Books: Sheed's Specters of the Past

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THE BLACKING FACTORY and PENNSYLVANIA GOTHIC by Wilfrid Sheed. 246 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.50.

When Charles Dickens was twelve, his debt-hounded family yanked him from school and sent him to work in a ratty London warehouse where blacking paste was made. His ordeal lasted only a few months, then he returned to school. But, as Wilfrid Sheed notes in a preface to this brace of new fiction pieces, a sense of shock and abandonment stayed with Dickens the rest of his life. He could not even bring himself to mention the episode until 25 years later, when he wrote bitterly of "the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless."

For the young protagonist of Sheed's feverish short novel, the equivalent of Dickens' blacking factory is a backwater English secondary school called Sopworth College. Jimmy Bannister, 15 and feckless, is suddenly uprooted from his American adolescence and packed off to Sopworth. Both menacing and seedy, Sopworth gives him an advanced course in the three Bs: boredom, bullying and befuddlement.

His interviews with the headmaster, a Waugh refugee nicknamed Dr. Rabelais, are symptomatic. The man seems plunged in a "burrow of vagueness." As Rabelais drones on in a voice reminiscent of "old curtains," Jimmy feels "woofed more and more tightly into an endless tapestry." The poor lad cannot tell whether his questions are being answered, or even remember exactly what the questions were. For consolation he flicks mentally through colored-slide images of the post-World War II America that he thinks he misses.

Suspended Sensibilities. But back home during summer vacation, Jimmy finds that the subjects of those slides shrink, blur and become distorted. He half realizes that he is beginning to see old friends, new cars, his father and the N.Y. Yankee., through the eyes of an English schoolboy. He decides that the world of tea and Sopworth isn't so bad after all—until his re-entry into it, when he is buffeted more harshly than ever. Crikey! Now his sensibilities are hopelessly suspended somewhere in mid-Atlantic.

In an agony of alienation from both the real America and the real England, he opts for comforting myth. Just before making a deranged attack on Dr. Rabelais, he embraces those colored slides once and for all, even though he knows they are "terrible, terrible lies."

Sheed has already disclosed in a prologue what all this leads to. In later life, James Bannister becomes owner and resident propagandist of two right-wing radio stations in California. Aloof and "Eastern" in the West, he fervently eulogizes his conception of a departed America while railing against English decadence in an incurable English accent. But Sheed's tale is more than an ironic pathology of the right-wing mind, more, even, than a wry diagnosis of a severely fractured nationality. It also captures the comic anguish of a youth who begins to understand himself just at the moment when he loses the sense of who he is.