Book Review: The Spirit of the Leader
There is nothing quite so satisfying as running a book to earth after years of searching, and so I read William Heyliger’s The Spirit of the Leader with the deep, satisfied sigh of one who drinks a cup of cool water after a long sweaty hike on a hot summer’s day.
Even for Heyliger, this book is extremely Heyliger, by which I mean that it is so earnestly idealistic that one pictures young Steve Rogers reading it as a guilty pleasure: he knows that people aren’t really like this (he fails to notice that he himself is a close approximation of a Heyliger hero), but wouldn’t it be nice if high school students were truly this honest and upright?
The Spirit of the Leader takes place at Northfield High, and particularly focuses on the students’ attempts at self-government. Their student council has actual power, a fact that struck me as absolutely novel when I first read an excerpt from this book during my own high school days. Not only that, but led by George Praska, the student body marches eight hundred strong on the city building to demand that the pot-holed street in front of their school should be paved. (The city government, presumably petrified by the specter of eight hundred high school students marching for anything, gets on it double-quick.)
The book is an ensemble piece, featuring Perry (clever, funny, unathletic but yearning to be a part of a team), his best friend George Praska (solid, athletic, smart but not quick-witted; he needs time to think things through), and various other school types, including - wait for it - that unusual creature in a Heyliger book: a girl!
In this case the girl is Betty Lawton, a leader among the girls of the school. (The girls, Heyliger notes in passing, outnumber the boys; this was common in early twentieth-century high schools.) She is here to demonstrate to the reader that girls can be good citizens too; that, as Praska puts it, girls “are just as much alive to the real things as any of us are. I think they’d be insulted if they thought the school had one line of treatment for the boy citizens and another for the girl… They’re citizens; and the fellow who refuses to judge them as citizens belittles them and belittles the school.”
Betty proves this point of view correct by throwing her weight behind the candidate who truly has the school’s best interests at heart (Praska, of course) and becoming a pillar of the later campaign to win the school an athletic field.
You might imagine that, having introduced a girl to the scrum, Heyliger might also introduce a hint of romance. Absolutely not. Sexual attraction is absolutely alien to the Heyliger verse. I strongly suspect that babies come into being when their parents hold hands while wishing on a star till a stork drops a baby in the cabbage patch.
Despite this general atmosphere, I have long cherished the hope that I might find a slashy Heyliger novel (not least because then I might be able to drag other people into my Heyliger readings)... and we do, finally, get a glimmer near the end of this book! Praska hero-worships former Northfield quarterback Carlos Dix, to the point that a friend teases him, “I’ll bet there was a time you dreamed of him at night.” When Praska thinks Dix might be involved in a shady real estate deal, Praska nearly loses faith in humanity: if you can’t trust Carlos Dix, “a keen, alert man, generous, public spirited, and straight as a string,” then who can you trust?
But of course it all turns out to be a misunderstanding. Praska restores Carlos Dix to his pedestal and gazes at him in the Heyliger version of love, where you just really, really, really admire someone’s outstanding good citizenship.
Even for Heyliger, this book is extremely Heyliger, by which I mean that it is so earnestly idealistic that one pictures young Steve Rogers reading it as a guilty pleasure: he knows that people aren’t really like this (he fails to notice that he himself is a close approximation of a Heyliger hero), but wouldn’t it be nice if high school students were truly this honest and upright?
The Spirit of the Leader takes place at Northfield High, and particularly focuses on the students’ attempts at self-government. Their student council has actual power, a fact that struck me as absolutely novel when I first read an excerpt from this book during my own high school days. Not only that, but led by George Praska, the student body marches eight hundred strong on the city building to demand that the pot-holed street in front of their school should be paved. (The city government, presumably petrified by the specter of eight hundred high school students marching for anything, gets on it double-quick.)
The book is an ensemble piece, featuring Perry (clever, funny, unathletic but yearning to be a part of a team), his best friend George Praska (solid, athletic, smart but not quick-witted; he needs time to think things through), and various other school types, including - wait for it - that unusual creature in a Heyliger book: a girl!
In this case the girl is Betty Lawton, a leader among the girls of the school. (The girls, Heyliger notes in passing, outnumber the boys; this was common in early twentieth-century high schools.) She is here to demonstrate to the reader that girls can be good citizens too; that, as Praska puts it, girls “are just as much alive to the real things as any of us are. I think they’d be insulted if they thought the school had one line of treatment for the boy citizens and another for the girl… They’re citizens; and the fellow who refuses to judge them as citizens belittles them and belittles the school.”
Betty proves this point of view correct by throwing her weight behind the candidate who truly has the school’s best interests at heart (Praska, of course) and becoming a pillar of the later campaign to win the school an athletic field.
You might imagine that, having introduced a girl to the scrum, Heyliger might also introduce a hint of romance. Absolutely not. Sexual attraction is absolutely alien to the Heyliger verse. I strongly suspect that babies come into being when their parents hold hands while wishing on a star till a stork drops a baby in the cabbage patch.
Despite this general atmosphere, I have long cherished the hope that I might find a slashy Heyliger novel (not least because then I might be able to drag other people into my Heyliger readings)... and we do, finally, get a glimmer near the end of this book! Praska hero-worships former Northfield quarterback Carlos Dix, to the point that a friend teases him, “I’ll bet there was a time you dreamed of him at night.” When Praska thinks Dix might be involved in a shady real estate deal, Praska nearly loses faith in humanity: if you can’t trust Carlos Dix, “a keen, alert man, generous, public spirited, and straight as a string,” then who can you trust?
But of course it all turns out to be a misunderstanding. Praska restores Carlos Dix to his pedestal and gazes at him in the Heyliger version of love, where you just really, really, really admire someone’s outstanding good citizenship.