A Delicate Aggression Read online

  A DELICATE AGGRESSION

  Published with assistance from the Louis Stern

  Memorial Fund.

  Copyright © 2019 by Yale University.

  All rights reserved.

  This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

  Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office).

  Set in Scala type by IDS Infotech, Ltd.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  ISBN 978-0-300-21584-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950106

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my faculty colleagues and students in the School of Journalism and

  Mass Communication at the University of Iowa

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Timeline

  Introduction

  PART 1 • COLD WARRIORS: WRITING IN THE ENGLE ERA (1941–1966)

  Students

  1. The Brilliant Misfit: Flannery O’Connor

  2. The Star: W. D. Snodgrass

  3. The Suicide: Robert Shelley

  Faculty and Visitors

  4. The Professional: R. V. Cassill

  5. The Guru: Marguerite Young

  6. The Turncoat: Robert Lowell

  7. Mad Poets: Dylan Thomas and John Berryman

  PART 2 • THE WORKSHOP IN THE AGE OF AQUARIUS (1960s–1970s)

  8. Celebrity Faculty: Kurt Vonnegut and John Irving

  9. Infidels: Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo

  10. The Crossover: Rita Dove

  11. The Genius: Jane Smiley

  12. Red High-Tops for Life: T. C. Boyle

  PART 3 • THE FRANK CONROY ERA AND BEYOND (1980s–PRESENT)

  13. The Mystic: Marilynne Robinson

  14. The Warrior: Anthony Swofford

  15. The Voice: Ayana Mathis and Mass Culture

  Epilogue. No Monument: Engle’s Legacy and the Workshop’s Future

  Notes

  Index

  A photograph gallery appears at the end of Part 1

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This project benefited from many who generously contributed their aid and wisdom. Among them, my faculty colleagues at the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication have played a crucial role in the conception, development, and funding of this book. They include Stephen J. Berry, the Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist, who read an early draft and provided valuable comments; Travis Vogan, a longtime co-author and collaborator who lent sage advice and useful feedback on key chapters from the beginning; and David Ryfe, who supplied essential administrative and financial support. Stephen Bloom’s insight and encouragement have been invaluable. Our many conversations about the finer points of preparing a manuscript of this scope were inspirational. Subin Paul, my research assistant, made a profound contribution to the book by tracking down leads and scouring hundreds of boxes of archival material. This project would not have been possible without his vital presence at every stage of its research and writing. Subin toiled in the trenches beside me from the onset; he deserves much of the credit for this achievement.

  Brooks Landon, former English department chair, kindly shared his voluminous knowledge of many of the figures discussed in this book as well as the larger institutional history of the Workshop’s relationship with the English department. In the Special Collections department of the University of Iowa’s main library, archivist David F. McCartney deserves special recognition for his professionalism, advocacy, and compassion. It was a privilege to have worked with an archivist of his caliber, especially one whose mastery of University of Iowa and Iowa City history is unmatched. He was a beacon of light throughout the entire journey. He and Kelly A. Smith, Iowa Writers’ Workshop curator of the Glenn Schaeffer Library at the Dey House, were instrumental in arranging access to important materials.

  My friends and colleagues in the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, Bill Reynolds, Joshua Roiland, John J. Pauly, William Dow, Norman Sims, and David Abrahamson contributed vital suggestions and encouragement that enriched the manuscript. I am grateful to Connie Brothers for sharing her candid memories and decades-long experience in the main office of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her reflections brought to life many of the scenes depicted in this book. The many Workshop staff and graduates who graciously accepted my requests for interviews, from Tracy Kidder to Marilynne Robinson, deserve acknowledgment. I thank Paul Ingram of Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City for insisting that a new history of the Workshop—by a non-affiliate of the program—needed to be written. Paul’s recollection of the many distinguished figures Prairie Lights hosted over the decades sparked my full commitment to this project. Sarah Miller, my Yale University Press editor, has my deepest appreciation for her care and professionalism. I also owe a deep debt of gratitude for the meticulous work of Yale’s senior manuscript editor Phillip King and publishing assistant Ash Lago. Their compassion, patience, and wit made for a productive and delightful process.

  Immersion in this vast undertaking would not have been possible without author and professor Caroline Tolbert and our children, Jacqueline, Eveline, and Edward, who backed this research through all its stages with their love and strength. I owe the world to them.

  TIMELINE

  Author

  Years at IWW

  Major Works Linked to IWW

  Flannery O’Connor

  1945–1948

  Wise Blood

  W. D. Snodgrass

  1951–1953

  Heart’s Needle

  Robert Shelley

  1949–1951

  “Harvest”

  “Evening in the Park”

  “On My Twenty-First Birthday”

  R. V. Cassill

  1946–1952, 1960–1966

  Clem Anderson

  In an Iron Time

  Marguerite Young

  1942–1943, 1955–1957

  Miss MacIntosh, My Darling

  Robert Lowell

  1950–1951, 1953–1954

  Life Studies

  Dylan Thomas

  1950

  Collected Poems, 1934–1952

  John Berryman

  1953–1954

  Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

  Kurt Vonnegut

  1965–1967

  Slaughterhouse-Five

  John Irving

  1965–1967, 1972–1975

  The World According to Garp

  Sandra Cisneros

  1976–1978

  The House on Mango Street

  Rita Dove

  1975–1977

  The Yellow House on the Corner

  Jane Smiley

  1973–1978

  Barn Blind

  T. C. Boyle

  1972–1977

  Descent of Man

  Marilynne Robinson

  1991–2016

  Gilead

  The Givenness of Things: Essays

  Anthony Swofford

  1999–2001, 2007

  Jarhead

  Ayana Mathis

  2009–present

  The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

  Introduction

  On a drunken evening in the winter of 19
54, renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning poet John Berryman groped for his mangled horn-rimmed glasses. Phil Levine, one of Berryman’s star MFA creative writing students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, had just landed a savage punch in his instructor’s face, sending him reeling in pain. Recently hired on the recommendation of his world-famous predecessor, Robert Lowell, Berryman filled his classes on the basis of his esteemed literary reputation. But many fled once exposed to his “blow-torch approach” to conducting his graduate seminar in poetry writing. Levine ironically was among the thirteen out of forty students brave enough to remain in Berryman’s course and “hang in there against John’s special mix of crankiness, brilliance, and cruelty,” as Robert Dana recalled.1

  Although Berryman’s tenure would end after one short semester—a tumultuous affair punctuated by a fall down a flight of stairs through a half-glass door that left him “happy to be alive” in the hospital after an evening drinking with his Princeton friends—Levine’s punch in the eye established a lifelong friendship with his mentor.2 On the strength of student recommendations such as Levine’s, Berryman might have remained on the faculty at Iowa much longer had he not been fired when faculty discord boiled over into an ugly public incident. In the wake of an intense liquor-ridden dispute with a colleague at Kenney’s, the Workshop bar of choice, Berryman’s landlord refused to let him into his apartment. His unspeakable protest on the porch led to his arrest for disorderly conduct.3 Despite what was perhaps the most bizarre exit by a faculty member in Workshop history, one that momentarily transformed this elite program into a theater of the absurd, Berryman’s followers were undeterred. Unlike other students who either abandoned Berryman’s seminar or chafed under his acerbic methods, Levine would remain his most loyal and vocal advocate, penning “Mine Own John Berryman” in support of his mentor as late as 1993.4 “No hanging back,” Levine recalled Berryman saying in class. “One must be ruthless with one’s own writing or someone else will be.” Such high standards meant “everyone who dared hand him a poem burdened with second-rate writing tasted his wrath, and that meant all of us.” Levine found himself transformed by such advice, which “wakened a dozen rising poets from their winter slumbers so that they might themselves dedicate their lives to poetry.”5

  The Berryman-Levine brawl embodied the risks inherent in the founding principle of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop built on contention and public criticism, a volatile cocktail of ego and competition that pervaded life in the world’s most powerful and prestigious creative writing program since 1941. Workshop founder Paul Engle, a backslid Methodist minister who rejected mystical understandings of professional development rooted in epiphanies and divine callings, had drawn on Iowa English professor Wilbur Schramm’s workshop method. In 1936, Schramm originally had classmates provide feedback on each other’s writing to foster the “process of constant self-criticism” in which “a writer teaches himself to write.”6 Engle, the son of a horse trainer who regarded teaching as another form of athletic coaching, transformed the peer criticism component of Schramm’s method into a blood sport.

  Under Engle, students would provide copies of their creative work to their peers in a classroom ritual of dissection and criticism, some constructive and some damaging. Workshop sessions eschewed gratuitous praise and superficial compliments for brutally honest feedback that more often humiliated than ennobled young writers to harden them for the real competition of the literary marketplace. Designed to simulate the intense pressure of publication, workshop sessions subjected creative writers unaccustomed and averse to the business world to a highly professionalized approach to their craft with a sense of urgency most had never encountered. Many had been acculturated to view creative writing as developing under opposite circumstances characterized by growing the good rather than beating back the bad in one’s work. Repercussions of this intense classroom environment could be felt in the student body’s social dynamic. Some of the most significant authors in the history of American letters, such as Sandra Cisneros, would look back in anger at their alienating Workshop experience. But they also acknowledged that their opposition to the program helped spring their boldest experiments and innovations.

  Competition can indeed breed community, and often did, according to Engle’s plan. Some, like the famous alumnus T. C. Boyle, who encouraged his own children to enroll in the Workshop, swore by the method. Others found it hostile to their own cultural understandings of community formation. Engle’s approach to bonding through preparation for a common enemy—in this case the publishing industry’s legions of potentially hostile critics and editors—grew out of a Cold War mentality. Many writers rebelled against this model built on opposition and defense, seeking alternatives rooted in mutual understanding and affirmation. “Say yes to everything,” the mantra Cisneros adopted as the key to creativity, developed as an alternative to Engle’s legacy of rigid disapproval and negation.7 Others embraced that vision. One of his most obedient students, Flannery O’Connor, articulated Engle’s approach that later generations of writers rebelled against when she said, “Everywhere I go I’m asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.”8

  In its broadest sense, this book examines the impact of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop on literary culture and the publishing industry through the careers of our most important contemporary authors who coursed the program from its origins to the present. Arranged as a series of critical biographies, it details the imprint Workshop members left on the institution’s official narrative it has chosen to publicly identify with, while also investigating the program’s influence on their professional development. With special attention to the institutional rituals and administrative leadership conditioning the program’s fraught negotiation of the writer’s role in mass culture at the nexus of art and commerce, it offers a glimpse into creative writing pedagogy and the enigmatic, often bruising, relationship between teacher and student. Now-famous authors appear in their formative years taking their first tentative steps toward professional careers, forming alliances and rivalries among intimidating world-renowned faculty and high-powered peers. Their struggles to survive the institutionalization of writing instruction deliberately designed to intensify the pressure and competition are etched in their successes and failures. This was an environment teeming with talent and ambition, a powder keg of emotion and creativity that exploded into bizarre controversies, unlikely bonds, turgid tensions, and frothy confrontations that shaped the course of literary history. At the Workshop, innovation and breakthroughs flourished in manuscripts that seemed to write themselves alongside others locked in the soul-killing anguish of writer’s block, an affliction that seemed contagious in this atmosphere of heightened self-consciousness. Publication was the gold standard from the beginning of the program, designed to professionalize rather than coddle young creative minds. Pragmatic and strategic works would emerge from the workshop crafted to fit the demands of the industry.

  But the Workshop was notorious for subjecting students and faculty alike to its own insular arbitrary standards. A student received a C− for a novel that was published by a renowned New York press; his fame later ostracized him socially, and he left the program.9 Tennessee Williams’s best friend at the Workshop, the African-American playwright Thomas Pawley, nearly dropped out due to the alienating and coarse bigotry of the place. “I could not eat in the restaurants of the student union, and I was told I could not stay in the dormitory,” Pawley, the author of the play Ku Klux, testified to an environment totally hostile to accommodating his bare necessities much less providing a setting to inspire his creativity.10 Decades later, Rita Dove also pointed to social segregation, “how everything ran by clique,” as “one of the worst things about Iowa.”11

  Such repressive features persisted during Dove’s era of the 1970s despite the Age of Aquarius being a time of liberation and rebellion against old repressive standards. Iowa’s sexual renaissance was in full bloom then. Workshop student Allan G
urganus recalled porn films being made in the apartment adjacent to his. With a hyperactive erotic imagination worthy of Philip Roth’s Portnoy, Gurganus fantasized that he might be recruited as an extra. He wrote amid the sounds of these productions taking place through the walls, glimpsing traces of the actors’ body makeup left in the apartment’s shared bathroom.12 Cisneros talked openly of her affairs and her sexual awakening during her creative development; Curtis Harnack slept with his instructor Hortense Calisher, who was in the process of divorce, igniting passion in the unlikeliest of places—Iowa City, which “was surprisingly accommodating, with no comments or any awkward social complications,” an environment “perfectly sophisticated.”13

  Too Much Blood

  Paul Engle’s singular ambition that developed the Iowa Writers’ Workshop into the world’s most powerful creative writing program significantly correlates with a scene at the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In it, the father of the deceased Jay Gatsby reveals his son’s well-thumbed copy of Hopalong Cassidy to narrator Nick Carraway. In the back pages is a list of mental and physical activities for self-improvement, from physical fitness and personal hygiene to studying before and after work. The list headed “GENERAL RESOLVES” would appear innocent enough and even heartbreakingly naive in the youth’s raw desire to build himself into a success through a “bath every other day” and to “save $5 (crossed out) $3 every week.” But more calculating plans to “study electricity, etc.” and “needed inventions” calibrated down to the minute reveal the eye of the financial speculator he would become.14 Franklinean invention blends with a Protestant work ethic in the list that appears in a book celebrating the life of the outlaw bandit Hopalong Cassidy. This telling volume, Fitzgerald suggests through Carraway, may provide the key to Gatsby’s character.