Tobias Wolff teaches English and creative writing at Stanford University. I first learned of his writing when I was sent his fictionalized childhood memoir, This Boy's Life, as part of a subscription to works by Stanford faculty. I liked it, having as yet no inkling that it would ultimately be made into a movie, a star vehicle for a young Leonardo DiCaprio.
In This Boy's Life, Wolff tells of Toby's unhappy and somewhat delinquent childhood in a small town in the North Cascades. Desperate to escape the narrowness of his life and the cruelty of his stepfather, he falsifies his school grades and invents a new, straight-A, Eagle Scout persona, a persona that expressed his dreams if not his reality ("It was a truth known only to me, but I believed in it more than I believed in the facts arrayed against it."), hoping to transfer to a top East Coast school. He ends up accepted by the highly selective Hill School in Pennsylvania. He loves the school, performs abysmally, and, in an epilogue, discloses that he flunks out his senior year.
I did not do well at Hill. How could I? I knew nothing. My ignorance was so profound that entire class periods would pass without my understanding anything that was said. ... While the boys around me nodded off during Chapel I prayed like a Moslem, prayed that I would somehow pull myself up again so I could stay in this place that I secretly and deeply loved.
A nice indictment of the secondary education offered by many small town schools.
Failure and dashed hopes at such a young age leave scars. In Wolff's novel Old School, a bright Seattle native, attending a school similar to the Hill School, desperately seeks admission to the world of the literary elite by winning a prize for his school's best short story. The annual prize winner enjoys a private meeting with a famous author -- in this term, Hemingway. The boy suffers from writer's block, he procrastinates, he panics, and he eventually copies a story written by a student in another school's literary journal. The plagiarism is discovered. The boy is expelled, devastated.
This year, I glanced at a list of suggested summer readings published by the Archdiocese of Seattle. Among the usual lives of saints and works of piety, I was surprised to see Wolff's first book of short stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs. Curious, I decided to give it a read.
Wonderful stories. Wolff's writing is spare, and the morals of his stories are complex. The reader is sugar-fed nothing. He reads the often sad, sometimes amusing, always surprising lives of his protagonists, and ends each story feeling stunned, left to draw his own conclusions. If any quality unites all the stories in this collection, I'd have to say that it is a frightening sense of how isolated each person's life really is, how little he "connects" with those around him. Wolff's characters meet, talk, befriend each other, perhaps even marry. But they have no real understanding of or empathy -- or often even sympathy -- for each other.
In "Maiden Voyage," for example, a couple is sent on a cruise by their children, in celebration of their golden anniversary. They "love" each other, each in his own fashion, but lack any awareness of each other's interior lives. The story ends at a festive costume party, in which the ship's social director points to their marriage as an example for all to emulate. The couple move (he reluctantly) onto the dance floor, to begin the romantic dance for the others to follow:
Nora moved close to him, pressed her cheek to his. ... His unpatched [pirate's] eye ached. Howard turned slowly around to escape Stella's grin, and above it, the winking of her tiara in the moving red light.
End of story.
In the eponymous Garden, a professor who has played it safe during her entire career and, as a result, has accomplished little, is invited by a former friend to apply for a position at a much better school. She learns, during the interview process, that she has been invited to travel across the country and submit to the interrogation of the faculty merely because state law requires that one woman be so invited for each new position. Everyone, including her one-time friend, has already agreed on hiring a better qualified applicant.
Devastated, she stands in front of an audience of faculty and students, delivering a "class" in the final part of the bogus ritual. On the spur of the moment, she deviates from her expected analysis of the Marshall Plan. Instead, the audience hears her extemporaneous description of bloodthirsty Iroquois torture techniques, and the supposed speech delivered by two Christian missionaries while dying under that torture:
"Mend your lives," she said. "You have deceived yourselves in the pride of your hearts and the strengths of your arms. Though you soar aloft like the eagle, though your nest is set among the stars, thence I will bring you down, says the Lord. Turn from power to love. Be kind. Do justice. Walk humbly.
The faculty moderators and her former friend -- representing a school that stands for none of the virtues urged by the dying missionaries upon their heathen tormentors -- are horrified, and try to stop her from continuing. "But Mary had more to say, much more." She turns off her hearing aid so she won't be distracted by their cries.
But the story I liked best -- and the one that once more hearkens back to Wolff's unfortunate experience at the Hill School -- is "Smokers."
The unnamed narrator is a freshman boy from a small town in Oregon (a town not really near Portland, but that's how he describes it: "In those days I naively assumed everyone had heard of Portland.") who's about to start prep school at Choate on a scholarship. Being on scholarship means -- in the era in which the story takes place -- that he begins prep school with at least one social strike against him. But he is canny and has prepared well, mastering in advance the clothes, the slang, and the body language that will allow him to fit in. His ultimate ambition is unremarkable:
I wanted to know boys whose fathers ran banks and held cabinet office and wrote books. I wanted to be their friend and go home with them on vacation and someday marry one of their sisters.
He meets Eugene on the train ride from New York to Connecticut, an odd-appearing boy who is wearing an alpine hat with a feather. He quickly decides that Eugene -- himself another scholarship lad -- has none of the upper class qualities that he is seeking in new friends. He rebuffs Eugene's too eager attempts at friendship.
As the year progresses, the narrator's roommate quits school, leaving him alone in a single room. Eugene, on the other hand, is randomly assigned to Talbot Nevin, Jr., of Talbot Nevin, Sr., fame -- the father having been one of the school's great benefactors and a race car hobbyist who travels in celebrity circles. Our hero virtually drools, and eagerly attempts to win Talbot's friendship without becoming entangled in Eugene's somewhat feckless life.
Talbot shows only vague and detached interest in his overtures, however. In fact, Talbot seems vague and detached in his associations with all of the other students. But the three boys form a certain casual friendship among themselves, with Talbot drawing his two admirers into his own attitude of reflexive contempt for school rules and requirements. Talbot invites Eugene home for Christmas, inspiring jealousy and longing on the narrator's part. But Christmas turns out to be no more a success for Eugene than it was for the narrator while visiting some unpleasant relatives in Baltimore.
Smoking was strictly forbidden at Choate, but -- inspired by Talbot -- all three boys smoke whenever they can, enjoying the danger as much as the nicotine. But the narrator is cautious:
Because I was not rich my dissatisfaction could not assume a really combative form. I paddled around on the surface, dabbling in revolt by way of the stories I wrote for ... the school literary journal.
Heeding Talbot's plea, he helps the celebrity kid pass English by staying up nights writing essays for him. Talbot is pleased with the grades, but not enthusiastically grateful. When the narrator finally stops helping him, Talbot's not bothered -- he already has received enough good grades on "his" earlier essays to win a C+, which is just fine with him.
Meanwhile, Eugene -- although socially gauche and often ridiculed -- isn't disliked, and has obtained a certain amount of social success through his strength on the swimming team. Still blissfully unaware of the narrator's disdain, Eugene suggests that they room together the following year, but accepts gracefully the narrator's polite refusal. All seems to be going well for all three boys.
And then lightning strikes. Eugene is caught in the act of smoking, and a search of his room reveals a wealth of Talbot's cigarette butts and other evidence of nicotine use. Talbot, his roommate, escapes suspicion -- he is "one of us," apparently. The narrator is even further from the circle of suspicion; his transgressions, like his entire life, have been cautious and calculated. And so Eugene -- friendly, open, uncalculating -- and slightly bizarre -- is forced to face the music alone.
A cab is called. Luggage is brought out of the dorm.
Then the headmaster and the dean came out of the house with Eugene behind them. Eugene was wearing his hat. He shook hands with both of them and then with Big John. Suddenly he bent over and put his hands up to his face. The dean reached out and touched his arm. They stood like that for a long time, the four of them, Eugene's shoulders bucking and heaving. ... When I looked out the window again the cab was gone. The headmaster and the dean were standing in the shadows, but I could see Big John clearly. ... [S]omething he said made the headmaster laugh, not really a laugh, more like a giggle. The only thing I heard was the word "feathers."
Eugene now gone, Talbot asks the narrator to room with him. The narrator thinks briefly of turning Talbot in for having been the far more active smoker, but that doesn't seem to make much sense. Besides, the narrator would himself be implicated, as well.
If you wanted to get technical about it, he [Eugene] was guilty as charged a hundred times over. It wasn't as if some great injustice had been done.
Once more, Wolff ruminates on the act of expulsion from prep school. Once more he describes a likable, somewhat naïve transgressor -- technically guilty, but an innocent at heart -- whose life may have been destroyed by a heartless institution whose own ethics, snobberies and inability to make wise and careful judgments about its students calls its own integrity into question.
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