William Arrowsmith

Transcription

Uh, down just a little bit. Down a little bit. You ready? That's your seat. Okay. And... Yeah, I was, ha-ha-ha. Hello, my name is Tobias Wolff. I'm here to talk to you about my novel, "Old School". A book can change your life. And I know because I had that happen to me. Frankly, I probably would have ended up, and I'm not being facetious, or self-deprecating, I probably would have ended up in prison. I was really, really going off the rails in a bad way. It illuminated for me the basic assumptions of the life that I had been living that I had no way of stepping outside of before to examine and to judge. And so books give you, you need a place to stand outside yourself. You need a place to stand outside the assumptions of the culture that you are living in. And I know of nothing that does that in quite the same way as reading. I was born in Alabama. My father was in Birmingham at the time. He was a sort of an aeronautical engineer. And I grew up in a part of Florida up until I was ten. Those very formative years that was very Southern in character. I remember falling in love with books when I was probably in the second or third grade. And that the memory I have is of my mother having to yell at me to get my attention. I'd be aware then that I had been completely immersed in what I was doing, which was reading, to the point that I really wasn't aware of what was going on around me. I mean I was stuffing towels under the door at night, saving up extra batteries for my flashlight, so I could stay up late without getting caught. The books that I was reading were actually books that she introduced me to. Books that she'd read when she was a girl. The books of a writer named Albert Payson Terhune, who wrote only about Collie dogs. He himself actually owned a great number of Collies, and he would just pick one of these dogs, and write a novel from his point of view. When I was young, school didn't come hard to me except in one way, and this is kind of ironical really, as I ended up being a writer, and that was I couldn't learn to write. I couldn't learn cursive. I printed everything at great speed, but it was unsatisfactory. And my teacher in the, would've been about the third grade, was really getting impatient with me on this, and she finally sent a note home to my mother saying that I was not allowed to come back to school until I could write cursive. So for a few nights running, when she got home from work, my mother would sit me down at the kitchen table, and she would put her hand over my hand, and she would move my hand through the motions of cursive writing. That's how I learned to actually write. And to this day when I write, in some ways my mother's hand is still on mine. The first library I used was in Sarasota, Florida. But I remember that always as a kind of place of peace, generosity, of the idea of being able to take all the books you wanted out. The librarian took note of her regulars, of whom I was one, and was always making recommendations based on what I'd already read. She said, "Well, if you like those books, you ought to read Jack London. You should read 'Call of the Wild', and 'White Fang'. I think you'd like those." And I loved them. And in that way, you begin, you begin a writing life. Frost has a great line in one of his poems, "Way leads on to way." Reading leads on to reading, book leads on to book. It's a kind of family. You keep meeting relatives of the books you're loving and you feel the familial connection between them, and eventually you're in this great kind of world of books. My growing up was quite, I think, dramatic in its structure. There were great movements, the people, you know, there were great kind of combats between characters. All the sort of element of drama was there. When I was about ten, a little older, my mother decided to get rich. She had been working as a soda jerk in a Dairy Queen in Florida, and going to secretarial school at night. She heard about all these Uranium strikes in Utah, and making bundles. So she decided we would go to Utah, and that she was gonna discover Uranium, and we were gonna... We were gonna... She was like that. She was a kind of blue sky artist. Needless to say, we did not discover Uranium. She got a secretarial job in Salt Lake City. She remarried in Seattle and moved up into the mountains, the Cascade Mountains to a little village on the Skagit River. And I went to school in a high school called Concrete. Every day was about a 70 mile round trip through the mountains to go to high school and back. And from that school I had been out of touch with my father and my brother for many, many years at that point. Didn't even know where they were, but I found out that my brother was at Princeton University. I'd looked up to him so much, and his attitude toward writing was to revere it. Through such encouragements, and through such examples, you know, your sense of what to do with your life becomes more and more focused. I was having a lot of trouble at home at the time, and I was getting into trouble generally by having you know, particularly difficult relations with my stepfather, who was a hard man to have good relations with. Later I ran into trouble in school just from not working very hard. I started running with other guys, and not spending much time doing... Doing my work and I was in a lot of trouble, and I was known to the police, as they say. My brother encouraged me to apply for a scholarship to a prep school, a boarding school, and I did. Now my grades really weren't good enough for... To earn a scholarship and I hadn't distinguished myself in many ways, and this becomes part of the subject of my memoir, "This Boy's Life." I kind of created a character for myself on paper, and got that scholarship. I essentially kind of forged my way into it. I have to say I regret the dishonesty, but I don't regret the result of it. I would be lying if I said I did. I had a wonderful experience at the school. I learned a lot, it changed my life, confirmed me in my wish to be a writer. It was a very literary place. They brought in writers like Robert Frost, William Golding, Edmund Wilson, the great critic, and sometime novelist had gone there, and William Arrowsmith, the translator-- All kinds of writers had gone there, and it was a part of the legacy of the place, and part of the atmosphere that it was very literary. There was also a certain kind of competitive nature to our writing. It was very hard to get a story or a poem placed in the school literary magazine. And occasionally they would choose one of us who had written something particularly good to meet a writer who was coming to visit, and indeed one of my roommates got to meet Frost when he visited. And this gave me the idea for a lot of what happens in "Old School." The novel takes place in a boarding school in the East. This is the setting. It's one of these eastern boarding schools to which the narrator, like the writer, has won a scholarship. So he's a little bit of a fish out of water. And he's observing this, almost as an anthropologist would, visiting some, you know, foreign country. Some boys went there who ended up fighting on opposite sides of the Civil War. These schools, it must be said, were evolved very deliberately to help in the creation of a ruling class in this country. And then for that reason, they imitated the great boarding schools of England-- Rugby, and Eden, Winchester, and Marlborough. Well, let me talk a little bit about how it happens that of all the writers in the world, I chose Hemingway, and Ayn Rand, and Robert Frost to be the guests of this novel, right? Well to begin with, each of those writers was very self-conscious about how they appeared in public. Hemingway, very self-conscious. He projected a certain image, very deliberately upon the world. He becomes very self-conscious about his masculinity, and about always being the Alpha male in the room, and Ayn Rand, the same way, even more than the other two in fact. She was her own favorite writer and never hid that fact. She would never admit she'd ever made a mistake. She was incapable of admitting a mistake. She thought she'd never made one actually. Frost was when I was growing up, the most influential of American poets. He was the Walt Whitman, if you will. Robert Frost, for example, read at John F. Kennedy's inauguration. It was a big deal. He read his poem, "The Gift Outright." He traveled to Russia and debated with the Premier, Nikita Khrushchev. Since they treated themselves as characters somewhat, it seemed fair to me that I could treat them as characters, and so I researched them. I became those characters, and I spoke as them, and I said the things I thought they would've said in the situation of my school. Now Frost actually did visit my school, but I didn't hear anything he said, because I was actually a couple years younger than my narrator in the novel. I was sitting in the back of the hall, I didn't really hear anything. The plot of the book follows the fortunes and misfortunes of its narrator who uh, who like everyone at that age makes a mistake, and it's very consequential for him. It changes his life. And he wants to be a writer himself. And he's dying at some basic part of him to tell the truth, and the irony is that in the novel his very attempt to tell the truth immerses him even more deeply in duplicity. Now "Old School" is not a memoir. I could not have written the novel had I not gone to a school like the one in the novel. And here I was among very, very wealthy boys, very sophisticated or at least pseudo-sophisticated boys, who had the airs of sophistication. So, I quickly learned to mold my manners and dress, and all that sort of thing after the culture of the school, which is all well and good, but you never really leave that other self behind and it creates a sense of division in you. And that other person in me is watching that and thinking, "You phony, you total fraud." Part of the energy that drives this book is the narrator's sense of fraudulence, and in that way I'm trying to get at this kind of feeling we all have of, of uh, how can I put it? Not being entirely known, and not knowing ourselves entirely. And I will certainly admit that that was my situation too. In that sense, there is a great deal of autobiography in the novel, in that it is an inner autobiography. It's an interior memoir. I did indeed get kicked out of my school, but not for plagiarism. I got kicked out for failing mathematics. You know, I couldn't pass Algebra II, frankly. And I lost my scholarship. The novel is about, you know, kind of finding your way home again. It's about forgiveness, it's about self forgiveness, and it's about the forming of an identity... You know, the creation of a face to...to meet the world with. But I had this idea of this adventurous life that you combine with writing. I joined the Army. I wasn't drafted, I joined up. There's no question at all that my joining the Army came uh, out of imitation of Hemingway, and Mailer and William Styron, and Erich Maria Remarque, James Jones... All these writers who I admired, who'd gotten a lot of their material out of their military service. If I'd been reading them a little closely, I would have seen that they were warning me not to join up, but nevertheless, you don't see that when you're young. Now the writers who influenced me most, probably Jack London, from what I understood about him, the romantic version of him, and of course later on, it's a natural step from loving Jack London to Hemingway. And Hemingway still is an abiding influence in my life. Those stories still touch me at the deepest level, the purity of his style, the beauty of his stories, this very truthful way of looking at human beings as so courageous in the face of their fragility and their attempts to come back from what... From the brokenness in their lives. I'd kept reading a lot while I was in the Army, and I managed to write a novel while I was in the Army. I went to England with a friend afterwards. Ended up visiting Oxford while I was there, and I liked the place a lot. It's hard not to. And I especially liked the idea that I could go to a university, where I wouldn't have to study math again. I wrote a novel when I was there. I was encouraged in my writing, and it...it was a... It was a very important time for me. There's no right way to write, there's no right place to write, and there's no right time to write. One of the things that's a little difficult about writing is that nobody else makes you do it. You know, you're not punching in at nine and punching out at five. You have to make yourself do it everyday, and it doesn't get that much easier as you get older. You gotta raise... Keep raising the bar a little bit on yourself, especially if you've written things that you really like. So part of what the novel aims to do I guess is to examine this vocation. How does the writer develop a character so that the character feels alive? What are the little gestures that the writer was able to capture that... That make me feel like I know that person so well? What at bottom is this writer trying to tell me? What... This book has a tremendous sense of urgency about it. I feel like if the writer hadn't written this book, the writer would have exploded. As my ambition to write grew firmer, and as my sense of my vocation grew firmer, it did come to me that this was something I really needed to write about. I couldn't quite figure out the form of it. I had thought at one point of writing it as a memoir and I... But in my memoir, "This Boy's Life," I stopped short of that. Treating that experience was too complex, and yet at the same time, not dramatic enough in its structure. So, the design grew larger in my mind, and when I finally sat down to write it, I wrote something that was about 450 pages long. One of the ways in which it was longer was that I had the narrator going home to different boys' houses for vacation. When I finished that I thought, you know, this isn't really working. And the reason I figured out that it wasn't working was when I had him leave the school, it let too much fresh air and light in, and it made this... The obsessional quality that carries this novel, the boy's obsession with literature, of winning this competition, it made it less believable because there's another world outside after all. So I cut all that out and just kept the boys completely in the school, kept it very claustrophobic, and then it worked much better. But I cut off over half the novel. Well, I'd had this book on my mind for years. You know, I was writing in my... In my mind for probably 20 years in some ways. I think I put the first words down in the fall of '97. Then I gave it to my editor as...as writers do, and he had a few suggestions to make, and some of which I took. And the book came out in the fall of 2003. Now and then, I would be rebuked for daring not to continue to write short stories. Reviewers like to hold you to one form, and they get uncomfortable if you leave that form for another one. But by and large, I have to say, I was very pleased with the way the book was received. Every writer is asked the question, and quite reasonably, "How do you become a writer? What's the... What's the life that makes you a writer? What was the history in your own past?" The person who makes you be a writer, is the one who turned you into a reader. You cannot be a writer if you're not a reader, and who...who excites you about that possibility? And so go way back and see who that was. It could be, you know, reading Peter Rabbit, and I mean, it...it...it... It goes way back, this experience. Now if you actually think about it for a minute, what is this? These are black marks on a page, on a white piece of paper. That's all it is. Black marks on a white piece of paper. And what are you doing when you're reading? You are creating a whole landscape, and I think that actually changes our ability to imagine. It's a way of looking in the mirror in some senses, reading. I think reading is deeply humanizing for us in that way. It allows us to grow. It's the most radical transformation that I think can happen in a human being is to be able to see from another person's point of view. I don't know, books of this kind, I hope give you a sense of companionship in the world. And they certainly did... did for me when I was young, and I can only hope that they... that they do that for others. It...it...it certainly engaged questions I had. There are kind of very private things that happened between my father and me that... That I worked through to... Oh, let me start again. Well, the novel certainly engaged some kind of very private things that went on between my father and me, things that I felt guilty about in my relations with him, tried to think through. He certainly never held them against me, and he made that very clear. There was plenty of blame to go around with both of us, and the truth is we...we became good friends before he died, and that's something I've always been... Always been grateful for that we managed to find each other before it was too late. I mean, he was not a model father, but in many ways, I was not a model son either. So that didn't seem to bother him that I wasn't, and finally there wasn't any profit in my lamenting the fact that he wasn't a model father. There were times in my life later on when those things would flare up again. When my first son was born, I remembered becoming very angry at my father, though my father was long dead by then, because when I held my infant son, and I felt that incredible rush of responsibility, and love that I had for him, it became inconceivable to me, incomprehensible how a father could walk away from his child. Which my father did. And that created a real rage in me for awhile, and it took some time for that to settle down and I think part of it perhaps, found its way into this book that I was, you know, trying to come to some kind of an emotional, emotional point of balance with that. But this father in my book is not my father. But you know, you can't write something like this, something so close to the bone without all this other... All these other questions finding their way in. My memoirs and in the novel, "Old School," I think I probably put a lot of weight on the role of imagination in the formation of identity. I hear a lot about nature, I hear a lot about nurture in the formation of identity, but what about the part that imagination plays? You can only finally become who you could imagine being. And eventually one of those roles is gonna be you. I'm not...I'm not unhappy with...with... You know, the big thing is to have... Not to have written a million books, but to have written a few that you really like, and are proud of, and I have. You know, I wish I'd written more. I wish, you know, but uh, but I didn't. I wrote the ones I wrote. Oh boy, what book would I really love to memorize? So many. Probably "The Great Gatsby." Hmm, what would be my epitaph? Ah, I don't know, I...I... Judging from what's been happening in the market the last few days, it goes something like this. Here lies the body of Tobias Wolff, who squandered all his money. His jokes were his own, but they weren't funny. [laughing] How 'bout something like that? Ha-ha-ha, no, no, no, we'll do it this way. Here lies the body of Tobias Wolff, who borrowed all his money. His jokes were his own, but they weren't funny. Ha-ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha.