INTERVIEWER

Richard Yates's and your name often pop up in the same places -- some claim that he was an influence in your work. Is there any truth to that?

WOLFF

Really? No, that's not true. I came to his work rather late, I'm afraid. I started reading his stories in the early eighties and ended up using one -- "Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired" -- in an anthology I put together in 1983. Funny story about that. Yates was an odd duck, as is well known, and he did a drop take now and then. Now, when this anthology I'd edited, Matters of Life and Death, was coming out, the publisher arranged a launch reading for the book at a museum in Boston. Jayne Anne Phillips, Mary Robison, and Richard Yates were going to read, in that order. I showed up just before the reading, and met everyone in the lobby, and sat down with Yates for a while -- first time I'd met him -- though he was hardly in a state to have much of a conversation with me. He was very, very drunk. He had on a beautiful suit that was full of cigarette holes, and his elbows kept slipping off the table, he could hardly put two sentences together, and I thought, Oh, well, what can one do, you know? And so the reading began, first Jayne Anne, then Mary, and Yates was slumped in the front row and every once in a while you'd see his head bob up violently, and you'd know he'd gone to sleep. Now, "Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired" is a very long story, and it's written in a complex language, full-throated sentences, delicately inflected, nuanced. How was he going to get through a page of it? But when Mary Robison ended her reading, and Yates was introduced, he made his way to the podium and read that story without dropping a comma. He read it in a beautiful, smoke-cured, gravelly voice. It was a wonderful reading. A perfect reading. Professional doesn’t even begin to describe it. And then he came off the podium and I went up to congratulate him and he was drunk again. He was like that surgeon in Oliver Sacks's book An Anthropologist on Mars who's got Tourette's -- you know, his movements and moods are out of control -- but when he goes in to operate, he becomes an utterly efficient surgeon and apparently a gifted surgeon. There was something of that in Yates.

He was a beautiful writer, deeply melancholy -- when his Collected Stories came out, Michael Chabon and I read it on behalf of that new book, and one of the people in the audience said, Well, I like Yates's book too, but I find that I can't read very much of it at a time, it's so sad and hopeless. Well, yes. Often it is. Yates is not congenial. Nor is Paul Bowles, or Flannery O'Connor, her violence, her obsession with the sinfulness of the world. A writer whose got any distinctiveness is going to put off some readers.

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