This Writer's Life, Part One
A conversation with writer Tobias Wolff about war, family, memoir, and the ethics of storytelling.
By Michael Judge
On Memorial Day weekend I got an email from Tobias Wolff, one of my writing heroes as a young man. I first met Wolff at a 2017 tribute to his friend, my teacher, Denis Johnson, whom we both loved like a brother. We’d exchanged a few emails over the years—mostly after I excitedly (and embarrassingly) sent him something I’d just written—but still, I was surprised to get his email calling my Memorial Day piece “In Flanders Field” a “fine column” about a “great poem.” The poem was written in 1915 by Lt. Col. John McCrae, a Canadian poet, soldier, and physician who tended to wounded soldiers during World War I in some of the bloodiest battles on the Western Front, where at least four million perished.
Wolff’s email continued:
I can’t help thinking of a poem by Wilfred Owen, who was killed in the last days of WWI. He tells the story of Abraham and Isaac, as we know it, up to the point where they reach the place on the mountain where Abraham thinks he's supposed to sacrifice his son. Then, as in scripture, God offers him a way out: Instead of Isaac, he can sacrifice a ram caught in a thicket, identified in the poem as “the Ram of Pride.” The poem, “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young,” concludes:
But the old man would not so, and slew his son, And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
Every year at this time I think of that poem, and the friends I served with and lost in Vietnam, one in particular, a medic [I call Hugh Pierce in my memoir In Pharaoh’s Army]. I still miss him. Always will.
peace,
Tobias
The note moved me greatly, and I decided then and there to revisit In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War, first published in 1994, and to invite Wolff to a TFP conversation as soon as possible. His masterful 1989 memoir This Boy’s Life, still considered a classic of the genre, spoke to me like few books had. Wolff, who in the memoir demands to be called “Jack” after his literary hero Jack London, came of age in the 1950s. I came of age in the 1980s. But our experiences—Wolff’s in Concrete, Wash., mine in Mason City, Iowa—rhymed in crucial ways, and his power and precision as a storyteller made me want to become a writer.
The New York Times called This Boy’s Life “absolutely clear and hypnotic”—and it was, casting a spell on young writers and wannabe memoirists who thought to themselves: “This looks easy!”
Alas, they soon found out, as did I, that it’s not.
Still, Wolff, who turned 78 this summer, and painstakingly rewrites and rewrites and rewrites some more—makes it seem so. In all his books—which include four collections of short stories, three novels, and two bestselling memoirs—one marvels at his clarity and control, and how, with a stoic’s clear-eyed vision, he guides us to the truth in an often muddled and violent world.
Nowhere is this truer than in his second memoir, In Pharaoh’s Army, which deals largely with his experiences as a young U.S. Army officer stationed with South Vietnamese Army soldiers near Mỹ Tho before and during the Tet Offensive. Wolff served in the U.S. Army from 1964 to 1968, but the memoir also touches on his postwar studies at Oxford and early failures—and breakthroughs—as a writer grappling with the subject of his own life, and the lives of those around him, and finally finding the right rhythm to tell what needs to be told:
“There was the pleasure of having words come to me,” Wolff writes near the end of In Pharaoh’s Army, “and the pleasure of ordering them, re-ordering them, weighing one against another. Pleasure also in the imagination of the story, the feeling that it could mean something. Mostly I was glad to find out that I could write at all. In writing you work toward a result you won’t see for years, and can’t be sure you’ll ever see. It takes stamina and self-mastery and faith. It demands those things of you, then gives them back with a little extra, a surprise to keep you coming. It toughens you and clears your head. I could feel it happening. I was saving my life with every word I wrote, and I knew it.”
When I spoke with Wolff from his home in Palo Alto, Calif., near Stanford University where he teaches creative writing, he was hard at work on a new book he hoped to have finished months ago, but couldn’t seem to stop rewriting. I didn’t ask him about the new work, knowing most writers prefer not to talk about a work in progress, feeling—and rightly so—it might taint the process.
I called from Tokyo, never once mentioning his current project, but knowing just the same that, well into his seventh decade on this planet, he was, once again—like all my favorite writers—saving his own life with every word.
MJ: I want to start out by saying thank you so much for your kind words in regard to TFP, The First Person.
TW: I read it. I read it whenever you have one out. I like it. I like its honesty and it’s always interesting.
Thank you. And thank you for your notes of encouragement. Our sort of on-and-off-again correspondence has been inspiring. I think we first met, if you recall, at the Denis Johnson tribute at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop after his death in 2017.
That’s right.
You read a beautiful remembrance of Denis and spoke about how you two became friends in Phoenix in the late 1970s. Years later, Denis was my teacher in the poetry workshop at Iowa, and he was a very big influence on me. If memory serves, you also spoke about Jesus’ Son and the innocence at the heart of Denis’s work.
Yes, exactly.
I experienced that firsthand. I was wondering if you could just tell me a little bit about how you got to know him and what that relationship was like?
We had a pretty close relationship for a brief amount of time, and then I didn’t see him for years on end. But we met in Phoenix. I had gone there to teach at Arizona State and Denis was living there in recovery at the time from the difficulties that he’d been living with and was sober and working on staying that way.
I met him through some friends who were poets, Norman Dubie and Pamela Stewart, who had known him earlier. I started reading his poems after we met and loved them. They’re completely original. There’s no one who sounds like Denis, and as original as they are, they are unmistakably meant. They are intended. They are from, I guess what you’d call the heart. He’s not messing around. He can be very funny, but he’s also very serious. And I found that to be an aspect of his personal character too.
What was on the page was coming right out of that man without affectation. Actually at the time he was looking for a church to go to. So he and I started going to Mass together—not every Sunday, but now and then, and we stayed in touch. I left Phoenix after a couple of years. We stayed in touch, very fitfully through the years. I was down at Syracuse University teaching there. I had him out to Syracuse to read a couple of times. And then again, when I came to Stanford, I had him come here and read.
My daughter, Mary Elizabeth, meeting him and hearing him read, developed a great crush on him and on his work. She was in high school at the time, but it was like meeting a real celebrity for her when she met Denis. So I love the guy. I’ve never known anyone quite like him and I really, really loved his work, especially Jesus’ Son. But also Tree of Smoke I think is extraordinary. And the poems. The Incognito Lounge is one of my favorite more or less contemporary collections of poetry. I just love that.
Well, when I was a youngster at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he had just published Jesus’ Son, but he was to us poets like a God. Years later, I wrote a TFP piece about how much we worshipped him. We couldn’t get enough of Incognito Lounge and The Man Among the Seals . . .
The Man Among the Seals!
Yes. Denis’s first book of poems. The great Kim Merker, who was one of my teachers at Iowa too, founded the Stonewall Press and Windhover Press. He actually published Samuel Beckett and Ezra Pound’s last books, and he published The Man Among the Seals, Denis’s first book.
Wonderful. Wonderful.
And it’s handset type and it’s absolutely beautiful. I actually lifted it from the University of Iowa when I was an undergraduate and I felt so guilty that I returned it along with some other books about 18 years ago.
Good for you.
I couldn’t believe I did such a thing. I had a bad habit of not wanting to wait in line to check things out. So I would walk quickly through the gate at the library and hold the book above my head so that the alarm wouldn’t go off. Another was a first printing of Rene Char’s Hypnos Waking in translation, and I returned that as well.
I made sure I took them straight to the rare books collection and handed them to a librarian. She looked kind of puzzled and said, “Where did these come from?” And I said, “You don’t want to know.” And I gave them to her and walked away. Making up for past sins.
Anyway, Denis told me a great story once. We were walking from the English Philosophy Building on the Iowa campus up to The Mill where we would go after workshop sometimes for drinks, Denis always ordering Dr. Pepper. “Don’t listen to people in workshop if you don’t agree with them,” he said. “Your instincts as a writer are what’s most important here.”
Then he told me a story about “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” the mind-blowing first story in Jesus’ Son. He said he’d sent it to The New Yorker first and they said, ‘“Oh, we love it, except we want you to get rid of that last line: And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.’” And he said, “What? That’s the whole story, man! If you don’t want that last line, you don’t have to publish it.” Right?
Right.
So he basically said “Screw you” and sent it to The Paris Review. And that’s where it appeared—with everything, including the last line—intact.
Good for him.
So that was sort of his lesson in integrity and not taking this workshop business or a magazine editor too seriously when it comes to the heart of your work.
Right. And that took some guts to pull a story back. I’ll tell you someone else who did that too, and he needed the money, he needed the publication. Andre Dubus, a great short-story writer. Had some luck. He placed a couple of stories in The New Yorker and he was just out of the Marine Corps, had a wife and kids and he was trying to support himself. He was teaching four classes every semester at a women’s college in Merrimac, Mass.
But he pulled the story back from The New Yorker because the then-editor objected to his using the word diaphragm—the device that a woman might use then to prevent pregnancy. And they didn’t want him to use that and wanted to take some line out. He pulled his story back and he went years without publishing. He did eventually start publishing there again but much later. And that really cost him something.
I always admired his integrity for insisting on what he thought of as the veracity of his work and the world that he was making it in and being true to that at some expense. I’m lucky I haven’t encountered that sort of thing myself in my writing. I’ve had a couple of tussles with editors over the years, but nothing like that. And I’ve never had to pull a story over anything or even attempted to, but that would be Denis for sure.
I think what Denis told me—and I think I’m getting it right—The New Yorker was going to give him at least several thousand dollars for the story, maybe $5,000. The Paris Review gave him $500, and he was happy with it.
That’s great. That’s great.
In your work you deal a lot with, especially in This Boy’s Life, lying and liars and sort of the embellishments or myths that people create around their ordinary lives. In the book, you take on the name Jack in honor of your favorite author growing up, Jack London. I was wondering . . .
Friends from that time still call me that. I mean, even though I haven’t seen a lot of them in many years, but I’m still in contact with a couple of the guys I was close to in those years, between the time I was about 11 and 12 and 16. And they still call me Jack.
That reminds me of a beautiful line by Victoria Amelina, the Ukrainian poet and novelist, and also a writer of children’s books. She was murdered by the Russians this summer. I’m still ripped up about it . . .
God that’s sad.
She has this beautiful line from a 2016 essay “The Peter Pan Effect.” She says it’s worth learning to speak “to a child in the way you would have liked to be spoken to. And you should also write like this—as if for a distant little self. And despite your age, hope cautiously for the Peter Pan effect, which could fix something over there, far away, in the once little you.”
Wonderful. That’s a great line.
Isn’t that beautiful?
Yeah, that’s really beautiful.
In some ways I get that same sense reading your memoirs. There’s a tone where you go from the experience as you lived it to your understanding of it in the present, which to me is sort of you speaking to that child that she talks about. As if you could fix something far away . . . in the once little you. I was really struck with that feeling most recently in your book In Pharaoh’s Army because I just finished reading it again. But in This Boy’s Life too, it strikes me that there’s something very true about what she’s saying and that maybe that’s what we’re getting at with memoir—and why we have to return to these stories over and over again.
Right, and of course in writing something like that, it’s sometimes a hard negotiation between the you who has survived the times that you’re writing about more or less successfully, and come to wisdom and balance that you did not have at the time. So you want to honor the feelings and thoughts that you really had then. You don’t want to be imposing your present kind of maturities and sophistications on someone who didn’t have them at the time and who in some ways suffered for not having them, who would’ve benefited greatly from having them. You have to practice a kind of restraint and not artificially cushion the person you were then in writing about that person with present bromides and reassurances. Because they were on their own then. They didn’t have you looking over them and seeing how things were going to end up later. So you have to preserve in some way the—how can I put it?—the independence of that young person you’re writing about or younger person from your present self. It’s a trick: You can’t entirely efface the person that you are now, writing about it, but you have to find some way of keeping those realms distinct. . . .
To be continued next week with “This Writer's Life, Part Two.”
Very thoughtful interview. You are using my (creative commons) photo of him. I took a class with him when he was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, right at the time his first published short story, "Smokers" came out in ATLANTIC. He read some Raymond Chandler in class to illustrate distinctive style (although I don't think he cared much for Chandler) and that inspired me to write a private eye story in my next class with Ron Hansen (another fellow), which eventually was published.
Fascinating. Loved this interview. As an author of two memoirs, I particularly appreciated the part of this interview regarding the task of the present day memoirist not imposing their present-day insight onto the former, younger self. Bravo! Joe Armstrong of Joe the Human Substack.