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A novel beginning
Renowned writer Tobias Wolff makes his first foray into long-form fiction
BY TAMARA WIEDER

TOBIAS WOLFF IS among the most acclaimed writers of our time. But, quick: name three of his novels.

No?

Name one.

Still not coming to you?

Don’t worry — you don’t need to bone up on 20th-century American literature. Tobias Wolff, author of the memoirs This Boy’s Life (1989) — made into a 1993 film starring Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio — and In Pharaoh’s Army (1994), as well as two collections of stories and a novella, has never written a novel.

That is, until now. Old School (Knopf), out this month, is Wolff’s first novel, and despite its obvious connections to Wolff’s own life — the story takes place in 1960 at a boarding school not unlike the one Wolff attended as a scholarship student, and focuses on a group of students trying to win private audiences with some of the day’s most renowned writers, many of whom Wolff has named as personal influences — the book is most decidedly a work of fiction.

Q: What made you decide it was finally time to write a novel?

A: You know, it wasn’t really that I sort of decided to write a novel. I had been brooding on these strange literary competitions of ours when I was in school, and thinking about the writers who had visited, and especially Frost, and I had thought of writing something maybe the length of a long story about it. But the more I thought about the story, and the possibilities of it, and began to understand that to write truly about this I was going to have to address questions of class, vocation, friendship, the strains that competition puts on us, on our integrity, it was clear to me that I couldn’t adequately write about these things in the compass of a short story. So the decision to write a novel just really followed from the demands of the material that I was dealing with, and the kinds of questions. It wasn’t a matter of deciding to write a novel and then picking a topic — I don’t write that way, and I couldn’t write that way. Things just have to come out of the material I’m working with, and the material really should decide the form.

Q: Did you always think that you would write a novel, though, that it was just a matter of time?

A: Oh, I assumed eventually I would, yes. It isn’t that long narrative forms are very forbidding to me; my memoirs, they’re not novels, but I’m used to writing sustained narrative. And a lot of my stories tend to run a little long, too.

Q: How much of you — your life, your experiences — is in Old School?

A: Well, quite a bit. It’s certainly not a memoir by a long shot. I grew up in a largely working-class atmosphere, and was transported to this rather rarified world of privilege because of the scholarship that I got to this school. Though certainly I was aware of class, I’d never really experienced it much on a day-to-day basis because everybody we knew was basically from our class. And so this was a bit of a shock to me, to be there and to see the things that other boys took for granted were just extraordinary to me and presented a problem to a boy like me, who was already uncertain in his identity, just how to belong to such a place. So it was that kind of struggle with my own character that produced the book as much as any of the external events did, and that is pretty truly chronicled in there. But a work like this, the nature of it, is decided not only by the internal truth, which any novel should have anyway, but also by the events that take place in it, and those, too many of them to mention, are imagined. So it is most certainly a novel. But the core of it, if you will, the spiritual core of the book, is very, let me say, recognizable to me. It’s familiar terrain.

Q: Given the success you’ve had with your short stories and memoirs, how much pressure do you feel for this book to be well received, both critically and by the public at large?

A: I try not to think too much about it, because it isn’t anything I have any control over. And what I don’t have any control over I really do try not to worry too much about. Any writer who spends four years on a book wants people to like it, wants people to read it and like it. Even love it. So yes, that’s what I want, but I can’t make it happen. So there’s no pressure, because pressure is something one feels for something one has control over. I did feel pressure in writing the book to write it well, and as well as I could, and I never let myself let a sentence stand if I didn’t think it should. I didn’t let anything slide that I thought was cheap or cute or unworthy or unnecessary. That’s the kind of pressure that I felt. But as for the rest, that’s not up to me.

Q: Why do you think short stories have never been as universally embraced as novels?

A: I really don’t know. On the face of it, one would think that if indeed our attention spans are as short as everyone tells us they are these days, you would think the short story would be the ideal form. But in fact, the shorter our attention spans grow, the longer the popular novels grow. If you look at the bestseller list, the popular novels tend to be very fat books. I think people like to lose themselves in a story, and that’s an understandable impulse. And the short story, as it’s survived, is a pretty literary artifact.... I think readers perhaps have an intuition of it as being a potentially difficult form, something like poetry, and maybe that makes them a little shy of it. The novel tends to offer the satisfaction of completion: you see a whole life or series of lives in transit, and they do come to a kind of a — usually, in a satisfying novel — some kind of conclusion. And short stories tend to be, by their very nature, ambiguous and open and indecisive in their endings. Certainly the modern short story is. And readers generally I think are left hungry by that. The short story's become — I’m afraid, as I love writing them so much — something of an aficionado’s form, like poetry.

Q: Are you surprised, then, that you’ve managed to sustain such a successful career, having not written the form that people are so drawn to until now?

A: Yeah, I feel unbelievably lucky that in such a crowded field of writers, in a form that competes so ferociously for the attention of readers, for a few readers, that I’ve been really lucky. And I’m really grateful for that. It’s inexplicable. I mean, I know there are any number of wonderful short-story writers out there, many of them my friends. So yeah, this whole thing of taste and success in writing is extremely mysterious, and it can’t be predicted or explained.

Q: I read an interview where you said, "A lot of writing is an acquired schizophrenia —"

A: Did I say that?

Q: What did you mean by that?

A: Ahh, let’s see. What could I have meant by that?

Q: Or what does that mean to you now?

A: I think what I probably meant, and how I would mean it now if I were to say that now, is that it’s the process of writing, it’s an experience of being almost two people. You’re the person who lives, and simultaneously you’re the person who watches yourself live, and then you’re the person who writes about that life; and even as you write, you divide again, because when you write that first version, you really have to be patient with yourself. You’re going to make a lot of mistakes, you’re going to do it badly the first time around, you’re going to want to change things, and you have to accept that, you have to be gentle and not be a bully to yourself as you write, otherwise you’ll freeze yourself up, you won’t get it done. And then when you go back to rewrite, you have to be hard as nails. You have to read what you have done with the eyes of your worst enemy, and as I was saying earlier, you just can’t let anything stand that’s less than as good as you can make it. You have to be willing to cut things that you spent maybe weeks on. Maybe even months. I have done that. In the writing of this novel, I did that. The whole process of writing calls on you to be many different people at different times. That’s probably what I meant.

Q: As a writer, do you keep to a schedule?

A: I try to, yes. Right now, in the fall in a university, it’s always a busy and hectic time, and my schedule tends to fall apart. But when things settle down, I write every day for at least four or five hours. And I have a family life that I am happy to put a lot of time into. I like to see friends, travel. And I teach, not too much, but I teach a big literature class [at Stanford], a big lecture class to incoming freshmen every fall, which I love — it’s a kind of great-books course that I teach with another professor, and we take turns lecturing; each of us lectures about once a week to this big, vast group, and then they break up into smaller groups and meet with their teaching fellows to discuss the work that we are lecturing about. I just love it, because the freshmen really are fresh — they arrive hungry and willing, and they aren’t overworked yet because they just got here. So I like teaching that, and I usually teach one creative-writing workshop a year to our Stegner fellows in the creative-writing program here.

Q: My mother is a high-school English teacher, and she teaches This Boy’s Life every semester —

A: Oh good! I love hearing that!

Q: Does that feel strange to you, as a professor of literature, that your work is required reading for so many students now?

A: Nothing could make me happier. I wish all of my books were required reading. These are the readers of tomorrow. My brother recently wrote a book on John O’Hara, and when I was reading it, I discovered something in there that just took my breath away, which was that O’Hara decided at a certain point that he could manage his business better than his agent could, so he did it all himself after that, with catastrophic results, of course; it’s like defending yourself in court. But one of the things he did, he decided that it was foolish to allow people to put his short stories in anthologies, because then, he thought, people wouldn’t buy the whole book that the story was in. Well, of course the consequence is that no one has heard of him now. I can say the name John O’Hara to that class of fairly smart, well-read freshmen that I’m going to lecture to this morning, and not one of them would know who he is. And yet they know who Steinbeck is, not because they’ve read The Grapes of Wrath, but because they’ve read probably "The Chrysanthemums," say, or "The Red Pony." You know what I mean? It’s the availability of your work to students that will decide whether or not you’re read later. So it always, always makes me happy to hear that a student anywhere has read something of mine in class.

Q: Do you ever have a day when you don’t write at all?

A: Yeah.

Q: What does that feel like?

A: Well, it depends. If I’ve just finished something, I can forgive myself for it, but I don’t like not writing. There’s a wonderful line in a Ray Carver story, it’s about a writer; it says: "He was between stories, and despised himself." And every writer who comes across that line has to know what he meant.

Q: What do you like most about writing, and what do you like least?

A: I just like working with language. And I like the surprises that occur. One wants an element of surprise in life, and writing — if a story ends up as I had imagined it to begin with, I usually don’t like it very much. But if I open myself up to surprise when I write, I love the receiving of it. When something happens that I really hadn’t anticipated in a story, and I’m able to follow that and go somewhere I hadn’t thought to go, that is sheer pleasure for me. And I just love the texture of the English language — of the American language, I should say — and I like molding it and working with it and sculpting it to my ends, and making it as expressive as I can for the things I want to say.

And what do I like least about writing? Well, it’s when you finish something, and you begin again, and it’s that period before the new piece really catches, and you wonder, have I written my last good piece? Am I just going to wallow in this kind of netherworld now? Because you never really know. Nothing is guaranteed you.

Tobias Wolff reads from Old School at the Harvard Book Store, in Cambridge, on November 12, at 6 p.m. Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com


Issue Date: November 7 - 13, 2003
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