Tough comforts, hard truths

A Vietnam veteran and master of the short story form, Tobias Wolffstill believes in novels - and in John Kerry, he tells Eileen Battersby.

Open-faced and direct, Tobias Wolff is as candid as his fiction. His is a wholly American voice. It is also the voice of truth, it conveys the unsayable, the secret constructs we invent and would prefer to either remain hiding behind, or finally escape. He understands the onion-peel layers of honour, morality, desperate humour and humanity, as well as the essential complexity of being a male in the face of fear and power and choice.

To describe him as a master of the short story is not an opinion, it is an indisputable fact. His stories - such as 'Hunters in the Snow', 'Firelight', 'Smokers', 'The Night in Question', 'In the Garden of the North American Martyrs', The Barracks Thief - confirm that fiction can and does matter. Once you read a Wolff story, you have signed a life contract - to read and re-read his work for as long as you choose to read stories.

All that said, sitting down to interview Wolff, now aged 58 - "59 on June 19th" - about his first novel, Old School, is a bit like asking a famous stage actor how he approached his recent début television commercial. Storyteller and observer supreme, Wolff is a natural writer, not the typical début novelist, and that alone seems to render questions about his writing a novel rather than a short story pretty redundant. In addition, there is the feeling that Old School is both more than a novel and less than a novel - it is a series of stories based on the theme of personal reinvention, "self-construction", that so intrigues Wolff.

Far more pressing than quizzing Wolff the writer about his proven, delicately razor-sharp art is to inquire of Wolff the American what he thinks of life under a trigger-happy administration which, by comparison, has unintentionally recast the Reagan era as an interlude of deep cultural profundity. You don't have to mention the current US president by name for a short burst of anger to flash across Wolff's friendly face. There's no mistaking that his love of his country has been sorely bruised of late.

"It's been grim, being in the dark with the lights turned out," he says. "The past four years, we've been living in a basement, like mushrooms. But I'm hopeful. Now there's real hope."

By hope, Wolff means Bush stands a well-deserved chance of being voted out of the office he was so controversially elected to. Hope comes in the haggard form of Senator John Kerry.

"I like him," says Wolff, smiling with certainty, not merely simple relief. "He's got a good, not great, record in the Senate" - and as two things Bush does not possess, personal credibility and a war record. "There are some questions to be answered, like about giving Bush what seems to have been an open chequebook as regards Iraq, but I feel those questions can be answered. Kerry's solid. I trust his heart."

Kerry also served in Vietnam. To a fellow veteran such as Wolff, this means something. It is also beginning to mean a great deal to Americans in general. For a long time, Vietnam was like slavery in the Deep South - no-one mentioned it. Except in the work of a handful of writers who wrote about their experiences, Vietnam was national shame writ large. Finally, it has been acknowledged as a national experience, and to have served there now guarantees respect.

Bush might well own a wardrobe of flak-jackets but he never wore one in service, because he never served in action.

"When I see someone like Bush wrapping himself in the flag, this is the last guy to have the right to do that," says Wolff, more outraged US citizen than major US writer as he refers to a military exam Bush flunked. The president's activities at the time of Vietnam are currently being revisited by the US media. It seems he stayed at home in the Texas Air National Guard instead of going overseas. "That's not the same as serving your country in time of war," says Wolff. "If you were opposed to war, why not say so, or go to Canada, but pretending . . ."

It is the implicit dishonesty of bragging about war while having avoided it that seems to irk Wolff who, having spent four years in the US army and a year in Vietnam, says he chose to go "before I was sent".

Admitting that he went because "I wanted to see what it was like before I began my real life", Wolff has a gift for defining the elemental truth in most things and appears to have earned his anger. Throughout his life, he seems always to have watched and listened before making up his mind about the rights or wrongs of something.

There is also his sense of justice. This is a man with an inherent grasp of what is fair and what is not. Heroism and patriotism are not concepts that interest him. Instead, he sees serving your country as something you are supposed to do.

"I went, I wasn't wounded and I came back", is said with a matter-of-fact shrug. Neither of Wolff's sons, now aged 25 and 23, have ever asked him about this part of his life. But now his 14-year-old daughter is asking questions instead. "She's interested in me - she's writing a history project and I'm her subject," he says.

Not that Wolff the Vietnam veteran who wrote In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War, an account of his stint there, and who has used his war experiences elsewhere in his fiction, is a Vietnam writer in the same way that Michael Herr and Tim O'Brien are.

Agreeing with this, Wolff points out that while Herr's Despatches is "a great book, the best book about Vietnam", there is also more to Herr than that book. Such a comment is typical of Wolff. If something is said that strikes him as not quite correct, he steps in, firmly and politely, to set the record straight. As he does when I refer to Old School as his first novel.

"That's not right," he says. "I did write and publish a novel in the early 1970s. It wasn't any good and I have never included it in any list of published works - but I did write it."

Still, when a writer has made the short story so very much his own, why write a novel? Particularly as the novel somehow appears a lesser form than the short story. Wolff briefly considers this - much of his critical work has focused on the short story and he is one of the judges for the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing award for short stories.

"I write short stories, I love them," he says. "The appeal of the story is that perfection can be achieved - look at 'The Dead' or 'The Things They Carried' - and I'm not sure that can be said of the novel. But then there have been novels like Heart of Darkness; So Long, See You Tomorrow; The Great Gatsby."

As well as genius, that trio of novels has brevity in common. Then Wolff moves on to the longer novel and refers to "the baggy business". If most novels share a common flaw, it is an excess of information.

"Too much information - the writer does not trust the reader's intelligence to figure it out," he says.

As for Old School: "I loved writing this book. The original version was twice the length. I don't want to restrict myself to one form. I'm going to write another novel, I have a story to tell that requires the length of a novel."

With its emphasis on two often overlooked elements of US life, snobbery and class, Wolff says Old School is partly a gesture towards his English teachers. But its true essence is familiar Wolff territory, the world of the outsider and the consequences of dissembling. His secretive, calculating narrator is a scholarship boy who has invented a more attractive version of his family life and also concealed his father's Jewishness. The old school of the title apes an English style. Wolff, who was born in Alabama but grew up "all over the place" and sees himself as a westerner, has always been alert to that other world called the east.

Traditional athletic competitiveness in the Ivy League academy of Old School has been transferred from the playing-fields to the writing desk. Most of the boys are engaged in a literary war offering regular skirmishes in the form ofa private audience with a visiting writer.

Three writers are featured: a wickedly knowing Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Hemingway. Contained within the narrative is a great short story in which the narrator steals a previously published story and passes it off as his own, because he sees it as his life. There is also a virtuoso exposé of Rand as a tyrant. Wolff admits to having, like his narrator, devoured The Fountainhead as a boy, yet stresses "this novel is not a memoir".

Wolff's peripatetic early years, so brilliantly chronicled in his memoir, This Boy's Life, cost him that all-important sense of a particular place.

"Instead of that particular place, like my own Yoknapatawpha, I have a sense of the vastness of America. I guess that's why people always tell me there's a lot of cars in my work."

While the sheer danger of a writer such as Rand - "and she was very, very influential" - is chillingly underlined in the narrative, it is interesting to see how all roads still lead back to Hemingway, easy to parody, impossible to forget.

"He was, is, a very great writer. "You have to look to the early stories, the early novels, and ignore the bluster of the life."

Shrewd and fair - typical Wolff. He offers tough comforts, hard truths, as in his fiction. He has always watched, always listened. These habits didn't make him a writer.

"I think I always was one, that's why I was looking at everything," he says. "I already knew what I wanted to do.

Old School, by Tobias Wolff, is published by Bloomsbury (£12.99)