A Case of Forced Faith

THE RECTOR OF JUSTIN by Louis Auchincloss. 341 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $4.95.

After writing several urbane, rather thin novels about people with too much money, Louis Auchincloss has now written a much meatier novel about a man with too many morals: the puritanical headmaster of a New England boys' school.

Francis Prescott is about to retire after 55 years as rector of Justin Martyr school, and his life is narrated by people who have known him: students, teachers, family. For the leisurely first half of the book only his admirers comment on him, and they see him much as he sees himself: a man of rocklike integrity and boundless Christian charity. Says one ex-pupil: "His kindness was overwhelming, without ever being in the least sentimental; without even, perhaps, .being personal. He raised the great beaker of his hope to my lips like a communion cup and watched with grave countenance as I drank, and when he took it away, I knew that it was because I had had enough."

Strange Obsession. But eventually Prescott's detractors have their say. On the surface the old man is all assurance and firm faith, but Auchincloss neatly reveals, bit by bit, how forced that faith is. Prescott is a ferocious disciplinarian and moralist in order to cover his own numerous anxieties. He is strangely obsessed, for instance, with homosexuality. He encourages vicious hazing to make the boys "tough." All play is aggressively organized, and Prescott will not let the boys wander off anywhere in pairs. "I did not think a hundred examples of David and Jonathan were worth one of sodomy!" he thunders.

It gradually becomes evident that Prescott will move mountains for boys who accept his authority, but anyone who questions it is in for trouble. One wayward student locks the great man in his office, forcing him to make an undignified exit down a ladder from the window. An outraged Prescott takes his revenge by making a moral issue of the prank and ultimately hounds the boy to suicide.

Shrill Idealism. Perhaps in rebellion against tyrannical Daddy, Prescott's cynical, slatternly daughter Cordelia seduces one of his prize ex-pupils, Charley Strong, and shacks up with him in Paris. Poor Charley, missing one lung from shrapnel in World War I, has not long to live, and Cordelia genuinely loves him. But Prescott is determined to save them both. He pops up in Paris "at his most ebullient, his most awful." He takes over Charley and ousts Cordelia. When Charley dies, it is in Prescott's, not Cordelia's arms, and it is clear that Prescott has replaced everyone, including God, in Charley's affections. In a final fervid confession Charley writes of his headmaster: "He it was who baptized and confirmed me, he who talked to me of my doubts and miseries, he who gave me a love that made the shallow, prattling love of shallow, prattling parents seem like spray on one's face in a speedboat at sea. Yes, hope is only in him. Redemption is only in him."

Is Prescott's Justin a "Garden of Eden," as one student believes, or a place of "little shrill idealism," as another thinks? The reader can take his choice though Auchincloss, who apparently enjoyed his own tutelage at Groton, emphasizes the shrillness. Auchincloss is careful to disassociate his hero-headmaster from any real-life counterpart like Groton's Endicott Peabody, but Old Boys everywhere will nevertheless recognize the rector as a familiar enough type. Auchincloss may seem to have expended too much sound and fury over something so small in the universe as a prep school; a crazed old man like Lear (upon whom Prescott was obviously modeled) was at least a king. But Auchincloss writes in the manner of Henry James, finding great moral dilemmas in small events. Ever since James, novelists have delighted in exposing the ambiguities in the most high-minded behavior, and Prescott is the latest in a long line of puritans to take a beating.

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