Twenty-five or thirty years ago, probably at an in-law's, I pulled a copy of The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss from the shelves. I looked into it, evidently at Chapter 2, and put it back on the shelf. The scene of a callow teacher failing to dominate a class of boys simply did not interest me. I wonder now whether the form of the book, a small Modern Library hardback (as I recall it) had some effect.
I wonder this because I bought a paperback copy at Carpe Librum on Friday at lunch time, and finished it yesterday evening. The setting is curiously foreign--set all but entirely in America, among persons speaking recognizably American English--but largely in Episcopalian boarding schools, or among rich families who would send their sons to one. A fair number fall into the category of those one is glad not to have met. The narrator, a man aspiring to and eventually joining the Episcopalian clergy, is not prepossessing. Yet the novel carries one along.
Auchincloss wrote a memoir, which I read through at least once well before this. In the memoir he states that Frank Prescott, the rector, is based on the judge Learned Hand, not as some might have supposed Endicott Peabody, the founder of Groton. Peabody does make a cameo appearance in the novel, and gets a slighting mention. Clearly Peabody made a great impression on Auchincloss in his school days, but Auchincloss names Hand as the greatest man he had ever known.
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