Foreword
What Bertrand Russell once called the quest for a completely ethical society back in the Twenties, when America was fresh with the spirit of having won a war that was presumed to have put an end to all future wars, seems to have become a Utopian concept. For society begins essentially with the concept of the family, and this in itself has dramatically changed within the past two generations. Where once there was solidarity and unwavering respect of the young for their elders, today we find a vast gulf between parents and children as between politicians and the public. Morality just after World War I began in the home and continued in the schools, but basically it was the function of the parents to indoctrinate their young with the precepts of good and evil, right and wrong, truth and falsehood.
Today, however, such ideas appear to be out of the never-never world of Pollyanna: the old maxim of "do as I say, not as I do" has come about full cycle. That is one dramatic reason why today's younger generation is at odds with its elders and why the statistics of juvenile delinquency soar ever upward. The young cannot justify the integrity of what they are told or what they are shown as the proper course for them to follow, seeing their elders transgress and violate some of the most elementary rules of human conduct. Moreover, with the advent of our sexual revolution which had the effect of spotlighting the hypocrisy as well as ignorance with which so many adults approached their own sexual behavior, those who emerge out of puberty into adolescence often discover by themselves a new guide rule toward their own acceptance or rejection of behavioral standards which they find expected of them.
The great German operatic composer Carl Orff created an allegorical opera, "Die Kluge," shortly before Hitler's takeover of Czechoslovakia. There is one memorable scene which shows three drunken louts swaggering down the street singing an ironic ditty, "Where has honor gone? On the huntsman's horn, out unto the wind along with truth and justice!" --a sentiment which' very nearly got the composer sent to a concentration camp. What he meant was that in our complex, materialistic age the parables of virtue and decency no longer appear to prevail; an ambiguous word here, a double meaning there, and black becomes white and white black. Small wonder, then, that our modern youth comes early to grips with the decision of what they should do rather than what they are told to do.
Moreover, mainly because of our sexual revolution, which attempts to sweep clean the Augean stables of guilt and fear and shame, our present-day younger generation often finds that the conflict of ethical behavior against total lawlessness can sometimes be linked with sexual behavior as well. That, indeed, is what Mark Conroy attempts to portray in this novel of our contemporary scene. He has taken a middle-class family, showing them as they come together for a sentimental holiday reunion, beneath the surface of which exists such elements as selfishness, sexual tyranny, moral blackmail and hypocrisy. Young Elizabeth Trent, through whose fourteen-year-old eyes much of the story is seen, finds herself a pawn in her own father's unscrupulous attempt to gain a material advantage over his young nephew. Till the moment of this family reunion, Elizabeth herself has not the slightest suspicion that her father is anything but the fond, concerned parent whose will has been her law and who can do no wrong. How this alters her own youthful philosophy as well as her own erotic consciousness, is vividly detailed. Mark Conroy shows us through the eyes of a nubile young girl how her accidental introduction to the sexual complications practiced by adults affects her own impressionable psyche and in the process dramatically changes her own outlook and emotions.
-The Publishers