A Delicate Aggression Read online

  MFA by Mail: The Britannica Scandal

  Cassill’s paltry Iowa salary was not enough to recover from the massive debts he had accrued from a decade of expensive Parisian living, Sorbonne tuition for his art training, and the sustenance of his wife and two children. All of Engle’s efforts to increase Cassill’s wage from the university were stymied by the administration, mainly because of the openly hostile attitude of John Gerber, chairman of the English department, toward the Workshop. Engle’s 1963 financial report to Gerber highlighted the injustice of Cassill’s status as the lowest paid of his full-time faculty members despite his prolific output. Sharing notes from his meeting with the regents “about the present and projected needs of the program in creative writing,” he reported to Gerber that his expanding program consisted of “300 graduate enrollments in the writing program courses this year, of which 126 are actually in writing courses, 86 in fiction. For many years there were 35–40 students in fiction, with four staff members to look after them,” he explained. “Now we have twice as many students, and one less faculty member.” Cassill was his lowest paid faculty member, at $8,500 per year. Despite publishing scores of articles “in most of the good magazines,” five novels, and a textbook, he earned less than his former student James B. Hall, who “now receives $11,500 at Oregon, although he has published less than his teacher.”12 Such humiliation and injustice Engle would not tolerate.

  Cassill’s popular fiction written in France relieved only a fraction of the financial pressure, which became acute by 1963. Turning to the commercial publishing industry made perfect sense. Enter Britannica Schools, which offered a variety of correspondence courses for a fee. Engle agreed to undertake “the servicing of students enrolled through Britannica Schools” for poetry, playwriting, and fiction courses, while Britannica would “acquire the students through mutually acceptable advertising,” and the two entities would “split the proceeds down the middle.” The company’s affiliation with the Workshop was intended to “add luster to the Britannica Schools roster of offerings.”13 The Workshop in turn could enjoy the advantage of added exposure to increase enrollments through the correspondence course’s marketing campaign while bolstering sales of Cassill’s textbook to answer to his acute financial straits.

  But while Engle was abroad on a visit to Hong Kong funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, details of the deal with Britannica were published in the Daily Iowan on March 19, 1963—and it could not have come at a worse time. It appeared that a student-writer, Peter Huyck, had seized upon his routine assignment to review Cassill’s latest publication, Writing Fiction, as an occasion for revenge. Faculty member Donald Justice, in a letter to Engle, added a marginal comment identifying the author of the article as “a former student of Verlin’s who’d been given a ‘C’—now a philosophy student & a hanger-out at Kenney’s.” Justice’s conclusion was that, snubbed by his own treatment in the Workshop, Huyck had eviscerated Cassill for irresponsibly advising budding authors “to adopt the writer’s lifestyle, to ‘Go in debt as a writer,’ or ‘Choose writers’ illnesses,’ or (I like this one) ‘Drink like a writer.’ ” Engle also came under attack in the piece for pursuing funds through commercial channels and trafficking in “the slick magazines” instead of growing “serious talent.”14

  Although Huyck allowed that “the new [correspondence] program seems at first to be a boon since it will obviously provide a great deal of money for additional graduate students and staff,” he argued that this method of fund-raising corroded the program’s literary integrity. “For although the only legitimate purpose of the workshop may be the dissemination of funds,” he observed, “few if any students are initially attracted here for that sole reason (this, however, is conspicuously not so in the case of some staff).”15 Perhaps most stinging was Huyck’s own investigative journalism: “To convince myself that the new program is offensive enough to discourage talented young writers from coming to Iowa City in the future one need look no further than the advertising ballyhooing it.” He sent in the advertisement coupon for a “ten-day trial examination” of the course titled “Writing Is for Readers” that Britannica offered, which was “given for no credit, but you will receive an individual certificate of completion,” a faux diploma bearing the Workshop seal.

  Particularly devastating was the brochure’s shameless cover art “in montage: GI with machine gun, small boy fishing, man shooting grizzly bear, mechanic and race car, private eye and prostitute.” Under the heading “THE GREAT CHALLENGE” is a scene “of some Greeks talking on the Acropolis” that inexplicably includes “some women in Roman orgy dress” and begins with the words, “From Homer to Hemingway . . .”16 Huyck predicted a dire fate from this Faustian deal: “I doubt that even the thriving SUI Art Department could survive the establishment of a correspondence course in conjunction with Britannica Schools.”17 In a lengthy typed letter to Engle detailing the calamity, Justice scrawled in pencil on the last page the cause of the publicity crisis in his view: “The illustration on the cover of the Britannica brochure, for instance (machine gun, lady of the streets, etc.).” He insisted, “We ought to take steps to correct any commercial implications of the Britannica association, I’m sure.”18

  The scandal positively unhinged Cassill, who watched in horror as a public inquisition ignited the editorial pages of the Daily Iowan. Some rushed to his defense, such as David Roberts, who groused that although the student newspaper had chosen to publish a lengthy assault on Writing Fiction, it would not “condescend” to review Clem Anderson, Cassill’s most ambitious novel. “The only mention this fine novel merited” in the campus paper “occurred two and one half years after its publication in the form of a couple of letters,” he sneered, “by snot-nosed blurb quoters who seemed more interested in book jackets than in literature.”19 The next day, Norman Peterson blasted the “editorial irresponsibility” of the paper for printing the piece by Huyck. In defense of Cassill, he predicted that “at least one of his books will be considered a literary masterpiece,” arguing that he is an authority in his field “whose character cannot be attacked with impunity.”20 Three days later, a rebuttal criticized Cassill’s textbook and the “means by which the Workshop wishes to take culture to the masses,” highlighting “shortcomings in Mr. Cassill’s text book” rather than his novel, and questioning “the value of the venture with which it is connected.”21

  With the editorial page ablaze, Justice reported to Engle that “all this was unbearable, especially to Verlin who very naturally flew into a rage which has not subsided since.” Justice admitted, “I myself still smolder and I am tamer than Verlin.” Cassill responded by contacting everyone who might aid his plot for revenge. He “got in touch with various people, wrote letters to Gerber & Hancher [president of the university], and managed to have the publisher of the Iowan print a substantial correction of some of the misrepresentations.” Predictably, the unsympathetic Gerber “was of the opinion . . . to let the whole thing drop.” But his indifference only intensified Cassill’s fury, causing him to jump “to the conclusion, partly on intuition, partly on the basis of conversations with Gerry Stevenson, and partly (as I suggested to him) out of incipient paranoia, that a sort of conspiracy existed in Iowa City against the workshop,” Justice wrote. Cassill was convinced “that its headquarters were the Paper Place [bookstore] and Kenney’s and that one of the ringleaders was Stevenson; that, further this ring had a direct line to the Iowan somehow.” Although initially skeptical of Cassill’s theory, Justice allowed “that there are a number of disaffected ex-workshop students who don’t much like us” and “wanted to do some mischief.” Justice noted that if such a cadre of conspirators had not existed before, Cassill’s fiery crusade essentially willed them into existence, “hardening their views” collectively as “an organized conspiracy of malcontents.” This all distilled into a commitment to vengeance. “It is now for Verlin practically a vendetta.”22

  The Daily Iowan expanded the scope of the scandal
by sensationalizing the firing of recent Workshop graduate Edmund Skellings from his faculty position at Frostburg State College for teaching Lolita. As word of his firing spread, Skellings immediately dashed off a letter to Engle, begging for support. “Old faculty thought you were vulgar, same with Snodgrass and Langland,” he told Engle, hoping the director would sympathize with his own casting as “a dirty old man, contributing to the delinquency of students’ morals, which everyone knows the Commies are mixed up with and other liberals.”23 The newspaper claimed—and with more than a hint of schadenfreude—that Skellings taught for the Workshop. Despite holding a Workshop MFA, however, he had never been an instructor for the program. Cassill took the misidentification as further evidence of the Daily Iowan’s conspiracy against the Workshop, which for him “was the last straw.”24

  Leaping to defend the Workshop’s reputation, Cassill made it his first order of business to send a letter to the paper explaining that the shamed graduate had never taught at the Workshop. Next, he called Frostburg’s president to say that Skellings “had disgraced the U of I while in the Workshop, and that the Workshop washed its hands of [him].” The rampage provoked the incredulous Skellings to ask, “Why would Verlin spew this gratuitous venom?” Skellings consulted Gerber to find a deeper motive, discovering that “Verlin was having personality problems and acting strangely.” Skellings then learned that Cassill’s strange behavior was directly linked to his vendetta against Gerald Stevenson, the alleged leader of the Kenney’s conspiracy and perceived mastermind of the Huyck review. According to Skellings, at Cassill’s lowest point, he had “threatened Gerry physically and libeled him publically in the workshop (Gerry is deciding whether to sue) and said he would take a hammer and personally destroy Kenney’s and the Paper Place.”25

  Stevenson posed a major threat to Cassill primarily because of his powerful position as an editor of the underground press in Iowa City at the time. Stevenson had originally taken the reins of the Iowa Defender from Stephen Tudor, a disgruntled Daily Iowan editor bent on revenge against his former employer. Stevenson reinforced Tudor’s vision for the Defender as an anti-establishment countercultural alternative to the Daily Iowan. Its initials ID symbolized its oppositional stance—and lack of restraint—toward the DI. Cassill was well aware of the radical anti-corporate bent of Stevenson’s paper, which appeared weekly throughout the school year from 1959 to 1969 (except for 1966). A former special collections curator at the University of Iowa library, Stevenson held perhaps even greater power as proprietor of the Paper Place bookstore and the Qara Press. Combined with the Iowa Defender, these radical outlets formed the underground press of Iowa City, providing a potent liberal progressive critique of the university’s policies and practices, especially as they became intertwined with corporate financial interests.26

  Although Cassill was convinced Stevenson was the mastermind behind the Huyck attack, Skellings aptly diagnosed that the real source of the upheaval was the perception that Cassill had prostituted the Workshop for his own profit. Still worse, he had compromised his own standards to do it. “The Brit. Deal,” he remarked, “was a commercialization of the University and Workshop name.” The most damning evidence against Cassill was the deal’s violation of his own conviction that “it was impossible to teach writing without personal contact,” as Skellings pointed out.27 Cassill’s role as textbook author of the correspondence course enabled this faceless distant pedagogical arrangement that was totally adverse to the ideal he touted. How seriously would Workshop faculty really take the mission of educating correspondence students who would earn neither actual university credit nor a valid MFA? This was a clear case of not just compromising principles for money, but obliterating them. It was also the grain of truth in the criticism that nearly drove him to the brink of insanity.

  By now beside himself in Hong Kong, helpless to save his sinking ship with each incoming tale of the worsening disaster, Engle finally received Cassill’s testimony. In his letter, Cassill described Stevenson as “a local crank” trained in library science “who deeply loathes all Britannica enterprises.” Although rife with paranoia and indignation, Cassill’s account does acknowledge Huyck’s noble aim of encouraging the program to return to original principles that might attract rather than discourage serious writers. Cassill discovered this after calling the disgruntled student into his office, where he girded himself for a volcanic confrontation that threatened to boil over into raised voices, frank invectives, and even fisticuffs. To Cassill’s surprise, Huyck was operating less out of a personal vendetta than a desire to rescue the program from excessive commercialization. The student “eagerly asked if we weren’t changing plans as a result of his intrusion. I told him no.”28 If Cassill’s letter to Engle was any indication, it would appear that Huyck had achieved his agenda of initiating institutional reform specifically designed to tone down the promotion of the Workshop from its current shrill pitch.

  Whereas letters from Justice, Skellings, and Cassill on the home front to Engle were frantic and desperate—all sent within weeks of each other representing a dizzying constellation of views of the controversy—damage control at Britannica was cool and collected. Britannica executive Gordon Dupee sent a letter to Engle in July, months after the smoke had cleared, in which he resolved to replace the scandalous brochure cover with a more dignified group portrait of the Workshop’s principal faculty members. “The photo would be the one taken of Cassill, Justice, and yourself, rather than the one originally indicated by the advertising agency people” who had devised the pulp montage evoking sensational rather than literary fiction, much less poetry.29 Engle was relieved to reach this resolution, which nonetheless failed to address the deeper problem of profiting from the sale of faux Workshop degrees by mail.30

  Look Back in Anger

  In this Cold War climate of government surveillance and suspicion, R. V. Cassill fell prey to his fear of a conspiracy in Iowa. His free gravitation between popular culture and literary art in France was a recipe for disaster at the Workshop in the early 1960s. This is mainly because Engle’s work to bridge the gap between literature and commerce—spanning the deeper chasm between art and money, which the culture understood as mutually exclusive—had come to a head with the Britannica correspondence course. In 1951, Engle was actively promoting himself in precisely this manner through an aggressive campaign spearheaded by his publicity agent at W. Colston Leigh, Inc. The company compiled quotes on Engle’s lecturing in a series of full-page magazine advertisements with the explicit objective of showcasing his vision for both academic and business audiences. Engle’s marketing of his own speaking engagements positioned the Workshop as a viable partner with commercial trade and for-profit enterprise. Advertisements identified Engle as a friend of business appropriate for both academic and popular audiences.31

  Cassill’s sense of the state of literature reflects his paradoxical bitterness toward the mindless commercialization of “the short story and who is writing it in 1962.” Engle had sounded Cassill on the topic for a magazine piece he was commissioned to write shortly before the Britannica scandal. Cassill took it as an opportunity to weigh in, ripping J. D. Salinger and the New Yorker. He groused that “one of the great disasters of the last fifteen years was the promotion of Shirley Ann Grau as a writer, just because some of her idiot notions of what the short story ought to be (perhaps given an assist by Martha Foley through Rita Smith and them) very superficially resembled the departures from realism of Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor.” He fumed that “this is part of a larger pattern” in which “bad money drives good money out.” Commercialism taints literary art, he ranted, pointing to how “Tillie Olsen’s stuff resembles what certain ‘serious’ frauds in decades of writing classes were too often turning out.” Reserving his deepest cut for the author of The Catcher in the Rye, he says, “then there’s Salinger, who turns out to be an artist ‘after all’ in somewhat the same way Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, and even Laurel and Har
dy turned out to be artists making important contributions to the ‘development of film.’ ” Under the category of “minds I have loved [that] have prospered little of late,” Cassill reserves praise for “George PE, Jim Hall, Flannery O’Connor, Florence Gould, Herb Wilner, Robie Macauley, J. F. Powers . . .”32

  Cassill’s bitterness toward the literary market’s advancement of writers he considered superficial was just as intense as his spite toward university bureaucracy. He found particularly hollow the University of Iowa’s administrative promise to increase funding for creative writing: “since the legislature was getting more ‘liberal’ they could now buy for Iowa a better place in the cultural sun.”33 Such spite is not surprising since Cassill was so grossly underpaid. More pressing still was the fact that John Gerber had sought the hiring of Oregon faculty member Robert Williams with tenure at the rank of associate professor in January 1965. Such a lucrative offer came as a direct affront to the perennially underpaid Cassill, and a breach of authority to Engle who was out of town when the hire was made. Cassill immediately demanded that he too be considered for promotion and tenure, but was denied. After he submitted his resignation, which had been looming since the Britannica incident, the committee on appointments and promotions (which included Engle) persuaded him to remain for a one-month “cooling off” period, during which he might reconsider carrying on in his former position.