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An Interview with Tobias Wolff

2003; University of Missouri; Volume: 26; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mis.2003.0059

1548-9930

Tobias Barrington Wolff, William Harrison Bradley,

Themes in Literature Analysis

AN INTERVIEW WITH Tobias Wolff TOBIAS WOLFF Tobias Wolff's short stories have appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, Esquire and Atlantic Monthly and have been collected in three books—In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981), Back in the World (1985), and The Night in Question (1996). He received the PEN/Faulkner Award for his 1984 novella The Barracks Thief, and his two memoirs, This Boy's Life (1989) and In Pharaoh's Army: Memories ofthe Lost War enjoyed similar success. This Boy's Life was turned into a movie in 1993, and In Pharaoh's Army was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1994. A former newspaper reporter, William Bradley is now a graduate student and creative nonfiction writer at the University of Missouri. An Interview with Tobias Wolif/William Bradley Interviewer: In your new novel, Old School, your narrator claims— truthfully, itseems to me—"No true account canbe given ofhow or why you became a writer. . . ." However, I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about the course of events that led you to pursue a career as a writer. Wolff: Itwas, I suppose, a tendency in my nature, to some extent encouraged by my reading, and at one point by the example of my brother, Geoffrey, who is seven and a half years older than I. When a brother is that far ahead of you, he has a kind of avuncular influence because you don't compete with him the way you would with a brother who's closer to your age. Although we grew up on opposite ends of the country , when I was about fifteen we spent a summer together. He had just graduated from college and was absolutely book-drunk. He'd been an English major and wanted to be a writer himself. He had me reading all kinds of writers I'd never even known existed—Sophocles, Camus, you name it. That was a crucially important summer for me. I hadn't seen Geoffrey in six years. It was like meeting someone new and dazzling , who was at the same time my brother. I looked up to him, and his enthusiasms were catching. Interviewer: Was that what awakened your interest in writing? Wolff: Even as a boy I'd written stories. I never stopped writing them. I used to write them for friends of mine, to turn in for extra credit. Of course they were childish, imitative things, like any kid writes, but I loved writing, and I loved reading. I never really made the connection between the things I read and the writing I was doing until I was a freshman in high school, when a friend of mine said to me one day, "You should be a writer," and the idea stuck. Though I read a lot and loved to write, it had never occurred to me to be a writer, but somehow that suggestion, coming from a fourteen-year-old boy, forced a connection The Missouri Review · 97 between those two passions. I thought, "Huh. I could be a writer. I write, I read." But you can't trace this vocation or any other to a single event or set of circumstances. It's really the way life plays on your temperament , on your interests—which of course change from time to time. And—this is something people don't say very much about—it has a lot to do with what you're not good at. After a while your choices get winnowed down by your inabilities as much as they're formed by your abilities. There are one hell of a lot of things I can't do. So I do what I can, like anyone else. Interviewer: In This Boy's Life, you say that you sent a story to your brother about two dogs fighting in the wilderness, and in the collection For the Love ofBooL·, which Ronald B. Schwartz edited, you talk about how, as a child, you were attracted to those stories of animals in the wild. Although you might not have been aware of them at the time, do you recognize distinct stages in...