A Delicate Aggression Read online

  Unlike many of his classmates, Shelley was not one of the “long-hairs” who chafed against the emphasis on published work and professionalism. But where the program misread him and underestimated the depth of his psychological instability was in the expectation that sanity would emerge from the no-nonsense regimentation of workshop sessions. In 1947, the year Shelley was making his name known to faculty for his powerful publications, Engle promoted the program as a place for creative writers with “no long-hairs,” one that rejected the assumption that “a poet is an unstable creature (if he wasn’t unstable, or even slightly cracked, then why would he write poetry?), who does not belong in the disciplined work of a university.” According to this formulation, Shelley never presented a problem to the faculty; he never received a 5:30 A.M. knock at the door from an instructor intending to exorcise his demons. Indeed, Shelley’s string of successful publications and prestigious awards signaled that he was already well on his way toward becoming a professional writer. Engle and most of the faculty besides Carrier, whose knowledge of Shelley was the most intimate of any instructor at Iowa, assumed him to be the antithesis of a precious and fragile idealist, the poet as “long-haired object with a nest of robins in their hair.”12 Yet what they terribly underestimated was the fallacy that productivity somehow equaled sanity. Heavy doses of Protestant work ethic and Cold War militant regimentation yielding steady publication made one immune to mental illness, so the thinking went.

  Engle insisted that only productive citizens and no free spirits could be found among his ranks. “Our experience is that poets today are so serious and, on the whole, stable, that their very stability is a worry,” he joked. Such an antiseptic condition, like that mentioned by Lowell in his blurb for Heart’s Needle, could be construed as a detriment to inspiration, to the wild flights of the imagination integral to creative pursuits like poetry. “Where is the frenzy? Where the eye rolling to heaven?” Engle asked rhetorically, affirming that the assiduous “poet in Iowa City works hard at his poetry and does his job as any other student does his.” With his frenzied visions kept neatly on the page, Shelley immediately fit into this system as a productive citizen capable of teaching his own courses in cutting-edge literary criticism and holding forth during workshop sessions with the authority of a faculty member. In this sense, he arrived as a finished man never to be confused with the neophyte “aesthete who wants to come and dabble his delicate fingers in the valley of the Iowa River.”13

  Engle’s formulation presumed that professionalization—through acculturation to productive literary labor—in a university setting stripped the specter of suicide from the program. Like the husbandry his own father practiced as a horse trainer in Cedar Rapids, Engle was convinced that authors could be broken of their unstable temperaments and that their creative energies could be tamed and directed toward productivity. But such productivity in the form of published work, which was Engle’s favorite measure of the Workshop’s success, was not a panacea for the very real illnesses that plagued its members, fractured lives, troubled careers, and ruined marriages. Medical research “is confirming the long-held suspicion that there is a clinical link with important psychosocial implications between creativity and mental illness.” In particular, eighty percent of a sample of thirty Iowa Writers’ Workshop members studied by Nancy Andreasen “suffered from affective disorder compared to thirty percent of a matched control sample whose occupations ranged from lawyers to hospital administrators and social workers.” Shelley was not in a small minority, as Engle liked to suggest. Among the thirty Workshop members of Andreasen’s study, “Forty-three percent of writers had suffered from bipolar disorder in comparison with 10 percent of the controls.” Two of them committed suicide, totaling six percent of the sample, a number thousands of times greater than the one suicide, Shelley, out of 2,300 Engle estimated in 1961.14 In 1947, Engle refuted the link between creativity and mental illness on the evidence of his students’ long list of publications, prizes, and grants that included pieces in “Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Mademoiselle, Harper’s Bazaar, Saturday Review of Literature, New Yorker, Esquire, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, Accent, and the annual collections of short stories, The Best Short Stories of each year, and the O. Henry Prize Stories of each year.”15 According to the Look feature in 1965, he admitted the connection and thus presented the program as an institution that might serve as a corrective influence on imbalanced artists. In this vein, he touted the Workshop’s function as caustic medicine.

  “Our Richard Cory”

  Richard Cory was a well-acculturated professional man, a productive citizen to all who knew him—or thought they did. What troubled him remained closeted from view, discreetly hidden beneath a mantle of respectability that passed through society unquestioned. Edwin Arlington Robinson’s haunting poem, “Richard Cory,” depicts “a gentleman from sole to crown” who “fluttered pulses” and “glittered when he walked.” He was universally admired and even envied for his manifest material success and regal bearing that bore no ostentation. “In fine, we thought he was everything/ To make us wish that we were in his place.” Laboring to acquire his prestige, his admirers “worked and waited for the light,/ And went without the meat, and cursed the bread.” But, to their astonishment, “Richard Cory, one calm summer night/ Went home and put a bullet through his head.”16

  The professional success and social graces of Robert Shelley were appearances that belied the severe mental illness exacerbated by his closeted gay identity. “He is always cordial, always neatly attired,” notes Richard Bode of Shelley’s poetic counterpart. “But what he presents is not himself but a counterfeit picture of himself, a carefully composed disguise to impress those he encounters along the way,” he explains, noting that “the world is full of Richard Corys.” Like Shelley, repressed homosexuals “are dying slowly, dying inevitably, because, whether they admit it or not, they despise the person they pretend to be and lack the courage to become the person they are.” Only on rare occasions did figures like Randall Jarrell, who dared to reconfigure gender identity, pass through the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the late 1940s and early 1950s.17 Coming out to a community dominated by macho heterosexual combat veterans would have taken an extraordinary feat of courage. Shelley was thus “one of many who would sooner die than remove his mask and stand barefaced before the world.”18

  Heterosexual normativity was etched into the public life Shelley encountered at Iowa. The cultural climate at the workshop was replete with nuclear families, including that of Shelley’s mentor Warren Carrier. Carrier lived with his wife and children among “the young married students in the trailers, Quonsets and barracks” provided by university housing. “The hot summer of 1950” was filled with “the sound of clacking typewriters” that “vied with the cries of children,” a symphony of literary labor and domestic clamor. Ambition was paramount; “We would all be famous, and we would all have famous children. Yes.” But the students “were equally uncertain, whether authors or parents.” As the GI Bill funding began to run out, many scrambled to make ends meet for their young families “with part-time jobs to pay for cans of Gerber’s baby food and Carnation milk.” For men in the program, “the writing went slowly,” Shelley’s classmate James Sunwall notes, “and I fear we were only part-time husbands and fathers as well.”19 Tethered to his roommate and longtime companion William Stuckey from St. Louis, who had enrolled in the Workshop with him, Shelley was neither husband nor father. Those roles both dominated the cultural climate of the postwar Workshop and dictated the subject matter of student and faculty poetry. Engle’s own American Child: A Sonnet Sequence, published in 1945, was written for his daughter focusing on his trials of fatherhood, and Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle also takes up the theme of fatherhood, only from the point of view of loss and estrangement from his daughter in the wake of his divorce.

  On the rare occasions when Shelley treated domestic subjects in his poetry, fatherly love is conspicuously absent. The most no
table instance depicts children at a playground in “Evening in the Park.” In it, they “Seemed adrift on a darkened excursion” as evening closes in, cast as “ghosts in a sea of debris.” Opposite Engle and Snodgrass, the antithesis of sentimental and caring parents hurry them “to waiting cars and could have slapped/ Their children whose hands smelled of crushed fireflies” and, death-like, “shone with a greasy green light in the dark.” The alienation of the wives of MFA students was indicative of the heterosexual-male-centered locus of activity. “One young mother couldn’t stand pushing a cart through the abundance of a supermarket.” That sacrifice of family combined with a dedication to craft, Engle urged, was essential to the work of writing. “A writer is a monster with character,” he claimed, presuming the writer typically was a father compromising his family’s immediate well-being for long-term literary success.20 This formulation of authorship in effect evacuates the situation of the gay writer who ostensibly is not a father at a time predating married gay families by more than a half century. Shelley faced such trying circumstances in which he began to forge confessional poetry—a form that dropped masks and peeled labels to lay bare identity—within a veritable boot camp predicated on the systematic removal of identity from writing.

  Although everyone close to Shelley agreed that his death could have been prevented, there was no consensus about what finally drove him to the act. Carrier suggested his student’s inability to cope with his sexuality in this environment precipitated his suicide. Sunwall, on the other hand, cited undue pressure to achieve literary prestige. Shelley may have had a series of powerful publications that preceded him, Sunwall argued, but he was not immune to how “there was always a doubting of talent” at the Workshop. The seeds of his destruction were sown in the inherent dangers of the creative process itself, because “when you plumb around in the deep womb of the unconscious, anxiety and disturbance results. Such was the end of Bob Shelley, our most brilliant and best at the time.” In this sense, “He was our Richard Cory.” The drive for literary fame “in the midst of youth” epitomized in his singular “talent and publication—suddenly ended.” Sunwall attributed the response to how “we took too narrow a view, but our lives were caught up with writing and creativity which demand life and survival.” Students such as Snodgrass rushed in to occupy the newly vacated creative territory Shelley had discovered. But had the student body moved forward beyond his death with too much alacrity? Had his death merely operated like everything else at the Workshop—a justification for more literary production?

  According to Shelley’s classmate and fellow Workshop poet James B. Hall, too much sacrifice was made for the pursuit of publishable writing, an obsession that totally overshadowed the mental health of the students producing it. “Our wide reading, our commitment to the arts, our interest in criticism and theory, the often informed care that went into conceptual matters now seems to me to represent one overwhelming thing,” Hall concluded: “I think we cared too much.” Workshop students poured themselves into the creative process at the expense of their personal lives and social well-being. His accounting of the damaged and destroyed lives tells a different tale than Engle’s boast of only one suicide occurring on his watch as the program’s director. Hall could count “at least three workshop members [who] destroyed themselves.” Shelley stood out as “one marvelously talented poet [who] wrote ‘And chunks [sic] of snowmen tumbled from the sky,’ and thus foretold his own suicide.” Others with only a modicum of the talent Shelley possessed, who “seemed never to have attained literary—or perhaps emotional—maturity most surely killed themselves over things close to literature.” Self-destructive behavior was rampant in the vicious cycle of drinking and divorce. Many “lapsed into silence, disappeared, failed to reregister, drifted off into something else.” The dropouts and suicides mounted into a “process of elimination” that many saw “as tragic, as wasteful.” Those who “moved happily to something else” could rest assured “their leaving was for the best.” Praise was hard won in this environment where writers could expect their work to be received with skepticism and opposition. “False encouragement at Iowa City, there was none.”21

  Authorized histories of the Workshop have carefully muted any such insinuation that the students may have been overzealous in their pursuit of literary esteem to the point of neglecting the well-being of themselves and others. Hall’s original testimony, according to its appearance in the Iowa archive, was heavily excised and censored for A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Without Hall’s dark commentary, the volume maintains its commemorative appeal in honor of Engle’s memory. Two decades earlier, Engle himself hurried across campus when he heard that Stephen Wilbers’s history of the Workshop was headed into production at the University of Iowa Press. Similarly, Engle wanted to add key details to polish his historical memory. He supplied new passages that alluded to his own contribution to the study of criticism in the program to refute dissenters in the English department claiming the curriculum lacked theoretical substance. In particular, he insisted that the manuscript should mention how “He introduced, and himself taught—the first course in Contemporary Literature on the campus; the first Seminars in such major individual writers as James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Proust, etc.”22

  Any gaps in the area of literary criticism within the curriculum Shelley covered by developing his analytical expertise in the advanced theory course he taught and the sophisticated reviews he published. Had he lived to see the publication of Poetry in February 1952, Shelley would have been gratified that he was proclaimed the unofficial poet laureate of the Workshop. He had single-handedly revitalized poetry at Iowa, which had come under fire for its stale standardized curriculum and factory-like production of MFAs. His death in late April of 1951 indeed came precisely at the moment the literary establishment had made preparations not just for his introduction as a young new phenomenon, but also for his canonization in the pantheon of great contemporary literature. If the Workshop students cared too much about their professional development, as Hall suggested, it was in large part because such powerful and accomplished writers as Shelley had been poached by Carrier and Engle, who groomed them as future Workshop faculty members.

  Shelley’s grooming into the literary profession was perhaps no more apparent than when he made his debut in Poetry, which was engineered by Engle and the journal’s editor Karl Shapiro. At the time, Shapiro had dedicated a series of issues to trending topics such as Activists for the May 1951 issue and the translated poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez for July 1953. Between the two issues, he prominently positioned an issue recognizing the high quality and quantity of work crossing his desk from “colleges and universities and from the poetry workshops and summer writing conferences of America.” For February 1952, Poetry thus divided its pages between the world’s two most powerful graduate creative writing programs. Shapiro had chosen Engle’s Iowa Writers’ Workshop on the strength of its brilliant showing in a variety of high-end literary journals. What struck him most was a thirty-three-page booklet published by Prairie Press that had appeared the previous spring, in 1951. Shapiro found the work showcased in the slim volume so impressive that he conscripted Brewster Ghiselin, then director of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Utah, to review it in the back pages of the issue. His dedication of the issue to such a great deal of Workshop writing was in many ways a foregone conclusion for Shapiro, given the manifest success of Engle’s young poets. Shapiro had also served on the Workshop faculty before taking over as editor of Poetry in 1950.23 The only difficult consideration for him was which of the Workshop’s peer institutions to feature in the issue. He settled on the University of Washington, not because any of its students particularly struck him as the face of poetry’s future, but because its director, Theodore Roethke, had achieved a luminous presence in the literary world. Roethke, along with Lowell, was the standard for aspiring poets. In Lowell’s creative writing course at the Boston Center for Adult
Education, Anne Sexton began to model her work after Roethke. Together with Randall Jarrell and Sexton, Roethke defined the middle generation of mid-twentieth-century American poets.24

  Of the many MFA students from Iowa and Washington featured in the February 1952 issue of Poetry, Shelley received the lion’s share of attention. Saving the best for last, Shapiro selected his Shakespearean sonnet “Harvest” for the prized closing position in the collection. The one piece Ghiselin chose to reprint in its entirety from Poems from the Iowa Poetry Workshop in his review was Shelley’s “Evening in the Park.” Whereas all other contributors were limited to one poem each in the issue, Shelley had two and was spotlighted in Ghiselin’s glowing review. Indeed, Ghiselin reprinted “Evening in the Park” less as a means of illustrating the volume’s prowess than as a way of showcasing Shelley, whom he named the best of the top three poets in the volume, along with Peter Hald and James B. Hall. But in praising Shelley, Ghiselin’s words seemed to prophesy the young writer’s suicide. He wrote that his technical skill reinforces “thematic” effects of “slack integrity” and “imminent disintegration.” Shelley’s impeding self-destruction saturates “Evening in the Park.” “Paper boats soon sank” on this playground as “balloons went limp” and the sky darkened. Ghiselin highlights how “in the second section of the poem the park itself becomes a boat washed on a journey brief and digressive like a pleasure trip, in every sense ‘darkened’; and in the last line the ‘sea of debris’ shows to baffled ghosts a green light of passage that suggests grave-gleam and sea phosphorous.” As the children gather their belongings, they “Had expected too much probably,” signaling a despondent note of resignation that refuses to determine the symbolic meaning of the poem’s details of balloons, “crackerjack icons,” and the sunken paper boats. This results in an eerie detachment from embodied presence, a kind of evacuation of humanity focused instead on an image of the park after death, occupied only by “ghosts in a sea of debris.”25