Old School by Tobias Wolff

Old School by Tobias Wolff


Opening Quotation:
"Why did you lie to me?
'I always thought I told the truth'
Why did you lie to me?
'Because the truth lies like nothing else and I love the truth.'"
Mark Strand - Elegy for my Father

The old question, 'What is truth?' is the main theme of this book and the thesis is that truth is elusive, complex, and not always where we expect it to be. It reveals itself at the most unlikely times and once lost, the price to reclaim it is high.

The pivotal event, which takes us by surprise despite clever foreshadowing, takes place when the narrator submits a short story for an essay competition, of which Hemingway will be the judge. Running out of time because of his own procrastination and also his laudable responsibility to a commitment to the school literary magazine, he submits a story written by someone else. On the face of it this is certainly plagiarism, and the crime is punished severely. But the truth of the situation is elusive. The perpetrator was so struck by the truth in the story that he never considered what he was doing.
"Anyone who read this story would know who I was." p.127
"I had to see what Ernest Hemmingway thought of my work." p.132
"I didn't know what this was about…I'd never thought of Summer Dance as anyone's story but mine" p.142

Throughout his years at school, the narrator had striven to fit in by denying his background. He had created a persona for himself.
"I had begun this series (of stories) innocently enough, in unconscious tribute to the Nick Adams stories, but over time it had evolved into something less honest. I wanted to be taken for Sam by my schoolmates, who knew nothing of my life back in Seattle." p.32
His posing had prevented the boy from excelling at that which he most loved: writing stories. When his teacher read the Summer Dance, he was excited that the boy had finally dropped his mask and written from the heart.

Finally, the narrator decided to be truthful about himself, but he was punished rather than rewarded.

The truth in the story also confused the boy's roommate, Bill, a Jewish boy, who had also obscured his background and played a role throughout his school years. He was incensed when he read the story because he thought that his own story had been stolen. It was so true to his own experience.
"That was my story, you fucking leech." p.140



Our narrator is expelled, his life falls apart, and he must begin again. He leaves deceit behind, eventually builds on his true talent, becomes a famous author, and is invited to be a guest speaker at his old school. But in admitting his true identity to himself and his school, he paid a hard price.

This theme of the price and elusiveness of truth is further developed in the story of Dean Archibald Makepeace. 'Arch' has allowed the legend to develop around him that he is a friend of Hemingway's. His stature has been increased by this deceit, and he has been more effective in his work because of it. With the prospect of an imminent visit to the school by Hemingway, Arch admits the truth and resigns.
"This boy had laid false claim to a story, whereas he himself had laid false claim to much more - to a kind of importance, to a life not his own. He had been in violation of the Honor Code for many years now." - p.187
In his unemployment he discovered truths about his own vulnerability. He was eventually rehired by the school, but was never as effective as he had been when he had the respect accorded him by the Hemingway aura.

The search for truth is developed in the setting of a 60s-era boy's school which promotes a love of literature. Dean Makepeace helps the boys to discover truths about themselves and their world through their study of the literature he loves.
"English teachers...knew exactly what was most worth knowing….They made you feel that what mattered to the writer had consequence for you, too." p.5

"Stories, though - one could not live in a world without stories…Without stories one would hardly know what world one was in….It has to do with self-consciousness…knowledge of ourselves as a thing apart and bound to die….it's a wonder we're not all barking. And of course we would be if we hadn't any way to use self-consciousness against itself…. The dross of self- consciousness transformed into the gold of self-knowledge." p.132

"Writers formed a society of their own outside the common hierarchy. This gave them a power…And why would Caesar fear Ovid, except for knowing that neither his divinity nor all his legions could protect him from a good line of poetry." p.25

The power of literature to guide the development of youth is a strong theme throughout Old School. The narrator probes his troubled relationship with his father through reading Faulkner's "Barn Burning." Until he meets Ayn Rand in person, he is enthralled by her values and strives to be a second Roark.
"I was discovering the force of my will…I understood that nothing stood between me and my greatest desires… but the temptation to doubt my will and bow to counsels of moderation, expedience, and conventional morality, and shrink into the long, slow death of respectability." p.68

In the chapter, Slice of Life, the maturing narrator selects Hemingway as his inspiration.
"Hard things happened in these stories, but the people weren't hard. They felt the blows. Some of them gave up and some came back for more, but coming back wasn't easy….The truth of these stories didn't come as a set of theories. You felt it on the back of your neck." p.96-97

Wolff's prose is a pleasure to read. He is always faithful to his voice, that of a troubled adolescent. He can sum up a character in a paragraph or probe him layer by layer. His perceptive vignettes are delightful for their carefully selected details.
"Mr. Dufresne was also very rich and rained money on the school - most recently the new science building and the Wardell Memorial Hockey Rink, named in honor of his roommate here, who'd been killed in the war. He visited often and liked to give the blessing before meals, serving up plenty of Thees and Thous and Thines; and afterwards he would join us in Blaine Hall and lend his surprisingly high voice to the singing - a big, happy- looking man with an obvious orange hairpiece and a shiny round face and little square teeth like a baby's." p. 63

"The other two (literary magazine editors) would be no help at all, George in favor of everything and Bill cryptic and elusive. There are a lot of cats in this story, he'd say, or I didn't know it rained that hard in Athens, then shrug and fall silent. Though never overtly so, his responses were much more destructive than Purcell's. They left you feeling dazed, flatfooted. It was exactly the way he played squash - never slamming the ball head-on, like I did, but breezily tapping it through some sly angle so it died in the corner." p. 114

Major characters are multifaceted and a mixture of the admirable and the troubling. The English teacher, Mr. Ramsey, loses his brashness as he grows older. The roommate, Bill White, is racked with problems, but keeps his urbanity; the Dean is a loyal and supportive friend to Ramsey and the headmaster.
The understanding of the meaning of an Honor Code is questioned as we see the many ways in which a character can maintain and betray his principles.

Although Wolff's plot is never predictable, he makes good use of foreshadowing as he leads up to the school expulsion scene. In the context of Frost's visit, the headmaster says, "a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life." (p. 47) In relating the difficulties of editing the literary magazine, the narrator says, "All of us owed someone, Hemmingway or cummings or Kerouac. We wouldn't have admitted to it…Once crystallized, consciousness of influence would have doomed the collective and necessary fantasy that our work was purely our own." (p. 14)

Wolff is a master of irony and uses the technique to question our values and assumptions. Many things are the opposite of what the world perceives them to be. The over-riding irony is that the narrator broke the honor code when he was most truthful about himself. Through dishonesty, the boy discovered honesty. There is an ironic side to many events. Just after hearing the story of the Dean's duplicity, the narrator remembers how the boys used to listen in on the conversations of the masters, "These sure and finished men, our masters." (p. 175)
Hemingway explains why he has selected Summer Dance in the words: "This is the story of a conscience and that kind of story if it's honest always has something for another conscience to learn from." (p.135) It was the disgraced Dean's probing questions about the literature the boys were reading which made them understand the truth about the problems they were facing as they matured.

Wolff is well-known for his short stories, and sometimes the novel suggests a series of them. There are has several chapters that could stand alone for a reader, most notably Uberwench, the chapter about Ayn Rand. The book would seem to end with the chapter, When in Disgrace with Fortune. The following chapters serve to develop our understanding of truth and retell the events from another viewpoint. The story of the meeting with the real writer of Summer Dance reads like a Hemingway short story. The novel is not diminished by the long denouément, but the reader must pause and adjust his viewpoint.

As well as raising interesting questions about the nature of truth, this book makes us reflect on our own education and the teachers and books which influenced us. As I also attended a boarding school in the 60s, it made me reflect on my own education, and was of special interest to me. But what I enjoyed the most was the author's mastery of language and storytelling.

Esther MacLeod
19/10/09