posted on 27 Jun 2022

Old School by Tobias Wolff

I don’t think that it had previously occurred to me that Old School is Wolff’s only novel. His fame rests primarily on his lifetime output of short stories and the two memoirs, This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army, although an early short story, The Barracks Thief, arguably reached novella length.

Old School contains some of Wolff’s most sensuously exact, lushly descriptive writing, and some of his most intellectually and emotionally engaging too. It also exemplifies the moral ambiguity and lacerating scrutiny for which his short stories are known.

An unnamed narrator, a teenage boy, is in his final year at an elite boarding school somewhere in northeastern America. It is 1960. In his desire to win a short story competition the boy plagiarises a piece written by a girl at a sister prep school, submitting this as his own. In a tradition going back some years, submissions at the boys’ school are judged by a visiting writer and the winning entrant is published in the school newspaper and has a private audience with the visiting writer. And in 1960 this writer will be none other than Ernest Hemingway. While the two preceding years have seen the school visited by the poet Robert Frost and the ferociously anti-egalitarian novelist Ayn Rand, their visits pale when considered alongside Hemingway’s.

The narrator swiftly comes to regard the plagiarism as not just excusable but in a sense inevitable. In fact, so closely does the girl’s astonishingly honest and raw story mirror his own life and feelings – in particular the deceptions he feels he has practiced in concealing his Jewishness – that he considers the story his own, a story he was fated to write. Any sense of wrongdoing is further blurred by the fact that for months he has been told to gain a deeper understanding of the style and methods of the literary greats by writing out parts of the stories he most admires.  

The young man’s offence is discovered and he is judged to be irreparably in breach of the school’s Honour Code and is expelled. Yet even he recognises the justice of this, for despite what he has done, he loves the school and its almost chivalric moral values and believes that no other decision is possible.

This is yet another of those books that never quite conforms to the narrative shape I remember it having. In memory, it is a beautifully written and profoundly imagined ‘school story’ set during an idealised version of the very late-50s and early-60s, relatively simple in its scope. In fact, it is far more complex than this, for Wolff is exploring not just the morality of school life but also the morality of imagination, of creativity and invention, and just as his alter ego reveals himself most nakedly and honestly in a story which paradoxically he has stolen, Wolff too is using fiction to explore a shaming episode in his own personal life, when in an effort to flee a chaotic home and a violent stepfather he faked the credentials which won him a place at a prestigious boarding school.

I return time and again to Old School for its wonderful descriptive writing. The detail of the narrator’s remembered school days must surely mirror memories that are equally dear to Wolff himself. For example, “The chapel windows blazing red on winter afternoons. The comradely sound of the glee club practicing, the scrape of skates on the outdoor rink, a certain chair in the library.” It would be possible to quote from dozens and dozens of passages.

Why is it then that I have a nagging sense of slight dissatisfaction with Old School? I think it is for two reasons. First, I think Wolff tries to cram too much moral scrutiny and high-toned intellectual analysis into the closing thirty or so pages and consequently what to my mind should be allowed to fade away on a graceful dying fall becomes a little congested. And second, I sometimes think that Old School reads like a collection of linked short stories – a sequence of heart-stoppingly lovely episodes, but perhaps at some cost to the overall integration of the novel.

Even so, I think it is a rich, complex (in the best sense), nuanced and rewarding novel, written in prose of apparently effortless grace and flexibility. Whether it ranks amongst Wolff’s greatest achievements is probably a matter of personal taste and judgement. I feel certain that this won’t be the last time I read it.

 

Alun Severn

June 2022

 

 

 

 

Tobias Wolff elsewhere on Letterpress:

 

This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff