Tobias Wolff speaks in a voice as direct and steady as an electric can opener. The award-winning writer’s telephone personality seems in keeping with incisive portrayals of life’s jagged resonances made audible in his memoirs, novels, and short stories. Known for candor and authenticity in depicting both real and invented characters, abetted by razor-sharp prose, the master storyteller has honed his craft over the course of four decades.
Wolff was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1945. An unconventional, peripatetic upbringing followed, as chronicled in his 1989 PEN Faulkner Award-winning memoir This Boy’s Life. (A film adaptation in which Leo
nardo DiCaprio plays the author as a young teenager came out in 1993, but Wolff declines to discuss it.) Clear and unblinking, it inaugurated the memoir of self-disclosure. His parents divorced when Tobias was 10, separating him and his mother from his brother Geoffrey and their father. Tormented by an overbearing stepfather, adolescent Toby developed a proclivity for spinning tales and adopting various personae as a coping mechanism. A vocation as a writer inevitably emerged. “That was what I wanted to do from age 15. I never formed another ambition,” Wolff told me. “And I wrote a lot. Like most young people who begin to write I did it out of imitative admiration for writers I read. I even changed my name to Jack, for Jack London.”
Determined to escape a dismal life in rural Washington State, erstwhile Jack conned his way into an East Coast boarding school, the eventual setting for the 2003 novel Old School, finalist for a slew of national literary prizes. The book’s unnamed narrator, a fledgling writer, reveres Hemingway. “I hope I owe a debt to Hemingway,” Wolff acknowledges. “I admire him for the clarity, for the exactitude of his style. He’s really a musician (and wrote poetry too) in the way the words create certain sounds and carry from sentence to sentence. He was very influential in terms of suggesting an apparently natural style. He treated his past, but I saw the difference—writers dip their cup in the well of memory—but it didn’t confine him. Same with Fitzgerald. I really loved his work.”
Wolff admits “no hesitation in consulting memory,” as life experiences may supply social or cultural contexts for his work. A four-year stint in the Army, including Special Forces in Vietnam (1965-67), furnished the title for Back in the World (as American combatants referred to the United States). The 1985 short fiction collection includes a psychological portrait of an aging, disaffected enlisted man (“Soldier’s Joy”), and also examines a young returnee adjusting to civilian life (“Desert Breakdown, 1968”). Vietnam sparked a second critically acclaimed memoir, In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War (1994). Centered on moral transformation rather than carnage, it leads to the homecoming of a young man, soon to earn a degree in English from Oxford University. Though he “can’t imagine writing a third memoir,” Wolff allows that “the word ‘fiction’ or ‘story’ is letting the reader know this is a particular kind of work.”
Overlaps may remain. For instance, Wolff confronts the elusiveness of male bonding by treating the same situational memory within two categories of prose. The narrator of This Boy’s Life yearns for and mythologizes his largely absent biological father well into adulthood. “This way of thinking worked pretty well until my first child was born,” he writes. A similar mindset haunts the protagonist of short story “Deep Kiss.” Parallel scenes unite the men, each of whom cradles a newborn son. Uneasily, Wolff recalls “a shadow, a coldness at the edges,” attributing grief, then rage, to his father, “10 years dead by then.” As happens for Tobias in the memoir, “holding the baby” for fictive Joe powerfully summons his own father’s death, which feels like “a betryal, a desertion.”
Personal parenthood yet ahead in 1975, Wolff landed a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University; his first book (the novel Ugly Rumors) had just appeared in England. But a prouder achievement, “a great blessing,” was the 1976 publication in Atlantic Monthly of the prep-school-based story “Smokers,” which brought wide readership and “encouraging letters.” Earning a master’s and staying on at Stanford through 1980 as Jones Lecturer, he next joined the graduate faculty in Creative Writing at Syracuse University and continued publishing in topflight journals. His first short story collection, In the Garden of North American Martyrs, claimed the St. Lawrence Award for Fiction in 1982. The Night in Question (1996) and Our Story Begins (2008) cemented his reputation in the genre.
Just as a perfect piece of fruit conjures a well-tended orchard, Wolff’s stories amplify reality through simplification, gaining momentum through believable dialogue and artful narrative pacing. For instance, a couple’s longstanding marital tensions contract uniquely in the six-page “Say Yes,” elapsing almost entirely in the time it takes to wash and dry dinner dishes; but the question of how well two people can really know each other lingers long afterward. Similarly compressed, the bank-heist drama “Bullet in the Brain” recalls Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” as an entire life unfolds during seconds-long exposition that describes the eponymous title event.
Along with writing, Wolff continues to teach. Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of English at Stanford since 1997, he need look no further than the workplace for inspirational material. “Academia is a hothouse of human appetites and transcendence sometimes,” he says, expelling “a little laugh,” perhaps not unlike the antagonist in “An Episode in the Life of Professor Brooke.”
Why bite the hand that feeds? Wolff explains: “One of the reasons that a writer would return to stories set in a school or military institution: Those are closed worlds. They set their own mores, their own world rules-the school culture, the military culture-fixed in customs, dialogues, or clothes.” Other times, a story might “set within the circle of a family—another closed world, another system, if you will. We see the consequences of cooperation or defiance in relationship to those worlds.” The story “Firelight” bridges two. A mother and son pretend to seek a rental in a well-to-do college neighborhood, encountering a failed professor. About the dénouement, the author remarks, “How could I know the future of those people? The narrator is describing his own future through the agency of talking through others, bringing together two different worlds at different times in my life. We [Toby and his mother] had these wishful excursions on the weekend, and in the story I brought in the apprehension of the professor, bringing together two kinds of disparate experiences.”
As faculty member, Wolff avoids teaching trendy literary theory. “I don’t like reductive characterizations. Hemingway is not a ‘minimalist’—and I hope I’m not,” he claims. “Writers break the bounds of categories. I never use those labels when I teach. Inevitably, someone [in a class] will label Camus an ‘existentialist.’ Students don’t know what it means—nobody knows what it means. It’s useful to talk about such categories to illustrate the uselessness of these labels.” Can writing be taught? Wolff won’t say. But onetime student Jay McInerney has compared Wolff to a forensic pathologist for his ability to introduce technique and structure.
A self-identified “writer of the world,” Wolff composes in short bursts. He reasons, “I have children. I have a teaching job. Sometimes I need to get an oil change or a haircut or go buy shoes. Like everyone, I’m busy and distracted. I don’t have a rigid schedule because of the demands on me. I tweak what I’ve written the day before. The longer I do it, the higher the standard becomes. I have given up on novels. Sometimes it just doesn’t come off.” He likens his overall process to “a dog gnawing on a great big bone, and he’s patient about getting to the marrow of the matter.” Refusing to regard his stories as “sacred texts,” the exacting stylist revised several older offerings in Our Story Begins. But as with others newly presented, they seem nothing short of miraculous.
The provocative “Awaiting Orders” concerns the closeted sexuality of one Sergeant Morse. “It’s not about ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’!” Wolff thunders, when I presume to identify a central motif. “It’s about a man!” Passion ringing, he goes on: “We all live under some kind of constraint in social situations, in work situations, concealing our nature. We perform our identities in public. A man who is harsh to his wife at home doesn’t show that at work. A man who desires an employee at work doesn’t let on—unless he wants a lawsuit. We all live in social situations that put a constraint on or stifle our nature. Sometimes that’s good—it would be hell if we did not. In the case of this man, it is not unique to the social situation. People keep invisible parts of our nature hidden. This story is about a cultural phenomenon that disallows people to be who they are—and there may be global consequences. It’s about the coercive effects of having to conceal our nature, which is true of soldiers and federal employees. There are all kinds of ways we are called upon to hold ourselves in check.”
Not surprisingly, Our Story Begins ends with the tale of a man who has kept unrequited adolescent love close to his chest ever after. Its final, lyrical sendoff reminds one that his story, like our own, must continue: “It baffled him that he couldn’t hold on to something he had known so well, and he stood fixed in his puzzlement as the song swelled to a finish and died, and a dog barked somewhere, and another waltz began.”
Tobias Wolff will appear in the Distinguished Speaker Series at SUNY New Paltz on Thursday, April 1, at 7:30pm in the McKenna Theatre. General admission tickets are $18. (845) 257-3972; www.newpaltz.edu/speakerseries.
This article appears in March 2010.
