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Old School by Tobias Wolff Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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Prodigal Tobias Wolff’s new novel, Old School, presents more insight into the formation of character in 200 pages than most readers will find in thousands of pages elsewhere. Set in a New England prep school in the 1960s, Old School is narrated by a scholarship student, full of literary ambition and desiring the attention of the visiting writers to the school. Unmet expectations, outright failures, loss and redemption can all be found in this tightly written book. Here’s an excerpt, From the beginning of the section titled “Ubermensch,” pp. 63-70 The rumor was true—Ayn Rand would be our next visiting writer. Some of the masters were sore enough about this to let the story of their failed protest sift down to steerage. It seemed that the chairman of the board of trustees, Hiram Dufresne, an admirer of Rand’s novels, had insisted on the invitation. Mr. Dufresne was also very rich and rained money on the school—most recently the flew 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 afterward he would join us in Blame 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. He once stopped me on the quad to ask where I hailed from and how I liked the school, and as I gave my gushing answers he smiled and closed his eyes like a purring cat. The headmaster invited Ayn Rand-so the story went-only because he was about to start a drive for scholarship funds and needed Mr. Dufresne’s support. A small party of masters came to object, and Mr. Ramsey used an impertinent metaphor, at which point the headmaster blew up and sent them home with hard feelings against both him and Dean Makepeace, who’d taken his side. It was a measure of their resentment that these masters let us hear so much about this dispute. Ayn Rand would visit in early February. By the time the announcement went out, just before Christmas break, I’d already heard the story behind it and was trying to figure out who held the high ground. Was the headmaster selling out, or were these masters indulging a mandarin snobbery regardless of the result? As a scholarship boy, I knew how I’d feel about losing my shot because some pedant wanted to show off his exquisite taste; hut I was also affected by the masters’ conviction that Ayn Rand simply did not belong in the company of Robert Frost or Katherine Anne Porter or Edmund Wilson or Edna St. Vincent Millay or any of the other visitors whose photographs hung in the foyer of Blame Hall. The school, they believed, would lose no less than part of its soul by playing host to her, and to them the money made it even worse—whoring after strange gods, as Mr. Ramsey supposedly had put it. By now I’d picked up enough swank to guess that Ayn Rand was as bad as she was popular, and she was very popular. In a smirky spirit I pulled a copy of The Fountainhead off a book rack in the train station as I was leaving for Christmas break, read a few pages for laughs, forgot to laugh, and got so caught up I decided to buy it. There was still a man ahead of me at the cash register when the conductor began his last call. The clerk was old and slow, damn his eyes. I stood there in a sweat, knowing I should give up and leave hut unable to surrender the novel. In the end I made the train at a dead run, suitcases nearly wrenching my arms out of their sockets. But I had it—the fat book swinging in my raincoat pocket, banging against my thigh. I was bound for Baltimore to spend the holidays with my mother’s father and his wife. The poky local was packed with boys from school, and on any other trip I would have been horsing around with the rest of them, hut this time I found a nearly empty car and settled in with the novel. At the next stop down the line we took on a hunch of girls from Miss Cobb’s Academy. I watched them milling around on the platform, waiting to hoard, and saw a girl I’d met at their Halloween dance. Her name was Lorraine—Rain, she called herself. By the third slow-dance we’d been pushing up close together, so close that one of the monitors wandering the floor tapped me on the shoulder with her pointer, which meant we had to retreat to opposite sides of the room and couldn’t dance with each other again. Later I saw her making out with my classmate Jack Broome, which didn’t stop me from writing her an ironically jocular letter a few days later, She never wrote hack. Whenever I thought of that letter, as I often did, every phrase glowed with stupidity, made even more garish by the dead silence of its reception. Rain came into my car, another girl at her elbow, Cigarette smoke curled from her nostrils. They stopped in the doorway and looked the car over. Her friend said something and Rain laughed, then she saw me and stopped. She was thrown, So was I. I had to force myself not to look away. A few weeks ago I’d been nudging a boner against her and she’d been sort of nudging hack, the two of us holding this thing between us like an apple in some birthday game. Then she’d betrayed me and snubbed me. Now what? I could see her decide to brazen it out. She said something to the other girl and came down the aisle, steadying herself on the seatbacks, long camel overcoat swaying to the rhythmic sideways lurch of the train. She was a redhead with beautifully arched eyebrows and pouty lips, her pale forehead faintly stippled with acne scars. When she talked to you she leaned back and narrowed her eyes as if sizing you up. She stopped beside me and asked where I was going, and when I said Baltimore she wondered if I knew sonic friend of hers who lived there. I repeated the name thoughtfully, then said no, I didn’t think I knew her. Well, you should, Rain said. She’s stupendous great fun. I’ll tell her to look out for you. Terrific. She dropped her cigarette and ground it out, her leg flashing forward from the pleats of her skirt. She had on black stockings. Then she glanced back at her friend. Well, she said—Oh, don’t tell me! She plucked the novel off my lap. Do not tell me you’re reading this book! It seemed useless to deny it. She flipped through the pages, then stopped and began to read. Oh, God, she said, and went on reading long enough for her friend to look impatient. I waited, smiling idiotically. Dominique is my spirit guide, Rain said. You know what I mean? Well, sure, I said. Absolutely. Roark too, she said, but in a different way. I have a completely different thing with Roark. I’m not even going to try to describe that. I know what you mean, I said, then added, Probably like what I have with Dominique. Her friend called out and jerked her head toward the next car. Rain held the hook out, then pulled it hack. Can I borrow it? I don’t have a thing to read. No. Afraid not. Please? Then, in a low voice: Pretty please? No. Sorry. She looked at me in that measuring way of hers, Maybe she was wondering whether I would take the book by force if I had to. She came up with the right answer. Okay, she said, and handed it over. Rain hadn’t bothered to close the hook. I glanced over the pages she’d been reading and found this exchange between Dominique and Roark: I want to he owned, not by a lover, hut by an adversary who will destroy my victor’s over him, not with honorable blows, hut with the touch of his body on mine. That is what I want of yout, Roark. That is what I can. You wanted to hear it all. You’ve heard it. What do you wish to say now? Take off your clothes. I read without stopping until we pulled into New York, where I took an empty bench in the station and went hack to the hook is my schoolmates played the fool around me. One boy had gotten plastered on the train and was puking into an ashtray, and a couple others were pretending to he drunk. What sheep! It was dark when I hoarded the train to Baltimore. Now and then I stopped reading to study my reflection in the window. His face was like a law of nature—a thing one could not question, alter, or implore. It had high cheekbones over gaunt, hollow cheeks; gray eyes, cold and steady; a contemptuous mouth, shut tight, the mouth of an executioner or a saint. My cheeks weren’t hollow and my eyes weren’t gray, hut my mouth surely tightened with contempt over the next weeks as I read and re-read The Fountainhead and considered how shabbily this world treats a man who is strong and great, simply because he’s strong and great. A man like the architect Howard Roark, who refuses to change even one angle of a design to advance his career and who, when his finest work—a housing project—is secretly modified during construction, goes there and personally dynamites the whole thing to smithereens rather than let people live in such mongrelized spaces. His genius is not for sale. He is a free man among parasites who hate him and punish him with poverty and neglect. And he has sex with Dominique. Dominique seems like a regular glacier as she rolls over the men in her path. With her air of cold serenity and her exquisitely vicious mouth she treats Roark like dirt, talking tough to him, even smacking his face with a branch, hut underneath she’s dying for him and he knows it and one night he goes to her room and gives Dominique exactly what she wants, with her fighting him all the way, because part of what she wants is to be broken by Roark. Taken. This was new and interesting to me——the idea that a woman’s indifference, even her scorn, might he an invitation to go a few rounds. I felt like a sucker. It seemed that all my routine gallantries and attentions had marked me as a weakling, a slave. I was discovering the force of my will. To read The Fountainhead was to feel this caged power, straining like a dammed-up river to break loose and crush every impediment to its free running. I understood that nothing stood between me and my greatest desires—nothing between me and greatness itself—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. That was where the contempt came in. I had stayed with my grandfather and his wife on other vacations, and found them kindly hut dull, Grandjohn was a retired air force colonel whose specialty had been photo analysis. While studying pictures of German trains during the war, he’d spotted a certain marking that led to an important bombing run. My mother told me that story. Grandjohn didn’t tell stories. After the war he’d worked in an office at the Pentagon before getting put out to pasture. At first I’d attributed his blandness to a professional habit of secrecy, and made it romantic—monotony as cover. This time, though, I watched Grandjohn and his wife with a cold eye. How could he have spent so many years in the air force without learning to fly? Thirty years around Mustangs and Tom cats and Saber Jets, and he seemed happy to pilot a desk to his retirement party. Patty was his second wife, a friend of my grandmother’s who’d married him after Grandmargie died. Patty was boring too. She Rod him the day’s news while he peered at the crossword puzzle through his half-moon glasses. They say they’re going to widen the road where that car went off with all those kids. She had covered the floors of their house in thick white carpets that deadened the air and made whatever you said in that woolen silence sound like the sudden caw of a crow on a damp day. I began to feel their kindness as a form of aggression. Patty was pitilessly solicitous. I couldn’t touch a hook without getting grilled about the sufficiency of light and the comfort of the chair. Was I warm enough? Did I need a pillow for my hack? How about one of the five thousand Cokes they’d stored up in anticipation of my visit? Grandjohn kept telling me how lucky I was to have my mother’s eyes, and how proud of me she would have been. Sometimes I had to go into the bathroom and scream silently, rocking from side to side like a gorilla, my head thrown back, my teeth bared. This, I decided, this sadistic dullness, this excruciating compulsion to please, was how you ended up after a lifetime of getting A’s in obedience school. Roark had worked in a quarry, hewing granite blocks with a chisel, rather than take a job doing tame architecture. He refused to think as others would have him think. Had Grandjohn ever done anything else? Had Patty ever thought at all? Christ! How could they last another hour like this without cutting each other’s throats? I fled the house every chance I got, riding a bus the ten miles into Baltimore from Wilton Oaks, their housing development. It rained steadily through Christmas into the new year. I walked the glistening streets in a fury of derision, wet and cold, sneering at everyone except the drunkards and hums who’d at least had the guts not to buy into the sham. Despising any sign of uniformity, I saw uniforms everywhere—not only on soldiers and policemen, hut on high school girls and housewives out shopping. The businessmen struck me as especially pathetic in their hats and suits and London Fogs, each with some laughable flag of individuality hanging from his neck. The Fountainhead made me alert to the smallest surrenders of will. Passing a shoe store, I saw a young salesman in the act of bending over a customer’s foot. I stopped by the window and stared at him, hoping he’d sense my rage and disgust. You—is this your dream? To grovel before strangers, to stuff their corns and bunions into Hush Puppies? And for what—a roof overhead and three squares a day? Coward! Fool! Men were horn to soar, and you have chosen to kneel! But he never looked myway. Instead he continued to chat up his customer, a grizzled old guy in overalls, all the while cradling the man’s stockinged foot in one hand, examining it as if it were an object of interest and value. The salesman laughed at something the geezer said, then lowered the foot gently to the sizing stool. He rose and walked toward the hack of the store. The old guy, smiling to himself, fingers laced across his stomach, stared past me into the street. Wolff’s fine writing makes Old School a pleasure to read. Thinking about will take longer than reading it. Steve Hopkins, April 23, 2004
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