The Salon Interview | Tobias Wolff, page 2

The Salon Interview | Tobias Wolff, page 2

you are very fond of Chekhov.
I did a book, a collection of his work published by Bantam a few years ago. I selected the stories from of all his work that has been published in English, and took the best translation of each of the stories I selected, so it was a lot of reading. But it was fun. I loved doing it.
What do you love about him?
His humanity, and at the same time his pitilessness. He's like a really good doctor — he's an expert diagnostician and at the same time he's very humane. But not soft. He knows where humans fit in the scale of things. There's a wonderful story of his about a soldier who's returning from Manchuria, dying on a troop ship, but too ignorant to realize he's dying. He was a brute, and that comes through, but he also has a very tender side. So he dies, in this state of longing and unredeemed ignorance, and most stories would end there. But Chekhov has the burial at sea, and then he follows the body, the weighted body going down and down and down. And a shark comes up, and nudges it, and swims away. And then he moves the vision back up to the sea and the sky where just at that moment the sun is breaking through the clouds and he talks about the light dancing on the water — and I'm trying to get this right — with a sort of joy for which there is no word in the language of men. So you get this tragic thing, this man dying in complete ignorance, a man with all the goodness in his heart that was never realized, so you have that incredible focus on the individual. And then suddenly he opens it up so we can see where we fit into this and how small it is. It doesn't diminish your feeling for the character, but it gives you a sense of the finitude of our duration here and our problems. He's an amazing writer. I love Chekhov. I could go on all day about him.
Which do you prefer teaching – literature or writing?
Literature. Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing. I have to be honest, of course, but I have to be sure that my honesty comes in a form that is not destructive because it can very easily become so. Anybody can be very destructive in that position without at all meaning to be, and I know that I have been inadvertently destructive in the past for certain people on certain occasions.
You began writing as a novelist. What made you decide to write short stories instead?
Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.
Phillip Levine says that about writing poems, that he always wanted to be a novelist but that poems are more suited to his attention span.
His poems are like compressed novels, actually. Such vivid narrative, such vivid people in them. He's a wonderful poet.
It's true. And your stories remind me of poems, actually.
Good. I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels. They have to be; there just can't be any kind of relaxation of the narrative. Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order. And you can't do that with a novel. A novel invites digression and a little relaxation of the grip because a reader can't endure being held that tightly in hand for so long a time.
Novels are easier to read.
People settle into them. You don't have to be quite so attentive. People are always asking me why more people don't read short stories, given the press of time we all experience now. It would seem to be the logical form for our culture. And I think the reason is exactly the reason people don't read poems. Because short stories are very demanding in their way. You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels. They don't have clear endings; they don't tell you everything; they work much more through implication. So a lot of people will read a story by Chekhov or Maupassant or Raymond Carver or Alice Munro or Mavis Gallant and they'll wonder, "Well, what happens then?" They want you to shut the show down the way you do with a novel. And the best short story writers don't work that way.
Short stories often seem to end at just the point where you tend to settle into a novel.
That's right. There's a kind of comfort in returning at the end of the day to the same people and watching them enter their lives more deeply. I'm reading a wonderful novel now by an Irish writer, Colm Toibin, called "The Heather Blazing." What's that great line in "The Death of Ivan Ilych" — Ivan Ilych's life was most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible — and that's the sense you get from this book. It's the everyday slowly taking on this terrible ominous weight, such a beautiful, beautiful novel. You have to be patient to read it.
How long does it take you to write a story?
Never less than six weeks. I live with it a long time. It usually takes me a while, two or three weeks, to even figure out what the story is about.
Do you spend a lot of time staring at the wall or do you sit dutifully in front of a typewriter every day?
I try different things and I explore. It's like spelunking, with a light on your hat. You keep going into different chambers until you find a chamber that seems to you to be the right one; you're descending into dark and unknown territory and you can never see very far ahead.
It never gets easier, does it?
No, it gets harder in a way. It gets harder and more satisfying. Because the more you write the more you're aware of the weight of your tradition and the difficulties of the form and the more you have already done that you do not want to do again. So you're continually searching for new ways of using the story form to most perfectly contain and express the story you're telling. You're setting the bar a little higher each time to keep it interesting for yourself. There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.
Maybe they don't easily hate themselves.
I envy them that anyway. They're not prone to being dissatisfied with themselves and their work. But a lot of writers — and I'm one of them — do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it's a goad and does keep you alert and restless. You push yourself a little harder; you want more. And you can tell the writers who do it — Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.
It seems arduous.
Writing is arduous, isn't it? When other people go to what they call work, they sit at their desks a little while, go over their stats, check the email, answer it, read some reports, and then they get up and go to the office next door, talk business, schmooze a little, go back, sit down and read a bit, type up some memos, go down the hall for a meeting, go out for lunch, then come back and do what they did in the morning. Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community. There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer — because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.
Do you think there is a characteristic way in which you, as a writer, tend to tell a story? Despite the fact that they are nonfiction and written in the first person, your memoirs have very much the shape and rhythm of your story collections.
It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time. That was the way they passed on what happened to them. We all tend to do that, to come home from the day and tell a story about what happened to us.
And we tend to think of our lives episodically, don't we, rather than novelistically?
Exactly. 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. Perhaps that is why the novel flourished in England. You had these communities that would stay put and people would see one another all the time and cause one another to change and have the opportunity to observe the changes over time. The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form.
How so?
Because we're very nomadic; 80 percent of Americans move at least once every 5 years. And there's an extraordinary social mobility in this culture and therefore a lot of social anxiety. People usually change social stations during their lifetimes, or their children do. That doesn't happen to the same degree in other places.
There is so much of that in your own memoirs. Why do you think your father lied to you about his background? Being partly Jewish, for instance.
Because I think he was pretending, out of some deep sadness of self, that he was someone other than who he was. He had this sort of pathetic WASP fantasy. I used to think it was the prep schools he went to, where there was a lot of anti-semitism. But as my brother was doing his research for a book about my father, it became his opinion that the most influential anti-semitism my father encountered when he was growing up was from Jews, because his relatives were German Jews, and doctors. Our grandfather was a doctor and our great-grandfather was a doctor and our great-great grandfather was a doctor to Napoleon, and they were very proud and insular. When this great wave of immigrants came here at the turn of the century — Jews from Poland, from Russia — they were looked down on by the German Jews who called them Yids and Hebes and all this stuff. The German Jews were very secularized, very unobservant, very assimilationist. And my father picked up a lot of this stuff. It's a very strange business.
How did you feel when you found out that you are partly Jewish?
I kind of liked it. Irish and Jewish seemed a good mix somehow, the way collie and labrador seem a good mix. It had a certain something.
You seem to have an incredible memory for detail. Do you think that as a child you were more observant than most?
I studied other people. I was watchful, but I don't know why. Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow. You let it all come out, but it's not all significant or interesting so the problem is how to shape this blob of experience into a narrative that gives your past meaning. I'm very conscious of working from memory but I also know that someone else who was there at the same moment would write something different about it.
Did you always know you would write?
When I was about 14 or 15 I decided to become a writer and never for a moment since have I wanted to do anything else.
What gave you the idea?
A friend of mine actually. I had been writing all along, ever since I was six. I used to write stories for my friends to turn in for extra credit in their English classes and whatnot, and one of these guys actually said to me one day, "You know, you ought to be a writer." And though I wrote stories and loved reading I was convinced that what I did and what writers did were two completely different things. And that was the first time anyone, including my teachers, ever said anything like that to me, because it was not an idea that would have occurred to the teachers at Concrete High School, that one of their students might become a writer. But it did occur to this kid, and he said it. And it's funny, but it just lit things up for me. He didn't know what he was talking about; he didn't know what it meant to try to become a writer, but it's sweet that something one kid says to another in all innocence and kindness can end up being so important.
When you put together a collection of stories, do you plan it as a collection or is it just a sampling of things you've recently written?
I actually wrote more stories than I collected in "The Night in Question," and when I'm choosing them, there is something about the tone or the problem presented in the story that makes it belong to this collection. And I've thought of the characters as belonging to a sort of community, almost as if it were a novel in which the characters don't know one another. And it's not a community based on place, but on the questions that preoccupy them. And there is something about the pace. There should be a sense of unfolding. There are all kinds of things at work when you put a collection together. Writers go to a great deal of trouble that way.
And how did "The Night in Question" become the title story?
I often don't know what the title of a work is going to be when I begin, but when I was writing that story the character uses the phrase, "the night in question," which is a phrase lawyers or police officers usually use in connection with some catastrophe, and it kind of just lifted off the page when I wrote it as if it were a different color from the rest of the words. I couldn't get it out of my head and it seemed like a wonderful phrase to begin a story with, suggesting something ominous, some unfolding, like "Our story begins" or "Once upon a time" or "There were two brothers" or "On the night in question." So it's like the first step forward in a whole series of stories, the whole Scheherazade thing. I want to invite you into this place of stories.