A Delicate Aggression Read online

  When authorship became a sustainable occupation, certain commercially successful writers found themselves isolated from the literary community. Stephen King succumbed to this truth in his emotional acceptance of the Distinguished Contribution to American Letters award from the National Book Award Foundation in 2003. King saw this lifetime achievement award as a token recognition of his decades-long dominance of the genre fiction market and an unmistakable sign that none of his works were worthy of the highly esteemed National Book Award itself, regardless of his various attempts to write literary fiction of that caliber. Authentic acceptance among the ranks of the elite literati permanently eluded him, he realized. The stigma of genre fiction writing that prevented him from joining the ranks of great American authors “was still hurtful[;] it’s infuriating and it’s demeaning,” he confessed. King has long held a grudge against the establishment occupied by figures like Martin Amis and Michael Chabon, leaving him “bitterly angry at writers who were considered ‘literary.’ ” Chabon, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, is a graduate of the prestigious creative writing MFA program at the University of California, Irvine, and Amis is the son of the literary lion Kingsley Amis, whom Time named one of the greatest British writers since 1945. King, without a degree like Chabon’s or a legacy like Amis’s, complained that these writers “seemed to have an inside track.”38 He is not mistaken that Norman Mailer and John Cheever, among others whom King revered and emulated throughout his career, all coursed through Iowa City and joined forces with the Workshop during their careers, the former in various visits and conference presentations, and the latter as a faculty member. Had he been armed with an Iowa MFA, King (the King of Shawshank Redemption and Dolores Claiborne rather than Cujo) might have been a force to be reckoned with in the literary world.

  American culture has been so disinclined to canonize popular writers because it deems that commercial success should follow rather than precede artistic greatness, mainly because of the persistent myth of the starving artist. To starve for one’s vision and then attain wealth is acceptable, whereas the reverse is an execrable taboo. Most master narratives of literary history, especially those produced by the webmasters and memoirists of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, obscure the commercial concerns for promotion and publicity in order to highlight a mystified portrait of the literary artist’s creativity, a vision of authorship ironically at odds with Engle’s. But creative writing programs came of age when literature itself became show business, and Iowa was attentive to this shift. Resistance to or renunciation of that shift crippled fledgling programs such as Columbia’s, which until recently offered limited financial support for its MFA creative writing students on the smug assumption that writing was the bastion of the independently wealthy.39 Iowa, on the other hand, responded to the cultivation of consumer taste and the popularization of literature visible not only in the standard bearers of the New Yorker, Harper’s, and the Atlantic, but in increasingly sophisticated popular postwar venues such as Look and Flair.

  The program’s intense dedication to commercial publication despite backlash from its own students surfaced in an Iowa Writers’ Workshop Newsletter from 1972. The heading, “ABOUT ‘PUBLICATION’: This is bound to enrage—so be it!” anticipated a firestorm on this sensitive issue. “We presume to be a professional body,” the statement proclaimed, “and are thus largely concerned with professional publication. While it is hardly the function of the Workshop newsletter to determine which are professional publishers and which amateur, some standards must be applied or the word itself becomes meaningless.” It then proceeded to rule out “Newspapers, vanity press, house-organ, public relations, one-shot or occasional magazine, and gratis publication,” this time prompting rather than bracing against protest: “You want to disagree about it? Come ahead. But keep us informed.” An impressive list of publications in high-profile journals and presses followed, featuring such students as T. C. Boyle, Robert C. S. Downs, and Dan Gleason. In the next issue, for spring 1973, a heading labeled “Angry” aired the dissenting views, suggesting that “if the Workshop has gone commercial, then where in America can there be any virtue left?” More outspoken ones claimed, “Once again profit and respectability are confirmed as a basis for professionalism, that touchstone of technology, as American as apple pie or Vietnam.” The anticommercial romantic idealists of the Age of Aquarius had protested against allying the Workshop with the publishing industry, which to them represented hegemonic rule, either through the director’s vision of the program or the top-down definition of publication, a management method found reprehensible because “only institutions in the advanced stages of fossilization make definitions.”40

  Commercial definitions of professionalism, however, served to reinforce Iowa’s solid alliance with the popularization of literature, a project historically contiguous with that of Horace Greeley and Margaret Fuller, who wished to bring literature to the masses a century earlier. Notable examples of Workshop literature that reached a mass audience include W. P. Kinsella’s Field of Dreams franchise (based on his first novel, Shoeless Joe), Anthony Swofford’s adaptation of his book Jarhead into a major Hollywood motion picture, and more recently Ayana Mathis’s Twelve Tribes of Hattie, which earned an endorsement from Oprah Winfrey. Literature’s intersection with popular culture in the broader culture appears in online group readings where classics from Dante to Melville receive serious attention alongside contemporary literary fiction such as Saturday and The Line of Beauty.41 Through the agency of creative writing programs like Iowa’s that are both steeped in literary tradition and dedicated to professionalization, Charles Dickens’s achievement during the Victorian age of simultaneous popularity and critical acclaim becomes more accessible to aspiring writers today.

  When assessing attempts to write the great American novel, which trace back at least to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in 1851, one is struck by authors’ profound struggle to align literary art in a fruitful way with mass culture. American literature blossomed during the height of the market revolution in the decades before the Civil War. Melville committed a sort of professional suicide in the pages of his strangest novel, Pierre, in 1852, when he realized that his magnum opus of Moby-Dick had failed miserably in its critical reception the year before. In Pierre, Melville savagely bit the hand that fed him, skewering literary intermediaries, including his own editor, Evert Duyckinck, as so many pretentious slaves to fashion in both attire and the printed page. In one passage, he drew out the analogy by imagining one publishing house doubling as a men’s clothing store. The coupling of literature with commercial culture received similar flack from the Workshop students in 1972 who rebelled against their director’s mandate for professional publications, a decree they said was as American as apple pie and Vietnam. But complete renunciations of commercial measures of authorial success had their own liabilities, as seen in Melville’s illustration of the idealistic young author’s role in derailing his own career. Without a market to check and balance the creative writer’s ego, the Workshop student risked falling into Melville’s trap (figured through the fictional Pierre), in which he “imagined himself as high priest charged by god to bring forth Truth.”42

  Workshop students subscribing to such a conception of authorship rooted in the myth of the solitary genius passively waited to be “discovered” at their own peril. Others searched in vain within the curriculum itself for answers. One former student, Barbara Spargo, suggested that beyond workshop sessions consisting of peer criticism of the writing itself, “more advice on how to publish” would be helpful, but not to teach students only “how to write what will sell” in a narrow sense. Formal guidance on publishing would be useful, perhaps in the form of a class dedicated to it, she argued, since eventually “many excellent writers are forced to learn” how to write for a mass audience, and “probably with no detriment to their career hopes.”43 Although no such courses would ever appear on the curriculum, the workshop
method served in tandem with the program’s well-connected faculty as vehicles of professionalization within the institution’s larger culture, whose privileged inner circle Spargo had clearly not circulated in. An insider like T. C. Boyle would never ask that class time be dedicated to instruction on how to publish; such information was exchanged in the social networks between rather than in classes.

  Creative writing program administrators have long faced the dilemma of whether and how to train students to pursue truth at the expense of professionalism and vice-versa. Truth seeking and professionalization, as Michigan professor Irving King claimed in 1908, do not need to be mutually opposed goals. “The truth seeker,” he argued, “is really the person who chooses, definitely and habitually to abandon the careless attitude in the sphere of activity in which he is engaged.”44 Aesthetic truth, King contended, could be transformed into a deliberate undertaking rather than a “careless” one reliant on a purely intuitive process of conjuring insight. Interestingly, creative writing programs originally distinguished themselves from basic writing associated with introductory English composition courses and standardized vocational training of journalists. Both were considered too rigid and formulaic to accommodate the more wide-ranging experimentation and modes of expression of creative writing. Peter Elbow’s contemporary concept of writing without teachers, the process-oriented “find your voice,” nondirective approach to composition instruction that prevails today, is part of a longer history of resistance to commercial literary intermediation. King’s emphasis on writing as deliberate truth-seeking set the stage for the entrance of more professionalized approaches diametrically opposed to Elbow’s efforts to liberate writing from authority and institutions, both educational and commercial, figured in teachers and played out in his cornerstone activity of intuitive “free writing.”45

  Resistance to the forces that mediate writing proved quite marketable, ironically, in several notable instances throughout literary history. The increasingly commercial condition of literary publishing is the subject of a contemptuous satirical novel called The Literary Guillotine by William Wallace Whitelock. In it, editors take over control of contemporary literature. “Writers may be relatively important, but it’s the editors, in the last analysis, upon whom literature depends,” a well-reputed publisher proclaims.46 In the nineteenth century, the publishing house of Roberts Brothers expressed the same sentiment with their No Name Series, which represented a backlash against the myriad editors, publishers, and agents creating and conditioning the reception and thus the reputations of authors.47 The purpose was to separate the text from the industry and to cleanse it of any distorting filter or spin of intermediaries. The stated intention was to restore the pure, unsullied relation between author and reader, liberating literature from a reception dictated by marketing campaigns on behalf of authorial name brands. The literature, and not its promotion and meta-commentary by blurbers and publicists, they insisted, should carry the day. But such pretensions were a thinly veiled scheme by which to entice readers into guessing which of the well-known writers, such as Louisa May Alcott, recruited for the series had penned each title. Emphasis inevitably gravitated directly toward authorial identity as the fetishized literary commodity.

  In this vein, Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel from 1888, Looking Backward: 2000–1887, imagines a literary marketplace based on a disintermediated meritocracy. In it, authors succeed or fail based entirely on their capacity to win an audience through writings alone—that bear their names, yet are free of any promotional apparatus—rather than the power of agents and editors to market their reputations. Mark Twain and Ralph Waldo Emerson also detested interference between the supply and demand of literature, as both reserved their most acerbic venom for authors like Sir Walter Scott and his popular medieval romances, which they deemed more a function of fashion than literary quality. Edgar Allan Poe also inveighed against the corrosive effects of artificially manufactured literary fame according to the mechanical reproduction of popular conventions in “How to Write a Blackwood Article.” Who’s your agent? is the nervous question among Workshop students entering the market, rather than style or genre as a marker of the author’s identity and status in the program. The intermediary—a devoted agent or editor/friend—deeply complicated if not overwhelmed definitions of literary success in the Workshop.

  As a shaping force in the formation of the twentieth-century literary canon, Engle was perhaps the most powerful literary intermediary—a “middle man” of the Midwest—in the mid-twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, Melville’s editor Evert Duyckinck had a similar effect on America’s first literary efflorescence. His editing of Putnam’s Library of American Books series and the Cyclopaedia of American Literature combined with his connection with the worlds of trade and politics to make him one of the primary architects of the American literary canon. The authors Duyckinck backed—Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Margaret Fuller, John Greenleaf Whittier—now represent the pantheon of great authors. Playing a similar role in the twentieth century, Engle would also mint young talent in the literary market. A preponderance of Workshop students and faculty members directly benefited from Engle’s position as editor of the O. Henry Award from 1954 to 1959, most notably, Flannery O’Connor, R. V. Cassill, Hortense Calisher, Donald Justice, and John Cheever. Life publisher Henry Luce was an intimate business acquaintance of Engle’s and thus offered his platform—glossy high-end journalism with an interest in capturing literary-minded audiences—for those connected to Iowa. With such media at his disposal, Engle turned the Workshop into a direct channel to the publishing industry and its mechanism of fame.

  The literary canon was in part formed in the nineteenth century under Duyckinck’s influence by catering to an expanding reading public receptive to literature as entertainment. In the twentieth century, however, the film and music industries directly competed with print. Engle publicized his authors and his program by reaching the masses through middlebrow magazines and TV such as Reader’s Digest and the Hallmark Hall of Fame, for fiction writers, and the company’s greeting card line for poets.48 The greeting cards, interestingly, may appear an appalling concession to mass culture for the sake of promotion, until one considers that Maya Angelou, the great American poet and winner of numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize and a Presidential Medal of Freedom, wrote verse for the Hallmark Mahogany line of cards. Angelou’s name may have aided in the company’s effort to reach the untapped African-American market and bring poetry to a segment of the population otherwise alienated from the genre.

  Engle’s and Angelou’s Hallmark deals represent an improbable alliance of high literary art and commercial culture. But the real traffic of the literary market has never abided by such strict divisions between art and commerce. Engle combated the anti-intellectual strain in mass culture, paradoxically deploying the University of Iowa’s insulation from the mass market as a selling point to attract powerful authors who were already literary celebrities. Writing to Sinclair Lewis in 1951, Engle argued that his faculty authors didn’t have “that financial dependence toward magazine editors and on publishers which the writer out bucking the market always has. In that sense, the university is a release, not a hindrance.”49 But Engle insisted that faculty were expected to continue to maintain their public reputations with a steady stream of publications. If publications were frequent, he demanded they be more calculated for greater impact. “Produce or get out” was Engle’s ultimatum on one occasion to a faculty member who failed to live up to this standard.50 A non-publishing professor, to Engle, was no longer an author. And he would only have authors, preferably famous ones, running his Workshop.

  Creative writing programs of the 1980s and 1990s with less rigorous professional standards than Iowa’s bred complacency inside the protective institutional enclaves of universities, and thus productivity suffered dramatically. Such declining productivity has been documented by Shirley Lim, who outlines how critics have noted that
“creative writing programs have composed a system of patronage between universities and writers that has resulted in a mediocre literary culture and intellectual dereliction for creative writing students and faculty.”51 August Kleinzahler has correlated the sharp “decline in the quality of contemporary poetry with the spread of creative writing programs.”52 Dana Gioia also noted a link between the rise of creative writing programs and poetry’s disappearance from “public view.”53 He has since advocated for more aggressive commercial engagement on the part of poets, actively supporting Poetry editor John Barr’s attempts to commercialize the vocation through a kind of economic stimulus package funded by a windfall $200 million donation from a pharmaceutical heiress.54 Lauding the comparative quality and quantity of American verse that attended authorship prior to the university’s shelter from the free market, Gioia laments the passing of the era when financial pressure to produce “delivered the collective cultural benefit of frightening away all but committed artists.”55 Ironically, Engle’s founding vision was to maintain that pressure through stressing publication among faculty and students in the Workshop.

  Students indeed felt pressure to publish. There was “an intense jockeying for status and position within the program,” mounting into “social pressure that formed over who could publish the most and the quickest,” according to Edmund Skellings. The process was “a variation on the then accepted theme of publish or perish.”56 On at least one occasion, students found themselves writing for publication more than they desired, despite advantages Engle’s connections to the publishing industry provided. Engle’s own capacity to generate Workshop revenue through gifts and contributions was predicated on the quality of his students’ published writing. He once dumped a pile of student publications on the desk of the dean to dramatize their worthiness of his resources. Student writing was his selling point for soliciting donations. There were allegations of “Paul’s making use of his students, taking them with him to the firms he targeted and having them recite their poems in front of the company executives. ‘We aren’t in show business,’ a girl in the group said.” One particular student had “refused to play the role of the bard” but nonetheless became the eventual beneficiary of Engle’s recommendation of her work to a prestigious literary journal.57 On other occasions, Engle acted as a literary agent to his students. He once announced to his class “that he surreptitiously sent a story by one of us to Esquire, and that the magazine had bought it,” theatrically “waving a check in the air as proof,” according to Charles Embree, the student who originally wrote the piece as a course assignment.58 For Workshop students, literature by then had irretrievably entered the realm of show business, for better or for worse, and Engle had assumed the role of their impresario with or without their consent.