One More Young Man

THIS IS THE SCHOOLROOM--Nicholas Monsarrat--Knopf ($2.50).

This novel's first sentence is: "I was unusually drunk the night my father died." The speaker is Marcus Hendrycks, a 21-year-old Cambridge undergraduate, reeking rich. He proceeds to paint a sharper-than-average picture of gambling, snobbery and alcoholism among the more gilded British collegians. At the end of his wild night he finds that his father is not only dead but bankrupt and that his real life has begun. On thin savings he subsists for a while in a shabby-genteel London boardinghouse, at length moves on to the full depth of the slums.

Meanwhile his brain has come to life. Everything in his experience feeds it; boardinghouse friends give it exercise. Into one ear an elderly doctor pours disenchanted liberalism; into the other an intense schoolteacher pours Communism.

For a time Communism wins hands down -- enough so that he goes to fight in Spain.

There, finding that he has rather enjoyed killing four men, he is shocked out of his faith in violence or in anything else. He returns to London, is picked up by some "adult Bohemians." At the end he is on the verge of rebuilding the world through a Gloucestershire bacon-cooperative and handicraft-eisteddfod. World War II interrupts these frowsy plans, ends this "record of what many young men in England thought and experienced during the latter half of the vanished '30s."

This Is the Schoolroom, in short, is one more of those novels in which a young man tells of his education, his quest for a meaning and a course in life. If the young man is intelligent enough or alive enough, such a story can have extraordinary power and significance. Since Marcus Hendrycks is not, his tale is rather a social document than a work of thought or of art.

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