Old School

By custom, only sixth formers, boys in their final year, were allowed to compete. That meant I had spent the last three years looking on helplessly as boy after boy was plucked from the crowd of suitors and invited to stroll between the headmaster’s prize roses in the blessed and blessing presence of literature itself, to speak of deep matters and receive counsel…

I’m not exaggerating the importance to us of these trophy meetings. We cared. And I cared as much as anyone, because I not only read writers, I read about writers. I knew that Maupassant, whose stories I loved, had been taken up when young by Flaubert and Turgenev; Faulkner by Sherwood Anderson; Hemingway by Fitzgerald and Pound and Gertrude Stein. All these writers were welcomed by other writers. [...] I wanted to receive the laying on of hands that had written living stories and poems, hands that had touched the hands of other writers. I wanted to be anointed.

The atmosphere of our school crackled with sexual static. […] The absence of an actual girl to compete for meant that every other prize became feminized. For honors in sport, scholarship, music, and writing we cracked our heads together like mountain rams, and to make your mark as a writer was equal as proof of puissance to a brilliant season on the gridiron.

Class was a fact. Not just the clothes a boy wore, but how he wore them. How he spent his summers. The sports he knew how to play. His way of turning cold at the mention of money, or at the spectacle of ambition too nakedly revealed. You felt it as a depth of ease in certain boys, their innate, affable assurance that they would not have to struggle for a place in the world, that it had already been reserved for them…

I simply decided that it would be better not to use the Jewish defense. There was no obvious reason for being cagey. In my short time at the school I’d seen no bullying or manifest contempt of that kind, and never did. Yet it seemed to me that the Jewish boys, even the popular ones, even the athletes, had a subtly charged field around them, an air of apartness.

I thought writing should give me pleasure, and generally it did. But I didn’t enjoy writing this poem. I did it almost grudgingly, yet in a kind of heat too. Maybe it was good, maybe not. Maybe it wasn’t even a poem, only a fragment of a story in broken lines. I couldn’t tell. It was too close to home. It was home: my mother gone; my father, though no fireman, wounded by my disregard as I was appalled by his need; the mess, the noise, the smells, all of it just like our place on a Saturday morning; the sense of time dying drop by drop, of stalled purpose and the close, aquarium atmosphere of confinement and repetition. I could hear and see everything in that apartment, right down to the pattern in the Formica tabletop. I could see myself there, and didn’t want to. Even more, I didn’t want anyone else to.

I submitted the elk-hunter poem. “Red Snow,” I called it.

I was conscious of him throughout the meal and held myself as though he were conscious of me. Some of the other boys at my table also suffered fits of dignity. The atmosphere in the hall had become theatrical. This had everything to do with Frost himself. The element of performance in his bearing—even the business with the napkin, awkward as it seemed, had a calculated quality—charged the room and put us on edge, not at all unpleasantly, as if a glamorous woman had entered the hall.

But no. Instead the headmaster told a story of how, as a farm boy completely ignorant of poetry, he had idly picked up a teacher’s copy of North of Boston and read a poem entitled “After Apple-Picking.” He approached it, he said, in a surly humor. He’d done more than a bit of apple-picking himself and was sure this poem would make it fancy and romantic and get it all wrong. Yet what struck him first was how physically true the poem was, even down to that ache you get in the arch of your foot after standing on a ladder all day—and not only the ache but the lingering pressure of the rung. Then, once he’d assented to the details, he was drawn to the poem’s more mysterious musings. […] Make no mistake, he said: a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.

I closed the encyclopedia and sat listening to the wind rattle the mullioned panes behind me. What was it about Kamchatka, that a young writer should forsake his schooling to go there? Spectacle, maybe. The drama of strange people living strangely. Danger. All this could be good matter for stories and poems. But Frost himself had lived in New England all his life at no cost to his art, and I wondered if he’d ever even been there. I guessed not. But it meant something to him, Kamchatka, something to do with the writer’s life, and what else could it mean but hardship? Solitude, darkness, and hardship.

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.

I blamed Ayn Rand for disregarding all this. And I no doubt blamed her even more because I had disregarded it myself—because for years now I had hidden my family in calculated silences and vague hints and dodges, suggesting another family in its place. The untruth of my position had given me an obscure, chronic sense of embarrassment, yet since I hadn’t outright lied I could still blind myself to its cause. Unacknowledged shame enters the world as anger; I naturally turned mine against the snobbery of others, in the present case Ayn Rand.

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. In the first couple of years there’d been some spirit of play in creating the part, refining it, watching it pass. There’d been pleasure in implying a personal history through purely dramatic effects of manner and speech without ever committing an expository lie, and pleasure in doubleness itself: there was more to me than people knew!

All that was gone. When I caught myself in the act now I felt embarrassed. It seemed a stale, conventional role, and four years of it had left me a stranger even to those I called my friends.

The whole thing came straight from the truthful diary I’d never kept: the typing class, the bus, the apartment; all mine. And mine too the calculations and stratagems, the throwing over of old friends for new, the shameless manipulation of a needy, loving parent and the desperation to flee not only the need but the love itself. Then the sweetness of flight, the lightness and joy of escape. And, yes, the almost physical attraction to privilege, the resolve to be near it at any cost: sycophancy, lies, self-suppression, the masking of ambitions and desires, the slow cowardly burn of resentment toward those for whose favor you have falsified yourself. Every moment of it was true.

I didn’t want to lose my place in the circle, so of course I was afraid of what my schoolmates would think after reading “Summer Dance.”

My fears came to nothing. Masters and boys alike told me pretty much what George had said—with plain goodwill and something else, something like relief, as if they’d felt all along that I was holding back, and could breathe easier now that I’d spoken up.

Now they sounded different to me. The very heedlessness of their voices defined the distance that had opened up between us. That easy brimming gaiety already seemed impossibly remote, no longer the true life I would wake to each morning, but a paling dream.

A steady line of wilted-looking passengers jostled past me into the carriage. Time to make a move. I pushed through to a forward-facing window seat, claimed it with my overnighter—my gladstone—took out In Our Time, and made my way to the smoking car.

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. […]

A more truthful dust-jacket sketch would say that the author, after much floundering, went to college and worked like the drones he’d once despised, kept reasonable hours, learned to be alone in a room, learned to throw stuff out, learned to keep gnawing the same bone until it cracked.

Susan considered my caper with her story a fine joke on this ivy-covered stud farm, and on Papa, as she acidly called him, and on the idea of literature as some kind of great phallic enterprise like bullfighting or boxing.

A writer was like a monk in his cell praying for the world—something he performed alone, but for other people.

Then to say it did no good! How could she say that? Of course it did good. And I stood there half-drunk and adrift in this bay of snoring men, and gave thanks for all the good it had done me.

Arch began to explain. He wasn’t used to talking about himself, and did it clumsily, but he tried to make the headmaster understand. This boy had laid false claim to a story, whereas he himself had laid false claim to much more—to a kind of importance, to a life not his own. He had been in violation of the Honor Code for many years now and had no right to punish lesser offenders, especially this one, who’d been caught up in a hysteria for which Arch held himself partly responsible.

I’m kicking myself out, he said. That’s my last act as dean.

Up to the moment he resigned he must have imagined that teaching was a distraction from some greater destiny still his for the taking. Of course he hadn’t said this to himself, but he’d surely felt it, he later decided, because how else could he not have known how useless he would be thereafter? For thirty years he had lived in conversation with boys, answerable to their own sense of how things worked, to their skepticism, and, most gravely, to their trust. Even when alone he had read and thought in their imagined presence, made responsible by it, enlivened and honed by it. Now he read in solitude and thought in solitude and hardly felt himself to be alive.

Arch stopped and looked down the garden to where the headmaster stood by the drinks table with another master. The headmaster said, Late for his own funeral! and everyone laughed, then he put his glass down and came toward Arch with both hands outstretched. Though the headmaster was the younger man, and much shorter, and though Arch was lame and had white hairs coming out of his ears and white stubble all over his face, he felt no more than a boy again—but a very well-versed boy who couldn’t help thinking of the scene described by these old words, surely the most beautiful words ever written or said: His father, when he saw him coming, ran to meet him.