Back to Eden

...But instead you are taken in hand by a tall, brooding man with a distinguished limp who involves you and a roomful of other boys in the consideration of what it means to be a son...

...Ironically, he does it through an imposture—plagiarism—that frees him to see and be himself: an outsider feigning "careless gentility," more Fitzgerald than Hemingway...

...It was an era of privileged innocence and complacency, when the joy of literature was in discovering not its political but its personal relevance...

...Soon we find out why "Arch" quit— and why this venerable figure is suddenly being called by his first name...

...The hierarchy is still in place...

...The young don't have voices...

...Thinking about them makes you uncomfortable...

...gazing at my own stunned reflection in the glass as every click of the wheels took me farther from the school...

...You've never had this conversation before, not with anyone...

...An insistent, probing teacher brings a great work to life by forcing you to stay with it, until you reluctantly and then joyfully recognize, through surrogate characters, your own inadmissible thoughts and unexpressed emotions...

...In their conversation we are taken back to the day the protagonist left school...

...Not only is this establishment in the Northeast, itself unnamed, strenuously egalitarian in matters of class and ethnicity, but—mirabile dictu!—it prides itself on valuing writers as much as, possibly more than, athletes...

...When a fellow student is thrown out for a drunk and disorderly episode, the narrator imagines himself in his shoes: "I could easily see myself on that train...

...On the other hand, self-exposure as the route to friendship may be overrated by adults...

...The verdict on wall-building is, after all, ambiguous...

...For teenagers, whose self is still emerging, secrecy may be only strategy they've got...

...Ramsey, the English master who befriended him as a student...

...Lying sleepless in bed that night, I saw my school as if from an impossible distance, heading across the plains in a darkened railway car, back to the melancholy muddle of life with my father...

...Back at school, the boy comes down with the flu in what might almost be seen as a convulsion of confused emotions and values...

...The goodness of loyalty and its difficulties and snares, how loyalty might also become betrayal—of the self and the world outside the circle of blood...

...left alone, you'd probably close the book and move on to other thoughts...

...At first glance Old School might seem to fit into the artist-asa-young-man genre...

...And even as it's happening you understand that just as your father's troubles with the world— emotional frailty, self-doubt, incomplete honesty—will not lead him to set it on fire, your own loyalty will never be the stuff of tragedy...

...Playing an important role, inevitably, are the myriad faces of imposture along with its stepcousin, nondisclosure—the toxic nature of what is hidden...

...Arch's embarrassed departure dovetails uncannily with the narrator's: two impostures, one outright, the other indirect but no less morally queasy format...

...Smoking, being anathema at the school, is the most serious form of rebellion, and our nascent artist compulsively smokes even though he knows if he's caught he will be summarily expelled...

...Say you'vejustreadFaulkner's'Barn Burning.' Like the son in the story, you've sensed the faults in your father's character...

...Even the competition for the attention of the visiting luminaries is less about careerism than about being welcomed into the larger fraternity of writers, symbolized by the fact that the stars of the syllabus are also the writers they take to bed at night...

...Reviewed by Molly Haskell Film critic and author The prep school lovingly described by the unnamed narrator in Tobias Wolff's slim, incandescent and deceptively straightforward novel is idyllic even by late '50s-early '60s standards...

...Though written with the author's customary grace, precision and humor, there is the checklist of "passages": stirrings of sex (the attractive faculty wife), class differences, risk of expulsion, and so on...

...Even while a student, he is looking down upon himself from afar, and when he finally does do something that gets him excommunicated it is the fulfillment of a dread so ardent it is almost a desire—as if only by being expelled could he prove to himself he was really there...

...As this happens, and the narrator gradually refines his own reactions, we see that the elegiac tone is not so much misleading as a mask for a much subtler revolution, an Oedipal fable, with words at its center, that is unfolding as powerfully as any war story: a portrayal of revision and reconsideration, of imposture and revelation that rearranges the principle of hierarchy itself...

...The smooth, urbane tone of authorial omniscience may seem to deprive the story of urgency, of the drama of rough young voices...

...You will not turn bravely and painfully from your father as the boy in the story does, but forsake him without regret...

...The loyalty that is your duty and your worth and your problem...

...The literary equivalent of first sex is seeing Nick Adams as more fragile than the narrow macho image with which his young admirers had necessarily invested him and his creator...

...And they respected, even worshiped...

...Salinger and Norman Mailer, Mad magazine and Jean-Paul Sartre...

...From having thought it simply meant that "all walls should come down," he now hears, in Frost's reading, something he had missed: "that forali the narrator's ironic superiority, the neighbor had his truth too...

...Something has been overturned, something returned...

...Of course the prep school, despite its vaunted ecumenism, harbors simmering tensions over class and ethnic distinctions that are all the more insidious for being unacknowledged...

...The narrator spends hours copying Hemingway verbatim, and he and his self-consciously literary friends ape the great writer in elaborate and funny parodies...

...A concluding passage of radiant insight begins strangely at first, almost out of left field, with the narrator, already a celebrated writer, running into Mr...

...It turns out that Dean Makepeace, the master with the gimp leg and the Hemingway connection, had left on the same day...

...men are welcomed as sons in a Biblical reconciliation echoing the words of the greatest book of them all...

...It was a matter of a few years, sometimes only months, before they (or "we," I should say, as a member of the same generation, educated in roughly the same manner) would be brought to the brink of subversion by ID...

...In the cyclical movement of human nature, he will go back to the school, no longer as a paternal demigod but as the prodigal son...

...But that's the point...

...The narrator is shocked to discover his Wasplooking roommate is a Jew when the boy's clearly Jewish father arrives to take them out to dinner...

...Not yet individuals, these adolescent wordsmiths need writers and teachers to tell them who they are...

...In a sense the work bridges the gap between the wild, inauspicious childhood of Wolff's superb memoir, This Boys Life, and the Vietnam War ordeal of the exceptional writer we know from In Pharaoh's Army as well as three decades of finely wrought short fiction...

...Nothing is said: Because the roommate gives no sign that something has been revealed, the narrator can't broach the subject, nor can he disclose that he himself is half Jewish...

...The headmaster, an acquaintance of Robert Frost's, has published a volume of poetry, and the beloved Dean Makepeace bears happy remnants of his World War I experiences, including a leg wound and the assumed friendship of Ernest Hemingway...

...And as you accept that separation, it seems to happen: Your father's sad, fleshy face grows vague, and you blink it away and look up to where your master leans against his desk, one hand in a coat pocket, the other rubbing his bum knee as he listens desolately to the clever bore behind you saying something about bird imagery...

...Or woman...

...Ramsey had recently asked him to return as a visiting writer—an invitation he reluctantly refused...

...Much excitement among faculty and students attends a visiting author series and the competition surrounding it: Three times a year a celebrity writer comes to lecture and hold a private interview—a desperately sought privilege—with the student whose composition earns him an audience with the great man...

...He emerges disappointed at having missed out on the Ayn Rand competition, but in time to witness and understand and finally distance himself from her peculiar hold on his imagination...

...Hence the importance of literature and their surrogate personae, and the intellectual confidence gained by conversation with writers of the past...

...The dream itself must be adjusted in the final "rereading...

...Nevertheless, the students who make up the school's core of literary aspirants live in a kind of Prelapsarian Eden, a time before drugs, race, sex, and rebellion roiled the ivied halls of Waspdom and the most insulting invective was "pseudo...

...We are led to assume that if these two desperately lonely masqueraders could have confided they could have become friends...

...In a deliciously divisive event, Ayn Rand, sandwiched between Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway, is one of the guest celebrities during the year covered by the book...

...When Frost comes to the campus in a wonderfully drawn scene and is reading "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," the narrator suddenly revises his previous understanding of the poem...

...Yet the drama is there, in the way reading alters and becomes a life-changing force...

...Wolff wonderfully captures how the transformation begins, the first epiphany...

...Dean Makepeace, having descended voluntarily from his pedestal, must now be called Arch because the icon has toppled, but he is not to be left to his humiliation, his squandered dreams...

...Throughout the book that dual perspective of distance and immediacy both fuels and undercuts the nostalgia by conveying the narrator's sense of his own precarious toehold in this paradise...

...The writers and their handmaidens, the English masters, are forming the literary sensibility of the narrator—an outsider, half Jewish and a scholarship student—who bears a striking resemblance to the author of this memoir-like novel...

...Identification with the cartoonish ubermensch Roark is as vital a benchmark as is the later recognition of his absurdity...

...their teachers...

...He begins, now, to accept his own mortality by seeing his fate reflected not in the mirror of supermen but in the flaws and weaknesses of ordinary human beings...

...Later, when our young man is going through an impassioned (and exquisitely funny) phase of Ayn Rand-inspired snobbery, looking down on all the poor 9-to-5 slobs, there is a moment when the Frost insight reverberates through his life: Walking through Baltimore, where he has had to endure his excruciatingly complaisant grandparents, he is mentally snickering at a shoe salesman, glimpsed through a window, down on his hands and knees before a grizzled customer, until the salesman does something simple and ordinary, which implicitly rejects his observer's superiority...

...They have literature...