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Journalism of Courage
Robert Frost made his visit in November 1960, just a week after the general election. It tells you something about our school that the prospect of his arrival cooked up more interest than the contest between Nixon and Kennedy, which for most of us was no contest at all. Nixon was a straight arrow and a scold. If he’d been one of us we would have glued his shoes to the floor. Kennedy, though — here was a warrior, an ironist, terse and unhysterical.”
Tobias Wolff’s seventh book, which is also his first novel, is set in a boys’ school, an institution where everyone does chores; where English teachers, (“a kind of chivalric order”, the narrator tells us) command deference; and where three annual visits by celebrated literary figures make up the biggest events of the year. It is a demanding environment, and mistakes are not easily tolerated. A tragic fire in one of the residential buildings, years ago, has resulted in a no-smoking rule that is followed so strictly that any boy found smoking in the campus is sent home by the end of the day. Above all, the school trains its boys in the Honor Code, “a system of honors that valued nothing you hadn’t done for yourself”.
Linked to the visit of each writer, the school has a tradition by which one boy is given a private audience with the writer during his or her visit. A contest is held in which each boy submits a piece of writing, from which the visiting writer selects one. During Frost’s visit, the winner is a boy who has carefully crafted a dramatic monologue about an old farmer on the first day of autumn. It is his tribute to Frost, but when the silvery-haired eminence arrives at their school, the narrator realises that Frost has seen the poem as a barb, “some fun at this old man’s expense”. In a beautiful and complex passage, the narrator goes on to tell us how one of the younger teachers asks the old poet a question about modern consciousness and formal arrangement, and how Frost proceeds to cut him down to size, almost brutally, with a stentorian lecture about Achilles’ grief, “that famous, terrible grief”, that perhaps “only really exists in form”.
The next visitor, at the instance of a rich patron, is Ayn Rand. The purists are up in arms, but Rand it is, with a clique of black-clad groupies. The third visit of the year — Hemingway’s — is when the story really begins.
Wolff is trying to do many things in this slim novel: perhaps too many things. He is trying to trace the “class picture”, especially probing the narrator’s feelings about his hidden part-Jewish heritage. He is also trying to explore the birth of the creative imagination. He is having some fun, himself, at the expense of Frost, the “old man”, and the near-hysterical Rand. I wish he had tried to have some fun at old Papa’s expense, too, but there is a sense of Wolff himself being overawed by Hemingway instead. As for the fierce literary rivalry among the boys, somehow it all rings less true when we read samples from, say, a story about two men and a woman holed up in a ski lodge.
But the real story in Old School, which begins after the narrator wins the contest, is one that Wolff tells only partially. It is the story of how character is built: how imagination and honesty, creativity and candor, are often two sides of a very thin line. It is also an intensely personal journey, about growth, forgiveness and letting go: one that merited a longer, more detailed narration. The reflective voice of the narrator, looking back across decades, is elegant and subtly nuanced, but at times it creates a distance from the vivid, immediate world of the boys.
