A Delicate Aggression Read online

  Individual chapters on Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, and Robert Penn Warren are not included because these figures have received an overabundance of attention for relatively sparse contributions to the program made during truncated stays. Other celebrity faculty members who joined the Workshop with the intention of staying longer in more permanent positions who I discuss are grouped in chapters in pairs. Kurt Vonnegut mentored John Irving, so the two are dealt with in the same chapter. The ever colorful and whisky-drenched Dylan Thomas shares a chapter with poet John Berryman, whose writing and teaching were deeply influenced by Thomas. Thomas’s Iowa City antics and international renown for his wit and singularity of character alone would justify inclusion in this volume. But Thomas was more than an itinerant celebrity, as indicated by his profound impact on the Workshop’s faculty and students. It is to the first generation of students that we now turn, beginning with Flannery O’Connor—the first world-famous Iowa MFA—and the fruitful tension of her tutelage under Paul Engle.

  PART 1

  COLD WARRIORS: WRITING IN THE

  ENGLE ERA (1941–1966)

  1 • The Brilliant Misfit: Flannery O’Connor

  At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1945, nothing horrified Flannery O’Connor more than the prospect of reading her stories aloud in class. One of only three women in the program, the abstemious southern Catholic and future National Book Award winner found herself in utterly alien—and often hostile—territory among her GI veteran classmates. Her friend Robie Macauley normally read for her, except on one notable occasion. Due to the sensitive nature of one particular scene, it seemed unconscionable to put him to the task; so with a quavering voice, she faced the scrutiny of her peers. Fresh from the European and Pacific theaters of war, her classmates were “a pretty riotous bunch, very hard-living people” who did not “fit Flannery’s lifestyle at all,” as former classmate Walter Sullivan recalled.1 Unlike them, she believed “there is a great deal that has to be given up or taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.” She modeled her own celibate life after the bohemian-turned-theologian Thomas Merton, who epitomized how abstinence could extend beyond the domain of priests and nuns to suit the life of an artist and devout worshiper. “There seems to be other conditions in life,” particularly authorship, “that demand celibacy besides the priesthood,” she explained.2 It thus came as a shock to her instructor Paul Engle when the bespectacled, nunlike O’Connor regaled the room with the erotic encounter of Hazel Motes, later to become Wise Blood’s protagonist, and the oversized African-American prostitute, Leora Watts. Engle promptly called his star pupil into his office for a one-on-one conference, where she immediately froze.3 The private confines of his car, he suggested, might provide a more comfortable setting for her to speak openly about her sexual experiences.

  Engle and his protégée, the strongest of the first generation of writers to enter the Workshop in the 1940s, walked in awkward silence down the hall, crossing the parking lot flanking the Quonset huts that housed the program. It was with trepidation that O’Connor climbed onto the wide bench seat of Engle’s car for an intimate discussion with her mentor about what constituted an effective sex scene. “There, I explained to her that sexual seduction didn’t take place quite the way she had written it—I suspect from a lovely lack of knowledge,” Engle recalled. Despite his efforts to transform his car into the functional equivalent of a confessional booth, a private place for the budding writer to fully disclose her sexual experiences to him, she refused to comply.4 Her confession in this case was that there was nothing to confess. She had committed no personal sin, nor—in her humble estimation—had she committed a literary one in her fiction. Politely holding her ground, she swung the door open and stepped out of the car, bringing Engle’s tutorial in literary erotica to an abrupt end.

  Although it might appear that the “frank and gregarious Engle obviously intimidated her,” as one O’Connor biographer suggests, the signal moment instead represented a bold statement of her editorial autonomy, the first of a series of firm stands that unleashed the full potential of her singular creative vision.5 Engle retold this story on several occasions long after the incident to illustrate her sexual naivety, hardly aware of its gender politics that today seem like a scene straight from David Mamet’s Oleanna. Notwithstanding 1940s gender ideology, to coax a shy, inexperienced student into the front seat of one’s car is a dubious tactic to begin with, especially by a faculty member whose power in this case was magnified by his position as director of the program. O’Connor’s refusal of Engle’s creative sexual remediation prefaced the decisive stands against male editorial authority that established her aesthetic independence from her mentor and the Workshop.

  Given her unique predicament as a devout Catholic whose spirituality drove her ungodly work ethic and justified her ascetic lifestyle, O’Connor paradoxically thrived in this aggressively masculine and militaristic environment, which otherwise might appear hostile to a sheltered postwar woman writer. The Workshop’s regimentation and emphasis on writing by elimination provided her with the essence of her own writing practice. The process of what she called “writing for discovery” that established autonomy from Engle and her faculty mentors at Iowa was marked by a recursive rigor, a fierce dedication to revision, and a surprising willingness to promote her work to a broad audience.6 But tensions with Engle and her male workshop peers were initially the least of the worries of this diminutive twenty-two-year-old with a heavy Georgia accent. Homesick the moment she stepped off the train in Iowa with her mother from Milledgeville, O’Connor felt a sense of displacement on campus among the burly GIs and female suitemates at Currier House dormitory, who routinely blasted their rumba records at high volume, that compounded an even more daunting concern—she had chosen the wrong major.7

  “I Am Not a Journalist”

  The arc of O’Connor’s career at Iowa and beyond was determined in large part by her tutelage under Engle, as evidenced by the dedication of her MFA thesis, “To Paul Engle, whose interest and criticism have made these stories better than they would otherwise have been.”8 This expression of gratitude was prompted by Engle’s unwavering support that began with his acceptance of her request to transfer from Iowa’s graduate program in the School of Journalism. But like many creative apprenticeships, O’Connor’s aesthetic development would not reach full fruition until she had figuratively killed off her mentor. As a journalism graduate student interested in pursuing a career as a political cartoonist—an early sign of her penchant for caricature and wicked satire visible in her best fiction—she had originally enrolled in Magazine Writing, Principles of Advertising, and American Political Ideas. Frustrated with the string of rejection notices she had received from the New Yorker in response to her cartoon submissions, she had determined that an advanced degree in journalism would lend insight into the magazine and newspaper industry while distinguishing her from competitors. Her interest in visual arts is evident in her paintings and illustration of two books for children.9 Creative writing in Engle’s Workshop struck O’Connor as a viable career option only after she had arrived on campus. The Workshop was not her original destination in part because it was not a household name in 1945. At that early stage, Iowa students had yet to enter the limelight, but certainly had begun to win notice in literary and mainstream journals.

  William Porter’s Magazine Writing, for which O’Connor’s lackluster writing received a B, stands out in the journalism curriculum she abandoned for the Workshop. The mustachioed Porter, with his loud checked shirts and crime stories he brokered into Hollywood films, expanded her purview beyond her provincial experience as editor of The Corinthian at the Georgia State College for Women. The stage was set for a career in journalism, a vocation for which she seemed destined, as seen in a photo of her as a young editor staring directly through the camera with steely determination as her staff adoringly clustered around her. A decade later, editor Robert Giroux, who published Wise Blood,
would be captivated by the imagination behind those “electric eyes, very penetrating. She could see right through you.”10 Even at this early stage, O’Connor was intensely focused on establishing a winning byline, using her middle rather than her first name. “Flannery O’Connor” rang with celebrity promise, whereas “Mary O’Connor” was a name hardly destined for fame. She jokingly asked, “Who was likely to buy the stories of an Irish washerwoman?”11

  O’Connor’s other journalism course in Principles of Advertising, perhaps more than Porter’s, sent her fleeing for Engle’s Workshop. Despite coming to Iowa with a desire to build on her journalistic background and learn how to reach a mass audience, she soon discovered that selling advertisements was a soul-crushing endeavor focused too narrowly on the bottom line of profit. Although O’Connor’s practical side could respect Porter’s knowledge and expertise in how to wring revenue from magazine writing, his commercial interest was excessive for her taste. His preferences and methods were garish and shared little with the category of literature for which she longed. On the other side of campus, Engle’s Workshop carried the promise of professional training but without the loss of creative integrity. Although she “had earned a scholarship to the Iowa School of Journalism,” O’Connor “crossed over to do shum storrowies,” as she told her friend and Workshop classmate James B. Hall.12

  While crossing campus in 1945 from Seashore Hall to the Quonset huts on the east shore of the Iowa River, O’Connor weighed how to make a graceful yet powerful first impression on the Workshop director. Her delivery, however, was anything but. In a trembling whisper she struggled to explain her desire to write fiction instead of selling advertising. Engle, unable to decipher her syrupy southern drawl, rendered unintelligible by her overwhelming anxiety, handed her a slip of paper and a pencil. “My name is Flannery O’Connor,” she wrote, careful to suppress the dull washerwoman for her more dramatic authorial persona. “I am not a journalist. Can I come to the Writers’ Workshop?” she scribbled.13 Engle was unaware that this muted voice would blossom into the Workshop’s first world-famous author.

  When O’Connor transferred to the Workshop, it resembled nothing of its cozy domestic origins a few years before her arrival. For Wilbur Schramm, Engle’s predecessor, creative nonacademic writing was more pastime than profession, an activity to be savored rather than endured as a means toward building a career. The Journalism School’s focus on “selling stories to magazines,” as described in Porter’s syllabus, met its antithesis in Schramm’s domestic idyll.14 The earliest Workshop classes took place in Schramm’s living room. Ensconced in overstuffed sofas with a giant bearskin rug at their feet, students sipped literature like tea before the crackling fire. Discord had no place on this tranquil stage. The only histrionics surfaced when Schramm’s young daughter performed periodically to the students’ delight. MFA Barbara Spargo reminisced about how student writing was just one component of a scene in which “his big dog, Shakespeare, snored by the fireplace [and] the very attractive Mrs. Schramm served coffee and cookies. We watched four-year old Mary Schramm showing off for guests and being loved, too.”15 The program’s next home in the steely Quonset huts of Engle’s Workshop seemed worlds away.

  Students in the Workshop under Schramm’s direction from 1936 to 1941 enjoyed an intimate atmosphere that evacuated all vestiges of institutional structure. These were the earliest days of the “workshop method,” and sessions were “not held at regularly scheduled times, but took place perhaps once a month whenever several members had something ‘ready’ to present.” Engle’s postwar setting instead implemented with unprecedented regimentation the New Criticism that encouraged close scrutiny of texts. GI Bill veterans held forth at Workshop sessions, which transformed into literary war zones where peer feedback blasted away like artillery assaults. “Many sensitive young writers got shot down by the heavy onslaught of their critical fire,” according to Iowa MFA Jean Wylder.16 Although the rudiments of the workshop method certainly can be traced to Schramm’s informal instruction, Engle’s curt businesslike demeanor with students sharply contrasted with his predecessor’s “very warm and human personality,” through which he “seemed to regard himself as a friend of the would-be writers.”17 Soon after Franklin D. Roosevelt declared war against Japan on December 8, 1941, it was not the bellicose Engle who rushed to the front. The reserved Schramm instead requested a leave of absence to support the war effort in 1942, while Engle remained on the domestic front as interim director in his place, eventually taking over the program for the next twenty-four years. The cultural ascendancy of Cold War rhetoric during that time afforded ample ammunition for his quest to conquer the literary world.

  Unlike Engle, who held two M.A.s, one as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, Schramm had earned a Ph.D. in American literature, served on the English faculty, and went on to direct the School of Journalism at Iowa. Engle’s distinction as the first to receive a graduate degree from Iowa for a creative thesis, an epic poem titled The Worn Earth written for his M.A. in 1932, initiated his career-long rivalry with literary critics. He routinely raised their ire with competitive taunts. At the Workshop “you can get an MA degree without counting commas in Shakespeare,” he declared, mocking literary criticism’s narrow pursuits.18 Engle aimed to bring credibility to the program, a goal that demanded decoupling the creative writing MFA from its stereotype as an easily attained and intellectually lightweight degree. Engle wore his belligerence like a badge of honor. “You do not create new programs without driving hard and if you drive hard you’re going to irritate people. Quiet people,” he proclaimed, “don’t offend.”19 Corn-growing Iowa quietism—from Grant Wood’s American Gothic tableau to Schramm’s living room—had never heard such a brash voice. Engle heralded nothing less than a literary revolution.

  O’Connor’s serious temperament was ideally suited to Engle’s mission. Especially appealing to her was that creative writing constituted the program’s primary subject rather than an ancillary diversion, as in the graduate programs in English and journalism. The Georgia State College for Women’s student-centered pedagogy had left her rudderless and aching for direction, particularly in the form of carefully assembled readings designed to advance her craft. Although her journalism courses made no pretense of placing the development of her writing under close scrutiny, their emphasis on selling stories to magazines did indeed resonate with Engle’s curriculum. Engle’s course titled Writers’ Workshop had even been cross-listed in both English and journalism. In the fall it appeared on O’Connor’s transcript as journalism, and thereafter as English.20

  Engle’s Understanding Fiction course lived up to O’Connor’s expectations for rigor and direction. Frustrated with her alma mater’s haphazard curriculum that integrated “English literature with geography, biology, home economics, basketball or fire prevention,” she was relieved to finally focus exclusively on fiction. In Engle’s class, she found an environment that embraced specialization toward publication and professional career development, one diametrically opposed to her former college’s demonization of vocational training.21 Radical for its time, the Peabody method used at GSCW derived from Elizabeth Peabody’s transcendentalist-inspired pedagogy, developed in the 1830s as an alternative to the rote learning and memorization that ruled classrooms then. But for a southern woman like O’Connor seeking skills necessary to launch a professional career first through cartooning and then through fiction writing, it left her empty. She found the curriculum and method of instruction favored “anything at all that will put off a little longer the evil day when the story or novel must be examined simply as a story or novel.”22

  A New Devotion

  When she enrolled in Engle’s Understanding Fiction course and purchased her copy of the required textbook of the same title (edited by the New Criticism figureheads Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren), O’Connor felt equipped to fulfill her aesthetic and professional ambition. The New Criticism was known for its highly specialized approach to the study of
literature, which anatomized textual structure to the exclusion of biography and history. Although detractors objected to its narrowness, it liberated O’Connor from the phobia of specialization at GSCW. According to her former Georgia classmate Elizabeth Horne, she “was so disturbed about the trend of asking the children what they wanted to do” that she demanded “there should be a list of books that everybody should read. She felt there must be a basic knowledge within each discipline.”23 Embarrassed that her own self-selected reading included such works as “a book of Ludwig Bemelmans’ about the hotel business,” she “was very much upset about not having to read some things that everybody ought to.”24 Porter and the journalism faculty provided structure, but approached stories as if they were advertisements. The Writers’ Workshop, on the other hand, allowed her to enter more decisively into the literary realm. Under Engle’s direction, the category of literature sacrificed nothing of the specialized professional training she sought, nor was it disconnected with the publishing industry that drew her to journalism in the first place.

  O’Connor was enthralled by Engle’s energy and vitality, which became the signature features of his teaching and promotion of the program. In response to her friend Betty Hester’s request for advice on how to develop creative writing skills, she recommended Understanding Fiction, “a textbook I used at Iowa.” Her letter, written in 1959, reveals that the book held significance to her more than a decade after she completed the course. This foundational text became her bible of the craft. Although she could see its obvious liability as “pure textbook and very uninviting,” she urged that “part of the value of it for me was that I had it in conjunction with Paul Engle who was able to breathe some life into it.” Engle’s role in animating this otherwise lifeless “how-to-do-it book” was clearly integral to its value for her at the time, as the personal impression of his teaching clearly resonated with her permanently. Ideally, the book should be read under Engle’s guidance, she suggested, “but even without him, it might help you some.”25