Cryptomnesia - Forging a self

The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020

Cryptomnesia
Forging a self

Tobias Wolff’s Old School (2004) centers on this tension between imitation and originality. The unnamed narrator of the novel is a senior at an (also unnamed) boys’ prep school in 1960. Like Lee in Prep, he is not one of the patrician East Coast WASPs who set the tone of his school. Rather, he is working class and part Jewish—both of which he does his best to hide. But unlike Lee, he identifies wholeheartedly with the intellectual ethos of his school. He yearns to be a writer, and as he puts it, “if the school had a snobbery it would confess to, this was its pride in being a literary place” (4). Three times a year the school is visited by a distinguished author. Before each of these visits, the students in the senior class are invited to submit a piece of writing to be read by the guest author, who selects from them one boy to meet with privately.

The idea is that you develop your own voice as a writer through apprenticing yourself to a master—learning to write in their cadences and diction, to work with their sort of themes and characters and preoccupations. In the year of the novel, the first author to visit the school is Robert Frost, and so the boys busy themselves trying to write poems both homespun and elegiac. The problem lies in finding something to write about that seems to fit with this approach to verse. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to occur to any of the boys that Frost was writing from his own experience. Instead, they try to invent the details of scenes they know next to nothing about. The narrator, for instance, writes a poem about elk hunting—although he has never been hunting or seen an elk. He is simply trying to evoke a sense of wintry stoicism.

The contest is won by the narrator’s friend George Kellogg, an earnest type, the editor of the school literary magazine, who writes a “dramatic monologue in which an old farmer feels the bite of mortality on the first cold day of autumn” (39). The poem begins with the old farmer’s thoughts as he ogles a young hired girl milking a cow, watching her soft hands “pull the foaming cream into the pail between her legs,” and ends as he strides off, philosophizing, into an early snow (39). George titles it “First Frost.”

To the surprise of everyone, though, the actual Frost reads George’s poem not as an homage but a gentle burlesque. As the distinguished poet tells a reporter for the school newspaper:

Young Kellogg has had some fun at this old man’s expense, and I guess this old man can stand some fun, if it isn’t too expensive. He said he liked the joke of the milkmaid having soft hands. All the milkmaids I’ve ever had to do with could’ve gone bare-knuckle with Jim Corbett and made him bleed for his purse. Frost suggested that a few winters on a farm wouldn’t hurt any young poet, to learn that snow is no metaphor, if nothing else. But I’ve dipped my bucket there a time or two, and your young fellow Kellogg has caught me fair and square. (40)

Poor George. Frost is unable to see his poem as a serious imitation of his work and so reads it as parody. Luckily, his good humor covers for his misunderstanding. He pays George the complement of seeming far more sophisticated than he actually is. But Frost is also only able to read the boy’s poem as a comment on his own writing—which leads him to misread George as much as George misappropriates him. Frost doesn’t see that the real themes of George’s poem are the teenage warhorses of horniness and fear of death. The joke is on both of them. Frost turns George into an ironist; George turns Frost into a back porch versifier.

The next visiting author misreads the work of her contest winner all the more comically. This is Ayn Rand, cheerleader for unchecked individualism and author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, who has been invited in an attempt to curry favor with a wealthy alumnus of the school. Rand chooses a story by Big Jeff Purcell, a likable oddball, the only vegetarian in the senior class, and an advocate of interplanetary exploration. Big Jeff has fused his two enthusiasms in a story called “The Day the Cows Came Home,” in which he imagines that the Earth has been invaded by a race of super-bovines from outer space who exact a terrifying price for our long-term carnivorous mistreatment of cows. But all Rand sees in this vegetarian fantasy of revenge is a reflection of her own crackpot philosophy, in which, as she puts it, “the herd denies the truth of its own enslaved condition, and attacks the heroic truth-teller” (78). This leads to a hilarious exchange between her and Big Jeff, who rises to his feet during her public appearance at the school to ask:

Miss Rand, your books reach thousands of people—

Millions.

Millions of people. Just think what a difference it would make if they knew your position on meat. (87)

Rand, of course, has no clue as to what Jeff is talking about. “Meat?” she says. “What depraved psychology prompts you to speak like this to the author of Atlas Shrugged?” (87). Angry and confused, she quits the room, her entourage following.

Imitating another writer thus proves more complicated than it might at first seem. George and Big Jeff are able to produce writing that sounds something like Frost or Rand, but they don’t really understand what they’re imitating. They have the manner but not the substance. However sincere their efforts, they thus produce something closer to parody than imitation. Ironically, though, it’s this unintended gap between the work of the student and the master that lends their writing its charm. For it is in the differences between George and Frost, Jeff and Rand—even when they result from a lack of skill or maturity—that we begin to sense the distinctive personalities of the students. Both boys end up writing in their own voices by accident, as it were, through trying to write like somebody else.

But what propels the novel is the announcement that Ernest Hemingway will be the third author to visit the school that year. Wolff’s narrator idolizes Hemingway. In fact, to understand what it would feel like to write like Hemingway, he has retyped several of the master’s short stories, page by page. So he is determined to win a meeting with his hero.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean he’s able to come up with a story in Hemingway’s vein. In fact, as the deadline for submission looms, he’s stuck. Alone late one night in the office of the school’s literary journal, the narrator leafs through a stack of back issues of journals from other New England prep schools, all filled with similarly predictable stories, until to his surprise he stumbles on one that arrests him, “Summer Dance,” a story published five years before in a review from a private girls’ school.

What engages the narrator is both the matter-of-fact tone of the story and its subject; it is about a middle-class Jewish girl trying to fit into a WASP culture. The story begins with the sentence, “I hope nobody saw me pick the cigarette butt off the sidewalk . . .” (122), and the narrator is hooked. The story continues, documenting the small indignities of belonging to a lower social class. As the narrator explains:

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 . . . 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. (125—26)

The narrator begins retyping. The story astonishes him because it is actually written from the point of view of a prep school student—not an elk hunter or a New England farmer or a witness to an interplanetary invasion. It feels authentic, without pretense, without a mask, like Hemingway except in high school. It is what he wishes he was capable of writing now. He keeps typing, obsessively, through the night and into the dawn, only changing a few necessary details—names, locations, “other particulars” (126):

I finished the story just before the bell rang before breakfast. I read it through and fixed a few typos, but otherwise it needed no correction. It was done. Anyone who read this story would know who I was. (127)

So who is this person who has been laid bare upon the page? In one sense, it is a fraud, someone who has almost unconsciously retyped and claimed the work of another writer as his own. But in another sense, the story does indeed show us the narrator—a boy who desperately wants to be accepted, to fit in, but who is painfully, nervously aware of the shortcomings of his background and temperament. And in still another sense, the story reveals the narrator as someone so eager to call himself a writer that he is willing to become someone else to do so.

Events unravel. Hemingway picks the narrator’s plagiarized story from the others sent to him. It’s published in the school paper, with a comment from Papa saying, in part, “He is writing cleanly and well about what he knows and he’s writing from his conscience” (135). The narrator’s friends are surprised by the unvarnished quality of his story while also envious that he was able to tell it. As one of them tells him, with unknowing irony, “If I hadn’t seen your name on it I wouldn’t have thought it was yours” (138). But the inevitable occurs. Someone has read the original version of the story. The narrator is summoned to the headmaster’s office and quickly expelled from school.

What is hard to convey in summary but is clear in the novel is that the narrator is not a cynic. He really does identify with the story he has plagiarized. It felt like his own, or at least it did during the first, frenzied activity of (re)writing it. But when confronted, he immediately sees and admits the story is not his—except in the sense that it spoke directly and powerfully to him. The narrator owns his guilt, accepts his punishment, leaves school, works at odd jobs, and joins the army—all the while still harboring dreams of becoming a writer. A few years later, he rereads the story and is moved to write a note of apology to its actual author, Susan Friedman. To his surprise, she writes back, saying “plagiarism, not imitation, is the sincerest form of flattery” (157).

Susan and the narrator meet for lunch. It’s an awkward meeting. She is five years older than him, a second-year medical student, much more sophisticated, and inclined to view the theft of her story as a “prank” rather than a life-altering event. She’s amused that “Papa himself couldn’t tell if he was reading the story of a boy or a girl” (161) and unimpressed by the literary life, which strikes her as frivolous. When the narrator insists that her story is “brave and honest,” she replies, “How do you know it isn’t a sham from start to finish” (162).

So once again we stumble upon a gap in interpretation between student and author. The narrator has plagiarized Susan, almost word for word. But his attitude toward her story remains too reverential for her taste. What was for her a “well-written little exercise” (162) was for him a revelation of self (although whose self exactly is never clear). The narrator describes Susan as poised and gracious. So it could be that she dismisses her story, at least in part, as a way of offering them a way out of a difficult conversation, of saying that what is past is past. Even still, it also seems clear that—like Frost with George or Rand with Big Jeff—she feels that her acolyte, her plagiarist, never really quite got what she was trying to say.

I find it telling that Old School offers no successful examples of imitation. George’s homage to Frost, Big Jeff’s vegetarian science fiction, even the narrator’s wholesale appropriation of “Summer Dance”—they all end up missing their targets. More important, none of the boys learns to write from his own experience. Near the beginning of the novel, there is a wonderful passage in which the narrator reflects on the one criticism he and his classmates are unwilling to make of each other:

All of us owed someone, Hemingway or cummings or Kerouac—or all of them, and more. We wouldn’t have admitted to it but the knowledge was surely there, because imitation was the only charge we never brought against the submissions we mocked so cruelly. There was no profit in it. Once crystallized, consciousness of influence would have doomed the collective and necessary fantasy that our work was purely our own. (14)

Because they’ve lived so little, the students are almost forced to mimic the voices and stories of those they’ve read. But they need to gain more than life experience alone. We learn near the end of the novel that the narrator does eventually become a working writer, but only when, “after much floundering, [he] went to college and worked like the drones he 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” (156). In other words, he becomes a writer only when, after years of trying to imitate genius, he learns to treat writing instead as a job. Old School ends up a paean to neither talent nor imitation but to craft.