Colm Tóibín Reads Tobias Wolff

Deborah Treisman (0:08)

This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from The New Yorker Magazine. I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

Each month, we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss. This month, we're going to hear Awaiting Orders by Tobias Wolff, which appeared in The New Yorker in July of 2005

Colm Tóibín (0:28)

Moritz had spent 20 of his 39 years in the army. He was not one of those who claimed to love it, but he belonged to it as to a tribe, bound to those around him by lines of unrefusable obligation, love being finally beside the point.

Deborah Treisman (0:47)

The story was chosen by Colm Tóibín, a winner of the International Dublin Literary Award, whose books of fiction include the novels The Master and Long Island, and the story collection, The News from Dublin, which was published earlier this year. Hi Colm.

Colm Tóibín (1:02)

Hi Deborah.

Deborah Treisman (1:04)

So the last couple of times that you were on the fiction podcast, you chose stories by Sylvia Townsend-Warner and Mary Lavin. What made you go for Tobias Wolff this time?

Colm Tóibín (1:15)

Maybe it's the same thing, the idea that something very plain, something that doesn't have gorgeous writing in it or have any sort of obvious efforts towards transcendence, that seems rooted in the daily, becomes oddly luminous in one way, and in another way with the characters becomes much more complex than you thought it would be. In other words, that simple characters ostensibly begin to have more than one characteristic and then become really quite mysterious.

Deborah Treisman (1:49)

It's difficult to write characters with more than one characteristic, isn't it?

Colm Tóibín (1:53)

It seems to me the essential element really, that you have to say to yourself, is this character merely gruff?

Is he merely careful? Is he merely good mannered? Is he merely dutiful? And if he's merely those things, then I think as in this story, you have to then start working at making him more complex, at giving him ambiguities, things that are opposite to each other, so that you're never quite sure where he's coming from. And I think that's part of the joy of this story, is the way in which Morse presents himself as a very complex figure indeed.

Deborah Treisman (2:29)

Yeah. And what did you first read the story?

Colm Tóibín (2:32)

I read the story when it came out in a book called Our Story Begins, which is the New and Selected Stories, and it was one of the stories towards the end of that. And I read that book when it came out.

Deborah Treisman (2:46)

And were you a longtime fan of Tobias Wolff?

Colm Tóibín (2:49)

Yeah. You know, the two memoirs, I think, had an enormous impact on people of my age. First one is This Boy's Life and then In Pharaoh's Army.

There's a sort of clarity in the writing that doesn't strive in any obvious way towards transcendence or towards anything, you know, especially wise or beautiful, but actually manages to do that almost without trying. And he could do that also in the stories. And there's a novel of his which is called Old School, which I read more or less in a sitting. And there is also in that that he can create a scene in a paragraph.

And when you look at the paragraph to see how did this happen in this paragraph, it's not obvious, but it is that every, I suppose, image is hard won and worked through. There's an image towards the end of this story where he's talking about rain. And just watch how he describes how the rain on the asphalt and also the rain hitting hard on somebody's face, who seems to turn her face towards the rain. It's pretty good stuff.

Deborah Treisman (3:57)

It's probably helpful for listeners to know that the story was written during the days of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, you know, when the Department of Defense policy was that you couldn't discriminate against gay people in the Army, but so long as they didn't identify themselves as gay.

But if they were openly gay, they were barred from service. So that is a backdrop for the story. Do you think there's anything else that listeners should know about it before we start?

Colm Tóibín (4:24)

Yeah, they should know that Don't Ask, Don't Tell was an absolute gift to writers. It's that funny moment from gay sex being unmentionable and unmentioned in the Army, and the moment of full disclosure. So in that funny interregnum, in that strange time, someone could be both ready for a relationship or even having a relationship, but that relationship would be kept secret. Whereas a decade earlier, the relationship would not have been possible, and a decade later, it would all be easier. So that decade of Don't Ask, Don't Tell was an extraordinary gift to writers.