Wolff Parade

It’s been quite a year for reappraising the glory of the short story. First there was Granta’s near definitive Richard Ford-edited anthology last winter, followed by the republication of Joe Hill’s wonderful 2005 debut 20th Century Ghosts. This spring brought Amy Hempel’s The Dog of the Marriage and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, plus advance reading copies of Gerard Donovan’s Country of the Grand, due next month. Now comes Our Story Begins, an epic collection of Tobias Wolff’s finest short fiction, plus a ream of new yarns.

Despite his formidable reputation as a memoirist and novelist, Wolff is a master of the 10-page tale. He once declared that he’s returned to the form again and again because it’s more forgiving than the novel, but today, sat at a table in the Morrison Hotel restaurant, he’s prepared to amend that statement.
“No, the short story is merciless,” he says, a bald, fit-looking 63-year-old with piercing eyes, snow-white moustache and the voice of a veteran sports broadcaster. “I never thought it was more forgiving, what I thought was the short story offers rare glimpses of utter perfection in the way certain poems do.”
The tales collected in Our Story Begins don’t just testify to Wolff’s virtuosity, they also mirror his longer works. Aching tales of adolescence such as ‘Flyboys’, ‘Two Boys and a Girl’ and ‘Smorgasbord’ find their counterparts in his memoir This Boy’s Life and the short novel Old School, while morality plays about stupid white males with guns (‘Hunters In The Snow’, ‘Soldier’s Joy’) play off his Vietnam memoir In Pharaoh’s Army. Do these collected tales serve as a sort of shadow autobiography?
“Yeah, I would say they do,” he concedes. “It’s very much a biography of the inner life rather than tracing things in any eventful detail. There are relics of my life floating up in the stories. But they’re certainly fictions and not memoir. Many of them are just my obsessions, things I’ve had to think about over the years about fraudulance and self-consciousness, the problem of shame and guilt, how you deal with it, especially when those you want to make things right with aren’t there to be made right with.”
As a professor of creative writing at Syracuse University for 17 years, Wolff mentored George Saunders, Jay McInerney and Alice Sebold among others. Does he know which students are special and might go on to make a name for themselves?
“No, I don’t. With undergraduates, 18, 19, 20-year-olds, what will make them really special is if they keep working at it, and I don’t know whether they will or not. But the undergraduate that I taught who’s had the greatest success, Alice Sebold, is not one that I would’ve at the time ever picked out of that workshop as the one who would be a writer later on. But Alice left Syracuse and every two or three years I’d get a manuscript in the mail from her, long after she’d graduated: ‘Will you take a look at this story?’ And then another one a few years later. And y’know, she worked at temp jobs and did all kinds of stuff to keep writing. She was just gonna fuckin’ well be a writer, and that was that! I couldn’t have foreseen that, so I really am not in the business of prophesy, especially with younger writers.”
So while a certain amount of raw talent is required, the clincher is bull-headed tenacity?
“Oh it is. I really think that’s it. I’m not saying this in false modesty at all, but I wanted to be a writer from the time I was about 14 or 15, and when I got a scholarship to this boarding school back east, there were a lot of guys there who wanted to be writers, it was still a glamorous thing to be then, Hemingway was alive, and Frost. And a great many of them were much more naturally talented than I was, but they didn’t keep doing it. They came to their senses, or they decided at a certain point they didn’t care to embrace the uncertainty of this life, people around them were getting their first Volvos and stuff. The only classmate I had who went on to be an artist was Oliver Stone. He’s the only one of a very talented crew of people that ended up becoming a writer.”
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Wolff has all the hallmarks of a classic southern yarn-spinner, but confesses he never felt like one.
“No, I don’t feel like I did, because my mother wasn’t one. Even as a kid when I was growing up among real southerners, I just felt a little different. For one thing there was a tremendous amount of hatred in the kids that I grew up with, and they took it out on black people in their conversation, and that was something that was very alien to my mother, so I felt that difference.
“I mean, my mother was not a Civil Rights demonstrator or anything, she just was not a hater. It was a pretty raw place, the American south, when I was living there. They’re still fighting the Civil War there in a way that the people in the rest of the country aren’t. They still have this sense of injured pride and having been unfairly relegated to a subservient kind of position, which they haven’t been. Yeah, right after the Civil War they were, but for Christ’s sake that was 150 years ago.
“I haven’t lived in the South in years now, so I may be being unfair, but the fact that they’re still having fights over flying the Confederate flag over state houses, Capitol buildings, that tells me there’s a problem. And that Presidential candidates get into trouble for questioning the wisdom of doing this, flying a flag like that in the face of their black fellow citizens? I think they’re still having problems with this. I worry about Obama’s candidacy for this reason. The race thing in our country, we have still not figured this out. I voted for him, I hope he wins, but I worry.”

Our Story Begins is published by Bloomsbury