PROSE
Tobias Wolff
The Liar
Why this work?
Reading this short story is a good way to experience the LitSalon for the first time: the brief study will give you the room to consider this unique form of writing. The short story is not a novel, and not a poem, but perhaps between – and sometimes even more.
The story
In a 2008 review, Judith Shulevitz writes: “One of the best stories in Our Story Begins, a collection of new and selected older stories by Tobias Wolff, is called The Liar. It’s about a teenage boy who regales strangers with dark fictions about his family — appalling accounts of misfortune and disease. These drive his mother crazy; a concrete, pious person, she can’t stand dishonesty, and she sends him to the family doctor. The charm of the story lies in the likability of its characters.”
From a 1996 interview with Wolff in Salon.com: “Short stories, like poems, demand a lot from their readers. Novels may be longer, but they don’t require the same compressed attention. They allow moments of relaxation; their narratives promise to hold you, however casual the concentration you invest.”
As one of our great contemporary masters of the form, Tobias Wolff argues that the difficulty of the short story is its own reward. “The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story,” he once said. And the writer’s thrill is “working a miracle, making life where there was none” in the space of a few precisely and elegantly distilled pages. “There’s a joy in writing short stories,” he says, “a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.”
The reading
Edgar Allen Poe argued that the writer of a short story should aim at creating a single and total psychological/spiritual effect upon the reader. He believed that the theme or plot of the piece should always be subordinate to the author’s calculated construction of a single, intense mood in the reader’s or listener’s mind, be it melancholy, suspense, or horror. There are no extra elements in Poe, no subplots, no minor characters, and no digressions except those that show the madness of deranged first-person (“I”) narrators. Ultimately, Poe took writing to be a moral task that worked not through teaching lessons, but in simultaneously stimulating his readers’ mental, emotional, and spiritual faculties through texts of absolute integrity.
As a literary ancestor of the form, Poe’s theories and practice offer a starting point to the development of the short story. The Liar by Tobias Wolff offers a protagonist caught in his own world, using language to separate and shield himself from those he loves – and fears.
The author
Born in Alabama in 1945, Tobias Wolff is an American short story writer, memoirist, novelist, and teacher of creative writing at Stanford University. He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy’s Life (1989) and In Pharaoh’s Army (1994), two novels (including The Barracks Thief in 1984, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction) and four short story collections, including Our Story Begins.
Recommended edition: Our Story Begins (collected stories), Bloomsbury, ISBN 9780747597438.
Content courtesy of Toby Brothers, Director & Founder of the London Literary Salon.
POETRY
Seamus Heaney
Scaffolding
Why this poem?
We have chosen this short, memorable and well-loved poem as a jumping-off point for looking at the use of metaphor in poetry.
How to work with Scaffolding
To find your way around this poem I suggest reading it repeatedly, ideally aloud. If you can find someone who wants to explore these notes with you, or even just someone you can grab and read the poem to, that’s great. If not, reading aloud in front of a mirror works pretty well. Pets are also a better audience than you might think!
I suggest that you read the poem four times, at the start of each section. After each reading I’ve made a few suggestions to help you look at the poem from different angles and deepen your relationship with the work.
First Reading
Scaffolding is from Seamus Heaney’s first collection, Death of a Naturalist, published in 1966, the year after his marriage to Marie Devlin. This poem is about his marriage and his love for Marie.
For the first reading, look at how the poem is put together. Focus on the central image – how the masons erect the scaffolding. How do these details – make sure the planks won’t slip at busy points – Secure all ladders – tighten bolted joints – relate to the idea that scaffolding can be compared to marriage? Then look at the join (I apologise, but the building puns are just writing themselves) at line 7, when he addresses his wife directly and links the two things.
Second Reading
For the second reading, think about how Heaney links two very disparate things – why has he chosen to compare the two and what is he saying about marriage, through describing the work of builders?
I think the slightly odd, unromantic metaphor helps the poem here and it’s much more common to find this type of comparison in a contemporary love poem. Of course, there is nothing stopping a modern poet from comparing their love to a red, red rose but it’s unlikely to result in any fresh or original idea.
Third Reading
Exploring poetry will make you look more closely at metaphor*. It is used in prose, with poetry it’s central to the form and a huge part of what makes a poem.
For a more in-depth look at metaphor, this information from the Poetry Foundation website is useful (please click on the linked text in bold). I find Robert Frost’s analysis particularly striking: “There are many other things I have found myself saying about poetry, but chiefest of these is that it is metaphor, saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another, the pleasure of ulteriority.”
I think metaphor brings us closer to understanding the purpose of poetry and the role it plays in our lives. I notice people reaching for metaphors when describing their most difficult or intense emotions. When someone says “I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach” they are at the limits of what language can do when the only thing left is to say “it’s like….” And poetry itself is one of the best ways we have of exploring this territory, which is perhaps why even people with little interest in poetry will instinctively choose a poem for milestones like weddings and funerals.
*You may have been taught, as I was, that a simile uses like and as, while a metaphor says something is another thing. This distinction can become a bit awkward to maintain, so most writing about poetry uses metaphor as a general term for both.
Fourth Reading
In using this metaphor, Heaney is making a subjective argument about the nature of love and relationships. You may or may not agree that it’s safe to “Let the scaffolding fall….”
For this reading it’s worth thinking about how these ideas relate to or change your understanding of your own relationships. For me, the image of scaffolding makes me think not just of marriage and romantic relationships but also long-standing friendships and sibling relationships, with their shared childhood and adolescent experiences.
To Finish – Heaney’s Own Reading
Finally here’s a link to Seamus Heaney reading Scaffolding (please click the bold text). I think it’s wonderful to hear it in his own Country Antrim accent, some of the emphasis is very different from the way I would read it and that deepens my understanding. He also speaks about his attitude towards the poem, many decades after it was written. He’s clearly ambivalent about it, and I’ve often noticed that poets will partially disavow some of their most famous/acclaimed/beloved works. I have a few ideas about why that happens, but that’s a topic for another day.
I hope that you enjoy studying this poem and look forward to discussing it with some of you in December.
Recommended editions: Death of a Naturalist, Faber, ISBN: 9780571230839 or New Selected Poems 1966-1987, Faber, ISBN: 9780571143726 (it is also possible to read the poem on the poets.org website).
Content courtesy of poet Caroline Hammond, Facilitator at the London Literary Salon.
