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WOLFF: ’You imagine who
you are.’
Glenn Matsumura |
When author Tobias Wolff’s
latest book, Old School, came out last winter,
it was trumpeted as the author’s first novel.
Many asked the obvious question: Why, suddenly, a novel?
Wolff, MA ’78, a professor in Stanford’s
creative writing program, has long been known as a passionate
advocate for the short story form. He has published
three books of his own stories and edited several other
collections. He called the short story “the perfect
American form” in a 1996 Salon interview,
saying “most of us don’t live lives that
lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our
lives are so fragmented. Instead of that long arc of
experience, that sustained community that’s implied
by a novel, there are these moments.”
Wolff is a fast talker, and words don’t fail
him on this occasion. “I don’t write short
stories out of any slavish devotion to that form,”
he tells me, but rather “because the story I have
to tell will work best in [it].”
His answer isn’t entirely convincing. But then
again, it turns out that Old School is not
really his first novel. His publisher, Knopf, had already
printed the dust jackets when the author remembered
it wasn’t. His first novel, Ugly Rumours,
was published in England in 1975. Wolff told the Los
Angeles Times that he leaves the book off his list
of published works because “within two or three
years of having written it, I couldn’t read a
word of it without cringing. So I don’t call attention
to it.”
Now you see it; now you don’t. That seems typical
of Wolff the literary magician, Wolff the inventor,
a man who extols the force of imagination in shaping
destiny. “You can’t become what you can’t
imagine becoming,” he says. “You imagine
who you are. Your life forms itself towards that notion.”
Wolff has a certain forza del destino about
him: he’s strikingly tall and muscular. His gaze
is sharp and direct and he is largely bald, lending
an impression of boldness. He’s a former Vietnam
Green Beret officer, with “command presence,”
as he explains in his 1994 memoir, In Pharaoh’s
Army. He’s also a vegetarian. He’s
a man of apparent contradictions. A lifelong academic
thrown out of prep school for bad grades. A family man
(with three children) who came from one of the most
mixed-up, broken homes imaginable.
Perhaps his most revealing comments come when the subject
turns to Robert Frost’s famous poem “The
Road Not Taken” and its conclusion, “I took
the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the
difference.” The poem is commonly taken in a “Hallmark-card
way, as inspirational verse,” Wolff says. Yet
the poet remarks that the two paths are both “just
as fair” and “worn . . . really about the
same.” Wolff says the key lines are “I shall
be telling this with a sigh/Somewhere ages and ages
hence.” The narrator is already imagining himself
as an old gaffer, telling the youngsters what made him
great. For Wolff, it’s the story of how we invent
ourselves and the stories we will tell in the future.
“Things don’t happen to us in stories.
We make the story. The very act of remembering
is bending experience,” he says. “You do
it unwittingly. The faculty of your memory is doing
this even before you get to it.”
It’s typical of Frost, Wolff adds, to write a
poem that was so greatly misread. “He was a very
double guy. He didn’t like being known. He didn’t
like people to have his number.” One wonders if
the same might be said of Wolff—a self-invented
man, a cat landing on his feet.
“There’s nothing inevitable at all in the
luck I’ve had,” he admits. That includes
a six-month stint as a Washington Post reporter.
He landed the job shortly before Watergate, when he
met executive editor Ben Bradlee at a party and asked
for a job. He was hired over many applicants with journalism
degrees from top universities. Why? Bradlee later confessed
to him, “Because you called me ‘sir.’”
“I wasn’t a good reporter. I didn’t
have any future as a reporter, and didn’t really
want one,” Wolff says. “I wanted to write
fiction.”
His career was launched in 1976 when Atlantic Monthly
pulled from a slush pile the short story he wrote while
a Stegner Fellow. “It was a great break,”
he concedes. “But it could just as easily have
happened that [fiction editor] Michael Curtis passed
over that story, or that he was in a bad mood that day,
or that somebody else at the magazine didn’t like
it.”
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“Things don’t
happen to us in stories. We make the
story."
- Tobias Wolff |
Wolff was hardly a child prodigy. “Think of it
this way,” he says. “When I was 30, my contemporaries
were in big apartments, getting their first Volvos.
Meanwhile, I’m popping champagne over a story
in the Atlantic Monthly for which I’m
paid $500.”
Leaving his office, we walk briskly across the Quad
to a seminar course he’s guest teaching. Wolff’s
strides are long and fast, and it’s hard to keep
up as he heads towards a basement classroom.
The students are studying The Divine Comedy.
On the way to class, Wolff expresses some concerns—Dante
is not his field—but once he is before the two
dozen students, his comments are characteristically
sharp and provocative. When asked if Dante is the hero
of the commedia, Wolff distinguishes between a pilgrim
and a hero.
“The treasure he is after is the redemption of
his soul. He makes it so actual for himself that he
actually underwent it.” Wolff has returned to
the perennial theme of a man creating his fate. He tells
the class the “self-inventing man” is the
central motif of American literature.
Inventing his own identity came early to Wolff, who
grew up in a small town near Seattle. His mother is
100 percent Irish; his father 100 percent Jewish—though
Wolff didn’t learn about his Jewish heritage until
adulthood. He describes his father as an engaging, charming,
compulsive liar.
Like father, like son. As a boy, Wolff had a similar
habit of making things up. According to his 1989 memoir
This Boy’s Life—made into a 1993
film starring Robert De Niro, Ellen Barkin and Leonardo
DiCaprio—he was always telling whoppers, always
faking it in a bizarre, ruffian childhood. He had an
absentee father, a beautiful, footloose mother, and
a rough-cut stepfather.
Wolff wrote so tirelessly as a kid that he gave his
stories to friends to submit for extra credit in school.
In typical fashion, he faked his own transcript and
letter of recommendation to get into the tony Hill School
in Pottstown, Penn. As he recounts the experience in
This Boy’s Life:
Now the words came as easily as if someone were
breathing them into my ear. I felt full of things that
had to be said, full of stifled truth. That was what
I thought I was writing—the truth. It was truth
known only to me, but I believed in it more than I believed
the facts arrayed against it . . . And on the boy who
lived in [the] letters, the splendid phantom who carried
all my hopes, it seemed to me I saw, at last, my own
face.
On the basis of his self-recommendations, he was accepted.
The story is kindred to his new novel.
On the cover of Old School, a hundred or so
young men, in jackets and ties dating from the early
’60s, line immaculate tables formally set with
white tablecloths. Their heads are bowed, presumably
for some sort of blessing, under the chandeliers.
Wolff could be somewhere among them, for the photo
is of the Hill School. In the book, imagination blends
with autobiography as seamlessly as the real-life school
on the cover of a piece of fiction. The novel tells
of a young man in an East Coast prep school that encourages
aspiring writers by sponsoring a writers’ competition
each year. The winner spends time with a famous writer
visiting campus—Robert Frost among them.
Its most haunting theme is the way lying—whether
by omission, misleading remarks or outright fraud—underpins
our lives. Nothing is what it seems. Each student’s
work is misunderstood by the famous writer who judges
it. People lie without even realizing they are lying,
and the momentary failure to correct a misunderstanding
creates legends that are impossible to refute years
later. The book culminates with an act of plagiarism.
Wolff’s story parallels his hero’s; however,
no climactic lie caused Wolff’s departure from
Hill. The cause was more pedestrian: Wolff was asked
to leave in his final year because his grades were so
poor. As he writes in This Boy’s Life:
“I did not do well at Hill. How could I?
I knew nothing. My ignorance was so profound that entire
class periods would pass without my understanding anything
that was said.... It scared me to do so poorly when
so much was expected, and to cover my fear I became
one of the school wildmen—a drinker, a smoker,
a make-out artist at the mixers we had.... While the
boys around me nodded off during chapel I prayed like
a Moslem, prayed that I would somehow pull myself up
again so I could stay in this place that I secretly
and deeply loved.
A strange beginning indeed for a Stanford professor,
but one in keeping with his message that there is more
to life than nature versus nurture. Wolff insists we’ve
overlooked the role of individual will and imagination
in forging an identity. He ought to know. |
