Posts Tagged ‘Tobias Wolff’

Sophisticated? He didn't think so.

“I don’t think he tried very hard to promote himself,” said writer Benjamin Cheever, son of novelist John Cheever, in a telephone interview. “He was very, very quiet – both as a public person and as a conversationalist. He used a pause better than most of us use a paragraph.”

In preparation for Stanford’s “Another Look,” a new book club launched by the English department at Stanford, I wrote a retrospective on author William Maxwell, whose masterpiece, So Long, See You Tomorrow, will be the inaugural book for “Another Look” on Monday, November 12. The book will be discussed by award-winning author Tobias Wolff, with Bay Area novelist, journalist, and editor Vendela Vida and Stanford’s lit scholar Vaughn Rasberry, to be followed by an audience discussion. More on “Another Look” here.

Here’s a bit from my piece about Maxwell. Read the whole thing here:

“I never felt sophisticated,” the erudite and elderly Midwesterner explained to NPR’s Terry Gross in 1995. His modesty is certainly one reason why William Maxwell remains a connoisseur’s writer, never achieving the wider recognition he deserves.

Yet Maxwell’s career was situated at the epicenter of American literature and letters: On staff at the New Yorker from 1936 to 1975, he was the editor of J.D. Salinger, Vladimir Nabokov, Eudora Welty, Frank O’Connor, John Cheever, and many other luminaries. He also contributed regularly to the magazine’s reviews and columns, and continued to do so until 1999, a year before his death. …

When J.D. Salinger finished Catcher in the Rye, he drove to the Maxwells’ house in the country and, over the course of a single afternoon and evening, read the manuscript to them as they sat on the porch together.

That’s an indication of his stature as an editor, and how much his writers valued him. Eudora Welty wrote: “For fiction writers, he was the headquarters.” Maxwell felt that being a good editor made him a better writer. …

Typical of the kind of attention that writers received was this 1993 letter, which Cheever read aloud at a 2008 commemorative event:

Dear Ben,

Yes, all you have to do is work very hard. I have never known good things not to come of it, and I am all the better for work habits. I feel I’m engaged in a struggle, with whom or with what I am not sure. For your soul. If I win, as an old man you will look back kindly on your life and say to yourself, “To think, I spent all those years thinking poorly of myself. How unnecessary.”

Love,

Bill

(May I say it again? Read the rest here.)

Alberto Giacometti’s “Palace at 4 a.m.” (Photo: Antonio Villar Liñán)

Earlier this week, I announced “Another Look,” Stanford’s book club for the best books you’ve never read. But I didn’t have a chance to give my pitch for William Maxwell‘s masterpiece, So Long, See You Tomorrow. Let me make amends now.

I read the book on the strength of Tobias Wolff‘s powerful recommendation several months ago. The graceful, elegant, and melancholic writing is infused with the Midwestern attitudes and turns of phrase still extant in my own Michigan childhood. As I read, I wondered where those phrases, metaphors, and mindsets have gone since. Maxwell’s excavation of memory has become more urgent with the passage of time. “I didn’t want the things that I loved, and remembered, to go down to oblivion. The only way to avoid that is to write about them,” he said in an interview.

Toby called the book “a beautifully written, complex, haunting story of a boy’s attempt to find warmth and companionship following the death of his mother in the Spanish Influenza epidemic — which killed more people than the Great War it so quickly followed. It is a work of consummate literary artistry, and a cry from the heart that, once heard, cannot be forgotten.”

When I read the book, I hadn’t yet seen the work Maxwell uses as a metaphor for his childhood, Alberto Giacometti’s “Palace at 4 a.m.,” in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Google found it for me, and when assembling materials for the Another Look website, I thought I would do new readers the favor of including an image of it.

I prefer some of Giocometti’s other work, which is reminiscent of the work of his mentor, the French sculptor Antoine Bourdelle. My own father was a sculptor; Bourdelle and Sir Jacob Epstein were perhaps his favorite masters of the medium, and hence became my own. But for Maxwell, Giacometti’s “Palace at 4 a.m.” had a special poignance.

Here’s his ekphrastic turn in So Long, See You Tomorrow. I liked the last line so much, I used it in our bookmark for the event – you can pick up one of the bookmarks at the Stanford Bookstore, or at the Stanford Libraries – or drop me a line and I’ll save one for you.

From Maxwell:

“When, wandering around through the Museum of Modern Art, I come upon the piece of sculpture by Alberto Giacometti with the title ‘Palace at 4 a.m.,’ I always stand back and look at it – partly because it reminds me of my father’s new house in its unfinished state and partly because it is so beautiful. It is about thirty inches high and sufficiently well known that I probably don’t need to describe it. But anyway, it is made of wood, and there are no solid walls, only thin uprights and horizontal beams. There is the suggestion of a classic pediment and of a tower. Flying around in a room at the top of the palace there is a queer-looking creature with the head of a monkey wrench. A bird? a cross between a male ballet dancer and a pterodactyl? Below it, in a kind of freestanding closet, the backbone of some animal. To the left, backed by three off-white parallelograms, what could be an imposing female figure or one of the more important pieces of a chess set. And, in about the position a basketball ring would occupy, a vertical, hollowed-out spatulate shape with a ball in front of it. …

“I seem to remember that I went to the new house one winter day and saw snow descending through the attic to the upstairs bedrooms. It could also be that I never did any such thing, for I am fairly certain that in a snapshot album I have lost track of there was a picture of the house taken in the circumstances I have just described, and it is possible that I am remembering that rather than an actual experience. What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory – meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion – is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.”

"I didn't want the things that I loved, and remembered, to go down to oblivion. The only way to avoid that is to write about them." (Photo: Brookie Maxwell)

Finally, the news is out! For several months, I’ve been working with author Tobias Wolff on a new idea for a book club, “Another Look.” First book we’re going to feature on November 12 at Stanford: William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow. Here’s the announcement:

Book clubs have proliferated across the United States, though most stick to middle-of-the-road bestsellers. Once in a while, however, you run across an off-the-beaten-track book you may not know about, praised by a leading literary figure. Where do you go to talk about this unfamiliar, top-notch fare?

Look no further. Stanford is allowing readers to get an insider’s look at literature via a seasonal book club, “Another Look,” which will be offered by one of the top-ranked English and creative writing departments in the nation.

“Another Look” is the brainchild of award-winning writer Tobias Wolff, a Stanford professor of English, who will kick off the event with William Maxwell‘s 144-page novel So Long, See You Tomorrow.

Interested readers are invited to a discussion of the book at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 12, in the Levinthal Room of the Stanford Humanities Center. The event is free. Wolff will talk about the book with Bay Area novelist, journalist and editor Vendela Vida and Stanford Assistant Professor Vaughn Rasberry, to be followed by an audience discussion.

For Wolff, “Another Look” started in a conversation with colleagues: “We had occasionally held lunchtime discussions of a story or novel or poem for interested students and members of the department, and these had proved popular. Well, why not open our arms a little farther and invite the university community to participate; or, better yet, open our arms out wide to the community at large?”

Said Wolff, “Each of the faculty members are choosing books that really matter to them, and that they feel have not earned the readership they deserve.”

The books will be on the short side as well. “We recognize that the Bay Area is a busy place – and we recognize that people have limited resources of time. We don’t want to suggest books of discouraging length,” said Wolff.

So Long, See You Tomorrow was originally published in two parts in The New Yorker in 1979. The book, set in rural Illinois, describes the effects of a murder on the friendship of two boys – one of whom, in old age, narrates the story. Wolff called it “a beautifully written, complex, haunting story of a boy’s attempt to find warmth and companionship following the death of his mother in the Spanish Influenza epidemic – which killed more people than the Great War it so quickly followed.”

He called it “a cry from the heart that, once heard, cannot be forgotten.”

“It’s been a project of mine since 1980 to make people read that book. Whenever I sit down with people to talk about books I love, I always make sure that I mention that one. I give it to people as a gift,” he said. “This is my attempt to give this novel to the whole Bay Area as a gift.”

Wolff hopes to encourage a rich community discussion of the book on Nov. 12. “The conversation will be much richer if people have read and thought about the book first,” he said.

“The book club offers a wonderful opportunity for the writers and scholars of the English Department and the Creative Writing Program to introduce these neglected classics to a broader audience,” said Gavin Jones, chair of the English Department. “I’m excited at this opportunity to continue our literary conversations beyond the classroom.”

For the second event in February, poet Kenneth Fields will present Janet Lewis‘ 1941 The Wife of Martin Guerre, a 109-page novel. The name might ring a bell with some Bay Area readers: Poet Janet Lewis was also the wife of Stanford’s eminent poet-critic Yvor Winters.

On Lewis’ death in 1998, the New York Times wrote: “There are many who will assure you that when the literary history of the second millennium is written … in the category of dazzling American short fiction her Wife of Martin Guerre will be regarded as the 20th century’s Billy Budd and Janet Lewis will be ranked with Herman Melville.”

Although the Nov. 12 event is free, seating is limited. Reservations on the website anotherlook.stanford.edu. The website includes Wolff’s introductory remarks, as well as Cynthia Haven’s [dat's me – ED] retrospective on Maxwell’s life, with interviews of his colleagues and daughter.

Skip the therapy. Write books instead. (Photo: Sonia Lee)

Two troubled childhoods. Two men who grew up absent the parental care all children need. One homeless child spent time living in an urban sewer system, the other boy bounced from city to city, state to state.

A recipe for lifelong failure and therapy, yes?

Nope. Both grew up to be award-winning writers: one is Tobias Wolff, author of Old School, This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army, the other is Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer-awarded author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb and, more recently, the acclaimed Hedy’s Folly. The two friends spoke at a private, invitation-only only event in the Bender Room in Green Library on the evening of Sept. 17 about what it takes to become a writer. It’s not what you think.

Both talks were so good I can do no better than share my notes with you.

Richard Rhodes: “Urban Hucky Finns”

Rhodes was born in 1937, and his mother committed suicide the following year. He lived in a series of boarding houses in Kansas City, Missouri.

From sewers to Mars in one lifetime

Could it get worse? It did.

His father remarried and his stepmother was abusive, not allowing the brothers in the house during the daytime. At some point, he and his older brother Stanley did what so many abused children do: they took to the streets of Kansas City.

Rhodes recalled “I think of us as urban Hucky Finns,” he said. Far from feeling sorry for himself, he recalled it as an adventure.

“The big city junkyard wasn’t fenced off from the world. I could wander around there and discover pieces of the world,” he said. “The vacuum tubes smelled of hot varnish. Baby strollers and tricycles and all those wheels. Pieces of automobiles.”

At one point, he took apart a sewing machine he found and put it back together again – and had two extra pieces leftover. “I felt that I had made a breakthrough.”

“It doesn’t surprise me I became interested in science and technology,” he said.

The brothers went through the dumpsters for food. A half-eaten hamburger was something to be prized: “To brush off the cigarette ash, was to have something really wonderful.”

Ethical robots

Sewers were for the summers. He remembers tunnels that were 12 feet in diameter. “They didn’t have sewage in them, they just had water in them … and a healthy population of rats.”

The brothers would pop up for fresh air at various points in the city through the manhole covers in the street, “no doubt scaring people.” At that time – he was about 10 or 11 – he remembers reading Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. It matched his life.

“It was so wonderful … it was still the first big novel I ever read,” he said.

“By the time I got to adolescence, I was really fascinated by science fiction.” In particular, he was impressed by Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, exploring the ethics of being a robot.”

“Trivial as it sounds, it was my first encounter with philosophy and ethics.” Then Albert Schweitzer’s My Life and Thought showed him “a way to think of moral issue of world.”

In 1949, his older brother went to the police. The brothers were told that they were “obviously starved.” Stanley Rhodes was 5’ 4” and weighed 98 pounds.

The boys went to a farm – a “very empowering business,” Rhodes recalled. Then, the miracle, or as he put it, “I got lucky.” He was offered a four-year, all-expenses-paid scholarship to Yale.

Yale was not exactly like home. “I was feeling as if landing on Mars.”

Tobias Wolff – call him “Jack”

“My folks separated and quickly divorced when I about 5,” Tobias Wolff said. “My father was not good about support.” His mother worked at the Dairy Queen during the day, while she took nighttime secretarial classes.

"Books seemed to come from another planet."

The local library was his babysitter. “I found myself going to the library a lot.”

“I spent a lot of time in those libraries, feeling safe.” Palo Alto’s cozy College Terrace branch library is akin to the libraries he remembers.

Although he is “not at all nostalgic for world grew up with” in the 1950s, “there’s an intimacy about that world I remember fondly. It’s one of the things that stayed with me.”

He developed an addiction for the novels of Albert Payson Terhune, who wrote such immortal classics as The Faith of a Collie. “I read all those books, one after another.”

“He wrote about Collie dogs. That’s all he wrote about. He had no other subject,” he said. “He did his best to stay within bounds of Collie psychology,” said Toby – even to the edges of canine ESP. In one novel, “the Master joins up in the great effort of World War I.” Back home, the dog suffers, knowing his Master has fallen in Belgium. “This dog gets himself to Belgium, finds the man and pulls him to safety.”

Relief was on the way. When he was 10 or 11, one prescient librarian asked him read the works of Jack London. She pulled White Fang off the shelf for him. “Then I read everything by Jack London.”

He changed his name to Jack Wolff. “My mother agreed to let me change my name on condition I was baptized at the Church of the Madeleine.” In Salt Lake City, where they lived, he was one of two children in his school who was not Mormon. “She was terrified I would become a Mormon.” Baptism was a fair trade for a name like Jack.

Inspiration ... where you can find it.

“I was beginning to write imitations. To build a fire,” he said. “Books seemed to come from another planet. I really did it out of love, and for the pleasure of writing down stories that were read only by my mother for years.”

If being a “professional writer” means making a profit on one’s writing, he made it early, giving copies of stories to his friends to turn in for extra credit.

When his memoir This Boy’s Life came out, he got a call from one of his boyhood pals from Washington state, who was living in Alaska. “I hear there’s this book and I’m in it,” he said.

The pal had turned in for extra credit the far-fetched story of a family of Italian acrobats and domineering patriarch. In the finale, he dives into pool of water from great height. The family had taken out insurance on his life, drained pool, and painted it blue. The End.

“What grade did she give you?” he asked. “She gave me a ‘C’,” he replied.

“I thought it was an ‘A’ story,” Toby replied thoughtfully. Apparently, the teacher agreed. “I think it’s an ‘A’ story,” she told the budding plagiarist. “But you didn’t write that. Jack Wolff wrote that.”

His attendance at Pennsylvania’s Hill School changed his life. The school emphasized literature, and writers like Robert Frost, William Golding were treasured.

The rest of that story is told in his memoirs. He lost his scholarship for repeated failures in mathematics. He went into the army, and then to Vietnam. “Even in army kept writing. I was conscious of myself as someone who wanted to be writing.”

At Kepler's in 2008 (Photo: Mark Coggins)

Acclaimed novelist Tobias Wolff shares his own evolutionary path in the Los Altos Town Crier this week.

“The first step to becoming a writer is to be a reader,” Wolff said. “I remember being huddled under the blankets with a flashlight reading Albert Payson Terhune. I loved those collies. Being able to see the world through the eyes and the mind of a dog captivated me. I read all his books.”

As a boy, Wolff was also taken with with the works of Jack London. “I was so enthusiastic that I changed my name to Jack,” he said. “I was writing all the time and began to try to imitate London’s style. I learned a writer reads differently. He notices the form, language, sense of character and voice.”

In fact, he said:

“You need to imitate until you find your voice,” he told the audience. “It’s just like listening to great music before you play. I assign my students an essay to be written in the style of Henry James,” he said. “One of the most difficult parts of writing a book is selecting names for your characters. They need to fit like a suit of clothes.”

His final advice to those writing memoirs: “Tell the truth.”

Every cliché marks a little dead spot in the brain.  Yet after any intense experience — sex, childbirth, love, death, war — they are on-the-ready to frame our experience the way we’ve heard before, in ways that dull our own rough, unwelcome, and unmanageable perceptions.

Giving into them is like sinking comfortably into a jacuzzi.  Resisting is like swatting at the nasty flies buzzing around your head.

That’s precisely the role of the writer.  It’s got to do with staying honest.  Joseph Brodsky referred to it as resisting the “vulgarity of the human heart” — which is endlessly inventive in creating new clichés (yes, I’m aware of the irony) to do our thinking for us, to digest and regugitate our experience in pre-packaged, socially acceptable, and often sentimentalized ways.

We can jeer some of these prefabricated phrases, stereotypes, and the habitual ways of thinking and feeling into a well-earned oblivion — one by one, or, on occasion, in groups.  So when writers Tobias Wolff and Tim O’Brien appeared  in an onstage conversation Monday night to talk about writing and war, it was a rare opportunity.  I wrote about their discussion here.  Excerpts:

Wolff, author of Old School, This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army, noted that war writing is “so encrusted with cliché,” replete with images of “helicopters coming out of the mist” and jazzy lingo among soldiers. Wolff recoils at the clichés, adding that, for him, “When people use the word ‘Nam’ it’s like salt on a slug.”

Wolff: Keeping honest

Wolff, who has received two PEN awards and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, said war writing typically features “ossified conventions” – soldier teams that inevitably include “a Polock,” and “a guy who wears glasses; they call him ‘Doc.’” Wolff recalled hammy stereotypes of more recent vintage – a recent portrayal of a vet as an amputee, wheeling himself on a sort of scooter, “like Porgy.”

“It took years before I could deal with my memory honestly,” he said.

Wolff said he already had literary aspirations when he went to Vietnam. He wrote letters home with the idea that they would be the basis of his future writing. On reviewing them years later, he said, laughing, that “they were just crap.”

“They were totally untrue. They were literary. I was actually there, writing home literary experiences from books I had read,” he said.

His letters failed to capture the “growing corruption,” “the horrible way we treated people,” “the ironic vocabulary around every corrupt thing you did, how you became habituated to it, callous.”

O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried, In the Lake of the Woods, and July, July, noted that

he didn’t have the expected “shoot ‘em up stuff” in his books for a simple reason: “Part of it is that I can’t recall well. There was a general atmosphere of chaos, fear-based,” he told an overflow crowd at Cubberley Auditorium. “Memory evaporates,” said the writer, who has received a National Book Award. …

He added that he never saw war as “male adventure,” but was drafted: “I went to war kicking and screaming. I was terrified of dying.”

O’Brien considered how he writes about war:   “You do it sentence by sentence, line by line, character by character, even syllable by syllable,” said O’Brien. “You have to have a poetic sensibility – that language matters.” He approaches his books not first by theme, but by language (another part that didn’t make it into the story) “out of that, your body as a writer is moving — I’m not talking mystically about hearing stuff coming at me.”

O’Brien turned audience expectations upside down again when a woman asked him about treating post-traumatic stress disorder.  O’Brien took an unconventional stance: “One of the ways to deal with trauma is to be traumatized,” he said.  “I worry that there’s not enough trauma,” said O’Brien. “We seem to heal too quickly, too easily, too smoothly. I think you’re nuts if you come back from what I went through and aren’t nuts,” he said. “If you don’t have anger issues, I think you’re crazy, you’re not human.”

Actually, I’ve often thought that myself:  Why does therapy attempt to smooth out the rough edges of our life, to level the hard iron ore of experience? We talk about “processing” our emotions.  What exactly do “grief counselors” do?  We talk about “not being bitter” when people undergo experiences that are, essentially, bitter.  Drink it down to the bottom and then move on … well, “move on.”  There’s another one, eh?

Just when the audience was convinced that Vietnam was a meaningless horror, expectations turned again, with the poignant witness of a Vietnamese-American young woman, presumably a Stanford student, who said she felt “blessed” to be in the room — and without the American soldiers, she would not be privileged to be here.  She asked about “demonizing the enemy,” and said when she visits Vietnam, it’s hard to believe anything ever happened.

O’Brien, who has returned to Vietnam in recent years, grew thoughtful. “There’s a beauty that I missed, the first time around. The tree was ugly to me because someone might be behind it, shooting at me.”

He recalled returning to Vietnam and feeling “forgiven.”  He even went drinking with his erstwhile enemies, who joked about how easy it had been to find “big and noisy” Americans.  For the Vietnamese, “Our American War was just a blip on their radar screen. Not as big as the China War.

“There was none of the bone-killing animosity,” he said, “which makes you wonder: Which is the real world? That one or this one?”

Postscript on 2/2: The video of the event has just been posted — included below.

Tim O’Brien in Conversation with Tobias Wolff on “Writing and War” from Stanford Humanities on Vimeo.

Wow. How weird is this?

Imagine going home to Brooklyn Heights, or catching the G train at Clinton-Washington, or waiting in the subway station near Times Square, or on the long bus ride up to visit the Cloisters. You are quietly minding your own business.

You attract the stares of a nearby, shleppy fellow traveler with slightly crazy eyes. Is it a pickpocket? A mugger? A masher?

It’s not you he’s after. It’s your book.

Here’s how the website CoverSpy explains itself: “A team of publishing nerds hits the subways, streets, parks & bars to find out what New Yorkers are reading now.”

Yesterday, a teacher in her thirties was going over her lesson plans at the Housing Works bookstore. She’s reading the Tobias Wolff collection (left). The moment immortalized on the worldwide web!

Today, a 20-something woman wearing ear-pad headphones at the Carroll Street station reads about Marilyn Monroe (right). Captured!

It goes on and on — and the Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/CoverSpy, if you absolutely must know the latest in what other people are reading right now, now, now. Kind of like watching other people eating, innit?

Thanks, Andrew Herkovic, for this tip. Whew! Who knew 21st century life would get so strange, so fast?