A Passion for Writing

Geoffrey Wolff is the director of UC Irvine’s graduate writing program. He is the author of six novels, a biography of poet and publisher Harry Crosby and a memoir of his father, “The Duke of Deception.” Wolff, 62, is completing a biography of the writer John O’Hara. His wife, Priscilla, is academic dean at the Curtis School in Los Angeles.

Q: We had a report in the paper that only one in four American students can write well enough for success. What does that mean for the future of our society?

A: In my experience, there is not a crisis in literacy. The people I’ve encountered, undergrads here for example, where as you know 60% have learned English as a second language, I find them ill-read but entirely capable of reading, understanding, responding to work. They learn very quickly. The students I’m teaching now are certainly as good as the students I was teaching in 1961 and ’62.

I don’t think it’s right to say in 1999 that the world is going to hell in a handcart and nobody can read, nobody will ever want to read, we are losing a love of reading. People have been saying that since the mid-’60s. The novel is dead. The short story is dead. History is dead. One thing after another has been declared dead and mysteriously resurrected.

I’m extremely distrustful of the utter gloom-and-doomers. I can tell you that it’s a better thing to be a writer in 1999 than it was in 1969. The audience is bigger, the audience is smarter, the audience is more willing to spend money on books.

People are very stubborn about wanting to read. A book is an escape from the prison of the self and an escape from the here and now, which is a big deal.

*

Q: In “The Duke of Deception,” you talk about your father’s love of literature as a gift to you. Can you talk about how important it is for kids to see their parents enjoying reading?

A: For me, it was that my father sang poems to me in the car when we’d drive. Very inappropriate songs and limericks and ballads, and he would take such joy in this, and usually the things that he took joy in were unexpected juxtapositions of language.

I began to hear the rhythms of these things. I began to associate the hearing of this with pleasure.

What it did to my moral structure, God is the judge. But the fact of the matter is no matter what the poetry was, it wouldn’t much matter. It’s the sense that language had the standing of song and it gave pleasure to hear it, it gave pleasure to say it and it began to occur to me it might give pleasure to make it.

*

Q: Writers are not only competing with TV, but with computer games and the Internet. How do you encourage children to read and write while they have all these distractions?

A: TV is an enemy. One of the things I’ve often wondered and talked about to my brother, who’s also a writer, is that, because at those early ages we were both sort of shuttled from town to town, school to school, so we were always lonely, so the library was a solace.

If we had grown up with television sets, I don’t know what we would have done. I notice plenty of kids today with books. They read books walking down the street. So it can be encouraged as an addictive virtue.

The computer is far more complicated in my experience than that. For example, a lot of the kids at the Curtis School write because it’s fun to write on a computer. It’s as intimate as handwriting. I think, for all the talk about computer technology and teaching, this is kind of an unknown quantity, but I don’t regard computers or their programs with the same hostility that I regard television, which I regard as an alternate way of escaping.

*

Q: How important is it for parents to read to a child?

A: Extremely important. The appetite for story that is unaccompanied by explosions, burning buildings and machine gun fire is extremely important, the sense there is a kind of drama in the quiet.

*

Q: As a kid you read the Hardy Boys, as did so many of us. What should a kid read today or does it matter?

A: I don’t think it matters. I think anything that offers a glimpse of a world that is not immediately here and now. I don’t care if kids want to imagine themselves as rap stars, as long as they imagine themselves in sort of alternate realities with alternate outcomes.

There will then be a kind of sense in reading, as there should be, as a transgression of some kind. I think it’s not without importance that so many people remember the experience of reading with the experience of reading illicitly under the covers with a flashlight.

A writer I was very fond of, Stanley Elkin, who’s dead now, said that writing was a revenge against bullies. In a way reading is too. It’s a way of undoing lines of authority, of speaking as an equal to the person who’s writing to you or being spoken to as an equal, actually being courted by a person who’s writing to you. So I don’t care what it is. I’d prefer it to be narrative of some kind, to have a shaped story, but what it is doesn’t matter as far as I’m concerned.

*

Q: When should kids start reading the classics?

A: It can be argued there are books that can be ruined for people if they’re imposed too early. I think “Moby Dick” is one. I think “Moby Dick” is probably a book best read when you’re at least in your mid-20s. It’s no book for teenagers to appreciate. But that’s a risk I’m willing to run.

Having books spoiled by premature reading is not going to destroy the habit of reading. For example, I think probably it’s better if you’re in the ninth grade to read “Romeo and Juliet” or to read “Julius Caesar” than to read “Richard III” or to read “King Lear.” Sure, there are things that are better for you at certain ages than they are at others. I just want them to read something.

*

Q: How do you spot young writers?

A: Gift, in a way, is the least interesting part of good writing. What I look for is passion. Obsession of some kind and an instinct for surprise, which is at the heart of the reading experience.

*

Q: Is there any age when it’s reasonable for a kid to start thinking about becoming a writer?

A: That’s an excellent question. The culture has changed quite considerably. I’ll make reference to the second-grade newspaper [at the Curtis School]. There was a young girl who wrote about taking a field trip. She gave a straightforward expository account of her field trip--they went on a bus; they saw animals; they ate a picnic lunch; and they got on the very same bus they had got on to go home.

It was all extremely efficiently told. It was about three paragraphs. It comes to the end and says, “I like anything that gets me away from my work on a long novel.”

Nobody knows what she’s talking about. Somehow she has it in her head that somewhere she’s writing a long novel. She thinks of herself as a writer so casually in the second grade that it’s something she takes for granted.

It blew me away. It’s great. In my day, nobody thought of themselves as writers until they’d had something published. It was just a different culture.

But I don’t think it’s particularly productive for a young person to think of himself or herself as a writer so much as it is to think of yourself as someone who writes.

In other words, to emphasize process over outcome. The outcome is unknowable. One of the cruelest things to do is to encourage someone to believe that if they apply themselves to what they’re doing they will be rewarded by the enthusiasm of other people because that’s not necessarily true.

*

Q: What can teachers do to encourage kids to write?

A: Sharing work in class is great. Having somebody read a story or an account. Any collaborative effort like that is terrific. How do you think this story could be made better?

They’ll do anything. They don’t know enough to say they can’t do it. I’m not an expert on this, but there’s a window, say from second grade to sixth grade. Before kids know how hard the thing they’re doing is, before they’re made to understand it’s a huge labor to learn how to do it well, you have a free pass. You can get kids to write poems, you can get kids to write plays, you can get kids to write movie scripts, you can get kids to do all kinds of things until they realize that they are laughably unintimidated about what they’re doing. . . .

Show joy in reading and language when you’re talking to kids, and the other thing is let them go. Give them a frame. There always has to be a frame, like addressing a letter to first-graders about what second grade is like. It’s something they can control. Something that can tap into their judgment and their sense of audience, that they are talking to somebody. It’s very important to think you are talking to somebody.

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LIVING

Sports stories and tales of teen angst are giving way to tougher issues like civil rights and racism. E6