Old School

“Make no mistake,” he (Robert Frost) said. “A true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.” (pg. 46)

I have read this poem (Frost, The Mending Wall”) and thought I understood it. But in Frost’s voice the scene became newly vivid, and I caught something I’d missed; that for all the narrator’s ironic superiority, the neighbor had his truth too. The image of him moving in the shadows like an old-stone savage armed – he himself was a good reason to have a wall, the living proof of his own argument that good fences make good neighbors. Maybe something doesn’t like a wall, but take it down at your own peril. (pg. 49)

I have never read anything by Tobias Wolff who is primarily a short-story writer but when I learned the Non-structured Group was reading this book for October, I decided to join in.

Old School takes place in a New England boarding school in the 1960’s and is narrated by a scholarship student in his last year at the school.  We learn the narrator is escaping from a mundane existence with his father in a small apartment on the west coast. He finds himself in an environment where class and circumstances are not mentioned but matter a great deal and his spends a lot of his time hiding his background. Walls are very apparent in Wolff’s work: class walls, walls between teachers and students, walls between a person and their writing, walls everywhere.  In some respects, you come away with a feeling of isolation while reading this novel.

At this school, it is a tradition to have visiting writers come and speak to the students.  In addition, the school has a writing contest with the winner picked by the author and rewarded with a private audience.  Robert Frost is the first author,  followed by Ayn Rand.  When it is announced that Ernest Hemmingway is to be the final author of the year, there is a great scramble among the students to prepare a work worthy of Hemmingway’s approval.  It is this contest that unsettles the school and leads to some severe consequences.

I enjoyed the book and its discussion of writing and literature but I was unsure of exactly what the author was trying to say about writing.  It seemed that many of the people in the novel had walls up including the two authors, Frost and Rand and I found the final thoughts on the act of writing somewhat disquieting – how much of the writer should appear in his or her writing and is total honesty from a writer possible? What walls should be in place, if any at all? These are important questions; ones that I don’t think are fully answered by the author which may well be his intention.

The life that produces writing cannot be written about. It is a life carried on within the knowledge even of the writer, below the mind’s business and nose, in deep unlit shafts where phantom messengers struggle toward us, killing one another along the way: and when a few survivors break through to our attention the are received as blandly as waiters bring more coffee.

No true account can be given of how and why you become a writer, nor is there any movement of which you can say: this is when I became a writer. It gets all cobbled together later, more or less sincerely, and after the stories have been revealed they put on the badge of memory and block all other routes of exploration. There is something to be said for this. It’s efficient, and may even provide a homeopathic tincture of the truth. (pg. 156)

Old School has an autobiographical feel to it and it has wonderful passages describing the affection the narrator has for the school as well as the relationship between Master and Student. I also enjoyed the sections on the writing process and was please to see my habit of transcribing long sections of authors’ writing discussed as a worthwhile thing. I loved the sections with Ayn Rand, in part because I have never been able to relate to her work and Wolff was able to articulate why I feel that way.  And I thought his portrayal of Rand was amusing.

One of the threads I found interesting in this novel was the exploration of the relationship between father and son.  The narrator would speak about his father and the reader had a strong sense of the way things stood between the two.  But there was also a subtle undercurrent of the association between teacher and student as well as between teacher and school which echoed the traditional father/son relationship. I felt this thread added depth and nuance to the storyline.  I also appreciated the “rivalry” the teachers had about different writers something that remains true among readers.  We each have our favorite authors and we can become very fierce in advocating for our preferred choices.

All in all a very good choice for a read and I am grateful for the Non-Structured Group for choosing something I don’t think I would have heard of let along pick up and read.

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