Old School

by Tobias Wolff

  That afternoon a third former who’d just been admitted to the infirmary told me that Purcell had won the audience with Ayn Rand. We were playing chess in the sunroom, and I bent low over the board so he couldn’t see my face.

  Not that I’d even submitted anything. Indeed, by now I could hardly remember the story I’d been so sure of. Most of it had vanished with the fever, leaving only traces of plot like the outlines in a coloring book. Since I couldn’t have won, it followed that someone else would. So why not Purcell—talented, serious Purcell, Purcell who cared so much? Over the next few days I scraped together enough generosity to convince myself that I was happy for him, and when I got discharged the first thing I did was stop by his room to shake his hand.

  What are you talking about? he said. I didn’t win.

  You didn’t win? I heard you did.

  Well, I didn’t. Big Jeff won.

  Big Jeff? Big Jeff won?

  Purcell’s roommate was all pretzeled over in a chair, cutting his toenails. He looked up and said, How’s about them apples? Big Jeff, the award-winning author!

  Purcell looked at him, and he laughed and went back to work with his clippers. They always acted like they hated each other, then signed up as roommates again every year.

  I can’t believe it, I said.

  Purcell was lying on his bed. He lowered the book he’d been reading and stared up at the ceiling.

  Jesus, I said. Big Jeff. Did you submit anything?

  Yes, I have to admit I did. I actually put myself in the position of being judged by Ayn Rand.

  Oh, bull. Have you even read her?

  He didn’t answer.

  You haven’t seen Big Jeff’s story? the roommate said to me.

  No. I’ve been sort of out of commission.

  He looked at Purcell and smiled. It’s a classic, he said. Schoolboys will be parsing its subtleties for generations to come.

  Purcell closed his eyes.

  So Big Jeff won, I said. Too much! I didn’t know Big Jeff could write.

  He can’t, Purcell said.

  Then why did she choose him?

  He just shook his head, eyes still closed.

  I’ll tell you why, the roommate said. Because the blood of an artist runs in Big Jeff’s veins. Because he’s a two-fisted, bigger-than-life, award-winning author and not one of your local artistes who give themselves orgasms by forswearing capital letters and boring the living shit out of everybody. That’s why.

  He bent toward his desk and picked up a copy of the school paper. Here, he said. Read him and weep.

  Big Jeff’s story was called “The Day the Cows Came Home,” and it managed to combine his vegetarianism with his interest in space travel.

  It went like this. A flying saucer lands in a field outside Boston. The police and various armed services try to destroy it, without success. Then it fires a ray that atomizes a nearby truck, mercifully empty, and everyone backs off while an exhaustively described robot disembarks and demands that a delegation of world leaders present themselves to the saucer’s commander. Tomorrow—or else.

  Old hat so far, but not for long. The next day the president, the Soviet premier, and the queen of England assemble in the field and are led by the robot to the command center. And what do they find there, sitting at the controls and surrounded by a crew of the same species, but an enormous bull! This is no ordinary bull, but a horned argonaut of imperial carriage whose eyes flash with preternatural intelligence and who otherwise bears the same resemblance to earthly bovines that the untrammeled wolf, bold ruler of his arctic realm, bears to the permed and coiffured poodle in his rhinestone sweater.

  Then the world’s leaders get the story. Long ago, one of the aliens’ ships had developed engine trouble and been directed to our planet because of its nutritious flora. Their own galaxy was light years away and by now the crew would’ve been dead for scores of centuries, but this expedition had come to gather the descendants of that valiant band and take them home. They had left descendants, hadn’t they?

  The perils of answering this question are not lost on the humans. They deny any knowledge of such creatures, until the ship’s commander produces a picture of cows in a field—at which point the queen of England, her tender female spirit unequal to the sternness of his gaze, breaks down and babbles out the truth. The travelers gathered around her are not pleased to learn the present state of their kin, or the uses to which they’ve been put. Indeed they can hardly believe their ears, and the commander insists on a fact-finding tour.

  He visits a dairy in Wisconsin, where he sees the cows sucked dry by machines and shot full of sperm from bulls they’ve never even met. He watches calves being castrated and branded in Texas, and tours a farm in Japan where the animals are force-fed gallons of beer to sweeten their flesh. He’s taken to a messy bullfight in Mexico, a rodeo in Wyoming, and a killing-floor in the Chicago stockyards.

  The commander of the spaceship sees all this and more. He grows ominously silent. After returning to the ship to confer with his comrades, he emerges to make a grand tour of all the ranches and farms, gathering the herds around him to tell them exactly what lies in store if they don’t accept his invitation to return to the home planet. They retain just enough of the old language to understand the warning, but most of them shrug it off. Instead they invite him to join them. They’ve got it made: all they can eat, protection from predators, medical care—the works. The commander is reviled as a troublemaker, and in Montana a bunch of steers stampede him off the ranch. Finally, only a handful of the bravest and smartest choose to leave, and even this small procession is diminished when some of them lose their nerve at the sight of the long ramp leading into the ship, and defect.

  At sunset the saucer lifts off with its crew and their newfound cousins. But they don’t head for home—not yet. They hang up there for a while putting their ray to work. The killing is efficient, implacable, and completely misanthropic. In the end not a single human being remains alive. The story concludes with this line, spoken by one of the crew to a cow weeping for the little boy who milked her: He’s lucky we didn’t eat him.

  In her front-page interview, Ayn Rand praised Big Jeff as a great writer in the making. It is most gratifying, she said, to see someone of Mr. Purcell’s youth dare to challenge the collectivist orthodoxy that tyrannizes intellectual life in this country—and nowhere more than in its colleges and schools. Mr. Purcell excels in his depiction of the victim kissing the whip. Of course the herd denies the truth of its own enslaved condition, and attacks the heroic truth-teller. One need only read the reviews of Atlas Shrugged to see that principle at work in our so-called free press, which can appear free only to those who’ve been completely brainwashed by egalitarian mystifications. But just look what happens when truly superior men like John Galt cease to exercise their powers—the whole world comes to a halt!

  Ayn Rand spent most of the interview going on about this John Galt. Since I didn’t know who he was I skipped to the end, where she came back to Big Jeff and complimented his use of the farm and the stockyard as a metaphor for the welfare state, whose siren song lures us ever closer to the wasteland of coerced mediocrity—where to be done for matters more than to do, where freedom is a fantasy achieved by shutting one’s eyes to the corral in which one lives, and where the herd counts itself fortunate to be fattened on the proceeds of its own eventual slaughter. Mr. Purcell has here revealed a great and most unpopular truth. The dream of universal equality leads not to paradise, but to Auschwitz!

  I couldn’t shake the flu. My nose was red and swollen from uncontrollable fits of honking, my eyes weepy, my upper lip chapped. I dozed off constantly. Two days before Ayn Rand’s visit I was nudged awake by my Latin master and told, not unkindly, to check myself back into the infirmary until I got well enough to keep my eyes open in class.

  Ayn Rand gave her talk in the afternoon. I’d thought of sneaking out for it, but the nurse kept fussing through my room and then I fell asleep and didn’
t wake up until Bill White dropped by after it was over. He meant to cheer me up, of course, but instead left me desolate for everything I’d missed.

  He said that a bunch of Ayn Rand’s followers had driven up from Boston and waited over an hour in the snow—smoking like chimneys, dropping their butts everywhere—so they could grab the front seats. They looked like a bunch of undertakers, Bill said, even the women, all of them silent and unsmiling in their dark clothes. During the talk they applauded at odd times and generally made a stir.

  But not as much as Ayn Rand. Right away she tore into our school motto—Give All—and urged everyone to ignore such drivel and live for themselves alone. Then she rebuked Hiram Dufresne for calling her a conservative in his introduction. She said that she was a radical, not a conservative, and that people should attach meaning to the words they speak. Toward the end some students actually walked out when she attacked President Kennedy for inviting us to consider what we might do for our country. Her talk went on too long for questions, but when the headmaster suggested a follow-up meeting in Blaine Hall after dinner, she agreed on the condition that only her true readers would be welcome—those who had read all her novels. She was willing to have a serious discussion, she said, but not to answer ignorant questions or be gawked at by tourists.

  I came in at the last minute to give the masters less time to notice me and send me back to bed. There weren’t many, as it happened—a young science master, another from history, the football coach, and Mr. Ramsey, who was officiating at the punch bowl, probably as penance for getting mouthy with the headmaster. Mrs. Ramsey stood beside him, talking to Big Jeff. Some fifteen boys were scattered around on folding chairs and an equal number of darkly dressed men and women—Bill’s undertakers, no doubt—sat somberly in front of the fireplace. One of the women, a skinny thing with cropped blond hair, lit a cigarette, and when the football coach asked her to put it out she took another long drag and flicked it into the fire without even looking at him. The logs popped and hissed. Otherwise the room was eerily quiet.

  Then Ayn Rand came in, accompanied by the headmaster and Hiram Dufresne and a tall, grave young guy with a pompadour. That she was short and blocky surprised me—I’d been expecting Dominique. Her dark hair was cut close, shaped like a helmet. She shrugged off her cape, handed it without a glance to the tall guy, and headed for the Morris chair that had been drawn up for her by the fireplace.

  Mr. Dufresne began to follow but she turned toward him and said, quite distinctly, No further introduction will be necessary, thank you. Her voice was deep and richly accented. Mr. Dufresne stopped and blinked at her, then retreated to the side of the room.

  Ayn Rand settled into the Morris chair and took a cigarette from her bag and twisted it into a long black holder. One of the men in the front row leaned forward with a lighter. She bent toward the flame, then leaned back and looked us over, her wide red mouth fixed in a skeptical wince. She wore a black suit with a short skirt that rode up her thighs. She had nice legs for a woman so squarely built. A gold pin glittered on her lapel. The smoke from her cigarette drifted up past the picture of the Blaine Boys.

  So, she said. How many writers have we among you boys?

  The undertakers turned and looked at us. Not a single hand went up.

  Come, come, she said. I know we have at least one, the estimable Mr. Jeffrey Purcell, whom I look forward to meeting. There must be others. No? Ah, your meek little hearts are afraid to show themselves. Shame on you! You must never be meek, the meek shall inherit nothing but a boot on the neck. You must be bold! My heroes have been ridiculed for refusing fear and compromise. My critics say such people do not exist. But allow me to inform you that I am such a person, and I most assuredly do exist!

  She drew fiercely on her cigarette and leaned toward us. The light glanced off her gold lapel pin, which I now saw was a dollar sign.

  In Russia, she said, as a student in Petrograd University, I studied by candlelight. There was no firewood, the ink froze in our pens. Mr. Lenin’s altruists shot so many of us we had to rent the coffins in which we carried our teachers and friends to their graves. But I am still here. And why? Not because I kissed the rings of our new Russian popes, I assure you. Not because I gave in to fear. Never. To give in to fear is to be already dead. I refused fear, I refused defeat. Did you know that The Fountainhead was rejected twelve times? Imagine! But I did not accept defeat. That is why I am here, for that reason and no other. So please do not tell me that characters such as mine do not exist! No! She slapped the arm of her chair.

  No! And please do not tell me that my characters are unreal because they live out their ideals. Of course the second-handers will tell you that the ideal is impossible, that a real story can only be a story of the folks next door, those frustrated imbeciles—a story of toad-eaters and mediocrities—a story of compromise and failure.

  At that moment the sneeze I’d been trying to hold back exploded wetly. Ayn Rand fixed me with her dark, deep-set eyes as I wiped my raw lip and gave my nose a final clearing blast. She looked away only when a log collapsed heavily in the fireplace, sending up a flourish of sparks.

  She contemplated the fire. Yes, she said. The folks next door. If you are not prepared to be vilified as I have been, you must take those drab little lives as your subject. The lives of the people. Of your brother. Remember this: when someone calls himself your brother, he does so with one desire—that you will become his keeper, a slave to his own incapacity and idleness. Above all, save yourselves from your brother.

  Now, boys, here is a question for you. What does your value derive from? She watched us as she put another cigarette in her holder and accepted the flame from an outstretched hand. She let the silence grow. I noticed that her florid red lipstick was smeared at both corners of her mouth, and that a run in one of her stockings cut a long white scar across her knee.

  Very well, she finally said. Let me tell you what your value does not derive from. It does not derive from the self-sacrifice demanded by some party, or state, or from the church of some ludicrous god. It does not proceed from the people. In exchange for your reason and your freedom they may give you a certificate of virtue, even some power, but this is worthless. It is less than worthless—it is bondage. When your power comes from others, on approval, you are their slave. Never sacrifice yourselves—never! Whoever urges you to self-sacrifice is worse than a common murderer, who at least cuts your throat himself, without persuading you to do it. You must revere yourselves. To revere yourself is to live truly. And as I know only too well, to live truly is to live at war. Yes, at war—with the people and the party and the guilt-peddling Jesus industry!

  Hear, hear! barked a man in the front row.

  Ayn Rand dipped her head in acknowledgment and gave a bitter smile. My heroes are impossible, they say. Unreal. And why do they say that? Because they want you to believe that heroism itself is unreal! They want you to despise yourselves before you discover what you’re capable of. Boys! Please! You are born to be giants, not sacrifices to some tribal deity or some idiot fantasy of earthly paradise, or some brainless slattern worrying about the next payment on the refrigerator. What do other writers present as life? Little men and little women with little worries being held hostage by snot-nosed brats. They would have you think only this is real, that you must settle for this. The worst of lies! I say that what other writers present as life is nothing more than an alibi for cowardice and treason—treason against yourselves, against the John Galt in each of you.

  I sneezed again. It had come on, strangely enough, at the mention of snot-nosed brats, and there was no stopping it. Ayn Rand stiffened visibly but didn’t look at me.

  Miss Rand?

  She turned to face the headmaster. He was standing against the back wall, arms across his chest.

  Miss Rand, you take a pretty dim view of your fellow writers.

  She stared at him as if transfixed, perhaps by the wen on his forehead, which was glowing like a coal. Finally she said,
Yes. What other view do they offer?

  A good many, I think. But let me ask you this. If you had to name the single greatest work by an American author, what would it be?

  Atlas Shrugged.

  Your own novel.

  Is there another?

  And after that?

  The Fountainhead.

  Is there really no other American writer whose work you admire?

  The ash on her cigarette, having grown to an improbable length, fell into her lap. She brushed it away, then glared at the gray smudge it left on her black skirt. There is one, she said. I am interested in the novels of Mr. Mickey Spillane. His metaphysic is perhaps rather instinctive but quite sound nevertheless.

  Mickey Spillane? The mystery writer?

  I would particularly recommend I, the Jury. In Mike Hammer he has created a true hero, one who doesn’t torture himself in the current fashion with decadent niceties. Mike knows evil from good and destroys it without hesitation or regret. Most unusual. Most satisfying. I might also mention Kiss Me, Deadly, though Mr. Spillane leaves us hanging somewhat at the end. What will happen with Mike and the beautiful Velda? I believe he owes us a sequel.

  I thought, What about Ernest Hemingway? and blurted the question in just those words.

  Hemingway again! Hemingway with the beard! Please! What you find in Hemingway is everything that is wrong with the so-called literature of this country. Weak premises. Weak, defeated people. A completely malevolent sense of life. Why should that nurse, what’s her name, Catherine—why should Catherine have to die at the end? No reason. Only to give the lieutenant a tragedy to excuse his self-pity. Unreadable mush! And I understand that the other novels are even worse. Indeed, I’m told that one of them has a hero with no—how shall we say this—no manhood. How fitting! And what shall we learn from this wretched eunuch to whom the great bearded Ernest Hemingway has devoted an entire novel? The superior virtue of impotence? No thank you!