An interview with Tobias Wolff, discussing his book The Night in Question
Published December 5th, 1996,
in The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine
This Boy’s Stories
Writer Tobias Wolff Discusses New Collection
By Tobias Wolff
Knopf, $25.00
The new collection extends
Wolff’s already formidable mastery of the short story form. Stories such as
“Bullet in the Brain,” which delves into the memory of a smart-ass book
reviewer at the moment of his death, and “Lady’s Dream,” which blurs the line
between dream and reality as a woman remembers her courtship, stretch the
limits of the form to terrific lengths.
Speaking from his hotel room in
Seattle—which is not far from Concrete, the town he immortalized in This
Boy’s Life—Wolff elaborated on his unique approach to short fiction.
The Story “Bullet in the Brain” is very different from
your other work. How did it come about?
Why did I write that story?
Because it surprised me. I think that I wasn’t really planning to write that
story. I got hit by lightning or something when I was writing that story. The
second half of the story came to me not as part of the original conception of
the story but in the writing of it. It was originally intended to be something
different. As happens, I think, when writers are at their best, I was kind of
ambushed in the process of writing that story, and my idea was hijacked by some
other—I can only call it inspiration—that came to me in the writing, and I just
let it rip, basically. Something takes over, and you have to let it lead
you—perhaps where you didn’t intend to go. But when that happens to writers,
they should definitely surrender.
That switch in the middle is amazing. A lot of your stuff
is pretty spatial, pretty in the real, and this one really goes inside—almost stream
of consciousness. Is this something that you’re trying to explore, or did it
just happen?
Well, I’m obviously open to it
happening, or it wouldn’t have happened. Yeah, I’m very interested in pushing
the story form to whatever limits I can push it to. And this seemed to offer a
way of exploring the form in a different way than I had before. And I liked the
feeling, and I’m open to doing it again. It was a lot of fun writing that
story.
I think of Umberto Eco’s quote about wanting to poison a
monk—had you just been wanting to shoot a book reviewer?
Yeah, I won’t deny that there was
a little bit of, shall we say, puckish ill will intended in that story, and a
return for services rendered.
You actually got a bad review?
I’ve been very gently treated by
reviewers, but a lot of friends of mine have been roughed up very badly and
very deeply hurt—one of them to the point where she stopped writing, for years
and years. I’m not going to name her, but she was one of the pre-eminent short
story writers in this country, and she was savaged on the front page of the New
York Times Book Review. And she simply stopped writing. Writers are very
fragile people, most of them. It isn’t that reviewers shouldn’t be honest,
that’s not it, but some of them take pleasure in cruelty. And there’s almost a
hatred of writing in some of their reviews. There aren’t that many of them who
are like that—there are just a few. And at the same time I have to say that I
recognize—I just couldn’t have written that story just about someone like that.
Then they’d just be a cartoon to me. But I recognize in myself a propensity for
that kind of detached and caustic oversight in life—a certain ironic distance,
shall we say, from life itself that I don’t like—a quality in me that I
recognize and that I recognize in a lot of other writers too. And I think that
if you indulge it you can become dangerously detached from life. It’s usually a
more spiritual danger, but in this case it becomes a physical danger too. The
sort of reviewing habit—that sense that life owes you novelty and originality
all the time, that life should be putting on a superior and entertaining
performance for you all the time—is a kind of dangerous expectation for the
spirit, and in this case, obviously, it becomes a dangerous one physically for
the guy.
He seemed to be reading instead of living it.
Exactly—life as text.
But you take this jaded character back to the essence of
why he loves language—with his last memories.
Returned him to his source.
This bullet saved him, like in Flannery O’Connor.
Like Flannery O’Connor, yes, the
way violence works in her stories sometimes—it can wake people up.
So if there had been someone to rob a bank every minute of
his life, he would have been a good man.
That’s right, exactly. It’s funny
you say that—I was sitting around with some friends last night, and we were
quoting Flannery O’Connor. I came up with that great line of Manley Pointer’s
while he’s stealing that girl’s leg, and he’s going down the ladder of the
hayloft, leaving her up there, and he says, “You think you’re so smart, ’cause
you don’t believe in anything. I’ve been believing in nothing my whole life.”
Your story “Lady’s Dream,” with its mixture of reality and
dreams, is different from a lot of stuff you’ve done too.
Sometimes, perhaps, as maybe also
comes out in “Bullet in the Brain,” the present can become insubstantial to us.
This is a way of figuring the past—and that moment when you perhaps see back to
where you might have gone another way, and you imagine yourself back there, and
your life has taken a particular turn. I mean I wouldn’t go in a different
direction myself, in the way my life has gone, but I know a lot of people
would. And I imagine somebody going back to that source moment of the situation
they’re in now—and would they do it differently? And this woman, in finding
herself there, discovers that she loves this man. And, in a sense, accepts that
condition that she’s lived in that she does not like all over again. Usually a
dream is an escape. In this story, it becomes almost a kind of renewed
commitment.
Your story “Sanity” also features a dysfunctional family
that ends up sticking together.
Yeah, [April] manipulates her
stepmother into buying the car. Then she has to stay. It’s kind of like that
story about Atlas handing the world over to that other fellow, kind of tricking
the other strongman into holding the world on his shoulders, so he can get out
from under it. And in a way that’s what we do—sanity in this world means a
certain calculation sometimes. It’s hard to keep your head above water and to
manage things, especially for the young, and this kind of coolness, perhaps, in
necessary to survival.
Your story “The Chain” is something of an allegory. I’ve
never seen that happen in your stories—I’ve never seen a moral in your stories
before.
The moral is so obvious that we
know it already. You know what I mean? It’s really a question of following—of
being forced psychologically. My project in this story is to make the reader
want to do what the guy does—and to follow the psychological process by which
someone can commit an irrevocable wrong.
So your plan was to make the reader root for doing these
terrible things, these irrational things?
Well, here’s the thing. This
story is based on something that happened to me. I had to watch my
four-year-old son be savaged by a dog as I ran down a hill. It was just exactly
the scene that I described at the beginning of that story, and that dog was on
a 100-foot leash, and the police would do nothing about it. And it seemed wrong
to me that that dog should be allowed to stay in that yard like that. And I
felt morally obliged to do something about that, even if the law wouldn’t help
me. And in the end, I didn’t. A friend of mine offered to do it for me, and I
wouldn’t finally let him do it. But I could imagine, in a weak moment, in an
angry moment, in a moment such as I experienced and could understand if someone
else did it, saying, “Yes, take that dog out, because I’ve tried everything
else. This dog needs to go.” And what would happen from that moment on, the
terrible things that could be set in motion? I mean it’s happening everywhere
in the world, isn’t it? Everybody’s trying to get justice. The Bosnians are
trying to get justice. The Serbs are trying to get justice. The Hutus and
Tutsis are trying to get justice. The Chechnyans are trying to get justice. And
one man’s justice is another man’s injustice. So when you start that thing, it
doesn’t stop. It’s never stopped, in fact, from the first time. It just goes on
and on. We’re caught in this chain, really. It’s our condition. What I’m trying
to do is understand it—how even with good intentions, that thing can happen. I
don’t consider [Gold] an evil man. I think of Gold as a man not unlike other
men I know—trying to work out the best thing to do from a number of very
imperfect choices.
In “The Life of the Body,” like in “Bullet in the Brain,”
there’s this really self-satisfied character whose world just gets shattered.
This seems like something you’re interested in, at least in this collection.
Yes, I am. That’s something
stories can do, I think. Just for a moment they can hold up a true picture to a
person, to allow them just for a moment, perhaps, to glimpse their real face
through that wishful portrait that they carry around in their mind. Though
Wiley is a figure not unlike many who profess the life of the mind, it seems to
me. There’s a distance between what he professes and how he lives. It is in
this story, as stories do—it’s dramatized. Stories are dramatic moments. But I
don’t consider him, again, a monster of hypocrisy, or anything like that. His
main enemy is himself. You know when he talks about not liking contemporary
fiction—the funny thing about that is that I think he would benefit from
reading some contemporary fiction. He would learn something about self-scrutiny
from it. And the personal life, he’s pretending not to have an interest in
that. He finds it more comfortable to indulge in the kind of generalities of a
day gone by and to lose himself in a world that no longer exists—and all in the
interest of being very high minded. There’s something that he could learn about
himself in contemporary fiction that, I think, is symptomatic of his flight
from reality. He’s a very familiar figure to me and not a bad figure. I’ve had
teachers like him, and they were good teachers, actually. Some of the best
teachers I had were people like him. There are traits of that man in myself, or
I couldn’t have written that.
—David Wiley
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