The Boston Phoenix

September 6, 1990

Life after Providence
A conversation with Geoffrey Wolff

By BILL RODRIGUEZ 

Everybody knows that artists are supposed to suffer. It's part of the job description, provides credentials. But Geoffrey Wolff, man of letters, sure is glad he won't have to face the happy-talk circuit this time around on his book tour. Back on a 1969 interview to promote The Duke of Deception, a memoir focused on his scoundrel father, he found himself following some trained chickens on an L.A. TV show. Wolff was flustered at encountering a rooster that seemed nearly his size, but that was handy transition for the grilling that began: "Well, you must be ashamed of yourself for abandoning your father!"

Wolff takes such incidents with good humor, relating how his Pavlovian response to that interviewer was to, as requested, start reciting a 30-second precis of his book before he stopped short and protested, "No, I don't think so -- not here, not now, not with the chickens!"

Shudder. Never again. Uh, hopefully. There's the Today show on September 24, but mostly the cross-country tour for his latest novel will require public readings arranged by bookstores. Boston's will be at Trinity Church, Copley Square, on October 3. But don't worry, his bona fides will be maintained by the grueling pace.

A dozen nights in a row for one stretch -- and anxiety over his occasionally stuttering under stress. Ah, the life of a littérateur is more than buttered scones and effulgent praise.

"The thing is now completely out of my control. Obviously, writing a book is 100 percent about controlling things, controlling the world that I invent," Wolff observed. "Then suddenly -- wham! It's other people choosing everything."

From typeface to book jacket. And more. In its July issue, Esquire published the first two chapters of The Final Club (to be released September 17) and made the odd decision to illustrate them with photos. "J. Crew models," to Wolff's eye. Wanting the main character to be judged only by his thoughts and actions, Wolff had described him merely as tall.

He spoke recently in the living room and of his Jamestown house, wearing a blue polo shirt, worn blue espadrilles and his usual informal manner. Wolff, age 52, is the author of Black Sun, the biography of '20s hellion-cum-publisher Harry Crosby, and four other novels, including Providence (1986), a brisk plunge into local criminal waters. His Medic Alert bracelet is a reminder of one of the reasons he wrote this latest novel. He had been working on a biography of Herman Melville when massive heart failure, and a prospective operation to replace an aortic valve reduced to a pinhole, shook up his priorities.

"If I started a novel about the time I was being operated on, then I couldn't croak, because then the thing wouldn't be finished!" he recalled.

Wolff already had the idea for a short story that looked promising. It was about a father driving along with a son who was depressed for some reason, when he strikes and kills a dog.

"I always do this. All my novel start as short stories, all my books start as short pieces," Wolff said, and went on to detail his creative process. "I want to imply who people are, and suddenly I want to tell who they are, so they grow and grow and grow. In fact, I've never written a short story, not since school. I always mean to and never do."

His best-selling The Duke of Deception began as a letter to his young sons, not intended to be published, in case they later asked about their late grandfather. The book is a powerful memoir, structured for maximum narrative impact. It is as self-revealing as it is clarifying about his father, a reprobate who was capable of bluffing his way into getting, and keeping, a job as an aviation engineer. The man also was capable of racking up bills at his son's haberdashers at Princeton, causing Geoffrey to drop out for a year to pay them off. Despite the colorful, if rattling, upbringing, Wolff lived to age 27 convinced that there was nothing of sufficient interest within himself to coax out as fiction. This from a Fulbright and Ivy League scholar who had long aspired to be a man of letters. Then, in 1969, he published Bad Debts, about a fictional rogue of a father, written in a white heat on three months leave from the Washington Post, where he was book critic.

The Final Club treats two generations at Princeton. Wolff discussed his undergraduate experiences briefly in The Duke and twice in unsuccessful, never published essays after the 10th and 20th reunion is of his Class of '60. The latter described a group of friends who would hold posh dinners and garrulous conversations about once a month upstairs at the elegant Ivy Club on campus.

"They didn't work out at all, at all. I didn't know where to situate myself. In one of the versions I tried to have myself as a character in the third person," Wolff explained. "I couldn't fix what I thought about it all, also how I saw myself in it: whether I was a wiseguy or what kind of ironies I felt toward it, or any irony."

The short story idea about the father and son helped break his psychological logjam as he thought about what led the two characters -- one largely formed at Princeton, one eventually to be -- to that moment. "I described it to strangers as a novel of manners, but I described it to very good friends as a story of a young man's moral education," Wolff said. "That's what I was really interested in."

That interest is a broad one.

"I've always been interested in the lessons that Western culture teaches its children about discrimination, of all kinds," he said. "This is good, this is better -- that kind of discrimination."

Wolff deplores what he sees as a key national characteristic of ours, individually and collectively needing to be number one. "There's also a sense that in being the best, let's bury in the opposition, too. I find this so childish and so hurtful to the culture at-large."

This oh-so-American excess can get ludicrous. "We have this as a God-given right, to triumph, not just to endure but to prevail. But to prevail over Dartmouth, for God's sake?" he asked with a laugh.

The Final Club was the most extensively revised of Wolff's seven books. The opening chapter, a cross-country train ride by the main character Nathaniel Clay, heading to college, wasn't even conceived of until the sixth draft. Since young Nathaniel is by no means the young Wolff -- a decidedly harder case than the callow naif -- getting the tone of voice right was tough.

"If The Duke of Deception had an emotion that I ascribed to myself and I'd read it on the page and say, 'That's not right,' the whole chapter would fall apart and would feel terribly depressing, like a great lie will," he said. "Here it was more of a tonal atmosphere: I'd know what was wrong with it, but I couldn't quite put my finger on what exactly it was. So it was a labor of love, but it was it a lot of labor this time."

Wolff's next labor will be another novel -- a spin-off of the latest, about the son after Princeton -- before he gets back to the Melville bio. Wolff is quite the adept essayist. Whether writing about his heart failure or his two sons or his brother Tobias, the ace short story writer, his essays are killers. Whimsical, insightful but not self-absorbed, fueled by ardent language. A collection of 17 will come out next September. But Wolff says he's heard himself out by now, and so he wants to shut up about first person singular, stick to fiction and biography.

"My vice is an instinct for irony and self-deprecation. It's a reflex," he remarked about his essay writing as though making a confession. "My first response when I'm trying to figure out how things were is to subvert how things were, is to create a pretty picture and then dismantle it. The hard work for me is to restore to it those things in it that were decent, pleasurable. It's hard to get it right."

Sure enough. But from past evidence, the harder it gets for Geoffrey Wolff, the righter he gets it.