Books: Unlaughing Boy

RAW MATERIAL—Oliver La Farge— Houghton Mifflin ($3). “Bumwad Inky,” mused the Second Form bully, his eye alight with sudden inspiration as he watched his gawky, bespectacled classmate unpacking, “Bumwad Inky in his bumwad suit!”

“I don’t remember just what set him off,” confesses Novelist Oliver La Farge, describing this painful encounter in his second year at Groton School. “Perhaps I had wrapped something in toilet paper when I was packing.” Whatever the cause, the dart stuck. Throughout the day the inspired bully developed it “through Bumwad Inky to Bumptink to Bump, and finally to the chef d’oeuvre of his career — Bop. … I fought him and was licked, that evening and several times more in the next few days. It was too late then. I was Bop. … I had joined the outcasts.”

Like many another schoolboy outcast, flop-footed, inky-fingered “Bop” La Farge plugged his dogged way out of pariahdom. In his third year he tackled another bully, finished him off with an astonished “30 seconds of deliriously swinging one haymaker after another.” In the Fourth Form he was a star high-jumper despite heckling classmates who chanted “Bop-Bop-Bop” at the side of the jumping pit. By graduation he had attained respectability with the kudos of a letterman in both football and crew.

At Harvard ink-stained young La Farge lost his nickname at last, was president of the highbrow Advocate and edited the lusty Lampoon. When he was 28 his first novel won the Pulitzer Prize. But the name “Bop” still haunted him. It was not until he was 36 that a “woman of unusual quality, great perception and remorseless persistence” forced the hated word across his unwilling lips. “Then,” he writes, “and only then, I ceased to be afraid, and then at last I slew the Groton Boy.”

Readers of this random biography may not be so sure. In throwing together the uncooked condiments of Raw Material, the 44-year-old author of Laughing Boy, Sparks Fly Upward, and The Enemy Gods has plainly been compounding medicine for his own ego. As in a painter’s sketchbook, he has drawn the scenes that have caught his fancy: sailing, rowing, his first expedition to the Arizona Indian country, the wonderful new world of New Orleans, where nobody had ever heard of a La Farge or a Grottie and a girl told him frankly, “I like you. I think you’re nice.” There, amid the absinthe and saratoga chips of his French Quarter parties, La Farge would tell himself over & over, “Well, Oliver, you certainly have nice friends.” But for all the call of the wild Southwest and the high-jinks of Mardi-Gras, the Groton Boy was still alive. When Laughing Boy hit the jackpot, Oliver bee-lined it for a Park Avenue apartment and all the trimmings.

Beginning a new assignment in the Air Transport Command, as he finished his autobiography, Major La Farge was sure at last that he saw a new world of reality ahead for him. He was sure he had said goodbye forever to the un-Grotonian Groton Boy who had long been uncomfortable in both an old school tie and an open-necked shirt.