A Delicate Aggression Read online

  The most impressive evidence of the effectiveness of the program’s pedagogy, as showcased in “How Creative Writing Is Taught at University of Iowa Workshop”—an article (really an advertorial) Engle wrote for the Des Moines Sunday Register in 1947—was the awarding of the Rinehart & Company Publishers Fellowship to Flannery O’Connor in May that year. Engle had persuaded Rinehart to “offer two Fellowships a year, of $750 each, as an outright gift and not less than a further $500 when the manuscript is accepted for publication, to members of the Writers’ Workshop here.” The incentives in the deal were clear. Workshop students had access to a publisher with a vested interest in seeing their work in print, and for the sake of their own revenue, salable to a wide audience. Only a rigorous and severe program in which “the staff acts as a form of publication, giving the writer an objective critical view of his work” would be appealing enough for a publisher such as Rinehart to pay for access to the best of the program’s students. As one might expect, Engle was not demure about heralding the Rinehart Fellowship as “the only example in the United States of a commercial publishing house offering such prize money to a single university class.” Engle expounds on the singular achievement as one that pitted the Workshop itself in fierce competition against other creative writing programs, such as Stanford’s, which at the time was far less interested in developing ties with the publishing industry and so aggressively channeling their students into print.

  As the recipient of the first Rinehart Fellowship, O’Connor became the face of the Workshop, the embodiment of its potential to produce professional authors. But little did Engle know, when he boasted how “she is now completing her novel in the Workshop” under the Rinehart Fellowship, that his star student would come to a critical crisis with the publisher. His presumptive language, “when the manuscript is accepted,” overlooked the conditional nature of editor-author relations as well as the manuscript’s fit within the publisher’s existing list.51

  As the heir apparent to the new throne of literary glory, and as Engle’s new selling point of the program, O’Connor faced immense pressure when she was awarded the Rinehart Fellowship that funded her for a third year, following her June 1947 graduation. The following fall, when O’Connor was assigned to work with editor John Selby, Rinehart & Company was riding high on two recent bestsellers, The Lost Weekend and The Hucksters, and wanted a new rising star to build on this mounting wave of success. But these titles hardly represented the sort of fiction O’Connor was writing. They consisted instead of mass market pulp with highbrow pretensions, whereas her work inflected Poe’s dark humor with Faulknerian metaphysics, a heady cocktail of spiritual crisis and existential terror periodically inverted with an almost surreal slapstick humor anticipating Vonnegut. Thus, when Selby received her manuscript in progress, he “didn’t think much of the 108 pages and didn’t know what to say,” as O’Connor confided in a letter to Engle. The response was “very vague and I thought totally missed the point of what kind of a novel I am writing.” She worried “that they want a conventional novel,” and that Engle might catch wind of Selby’s contention that she was “working in a vacuum” isolated from editorial opinion. That opinion, however, was mitigated by that of “the ladies there [at Rinehart who] found it unpleasant (which pleased me),” she sardonically added. O’Connor could see clearly that Selby’s editorial taste was in his mouth.52 The domineering Selby demanded a summary of the rest of the novel before proffering a contract. His sense of her as a sheltered woman writer whose fiction suffered from a lack of Hemingway-esque real-world adventure was unmistakable in his rhetoric.

  Selby had totally missed that her method of writing by discovery without drawing on past events or preconceived plans was actually aided by her intensely private life. He thus scolded her by invoking the collective wisdom of his Rinehart colleagues. “To be honest,” he sniffed, “most of us have sensed a kind of aloneness in the book, as if you were writing out of the small world of your own experience, and as if you were consciously limiting this experience.”53 With her confidence shaken, she consulted Robert Lowell for validation, which he duly delivered. She knew as well as Lowell that imperfections at this early stage would be corrected in subsequent drafts, given her persistent process of revision. Selby’s contention that she was “prematurely arrogant” in her refusal to follow his command missed the importance of revision in her process of production. “Believe me, I work ALL the time,” she told Engle, “but I cannot work fast. No one,” especially not Selby, “can convince me I shouldn’t rewrite as much as I do.”54 She explained her writing habits in a letter written later to Elizabeth McKee: “I don’t have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I have to say; then I say it over again.”55

  The dispute between O’Connor and Selby ended in a standoff. O’Connor accurately diagnosed Rinehart as “interested in the conventional and I have no indication that they are very bright.” Enter Robert Giroux, of Harcourt, and in 1955 the famed publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “Robert Lowell brought her into my office late in February 1949,” according to the editor. “After she had obtained a release” from Selby, “I offered and she signed a contract for Wise Blood.”56 Her break with Rinehart thus liberated her to find the true value of the novel in the literary market, as evident by its eventual publication with the more reputable FSG. Buoying her through the darkest moments of doubt during the courtship with Rinehart was Engle, ironically the one who had initially arranged it. Indeed, the man to whom she dedicated her MFA thesis was her anchor tethering her to her vision and securing her self-confidence in her refusal to bow to the unreasonable demands of Selby. His support was instrumental in her courage to annul what was to be the Workshop’s first book published by a Rinehart Fellowship winner. Far from fearing the repercussions of refusing Rinehart’s demands, she felt galvanized by his example of drive and fortitude. “Now I am sure,” she wrote Engle, who at this stage in 1949 was still very much her mentor, “that no one will understand my need to work out the novel in my own way better than you.”57 The Workshop had paradoxically taught her to stand up to criticism and trust her creative instinct, rather than taming it into submission.

  Selby clearly misjudged the power of O’Connor’s literary method of writing by discovery. One of the mysteries about O’Connor was her capacity to describe scenes she likely had never encountered firsthand. Her disapproving veteran classmates had also underestimated her talent by dismissing it in favor of their own superficial macho idiom. There was no substitute for personal lived experience, they believed, as the source of fiction. Instead she drew from news stories and cultural cues, using her memory and powers of observation to set her characters in motion and grapple with their anguished spiritual lives. “She never forgot any person she ever heard or the meaning of any small episode of the human comedy she ever witnessed,” as one of her undergraduate instructors at GSCW observed.58 Aspects of her characters Manley Pointer and the Misfit—both cracked criminals, the latter of whom coldly empties his revolver at point-blank range into a grandmother pathetically pleading for mercy in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”—were drawn from a news report about an outlaw. She needed very little data to enter imaginatively into this world to chart the emotional terrain of her spiritually frustrated protagonist. “Why, she could just walk by a poolroom and know exactly what was happening just by the smell,” her instructor Andrew Lytle recalled.59

  At this phase in her apprenticeship, nearing the end of the Rinehart Fellowship providing her with a third year at Iowa to write her novel, she had made her most decisive step toward professional and aesthetic autonomy. Her rejection of Selby signaled a sea change from the obedient acolyte who had entered Engle’s office trembling in the fall of 1945, her voice faint and unintelligible behind her lilting southern accent. Working intuitively without a preconceived plot outline, O’Connor enriched and expanded the initially flat embryonic fiction she had
submitted for her MFA thesis in 1947. Soon it bloomed into the wakeful dreaming of her Poe-inspired allegorical tales that arrested even her closest friends like Robie Macauley, who found them “entirely original, strange.”60

  “The Least Common Denominator”

  By 1952, Wise Blood was making its way from hardcover to paperback, and O’Connor could share a laugh at Engle’s expense with her confidante Robie Macauley, only this time not as an underling but as an established author. In a letter to Macauley, she told of Engle’s disapproval of the title and the ending of Wise Blood, in addition to the erotic scene between her wayward main character Hazel Motes and Leora Watts, the prostitute whose name he discovers on a restroom wall. This latter point she could only smile about, thinking of her meeting with him in his office and the awkward consultation in his car about the finer points of sexual realism in fiction. But what she found especially amusing was Engle’s criticism of the cover, which lacked any promotional mention of the Workshop. Here again was the impresario, the indefatigable promoter of the program that O’Connor and Macauley had joked about as students. “From the jacket nobody would have known I had ever been at Iowas [sic] WHEREAS my book had really been ‘shaped’ there and this was a ‘simple and honorable fact that I should have thought of myself.’ ” Not missing a beat, she related to Macauley how she wrote her ex-mentor back, alleging to have told Harcourt, which later published the paperback version, “that I had been to Iowa and studied under him but that I hadn’t had anything to do with the jacket and didn’t know how it would look until I saw it.” She assured Engle that an even better opportunity to market the Workshop awaited in the forthcoming paperback edition, “the drugstore reprint that has been sold to the New American Library.” Its design, she said dryly, would be especially memorable. “That would really be a jacket,” she promised, “with Mrs. Watts on the front cover, wearing the least common denominator, and I would certainly see that everything about Iowa etc. etc. was on that one.”61 By imagining Watts sharing space with an advertisement for the Workshop, O’Connor rendered a scathing tableau worthy of her satirical political cartoons from the beginning of her career at Iowa. The visual counterpart of Watts in her “least common denominator” served as a fitting lampoon of the business tactics of her ex-mentor, one that Macauley, a sharp critic of Engle’s shameless self-promotion, could appreciate.

  Although Engle’s insistence on advertising the Workshop struck O’Connor as ludicrous, especially when paired with the marketing of Wise Blood, she continued to promote her own work and name to the widest audience possible. That audience extended well beyond the Esquire and Mademoiselle readers Iowa MFAs typically catered to at the time. Indeed, O’Connor’s unpublished correspondence with Engle subsequent to her graduation speaks to her marketing efforts and business acumen. If Engle no longer was useful for creative advice, he continued to provide invaluable support on the business side of her career, which came to define their relationship until her early death in 1964 at the age of thirty-nine. Writing in February 1955, she expressed her pleasure with his “kind words in the O. Henry collection about my stories,” which functioned as well-placed publicity on her behalf. Elsewhere in their correspondence she shared notes with Engle about her experience on the road promoting her work. Undaunted by the oddity of being an intellectual in Milledgeville, Georgia, where her “kin” assume she sleeps rather than writes while in her room, she tells of her efforts to reach a popular audience. She touches on the comic juxtaposition between high and lowbrow reading culture in her plan to deliver an invited talk at a breakfast for the Atlanta Branch of the Penwomen. That audience contrasted with the one attending her panel at a Greensboro arts conference: “I figure the company will be more high-toned there.” As for her Penwomen engagement, and a similar speaking gig with the Milledge-ville Book Club, she says she “goes wherever I am invited to see how the other half lives,” opening herself up to unusual interactions, many hilarious, for an author of her caliber. At the book club, she notes, “one lady told me that the kind of book she liked best was books about Indians.”62 O’Connor knew Engle would appreciate hearing of such encounters with provincial culture, since he had experienced similar awkward moments during his countless lectures touting the powers of poetry to nonliterary audiences, from rural schoolchildren to business executives. O’Connor was not above finding readers like the Penwomen of Georgia, just as Engle boldly brought literature, for better or worse, to corporate America. Both were avid ambassadors of literature.

  Five years later, O’Connor herself was playing the role of publicist and literary agent to young talent. Her letter addressed to Engle in 1960 intended to “recommend a Miss Roslyn Barnes for a fellowship in English out there.” Barnes “knows about as much about [writing] as I did when I arrived out there, which is to say nothing,” she joked. “I’d appreciate anything you can do for her,” adding a pitch on her own behalf. “You were supposed to be sent a copy of my novel which I hope you got and will read some time.”63 By 1961, O’Connor had considered Engle an extension of her own literary agent, whose contact information she shared with him. “My agent is Miss Elizabeth McKee,” she reported with the witty aside that “she is happy to receive even small checks.” Engle had requested her agent’s name and address in order to direct future business, especially publishing contacts, toward her.64 Their fond relationship thus continued to develop over the years in this manner, as the two utilized each other’s considerable fame for the mutual benefit of their careers. Short of emblazoning the image of Leora Watts with the Workshop name, O’Connor clearly maintained her affiliation with the program almost exclusively through the friendship and literary agency of Engle, the figure behind its peerless promotional engine.

  From Workshop to Wise Blood

  Rewritten as the first chapter of Wise Blood, “The Train” was one of six stories O’Connor submitted as her MFA thesis. The original story draws its descriptive details from her train ride from Iowa City to Chicago with Jean Wylder, where she also was struck by the kinetic and forceful manner of the porter. O’Connor would recreate the porter as the comic foil of her novel’s protagonist Hazel Motes. Just as O’Connor had conformed to her Workshop peers’ demand to suppress the gripping suicide ending of “The Geranium” during one particularly acrimonious critique, Motes was a character more in the mold of her classmates—a disoriented war veteran headed home—in her Workshop story than the spiritually wracked cynic who becomes an accidental questing agnostic in her novel. Early tension with Engle regarding her erotic writing method, interestingly, did not prevent her from placing her main character in bed with a prostitute as literally the first stop of his journey at the end of chapter two. Indeed, our introduction to Watts in Wise Blood is through Motes’s first glimpse of her unglamorously trimming her toenails. Free of Workshop censors, O’Connor unfurls a mixed-race sexual encounter. When his cab driver warns, “She usually don’t have no preachers for company,” Motes replies, “ ‘Listen,’ tilting the hat over one eye, ‘I ain’t no preacher.’ ”65

  O’Connor’s characters often exude a kind of reckless frustration at the elusiveness of a meaningful existence. According to the Misfit, if Christ “did what he said, then it’s nothing for you to throw away everything and follow him, and if he didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house.”66 Hazel Motes annoys theatergoers by leafleting them to promote his Church of God Without Christ, a bizarre rebellion against the faithless and his own failure to achieve redemption. Wise Blood’s first chapter plunges into terror only hinted at in its early version written for the Workshop. In his cramped sleeping compartment on the train, Motes meditates on the coffins of his two brothers, recollecting how “One died in infancy and was put in a small box. The other fell in front of a mowing machine when he was seven.”67

  As a backslid minister like Motes’s grandfather, Engle also ran from the ragged figure of Jesus, in
the process racing into a commercialized form of selling faith in creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Like Engle on his fund-raising trips, the grandfather would parade into town “as if he were just in time to save them all from hell.”68 Not surprisingly, neither the confrontational proclamation by Motes that “I wouldn’t believe in Jesus even if he were on this train” nor the description of the circuit preacher appears in “The Train.” Left to her own devices after operating within the confines of Engle’s curriculum and Rinehart’s publishing deal, O’Connor not only unleashed her grand apocalyptic vision of Motes’s spiritual quest in Wise Blood. She responded to the Workshop’s form of collective critical coercion by dedicating herself to what she called her “perennial service” of helping young writers in informal one-on-one meetings unmitigated by the strictures of institutional pressure.69

  But O’Connor’s career depended on that institution. It was Engle who selected “The Life You Save” for the 1954 O. Henry prize that helped spring her career. It was his ongoing support that sustained it. Her ex-mentor indeed proved instrumental in the renown she enjoyed up until contracting lupus, the disease she succumbed to long before her time. O’Connor was the first Workshop graduate to break through the rut of anonymous scattered publications and breach full bodied into the limelight of literary celebrity. Others after her achieving such status inspired both envy and admiration from their Workshop peers. The ascendance of W. D. Snodgrass illustrates such perils of literary success to which we now turn.

  2 • The Star: W. D. Snodgrass

  Given his extraordinary talent, students and faculty alike at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop loved to hate W. D. Snodgrass, the confident, self-possessed free spirit who glided into Iowa City “resplendent in cast-off Navy costume, great head of hair and flowing beard, and properly abstracted poet’s eye.”1 Effortlessly playing the part of poet both in appearance and habit of mind before attending his first day of classes, Snodgrass rapidly established himself as the program’s prized prodigy. Everyone knew “that W. D. Snodgrass . . . had done something introspective and important in poems later called Heart’s Needle.” This meant he “had to be careful if he turned up, because knives seemed to be out for him,” as his classmate Robert Bly explained.2 Even small victories in this hotly competitive environment drew hostility, as the struggling majority of young writers were all too aware of “the easy confidence of someone whose story had obviously gone well in workshop that day.” As soon as the triumphant writer was out of earshot, “when he or she’d get up to go to the bathroom, everyone would cut them down in a barrage of catty commentary.” Desperate to discover their own creative brilliance, the jealous then would typically retrench in small groups, or individuals would retreat in isolation to a corner, “pull out some paper and commence to chew their pens and stare out the window.”3