Rites of Passage
LEONARD, JOHN
WRITERS(C WRITING Rites of Passage By John Leonard Wilfrid Sheed's "long story and short novel" (The Blacking Factory and Pennsylvania Gothic, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 246 pp., $5.50) are both...
...the meek homosexual overtures and the aborted friendships...
...Again, urban specialists in "disrelation" and the various pornographic dysfunctions of the detached psyche may parse away at their puerilities: the theme of innocence corrupted, reversing presently popular orthodoxies of innocence and corruption: Mother England is a Big Bad Mother, etc...
...Thus Sheed's prologue ends and the story of young Bannister's sojourn begins...
...She had overplayed her hand seriously, telling him rubbish like that...
...The atmosphere is sketched in skillfully: "Jimmy became seriously aware of his clothes, item by item, of the sports coat with the comb sticking out of the breast pocket, of the two-tone shoes...
...As an admixture of the past and present, she is able to draw the poison from Charlie...
...She tells him the truth about his father, a truth that did not die with his father...
...The foreign thing is his English accent, which strikes the good citizens as strange, even when it says: "In this country, and especially in the West of this country, Christendom has been given a second chance...
...But I don't want to hear that it's the Baroness Rotternburg...
...the loss of a way of life which leaves its refugees a-historical, oddly unstrung, and quietly desperate in their attempt to camouflage the loss...
...Like the Catholic Church, Sheed deals "in various fever points...
...Charlie returns to Tewksbury, believing himself saved...
...He conceives of his killing her as a redemptive act...
...He embraced her for a long time and held her like a lover, and the poison ran out of his arms and buried itself in her...
...In "Pennsylvania Gothic," 12-year-old Charlie Trimble loses a fist-fight to a younger, smaller boy?his only friend in the Philadelphia exurb of Tewksbury...
...There is another old woman waiting for Charlie, next door...
...Among those points are the ambivalent nature of evil and the always compromising struggle for moral co-ordinates as we accommodate ourselves to death...
...depending on how he looks through the lens, the familiar is foreshortened or elongated, distortions of his sense of place and his sense of relevance...
...I'm talking about things like the corruption of the heart...
...The Jimmy who dropped out of history must nourish myth, even the myth of the American West—of simplicities and decencies and opennesses, hard work and honest relationships—and even though he might suspect the brutal potentialities of that myth...
...Sheed nails down his theme in the short novel that follows...
...The exhibitionists of alienation serve us less than those who, like Sheed, probe the very compost of which we are the dangerous flower...
...Trimble, Charlie's lawyer-father, who talks excitedly with his wife late at night, dark emotional arguments that Charlie, too much absorbed in his adolescent death-sulk, cannot understand...
...the room began to fill up with real furniture . . . and the official had thickness...
...This is uncompromising fiction...
...But Sheed cuts deep in this marvelous novella...
...But there is another element here as well, one which is perhaps uncongenial to urban literary critics: the embodiment in the land of basic rhythms of growth and decay...
...Leaving the school at the end of them was not unlike leaving the warmth of the bathroom...
...behavioral codes arising from cycles of time and family and locale...
...Her frosty fingers ground into the back of his skull...
...People talk about Europe's wonderful postwar recovery, but to me this is no more than the last twitch of a corpse...
...the strategies of youth—all are deftly rendered, imaginatively convincing...
...So "the two weeks he had dreaded so much were among the happiest he had ever spent...
...cynicism and snobbery and hypocrisy...
...Because Sheed is capable of modulating the grotesque instead of just embracing it, of sympathizing as well as describing, of re-creating man in and out of a social context while skewering the attitudes of aloneness, he makes ritual of his insight...
...He was still hunched against Miss Skinner and he could taste her wool cardigan...
...Theirs is a spiritual wrestling match: Miss Skinner drones on in the night of enormous empty houses, the past, meaningless social distinctions, and madness...
...His vacations home have a telescopic quality...
...A strange thing happens: "They pottered their way through all the subjects in the syllabus, and although he couldn't see that it was getting him any closer to the school certificate, Jimmy did at least begin to understand the headmaster's musty enthusiasm for learning: and, just in this peculiar context, even to share it a little...
...He must stay with the headmaster, "Dr...
...even though the born parishioners of it suspect his motives as a publicist...
...Trimble died in the waste of the river, Charlie is, at least partially, cleansed in Miss Skinner's river of time...
...And I certainly don't want to hear that it's her brother...
...Charlie and his mother journey to a new life in New York, "clean, white and gleaming...
...But Sheed is not about to let Charlie off that easily...
...Her hands were incredibly strong, as if they were indeed a dead woman's...
...The objects and images around him seem to conspire in his fantasizing: cold steel knives in a velvet box, spiders in the faucets, rusty swords, mossy sofas, green statuettes, glass figurines, poisonous leaves, a polluted river, even the lampstand on the second-floor landing of his house, "the old woman waiting . . . with a rope around her neck...
...Jimmy's mediocre performance in the classroom...
...No, I'm not talking about sex and I'm not talking about loose living...
...Death in "Pennsylvania Gothic" is omnipresent, not only in Charlie as he grows up and in Miss Skinner as she wastes away, but in Tewksbury itself...
...He wants to die...
...she, by dying naturally as he stands above her with a knife, triumphs over his impulse, releasing him from Tewksbury, childhood and darkness: "Trimble, Lord of Life...
...his specific and historical dislocation...
...When the end of the term, for which he has been abjectly waiting, finally arrives, he is further betrayed...
...WRITERS(C WRITING Rites of Passage By John Leonard Wilfrid Sheed's "long story and short novel" (The Blacking Factory and Pennsylvania Gothic, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 246 pp., $5.50) are both about the same thing: the rite of passage...
...After a perversely ambiguous dying fall, Sheed releases his readers too: "He sincerely believes that everything is going to work out...
...She is a witch, the prototypical androgyne, ageless?I myself have never left Tewksbury in three hundred years or more"—and sexless, a principle of energy combining life and death...
...Jimmy, seeking recognition, a place and a part to play, finds derisive laughter and fending-off black arms and a loss as painful to read about as it must be to experience...
...The spinster Miss Skinner receives him in the night...
...But not all truths are strictly urban...
...Charlie is posted to a private school, Brookshire, where he manages to lose that "trick" of boyishness, that innocent guile, which wins us forgiveness for our many crimes against intelligence and decency while we are young...
...Trimble has committed suicide by drowning himself in the polluted river he used to rage against...
...James Bannister is a sort of William Buckley manque: ". . . for all his charm, and his almost excessive politeness, there is this foreign thing about him that nags them...
...His father's new affair, the remoteness of his friends, the memory of monastic warmth, signal a singular psychological sea change: "He couldn't wait to get back to England...
...He tried to move and realized that he was pinioned to her...
...his loathing of the other "conspicuous" American (Smedley of the purple shirt and pretended dumbness and jazz-patter...
...It is fatal...
...Ashamed of himself, he wanders right into Shirley Jackson country...
...The passage is through history and myth to manhood, and it is a cruel one, and the agonists are wounded at the end...
...And he makes art of the rites he records...
...She's crazy, he thought...
...Sheed's "blacking factory" is England, the England remembered by an American Anglophobe operating a radio station in the Far West...
...On Miss Skinners' summons, however, he returns one last time to Tewksbury...
...Bannister's confrontation on the airwaves with a visiting English dignitary reveals that during World War II he attended a British school...
...There is still Miss Skinner, to whom Charlie ventures once more, to ask of the past and to exorcise it...
...The Blacking Factory" refers to the period when young Charles Dickens was removed from school and put to work in a dismal place—so dismal that he never mentioned the interlude to anyone for over 20 years...
...The America he returns to for the summer is entirely plastic, libidinally ferocious, of tennis togs and popcorn, vulgar laughter and regimented leisure...
...Like Charlie, the reader is prepared for the news the Brookshire headmaster finally brings: Mr...
...It is present in Mr...
...his sense of his father's betrayal...
...not even a father can die for us by proxy...
...his longing for the familiar...
...As to that, we shall just have to wait and see...
...Rabelais," for two more weeks of private tutoring...
...What does he want, what is he doing here...
...Miss Skinner knew the river before it was polluted, knew the town before it was poisoned at its source, before the industrial waste, before the repository of images and references was spoiled...
...He knows that his father had come to Miss Skinner before him, had lain like this...
...There, Sheed spares us nothing of the final embarrassment...
...Rabelais made it seem like an extension of The Times" they read at breakfast...
...I don't mind a girl in a bikini...
...whereas Mr...
...Those of us accustomed to a contemporary and urban alienation, an abstract and deracinated identity-woundedness, are bound to resist this cyclical loss and this play of shadows on the river...
...Pennsylvania Gothic" is, happily, not susceptible to the myth-shrinking exegeses of psychopathologists...
...Charlie is alternately comforted and trapped by the claims she makes upon him...
...Miss Skinner is dying, and the final hand of a terrifying game must be played out...
Vol. 51 • November 1968 • No. 21
