1989 Book Prize Winner: Biography : Discharging the First Duty of Life

“Memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story,” Tobias Wolff writes in the acknowledgement page of his splendid “This Boy’s Life: A Memoir.” But memory does not always tell a “truthful story,” and Wolff exemplifies this immediately: “ . . . my mother thinks that a dog I describe as ugly was actually quite handsome.” This dichotomy is extended in the book’s epigraph, from that master of artifice Oscar Wilde: “The first duty in life is to assume a pose.”

Life and art melded for Wilde, and all biography assumes a pose. To assert that it is possible to re-create more than an approximation of another’s life, even one’s own, may require the most enormous leap into willing suspension of disbelief. Fiction is more “truthful.” With unabashed honesty, it admits: This is an invention that I’m going to try to convince you is true.

By choosing the form of the memoir, Wolff keeps within the boundaries of his own “truth”--its chronology and geography, its protagonists, and what he remembers experiencing. But he gives his book its unique life by employing fully his talents as a fiction writer: He writes in language that is lyrical without embellishment, defines his characters with exact strokes and perfectly pitched voices, creates suspense around ordinary events, locating deep mystery within them.

This juxtaposition produces surprising effects. At times a childhood memory is left as the boy may have experienced it: Tina, a pregnant 15-year-old girl, is seen as “one of a pack of hysterically miserable girls who . . . did their best to catch the attention of boys who would be sure to use them badly.” He confesses he “felt no pity” for her. Cruel? Yes. Wolff is here being unflinchingly true to the cruelty of childhood.

At other times, as writer, he locates the point of origin for future understanding, even redemption. When the boy is caught stealing gasoline from a poor family, he refuses to apologize: “ . . . there was no difference between explanations and excuses . . . excuses were unmanly. So were feelings.” That was the boy. This is the writer: “Everything I saw thereafter forced the knowledge in deeper. These people . . . were near the edge, and I had nudged them that much farther along . . . Returning the gas didn’t change that. The real harm was in their knowing that someone could come upon them . . . and pause to do them injury. It had to make them feel small and alone, knowing this.”

Jack Wolff--he resumes Tobias only toward the end--is no ghostly memoirist; he is a living character. Seeing himself in a mirror while wearing the unfamiliar clothes of prep school, the “I” of the boy surrenders to the “he” of the emerging writer: “The elegant stranger . . . regarded me with a doubtful, almost haunted expression . . . looking for a sign of what lay in store for him . . . He took a step forward, stuck his hands in his pockets, threw back his shoulders and cocked his head. There was a dash of swagger in his pose.”

The book follows the boy from age 10 to his teens as he and his mother travel--”restless, scheming, poised for flight”--from Florida to Utah to Washington State, through major and minor catastrophes, and very few joys.

A child roams through the world of adults like a spy gathering evidence for future meanings--and encountering much mystery. There is much mystery in Wolff’s book. Just as in life, it often is left unsolved. Sister James, “a woman of passion,” is Jack’s catechism teacher. When he cannot bring himself to confess to a testy priest, she takes the boy aside and blithely tells him her own childhood sins--she was a “backbiter” who stole from her father. Back in the confessional, the boy recites her sins as his. A few days later she slips a letter under his apartment door, for his mother. The boy opens the letter and learns that the nun wants Mrs. Wolff to call her. About what? Jack burns up the note. “I never saw her again.” Like many others in the book, this perfectly nuanced interlude could stand alone as a gem of a short story.

By conveying an experience with urgent immediacy, Wolff leaves judgment to the reader. Silver, the son of a cantor, is “an only child, clever, skinny, malicious, a shameless coward.” With Jack and another boy, he watches television news clips of what an announcer identifies as the ugly time of “the little Fuehrer and his bullyboys.” Yet the admonitory voice accompanies images that “celebrate snappy uniforms and racy Mercedes staff cars and great marching, thousands of boots slamming down together . . . while banners streamed overhead and strong voices sang songs that stirred . . . “

Soon after, Silver is wearing a Nazi armband, telephoning people with Jewish-sounding names and screaming at them in “pig German.” When he and his two friends bombard a car with eggs thrown from a roof, Silver becomes enraged “as if he had been the one set upon and outraged . . . he leaned over the edge . . . and screamed a word I had heard only once . . . ‘Yid!’ Silver screamed.” Wolff leaves the reader to draw the inevitable conclusion: that Silver has, indeed, also been “set upon and outraged.”

Wolff is at his best when he explores complex, even contradictory characters. Dwight, his stepfather, is absurd and cruel. Once started on a room, he cannot stop painting a whole house white, even its furniture. He is obsessed with weapons and their props: “To spot the game he never got close to he carried a pair of high-powered Zeiss binoculars. To dress the game he never killed he carried a Puma hunting knife.” Insisting that Champion--the dog that may be ugly or handsome--is a good hunting dog, he orders it to fetch a stick. The dog merely barks at it. “Smart dog,” Dwight concludes. “Knows it’s not a bird.”

Dwight ponders for hours how to refine his tortures of the boy. He takes Jack on life-threatening drives, laughing to show he isn’t afraid. He leaves the adult Wolff a terrible legacy: “We hated each other so much that . . . it disfigured me . . . I hear his voice in my own when I speak to my children in anger. They hear it too, and look at me in surprise. My youngest once said, ‘Don’t you love me any more?’ ” So powerful is this voice that Wolff has explored its various tones in his best fiction.

Wolff’s satirical humor shines here. Jack and his friends dutifully pant after Annette Funicello: “As soon as she appeared . . . Taylor would start moaning and Silver would lick the screen.” Suddenly children again, they surrender to the mesmerizing mindlessness of the Mickey Mouse Club: “Taylor forgot himself and sucked his thumb.”

Wolff drowns Lawrence Welk, a favorite of Dwight’s, in his own Champagne bubbles: Dwight “leaned forward as the bubbles rose over the Champagne Orchestra and Lawrence Welk came on-stage salaaming in every direction, crying out declarations of humility in his unctuous, brain-scalding Swedish kazoo of a voice.” And perhaps no one has more accurately captured the exalted silliness of the Boy Scouts, their tidy education for precise heroism, exact catastrophes.

Wolff accomplishes what every child yearns to do, to get even with stultifying adults by entombing them forever in a book. Mr. Mitchell, civics teacher, goes about sniffing out conflict between boys for his regular “grudge-matches.” Miss Houlihan insists that elocution has to do with “ ‘reaching down’ for words as if they were already perfectly formed in our stomachs.” She exhorts stupefied children to “simply let the words ‘escape’ . . . Reach down, reach down.” Horseface Greeley, shop teacher, drops a 50-pound block of iron on his foot to show off his “Tuff-Top shoes, which had reinforced steel uppers.”

Wolff employs his mastery of details and mimetic dialogue to strengthen the reality of his memories: “Gulls strutted on the railing outside, shaking their feathers and turning their heads at us. The air was rich with the smell of chowder. Sunlight gleamed on the silver, lit up the ice cubes in our glasses, made the tablecloth bright as a snowfield.” If those are not the details memory retains, they donate richness to its re-creation.

Here’s Dwight instructing Jack on how he approached a fight: “I went over to this guy, but not acting tough, okay? Not acting tough. Acting more like, Oh gee, I’m so scared, please don’t hurt me . . . So I came over to him and in this little scaredy-cat voice I say, Excuse me, what’s the problem?” That is not the exact language memory recalls, but it is the expert dialogue of a fine writer.

Wolff structures events into mini-epics: Will the subtly crafty, nervous woman who may have encouraged Jack to cash a fraudulent check entrap him--even following him along the streets, to an alley? Will a return match with Arthur--a boy who prances magnificently in gay defiance but beats Jack up for calling him a sissy--deal Jack another defeat when featured in one of Mr. Mitchell’s gruesome “grudge matches”?

In the area of sex, so central to boyhood, Wolff is honestly dishonest with the boy of his memory. Like other boys his age, Jack brags about himself as a “make-out artist.” But he gives no evidence of that, obscures all sexual matters: “ . . . that’s another story,” he shrugs, hoping we won’t notice--and Wolff chooses not to challenge him.

There is no sentimentality in Wolff’s book, no trace of self-pity, no psychological jargon about childhood scars. Without resorting to symbols that would compromise the verisimilitude of his remembered childhood, he can create a sense of meaningful but undefined eeriness: A beaver Dwight ran over and abandoned in the attic is found two years later: “covered with mold . . . white and transparent, a network of gossamer filaments that had flowered to a height of two feet . . . like cotton candy but more loosely spun . . . The mold had no features . . . but its outline somehow suggested the shape of the beaver it had consumed: a vague cloud-picture of a beaver crouching in the air.”

To the rich fiction of childhood that ranges from “Huckleberry Finn” to “Catcher in the Rye,” Wolff has contributed his superb memoir, his “truthful story.”

Biography Nominees Clear Pictures: First Loves, First Guides by Reynolds Price (Atheneum) Paul Robeson: A Biography by Martin Bauml Duberman (Alfred A. Knopf) This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff (Atlantic Monthly Press) George Bernard Shaw: The Search for Love by Michael Holroyd (Random House) Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 by Taylor Branch (Simon & Schuster)