Wolff - This boys life : a Memoir
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- Year:2007
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This boys life : a Memoir: summary, description and annotation
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Overview: Tobias Wolff is an American author. He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boys Life (1989), and his short stories. He has also written two novels. He served in the US Army during the Vietnam War era. He holds a First Class Honours degree in English from Hertford College, Oxford and an M.A. from Stanford University. In 1975 he was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford.
Wolff: author's other books
Who wrote This boys life : a Memoir? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Doroethy B. Leonard
Tobias Wolff
Peter Wolff
Wallace Stegner
Stanford University.
Tobias Wolff
Tobias Wolff
Tobias Wolff
Charles E. Rankin
Tobias Wolff
Tobias Wolff
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Table of Contents
OTHER BOOKS BY TOBIAS WOLFF
In the Garden of the North AmericanMartyrs
Back in the World
The Barracks Thief
In Pharaohs Army
The Night in Question
For Michael and Patrick
I am especially grateful to my wife, Catherine, for her many careful readings of this book. I would also like to thank Rosemary Hutchins, Geoffrey Wolff, Gary Fisketjon, and Amanda Urban for their help and support. I have been corrected on some points, mostly of chronology. Also my mother thinks that a dog I describe as ugly was actually quite handsome. Ive allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story.
My first stepfather used to say that what I didnt know would fill a book. Well, here it is.
The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second is, no one has yet discovered.
OSCAR WILDE
He who fears corruption fears life.
SAUL ALINSKY
Fortune
Our car boiled over again just after my mother and I crossed the Continental Divide. While we were waiting for it to cool we heard, from somewhere above us, the bawling of an airhorn. The sound got louder and then a big truck came around the comer and shot past us into the next curve, its trailer shimmying wildly. We stared after it. Oh, Toby, my mother said, hes lost his brakes.
The sound of the horn grew distant, then faded in the wind that sighed in the trees all around us.
By the time we got there, quite a few people were standing along the cliff where the truck went over. It had smashed through the guardrails and fallen hundreds of feet through empty space to the river below, where it lay on its back among the boulders. It looked pitifully small. A stream of thick black smoke rose from the cab, feathering out in the wind. My mother asked whether anyone had gone to report the accident. Someone had. We stood with the others at the cliffs edge. Nobody spoke. My mother put her arm around my shoulder.
For the rest of the day she kept looking over at me, touching me, brushing back my hair. I saw that the time was right to make a play for souvenirs. I knew she had no money for them, and I had tried not to ask, but now that her guard was down I couldnt help myself. When we pulled out of Grand Junction I owned a beaded Indian belt, beaded moccasins, and a bronze horse with a removable, tooled-leather saddle.
IT WAS 1955 and we were driving from Florida to Utah, to get away from a man my mother was afraid of and to get rich on uranium. We were going to change our luck.
Wed left Sarasota in the dead of summer, right after my tenth birthday, and headed West under low flickering skies that turned black and exploded and cleared just long enough to leave the air gauzy with steam. We drove through Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, stopping to cool the engine in towns where people moved with arthritic slowness and spoke in thick, strangled tongues. Idlers with rotten teeth surrounded the car to press peanuts on the pretty Yankee lady and her little boy, arguing among themselves about shortcuts. Women looked up from their flower beds as we drove past, or watched us from their porches, sometimes impassively, sometimes giving us a nod and a flutter of their fans.
Every couple of hours the Nash Rambler boiled over. My mother kept digging into her little grubstake but no mechanic could fix it. All we could do was wait for it to cool, then drive on until it boiled over again. (My mother came to hate this machine so much that not long after we got to Utah she gave it away to a woman she met in a cafeteria.) At night we slept in boggy rooms where headlight beams crawled up and down the walls and mosquitoes sang in our ears, incessant as the tires whining on the highway outside. But none of this bothered me. I was caught up in my mothers freedom, her delight in her freedom, her dream of transformation.
Everything was going to change when we got out West. My mother had been a girl in Beverly Hills, and the life we saw ahead of us was conjured from her memories of California in the days before the Crash. Her father, Daddy as she called him, had been a navy officer and a paper millionaire. Theyd lived in a big house with a turret. Just before Daddy lost all his money and all his shanty-Irish relatives money and got himself transferred overseas, my mother was one of four girls chosen to ride on the Beverly Hills float in the Tournament of Roses. The floats theme was The End of the Rainbow and it won that years prize by acclamation. She met Jackie Coogan. She had her picture taken with Harold Lloyd and Marion Davies, whose movie The Sailor Man was filmed on Daddys ship. When Daddy was at sea she and her mother lived a dream life in which, for days at a time, they played the part of sisters.
And the cars my mother told me about as we waited for the Rambler to coolI should have seen the cars! Daddy drove a Franklin touring car. Shed been courted by a boy who had his own Chrysler convertible with a musical horn. And of course there was the Hernandez family, neighbors whod moved up from Mexico after finding oil under their cactus ranch. The family was large. When they were expected to appear somewhere together they drove singly in a caravan of identical Pierce-Arrows.
Something like that was supposed to happen to us. People in Utah were getting up poor in the morning and going to bed rich at night. You didnt need to be a mining engineer or a mineralogist. All you needed was a Geiger counter. We were on our way to the uranium fields, where my mother would get a job and keep her eyes open. Once she learned the ropes shed start prospecting for a claim of her own.
And when she found it she planned to do some serious compensating: for the years of hard work, first as a soda jerk and then as a novice secretary, that had gotten her no farther than flat broke and sometimes not that far. For the breakup of our family five years earlier. For the misery of her long affair with a violent man. She was going to make up for lost time, and I was going to help her.
WE GOT TO Utah the day after the truck went down. We were too latemonths too late. Moab and the other mining towns had been overrun. All the motels were full. The locals had rented out their bedrooms and living rooms and garages and were now offering trailer space in their front yards for a hundred dollars a week, which was what my mother could make in a month if she had a job. But there were no jobs, and people were getting ornery. Thered been murders. Prostitutes walked the streets in broad daylight, drunk and bellicose. Geiger counters cost a fortune. Everyone told us to keep going.
My mother thought things over. Finally she bought a poor mans Geiger counter, a black light that was supposed to make uranium trace glow, and we started for Salt Lake City. She figured there must be ore somewhere around there. The fact that nobody else had found any meant that we would have the place pretty much to ourselves. To tide us over she planned to take a job with the Kennecott Mining Company, whose personnel officer had responded to a letter of inquiry shed sent from Florida some time back. He had warned her against coming, said there was no work in Salt Lake and that his own company was about to go out on strike. But his letter was so friendly! My mother just knew shed get a job out of him. It was as good as guaranteed.
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