Book 17: This Boy's Life, Tobias Wolff
A story about the worst short story I ever wrote
I’m never entirely sure what the balance on this blog should be between personal anecdotes and sticking to the book in question. Consider this an experiment with pushing the slider all the way in one direction.
I read Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life this week, which is a beautiful and personal book from someone who has made a long career of writing beautiful and personal books. This is awkward for me, but it made me think I should tell you about the worst short story I ever wrote.
Not that it’s a crowded field. I doubt I’ve ever actually tried to write more than three or four short stories in my life. I get a few sentences in, realize I don’t actually have a coherent idea about what I’m going to make happen, and give up. It’s not my metier, my forte, or for that matter my oeuvre. But there was a time, probably twelve years ago now, when I was briefly in a story-writing group, and in order to validate my presence in a room full of people who impressed me, I wrote a whole short story. Like most people’s first short story, it was actually about myself.
I knew a girl in college. Several, actually, but this one was back home, and we had grown up together. Not close friends, I wouldn’t say, not in high school, but at the same church and in the same group. And then, as sometimes happens, when I left town we stayed in touch through the miracle of Facebook, which was still good at the time. I still didn’t think of this as “being” anything. I had known her for too long for that to seem probable, and also if I was being real she was objectively out of my league. It was not a scientific possibility.
But we were talking, at least a little, almost every day. I remember getting her to weigh in on which color of pants I should buy. It was, as a different girl I very much did imagine myself with would say, a nonversation. And when I went home on breaks, we were definitely friendly. There was a rapport. But nothing ever came of it, and as far as I was concerned at the time that was exactly how it should have been.
This state of affairs lasted for maybe two years, off and on. In senior year I had a very serious girlfriend at college, for three very serious months, that ended very seriously badly, and somewhere in that part of my life we stopped talking. She had also gotten a serious boyfriend; the summer before senior year the three of us went out on the town in Vancouver, and ended up having an awkward dinner under an enormous painting of two women and a sex toy. I lent her boyfriend a Wodehouse novel that I never saw again after they, too, broke up. After that I doubt I saw or talked to her for a year.
The summer after I graduated from college, though, she was engaged, and I was living at my parents while I figured out what I would do next, and somehow or other the three of us, again, ended up going out for a drink. If I remember right they showed up unexpectedly at some event I had gone to to pass the time. We were all very friendly, and getting a drink or two and catching up was the natural thing to do.
Her fiancé was, frankly, much nicer and better-looking than I was. He seemed as if he’d been grown in a lab to be the right kind of guy for her, all affability and non-threatening light facial hair. We hit it off immediately, although I don’t know if anyone ever didn’t hit it off with him. It would have been like squabbling with a teddy bear. We all had two or three rounds, and started getting into telling ridiculous stories about our shared experiences having grown in the same little church community. And, at some point, he laughed at some story we told and looked at her and said “Was this when you two were going out?”
I looked at her and she looked at me and neither of us knew what to say about this. Because in that moment I knew that there had been a year or more when she had been waiting for me to say something, anything, to acknowledge that to everyone except me we were, quite obviously, on the verge of being a couple, and the lightest breath of wind could have blown us over into a condition that everyone, except me, had known about. And which, despite my certainty that it was a scientific impossibility, she had also wanted us to fall into.
We both denied it, of course, even when he insisted that her mom had told him all about it. And there was a little nervous laughter about what a silly misunderstanding THAT had been, and we talked about having one more round but decided against it because after all it was getting late. But it had been so nice to see you again, great to meet you, you too, let’s stay in touch! And I never saw her or him again, and when I followed her on Instagram years later she did not follow me back.
The reason I’m telling you this is because, a year or two later, when I was newly invited to a short story writing group and struggling to come up with something to write a decent short story about, what I eventually landed on was the possibility of writing a story in which a thinly veiled version of me and a thinly veiled version of her met, again, at the funeral of a thinly veiled version of one of our mutual friends (I had to choose someone to sacrifice, no-one we knew had actually died.) And our two avatars had an awkward but cathartic continuation of that drunken pause, and came to some kind of understanding about what had happened to us, and both of us, but especially I, felt the clarity of resolution.
It was, obviously, awful.
And the other people in the group savaged it, as they should have, even though I pretended it wasn’t about myself. And I haven’t written a short story since then.
But in the decade since then I’ve been relieved to find that this urge to use a story as an opportunity to go back, to have that one last conversation, and to get that illusive “closure” on a relationship that ended inchoately, is almost universal. Usually it’s romantic, although not always. Think of the narrator of Julian Barnes’ Sense of An Ending, continually trying to arrange One Last Meeting with his college friend in order to get past his undefined sense of guilt. Or last year’s not-a-book Past Lives, which we watched last week, which made very good work out of its story of two childhood friends meeting after 24 years to confront their feelings - of both missed romantic opportunity and abandoned personal identity. It makes very good drama, as a narrative, for your story to conclude with a final conversation in which All Is Revealed, Cards Are Laid On The Table, and perhaps Previously Unknown Motivations Are Discovered. In the best case scenario it feels like the last piece of a puzzle falling into place.
At the same time though it can’t help feeling like wish fulfillment to me. In my limited experience of encounters like this, they actually resolve nothing. What has happened between us and those we know is generally an unchangeable fact; digging it up for ourselves, for love or guilt or whatever, is pointless. But the fantasy is so, so compelling. Which of us doesn’t have something, even if it’s something small, that we’d like to revisit and lay to rest, something that nags at us because it caught in the gears of a relationship we once valued and then lost? In the absence of time travel it’s the closest we’ll come to being able to go back and set things right and be the person we wonder if we should have been.
I was reminded of this reading This Boy’s Life because it concludes with the young Wolff in 1960 or 61 being sent, at last, to prep school, escaping the dreary poverty and abuse he’s pushed through for most of the book. He’s done this, as it happens, by forging his grades and his letters of recommendation to match the person he thinks he could have been if he’d tried. But on this shaky foundation he goes off to school, only to reveal quickly that prep school did not transform his life in the way he imagined it would, and that in the end he was expelled.
The life of an outsider at prep school in 1961, as it happens, is also the subject of Wolff’s award-winning 2003 novel Old School, which I’ve read two or three times and will read again. Old School presents itself as a delicate intersection of reality and imagination; it’s written in the same first-person voice as This Boy’s Life and is almost certainly a thinly veiled representation of something true about Wolff’s own experiences. But in Old School it isn’t an envelope of falsified references that leads to the fictional boy’s expulsion, it’s an act of plagiarism. Desperate to impress his fellow students and the faculty of the fiction-mad school he copies a short story that a student at the neighboring girls’ school wrote, passes it off as his own, and wins a prestigious prize before being caught and expelled.
The relatively long denouement of Old School actually offers not one but two clarifying conversations of the kind I’ve been thinking about; not only does the narrator have a chance to meet the girl from whom he stole the story, but he also, much later, has a chance encounter with the school official who had gone to bat for him, and discovers several secrets about the inner lives of the other people at the school that radically re-orient his understanding of what happened to him. And I couldn’t help feeling that Wolff was using a fictional version of his own story to try to understand what had actually happened to him; to imagine other ways it could have happened, in order to learn more about what did.
This Boy’s Life is closer to a straight memoir than Old School, or at least that’s how it presents itself. But I felt something of the same energy in it; the same desire to go back to a tumultuous part of the author’s life, one about which he has not entirely decided how he feels, to talk to the people he knew then, pick through his memories, and try to understand why they did what they did, try to find something that would reveal the thoughts in their heads that were so mysterious to him at the time.
I don’t mean this as a strike against Wolff, or the artistry of what each of his novels and memoirs and short story collections has accomplished. Little, if any, great art isn’t at least partly an attempt by the artist to understand themselves. Maybe the difference between great artists and the rest of us is that they’re able to take their nostalgia and elevate it into something that will speak, not just to them, but to their readers as well.
I hope you consider this experiment to be highly successful. This is a wonderfully thoughtful and thought-provoking piece.