Is Toby Still Jack?

Is Toby Still Jack?

Throughout Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life, the reader cannot shake a strange feeling of discord, an intellectual conflict between the writer's life and the writer's craft. As a reviewer for The Atlantic observed, "...it seems so unlikely that the bewildered juvenile nuisance was to become the excellent writer that he is." A perpetual suspense fills the book as the reader wonders where the momentous turning point will be, when his life is straightened out, he finds an identity, and he stops doing stupid things. But Wolff does not show us any such turning point, if such a point even exists. He leaves us to conclude for ourselves how to resolve this conflict.

Despite his shady life, he is a skilled writer. And despite some romantic conceptions, no one is born a great writer. True, a certain degree of natural talent is required, but a large portion of any great ability is practice. Fortunately, we are not left entirely in the dark as to the mystery of Wolff's talent. Wolff drops clues throughout the book. He frequently practices; he writes with frequency and creativity in numerous places in the book.

"The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second is, no one has yet discovered." This Oscar Wilde quote is at the very beginning of the book on Toby's life. Toby poses throughout the book, always assuming the characteristics he thinks those around him will admire. He is by turns brave and tough with his friends, talented and ambitious with Mr. Howard, and meek and agreeable with Father Karl. This chameleonlike willingness to assume his surroundings for protection leads to another profound question: is Wolff posing with the book itself? He does only show us selected portions of his life, the portions he wanted us to see. Or are they even portions of his life? He may have made them up.

In examining Wolff's clues, we find that every time we see him writing someone, he exaggerates and elaborates everything. His writing career begins at a young age; he concocts an elaborate story, relating to his pen pal Alice his "encounters with mountain lions, rattlesnakes, and packs of coyotes on [his] father's ranch, the Lazy B." He is pretending. Later, he begins writing Annette Funicello, telling her that "instead of a ranch, my father, Cap'n Wolff, now owned a fleet of fishing boats. I was first mate, myself, and a pretty fair hand at reeling in the big ones." His story is far from reality.

He then moves on to people he actually knows, but he has a little more difficulty in this task, as his intended recipients know who he is. They know he is not the person he wants them to think he is. In high school, he has a "crush" on Rhea Clark, and gets to dance with her for a short period. After that moment which he cherished and she forgot, he wrote her "long grandiloquent letters which [he] then destroyed." He could not actually give her his letters. He writes his brother Geoffrey a story about "two wolves fighting to the death in the Yukon." He could not possibly have any first-hand knowledge of either wolves or the Yukon.

The point at which we see Wolff's inventive writing genius really shine is when he applies to prestigious prep schools. He devises his own transcripts, his own teacher recommendations, his own extracurricular activities, his own community service, his own everything. And he has to be convincing. This represents a culmination of his years of fabricating realities. Here is the opportunity he dreamed about at the beginning of the book, the opportunity to present himself as a fine, upstanding, straight A scholar. Here is the ultimate pose. His experience by this point is such that "the words came as easily as if someone were breathing them in [his] ear." His talent at posing is so great that the school is interested. So the second test begins: an alumnus interviews him. Again, Toby becomes the boy in his application to Mr. Howard, and he is good enough that he is eventually accepted to the school.

There are also times when he has difficulty writing. Every time he writes someone in the book he is pretending, except for the time when he writes his brother. Rather than send him a letter detailing some harrowing adventure that never happened, rather than describe how Dwight was lashing him with a rawhide whip on a nightly basis, he sends him a story about wolves. Here is the one instance when he is not posing. They are not his wolves. In no way does he attempt to make his brother assume that his story was reality. It is fiction, and he himself does not believe any part of it to be true, unlike the school applications. Then, he "believed that [he] was an Eagle Scout, and a powerful swimmer, and a boy of integrity."

He also had difficulty writing the school applications at first. Before he was able to fabricate the teacher recommendations and transcripts, he could not think of anything. He "composed high-flown circumlocutions," but "balked at the silliness of them." Whatever he posed as, the teacher's recommendations would not agree with him. His actual grades would assure his application's hasty dismissal. He could not write anything. He said "I was stumped," and he gave up.

The more distant from reality his subject, the easier it was for him to write about it. He wrote his pen pal "at least once a week, ten, twelve, fifteen pages at a time." It appears that Toby cranked the wolf story out quite quickly. His fabricated application came naturally to him. But he could not give Rhea Clark the "grandiloquent" letters he wrote her, and he could not write anything at all when everything he wrote would be seen alongside reality.

By induction, then, Wolff is posing with the book, too. He is showing us himself as he would like us to see himself, which may or may not be his real self. His many years of posing have made him quite skilled at it.

But what about his honesty? He is honest with his readers, something that a pretender is not. His internal answer to Father Karl's question, "What do you want?" is blatantly honest: "I could not imagine Father Karl wanting money, a certain array of merchandise, wanting, at any price, the world's esteem. I could not imagine him wanting anything as much as I wanted these things." Here are his real wants in his identity quest.

Also, why would Wolff show us that he was pretending if he still is? A pretender hates being exposed as such. If Wolff is actually posing with his book, then he practically invalidates the whole book, writing it off as a flight of fantasy.

So does the momentous turning point take place outside of the book? Not necessarily. Not everything in life happens in climactic moments suitable for drama. Some things happen gradually. Toby got better at pretending gradually, he may have found an identity gradually. He didn't have one yet by the book's end, but he was on the road to finding one, and there is certainly a big gap between the book's finish and the time of writing.

In short, Wolff gives us his clues to show us his tools in finding his identity, not his ability to conceal it. His book is actually a biography and not fiction. It is titled a memoir. It is his life.