Years ago, when I first moved to England, I pitied the English for their lack of a West. When it was late afternoon or last call at a pub and I felt one of my colleagues turning chippy in a way that reminded me of high school—I forgave them the hostility because I thought, You have nowhere to go to start over. There’s no elsewhere here, no California: there’s just Bristol, and I would tune out whatever negativity, real or imagined, that was being piped into the conversation.
This was years ago, and I now burn a bit in memory at a few layers of fraudulence here. Whatever the West is, the sheer size of the American landscape makes wielding it this way ridiculous. And who’s to say it was mine to metaphorically beat someone with? Even as a 10-year-old, when my family moved west to California, where generations of my father’s family had lived, I was perspicacious enough to feel my dream fizzling within a week. What I felt arriving in Sacramento wasn’t freedom, a ranginess of identity, all those myths fluttering my hair. What I felt was the terror of not having my old world around me.
That story—the person uprooted—is a hard one to tell, but it’s an important one to the West because of how many people come to the place from elsewhere. For some people, what they experience going west has to be prized apart from what it truly is, much in the same way that, growing up a boy, one inherits stories about how to be. And if you want to survive being a boy, you must learn how to put some distance between yourself and those stories.
Nearly 70 years ago, Tobias Wolff found himself in this acute double bind. The use of the passive verb is key here. As he writes in This Boy’s Life, his sterling memoir of the period: “It was 1955 and we were driving from Florida to Utah to get away from a man my mother was afraid of and to get rich on uranium. We were going to change our luck.” He soon adds: “I didn’t come to Utah to be the same boy I’d been before. I had my own dreams of transformation, Western dreams, dreams of freedom and dominion and taciturn self-sufficiency. The first thing I wanted to do was change my name.”
The story of how young Tobias Wolff, or Toby, became Jack (the name he assumed for himself during boyhood), and—absent the forces that might tell him who he is—who he tried to become, makes This Boy’s Life one of the best memoirs you will ever read. One by one, Wolff recalls the ways he was to become a boy out West—the shooting, the scouting, the supposed proximity to animals he applied to his own legend when writing to pen pals—and makes rip-roaring comedy of showing how these went for him, in reality. Poignant and poetic, the memoir also claims all the parts of being a boy that are often left on the manual’s cutting-room floor: the closeness with your mother, especially if it’s just you two alone; the erotic charge of friendship; the strategies for surviving abuse.
In truth, they were vulnerable, Jack and his mother, Rosemary, by virtue of their exposure. In Utah, they arrive dead broke. Roy, the man Rosemary had been afraid of in Florida, tracks them there. He can fix a Jeep, went to the war and doesn’t talk of it, and gives young Jack a Winchester .22 rifle. Wolff cleverly tacks into the essence of that time by charting his own evolution toward casual violence. Alone after school, Jack takes the rifle out—in the beginning, just to clean it, then to disassemble and reassemble it; then one day he starts scoping out passersby. “I sometimes had to bite my lip to keep from laughing in the ecstasy of my power over them, and at their absurd and innocent belief that they were safe,” he recalls. Of course, he pulls the trigger. He kills a squirrel.
One of the great strengths of This Boy’s Life is Wolff’s control over his narrative frame. The vast majority of this book stays faithfully within the point of view of a youthful Jack, gently satirizing his sureties with the irony that develops as we look over his shoulder. He is not a soldier, a tough guy, a real thief, or an expert con man (all poses he tries on), just a boy: “Because I did not know who I was, any image of myself, no matter how grotesque, had power over me.” Just three times in the book does the narrative flash forward to cast what Wolff was doing in the longer shadow of who he’d become and what he’d do as an adult. His time pretending to be a sniper in Utah is one of them—the narrative suddenly leaves this time frame and situates Jack’s casual cruelty with the feeling some of Wolff’s fellow soldiers would have when civilians in Vietnam were in their scope, years later.
Wolff went on to write of this period of his life in one of the best books about American soldiering—In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War. It is a book, like this one, full of disquiet and fragments of beauty, a memoir powered by the charged juxtaposition of ideas of how he was supposed to be with how it was to live that role. One of that memoir’s primary tales is how quickly notions of honor and faith, whatever it is that led some of them (like Wolff) to enlist, are replaced with a more occult system based on sheer survival. “We were all living on fantasies,” he wrote of his fellow terrified soldiers. “There was some variation among them, but every one of us believed, instinctively if not unconsciously, that he could help his chances by observing certain rites and protocols.” Wolff’s, at the time, had to do with a heavy timepiece that his fiancée had given him, which was a family heirloom and which she’d had engraved with a verse from Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet.
Back in the 1950s, long before he would lug this watch around, Rosemary had her own occult belief system of survival. It was not a whim but rather something she held on to and hewed to. This Boy’s Life reveals that Wolff was shaped by his mother’s belief that a new place and a new man could save things. When Roy turns out to be not enough, they leave Utah in a flash and ride a bus out to Seattle. Along the way, Wolff later learns, his mother was offered a job and a place to stay in Portland, but she had “a lucky feeling about Seattle.” They land hard in a boardinghouse with a couple of watchful women and are circled by men who are bad news. In one profoundly disturbing scene, Rosemary is picked up at a picnic by two men, one of whom gradually dulls Jack’s skepticism by promising him a hamburger. Jack knows he’s being bought off by a hamburger, but he’s hungry.
The best part of the scene isn’t its jittery buildup but the brief and moving aftermath. Rosemary agrees to go out with one of them, gets dressed to the nines, paints her makeup and wears her best dress, only to come home weeping hours later. Something awful has happened. Wolff doesn’t need to specify what. We read how, “I rocked her and murmured to her. I was practiced at this and happy doing it, not because she was unhappy but because she needed me, and to be needed made me feel capable. Soothing her soothed me.” The next evening, though, when her tears are dry, he still asks after the bike one of the men had promised him.
This Boy’s Life eddies and swirls in contradictory directions as it depicts Jack learning how to be a boy—and through example, a man. He is just 10, just 11, just 12, but he is also exposed to events and emotions that it’ll take a lifetime to work out. In the meantime, he creates mayhem. He and his friends vandalize, steal, break things, and lob water balloons at one another. All of them are working out the rage that comes from this confusion—of what they know but don’t understand. One of his friends, the son of a cantor who has left home, shouts anti-Semitic insults at people. The other descends into outright crime. Then in the late afternoon they drink down The Mickey Mouse Club television hour while one sucks his thumb.
How brilliant this book is at capturing that cusp between boyhood and what lies afterward. The way information and legends arrive in a young boy’s brain in advance of the ability to fathom what they mean, the sneakiness that develops out of that doubleness. It is into this period of Wolff’s life that Dwight arrives, awkward, trying a little too hard, desperate to please. He lives far north along the Upper Skagit in a camp in a company town, nearly 40 miles from the nearest town, poetically named Concrete. Rosemary doesn’t seem remotely charmed by him, but she is so desperate that she entertains his courtship, and then his offer of marriage.
There are many books This Boy’s Life bounces off as it goes, among them The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Catcher in the Rye and Denis Johnson’s stupendous debut, Angels. What they all have in common is a sense of orphanhood. Of boys left alone to be boys, and the adventure of that supposed freedom, but also the deep sadness. In the middle of Dwight’s courtship of Wolff’s mother, it is decided that it’ll be easier for her to work and make her decision if Jack is packed up and sent north to Dwight’s cabin in the woods for a time, until she is ready to follow.
Jack already knows Dwight isn’t a nice man, but experience quickly teaches him how precarious a situation he’s landed in. Dwight spends a year making a study of Jack, molding, shaping, leaning on him, browbeating him, giving him arduous lackey tasks like shucking so many chestnuts his hands turn orange and delivering a paper route for which Dwight keeps all the proceeds. On some terrifying nights, Dwight stops at a tavern, drinks himself angry, then drives home drunk, laying into Jack the whole time, as they fishtail home. In the middle of all this, Rosemary tells Jack it’s not too late to change her mind.
“I had come to feel that all of this was fated,” Wolff remembers, “that I was bound to accept as my home a place I did not feel at home in, and to take as my father a man who was offended by my existence and would never stop questioning my right to it. I did not believe my mother when she told me it wasn’t too late. I knew she meant what she said, but it seemed to me that she was deceiving herself. Things had gone too far. And somehow, it was her telling me it wasn’t too late that made me believe, past all doubt, that it was. Those words still sound to me less like a hope than an epitaph, the last lie we tell before hurling ourselves over the brink.”
Fully half of This Boy’s Life consists of a survival story, of getting through the years Wolff spent under Dwight’s watch. Jack’s attention orbits between other possible escape artists, equally caught in that family fabric or another. There’s Skipper, Dwight’s son, who spends years preparing his own expulsion in rebuilding a car from scratch. There’s Arthur, a flamboyant, possibly gay young man with whom Jack picks a fight before falling into a fast, secretive friendship. Eventually, amazingly, there’s his own family, who until this point had operated like far-off blinking satellites, barely felt. An uncle lives in France, and Wolff’s older brother Geoffrey (who would later write a memoir of their father, The Duke of Deception) is at Princeton. When the verbal abuse from Dwight gets bad enough, Wolff writes to both, setting in motion the beginning of his eventual departure.
Through it all, Jack is also—simply—a teenage boy. “I kept outgrowing my shoes, two pairs in the seventh grade alone. Dwight was indignant. He thought I was growing out of malice,” Wolff writes. He develops crushes, he tries out for teams he’s sorely unqualified to play for, he’s proud of his mother’s competence with a gun (because it shows up Dwight), and he moons after an older Native boy named Bobby Crow who is impossibly cool, whereas he is not. Haircuts come and go. He starts sneaking smokes on the side and then alcohol. One boy makes a punch that’s so strong that the boy dubs it “gorilla blood.” To bridge the gap between who he feels like and who he wants to be, Jack lies.
Virtually all kids lie, but the deception at the heart of Wolff’s life becomes a theme that will permeate all of his work—the elegantly natural short stories, his two brief and powerful novels, his other memoir, every time he seems to put pen to paper. This Boy’s Life finds the tiny childhood stream from which all this will trickle. When Geoffrey decides that the way out for young Jack is for him to apply to prep schools, he goes to town on his transcript. He even writes letters of support. Willing his future life into existence with a fiction.
I wrote the first drafts deliberately, with much crossing out and penciling in, but with none of the hesitance I’d felt before. Now the words came as easily as if someone were breathing them into my ear. I felt full of things that had to be said, full of stifled truth. That was what I thought I was writing—the truth. It was truth known only to me, but I believed in it more than I believed in the facts arrayed against it. I believed that in some sense not factually verifiable that I was a straight-A student. In the same way, I believed that I was an Eagle Scout, and a powerful swimmer, and a boy of integrity. These were ideas about myself that I had held on to for dear life. Now I gave them voice.
Like In Pharaoh’s Army, This Boy’s Life is very much the story of becoming a writer. Not by vocation but by habit, imagination, deed, and fib. Also, through observation. If there is a closer study of adults as seen from a child’s-eye perspective, it’s hard to find. Rosemary, Dwight, a later set of adoptive parents, and a neighboring farming couple Jack does something cruel to—many-sided and full of the mysterious depths of existence, they are articulated under a spotlight here. “It takes a childish or corrupt imagination to make symbols of other people,” Wolff writes.
The greatness of This Boy’s Life comes from its insistence on never making anyone a symbol of anything. The book’s faithfulness to Wolff’s memory is matched by an adult awareness that each person in this book had a life aside from their connection to him. In this way, some of the truest parts of the book come as Wolff remembers how, trapped in a family that didn’t want him, he would occasionally let his eye drift, how it caught the purpling of the sky, the horizon of mountains, the extraordinary way a river flashed through the trees driving north in spring. Perhaps it is here, at last, that he finds the lodestar of images that tell him who he is and, then, who he was.
“When we are green, still half-created,” he writes in one memorable late passage, “we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and that falling and dying are for quitters. We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever.” Of course, Wolff, like everyone, grows up, and when the book ends, it is clear this green is long in the past. But he has left behind a record that ought to endure.•
Join us on October 17 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Wolff will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Carol Edgarian to discuss This Boy’s Life. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
