January 07, 2004

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Palo Alto Online

Smitten with writers

by Don Kazak

I remember when I first read the novels of Ernest Hemingway when I was a teen. I had a sense of wonder of worlds opening before me, awestruck that anyone could write with that kind of shining clarity.

There is a moment in "Old School," the novel by Stanford teacher Tobias Wolff, which perfectly captures that feeling.

The novel is set at a New England boys' boarding school in 1961, and for them Hemingway is a god whom they playfully mimic: "Today is the day of meatloaf. The meatloaf is swell. It is swell but when it is gone the not-having meatloaf will be tragic and the meatloaf man will not come anymore."

But make no mistake, the playfulness is done out of reverence.

The boys worship the writers they read, and the school has a tradition of important writers visiting the school for a talk. One lucky boy will be chosen for a private audience with each esteemed writer, based on the poem or short story that the boys have written. The competition for that honor, needless to say, is fierce.

"Old School" starts with a visit by the poet Robert Frost, and more or less culminates with a scheduled visit by Papa himself, Hemingway.

The boys have to fight their way through some stuffy traditions, too. Back in 1960, when Frost and Hemingway were venerated, a new wave of writing -- the Beats -- was breaking through, but attitudes change slowly among the sometimes crusty faculty: "I expected the headmaster to use this moment for a swipe at the Ginsberg-Ferlinghetti crime family, which had a few soldiers among us, though not as many as he feared. He had read their work and affected to see no difference between 'Howl' and 'A Coney Island of the Mind.'" The narrator then concludes, ". . . it took me many years to figure out that 'Howl' was a great poem."

The headmaster and other teachers, however, do care about their young students. One telling excerpt from "Old School" states: "Make no mistake, a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life."

The writing competition does change lives, but in ways that are not foreseen, and not all for the better.

The heart of the book has a question of honor, or rather two questions. The headmaster's own honor is upheld by him alone. That, one suspects, is the "old school" in the sense of the way things used to be done. "Old school" is sometimes used in sports or politics, calling to a bygone era when things were supposedly morally more consistent, more upright, more principled and without the situational ethics of today.

There is also a sense of maturity that some of the boys, including the narrator (who is not named) have, which goes beyond their years.

The narrator chooses to accept a scholarship at Columbia for college, picking that school because he "liked how the city seethed up against the school, mocking its theoretical seclusion with hustle and noise."

The boy knows he has been playing a role at the boarding school, amid boys of wealthier class. But at the school, wealth counts for nothing and achievement -- in the classroom, in writing, on the athletic fields -- is the one true measure of how the boys see each other.

The narrator confesses: "I had also meant to wipe out (by going to Columbia) any trace of the public school virtues -- sharpness of dress, keenness of manner, spanking cleanliness, freshness, niceness, sincerity -- I used to cultivate. By now I'd been absorbed so far into my performance that nothing else came naturally. But I never quite forgot that I was performing."

That's remarkable insight for a high school aged boy, but not quite as remarkable as the performance itself, playing a role for his peers for acceptance. Then again, that's also the stuff of adolescence, when the judgment of classmates means the world.

The narrator goes through his own travails over the Hemingway competition, upon which the story turns unexpectedly.

But there is a nostalgia for what will be lost when the term ends and young adulthood beckons. The narrator notes that one boy, because of violations, won't attend graduation. The boy will miss the pomp and circumstance of the ceremony, "To linger as the shadows spill over the grass and day turns to dusk -- even to lend his raspy voice to the songs being raised by boys still not ready to say goodbye to each other. To look into their faces, some dear, some not, all of them as familiar as his own, and allow himself a moment's blindness as our last song dies away."

It's a passage into manhood, necessary and inevitable, marked by the things that were learned along the way.

Wolff, writing as the narrator, comes to a conclusion that writers make up their histories after they have lived them, to make sense of what happened:

"The life that produces writing can't be written about. It is a life carried on without the knowledge even of the writer, below the mind's business and noise, in deep unlit shafts where phantom messengers struggle toward us, killing one another along the way; and when a few survivors break through to our attention, they are received as blandly as waiters bringing more coffee.

"No true account can be given of how or why you became a writer, nor is there any moment of which you can say: This is when I became a writer. It all gets cobbled together later, more or less sincerely, and after the stories have been repeated they put on the badge of memory and block all other routes of exploration."

Maybe so, but the process of getting there does have its rites of passage.

"Old School" marks that passage for the boys striving to be who they think they are. It's a story written with heart and compassion, where the lessons are private ones well learned.

Don Kazak can be e-mailed at dkazak@paweekly.com

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