But with a difference...

...We know that, historically, young men from Knowles's class at Phillips Exeter-the Devon of Gene and Phineas-went on to serve John Kennedy on the New Frontier...

...Now, twenty-one years later, in Peace Breaks Out, like many a writer whose later novels have not caught on as well as the first, Knowles has returned to the source of his first inspiration...

...Was the deep, unacknowledged fear of far-off, violent death in battle in some way responsible for the ultimately deadly violence- cloaked and legitimized in prep school ritual -of these young men...

...The class of '46 graduates "in the soft and steady radiance of New Hampshire in June," and goes on first to Harvard and then to their bank presidencies, editorships, and seats in the Senate...

...Eric, who has a weak heart, passes out and dies in the infirmary...

...Virtually alone among Devon boys Wexford was sallow-a lounge lizard, bookworm, pianist, smoker, palaverer, debater, away-from-school drinker, and rumor had it secret drinker as well...

...On one level-the level most responsible for its popularity-A Separate Peace was a love story, a tale of adolescent male friendship...

...Four fine young men, with the faces of Eagle Scouts, inspired by Wex-ford's insinuations, pursue him in canoes, beat him, and hold him under water to force him to confess breaking the window...

...Some of them transform this guilt into that strain of neo-fascist patriotism that Mailer, in The Naked and the Dead, warned would contaminate postwar American society, which thrived in McCarthyism, and which lives on today in the authoritarian righteousness of the right...

...One spring afternoon Eric, a solitary Thoreau listening to a Prussian drummer,' rows his single scull up the Devon River...

...coach, and proctor Pembroke House where the athletes live...

...Pete Hallam says goodbye to Wexford knowing that Devon has unleashed a monster...

...Many of the same elements are at work: the lovely evocations of New England winters and ski trips, the cult of popularity among the boys and the indulgence of their masters, the mysterious chemistry of high school affections and rivalries, the athletic challenges that supposedly establish manhood, and the pervading presence of the war...

...He does not reflect on the fact-and the reader, like the reader of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, almost forgets - that the establishment has covered up a murder...

...There is no proper investigation...

...If we can accept the idea that there might be an overt Hitler sympathizer at America's "second best" exclusive prep school in 1945, then we can probably accept his role in the novel, as a test case on the quality of democracy and the reality of freedom in America's ruling class...

...Meanwhile, the novel's tension springs from the plottings of Wexford, son of a Roosevelt-hating millionaire family with homes in Brooklyn Heights, Cape Cod, and Palm Beach...

...When Eric Hochschwender is destroyed by an extension of some of the same impulses we are supposed to ask questions about America...

...Raymond Schroth THE STRANGE power of A Separate Peace, John Knowles's illusive little 1960 classic which those of us who taught high school in the early '60s so loved to assign to and discuss with our classes, came from its ambiguity-the fleeting sense that beneath the story of the affectionate rivalry unto death of two Devon, New Hampshire, preppies during World War II was another story, and yet another, lurking: some clue about the bizarre embrace of love and aggression within every man- and boy...

...Along with its commentary on original sin-that unnamed violent impulse that led Gene to shake that now famous limb from which his friend Phineas was about to dive into the Devon River-the central lesson was the same one that Frederick Henry had learned in A Farewell to Arms: that there is no "separate peace," that a world war spares no one, that it pursues its victims to a maternity ward in Switzerland and to a snow-bound New England prep school as well...

...It is 1945 and young Pete Hallam, Devon '37 and Dartmouth '41, who has survived the Italian campaign where he witnesses the bombing of Monte Cassino, a German prison camp, and a dear-John letter from his wife, arrives at Devon to teach history (without an MA...

...To present the rigid, blond, disdainful Eric Hochschwender, who defiantly spouts Nazi theories in history class, as his sacrificial victim is Knowles's imaginative risk...

...Now Knowles reminds us how the same class structure and educational system planted the seeds of Vietnam and Watergate, nurtured a rich and clever amoral journalist who is now, at 53, protecting us from an'' ism,'' and drowned the very notion of freedom a school is dedicated to preserve...

...John Knowles seems to think so-or at least he wants us to think so, so his novel can have its effect...