The Leap

A SEPARATE PEACE (186 pp.)--John KnovWes--Macm/7/an ($3.50).

This excellent first nov.el is remarkable not only for the virtues it possesses but for the faults it lacks. There is little of the melodrama customary in books about adolescence. There is no Wolfeian confluence of the literary and the pituitary--the youthful poet growing an inch a month on a diet of a book a day. The author is no more sentimental or romantic about his hero than Stephen Crane was about the protagonist of The Red Badge of Courage. The books are similar in kind and (to a considerable extent) in quality: Author Crane's young soldier had to endure the discovery of fear, and Author Knowles's schoolboy must face the discovery of hatred--a bitter and homicidal knot of hatred in himself.

Compulsion. It is the summer of 1942, and at Devon School in New Hampshire, the war has widened the gap between classes. The 17-year-old seniors, who will be drafted within a year, grunt ferociously at their military calisthenics and practice the set of their jaws. But Gene

Forrester and the rest of the 16-year-olds, two years away from soldiering and left to themselves by a lackadaisical summer-session faculty, idle away the last of their childhood. Their leader, Gene's roommate, is a wild, laughing youth named Phineas. He is the best athlete in the school, a boy of immense grace, no more capable of an awkward movement than is a cat.

Gene is a clever student, and Phineas laughs his way to a C average, but Gene takes no comfort from his crumb of superiority. His friend's perfection galls him. Worse, Phineas has begun to prod Gene to follow him in nonsensical feats of daring. The athlete fearlessly climbs a tall tree by a riverbank, walks the length of a limb, and leaps far out into safe, deep water. Gene queasily repeats the stunt, and bitterly resents the compulsion that makes him do it. Soon Gene comes to suspect that everything Phineas does is calculated to humiliate him.

Innocence. One night Phineas has a new idea--a double leap. The boys climb the tree. Phineas balances jauntily on the limb, and Gene grimly clutches the trunk.. Abruptly the athlete falls. In the minutes that follow, as Phineas is carried to the infirmary with a shattered leg, P:Gene tries to shut away a terrifying fact: in an instant of hatred, he had jounced the limb his friend was standing on.

The summer ends, and the war comes nearer. The crippled Phineas returns to Devon School, announces gaily that the war is a fraud, and begins training the tormented Gene for the 1944 Olympics. But what happened in the tree obtrudes ike the maimed athlete's dragging leg. In a weird kangaroo court, even Phineas is made to accept the truth. He staggers out of the room, breaks his leg in another fall, and this time dies. "My war ended before I ever put on a uniform," Gene reflects. "I was on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there."

To insist on a single explication for a book as subtle and brilliant as Author Knowles's would be idle. But one of the things the novelist seems to be saying is that the enemy Gene killed, and loved, is the one every man must kill: his own youth, the innocence that burns too hotly to be endured.

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