The narrator describes his prep school as a “literary place,” and writing is central to the students’ lives at the school. Many of the boys submit pieces to Troubadour, the school’s literary magazine; three famous writers visit the school every year; and the headmaster invites the sixth-form (senior) Honors English Seminar to have dinner with him once a week and enjoy “literary conversation.” The narrator’s own writing and reading influences him heavily, as he starts to form his own beliefs in conversation with other people’s narratives. His experiences suggest that literature’s power lies in its ability to affect the worldview of the person reading it.
The writers who visit the school have diverse styles, yet all of them—particularly Ayn Rand and Ernest Hemingway—have a profound impact on the narrator. When the narrator reads Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead for the first time, he is deeply affected by her strong, individualistic characters. He thinks, “To read The Fountainhead was to feel this caged power.” Because of Rand’s emphasis on individuality and overcoming weakness, the narrator becomes “alert to the smallest surrenders of will,” like a shoe salesman bending over a customer’s foot in the story. Rand’s writing is so captivating because it changes the narrator’s view of himself and of the world around him. Hemingway, too, has a profound effect on the narrator—particularly after reading Rand’s work. However, when Rand visits the school, she calls Jake Barnes (the protagonist of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises) a “wretched eunuch,” because he suffered a wound in the war that rendered him unable to have sex. Rereading The Sun Also Rises, the narrator disagrees with Rand: he’s struck by how Jake takes pleasure in simple things like Paris in the morning, fishing, and friendship. The narrator thinks that just because Jake has experienced hardship doesn’t make him “wretched.” He starts to understand that Rand’s characters are unrealistically tough, while Hemingway’s characters are so truthful in their vulnerability that “you felt it on the back of your neck.” In this way, Hemingway’s work makes the narrator more empathetic toward others and more open to emotional vulnerability.
The narrator’s studies also inform his understanding that literature can powerfully affect readers. The narrator relays a class discussion about the history of Russian writers being imprisoned and killed for not conforming to the Communist Party’s agenda after the Russian Revolution. They also talk about Augustus Caesar sending the poet Ovid into exile in 8 C.E. He wonders, “why would Caesar fear Ovid, except for knowing that neither his divinity nor all his legions could protect him from a good line of poetry.” Poetry is not inherently revolutionary; rather, its power lies in the fact that it can incite others to rebel. The narrator reiterates this idea in arguing that writers have “the power to create images of the system they stood apart from, and thereby to judge it.” Crafting images—being able to impact others’ views of the world—is what gives them their power. The school’s headmaster explicitly acknowledges the power of writing when he introduces Robert Frost, who also visits the school. Growing up, the headmaster was a farm boy who had no interest in literature—but reading “After Apple-Picking” sparked a curiosity in poetry. “Make no mistake, he [says]: a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.” This is evidenced by the headmaster’s decision to study poetry and teach as a result of reading this poem. His own experience proves that writing is powerful because of its effect on the reader—it can even change a person’s life path.
The narrator also experiences literature’s power through his own writing, which shapes his identity and ends up altering his life path. The narrator understands that his writing can affect how the world views him. Writing is a point of pride and status for the narrator, as he is the director of publication for Troubadour, the school’s literary review. The narrator also realizes that writing can change people’s image of him. When he finds a story written by Susan Friedman (a former student at the nearby girl’s school Miss Cobb’s) that focuses on a middle-class Jewish girl, he identifies with the story and submits it under his name as a way of indirectly admitting and coming to terms with his true identity (he’s middle-class and Jewish as well). Although plagiarizing this story leads to the narrator’s expulsion from his school, the experience helps him come to terms with aspects of himself that he previously hid away. Later on, the narrator’s chooses to pursue a life as a professional writer. Like the headmaster, he is so impacted by the literature that he reads—and the pleasure of writing—that he chooses to dedicate his life to it.
Years later, when Susan Friedman tells the narrator why she stopped writing, she says “It just cuts you off and makes you selfish and doesn't really do any good.” The narrator’s shock in response to her assertion implies that the narrator—who is a proxy for Tobias Wolff, the author of Old School—believes the exact opposite. He thinks later, “A writer was like a monk in his cell praying for the world—something he performed alone, but for other people.” Reciting a prayer is not for a monk’s own benefit, but “for other people”—and so does the power of writing lie in its ability to impact others.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Power of Literature ThemeTracker
The Power of Literature Quotes in 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
