Tobias Wolff

Excerpts from an interview in Carolina Quarterly Summer 2002 vol. 54, no. 3

Tobias Wolff is the author of several books of short stories and memoirs and is currently Director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. He made a week-long visit to the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Morgan Family Writer-in-Residence in March, 2002. During his stay, he met with students, faculty, and community members to discuss the art of writing and gave a reading from his novel-in-progress. On the morning of March 21, he sat down with Jonathan D’Amore (JD) and Farrell O’Gorman (FO) to talk about his work as a writer, editor, reader, and teacher.

O’Gorman: You're obviously a reader and editor of contemporary fiction as well as a writer—you've done a lot of work editing short story anthologies—and I was wondering if you think it's still useful to think of American fiction in regional terms? Has it, for example, occurred to you to try and achieve any sort of regional balance in the anthologies you've edited?

Wolff: No, actually, it's never occurred to me to try for regional balance in an anthology. And I haven't given a lot of thought to the larger question.

I've noticed since I came to California a certain prickliness among California writers, a feeling that they've been marginalized. I have to admit that I laughed at the notion. It's not as if this country has failed to appreciate or any number of other California writers: Wallace Stegner Maxine Hong Kingston, Raymond Carver, Ishmael Reed, Michael Chabon, any number of … I could go on. There are a lot of California writers who seem to be getting their due, and rightly so.

Certainly the South has been very proud of its writers, and again, rightly so. But I don't tend to see things in those terms. I notice that Colson Whitehead, in being praised by John Updike as a talented young African-American writer,replied that he thought that Updike was a talented Anglo-American writer. I thought that was a neat way of calling attention to the fact that, in the end, we're all trying to practice this art as best we can. And sure, we bring something of our place with us whenever we write—everything happens somewhere. But I'm sure that no one is sicker of hearing all this stuff about "the great Southern tradition of storytelling" than Southern writers.

The tendency to see our literature in balkanized terms is probably reflecting what's happened in our politics. We relish our differences, obviously; that's what makes things interesting. We wouldn't want to read the same story from everybody. But those differences aren't the point.

I was talking to a woman the other day and she said to me, "What is 'women's fiction'?" I said, "I haven't the slightest idea what that means." And she said, "Well, I read something from a publisher that said they encourage submission of 'women's fiction.'" Anyway, she wrote off—I forget what publisher it was—and got a description of what they thought it was: it emphasized 'relationships,' and 'family,' and all this sort of thing. She really resented it, and I understand why. Then, 'guy's fiction'—what's that? I tend not to parse things out too much in that way. Either I like a story or I don't.

FO: I've seen Stanford somewhere—a magazine or web page—claim you as a "Westerner." And you've commented elsewhere that, on the one hand, your nomadic background has been helpful in exposing you to many different aspects of American life….

TW: Yes.

FO: …but you've also sometimes regretted not having your Yoknapatawpha County. Do you think it's helpful to think of any of your fiction as 'Western'? Back in the World, in particular, seems more strongly unified than your other story collections in this regard.

TW: Yes, that has a Western locale—New West, not cowboy West. I suppose that's true. Again, everything happens somewhere. And at a certain point as a collection is forming, you do look for certain things the stories have in common. With that particular book of stories, I guess I wanted you to have the feeling you have in reading Dubliners, the sense of these people inhabiting a common world. But place there isn't as specific as it is in, say, Tolstoy's Moscow, where restaurants and clubs are named. But yes, there's the atmosphere of a particular place in that collection of stories, an element of coherence, as I hoped.

D’Amore: Your memoirs are certainly very personal stories, even regarding an event like the Vietnam War. In Pharaoh’s Army is about your individual experience more so I think than the experiences of just a soldier—they’re undoubtedly Tobias Wolff’s memories...

TW: Yes. My argument would be that we have generic notions of the experience of soldiers in Vietnam. The mass media obviously feeds those notions. There was no generic experience—everybody over there had a different experience. Certainly my experience was dramatically different from the experience of friends of mine, even those who were in the same kind of unit I was in but were stationed up north. It was the luck of the draw. The closer I get to anybody’s experience the more particular and distinct it becomes. So finally the only kind of honest rendering I could give would be extremely particular—how one person got into this and lived through it, and what it was like to come out the other end. But I was very careful not to generalize from my own experience and I would take that same approach now.

FO: For me as a reader, one of the most unexpected but also compelling things about your two memoirs is the way in which each ends with a meditation upon 'worldliness.' This suggests a kind of religious impulse that is obviously present in at least some of your writing, has shaped at least some of your stories.

TW: Yes.

FO: You've expressed admiration for—though perhaps also some distance from—Flannery O'Connor as a Catholic writer, and you've written of your friend Andre Dubus's "unapologetically sacramental vision of life." Could you say a little about how Catholicism might—or might not—shape your literary imagination, maybe by reference to some other writers?

TW: Well, I didn't really grow up in the Church the way Andre and Flannery O'Connor did. I was baptized when young and confirmed at the age of eleven, but had very little to do with the Church again until I was in my twenties. I have a very difficult relationship with the Church, though I suppose I would still describe myself as a Catholic. In all the versions of reality that are available to us, there is a certain generosity and recognition of human frailty in what I would call the Catholic vision that seems recognizable to me.

But I don't think of myself as a Catholic writer in the way that Andre Dubus is or Flannery O'Connor is; there's a certain allegiance even to Catholic doctrine in their work. In O'Connor's "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" she pits Catholic theology against fundamentalist Protestant theology and has a little argument going on in the songs that they sing back and forth. I would never feel comfortable with or be particularly interested in doing that sort of thing.

Sean O'Faolain said in one of his essays that all the best writing is the writer's argument with God. That's interesting to me, because that locates the sense of the religious in a story out of the realm of doctrine and into the realm of a spiritual discontent, which, when sincere and passionate, is for me the highest kind of literature. I see it in Chekhov, who was an atheist. I think that there's more true 'religious'—if you want to use that word—power in one of his stories than in any number of more pious works that have an argumentative purpose, a persuasive purpose. Keats has that wonderful line: we resist poetry that has a palpable design on us. The key word there is 'palpable': when you can see the salesman coming toward you, you brace.

Flannery O'Connor was for me a very powerful and influential writer at a certain point in my life. Some of the stories I still admire tremendously. But the more I read her, the more apparent her design is to me. I'm much more interested in Katherine Anne Porter, who has more real mystery in her work than Flannery O'Connor does, despite all her talk of mystery. I love Flannery O'Connor, don't get me wrong. Stories like "Revelation," "Parker's Back," "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," any number of stories. But I can see it coming, I can see her hand on the scales a lot of the time, and I don't ever with Porter. Stories like "Noon Wine" and "Flowering Judas" are the highest achievement of a really deeply questioning spirit, a sincerely questioning spirit. Maybe that's what I miss in O'Connor: there's not really a question there. She's already made her mind up, and she's just trying to get you to make yours up the same way.

Does that make any sense? It's a hard question. I don't want to disavow the power of the persuasive impulse. It was the dominant impulse in literature for a long time. It's in the very marrow and sinews of our culture.