'Dear Stanford': Letter 19

A Collection of Letters in Support of Stanford's 23 Jones Lecturers

Each and every letter we have featured and will feature through this Substack is special. But today we have the honor of sharing a piece that George Saunders wrote about one of the greatest writers and teachers in American literature, Tobias Wolff. Because Toby taught many of the Jones Lecturers on the fiction side who were fired by Stanford, we wanted to publish this celebration of the influence Toby has had on George and so many others. It is the example of teachers like Tobias Wolff (who retired from Stanford years ago but is still a wonderful friend and supporter of us lecturers) that has inspired us to demand better from the current faculty. George also writes about the power of literature to move us, something we try to teach our students in the classes that will be extinguished by this incomprehensible decision.

George’s piece, titled “My Dear Friend and Yours,” originally appeared in Narrative Magazine. I, Austin Smith, heard George read this piece at an event called Narrative Night, where Toby himself was present. You can hear George read it too at this link: "My Dear Friend and Yours" - Narrative Magazine - my thanks to George Saunders for agreeing to my idea to run this piece, and to the founders and editors of Narrative Magazine, Tom Jenks and Carol Edgarian, for permission to publish it here.

Tobias Wolff has been, for Paula and me, a powerful force in our lives since we first met him—thirty-five years ago or so. So it’s a bit like: “Well, just talk for ten minutes about the role of oxygen in your life. Or Led Zeppelin.”

But I’ll give it a try.

Let me start with a basic question: Why do we even read fiction? Why should it be of value to read a story made up by someone else?

I’ve sometimes thought that what we’re really looking for in our writers is a sort of God surrogate. “Tell us how You see us,” we say, “so that we can know how to see ourselves. Give us a voice in which we can think about our fellow human beings, and a workable model of cause and effect that explains the crazy things they do.”

As we read the scale model of the universe that is a story, we ask: Is the model true? Does it account for good and evil correctly? But most important—because, in the end, we all die: Is there sufficient joy in the telling? A work of art is, or should be, ultimately, an act of consolation—a comforting arm around the shoulder on the way to the gallows, and a comforting word in the ear. And that word is not, “You’re not going to die,” or “You’re not afraid,” but, “You are going to die and are therefore afraid, and yet . . . look at how beautiful it is here, even still.”

If I was walking to the gallows, Tobias Wolff is the artistic friend I’d most want by my side.

He is, simply put, our great fiction master. He has been honored with many awards—the PEN/Faulkner, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the PEN/Malamud, the Story Prize, the Stone Award for Lifetime Achievement, the National Medal for the Arts, to name just a few—and is beloved by so many people all over the world (Zadie Smith, Owen Wilson, Bill Hader, and President Obama come to mind, off the top of my head). But he is also, it seems to me, in that very small category of writers who are admired not only artistically but morally—understood as a true master but also as a role model, a teacher in the largest sense, and—though I think he might cringe at this, a spiritual leader. He certainly is for me. “What would Toby do?” is a question that often appears in my mind at moments of duress. The stories are as good as they are because of the person he is; and the person he is, we feel, has been elevated by his immersion in the work; the art informed by a fundamental decency of spirit, the spirit enlarged continually by practice of the art.

Part of the reason we love him so much is because, reading his work, we feel that nothing has been excluded; no human attitude is unknown to him, or beneath his consideration. If it is human, he is for it. He is funny, acerbic, wry, lyrical. His virtue comes not from a frozen, static, fearful position but from his openness, to everything, just as he finds it. If it occurs in the world, he is okay with it, and his prose will find a way to accommodate and even celebrate it.

Toby sees us, he really sees us, but likes us anyway. And one of the ways we know he likes us is how funny—how seriously funny—he is when writing about us. And the essence of his humor is frankness.

Returning to the gallows for a moment. If, on the floor in front of us, in that long hallway, there appeared a banana peel—would Toby acknowledge it? Of course, because it’s there, and because it’s funny. “Watch out, pal,” I can almost hear him say, “you wouldn’t want to slip on that and break your neck.”

Whenever I’m talking to other writers, I find that all I have to do is bring up Toby’s stories, and suddenly the table comes alive with admiration and affection. Other writers can see the radical care he’s taken. His stories are subtle, precisely calibrated. They mean exactly, and in every detail. It’s crazy how many refracting surfaces are contained within them—have been put within them. I teach his stories to communicate to my students the extent to which a gonzo level of artistic control is actually a form of wildness—is not only possible but required—is all we really have, to break the reader’s heart.

When we read a Wolff story, then, we are instructed in the infinite responsiveness of the form—guided through a precisely curated organic system in which nothing was left to chance or, rather, no opportunity to make beauty was overlooked; and the function of this technical mastery is, paradoxically, to communicate profound mystery.

Many of the writers I loved when I was young have fallen away. Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Kerouac—they speak to me less urgently now, at sixty. Hemingway says, to me, across the ages: “Don’t allow yourself to be broken.” To which I feel like responding: “But what if I already am?” Kerouac says: “Keep moving, be free, celebrate yourself, dig everything, don’t get tied down in the mundane, man!” To which I say: “But I’ve found all these people to love, and sometimes caring for each other gets, you know, mundane, Jack!” But Toby’s work speaks to me more and more powerfully with every passing year. His stories are mature and kindhearted and wise; they are about the things that actually torment and delight us; they are not mission statements, or structures behind which the writer attempts to hide or be supreme—they are, to me, the prose equivalent of a look of wonder, exchanged between writer and reader.

For all their technical mastery, they are also simple, and beautiful, and fundamental. They are the first stories I recommend to people who aren’t short story readers but would like to be.

He is concerned with the question of decency—how should we live? And, more than any other writer I know, he scales the question correctly—understanding that good and evil enter our lives on the micro-level. You don’t often hear this referenced as a fictive virtue, but Toby makes good problems. Problems not easily solved and not solved without consequence—problems of the kind we ourselves have faced, and faced imperfectly.

As many writers fall away, Toby is left (along with Flannery O’Connor, Nathaniel West, Toni Morrison) among a small group of artists who see America for the wicked and ecstatic dream-state that it is; who describe vividly the extreme comedy and cruelty of the place, yet still believe that, even in this degraded time, the choices a person makes are meaningful—that salvation, in fact, depends on these choices.

A writer tells us what he believes by the virtues he models in his prose. In Toby’s prose, the prime virtue is clarity. The prose cuts like a knife. It has been worked and reworked for precision and the effect is that we believe completely in the fictive reality, because the precision of the language leaves no room for doubt. Listen to this, from “Hunters in the Snow,” and watch a tense, country living room appear by steps in your mind: “There was a woman sitting by the stove in the middle of the room. The stove was smoking badly. She looked up then down again at the child asleep in her lap. Her face was white and damp; strands of hair were pasted across her forehead.” Another principal virtue: radical efficiency. Toby has dwelt in the fictive reality so thoroughly, through his legendarily rigorous revision process, that the resulting action has been optimized—the obvious, the banal, and the habitual all having been stripped away, so that the story ascends into the realm of myth, where it belongs. (Anders, in “Bullet in the Brain,” is both a very specific and grumpy literary critic—and also is every one of us, knotted up late in life by some slight misstep along the way. Pete and Donald in “The Rich Brother” are not only two specific brothers, in a specific car, but any two people with even the slightest discrepancy in good fortune lying between them.)

One of the discouraging things about being an American right now is that, when we look up to where our leaders should be, we find mostly clowns. It makes us think less of ourselves—the smallness of thought, the shrillness, the aggression. And in the current political moment, even those of us who love it and have lived by it may find ourselves doubting the power of The Word. There is so much vagueness, so much lying—how can we continue to believe in the power of the precise and the true? Well, what we need to do—what we’re doing here tonight—is turn our minds gratefully to certain role models, certain high-water examples of the thoughtful and humane.

If there was justice in the world—if we were really led by the best among us, those who had lived the most intensely, and reflected most deeply upon it, and had the biggest hearts, and the most radically compassionate sensibilities, those who made us proudest to be human, and to whom we turned in our darkest times—then this would be a political rally, and Toby would be running for president. But he has more sense than that, and more love for his vocation, and knows that a heartful and virtuosic writer has the greatest power of all: to change hearts and minds, to truly inspire, now and for years into the future.

In the end, we love the artists we love because they have, somehow, consoled us. That person doing the consoling, we may suddenly realize, is, like us, finite and vanishing, and, possibly, afraid themselves. And yet they console. This is—maybe a strange word to use for an artist—this is leadership. Toby leads. When I look around at our poor, dissolving culture—our degraded public manners, our nascent tyranny, our braying media—and cast my mind around for a leader, my mind goes to Toby. Leaders lay down a path—a way of thinking, a way of being, a way of loving—that is workable, that account for all difficulties, that is joyful, and generous. Toby has done this, is doing this, with his life and his teaching and his writing. I am—we all are—immensely grateful for his presence among us.