Tobias Wolff, Old School

No one has written better than Tobias Wolff, more shrewdly and memorably, about various forms of self-invention and self-authoring, about posturing and posing, about faking it until (maybe) making it. (His brother is awfully good on the theme, too: Geoffrey Wolff’s Duke of Deception is an unforgettable portrait of their father, a life-long con man.) 

In his classic memoir, This Boy’s Life, young Tobias—he was calling himself Jack then, in honor of Jack London—finds himself trapped in a miserable high school, in a miserable life. He manages to con a friend into stealing some school stationery, and then, using different typewriters, in the voices of his teachers, he recommends himself into a fancy Eastern prep school: “I wrote without heat or hyperbole, in the words my teachers would have used if they had known me as I knew myself. These were their letters. And on the boy who lived in their letters, that splendid phantom who carried all my hopes, it seemed to me I saw, at last, my own face.”

The uses and abuses of fiction, its possibilities and pathologies, are explored once again in Old School, Wolff’s seventh book, his first full-length novel.

Old School’s unnamed narrator is a student at an Eastern prep school—much like Hill, one imagines, which Wolff attended. He, along with a number of other kindred spirits are mad about literature, utterly obsessed. They edit the literary magazine; they argue passionately about the merits of Hemingway and Faulkner and the new—it is 1960—influence of what the narrator calls the Ginsberg-Ferlinghetti crime family. 

Writing, literature, the talk of books with their revered masters—these involve something much deeper and more fundamental than the mere appreciation of art: They suggest a way of being in the world, of making sense of themselves, of being themselves.

Of course, all the boys are writers. Each year, distinguished writers visit the school and the boys compete for a most coveted prize: The student-author of the best poem or story, as selected by the visiting writer, is granted a private audience. The narrator’s ardent desire to be chosen is not practical but “mystical”: “I wanted to receive the laying on of hands,” the narrator says. “I wanted to be anointed.”

Among the great pleasures of the novel are the brilliant portraits of the writers, exercises in Plutarchian biography that with a few telling details, a slight gesture, reveal something essential about the subject’s character. Wolff’s Robert Frost is weathered and canny, magnificently wintery: “He didn’t look old; he looked eternal.” He can’t quite believe that the student poem written in homage to him (“First Frost”) isn’t really a parody, a jab at him, and goes to excessive lengths to let the boys know it is all right by him if one of them wants to have “some fun at this old man’s expense.”

Ayn Rand is squarely built, constantly smoking, happy to concede that the greatest work by an American author is her own Atlas Shrugged. (The story she chooses is “The Day the Cows Came Home,” a piece that combined its author’s twin passions, vegetarianism and space travel.) She badmouths “the great bearded Hemingway” and espouses her own fierce philosophy of the heroic self. When the narrator lets loose a sneeze during her presentation, she gives him a look of such powerful disgust that he understands the fatal lack in her grasp of human life: “The heroic life apparently left no time for children, or domestic cares, or the exertions of human sympathy.” 

The last of the visiting writers is to be Ernest Hemingway himself, revered by the boys, and, it is said, an old friend of the dean, who also drove an ambulance in Italy during World War I. In a rambling telephone interview given in anticipation of his visit, Hemingway advises the boys not to take advice but does warn them repeatedly: “Watch the sauce. The sauce kills more writers than war.”

The narrator’s problem is that he wants to write, as his hero Hemingway advises, truly, honestly, out of what he knows and who he is. But he can’t. For years, at school, he’s been performing, “implying a personal history,” one that involved money and sailing and gentility. His own scruffy past in the Northwest, his Jewishness, an absent father and a needy mother—these are inconvenient facts he doesn’t bring up. When he does write something genuine—in this story, there are crumbs on the kitchen table, dirty dishes in the sink, a loud television, the smell of burned toast in the air—he quickly discards it. It’s too painfully true. Instead, he attempts a hunting poem, something elegiac about a dead elk, but is left wondering: “How big was an elk anyway?” He has no idea.

At the heart of the book is an audacious act of, literary appropriation, call it, that leads the novel to a surprising, wonderfully satisfying, and deeply moving conclusion. Old School is a beautifully crafted book, funny and wise, and like all the best fiction, true. 

—The Buffalo News