THE SUNDAY PROFILE : Staying Power : A childhood on the run could have been damaging. But for writer and teacher Geoffrey Wolff, it fired his imagination.

His father was a flamboyant con man: He was expelled from college yet claimed to be a graduate of Yale and the Sorbonne. He was a writer of bogus resumes, a passer of bad checks, a defrauder of innkeepers, a car thief.

Growing up, Geoffrey Wolff spent little time in one place. Depending on the state of his father’s fortunes, home was anything from a fleabag boardinghouse to a lakeside estate.

“I think I figured out once that I went to 10 schools in the first 12 years. We were always leaving town a rope’s length ahead of the posse,” says Wolff, 58, the new director of the graduate fiction program at UC Irvine.

Wolff, who told the tale of his con-man father in his best-selling 1979 memoir, “The Duke of Deception,” continued to avoid planting roots during his first two decades as a writer and teacher, a time in which Turkey, Italy, Spain, France, Washington, D.C., and Warren, Vt., were variously called home.

Finally, in 1980, Wolff and his wife, Priscilla, then the parents of two young sons, settled down in Jamestown, R.I. Hired as writer in residence at Brandeis University, Wolff commuted to the campus in a Boston suburb to teach an undergraduate writing workshop and literature courses. Priscilla became a dean and head of the English department at a private school in nearby Providence.

Moving to a three-story 19th-century house on a three-acre plot thick with specimen trees, the Wolffs dug in, falling into sync with the “rhythms” of their bay-side surroundings--the rhythms of his boat, the rhythms of her garden. In time, they grew content to not go anywhere and were, as Wolff says, “just sort of gradually shutting down possibilities.”

So why give it all up for UCI?

“I wanted a jolt in my life, as did my wife,” he says. “Obviously, this was done completely in tandem. We’d lived in one place for 15 years and loved it. But one year was slipping into the next without our really noticing it. That’s always a danger.”

Wolff recalls the reaction of their now-grown sons when he and his wife told them they were thinking of pulling up stakes to head West.

“To our astonishment, they said, ‘Go! Do it!’ So they also noticed we needed 12 volts right here,” says Wolff as he thumps his fist against his chest.

The couple are renting a house in Laguna Beach, about four blocks up the hill from Woods Cove.

“We’re extremely happy there,” Wolff says during an interview at UCI. He arrived just before the start of the fall quarter, settling into a small office in the humanities office building. (Priscilla, who was hired to teach composition, is just two doors down the hall.) He’s stocked the bookshelves and hung personal pictures next to his desk--one of himself and friends on a 1962 skiing trip to St. Anton, Austria; a shot of Blackwing, his beloved 30-foot sailboat; and photos of his sons--28-year-old Nicholas, a marine biologist, and 25-year-old Justin, a doctorate candidate in art history at Princeton.

Wolff, himself a 1961 graduate, summa cum laude, of Princeton, brings to his new job a diverse career as a writer and teacher.

As a writer over the last 30 years, he has worked as literary critic or books editor for the Washington Post, Newsweek, New Times, Esquire and New England Monthly. He also has written six novels and four nonfiction books, including an acclaimed 1976 biography of Harry Crosby, a 1920s expatriate poet and publisher who committed suicide. Wolff’s most recent novel, “The Age of Consent,” was published by Knopf in February 1995, and he is now working on a biography of John O’Hara, the novelist and prolific New Yorker short-story writer.

As a teacher, the onetime Fulbright scholar in English literature at Cambridge University has also had stints at Princeton, Columbia, Boston and Brown universities.

Press clippings stashed away over the years are a Wolffian primer:

There’s a Publishers Weekly interview shortly after the publication of “The Duke of Deception” (a 1980 Pulitzer Prize runner-up for biography) in which he says his nomadic childhood has given him a “fanatical, insane preoccupation with discharging debts” and a desire to be honest with his own children (in reinventing his past, Wolff’s father even denied being a Jew).

There’s a 1990 Rhode Island Monthly profile that asserts that the robust, squash-playing Wolff “is not a quitter”--”not as a boy when a severe stammer earned him the ridicule of classmates . . . not as a middle-aged vacationer gasping for life on a Caribbean beach, the victim of heart failure . . . and never, never as a writer.”

And there’s a 1991 article in the Sunday Times of London magazine about Wolff and his younger brother, writer Tobias Wolff, who tapped his own childhood memories in his autobiographical “This Boy’s Life,” which won a Times Book Award in 1989 and became a 1993 movie starring Robert De Niro.

As children, the brothers were separated for 10 years. After their parents’ split when Geoffrey Wolff was 12, he went to live with their father in Seattle while 5-year-old Tobias stayed in Florida with their mother. Today, the brothers talk on the phone at least three times a week and Geoffrey says he is closer to Tobias, who teaches at Syracuse University, than anybody “except for my sons and my wife.”

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Wolff began writing “The Duke of Deception” five years after his twice-married, thrice-imprisoned father died in 1970 of congested arteries at age 62. His body was found two weeks after his death in a dank room strewn with empty liquor bottles and empty barbiturate pillboxes. Although they had been in touch periodically, Geoffrey hadn’t seen his father since the elder Wolff went to prison for auto theft in 1961.

As a kid, however, Wolff recalls being “absolutely crazy” about his old man.

“I worshiped him. I was in awe of him, particularly, I think it’s fair to say, in awe of him for who he was, and in awe of him for whom he claimed to be,” Wolff says. “When I learned he was not who he claimed he was I went through a period of hating him. As I grew older it became increasingly complicated--the two things became mixed--so I came finally to conclude, as I say in the book, ‘he was a bad man but a good father.’ ”

Wolff wrote “The Duke of Deception” so his sons would know who their grandfather was. “One of the things I’m proudest of,” he says, “is my sons think of him, improbably enough, with affection. They wish they had known him.”

It was during his vagabond childhood that Wolff got his first taste of the literary life.

He became an avid reader--of “The Hardy Boys” series and the other “stuff kids read”--”partly because we were on the lam all the time and I’d come into a new town and the one thing I knew how to do was find a library. One library tends to be a lot like the others, and it was a sense of connection and continuity.

“Moreover, since my life was pretty chaotic when I was a kid, it was a way to escape from it. Books were the key to the cell, and I got out of my life that way.”

But it wasn’t until he had read “a critical mass” of books--sometime around age 16, he says, “that I started hearing the ‘music.’ ”

“I’d hear that the music was different from writer to writer and became interested in that. I started reading what [friend and writer] Richard Ford calls the three kings: Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner. By college it was Joyce, and in the meantime I was getting an education, so that habit never stopped.”

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Wolff had begun writing at 13. Having devoured every one of “The Hardy Boys” adventures, he recalls, “I became so bereft I decided to write one myself.” By the time he entered Choate, a Connecticut prep school, he had embarked on “very pretentious short stories--bad Fitzgerald imitations, bad Hemingway imitations, then in college bad Faulkner imitations.”

Midway through Princeton, Wolff took a year off, during which he wrote “a dreary, ghastly novel” about “an expatriate boy as unlike me as I could possibly imagine someone to be, who was exactly what I wished I was and exactly what I’m glad now I’m not.”

Wolff never tried to sell the novel. His advisor at Princeton “took care of that for me,” he says. “Actually, he advised me to put it in my desk drawer. And I said, ‘Save it?’ He said, ‘No, I’d lock the desk drawer, throw away the key.’ Keys can be found. He said, ‘I’d set fire to the desk.’ ”

Although he abandoned that first novel, Wolff never contemplated abandoning writing.

The same advisor who called his novel hideous did so without extinguishing the young writer’s creative fire.

“The fact that it wasn’t any good was of no interest to him at all,” Wolff says.

Of more importance, Wolff says, was the remarkable fact that a 19-year-old kid had written a first novel--that bad first novels are simply “the way of things” and that if Wolff kept working he’d get better.

“He didn’t make me ashamed of it,” Wolff says. “For that I will thank him forever, and that’s the quality that I want to bring to my enterprises with my students.”