KEY POINTS:
While his co-workers at the Washington Post investigated Watergate in 1972, Tobias Wolff was a negligent obituary writer.
A colleague, aware the cub reporter wasn't following protocol, phoned in a fake death notice.
Wolff was saved from exposure only because another journalist warned him about the
ruse. From his undistinguished stint as a journalist came the story Mortals, about a man craving recognition who calls in an obit for himself and furthers the deception by complaining when it is printed.
This bleakly comic tale is included in Our Story Begins, a new omnibus volume of Wolff's stories, which combines selections from his three previous collections with 10 new pieces.
Mainstream success arrived for Wolff in 1989 with the memoir of his troubled youth, This Boy's Life, furthered by the 1993 film adaptation in which he was played by Leonardo DiCaprio.
Until then, he was best known for his role in the American renaissance of the short story. Along with Richard Ford and Raymond Carver, he was tagged as a pioneer of "dirty realism", denoting the new orthodoxy of sombre and minimalist fiction about blue-collar life.
Wolff dismisses the term as "utterly meaningless". His stories often explore the lies people tell to reinvent themselves and colour their underwhelming lives. Wolff himself owes a lot to bluffing.
As a delinquent 14-year-old in the backwater town of Chinook, Washington, he won a scholarship to study at an elite east coast preparatory academy, the Hill School, by forging straight-A grades on blank report cards and fabricating testimonials on school letterhead.
The boy's talent for dissembling seemed destined to land him in prison, where his father, an alcoholic and conman, did time for passing bad cheques. Instead, Wolff made a career out of telling truth through fiction. His stories build towards old-fashioned epiphanies in spare and unsentimental prose.
As the title Our Story Begins suggests, they respect traditional form, with clear beginnings, middles and ends. Yet he feels indebted to the numerous postmodern stories he wrote, though never published, in the 1970s.
"It taught me a great deal about the construction of stories - to look upon the story form as a malleable, constructed thing rather than taking it as a received and sacred charge," Wolff, 63, reflects by phone from California, where he teaches writing at Stanford.
Another important literary influence was his brother Geoffrey, also a writer and older by seven years. Their parents divorced when Tobias was 5: he moved with his mother to the west coast, while Geoffrey lived with their father on the east. Before the brothers were reunited, when Tobias was 15, they lost touch for six years. But the siblings independently became aspiring writers.
The brothers' shared literary leanings may have owed less to uncanny coincidence than heredity; their father Arthur was an inveterate teller of fictions - a scam artist as charismatic as he was duplicitous. Not until he was 19 did Wolff, now a practising Catholic, learn that his father was of Jewish extraction rather than the Episcopalian he claimed to be.
Geoffrey recounted his life with their father in The Duke of Deception, published in 1980. A decade later, Tobias wrote about his upbringing with their hard-up but endlessly optimistic mother Rosemary in This Boy's Life. Her second husband was no improvement on Arthur; Dwight, a mechanic, relished humiliating his stepson and terrifying him on drunken car rides.
Before heading to "The Hill", as it was known, Wolff visited his father and brother. Arthur, who suggested the family reunion, had a nervous breakdown two weeks after Tobias' arrival and spent most of the summer in a sanatorium.
Still, Wolff warmed to him. "There was something very dear and vulnerable about my father." Wolff felt less forgiving after the first of his three children was born. "When I realised what it was to have a child, it became unimaginable to me that someone could just walk away from them."
After leaving The Hill, he spent four years in the army, including a year's stint in Vietnam. "It seemed almost inevitable for me to join up. All the men I knew when I was growing up had served." It was two decades before he began work on the memoir of his Vietnam days, In Pharaoh's Army, published in 1994, which was the time necessary "to find a form for those memories and see myself in them from a distance". If he writes a third memoir, he says, it will be a recollection of the literary life in America. Asked what remains in him of the scamp from This Boy's Life, Wolff mentions "the longing for home, for family, and that tendency towards mythologising". But, he adds: "I don't self-mythologise any more: I'm just too tired, too old." It's safe to say the fibber who improvised his own reference letters will not be writing his own obituary.
- Our Story Begins (Bloomsbury $59.99)
