A Delicate Aggression Page 8
The success of William De Witt Snodgrass, known as “De” at the Workshop, might have been more tolerable to his classmates had he not done precisely what they had yearned to do—defy the New Critical convention of depersonalized writing by placing himself unapologetically at the heart of his poetry. “ ‘Snodgrass is walking through the universe’?” they protested. “Man, you can’t get away with that.”4 But he did, and like a colossus. Along with Robert Lowell, Snodgrass became known as a founder of the confessional school of poetry associated with Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and Allen Ginsberg. His distaste for the term, like Anne Sexton’s, stemmed from its evacuation of the possibility of artful expression in the verse. Snodgrass wrote in the preface of his collection of autobiographical sketches that “confessional” is “a term I heartily dislike,” in part for its religious connotations as well as its association with “the lurid revelations of afternoon TV shows or of ‘true confessions’ publications.” Personal and private matters were well suited to poetry, in his view, but with the caveat that they are not “broached for their own sensational sake, where they could damage people still living, or might lead to self-display or self-justification.” The art should demand confession, rather than the individual’s thirst for publicity or self-promotion, he urged, so that “autobiographical details, if they appear, should satisfy the poem’s needs, not the author’s hankering for notice or admiration.”5 The irony in this aesthetic is its disavowal of self-promotion embodied in the Workshop’s unmatched mechanism for literary publicity, one that enabled Heart’s Needle to attract the attention of aspiring young poets like Sexton to probe her suicidal demons, sex addiction, and repeated hospitalizations in the confessional mode.
In the context of the Workshop, Snodgrass’s most audacious exploit was his brazen breach of the New Critical doctrine of depersonalized writing advanced by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. “When I started to write these poems,” Snodgrass described in a personal letter to his friend J. D. McClatchy, “my teachers were concerned for me and didn’t like the poems at all.” Above all, his mentor Robert Lowell “was particularly distressed.”6 Depersonalized writing of the sort that leaves out the subjectivity of the author was sacrosanct; Snodgrass’s “confession” in his poetry—complete self-disclosure that laid bare his anguish over losing access to his first-born child Cynthia Jean in the wake of his divorce in 1953 from his first wife, Lila Jean Hank—was considered taboo. Snodgrass, in his profound pain, had revolutionized poetry, wresting it from the grip of the Workshop model’s systematized approach to writing based on pared-down minimalism and a disciplined refusal to obey introspective or highly subjective instincts. Surprisingly, three of the poems from Heart’s Needle made their way straight from the worksheets to the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.7 Even more striking, despite his grave concern for his pupil’s introspective turn, Lowell himself “credited his Iowa pupil Snodgrass for showing him the way to Life Studies,” a “major swerve” toward poetic autobiography, which won the National Book Award in 1960 and was named a “groundbreaking book” by the Academy of American Poets.8
Snodgrass’s complete disclosure of his personal psychic state indeed flew in the face of the Workshop’s “pedagogical and compositional method” that begins “in ‘self’ but ends in disciplined ‘impersonality.’ ” That pedagogical method echoed James Joyce’s insistence that “the personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence.”9 Workshop director Paul Engle had determined to shake young authors from “writing as the spontaneous outpouring of immediate feeling,” to embrace a more methodical and technical approach. Snodgrass had all but desecrated the vision, especially in the runaway success of Heart’s Needle and the confessional school of poetry. In Midland, Engle derided any association of psychotherapy sessions with the creative process, scoffing at authors who write “like a patient on the psychiatrist’s couch, the sodium amytal in his blood dissolving his inhibitions . . . releasing the babble of language.”10 Interestingly, the culture of psychotherapy in the 1950s not only drove much of Snodgrass’s greatest poetic innovations, but provided the template for poets like Anne Sexton to write in the same mode, as evidenced in poems such as “Said the Poet to the Analyst” and “You, Dr. Martin,” where she reshapes her therapy sessions into verse. Sexton’s All My Pretty Ones passed among Workshop students like literary contraband—Chuck Hanzlicek’s copy made its way across the coffee tables of Iowa creative writing and literature students, including one notable undergraduate suicide—a forbidden aesthetic that squarely faced the fragile and often tragically broken psyche of the creative mind.11
When asked about Snodgrass’s success in an interview published in the New York Herald Tribune book section, Engle elided any mention of the underground culture of psychoanalytic aesthetics that spawned it. Instead, he credited the Workshop curriculum for producing Heart’s Needle, portraying it as the direct result of rigorous class criticism focused on elimination. “I think the criticism he had there—and not merely from me, but from, for example, Robert Lowell—was very useful to him” in producing these “finished poems.” Revision and industry, not spontaneous confession, Engle asserts, were behind Snodgrass’s success. Despite his pupil’s bold resistance to these institutional protocols, Engle claimed that “Snodgrass adopted the attitude that is in the writing program—you work a poem until it is absolutely as good as you can make it,” especially under the intense glare of constant criticism. “Almost all of those poems had been criticized in the poetry workshop,” and thus “we were responsible, in part, for the fact that Snodgrass was so eager to go back and back and get them right,” he said, ascribing undue credit to the Workshop.12 Engle spun Snodgrass’s defiance of the Workshop into its crowning glory out of a stubborn consistency in promoting the program’s distinct identity and brand rooted in the development of “self-criticism,” enabling a young author to “put aside a manuscript he has written and then come back to it with a cold eye for its faults.”13 Engle’s commentary pointed to the Workshop’s many uses for and reactions to Snodgrass’s newly minted fame. Maligned by envious fellow students, and willfully misapprehended by an administration seeking to promote the Workshop, Snodgrass epitomized the privileges and perils attendant to being the Workshop’s star student.
Poetry Beckons
W. D. Snodgrass originally entered college to pursue a degree in music, but soon discovered he sorely lacked the background necessary to excel. He absurdly reasoned that his next best option was literature because it required no experience beyond the ability to speak English. After seeing an article in Life about the Workshop, he applied, and through the intervention of his mother, who had connections with the program, he gained admission. Snodgrass’s initiation into the Workshop through playwriting was a baptism by fire. The instructor, who had been the bane of Tennessee Williams’s existence when he attended the Workshop, disparaged Williams as “a one shot author” for the success of The Glass Menagerie, the first draft of which had originally been rejected as his master’s thesis. Much to her chagrin, “the one shot author” received even greater acclaim when his second play, A Streetcar Named Desire, was produced just one month before Snodgrass’s entrance into her class. Snodgrass recalled that she was “generally known as ‘The Bitch’ ” and “was rumored to be the model for Blanche DuBois.”14
While Snodgrass was enrolled in his first playwriting courses, his accultura-tion to the workshop method was anything but smooth. He learned quickly, as Workshop student Pete Hendley did in a later generation, that classroom critiques of manuscripts were forums for determining status within the program, for better or worse depending on one’s performance. Hendley was stunned to learn that offering up an early draft of a story to a class for feedback meant “that my ability and my status as a writer were also on the line and that I could greatly impact whether I would eventually be able to get recommendations for fellowship
s or teaching positions.”15 A powerful showing at workshop, such as Flannery O’Connor’s stellar reading toward the end of her second year, was often taken as a universal harbinger of a brilliant career. In O’Connor’s case, her classmates spontaneously gathered flowers “from people’s yards as if they were public domain . . . taking only the most beautiful” as an outpouring of love for the author.16 Alternately, manuscripts faring poorly at workshop could have the reverse effect, sending the student retching into reeds on the swampy banks of the Iowa River adjacent to the Quonset huts.
Snodgrass first sensed trouble when his playwriting instructor began one class by asserting that all leading characters needed to be likable. Snodgrass protested, citing Macbeth and Medea, to which his instructor responded, “you had to learn the rules before you could break them.” Thereafter, “she and I were at war,” he acknowledged, a very bad sign for his future as a playwright, but less obvious than her habit of parading about the classroom dangling his writing “between pinched fingers as if it were a dead rat’s tail, meantime holding her nose with the other hand.” When she assigned students to create scenes based on a plot sequence she provided them, Snodgrass instantly shifted into workshop mode, critiquing the quality of the given script. “I collected my nerve and said it was gawd-awful,” an utterance that forever changed the course of his career. After class, a group of theater majors pulled him aside to reveal his galling error: “You idiot!—don’t you know that play is in her doctoral dissertation!” Snodgrass, it turned out, was the only one who was unaware.17
Rather than leaving the program altogether, or flying south with the swallows, as in William Cotter Murray’s escape fantasy, Snodgrass transferred to the poetry unit of the Workshop, where he pursued the MFA from 1951 to 1953. Although he published several poems during this early period, his efflorescence did not occur until the appearance in 1958 of The New Poets of England and America, which showcased a substantial five-section sequence reworked from his larger MFA thesis titled “Heart’s Needle.”18
Snodgrass’s circuitous path to this lofty perch—one that veered from his initial aspiration to become a symphony composer into playwriting and finally poetry—began when he first laid eyes on Robert Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle. The surging energy and immediacy of Lowell’s verse sparked a new sensation “after the dry, etiolated language and attitudes of Eliot.” Having recently won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Lord Weary’s Castle “had overwhelmed young readers” who were “ravenous for its vigor,” a revitalizing force for the bloodless anatomies of the New Criticism. Lowell’s book functioned like “some massive generator, steel jacketed in formal metrics against the throb of rhetoric and imagery.” Such metrical formality barely containing bursting cadences of emotion became for Snodgrass’s generation of poets the model they emulated. “Even before we heard he was coming, I’d been writing like him,” Snodgrass admitted.19
Lowell’s cryptic syntax and dissonant images many found bewildering, just as the nonlinear digressions and shocking metaphors of Emerson’s ecstatic language transfixed his followers. The bewitched admirers of Lord Weary’s Castle were as baffled as they were dazzled by Lowell’s indirection and jarring juxtapositions, so much that “I cannot say we understood them. I cannot say I understand them now—or even that Lowell understood them,” Snodgrass revealed.20 Lowell’s much anticipated arrival at the Workshop preceded him in the buzz of gossip about his conscientious objection to the war, his madness, and his violent past. Tension eventually arose when Lowell admonished Snodgrass for excessive sentimentality. Pressing him for greater abstraction and less personal revelation, Lowell urged, “Look; you’ve got a mind. You mustn’t write this kind of tear-jerking stuff!”21
The figure to disabuse Snodgrass from imitating his mentor was not Lowell, whose advice to avoid direct revelation in his poetry actually guided him closer to his own aesthetic. Lowell’s brutality in workshop sessions stymied rather than encouraged individual creativity, especially according to his favorite method of highlighting how student work paled in comparison with classical masterpieces such as Milton’s “Lycidas” or Tennyson’s “Tithonus.” Lowell and other faculty members “were teaching me to write learned, symbol-laden poems that any good poetry committee could write. They all thought I was wrong, and were really concerned for me.”22 Criticism of student poems in workshop sessions was thorough and violent, “as if a muscle-bound octopus came and sat down on” their manuscripts, as Snodgrass described it. Instead, it was visiting faculty member Randall Jarrell who held a mirror to Snodgrass’s dysfunctional relationship with Lowell. With his signature outrageous aplomb, Jarrell observed what Snodgrass had been blind to for months. “Do you know, Snodgrass,” he crowed, “you’re writing the very best second-rate Lowell in the whole country? The only trouble is there’s only one person writing any first-rate Lowell: Lowell.”23
Known as a World War II poet dealing in dark subjects, Jarrell spurred Snodgrass to life when he arrived as a visiting faculty member at the Workshop. For as intensely intellectual as Lowell was, Jarrell’s emotional and personal dimension “helped jar me out of that style” drummed into him by martinet instructors such as Andrew Lytle. Famous for mentoring Flannery O’Connor, Lytle “managed us as though we were blooded animals to be trained correctly,” and “could make ‘a federal case out of a comma.’ ”24 In sharp contrast to such domineering teachers stood Jarrell: “Slender and graceful, with a pencil-line mustache, his manners and vocabulary [like] those of a spoiled but lively little girl.” In stagey falsettos, he could make disarmingly glib comments like, “don’t you just love Colorado? I think Colorado’s simply dovey!”25 Snodgrass appreciated Jarrell’s panache. “It’s fun to have a gee whizz critic now and then, after these austere visitors,” Snodgrass remarked. Jarrell’s aplomb as both a critic of his poetry and a conversationalist gave him license to mine the depths of his own complex emotions free from the conventional gender codes of New Criticism that called for impersonal approaches to subjects. With Jarrell’s validation, Snodgrass expressed his personal anguish in the verse of Heart’s Needle, and felt liberated from pressure to mute or excessively reconfigure his sentiment; if his voice ached with love for his absent daughter, it should carry the day. Jarrell’s flamboyant personality and candid powers of observation formed an emblem of individualistic self-expression uncommon in the Workshop culture.
Snodgrass, like so many other Workshop students, found refuge from the stultifying air of the Quonset huts in places that invited rather than silenced self-expression. These included bars such as Kenney’s and the Airliner “or wherever the main gossip was,” according to his classmate William Stafford. The formalist paradigm predominated to the extent that spontaneous and passionate expression in literature was considered inferior, if not contraband. During one workshop led by Robert Penn Warren, a sartorial southern gentleman poet, the entire tradition of romantic poetry came under fire. During the assault, one woman leaned toward Stafford and whispered, “But I like Shelley.” The reign of formalism had so taken control that when Warren peered at a sheet of a student’s highly subjective spontaneous verse saturated in autobiographical details, the dean of New Criticism rocked back in his chair and sighed magisterially, “I do not understand these poems.”26
The origins of Heart’s Needle can be traced to Snodgrass’s discovery, through Jarrell’s astute observation, that the voice he was using was not his own. His acute depression in the wake of his divorce had prompted him to seek out professional psychotherapy. During therapy, he realized what Jarrell had highlighted to him in a professional literary context. “I noticed that of the two of us, the doctor and myself, one sounded like a psychiatry textbook; it wasn’t him.” The sense of alienation was compounded by how “he—the doctor—wasn’t really in the room at all because the whole thing was part of an experimental technique.” Snodgrass had “gone into therapy because (partly) I’d not been able to write for two years. I recall that my doctor specifically asked me if t
hat wasn’t because I wasn’t writing about things I cared enough about to get me past the resistance.”27 The suggestion led Snodgrass to treat his daughter as his next poetic subject, much in the way Dr. Martin Orne encouraged Anne Sexton to write poetry as a means of assuaging her demons.
The Workshop’s effect on Snodgrass was unmistakable; it had undone his creative instinct and distanced him from the locus of energy nearest his heart. Instead of searching for poetic technique, method, or convention from the masters, whether in Lord Weary’s Castle or classical poetry, Snodgrass trained his sights directly on the source of his pain. Indeed, the language he used during therapy sessions alerted him to the corpse-cold habit of self-expression innumerable workshop sessions had drummed into him. That language became his rally cry for aesthetic rebirth, his own Howl of Ginsberg-esque self-disclosure. A major influence was Robert Shelley. “We were all very fond of him,” so to emulate his approach “seemed not only permissible but even a good thing.” Snodgrass resolved “to take that style he’d only begun and go on to develop it.”28 This discovery, Snodgrass remarked, “led me to write markedly different poems, in particular a cycle of poems about my daughter which first brought me general notice.”29