Word: mcgough
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...fellow's sister was sort of sacred when Frank Merriwell went to Yale. There have been changes since. Cramming on summer vacation from Hawley School, A.D. 1935, future Yaleman McGough, G. F. turned to future Yaleman Baxter, C. K. and said: "Now, about this sister of yours, Baxter. Which does she prefer, rape or seduction...
...nearby Hotchkiss, "under oath" to abstain from smoking; Hawley's "deadly droops" (a Hotchkiss epithet) are merely forbidden this pleasure. For characters like Baxter (an outcast because he arrived from the West Coast, of all places, in a brown suit and porkpie hat) and for McGough (who suffers the crippling handicap of being the headmaster's son), there is only one thing to do at Hawley-defeat Hawley. They nearly succeed. A pipe is shot from the mouth of a bird-watching master, the dorm-to-chapel sprint record is broken, and the "discriminatory practices...
Taps for George. The special quality of the book lies in the character of George McGough (pronounced McGoo), archetype of all overprivileged rebels without a cause. His doctrine is personal survival. They're out to get us; boy, one and all ... They fill the air with boomerangs. It's up to us to see they miss, no matter how." His personal style is unmistakable, reaching in places to the wonderful idiosyncrasy of J. D. Salinger's hero of The Catcher in the Rye. He has youth's uncertain arrogance ("Girls drool over me") and its superstitions...
...McGough's comic skirmishes in the war between the sexes and the generations are climaxed by a ritual hatred of Skull and Bones-to him a mausoleum in which is embalmed the spirit of Yaledom. His career at Yale ends on the great day that Edmund Wilson hymned in a parody of Yaleman-Poet Archibald MacLeish...
...amusing, the book carries a paradoxical and completely unpreachy moral: the longest way around is the shortest way home. Those who at first appear to be against God, Country and Yale in the end do well by all three. At one time it appears as if the only letters McGough and Baxter are likely to win in life are four-letter ones, but Baxter (like Author Ham) becomes an insurance salesman and McGough winds up amid semi-rustic bliss in Westport, Conn. There is a suitable epitaph on the abortive revolt of the generation of the '30s when...