A Delicate Aggression Read online

  Cassill withdrew his resignation, although he did anything but cool off during the ensuing month. Instead he marshaled an army of supporters who rained hellfire on Gerber and the university’s new president Howard Bowen, circulating petitions to protect his place on the Workshop faculty. One former student, Andre Dubus, arranged a protest march on the Pentacrest, the main square of Iowa’s campus, but was dissuaded by Engle, who feared the public display would destroy the program. Hardly a gesture of diplomacy, Cassill’s vitriolic campaign was clearly the wrong tactic for securing lasting employment. Instead the assault functioned as a wild form of self-immolation. “Almost immediately,” Gerber recorded in a department memo he stapled to Cassill’s file, “he and his friends began a steady attack, orally and in letters, on certain individuals and groups within the Department.” Now under pressure, Gerber suggested that the English department would “review Mr. Cassill’s claims to tenure but not while subject to duress which is both unjustified and unjustifiable.”34 Convinced that Gerber had been “disarmed by the ploy” to withdraw his resignation, Cassill, in a last desperate act, made “a tactical offer to assume the directorship” during the spring of 1965.35 No one, including himself, took it seriously. By the following fall, Cassill had begun a writer-in-residence position at Purdue University. On leave during the upheaval was Donald Justice, who returned to the Workshop in the fall. Engle requested a salary increase for Justice, but was denied because the administration had allocated the necessary finances for a new secretary. The Williams hire, the abuse of Cassill, and now the refusal to support Justice, his next strongest faculty member, combined to break Engle’s spirit. He submitted his resignation, effective at the close of the spring semester in 1966, after which he immediately founded the International Writing Program.36

  In his bitter diatribe “Why I Left the Midwest,” Cassill blamed a climate in which young talent cannot thrive. To know finally that in Iowa “young writers are unthinkable” is the instance in which “one realizes the reality of his exile.” Worse yet, Iowa is ignored in New York City, Cassill complained. “In the distorting mirror that the Midwest offered me in recent years, I saw reflected the pig who had been, not very gloriously, after all, to the culture market in New York, valued or ignored on the basis of his market value, his voice lost somewhere on the wind.” A “sign painted on the wall of one or another of the public buildings” near the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, reading, “Where there is no vision the people perish,” captured Cassill’s attention. He read it “as a warning with a very personal application. Coupled with my instinct for survival,” he recalled, “the sign said, ‘Homo fugit. Get out while you can!’ ” From that moment on, Cassill “made arrangements to move and withdraw [his] manuscripts from the University of Iowa library,” transferring them to Brown University, where he accepted a visiting lecturer position, replacing the novelist John Hawkes in 1966.37 Just one year before this epiphany, signs of his imminent departure were evident in his spirited invective, “Must Be Trouble in River City,” published July 1965 in Washington Post Book Week.38

  In his final meeting with President Bowen, Cassill charged that “expediency, political maneuvering, jockeying for personal advantage had prevented any clear articulation of the issues most important to the students and the concerned people of the state.” The administrator simply replied that Cassill should “understand how that happened,” since so much of his own fiction dealt with it. Leaning back in his chair, Bowen lit a cigarette and ran his fingers through his hair. “Then with a flick of his wrists and impatience in his tone, he said, ‘If you feel the way you do, why don’t you take your manuscripts and just GO-oooh!”39 So Cassill left, never to return to his birth state that had shaped and nurtured his personal character and professional identity.

  Cassill’s achievements at the Workshop were considerable. Among the most notable was the success of his student Margaret Walker, the first African-American woman writer from the Workshop to win critical acclaim. Originally written as her MFA thesis under Cassill, her novel Jubilee (1966) initiated a movement dedicated to contemporary aesthetic treatments of the slave past that would eventuate in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a work many regard as the greatest novel in the history of American literature.40 In his sweeping dismissal of Iowa, Cassill clearly failed to appreciate his accomplishments with students such as Walker, and the progress he made with them. Not to be underestimated is his work with Raymond Chandler, whose writing embodied the principle of elevating popular forms to the level of literature that Cassill advanced throughout his career. This conviction was visible in Cassill’s comment on Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (1952) as a representative of how “the mode of the paperback original, husks and all, turns out to be excellently suited to the objectives of the novel of ideas.”41

  Cassill’s notorious habit of disowning and defacing his own significant contributions to American literary culture did not end with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In dramatic fashion rivaling his public rejection of all things Iowa, Cassill attempted to destroy a decade and a half of professional development in one speech. The speech took place at the fifteenth annual meeting of the Associated Writing Programs he had founded in 1967. Disgusted with its current trajectory, he declared the association irreversibly flawed and urged it to disband immediately, much to the horror of its loyal constituents. Capitalist corruption, he claimed, arose when faculty began “using other people’s money—grants from their universities and arts agencies—[and] devised ways to get their own and one another’s work into print, and then converted those publications into salary increments,” as Louis Menand explains.42 His stunned audience listened in disbelief as he pontificated on how “We are now at the point where writing programs are poisoning, and in turn, we are being poisoned by, departments and institutions on which we have fastened them.”43

  Greener pastures, it would seem, awaited Cassill at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, the location of his self-exile. But controversy followed him even there. Once again the university newspaper proved to be his nemesis. The staff of Brown’s newspaper had caught wind of an Esquire article by Cassill, “Up the Down Co-Ed,” a racy treatment of sex on campus reprising his previous fictional foray into the topic. “Verlin Cassill: Another D. H. Lawrence, or Just a Dirty Old Man?” the headline ran. Humiliated, Cassill decided to retreat rather than retaliate as he did with the Britannica controversy. Robert Day, his successor as head of the AWP, recalled his first meeting with Cassill. Due to the Esquire scandal just then hitting the headlines, “Verlin was having a bad day.” Cassill handed Day a shoebox of three-by-five index cards. “These are the names and addresses of all the creative writing teachers and graduate programs in the country. This is AWP. It will need to be many things to many people, but at its soul it should always be for our students to find their life as writers, and less for us to establish our academic careers,” he said warmly.44

  The ruptures and fissures in the arc of Cassill’s career occurred at the juncture between literature and commerce, forces in tension arising from Engle’s larger vision of forging an alliance between business, art, and higher education. Ironically, the corporate third-party interests Cassill found so reprehensible in the university infrastructure at Iowa were exactly those he had fully engaged for the sale of his textbook Writing Fiction with the Britannica Workshop course. Just as he had pursued avenues toward elevating conventional popular fiction into novels of ideas, Cassill also transgressed into the forbidden territory of journalism and advertising for his methodology. In particular, “the form of the story (which owes much to McLuhan’s analysis of the logic in advertising layout and the composition of a newspaper front page—and, therefore, by extension, owes much to ads on front pages) ought to indicate that character here is a product of cut-paste-and-paste editorializing, mine and the imperial ad-men’s,” he said in describing his work, making explicit the parallel between commercial marketing and his approach to short story writing.45

 
; Cassill mined his Workshop experience for his best material. His career clearly benefited from his association with the program. His first collection of short stories, for example, appeared in a volume co-authored with the former Workshop teachers Herbert Gold and James B. Hall in 1957. Iowa provided the settings and characters of his stories that appeared in the collections The Father and Other Stories (1965) and The Happy Marriage and Other Stories (1966). “And In My Heart,” which Clarence Andrews describes as a “thinly disguised roman à clef,” features a writing student named Steve Forest who dreams of becoming the next Dostoyevsky. Forest finds himself embroiled in academic turf wars, mainly between older and younger faculty with divergent aesthetic approaches. Cassill’s commentary on campus sex among co-eds again enters the scene, as Forest’s love interest, a charismatic and alluring sorority girl, happens to also be a nymphomaniac.46 Embedded in his stories are scores of references to Iowa, not the least of which is the literary pretense of its poets “trying to extend the Whitman catalogue of American goodies.” He skewers the belief that the rural setting is fertile for the country idyll, and the feeling “that coming west of Chicago is, in itself, qualification of a poet.” He writes, “the smell of horse dung does not automatically make it literature.”47 Cassill dismantles the myth just as surely as he helped construct it as an Iowa author. Ironically, Cassill believed his problems were in Iowa, when they were really in himself, as controversy followed him to Brown. The Workshop and Iowa nonetheless continued to influence his writings, which “carry with them a certain air of the creative writing class; even if they weren’t produced in one,” Bernard Bergzorn observed. One can “readily imagine these well-made pieces being put on the seminar table and opened up for examination.”48 The finish and technical brilliance of his work helped inspire a generation of writers who “can turn out a product that is as mechanically ingenious as the latest television set,” as James Laughlin commented in 1957.49

  Cassill idolized the aesthetic freedom and innovation of “the little magazines.” He admired such outlets as Perspective in St. Louis, Epoch, Accent, and sophisticated literary quarterlies like Kenyon and Hudson. Little magazines arose in opposition to the allegedly standardized and uniform “New Yorker rule book” of conventions that transform writers into mere reporters of “points of sociological interest” who “reproduce with the utmost authenticity—the points of view, the tags, the mannerisms—and the customers love it, because often they can recognize themselves and get a self-appreciating laugh.”50 The backlash aligned with the anticommercial mission of graduate creative writing programs. But Cassill saw regionalism as the barrier separating Iowa from the aesthetic credibility associated with the little magazines. “The collective denial of the very concept of an Iowa writer” to Cassill limited the state’s authors to such categories as “yokel poets” in the tradition of Edgar Lee Masters.51 Cassill’s venom toward this label surfaces in a telling passage from his early story “And in My Heart.” In it, his character pinpoints Masters as the cause of the Iowa curse, demonizing him “for delaying the building of literature.” “He shook himself and hissed, ‘I do blame it on Masters. If the sonofabitch were here I’d hit him in the face. I’d hit him in the face.’ He struck his knee with his fist.” The fictional professor confesses, “Once I went to the trouble of finding out where Masters was buried, and I made the pilgrimage there to spit on his grave. Pork-barrel poetry is killing us,” he proclaims, forecasting Cassill’s own exodus to Rhode Island, never to set foot in Iowa again.52

  5 • The Guru: Marguerite Young

  Resplendent in her black woolen cape despite the stifling ninety-degree heat of late August, Marguerite Young cut a charismatic—if not downright eccentric—artistic presence at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. “I thought she was crazy,” her student Bruce Kellner confessed. He quickly learned what her dedicated “sub-flock of young writers” knew.1 She dwelled in fictional worlds that spawned sprawling manuscripts running thousands of pages long. The most conspicuous of them was the capacious novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, her greatest achievement, which won her the spotlight she had always yearned for. The project was two decades in the making. Virtually invisible by comparison was her other gargantuan effort, an eclectic 2,500-page biography of the radical Socialist Eugene Debs, which she never finished. At Iowa, her runaway popularity among students sparked jealousy from professors like Robert O. Bowen, who once brandished a large butcher knife menacingly at her during an Iowa City party. Trying to shake off his hard glares during conversation, Young whispered to her interlocutors, “Bob is going to kill me.” Bowen’s knife drew blood that night, if only his own. In his drunken rage he accidentally sliced his hand, bleeding “all over the countertop, the floor, himself.” The wound was so severe that he was carted off to the emergency room, on the way screaming, “Goddamn! Goddamn Bruce Kellner!” in frustration that his star student had migrated to Young’s cohort.2

  Young’s magnetic appeal to Workshop students, which drove other teachers like Bowen mad with envy, was overwhelmingly obvious to all present during the first fiction workshop meeting for fall 1956. Poised before the incoming class in flamboyant bohemian attire that made her colleagues appear staid by comparison, “she looked every bit the literary artist.”3 Forty new students crowded into the baking Quonset hut that day to select a mentor. Only a slim minority of the class opted to sign on with Ray West and Curtis Harnack, while the rest flocked to Young. Much of her allure derived from her reinvention of the novel in a project of colossal ambition and experimentation not seen since Melville or Proust. Many elite and influential journals had published portions of it, drawing attention from posh literary audiences, much to the consternation of her colleagues such as Bowen. His own stilted war novel Bamboo was largely ignored by both critical and popular readers.4 In addition to her literary prowess, Young’s supportive teaching style also clashed sharply with the harsh methods of faculty members such as John Berryman.

  By her second year teaching in the program, Young had established a devout following of young writers dedicated to her belief in “using a fuller language for an imagination of plentitude.”5 This approach defied the program’s overriding emphasis on condensed prose produced through a halting composition process rooted in negation and depersonalization. Much of her appeal came from her curiously nineteenth-century bearing and attitude toward creative expression, one bizarrely anachronistic in this era of New Criticism that placed a premium on curtailing and pruning imaginative flights, much less surrendering to them with wild abandon. Her intimacy with her coterie, whom she took on research outings in the dead of night to observe passengers disembarking a midnight bus and filing into a sad downtown café, alerted Workshop student William Murray to “the fine line between mentor and apprentice.” Although he “would have liked it if she had asked me to sit with her,” Murray, who was not included in this silent “coterie ritual,” knew he would have been intruding and potentially calling attention to himself as an outsider.6 Years later he recalled rushing from class to retch into the reeds beside the Iowa River after his story “Goats” had been destroyed by his classmates, when moments later he felt Young’s consoling hand on his heaving shoulders.7

  Achieving access to Young’s inner circle promised nothing less than total liberation from the strictures of the workshop model and tyranny of New Critical creative methods. Young’s refreshing tolerance of subject matter selection invited experimentation. “Oh, the subject matter doesn’t matter!” she sang out. “I was having a romp letting my imagination go and not worrying too much about realism,” Murray wistfully reminisced. Rather than Young herself, “who made you feel special aesthetically,” the student body posed the greatest threat to creativity as a collective force capable of meting out lacerating criticism.8 Young focused primarily on students’ aesthetic growth. Although her work as literary agent was far less conspicuous than Paul Engle’s, her deep concern for the reception of their writing in class carried over into the public realm, whe
re she played an instrumental role in initiating their authorial careers.

  Young’s most famous student, John Gardner, Jr., the author of Grendel and October Light, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976, flourished under her literary tutelage. Gardner discovered his distinctive voice under her guidance, as he recalled in a 1971 interview, because “I was writing something different from what the other people in the Workshop were writing.” Like Young, he was averse to the damage of unproductive negative criticism and the stultifying conformity fostered by workshop sessions. “I didn’t want any comments because some writers want to learn how to write correctly. What that really means is that they write exactly like everyone else.” As one of the first serious writers to connect with Gardner, Young struck him as “so ‘Left Bank’ [that] I simply fell head over heels.” Like so many of her students, Gardner benefited enormously from “the writerly validation” she instilled in him, all through her unique subversion of the workshop method of instruction.9