Telling the Truth Slantwise: Tobias Wolff's "In Pharaoh's Army"

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My plan for this year is to clear more time for writing offline with the larger book goal in mind. To that end, I’ll post shorter craft pieces in the first and third weeks of each month, punctuate those with a mid-length interview, thought piece, or review in the second week, and then a longform chapter from the book in progress, usually in the fourth week.

I’m pleased to say that this is working well. I have two new chapters underway, one of which I’ll share in two weeks. I hope you enjoy the first review!

Telling the Truth Slantwise: Tobias Wolff's "In Pharaoh's Army"

When I first began thinking about literary memoir in the late 90s and early aughts, it seemed that everyone was teaching Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life and Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club. These were two cornerstone works that marked a shift from autobiography to memoir as literature.

Yes, yes, I see you with your hand up in the back, and I agree that Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem explored emotional truth two decades earlier. We could keep tracing that thread all the way back to John Smith playing fast and loose with his facts in 1608. “Who Was First” is a fun parlor game, but it’s not what I’m after here.

The point is that as soon as I began writing memoir, I had to contend with Wolff, and he became a primary reference point for my first book. So now that I’m beginning all over again, I’ve been revisiting my roots. Today I’ll review In Pharaoh's Army, which traces Wolff’s year in Vietnam and his reemergence as a student at Oxford.¹

The book is what we’d now call a memoir-in-essays, where each chapter is a complete work, an essay that can stand on its own, but there is a unifying integrity to the whole, a sense of long arcs that cover the gaps. It’s a form that can be done hastily, as Michael Chabon’s Pops is: a series of riffs on a theme, repackaged magazine fare. Or it can be done well, as In Pharaoh's Army shows, tracking a core question to a point of clarity or following the narrator’s metamorphosis to its logical (or illogical) end.

At this stage of my book I ought to have a sharper design in mind. But I’ll confess that I’m still weighing models, and Wolff’s is a fine one to keep ready at hand. It also poses stylistic problems for me, such as how we tell certain stories publicly, and the point at which craft can stiffen a story, raising doubts about truth or authenticity.

In Pharaoh’s Army is told in three parts. Part One moves forward and backward in time, tracing a fading innocence through six essays. Four of these take place during the war, and the other two fill in the backstory of training, deployments, and goodbyes. There is a recursive movement to the section that I recognize from my own major life transitions, where you can’t locate a single departure point, but have to keep circling back to try to make sense of things. If the past isn’t past, then a transformation as large as military service has more than one entry point. And it’s not as if we change permanently — sometimes we lapse back, grasping for parts of ourselves that we’ve lost or revisiting decisions even though they’ve long been fait accomplis.

All of the essays in Part Two take place during the war, showing the evolution of a fearful young soldier into a man trying (and mostly failing) to save a few shreds of dignity. Part Three consists of just two essays, the long “Civilian,” which ends improbably at Oxford, and the very brief “Last Shot,” which circles back to a moment with Wolff’s best friend from training, whom he lost early in the war.

Each piece deserves a close look, but I only have space for a deep dive into “Thanksgiving Special,” which turns on a drive back to Wolff’s battalion headquarters in My Tho. The essay begins and ends with the premise of transporting a contraband television back to base on Thanksgiving Day in time for a two-hour special of Bonanza. A good share of the piece is backstory — how Wolff ended up in the Delta, what that bigger picture looks like — but we’ve heard all that before. So Wolff anchors into the mundane, a black market for war souvenirs, and a deal Wolff and his best friend, Sergeant Benet, have arranged to trade a Chicom rifle (a prized souvenir) for a big color TV, with no more glorious goal than vegging out in front of it, as everyone else is doing back home on that holiday.

It’s worth stepping back to think about how Vietnam was seen in the early 90s, when Wolff published his book. There was a decidedly postmodern angle by then. Jacob’s Ladder, one of my favorite films, came out in 1990. It weaves together three storylines — before the war, during Jacob’s tour, and after his return — that turn out to be logically impossible, which is even more disorienting because the story is told as a biblical allegory. Yet it seems right that a quagmire is irreducible to moralizing, and so the tangle of Jacob’s Ladder feels closer to the truth than a documentary (with its own hidden biases) might be. So Wolff’s Vietnam story, if it could be unearthed at all, would need a sideways approach.²

I think this is what has stymied me about fatherhood. Much of what I read about parenting feels like muckraking or a temperance tract. As Judge Danforth says in The Crucible, “This is a sharp time now, a precise time.” Yet if there are truths to be told about parental identity and raising children, surely they are as elusive as the self or a war, to be glimpsed slantwise in a scene rather than straight in their face.³

“Thanksgiving Special” illustrates this complexity. By juxtaposing Wolff’s training with the unglamorous trade that he and Sergeant Benet arranged, the essay tells us that there is no heroism here, no reason why so many men fought and died. We root for Wolff and Benet even though they are breaking the rules, because we understand that the rules make no sense, and we wish them relief, some peace in front of a better TV. Yet even this inglorious goal proves harder than it seems.

After Wolff and Benet make it through several checkpoints and deliver the Chicom, they discover that the deal is off — or, rather, the price has changed from one rifle to two. There’s nothing to be done at that point, no speeding back to base, so they drive off in a huff to an officers’ lounge, which just happens to have an even bigger television up over the bar. The place is empty, so they just swipe the TV and bribe the officer at the checkpoint with the Chicom they’d intended to trade initially.

This all works well enough that by evening, when the Bonanza special comes on, Wolff and Benet can kick back with their pork chops as planned. So that’s Vietnam: to ignore the daily threat of dying for no clear purpose, soldiers swap phony souvenirs for creature comforts, disappearing into the tube to feel close to everyone back home. The writer’s job is to be at least slightly self-aware, if not one of those “on whom nothing is lost,” so Wolff ends on an appropriately ironic note:

Why else would I have put myself on the road that afternoon except for the certain reward of this emotion, unattainable from a 12-inch black-and-white? — this swelling of pride in the beauty of my own land, and the good hearts and high purposes of her people, of whom, after all, I was one.

It’s a gem of a sentence, the question counterposed with its answer, and a rhythmic pitch-perfect finish.

I also love the final line of the book, a present-tense memory of training with Hugh Pierce, Wolff’s friend who was killed almost immediately after flying overseas. The previous chapter ends in the past tense with Wolff translating the Bible at Oxford, safe in the past, resolving to build his future on solid ground. “Last Shot,” the final essay, carries us even further back in time, but also forward with its present-tense immediacy.

No matter how secure we think we are, some memories still have the power to undo us, as the future does, too. That indeterminacy — reliving a vivid moment with Hugh, who we’ve long known to be dead — lands truthfully. Here’s Wolff in his closing lines, as he and Hugh prepare for a parachute drop.

Men are disappearing out the door ahead of us, the sound of the engine is getting louder. Hugh is singing in falsetto, doing a goofy routine with his hands. Just before he reaches the door he looks back and says something to me. I can’t hear him for the wind. What? I say. He yells, Are we having fun? He laughs at the look on my face, then turns and takes his place in the door, and jumps, and is gone.

When I speak of craft, this is what I mean, a complex macro design and sentence-level command.

But I also have the sense at times while rereading Wolff that he is scripting his own life too well. I’ll save the particular problem of dialogue in memoir for next week, because it deserves separate treatment. But there are many moments throughout the book that seem too choreographed.

In one scene, after finding a grenade under his Jeep that mysteriously failed to detonate, Wolff’s knees turn to rubber and he shits himself while leaning against a wall. In another, he’s attacked by an angry crowd of Vietnamese men who have mistaken him for another white officer. Later, as Sergeant Benet (who is Black) tends to his wounds, Wolff goes on about how he didn’t look anything like the other guy, and Benet simply replies, “Why, you poor n—. You poor, poor n—.” In another scene, Wolff picks a fight with three rednecks by singing “We Shall Overcome.” (Really?)

Then there is Captain Kale, as flat a character as they come, a kind of Aryan cartoon who “owned records of people playing accordions, and could tell the difference between them” and who spent his free time ordering “cut-rate reproductions of Bavarian artifacts—cuckoo clocks, furniture made from antlers, figurines in lederhosen, steins inscribed with folkish sayings.” Kale gets tricked a few times, including once by a cross-dressing man who goes by Miss Be. I think we’re to understand that Wolff looks slightly better alongside such a buffoon, but that’s a low bar to clear. And was that really all Captain Kale was, a straw metaphor for a feckless Army? If so, why exactly do we need to know his story? The lack of subtlety there feels out of step with the rest of the book.

I’ve never been deployed to a war, and I wasn’t there at Wolff’s side, so I’m not saying these things didn’t happen. I’m responding more to how they land. It’s a crucial question for memoir and a rather brutal one, because it doesn’t matter how deep your trauma was or how beautiful a particular memory might seem — the perilous journey from thought to word must also pass through a cultural screen that changes the color and tone despite whatever efforts you made to get it right.

So there’s part of me now that sees these scenes coming more than I did the first time through the book. I’m not sure how Wolff intended them, but we see what he does there with his own racial profiling, right? There’s no magic in the irony now, if there ever was.

This, more than any other reason, is why I think so few books about fatherhood have been written. The motives, the stance, the tenor and pitch — all small needles to thread. I’m not judging Wolff for getting it wrong. He did his very best, and if my own book strikes anywhere near the mark of In Pharaoh’s Army I’ll be over the moon. What I mean to say is that the Zeitgeist is a filter over the lens of memory, and it’s one thing the writer can’t predict very well, much less control.

My guess is that Wolff felt, as I do, that these stories needed to be released. He says as much in the epigraph from Ford Madox Ford, who writes that many who have survived war feel compelled to “set down what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.” Many more feel equally compelled to never speak of it again.

But when you’ve been transformed as thoroughly as Wolff has by his tour, and as I have by fatherhood, I think there is another impulse at play. It’s the need to explain it all to yourself, to say what happened. And if that is the motive, you’re not trying to get the lighting just right or stage a particular effect even if you must come to your point circuitously. You’re just trying to bear witness to truth, in as many layers as it takes, out of a blind faith that what you’ve seen might serve others at an unknown time or place.

Questions:

• Have you read In Pharaoh’s Army or This Boy’s Life? If so, what do you admire about Wolff’s style generally or about a particular storytelling technique?

• What more recent memoirs have you read that were told masterfully?

• We all have Sergeant Benets and Captain Kales in our memory. How do you write about others fairly and honestly while remaining sensitive to differences in race, gender, or sexuality? How do you personally contend with the Zeitgeist as you frame such things?

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1. I’m not sure why it took me so long to realize this, but I’ve begun seeing a pattern with working-class memoirs. Tara Westover’s Educated, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, and Wolff’s This Boy’s Life begin with hardscrabble roots. But they all end in the Ivy League or its ilk. Wolff slums it all through In Pharaoh’s Army, but he ends in the Bodleian Library, translating the Sermon on the Mount from Old English, nearly as far from My Tho as could be. This seems almost the exact reverse of the trend through the earlier half of the 20th century, when literature was more firmly rooted in the salt of the earth, when the last thing that would make anyone interesting was money or privilege. So it could be that what a memoir needs now, even if it has no claim to celebrity, is access to some exclusive community. If so, I’ll add that to the general headwinds.

2. I’m realizing just how outdated this approach is in an age that gullibly craves authenticity. Or perhaps it’s not out of date at all, but just a technique that isn’t much used anymore when all that’s required to “tell your truth” is to pretend to be no more than your race or your gender ambiguity. Do we expect celebrities to tell their memoirs slant, or do we know more or less what we’re getting and just want the backstage pass?

3. This is what troubles me about the shift from Percival Everett’s Erasure (a satire) to James (a sermon) and the similarly didactic tone in The Six Triple Eight. The times call for preaching, but I have no soapbox to mount, no jeremiads to roll down from on high.