THE HEADMASTER'S PAPERS

by Richard A. Hawley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 10, 1983

One very sad year in the life of a prep-school headmaster--presented through his letters, his addresses to the students, his memos, his poems. . . and, finally, his suicide note. John Greeve, in his late 50s, begins the school-year in a fairly cheerful mood, despite continuing worry about son Brian--a druggie/hippie sort wandering around Europe, not heard from in months. There are letters to a brother, a nephew (starting a prep-school-teaching career), a colleague (about bad sportsmanship). But then Greeve's wife Meg is diagnosed as having terminal cancer--so, while everyday school correspondence continues (Greeve is very much a stiff-upper-lip man), many of the letters report on Meg's condition or meditate on this terrible situation: there's discussion of C. S. Lewis' A Grief Observed, a poem called ""Cancer"" (followed by angry dismissals of poetry in The New Yorker), and--at Christmas--news of Meg's death. And, in the winter, having lost the center of his personal life, Greeve will also seem to lose the center of his professional life: he writes with increasing despair about student vandalism, student drug-abuse, student surliness; he recoils in horror from an English class devoted to phallic imagery in Frost (""the teacher reinforcing the boys' muddled talk and thinking whenever possible""); he must deal with an inept math teacher, an accidental drowning, the future of prep schools, the likelihood of Brian's death abroad. . . and a move to have him relieved of his headmaster duties. ""All the props have fallen away,"" he writes to a friend in March, ""and I'm dead as a dead fish, as T. S. Eliot once said about Edith Wharton. . . . I am all I am ever going to be, and it's not enough, even for me."" Sometimes affecting, often a little off-putting in its self-pity and self-righteousness: a plainspoken, literate record of one man's descent into acute depression--with remarks along the way of special interest to those involved in the changing prep-school scene.

Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Eriksson

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1983

Categories: FICTION