Papa was a rolling stone

It seems ludicrous to describe a writer of Tobias Wolff’s calibre as a first-time novelist. After the twin towers of Carver and Cheever, Wolff is perhaps the landmark writer of the modern American short story as well as a respected memoirist (This Boy’s Life, published in 1989, was filmed some years ago with Robert De Niro, Ellen Barkin and Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead roles). But aside from an early misfire he’d rather forget about, Old School is his debut stab at long-form storytelling, and if it’s not the great American novel, it’s certainly one of the most accomplished and downright pleasurable reads of recent months.

Set in a boys’ boarding school of some privilege in the early 60s, the story reads like Dead Poet’s Society without the schmaltz. The central premise concerns an annual short story competition in which the winning student is granted an audience with a visiting writer. When Earnest Hemingway is confirmed as the next dignitary, the boys’ excitement and competitive instincts hit fever pitch. Thereafter, the author weaves a careful web of secrets and lies, obfuscation and disclosure, plus a few literary ventriloquist acts involving Robert Frost, Ayn Rand and Hemingway himself.
Wolff, in Dublin on a tight promo schedule, admits that in the vacuum-sealed atmosphere of a class-conscious boarding school, writers were the pop stars of their day.
“I couldn’t fit everybody in,” he says, “but for example, Ginsberg really had a spell. And ee cummings. And Ayn Rand, she still is kind of influential in the States, she gave rise to the subjectivist movement, as they called it in philosophy – although real philosophers have no time for her – but that gave rise to the libertarian party in the United States and indeed Alan Greenspan was a member of her inner circle.
“But in different ways Hemingway really was like a god to us and we really did imitate him, we tried to find that tone of his in our stories. And for better or worse he gave us a kind of pattern of how to behave in the world, as well as how to write.”
One of those patterns was the cult of experience. Old School is loosely based on Wolff’s alma mater The Hill in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where one of his fellow students was none other than Oliver Stone. Both men ended up fighting in Vietnam and writing about it afterwards: Wolff in his memoir In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories Of The Lost War, Stone in many of his screenplays.
And as Wolff admits, writers of the would-be Hemingway generation felt they had to go away and prove themselves in war in order to have something worth writing about.
“Oh yeah, I mean, look at Oliver,” he says. “There’s this war going on in Vietnam, so what does he do, he drops out of Yale and signs on as a merchant seaman and then he jumps ship and ends up teaching English and then he comes back and joins the infantry to go back. Yeah, that cult of experience Hemingway inspired, and Jack London before him to a certain extent. It’s been there in American letters – Stephen Crane – there was a sense that you had to earn your stripes. Which is of course a little bit ridiculous if you think of a writer like Flannery O’ Connor who lived her whole life on a farm in Georgia and wrote some of the most exciting and astute fiction in our literature.”
Yet, for a book set in the post-war television generation, Old School’s accomplished narrative style and characterisation recalls traditionalist American writers from Fitzgerald back to Twain. There’s no Beatlemania, no Slaughterhouse 5 satire or Catcher smart-aleckry.
“The reason there’s so little television or popular culture mentioned in there is because we were so completely isolated from it,” Wolff explains. “We never watched TV, but the one time that we did was when our hall master called us in to watch Kennedy tell us about discovering these missiles in Cuba, and we were in a really tough spot. It looked like things might go off and that would’ve been it for everybody, and so he thought we should probably see this. Oliver was my hall-mate at the time, so when I saw his movie JFK and there’s that scene, I was thinking, ‘Shit, I was there when he saw this.’ He was just a boy. It was a funny kind of completion of the circle.”

Old School is published by Bloomsbury