Ms. Crandell
English 9
Book group: This Boy’s Life
Play the Professor
Directions:
Read through the information about the ending of the book, annotating for the following:
--What surprises you?
--What changes the way you understand the book?
from http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jul/19/fiction2 by James Campbell
Writers of fiction like to say they ply their trade by telling lies, but Tobias Wolff really was a
liar. He would not be where he is today if he hadn't been. Terrorised by a violent stepfather,
dependent for refuge on his floundering mother, he made up stories in order to survive.
When it was necessary to fortify his inventions with facts, Wolff made an easy transition to
forgery. As an adolescent in 1960, for example, he glimpsed an escape from domestic hell through a
much sought-after scholarship to a Pennsylvania prep school. The authorities requested
recommendations, naturally, so 15-year-old "Jack" (he had adopted the name in homage to Jack
London) posted off a sheaf of testimonies to his academic, social and sporting prowess - all written
by him - and was duly accepted for a coveted scholarship place at the Hill School, whose illustrious
old boys included Edmund Wilson and General Patton.
Wolff describes his time there as an "idyll", which lasted just over two years before he was
"flushed out" and expelled. After a short stretch at sea, where he suspected one of his crew mates of
plotting to kill him, he joined the army and was trained as a member of the Special Forces,
otherwise known as the Green Berets. In the spring of 1967, he was shipped out to Vietnam.
Wolff has written about these experiences with scrupulous honesty - more self-laceration
than bravado - in two wonderful memoirs, This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army, and in a wellcrafted short novel, Old School. "It wasn't that long a time in my life", he says, seated in his office at
Stanford University, where he has taught in the English department since 1997. "I had pretty much
stopped being a bullshitter by the time I joined the army. I hope I don't still con people, though I
never quite believe that I got anything good legitimately. Maybe some of the imaginative effort that
it took to tell lies goes into my work."
Wolff was born in Alabama in June 1945. At 63, he is tall and hardy, more "trim and
stringy", to use his own description, than is suggested by the homely face that gazes from book
jackets. On a windy Sunday afternoon, an hour down the track from San Francisco, he is initially
harried and impatient to learn the time of the train that will whisk his questioner out of Palo Alto,
back to town. His new collection of short fiction, Our Story Begins, a mix of "new and selected"
tales, had received a full-page appreciation in the New York Times Book Review the same day, but
that had failed to excite him. "I knew about it last week." Once in familiar surroundings, however,
his mood settles and the conversation becomes reflective and perceptive, both about literary affairs
and the strange trajectory that has landed him here, in the full comfort of legitimacy.
Wolff's brother Geoffrey is also the author of fiction and memoirs. Their father, Duke, was a
genteel con man, who might have been found working as an executive in the aviation industry one
year and serving time in prison on fraud-related charges the next (he had several aliases, including
Saunders Ansell-Wolff III). Following their parents' separation when the boys were young, Tobias
went with his mother - rolling from state to state on get-rich-quick schemes or on the run from
some man she was "afraid of" - while Geoffrey moved east with their father. For seven years,
Geoffrey recalls, "I didn't know where he lived, or with whom, in addition to our mother."
In fact, Tobias was living under the iron-fisted rule of his stepfather Dwight - Geoffrey calls
him a "troglodyte" - whom their mother had married in 1957. The catalogue of put-downs and
punishments inflicted on the young Tobias in This Boy's Life would turn the worst Dickensian
tyrant queasy. "This Boy's Life began as a collection of memories I was putting down so that my
children would know how I grew up," Wolff says, "because they were raised in an academic
atmosphere, and my mother by that time was a very proper old lady."
Readers of the memoir will recall how Dwight tracked Tobias and his mother to the east
coast - "from Washington State to Washington DC" - where Dwight tried to strangle her. "That was
the last time I saw him," Wolff says. "Standing in a snowstorm, with policemen holding his arms.
My mother had bruises on her throat for weeks afterwards. They found a knife that he'd thrown
into the hedge."
When he showed his mother the manuscript of This Boy's Life, Rosemary Wolff must have
sighed. Geoffrey, who is seven years older than Tobias, had published his own memoir, The Duke of
Deception, a decade before. Tobias recalls her being "a little apprehensive", and joking: "If I'd
known both my sons were going to be writers, I might have behaved differently."
When the book came out in 1989, Dwight was still alive, though very ill. "One of my stepsisters
called me in a fury and said that her daughter had read aloud This Boy's Life to Dwight while he
was lying in bed, and he was so hurt by it. I think maybe she should have looked at it first. But she
blamed me anyway."
The brothers were reunited in 1961 - Tobias was 16, Geoffrey 23 - and lived together "like
two little orphans", Geoffrey says. "Shortly before then we had begun to correspond, and he sent
me stories he was writing. They were sweet - derring-do and hair's-breadth escapes in the Great
White North. Jack London had made an impression." Geoffrey remembers that his brother "had a
lust for stories. He wanted to tell them, write them and - most important at that age - read them. I
obliged him to read a piece of literary work and write an essay every day for two months."