Old School by Tobias Wolff Page A

noses at these loyal, good-hearted bores. And this line of thinking led me back to my own home, which Ayn Rand would consider a perfect instance of the drab little life she’d condemned. My mother had certainly been held hostage by one snot-nosed brat. Too much of her short life had been lost to worries about lousy cars, lousy teeth, lousy
refrigerators.
And as for my father, his already uncertain character devastated by grief, God knows there was plenty of weakness there.
    That much was true. But Ayn Rand’s cartoon vision of my parents—
brainless slattern, frustrated imbecile
—sickened me. She had no idea what went on between such beleaguered people, how infinitely complicated it was and dramatic, the effort it had taken them to keep going through all the disappointment and sickness and dreams of escape. I blamed Ayn Rand for disregarding all this. And I no doubt blamed her even more because I had disregarded it myself—because for years now I had hidden my family in calculated silences and vague hints and dodges, suggesting another family in its place. The untruth of my position had given me an obscure, chronic sense of embarrassment, yet since I hadn’t outright lied I could still blind myself to its cause. Unacknowledged shame enters the world as anger; I naturally turned mine against the snobbery of others, in the present case Ayn Rand.
    This part of my reaction was personal and unreasoned. But there was more. It had dawned on me that I didn’t really know anyone like Roark or Dominique. Though Ayn Rand insisted that such people existed and that she herself was one, my own experience of them was purely literary. Everyone I knew, even in the most privileged families, was beset by unheroic worries. A brilliant daughter made pregnant by her piano teacher, a sweet-tempered son gone surly and secretive, flunking out of school and shedding his friends and wrecking one car after another as if with a will; nervous breakdowns and squabbles over money. I had stayed with these families during holidays and long weekends, and among even the happiest of them I had learned to efface my presence at certain moments—the sound of a door slamming upstairs, a husband’s dark silence as his wife poured herself yet another glass of wine.
    The people I knew, and the families I knew, were all more or less beset. And none of them—not one—seemed capable of the perfect rationality and indomitable exercise of will that Ayn Rand demanded as a condition of respect. Nor, I had to admit, was I. Everyone was troubled, nobody measured up, and I began to think that the true failure lay in Ayn Rand’s grasp of human reality.
    Her ridicule of Hemingway brought this home to me. Not immediately, of course. My first reaction was shock—at her unfairness not only to the writer but to a character for whom I had a great liking. Wretched eunuch, she’d called Jake Barnes, as if the fact of such a wound, of woundedness itself, made him merely pathetic. I knew Jake pretty well, having read
The Sun Also Rises
twice the previous summer. He’d gotten about the worst break I could then imagine, but he wasn’t wretched. He took pleasure in how Paris came to life in the morning. Pleasure in food and drink and travel, in watching men face dangerous animals, in fishing, in friendship. Jake lingered on these things. He watched the life around him with interest. You could sometimes feel the pulse of hopeless longing, but you could not say that Jake was wretched. It was wrong, and it was mean.
    It had become a fashion at school to draw lines between certain writers, as if to like one meant you couldn’t like the other. So far I’d avoided the practice. I liked most of what I chose to read and saw no point in reducing my pleasures by half. But Ayn Rand jolted me into taking sides. She made me feel the difference between a writer who despised woundedness and one for whom it was a bedrock fact of life.
    In the weeks after her visit I re-read
In Our Time
and