A Delicate Aggression Read online

  It thus came as a devastating blow when Snodgrass learned that Engle had abruptly cut off his funding. The decision came in part as a punishment for Snodgrass’s rejection of Engle’s advice to pursue his Ph.D. But the larger factor was his divorce. Classmate Robert Dana speculated that “perhaps his divorce, in the buttoned-down 1950s, when divorce was not the conventional solution it is now . . . had put him in some special social category.”49 Engle blamed his decision on a lack of resources, although the program was actually well endowed. The news could not have come at a worse time. Snodgrass had been horribly blocked, failing to write anything substantial toward his MFA thesis in two years. This galling situation threatened his aspiration to make writing his main source of income. A tidal wave of debt and stress overwhelmed him in the form of attorney fees, alimony, and rental payments. Bills for his psychotherapy drove him deeper into debt and depression. His meager seven-hundred-dollar annual income from his teaching assistantship was not enough to cover his responsibility to his wife and child, so he was forced to take a second job “as an orderly at the V.A. Hospital, sometimes handling stiffs,” according to Robert Dana.50 During his expensive therapy sessions his doctor ironically steered him away from questions “about those things where I could sound impressive.” His powers of poetic expression were stymied; “more often he asked me how I was planning to pay my rent.”51

  The transformation of divorce and financial crisis into world-class poetry demanded a recalibration of creative powers. Snodgrass’s greatest creative achievement came at his most vulnerable personal and professional moment. He was at the nadir of his precipitous fall from family man to divorcé, from precocious prodigy to failed writer facing the prospect of dropping out of the Workshop, given Engle’s withdrawal of financial support. This jarring psychological fragmentation appears in the poignant final image of Heart’s Needle, in which he returns to the City Park Zoo with Cynthia on one of her rare court-ordered visits. Bears and raccoons in their cages metaphorically reflect his own aching isolation. “We’ve come around to the bears,/ punished and cared for, behind bars,” echoing his own predicament. Snodgrass yearns for freedom like “the coons on bread and water” who “stretch thin black fingers after ours,” taking solace in one slim fact he addresses to Cynthia: “And you are still my daughter.”52

  Snodgrass’s escape from the captivity of his New Critical training demanded subtle tactics. “In working on an actual poem,” he explained, “I almost always find myself starting it much the way we were taught at Iowa.” After writing his first draft as a Workshop poem, he then stripped it of abstraction, laying bare its core meaning in direct language. He described the process as first making “a very compacted, intellectualized, and obviously symbolical poem with a lot of fancy language in it. But then, as I go on working at it, the poem happily becomes plainer and longer, and seems much more ‘tossed off.’ ” The process of unpacking dense language and images to remove the appearance of technique was Snodgrass’s systematic way of shoring his fragments against his ruin, as Eliot would say, of escaping the “labored and literary and intellectual” to land on “the final version, if I’m lucky, [that] will seem very conversational, and sort of ‘thrown away.’ ”53 He built upon the hard thinking he learned from Lowell with his unique blend of unlabored spontaneity. That dashed-off feel, however, masks his airtight symmetry and near perfect meter, which at second glance bears the unmistakable fastidiousness of an Iowa MFA. Those traces of Iowa remained in Snodgrass in the face of the administrative neglect he endured in an institution that, like the City Park Zoo, alternately punished and took care of its subjects.

  Snodgrass’s letters to Engle over the years since winning the Pulitzer in the early sixties reveal how the administrator who once forgot his name at an alumni fund-raising event transformed into his greatest promoter and publicist. One telegram in 1964 asked to arrange a speaking appearance on campus; the same year a handwritten personal cover letter for his poetry translation project on Yves Bonnefoy requested Engle’s help in finding a publisher. Snodgrass also introduced to Engle “Walter Hall—my best student just now . . . very promising, I think,” much in the way Flannery O’Connor recommended aspiring authors to him for admission and financial aid. Immediately after graduation, Snodgrass accommodated Engle’s request for “several versions of the poem on what I recall as vivisection—known as Ph.D. study.”54 Engle wanted a variorum of one of the poems in the Heart’s Needle series for the Workshop as a way of demonstrating the rigor of revision and self-criticism fostered by the program.

  If he was blind to the value of Snodgrass when he was a student, Engle quickly became aware after his graduation that the program’s greatest poetic success to date was ideal for promotional purposes. Engle thus sought to showcase how his process of production was shaped by the Workshop pedagogy emphasizing intensive revision against impressionistic inspiration. Despite Snodgrass’s careful efforts to strip his poetry of any signs of the Workshop, Engle felt he could make the case that his poetry epitomized the program’s method. Interestingly, Snodgrass complied. The series of exchanges for their mutual benefit testifies to the ongoing business of maintaining literary enterprise through the benefit of the influential Workshop brand.

  For Snodgrass, like O’Connor before him, loyalty to Iowa brought privileged access to the Workshop network that ran mainly through the literary agency of Engle. MFA John Gilgun observed that Iowa Workshop alumni, unlike graduates of Grinnell and Columbia, remain in close contact in the manner of former students of the English public school system, except “We don’t meet in the House of Commons or in The Foreign Service; we meet in the foyers of publishing houses.” As with all Workshop alumni, Gilgun knew his most vital professional contacts grew out of the Iowa network, since “of the six or eight people I know in New York now, five of them I met at Iowa.”55 The lasting effects of a Workshop MFA, it would seem, are immeasurable, even for neglected stars like Snodgrass.

  3 • The Suicide: Robert Shelley

  In an interview published in Look magazine in June 1965, Paul Engle blithely bragged that “out of the nearly 2,300 men and women who have labored in his workshops, only one ever committed suicide on the scene in Iowa City.” He claimed this was remarkable since “Beautifully balanced people do not become artists.” In portraying himself as the “bill-paying daddy to more poets than any man in the history of letters,” Engle carefully suppressed details about the deceased and their circumstances. Such information might have cast doubt on his impeccable record of care for so many creative characters. Thus he did not mention that the twenty-five-year-old Robert Shelley had shown clear signs that he might take his own life when he arrived at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1949, fresh from his B.A. in English at Washington University in St. Louis. Nor did he allude to how faculty and students mourned his passing on April 25, 1951, as the loss of perhaps one of the greatest minds to enter the program. He also withheld comment on the Workshop community’s spontaneous outpouring of collective shame and guilt from the knowledge that Shelley’s death was entirely preventable. Fourteen years later—looking for an irresistible promotional angle for the glossy Look magazine spread on his role as benevolent “poet grower of the world” in Iowa farm country—Engle rendered Shelley both the punch line of his tasteless joke and a nameless inevitable statistic.1

  To those who knew him, Robert Shelley was uniquely gifted; faculty member Warren Carrier remembered him as “the student with whom I learned the most.” Carrier reminisced about how “My course in modern literary criticism often turned into a dialogue with Shelley as we explored the intricacies and limits of criticism.” More than just a memorable student, Shelley, “had he lived, would, I am convinced, have ranked with Justice and Snodgrass and Stafford as a poet.”2 W. D. Snodgrass himself acknowledged that Shelley’s innovative verse cast the aesthetic blueprint for his own Heart’s Needle, the breakthrough work that made his career. Indeed, Shelley was the figure behind Snodgrass’s Pulitzer Prize�
��winning masterpiece and one of the founding visionaries of the confessional school. In a private letter, Snodgrass admitted Shelley was the real inventor of “exactly the sort of poem all the critics were saying you couldn’t write because our age was too fragmented or complicated or something. He finished only half a dozen of those poems, however, before he committed suicide.” Snodgrass then picked up where Shelley left off. “So all of a sudden, his style came onto the market” and was available for use.3

  The community of poets at the Workshop soon followed, taking up Shelley’s unorthodox approach to escape the New Critical standards dominating the program at the time. Prior to Shelley’s experimental verse, most found themselves stuck in a derivative rut. Shelley himself was struggling to write imitation Hart Crane, while Snodgrass admits he “was writing imitation Lowell.” Liberation from the depersonalized mode signaled a renaissance; Snodgrass recalled how Shelley’s discovery “struck on a very simple, direct, lyrical style that really floored me.”4 This became the new voice and form of the confessional poets—a disarmingly direct address divulging inner demons in fastidiously clad verses of almost nursery-rhyme prosody. The musicality and deceptively simple lyricism of confessional poetry was such a hallmark of the confessional school that Anne Sexton, one of its more celebrated practitioners, dedicated an entire volume titled Transformations to seventeen adaptations of Grimm fairy tales.

  From 1949 to 1951, the Workshop’s most celebrated poet with the widest range of publications was not Snodgrass but Shelley. Snodgrass proved the most adept of any in the program at building on Shelley’s innovations, emerging as the one student capable of realizing the full potential of the revolutionary style represented in his half-dozen prototypes of confessional poetry. But beyond the new sensation he had created with these few experiments, Shelley had a dossier that suggested he was already an accomplished writer at the age of twenty-five. He may have imitated Hart Crane in a few derivative workshop manuscripts, but his original and haunting publications began to attract serious critical notice. Shelley had led the way; his classmates followed. Beloved by students and faculty alike, this powerful writer dreamed living nightmares in beautifully intricate verse, laying bare his tortured psyche in the process. To no one’s surprise, he yielded to the demons that drove his greatest art. To everyone’s dismay, no one in the Workshop community intervened. No one, Snodgrass and Carrier included, wanted to impede the surging momentum of this young talent that drew aesthetic power from being at war with himself. A tranquil, medicated Shelley, all were well aware, would never have produced such works as the Dante-esque “Le Lac des Cygnes.” Was it fair to encourage aesthetic creativity that was clearly self-destructive? Or was poetry actually a lifebuoy on his sea of inner torment? Did other issues besides poetry lead him to take his own life, concerns such as “his inability to cope with reality and especially his homosexuality,” as Carrier claimed?5 Or further still, as the Korean writer Richard Kim claimed, was the shame attached to suicide merely an artificial construct of Western culture, a judgmental view lacking the compassion of more honorable understandings?6

  Auspicious Beginnings

  Shelley initially made himself known to the Workshop faculty through his play Now Falls the Shadow, performed at Washington University in 1947. This drama made headlines when it received the Wilson Memorial Award during Shelley’s junior year. On the strength of its success, along with such poems as “Le Lac des Cygnes” and “The Homing Heart,” both of which appeared in different issues of the Western Review in 1948, Shelley emerged as one of the nation’s top undergraduate creative writers. Warren Carrier promptly offered him a place in the Workshop, luring this rare talent with a desirable position teaching advanced literary criticism, plus a generous stipend and tuition waver. Shelley’s Dante-inspired poem appeared the first semester of his senior year in the journal edited by Workshop faculty member Ray B. West. West had brought the Rocky Mountain Review with him to Iowa City when he relocated from the University of Colorado at Boulder. The renamed Western Review became the standard bearer for poetry and criticism featuring influential figures such as Cleanth Brooks. Shelley was all of twenty-two when his poems were published, making him by far the youngest contributor in their respective issues.

  Shelley epitomized the new turn in poetry heralded by West. At the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century, there were many “inescapable signs that writing in America has reached the end of an era.” Shelley’s 1950s generation left behind the “confused iconoclasm of the expatriates and Greenwich Village . . . followed by the uncertain orthodoxy of the Marxists and the pseudo-regionalist quarterlies of the Thirties,” featuring the little magazine that “resided finally in the academic reviews (Southern, Kenyon, and Sewanee) of the Forties.” West’s aggressive recruitment of Shelley speaks to the passing of grassroots literary movements and their attendant niche journals of the prior decades. Interestingly, West finds no threat to the organic vitality of literature in its migration from niche Greenwich Village circles to MFA programs. Just the opposite, Shelley stood at the forefront of liberation from the earlier era that West claimed “will be best remembered for the critical battles it has fought out in the smaller magazines.”7

  Shelley’s reputation preceded him. Workshop faculty members were impressed by the lyric gloom of Shelley’s “Le Lac des Cygnes” that imagines Dante’s eternally tormented “spirits, who came loud wailing, hurried on by their dire doom” from Canto V of The Inferno. The sky at the close of day above “The lake awry, a crumpled bedsheet of glass” fills with blood, “darkened by leaks in a rotting thigh” of the “murdered Odette.” Trees beside the lake transform into grotesque agents of pain. He imagines how these “Willows drive forked arms down to water/ As if divining cortex-depth through pain,” and swans “re-riding on hashing mesh of knives.” Beneath the lake, the murdered Odette suffers eternal unrest, “Nudged unintelligibly by blind schools of fish,/ Upborne her green wings burn in naveled bight.”8 Although submitted well in advance of his death, the subject of an afterlife of perpetual torment reflects the psychological suffering he was already enduring before he had arrived at Iowa.

  In the spring 1949 issue of the Western Review, West announced that Shelley would be joining the Workshop in the fall. Soon after Shelley accepted Carrier’s offer to enroll in the program, he received an invitation from West to serve as an assistant editor of his journal. Shelley’s formal application to the program lists several publications in monthly journals in addition to book and theater reviews for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the paper of his youth, originally established by media mogul Joseph Pulitzer.9 Accompanying Shelley to Iowa City from Washington University at St. Louis was William Stuckey, who had also gained admission to the Workshop. With the security of a close friend from home as his roommate and an accomplished curriculum vitae in hand, Robert Shelley was ideally positioned to become the program’s next rising star.

  His first days in workshop did not disappoint. Shelley impressed classmates and faculty alike with his critical and creative gifts, especially his flair for weaving simple diction into complex syntax. Creative writing in university settings was all Shelley ever knew. Unlike so many of his classmates attending on the GI Bill, he had never been a veteran of war, or seen any walk of life other than literary labor under the auspices of a well-endowed academic institution. Shelley was not averse to the rigors of criticism; he tended to thrive in that arena. Indeed, his reviews for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch helped land his position as assistant editor of the Western Review, where he reviewed A Fountain in Kentucky and Other Poems (1950) by John Frederick Nims. Shelley’s editorial eye was already adept at pinpointing rising new voices in poetry, as Nims would later go on to earn a nomination for a National Book Award in 1960 for Knowledge of the Evening. Since Shelley’s established professional credentials extended to editing and reviewing for a powerful literary journal, Engle’s intimidating curriculum simulating the rigors of publication did not present an obsta
cle for Shelley. The workshop system designed to professionalize aesthetes instead stimulated his creative growth.

  Engle’s Look magazine interview casts the Workshop Shelley encountered as a kind of “boot camp” for young writers, a phrase used to describe one intensive course in creative writing advertised on the walls of the English-Philosophy Building at Iowa as late as 2012. “At Iowa there has always been a bit of a boot camp mentality. Real Writers can take the heat,” Workshop graduate Robin Hemley commented. But all too often “the student whose piece is being critiqued receives conflicting and confusing reactions” and the student emerges “deflated and no longer able to see her work clearly.” In terms of professional attainment, similar results can occur. When he was a student in the early 1980s, Hemley, who went on to become director of nonfiction creative writing, “saw talented writers so discouraged that I never heard another peep from them after graduation.”10 This competitive climate intended to transform students into an army of “America’s relentless young writers” often crushed ambition. As in the military, boot camp is a matter of survival, a rite of passage that proves one’s fitness for the real battlefields that await. Attrition—in the form of failures and dropouts if not suicides—made the challenge of retention a daunting task for the faculty, given Engle’s commitment to cleaning up and shaving down sensitive creative artists. Faculty member R. V. Cassill was known for going to great lengths to persuade faltering students to persevere and remain in the program. In one case he made a personal visit to an at-risk student at 5:30 in the morning, knocking at his apartment door “with a simple message: ‘Don’t be yellow.’ The two took cups of hot tea out on the grass to watch the sun rise.” According to the boot camp mentality, Engle expected students to “sweat ink-blood in his workshop,” in the process forcing those with “self-conscious beards” evoking romantic narcissism to “shave down to clean professionalism.”11