Old School

“Once crystallized, consciousness of influence would have doomed the collective and necessary fantasy that our work was purely our own.”

Later in the novel, when the narrator plagiarizes the short story, he doesn’t seem to be fully aware of his wrongdoing. This passage foreshadows his lack of awareness by making clear that he sees all work, to some extent, as collaboration.

“The scene with Gershon could be spun into a certain kind of story. The new boy comes to clear things up with the cranky handyman he’s unwittingly affronted and ends up confiding his own Jewish blood, whereupon the handyman melts and a friendship ensues. In time the man who has lost his sons becomes a true father to the boy, enfolding him in the tradition his own false father has denied him. And what irony; the ambitious, upward-striving boy must descend to a basement room to learn the wisdom not being taught in the snob factory upstairs.”

Here, the narrator considers his situation’s viability as a story premise. This calls into question his reliability as the novel’s narrator. The narrator might be telling the novel’s story in a way that prioritizes captivation over accuracy. This also hints at a larger question in the book: Can a story be told with objective truth?

“I could see myself there, and didn’t want to. Even more, I didn’t want anyone else to.”

Because the task hits so close to home, the narrator struggles with drafting his poem for the Frost contest. He wants to write compelling work but is fearful of disclosing too much about himself. At this point, his impulse is more to project a persona than to reveal his true character.

“Make no mistake, he said: a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.”

When introducing Frost, the headmaster describes the power of physical accuracy in Frost’s imagery. His praise of written truth foreshadows the school’s later decision to expel the narrator for plagiarizing.

“He didn’t look old; he looked eternal.”

The narrator’s description of Frost speaks to the narrator’s belief that, through literature, one can achieve a lasting influence. In creating powerful work, one can, in a way, transcend the constraints of time.

“Form is everything. Without it, you’ve got nothing but a stubbed-toe cry—sincere, maybe, for what that’s worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance but you do not have grief, and grievances are for petitions, not poetry.”

Frost responds to Mr. Ramsey by fervently defending formal poetry. This exemplifies the growing gap between classical writers and those pursuing the more experimental styles that gained traction in the 1960s.

“I read without stopping until we pulled into New York, where I took an empty bench in the station and went back to the book as 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 be drunk. What sheep!”

Here, we see the author’s sudden, albeit fleeting, infatuation with The Fountainhead, despite his master’s disdain for Rand’s work. Furthermore, his literary ambitions and obsessions have given him an air of maturity his classmates lack.

“I understand 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.”

The Fountainhead not only is captivating the narrator but also has provoked a personal revelation. He is overcome with a sense of individualism. This philosophy of individualism is commonly understood to be the mass appeal of Rand’s work.

“Everyone was troubled, nobody measured up, and I began to think that the true failure lay in Ayn Rand’s grasp of human reality.”

After witnessing firsthand Rand’s callousness, the author loses his fascination with her. He no longer sees her as a literary trailblazer who is fighting for the sanctity of individual freedom. Rather, she now seems to be an uncaring person and a writer whose work doesn’t portray truthfulness.

“At this moment I knew what I knew: that what happened to everyone else would happen to me.”

After re-reading Hemingway’s “Indian Camp,” the narrator realizes that, despite Rand’s protests otherwise, everyone faces the same fate. The world is no more his than anyone else’s—and it really isn’t anyone’s.

“The truth of these stories didn’t come as a set of theories. You felt it on the back of your neck.”

Hemingway’s work moves the author because it honestly depicts human experience. Rand, on the other hand, crafts her novels in such a way that she explicitly tries to make political and philosophical points, to the detriment of her characters’ development and believability.

“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.”

The narrator has cultivated a persona that reflects his literary interests and ambitions. However, he retains a degree of self-awareness about his affectations. He seems unsure about his true identity and how such a thing could even be determined.

“We’d kept everything witty and cool, until the air between us was so ironized that to say anything in earnest would have been a breach of manners, even of trust.”

The narrator’s relationship with his long-time roommate, Bill, has been built on an adolescent masculinity that discourages emotional vulnerability. This sets the stage, and raises the stakes, for the later conflict between them, in which true feelings are revealed.

“I went back to the beginning and read it again, slowly this time, feeling all the while as if my inmost vault had been smashed open and looted and every hidden thing spread out across these pages. From the very first sentence I was looking myself right in the face.”

In “Summer Dance,” the narrator finally finds a story that rings true to his own experience. In response to his recent Hemingway binge, he has focused on writing what is true but has failed to produce any pages. Now, with “Summer Dance,” he has seemingly found his story, but it is written by someone else. His discovery of the story sets in motion a series of events that lead to his expulsion.

“With still a month to graduation I was already damp with nostalgia. I stretched out on a slab of rock. The sun in my face and radiant warmth on my back lulled me to sleep.”

Just after learning his plagiarized story has won the Hemingway prize, the narrator goes for a leisurely walk and manages to nap. This illustrates how unconcerned he is that he’s committed a grave academic sin. It seems less that he has malicious intent to get away with wrongdoing, and more that he lacks full awareness of his offense.

“The headmaster reached across his desk and picked up a piece of paper and handed it to me. It was the first page of ‘Summer Dance’ as it appeared in Cantiamo. The line below the title said by Susan Friedman. The name threw me. I’d completely forgotten it. It had flown my mind as soon as I’d begun reading the story that night in the Troubadour office and seen my own life laid bare on the page, and in all the time since then I’d never thought of ‘Summer Dance’ as anyone’s story but mine.”

At this moment, though the narrator hasn’t fully realized the seriousness of his offense, he does start to gain awareness that he has done wrong. Although he is in a bind, this illustrates some degree of growth. For years, in attempts to be perceived in a certain light, he has adopted personas and put on acts. Now, not only is he facing plagiarism charges, but his very character is being called into question. This will necessitate deep soul-searching as he tries to stake a claim to his identity.

“I couldn’t reconcile what I knew to be true with what I felt to be true.”

While the narrator logically understands that the story is Susan Friedman’s, he still feels as though it were his. After all, it spoke to his own experience more than anything he’d ever written.

“If this looks like a certain kind of author’s bio, that’s no accident. Even as I lived my life I was seeing it on the back of a book. And yet in all those years I actually wrote very little, maybe because I was afraid of not being good enough to justify this improvised existence, and because the improvising became an end in itself and left scant room for disciplined intervention.”

Even though he is now years removed from school, the narrator still tries to create a persona that cultivates a literary identity. His itinerant life, though it may have an air of romance, does not lead to productivity.

“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.”

In Wolff’s roman à clef, this passage’s opening sentence might seem ironic. The narrator claims that one’s writing life largely occurs subconsciously and that only fragments of it eventually emerge at a conscious level.

“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.”

In adulthood, the narrator has realized that one does not become a writer by intentionally adopting a literary persona. Rather, it is a gradual and cumulative process that is eventually defined through one’s work.

“When the invitation came I felt an almost embarrassing sense of relief. I didn’t know I was waiting for it, though I must have been.”

Regarding his expulsion, the narrator had given no previous indication that he felt any lingering regret or sense of slight. However, he realizes that, after all, he did need a mark of validation, which is what this invitation constitutes.

“Teaching made him accountable for his thoughts, and as he became accountable for them he had more of them, and they became sharper and deeper. It was the nature of literature to behave like the fallen world it contemplated, this dusky ground where subterfuge reigns and certainty is folly, and Arch felt like some master of hounds as he led the boy deep into a story or poem, driving them on with questions, forcing them to test cadence, gesture, and inflection for feint and doubletalk until at last the truth showed its face for an instant before vanishing into some new possibility of meaning.”

This passage speaks to Dean Makepeace’s passion for teaching and learning, but also to the fleeting and relative nature of objective truth, particularly in the literature classroom. This doesn’t excuse Dean Makepeace’s deception about Hemingway’s friendship, but it does provide context for it.

“In former times Arch had supposed that this sense of being a distinctive and valuable man proceeded from his own qualities, and that they would sustain him in that confidence wherever he happened to be. He’d never imagined that this surety was conferred on him by others, by their knowing and cherishing him. But so it was. Unrecognized, he had become a ghost, even to himself.”

Dean Makepeace realizes that his senses of value and purpose are entirely entwined with his students’ reverence of him. It is his students’ respect that makes him feel respectable.