The Chatham School Affair
by Thomas H. Cook
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Book Summary Information
Author: Thomas H. CookEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1997-10-01
ISBN: 0553571931
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Bantam
Book Reviews of The Chatham School Affair
Book Review: The Unpardonable Sin and its Sinister Consequences
Summary: 5 Stars
What a pleasure it was to discover this literary master. And master he is for he embodies all that is rich and wonderful in American literature: thoughtful storytelling, lush prose, interesting subject matter, and thematic complexity. Like his predecessors Hawthorne and Faulkner, Cook reminds us how subject to mistakes of judgment all mankind is. Tormented in his quest for meaning, man's mortal flaw is his failure to balance his considerable abilities. Lacking insight he is a victim of impulses prompted by fear and compulsion. Ironically man's search for meaning can result in failure so abysmal that it intensifies both his isolation from his fellow man and his incapacity to achieve human intimacy, thrusting him into a hellish prison of his own making. In "The Chatham School Affair," desperate to salvage something out of his squandered life, the elderly Henry Griswald makes one gesture that finally restores him to the human community his actions of seven decades earlier destroyed. From a modern perspective this book is about redemption; in traditional terms it is about the deep seated yearning to breach the limitations of being human and thereby experience freedom and happiness. However, man fails to realize the dangers inherent in such a pursuit. Thus do Elizabeth Channing, Leland Reed, Albert Parsons, and the community of Chatham fall prey to pride, ignorance and their own dark hearts.
Cook draws his characters so deftly that one can identify their similarities to various archetypes in classical fiction: Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, Ethan Brand, Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff, Jane Eyre, Ethan Frome, Isabel Archer, Daisy Miller - yet his characters are drawn with such texture that they speak their own truths as well as the universal ones of their predecessors. Cook achieves this artful characterization through a skillful use of internal narrative, original dialogue, and carefully chosen detail. Elizabeth Channing's sentiment of the need to live "on the edge of folly" resonates for it suggests Henry James' Isabel Archer or his Daisy Miller but also the possibility of transcending civilization's ironclad hold on human behavior. In this idea, Miss Channing refers to the ultimate pleasure of human beings which is to love and be loved wholly, meaningfully and without constraint.
Channing's beauty, her quiet self-containment and her dedication to learning as well as her ability to inspire her students speaks to a romantic figure, the ideal of womanhood or manhood, for that matter. Since this story is told not from her viewpoint, but from Henry's, we are not permitted to see into her heart; instead we perceive her image, the mask behind which all people hide in their quests to make life work. It is believable that both Henry in his adolescent yearnings and Sarah in her desire to be a "real lady" as well as the besotted Leland Reed in his longing to experience romantic love, would see in Channing the incarnation of truth and beauty. For Henry she symbolizes freedom from societal constraints imposed by his family, the community, and Chatham School. For Leland Reed, she is the symbol of what femininity should be and what, alas, his wife is not. Elizabeth is that which turns his sights to the true and lofty beyond his life of physical impairment, scarred memories of a brutal war, and the suspicious inclinations of his wife. For Channing's students, her descriptions of life abroad and her artistic inclinations suggest romantic destinies possible through applying oneself to the imagination. Her beauty and knowledge inspire positive and negative projections in others; yet it is only her employer, Arthur Griswald, who sees in her the goodness others fail to recognize. It is Arthur Griswald, the object of his son's contempt, that in the end is the true scholar of the human heart. It is he alone that promotes human community by advancing rigorous learning standards thereby assuring in wayward boys the necessary tools for emotional maturity. And it is for that reason that Elizabeth Channing urges young Henry, to "Be a good man, like your father."
Similarly, Leland Reed is a well drawn character of considerable depth. A thinker, he too yearns for adventure and freedom but is handicapped by the plight of a married man, father and sole breadwinner for his family. His wife, a fellow sufferer, has been abandoned and still nurses fears of rejection. Like Henry, she has an overwrought imagination and an untrusting nature. Like him, she fails to see the goodness in others, expecting from them more than mere civility and responsible behavior while lamenting the absence of something indefinable. Likewise Mr. Parsons fails to glimpse the goodness of the woman he pursues in his relentless effort to attach blame for the catastrophe at Black Pond.
In Henry's mind the restrained, plodding, dutiful people of Chatham are imprisoned by their conformity to convention. To Cook, they reflect man's incapacity to see beyond his limitations to the goodness of his fellow man. Seeking the bad and the blameworthy in the name of justice, the townspeople achieve a tentative reprieve without redemption. Their repressed lives have restricted their opportunity to grow and to bond with each other, their quelled spontaneity resulting in destructive projections. It is significant that Elizabeth Channing alone acknowledges her complicity in the ill fated chain of events when she says, "I loved Leland Reed...When you love someone as I loved [him] nothing matters but that love." This is the truth of the woman, and she is courageous to admit it.
Driven by her fears Mrs. Reed is unable to relate to someone propelled by unbridled passion. To her as to so many others in the town it is convention that preserves the social order and thereby deters people from immorality. She like the rest of the community perceives responsibility as enforcing the very laws that cripple the human spirit. When Henry eventually assumes that mantle, becoming a lawyer, he does so because he recognizes the destructive effects of flouting the moral law. In his capacity as a lawyer, he will attempt to ameliorate the senseless reactive tendencies that define man's desire for freedom and paradoxically demand laws and civilization to counteract them. For Cook as well as Hawthorne, Faulkner, Melville and Conrad, it is the balance between intellectual striving and emotional gratification that defines the basic conflict of man. Somehow the sojourner must strike a wary compromise between his obligations to others and his own desires, between the imagination and the intellect, to somehow accommodate, in Cook's words an attempt to "find the place between passion and boredom, ecstacy and despair, the life we can but dream of and the one we cannot bear." Only Elizabeth Channing and Mr. Griswald strike the appropriate balance. She does this by resigning and by not confessing the depth of her sins so as to spare Mary Reed future pain. Similarly Mr. Griswald refuses to condemn one of "a good heart" while at the same time he struggles to maintain an uneasy peace with those whom it is his duty to support. Says Henry of his father: "He was kindly, ebullient, slow to anger, quick to forgive," even if he was "least enslaved by passion," except for his beloved school. And for that "passion" he pursued a learning atmosphere that was "studious and disciplined."
Although Henry Griswald is ultimately revealed to have atoned for his mistaken actions, for most of his life he remains his own executioner, depriving himself of marriage and family. In the final analysis he has to acknowledge his trespasses because only in so doing can he reach out, however tentatively, to Alice Craddock. By this action he reclaims part of himself - the part that could love - once an integral component of his personality before his transgressions separated him from his Self and severed the bond that united him with his fellow man. So was he doomed by his insistence that life did not have to be legalistic and dreary, like his father's, for example, but could express freedom and imagination. Had he acknowledged the truth of his mentor, Elizabeth Channing, he would have understood the importance of love and while it might not free someone from obligation, it could be the compensatory gift of being human. Likewise Henry might have learned from his father how education endows one with the capability to see "into the human heart."
Elizabeth Channing realizes that she and Leland were "wrong to feel they lived in a world no one else did." Thus was their love a threat to the human community. Humans are obligated to each other, and they cannot break the bond of humanity by a careless disregard for others happiness. The author describes Channing's scarf as a "blood soaked cloth," symbolizing the blood on the hands of adulterers. Leland's passion was aroused to monomaniacal proportions, separating him from his family and the community. However, realizing this, Henry's father nevertheless admonishes his son, "Never forget, that it's the heart that matters." Yet only Henry knows the depth of his own transgression and so his life proceeds with the same dismal overlay he saw in the students of Chatham School - without imagination or freedom but shackled as certainly as those of his classmates, his father, Mr. Reed, and his poor, uninspired, loveless mother. Man's yearning for the ideal is futile, but with its mundane responsibilities and constant disappointments, life offers possibility and the miraculous experience of love, however volatile and short-lived.
Cook's testimony to the complexity of the human spirit and man's wary allegiances and desperate compulsions attests to his vast powers as an author. This is a writer who deserves to be read by those who are seekers of not only great fiction, but the eternal verities. Moreover, this book exemplifies how great and wondrous is the American tradition in literature. Cook suggests that some of our most notable writers as well as other classic authors did grasp the essentials of how to live life meaningfully. Ultimately "The Chatham School Affair" is about what it takes to be the "good man" Elizabeth Channing sees in Henry's father when she urges his son to follow in his footsteps rather than hers. She means that life requires a balance that only the wise achieve. If it's true as Henry's father claimed that "Evil doth back recoil," it is also true that goodness exists and is achieved through discipline and an openness to one's fellow man, even if that other is revealed in his portrait as possessing a "melancholy longing" for the unattainable and settling for a thwarted destiny, as Arthur Griswald's life attested. The world is never perfect; no one should expect it so...
Marjorie Meyerle
Colorado Writer
Author of "Bread of Shame"
Summary of The Chatham School Affair
Attorney Henry Griswald has a secret: the truth behind the tragic events the world knew as the Chatham School Affair, the controversial tragedy that destroyed five lives, shattered a quiet community, and forever scarred the young boy. Layer by layer, in The Chatham School Affair, Cook paints a stunning portrait of a woman, a school, and a town in which passionate violence seems impossible...and inevitable. "Thomas Cook's night visions, seen through a lens darkly, are haunting," raved the New York Times Book Review, and The Chatham School Affair will cement this superb writer's position as one of crime fiction's most prodigious talents, a master of the unexpected ending.In 1926 Henry Griswald was a kid, a student of the lovely and unusual Elizabeth Channing, who had recently arrived in his coastal Massachusetts village to teach art at a private school run by his father. Decades later, the people of Henry's village are still racked by guilt and troubled by uncertainty--who, or what, drove Miss Channing to madness and murder? Henry Griswald, narrator of The Chatham School Affair, holds the key. Using the same dark, brooding tone that permeated Breakheart Hill, Thomas Cook has crafted a disturbing yet entertaining psychological thriller.
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