I'm at the halfway point in Tobias Wolff's Old School. I picked this book up thanks to Cornflower who chose it as the September book for her online bookclub (click on the link and see the virtual treat she baked up for the discussion--it looks scrumptious!). Although I was excited to read the book, I hadn't started it and earlier this week considered returning it unread to the library. It's a fairly short novel, so I decided to give it a whirl even if I don't finish it by Saturday's discussion. I'm so glad I did, as I am enjoying it enormously! I love Wolff's writing style--crisp and clean prose, but so eloquently constructed as well. It's a pleasure to read.
Set in a boy's preparatory school on the East Coast (perhaps even upstate New York?) in the 1960s, it's narrated by a young man with literary leanings. Actually having literary leanings is anything but wimpy and the boys vie for the chance to spend a hour with the writers who are brought to the school several times a year. In order to be considered the boys must submit a story or poem, which is then selected by the author. The narrator describes his anguish as he writes his poem in hopes of meeting and talking to Robert Frost. I've never been very good with poetry (one of my shortcomings I feel, and always hope to make some progress in this area), but I have to say I have always loved the poetry of Robert Frost. So often I feel a little lost when reading poetry, but I've long thought Frost's poetry very beautiful (even if I am probably missing all the deep metaphorical meaning).
Although the school seems like a bastion of liberal (and when I say liberal I mean it in the sense of well rounded academically) thought, the narrator fears the headmaster will ridicule the works of Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg during his introduction to Frost. Liberal the school may be, but there is a limit to what's acceptable.
"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 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 the ache you get in the arch of your foot after standing on a ladder all day--and not only the ache but the lingering presence of the rung. Then, once he'd assented to the details, he was drawn to the poem's mysterious musings. Wheat was the pane of ice about? Which part of the poem was dream, and which part memory? When he borrowed the book he'd no idea where this act would lead him. Make no mistake, he said: a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life."
Are you curious about the poem? I was, too, and had to find it and read it again.
After Apple Picking
My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.
Isn't that a gorgeous poem? Some of my favorite passages in the book are about the authors who come to the school and their interactions and influence on the students.
"Frost was good at masking his eyes under those hanging brows, but now I saw him shift his gaze from the page to us without losing a word. He wasn't reading; he was reciting. He knew these poems by heart yet continued to make a show or reading them, even to the extent of pretending to lose his place or have trouble with the light."
"His awkwardness took nothing from his poems. It removed them from the page and put them back in the voice, a speculative, sometimes faltering voice. In print, under his great name, they had the look of inevitability; in his voice you caught the hesitation and perplexity behind them, the sound of a man brooding them into being."
Needless to say, I want to go and dig out my books of poetry by Frost. The fact that I'm having this impulse at all from reading Wolff says something about his writing!