[In the following interview, Wolff discusses the craft behind writing his two memoirs, This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War.]

The literary form of choice for Tobias Wolff is the short story, and by all accounts he has mastered it admirably. His work has been widely praised and duly recognized with honors including the O. Henry Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Rea Award. This fall, he has also edited The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories (Vintage) and guest edited The Best American Short Stories 1994 (Houghton Mifflin).

But it is with two volumes of memoirs, This Boy's Life (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988) and his new In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War, to be released later this month by Knopf (Forecasts, Aug. 29), that Wolff is reaching what is undoubtedly a much wider audience. His first memoir became the basis of a 1993 coming-of-age movie of the same name starring Ellen Barkin and Robert De Niro, while the second enjoys the unusual distinction of being chosen as a finalist for the National Book Award two weeks before its official publication. (The winner will be announced in New York on November 19.)

INWARD EXCITEMENT

The experiences recalled by In Pharaoh's Army barely take the author through the age of 22, leaving the 27 succeeding years of his life largely unexamined. “That may be so, but this is going to be my last memoir anyway,” Wolff insists good-naturedly to PW in his comfortable house not far from the campus of Syracuse University, where he has taught literature and writing since 1980.

He sits at ease in his third-floor study, a converted attic that has been sound-proofed and paneled in pine. The room is spacious and spare. The walls are mostly bare, the exception being a framed poster from the film of This Boy's Life autographed by the principals. Two windows overlook a quiet residential neighborhood, but since his desk faces a corner wall, they provide no distraction while he is working. He and his wife, Catherine, a clinical social worker, have three children: Michael, 15, Patrick, 14, and Mary Elizabeth, 5.

Because a writer's life is sedentary, the former Army officer who once took pride in his “command presence” keeps fit and lean by working out on an exercise machine that dominates the middle of the floor, and by taking a daily swim in the university pool. “These have been inwardly exciting times for me, probably the most meaningful of my life,” he notes. “But as you can see, they are quiet, and they don't lend themselves to the kind of narrative treatment that [my] earlier years do.”

THE ART OF FACT

Central to Wolff's work ethic is his insistence that his memoirs demand just as much artistry as his fiction and just as much effort to develop. “I did a lot of rewriting on this book, and that is because I intended it as a literary work,” he says pointedly.

In Pharaoh's Army picks up the trail of young Wolff's journey toward manhood in 1965, when he is 18 and at loose ends after being asked to leave prep school for his failing grades; he is fearful that he will face harm from a malicious shipmate if he remains aboard a Coast and Geodetic Survey ship about to sail for the Azores. Rosemary, the peripatetic mother Wolff profiled so splendidly in This Boy's Life, now receives only passing attention—living in Washington, D.C., she offers no resistance when her son announces his intention to join the Army.

Arthur Samuels Wolff, meanwhile, the absentee father of the earlier book—and the shadowy “duke” in older brother Geoffrey Wolff's 1979 memoir, The Duke of Deception—reappears more sharply focused. He enters the story at crucial times, just before Tobias goes off on a combat tour to Vietnam in 1967 and after he returns in 1968, when the two men achieve a degree of rapprochement.

A quintessential con man who spent time in jail for various fraudulent activities, such as passing bad checks, “Duke” Wolff died in 1970. In an odd way, he had inspired his son's decision to join the Army. “I knew I wanted to be a different kind of man, and I had made a more or less conscious attempt to separate myself from him,” Wolff says. “But at the end of his life we accepted each other in a way that we never really had before.”

HARDY AND CAPABLE

At the outset of In Pharaoh's Army, the Tobias Wolff we encounter is a soldier eager to take part in the defining event of his generation. “One of my pleasures was to learn I was hardy and capable,” he writes, qualities that earn him an appointment to Officer Candidate School. Trained as a paratrooper, he volunteers for Special Forces and learns to speak Vietnamese. But once “in country,” he becomes an adviser to a Vietnamese battalion in the Mekong Delta, spending his tour on the fringes of combat. Readers in search of riveting battle scenes will have to look elsewhere; of far greater moment is the maturation of Tobias Wolff. The immature lieutenant who arrives in the war zone returns home as a man ready to spend four years at Oxford University (1968-1972) and to begin his life as a writer.

“What the two memoirs show in different ways is someone who's unformed and trying to find a place in the world,” Wolff observes. In his next breath, he again stresses his conviction that In Pharaoh's Army is not a sequel to This Boy's Life.

“I'm a really different person in the new book. I see it as a story about a young man going off to war, and the kind of moral transformations that take place.” Because Wolff never intended to write an encyclopedic account of his military service, he was not hindered by the fact that he never kept a journal. “I'm glad I didn't take notes, because what is essential in that experience is exactly what would have stayed with me. I remembered what I needed to remember.”

EDUCATING TOBY

As a youngster who had been on the move from state to state with his mother during the 1950s, Wolff began at an early age to believe he could one day become a writer. While a student at Concrete High School in Concrete, Wash., he often wrote papers and essays for other students and felt especially rewarded once when a classmate told him his material was so good he should think about doing it for a living.

His brother Geoffrey stayed with their father after their parents separated, but he encouraged his kid brother's aspirations during their periodic telephone conversations, and—later on, when they got to know each other better—by furnishing Tobias with books to read. In addition to The Duke of Deception, Geoffrey Wolff's work includes a biography of Harry Crosby, a collection of essays and three novels. Tobias dedicated In Pharaoh's Army to him, with the phrase, “For my brother, who gave me books.”

Once out of the Army, Wolff was more determined than ever to fulfill his dream of writing; he set aside two to three hours every day to write, even while enrolled as a full-time student at Oxford. When he returned to the United States, he worked at a variety of jobs, including a six-month stint as a cub reporter for the Washington Post. “I was a lousy reporter, and nobody tried to talk me out of leaving,” he says. “The best job I had at this time was waiting on tables in San Francisco. I wrote three novels, one of which, I am embarrassed now to say, was taken in England by Allen and Unwin.” He is unwilling to divulge the title of that book. “It does not represent my mature work and I don't want anybody to read it,” he explains. “Most people's juvenilia doesn't get published, but mine did. Blessedly it died, but it had the virtue, at least, of making me feel that somebody else in the world thought I was a writer.”

NOT JUST A WAITER

The sales of that book also served to buoy his spirits. “I wasn't just a waiter anymore, but a waiter who wrote books that somebody else might even publish.” During his San Francisco period, Wolff began taking graduate courses at Stanford University, and earned an M.A. in English in 1978. It was during this time as well that he became “captivated by stories.” He recalls, “I found stories better suited to my particular gifts at that point. I liked everything about them—the power, the directness, the unity of impression, the ability they have to conjure up a whole world in a few pages and then get something going indelibly in a reader's mind. The novel, on the other hand, implies a kind of stability, a steady fund of experience, a certain place in which one stays for a while. Because of the very nomadic and very fragmentary life I led as a child, perhaps, there was something in my own experience that lent itself to an appreciation of the story, which has a very momentary nature.”

Soon, his dedication began to be rewarded with acceptances by magazines. “The first story I sent out was called ‘Smokers,’ and it was bought by the Atlantic Monthly. That was in 1976; a few months later they took another story called ‘The Liar.’ Pretty soon I had stories in Vogue and TriQuarterly.” A 1981 collection of Wolff's stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, was followed in 1984 by The Barracks Thief, a 101-page novel that was inspired by his military experiences and won the PEN/Faulkner Award. Back in the World, a second collection of stories, was published in 1985. Wolff's current contract with Knopf is for two books, and he is working on a still-untitled collection of stories that he hopes will be ready sometime next year.

Having published five books with four different publishing houses (Ecco, Houghton Mifflin, Atlantic Monthly Press and now Knopf), Wolff has worked with his share of editors over the years. “I have been extremely fortunate in my editors. At Ecco, I had the benefit of Daniel Halpern's sharp eye, his ability to imagine a story in different ways. My next book was edited by Nan Talese at Houghton Mifflin. She was an enthusiastic reader, brimming with ideas and encouragement. This Boy's Life and In Pharoah's Army went through the hands of Gary Fisketjon. Gary is a remarkably painstaking, hard-working editor. When I get my manuscripts back from him, every sentence has some mark of his reaction. Nothing is demanded; everything is suggested.”

In addition, Wolff says that he and his brother Geoffrey exchange manuscripts when they are in their final stages. “We do a lot of line-by-line editing of each others's work, and it's totally honest. It's fairly ruthless, as a matter of fact, but we also let each other know what we've done right.” Wolff's agent of the last 14 years has been Amanda Urban. “Binky is a great friend and a tireless advocate for writers. Once I give a manuscript to her, I relax.”

If there is a thematic connection between Wolff's stories and his two volumes of memoirs, he believes it is his continuing interest in relationships and domestic life. “That sense of kinship is what makes stories important to us.” he writes in his introduction to The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories. “Family life has always been great theater, and always will be, like war.” Wolff says he hopes readers will identify a consistency of “tone, feeling and atmosphere” in his books and feel a “certain quality of moral intention” in them that is “characteristic and definitive.”

The writing, meanwhile, has its own agenda, and when a story is ready, it is ready. “I work every day, at least six hours a day,” he says. “Sometimes the pace is glacial. It takes me about three months to get a story to the point where I really like it. When I am working at the top of my form, I see things differently, and there's an excitement that comes when things become clear to me that were not so clear before. I can think of no other word for what happens than revelation.”