This Boy's Life 
by 

Tobias Wolff

 

How Do Any of Us Survive?

This is the fourth memoir of a less than ideal childhood I’ve read in as many weeks. I have to say it’s getting a bit old, all this overcoming adversity stuff. But I think it’s safe to say that Tolstoy had it wrong: Unhappy families are just as unvarying and just as routine as happy ones. But at least occasionally the unhappy ones are interesting, sometimes even revelatory. 

Wolfe’s memoir is interesting to me because he understands how his childhood shaped his culture - not just his specific fears and aspirations (mostly about violence) but also his responses to the world in general. His childhood, as that of all of us, created the character we attribute to the universe as well as our own. To ‘get’ that and consider both aspects of character may be about as close to maturity as we can get.

So, for example, Wolff is able to articulate a basic relation which the child has intuited: “Power can be enjoyed only when it is recognized and feared. Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it.” The implication of course is a sort of Don Quixote self-image which incites and justifies all sorts of boyish bad behavior. But it is also worth noting that he is talking about a relationship here, and therefore a dynamic explanation, a theory of the world and how it works. This is what’s called a zero-sum relation: if you win, I lose. Therefore, if I can’t win, I make sure you can’t either. Pretty sophisticated stuff. But then children are always more sophisticated than adults remember.

To appreciate that one’s life has been shaped by a rather clever inference about the world is clearly a sort of breakthrough. The fact that others (like me) might have adopted similar theories of living is probably sufficient justification for publication. The theory allowed him to negotiate life as a boy and as a young man; it helped Wolff to survive. In short, Wolff’s puerile logic worked - power could be withstood, and even occasionally overcome. Not bad for a boy from a broken family, growing up poor and with no obvious prospects.

But of course the very success of this strategy for contending with power masks a deeper issue which is also very practical but by its nature must be raised in philosophical language: Is one’s life best spent contending with power? Success in beating power at its own game may be considered successful merely because of the deprivations one has experienced. Couldn’t it be that it is just this criterion of success which has to be overcome, that perhaps the world isn’t primarily an arena of power exercised and power subverted or deflected?

This is not an easy thing to even allow into consciousness much less address. The last thing any of us wants to do is question what we have implicitly lived our lives for. It takes a particular sort of lonely courage to permit it to percolate up through layers of experience acquired and confirmed over decades. What we value is its own measure of success after all. If power is what we have valued, giving it up as unimportant feels like giving up one’s life.

Because the memoir ends in late adolescence, there is only a hint that Wolff’s worldview of power and its control is starting to crack. He has a horrifying thought at one point, for example, that his behavior just might be a “solemn choreography of earnest useless acts.” And that perhaps the spectrum of power-relationships he has inferred doesn’t exhaust the range of human life. “It takes a childish or corrupt imagination to make symbols of other people,” he says. He knows he must somehow redeem himself, but that in order to have a “hope of [another’s idea of] redemption I would have to give up my own.”

A bird in the hand means one can’t do anything else with that hand. So it’s likely that most of us go through life self-handicapped by our successes.