MASTER OF THE SMALL SHIFT

"I WOULD be a liar if I said I regretted having been in Vietnam. Sure, it would be different had I gone out and had my legs shot off. But I didn't. It was a great experience in the way that war is," says writer Tobias Wolff, adding with an abrupt laugh: "It was also my first time out of America." His second volume of memoirs, In Pharaoh's Army (1994), tells the story of his year in Vietnam far better than any interview could.

Yet it is interesting hearing the intense, exact Wolff briefly revisit his stint "in country". "Vietnam was a major turning point for America," he says. "Not just because it was a war we lost and was one we shouldn't have been in anyhow - it was the end of the dream. It brought a lot of hidden evils to the surface. The sort of problems we didn't think we had racism across the country - not just in the South - and class snobbery, it made it harder to pretend everything was fine."

His Vietnam was My Tho on the Mekong Delta: "It was a very beautiful place, lush and green." Far less spooked than many veterans, he explains his relative calm by pointing out: "I didn't see a lot of combat" but as he writes in his account of it: "We did not die by the hundreds in pitched battles. We died a man at a time, at a pace almost casual." While he does not dispute that Vietnam shaped him as an individual - and indirectly helped make him the writer he is - he is adamant it did not make him a man. "The army is not about growing up. When you look at it, what is being in the army? it's having three square meals, a place to sleep and someone else to do your laundry. It's an extended childhood. Always having someone to clean up after you at an age when others are having to fend for themselves."

He spent four years in the army but was never a career soldier. The army was a last resort after his various schemes to secure a place at an elite school succeeded, then collapsed.

As he writes in his memoir, This Boy's Life (1989), on the period following his expulsion... I went into the army. I did so with a sense of relief and homecoming. It was good to find myself back in the clear life uniforms and ranks and weapons. It seemed clear to me when I got there that this was where I had been going all along, and where I might still redeem myself. All I needed was a war. Careful what you pray for."

Death must have dominated the long silences between engagements in Vietnam? "One year thinking about your death where it would come from - I was as terrified as anything... but funny, at the time, I didn't realise how upset I really was. Like I said, it was a beautiful place and so completely different from what I knew." Neither in conversation nor in his memoir does he present himself as a hero.

However neutral his intentions, a gradual dehumanising and indifferent suspicion did take over in Vietnam. On driving an armour plated military truck directly over two bicycles lying in the road while their owners argued, Wolff reports in In Pharoah's Army: "I hadn't done it for fun. Seven months back, at the beginning of my tour, when I was still calling them people instead of peasants, I wouldn't have run over their bikes. I would have slowed down or even stopped until they decided to move their arguments to the side of the road, if it was a real argument and not a set up. But I didn't stop anymore."

IT was not until after he returned home that he realised how much the war would affect him. "It was the reactions of others. A lot of the anti war feeling in the States was directed at the soldiers. You had people shouting `baby killer' at you. Everybody had an opinion. It was actually worse at home then it had been out there. While my friends didn't seem too interested, I didn't get a hero's welcome from them. They treated me like I'd been away for a few days - the rest of it was too much. I had to get out." Far from inaugurating a new freedom and pleasure, discharge resulted in aimlessness and solitude.

Availing of the GI Bill, Wolff arrived at Oxford University in 1969, aged 24. Three years later he went back to the US with an English degree and became a reporter.

As may be gleaned from Mortals, the first story in his new collection of short stories, The Night In Question, Wolff was not a natural journalist. In the story, the narrator is remembering the day his editor called him in to meet the man whose obituary he had written for that morning's edition. In real life, Wolff had been working on the Washington Post just as the Watergate scandal began to leak. Wolff was not a political reporter, he mainly covered the police beat, city hall and routine muggings while also producing obituaries with a carefree abandon which did not lend itself to checking facts.

Abandoning journalism - on the day he decided to quit, he was fired - he left Washington for California, performing the usual mixed bag of part time jobs, including night watchman, until a Stanford fellowship and other academic jobs made it easier for him to write. About 17 years ago he moved to upstate New York; he now teaches at Syracuse University. "These winters are so, so cold. We're hoping to move back to California. My wife is fifth generation San Francisco. I still teach a course each fall at Syracuse but I think it's time to move west."

Logic belongs as instinctively to his thinking as the clear, uncluttered quality of his prose does to his fiction. "I held my nose and voted for Clinton," he says of the recent election. "I did the last time as well. Maybe now that he can wake up in the morning without having to worry about being re elected, he might just start governing." How conscious is Wolff of being an American writer? "I'm not... Wait, I don't want to give the wrong impression. I'm glad to be living in a country that is a very exciting place to live. It's a good place for a writer. But as for `American', I don't knob what American is. The moment you put pressure on that word, it falls apart."

Seven years have passed since I last interviewed Tobias Wolff. Then, he admitted to being excitable and did give the impression of controlled hysteria. He was - and is - opinionated and precise. Still nervy he also remains a fit looking, tidy man with efficient good manners and an athlete's cleanliness. More western in demeanour then, more eastern now, he seems more shrewd, more serious, a bit tougher, far more the professional writer - although his literary reputation was well established by the short story collection, Hunters in the Snow (1982), even before the publication of a superb novella, The Barracks Thief (1984). Another collection, Back In The World (1985), quickly followed the novella.

While he does not review, he is actively engaged in literature beyond his own writing and is an enthusiastic and widely read reader. He acted as a judge for the recent Granta selection, The Best of Young American Novelists; also, he edited The Picador Book of Contemporary American Stories (1993) - he did not include his own work.

Wolff had a relatively short wait for critical acclaim. Author of several of America's finest post war short stories, including Hunters In The Snow from the collection of the same name, he is acknowledged along with the late Raymond Carver and Richard Ford as a member of an important literary group. Time has just about erased Bill Buford's irritating "Dirty Realist" marketing tag which once attempted to group stylistically these three very different writers. As Wolff remarks: "Well, I think Buford has suffered enough for that one, don't you?" Writers such as Wolff and Ford appear poised to take over from Bellow and Updike, for so long the dominant force in mainstream American literary fiction, as an influence on younger writers.

Wolff remarks of Bellow, "well some of his books are just so fine, look at Seize The Day - when he's on, he's really on." As for Updike he says, "I prefer Cheever. Yet - again, Updike is very good. I thought the last two Rabbit books were great - wait, I don't trust that word `great' - how about wonderful? They are wonderful books, particularly the last one."

HE has written brilliantly about Vietnam, in his fiction as well as in In Pharoah's Army, but Wolff is no "Vietnam" writer: he has always possessed tremendous range. Even in stories in which the war is present, such as The Barrack's Thief or in The Other Miller from the new collection - in which an opportunistic deception provides the story - it is often used more as a backdrop. "I'm more interested in conflict within a person," he says. Random observations occur which have nothing to do with the immediate setting - a soldier hearing dog tags jingle in the dark as some of his colleagues chat outside suddenly thinks of home, "of my mother's white Persian cat, belled for the sake of birds, jumping onto my bed in the morning with the same sound". Above all, Wolff has always been a storyteller, alert to the small shifts which determine a story. Another favourite device is the tense dynamic created by three people in any given situation. "Two can manage, three usually have problems - look at Hunters in the Snow," he says. He has a strong sense of history, yet his characters, caught in an eternal present of the moment, don't. His fiction is about memories and experience, not ideas.

"My obsession is to do with the way people create themselves. The moment by moment choices they make until they finally sculpt themselves." Though a serious individual, a black, at times surprising deadpan humour has often run through his work - "... at first Jean thought he was committing adultery against his wife, until she saw him on the ice one Saturday afternoon while she was out shoplifting with her girlfriend Kathy" (from Coming Attractions, in Back In The World) - and this new collection has a consistent lightness of touch about it.

Where does he see himself as a writer? "Well, I know I'm not Faulkner" - another of those sharp, abrupt laughs. "I started off with two terrible novels - neither was published one of them was a Thomas Pynchon type of narrative. For me it was always Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter." Chekhov, Maupassant, the Joyce of Dubliners and Paul Bowles have also had a part in shaping his work. Most writers relect regionalism yet the Southern school of American writing has assumed an almost mythic status. Wolff doesn't like it. "I think it's an irrelevance. There so much diversity in American writing, it's something of a problem. It's wrong to treat a group of writers as sacred or special just because they come from a certain place. Look at Richard Ford, he doesn't live in the South, most of his work is done in Montana." Ford's The Sportswriter (1987) and Independence Day (1995) are both set in New Jersey. Ironically Wolff, this least Southern of writers, was born by accident of geography in Alabama. "And I'm not Southern." He is also wary of the omnipresent American landscape which dominates so much of American writing. "I think you have to be careful with it, the landscape can take over.

In childhood, he travelled all over the US with his jauntily optimistic, divorced mother: his childhood odyssey has left him not belonging to any place in particular - "not necessarily a bad thing for a writer". Those years, including the domestic hell in Washington state created by Dwight, his mother's demented second husband, have been brilliantly chronicled in This Boy's Life. "My brother went with my father, stayed with my mother. I was only three - he was 11, an important age for a boy. I think he also romanticised my father." Wolff himself is far kinder towards his father than one might have expected. He was great fun, he was feckless and unreliable, but a wonderful storyteller. He seemed to have forgotten about me but he had his own problems as well." Was Dwight as wretched a man as he appears in the book? Worse. Far, far worse. He was really horrible. Believe me, the character in the book is mild."

The appalling Dwight often criticised Wolff's father "for being rich and living far away and having nothing to do with me, but all these qualities - even the last, perhaps especially the last - made my father fascinating. He had the advantage always enjoyed by the inconstant parent, of not being there to be found imperfect. I could see him as I wanted to see him." Wolff's memoir reports a father who "seemed to have forgotten I existed".

Near the close of This Boy's Life Tobias Wolff recalls of his younger self: "My life was a mess, and because I understood the problem as one of bad luck I could imagine no remedy but good luck, which I didn't seem to have." How does he view that boy now? "I see him as a wayward nephew. I have a fondness for him. He's not a bad kid, but he's not me any more." Throughout that book the young Wolff is intent on creating a new self and when applying to new schools writes letters on behalf of his teachers "in the words my teachers would have used if they had known me as I knew myself. These were their letters. And on the boy who lived in their letters, the splendid phantom who carried all my hopes, it seemed to me I saw, at last, my own face."

For all his intensity, Wolff is an easy: talker, open, direct without being overly confessional: he seems excited to be currently working on a novel. Discussing his fiction invariably draws him to the work of other writers. Asking him about the potential difficulties of writing two highly successful memoirs and then returning to fiction encourages him to refer to some of his favourite books: "I love memoirs, Robert Graves's Goodbye To All That, Mary McCarthy's books, Frank Conroy's StopTime. But I only concentrate on one thing at a time. I wanted to write my story, but I see it as different from my stories." Indeed Firelight, one of the strongest stories in The Night In Question, has in the portrayal of the mother and son relationship echoes of This Boy's Life. Wolff can move with ease between the autobiographical and the invented, as in The Chain, in which an apparently simple vendetta - the killing of a pet dog who has attacked a child - has horrific consequences.

There is no doubt about it, Wolff's return to fiction from memoir has produced one of the year's three best short story collections. And you admire the writer, but you look at the man who went to Vietnam and returned to tell the tale.

TIME has made it easier for Americans to discuss the Vietnam War. Is he asked more freely about his experiences now, or has his writing satisfied the curiosity? "I'm always easy about talking about it. It was, it is a part of my life. Without it, I wouldn't be the person I am today. But I'm always careful, it is too easy for people to just switch off. They're not really interested." For example, Wolff has two teenage sons: `They have never asked me about the war. It is difficult to believe." The person who does ask him about his war is his seven year old daughter. "She'll ask, `did you fight in a war?', `why?', and `did you hurt anybody?'"