As he walked into the Knight Library Browsing Room on Thursday, nationally known writer Tobias Wolff saw the 90-odd seats filled, and 50 more people standing behind the seats and sprawled on the floor behind the lectern from which he was to speak.
He held the crowd’s attention for an hour while he read from his famous works in his steady, calming baritone voice.
Wolff, who read a full short story and two excerpts of his longer works, also led a workshop earlier in the day for two graduate students and answered questions from community members and faculty about the controversy surrounding author James Frey. He also sat down with the Emerald and talked about his life as a writer.
The Creative Writing program and the Kidd Tutorials brought Wolff to the University as part of the Visiting Writer Series. Wolff has written two memoirs, “In Pharaoh’s Army” and “This Boy’s Life,” which was made into a motion picture starring Robert De Niro, Ellen Barkin and Leonardo DiCaprio in 1993. According to his online biography, Wolff has also written a novel, “Old School,” and three collections of short stories.
In the evening, before reading from “Old School,” Wolff spoke of the “increasingly vexed border” between fiction and nonfiction. Wolff said writers infuse their experiences into everything they produce. He said he attended a boarding school in Pennsylvania similar to the school the narrator attends in the novel. Wolff wrote the novel from the perspective of a writer who has not yet learned to write. The narrator is egotistical and cannot yet write well but has an overwhelming love of reading, which Wolff said drove him in his own youth.
Wolff also read from “In Pharaoh’s Army,” a memoir of his four years in the Army during the Vietnam War. The book documents a relationship he had with a woman named Vera who grew up with Russian expatriates. While studying Vietnamese in Washington, D.C., Wolff and Vera met and fell in love. Wolff said Vera was prone to uncontainable rages.Vera “drank like a man and ate like a wolf,” Wolff read.
Once while driving in his Volkswagen, Wolff asked Vera to “crack the window.” Vera did not understand the expression and began punching the windshield. She then jumped out of the Volkswagen into her mother’s nearby Mercedes and rammed into the side of Wolff’s car twice.
“This sort of thing became routine,” Wolff read.
Before ending to prolonged applause Thursday, Wolff read one of his short stories, “Bullet in the Brain.” The story stars a book reviewer who is critical of everything and unappreciative of life. While waiting in line in a bank, the book reviewer, a man named Anders, develops “towering hatred” toward the teller for leaving her post, and redirects it to the “presumptuous crybaby” ahead of him in line, who complained to Anders when the teller stuck the closed sign in her window. A group of robbers enter the bank and demand all the money. Anders mocks the robbers out loud for speaking in old movie cliches, and laughs in one’s face after he said
“Fuck with me again, you’re history. Capiche?”
As Anders laughs, the robber shoots him in the head.
Wolff then examines Anders’ life by showing what images did not cross Anders’ mind during the milliseconds it took for the bullet to travel through the flesh of his brain. After focusing on the endless criticism that defined and ultimately ended Anders’ life, Wolff ends by giving the audience an image of Anders, young on a summer baseball field, awash in wonder at the last moment he saw the immense beauty of life.
Wolff led a discussion in front of 30 spectators Thursday on two short stories written by graduate students, “Two Ladies” by Vanessa Norton and “What Adults Do” by J.T. Bushnell.
“To even exchange words with him was an honor,” Bushnell said. Bushnell called the experience “something I will value the rest of my life.”
During a question-and-answer session, Wolff spoke of the controversy surrounding James Frey’s book “A Million Little Pieces.” Frey marketed the book as a memoir but made up some of the details. The debate played out nationally on Oprah Winfrey’s television program and on Larry King Live, where she initially gave support to Frey, but then rescinded it, chastising Frey for taking advantage of trust.
“I found Oprah’s moral indignation even more distasteful than James Frey,” Wolff said. “I was not impressed by her moral superiority.”
Wolff said that Frey did betray a trust between writer and reader but that Oprah determines her stance on issues depending on the amount of angry e-mails she receives.
“Sometimes people will betray that trust,” Wolff said. “That’s the cost of being alive.”
After speaking about the methods he used to create the dialogue in his memoirs – “Their words wore grooves in my head; grownups always repeat themselves” – Wolff sat down with the Emerald to talk about his life as a writer.
When he was in his mid-teens, Wolff said he was thinking about writing, and at one moment he said to himself, “Hell, this is what I like to do, so this is what I’m gonna do.”
Wolff said that to support his writing habit he worked several undemanding jobs that didn’t pay well, and he taught English, which he said was demanding but still didn’t pay well.
Writing is more difficult when the writer is young, Wolff said.
If a person studies law or banking, they can make good money within a few years, Wolff said, but “writers tend to go a long time without making any money. In some ways, it’s a tough gig. I’m really lucky.”
Wolff said he came to speak at the University because writers he respects invited him, he wanted to see the area and to see some of his audience.
“It reminds me that I’m not writing into a vacuum,” Wolff said.
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