A Delicate Aggression

by David O. Dowling

  Engle’s teaching of the otherwise dry textbook Understanding Fiction was a potent source of creative vitality for O’Connor, specifically through the models of short fiction it offered in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark,” and Caroline Gordon’s “Old Red.” Faulkner’s voice of the community in “A Rose for Emily” exposed O’Connor to characters drawn as perverse outsiders with highly complex interiority, misfits compensating for profoundly frustrating missed opportunities—spiritual, social, economic—in their pasts. Interest in the spiritual psychology of outsidership captured her imagination in this early course, as evidenced in an exam essay she wrote for the class on Thomas Thompson’s “A Shore for the Sinking.” In it, she judged the story’s central concern to be about “a man’s realization that he has been ‘left out.’ ” Engle marked an “A+” on the blue book filled with her rococo handwriting, describing it as “Admirable.”26 Understanding fiction, according to the logic of the course, was essential to writing it well. The assumption was that great literature could be learned from the masters without exclusive dependence on individual inspiration.

  If O’Connor adored Engle for his Understanding Fiction course, the feeling was more than mutual. Her classmate Hank Messick, who published several nonfiction books and novels, described a hierarchy in the course that situated O’Connor at the pinnacle. Engle, he said, openly displayed favoritism on her behalf, creating a sense of jealousy and resentment in less gifted students such as himself. “We argued a lot about writing and the purpose of writing,” Messick recalled. He knew that his “optimistic suggestion that man might improve himself by his own efforts” was futile since O’Connor was Engle’s favorite. “She, of course, was a genius and was so recognized by Engle,” he remarked, noting that “I was scarcely tolerated” by contrast. Engle’s emphasis on suffering and self-denial in the creative process resonated with O’Connor’s “morbid, obviously Catholic point of view,” marginalizing Messick’s romantic optimism. Obviously hurt by such treatment, Messick groused that “she was a bit arrogant,” because Engle had endorsed her disdain for liberal Emersonian transcendentalism, with which she “disagreed angrily.”27

  The hostile classroom climate was designed specifically to raise such tensions. Engle described the strict procedure in 1947, the year O’Connor graduated, as “the reading of manuscripts by, customarily, two students, and the detailed criticism of the them, first of all by the staff of the writing program, acting as a critical panel, and then by the students themselves.” Engle deliberately choreographed the dynamic to condition “the students [to be] quite merciless in criticizing each other’s work, as well as in challenging the faculty before them.” Literature was to be fought for, this pedagogy assumed, as modeled in the “severe disagreement among the staff, and sustained arguments as to the proper fictional or poetic manner of handling a given manuscript.” Although dubbed a “workshop,” no emphasis on the actual process of writing received much attention in these sessions. Instead, the focus was on how defensible the final product was in the face of an onslaught in which “No holds are barred.”28

  Engle’s favoritism shielded O’Connor from the savagery of workshop sessions in Understanding Fiction, but in courses taught by other faculty members, she was battered into silence. In 1945, before her first publication, “her stories had not been well received and she had not tried to defend them.”29 Although she was never a vigorous participant in workshop sessions, they played a crucial role in her daily ritual, which she divided between attending class and writing in her dorm room at Currier House. She would rarely go out except for daily mass and Sunday services at St. Mary’s; one of her closest friends, Jean Wylder, recalled seeing her in public in this tiny community on only one or two occasions. She once crept out of her room to buy a single bar of soap at Woolworth’s Five-and-Ten-Cent Store. “I doubt if Flannery ever bought two of anything at that store,” Wylder commented. Surplus of any sort represented distraction from her aesthetic and spiritual practice.

  In her final year at Iowa, the room O’Connor occupied at 32 East Bloomington Street, in a house that was an annex of the Currier dormitory, embodied her abstemious devotion to the craft. Her former roommate, Martha Bell, described O’Connor during these days “as a quiet unassuming girl, totally introverted, with a deep religious conviction and a delightful sense of humor.” Bell was acutely aware of what writing meant to O’Connor, since it “totally consumed her attention; nothing could distract her.” By day, O’Connor shut herself in and “insisted on having the shades pulled, even in day-time, no doubt to prevent distractions.” The dim room drew “artificial light from one unshaded bulb hanging by a long cord from the center of the ceiling.”30

  Wylder provided a similar account of O’Connor’s daily life and habits rooted in incessant writing that took place in her spartan dorm room. The room contrasted sharply with those of the rest of the building that were crammed with sentimental tokens of home and popular culture. “There was nothing extraneous about the room except for a box of vanilla wafers beside the typewriter,” her only indulgence. “She nibbled on the cookies as she wrote, she said, because she didn’t smoke.” The spare environment conveyed a “monastic simplicity” to Wylder, who remarked that “there was something of the convent about Flannery.” In class, she typically sat “alone in the front row, over against the wall.” The functional equivalent of a nun’s habit, “her ‘uniform’ for the year” consisted of a “plain gray skirt and neatly-ironed silkish blouse, nylon stockings and penny brown loafers” with “a trace of lipstick” as “her only makeup.”31

  O’Connor displayed neither rosary beads nor crucifixes in her dorm or apartment rooms at Iowa. Instead, St. Mary’s Catholic Church on East Jefferson Street in Iowa City became her refuge. She would walk the two blocks from Currier House in all weather, entering the sanctuary’s ornate setting, decorated with stained glass windows depicting the Blessed Virgin Mary and the patron saints; a huge cross bearing a suffering Christ, head hanging, towered behind the pulpit. Vivid paintings and sculptures of Saint Boniface and Saint Patrick crafted during the nineteenth century animated this visual feast missing from her colorless residence and classrooms. The atmosphere alone was a refuge in which to genuflect and find spiritual sustenance, beyond anything the priests or congregation might offer. “I went to St. Mary’s,” she told Roslyn Barnes, a Workshop student in 1960, “as it was right around the corner and I could get there practically every morning.” She recalled going “there three years and never knew a soul in that congregation or any of the priests, but it was not necessary. As soon as I went in the door I was at home.”32

  O’Connor had no need for the priests at St. Mary’s because Engle more than filled that role in her life at the Workshop. Driven by salvation through suffering and the hard glare of self-scrutiny, she was an apt fit for the relentless Protestant work ethic of Engle’s midwestern Methodism. The meeting of a Protestant midwesterner and a southern Catholic at the uncanny crossroads of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop proved fruitful. O’Connor saw the path to spiritual redemption as a terrible and volatile process. Violence, which Engle spent his career justifying as a tool for developing creative writers, was engrained in his own upbringing at the hands of an abusive father.

  “My Ex-Mentor”

  Judging by his own writing, it is surprising that Engle—whom O’Connor referred to as her “ex-mentor” when she won the O. Henry Award in 1957 based on his nomination—could have such a profound influence on this towering figure in literary history.33 He influenced O’Connor mainly through his function as advocate and literary agent rather than aesthetic guide. Engle’s own writings from the period have been chided as treacle of the worst sort, sentimental nostalgia from his father-knows-best sonnets on raising his daughters to idyllic reminiscences of his childhood in An Old Fashioned Christmas, all regrettable popular Cold War domestic idealizations on one level. On another, his writings render insight into the ori
gin of his colossal vision to build the Workshop into a literary empire, an ambition he confessed to University of Iowa president Virgil Hancher in a private letter on Halloween of 1963: “My interest has never been in simply having some modest writing courses inside an English Department. I want this to be the best in the USA, and I want it to be an international as well as national center for young writers.” He did not intend the Workshop merely to contribute to literary culture, but to become literary culture. “My ambition is to run the future of American literature, and a great deal of European and Asian, through Iowa City. We are on the way.”34 Engle’s annual salary was $2,400 for his first four years; after ten years, $3,791; and $11,000 after fourteen years, through 1963. He routinely funded his own travel to solicit donations and fellowships from wealthy patrons and massive corporations, facts presented to Hancher as evidence of the need for an increased financial commitment to the program from the university. Personal profit was clearly not his priority, but ruling the world of literature was.

  Engle’s ambition functioned in part as a mechanism by which to flee the demons of his abusive childhood. His frantic commercialization of domestic harmony in the publishing industry can be understood as his attempt to liberate himself from his impoverished upbringing. Early life for Engle consisted of a struggle for financial survival in which his father, “working hard from 6AM to 9PM seven days a week, never made enough money in any one year to pay income tax, but he fed and housed a hungry family of six without complaint.”35 His father’s violence was interminable. “Father had a leathery voice and an instant temper,” Engle recalled in his autobiography. His rage knew no limits; “Even injured, an invalid in bed, he was violent.” Physical beatings were equally as brutal as the sting of his verbal assaults. “He dealt with us as he did with horses. If we did something wrong, it could be corrected by howling cuss words and giving us a smack (sometimes many).” Looking back at the horror of that abusive household at the age of seventy, Engle could explain if not excuse his father’s beatings as symptoms of his frustration with taming and training recalcitrant young horses. “The horses kicked him, he kicked us.” From a house “reeking with strong odors” of horse feces that “also rang with the noise of the howling of us children,” an Oxford-trained Rhodes scholar would emerge, moving in the most elite circles of literature, culture, and politics. Engle’s forte was fund-raising, a skill that required social grace and charm. This from the son of a brute, who “because of his sloppy eating habits, Mother always put newspapers under Father’s plate to protect the tablecloth and catch his drippings,” and whose literary inclinations amounted to a bovine pastime of reading “the American Horseman with snorts of agreement and indignation.”36 Tom Engle died falling from his horse into young Paul’s arms, fittingly, after suffering a heart attack during a particularly frustrating and enraged attempt to break a high-spirited colt. “He died like an Engle: swearing, in violence.”37

  Away from this toxic home life, Engle benefited from a public school experience that included art instruction from Grant Wood, the painter renowned for glorifying Iowa agrarians and their land. Wood is most famous for American Gothic, his iconic portrait of a farmer and wife staring ahead with determined and decidedly unglamorous grit. This combination of human oddity and imperfection—Wood’s model for the painting was his dentist, whom he selected for the comic angularity of his facial features—is set against the majestic glory of the landscape. Wood’s Edenic rows of corn are echoed in Engle’s Corn, a Whitmanian ode to Iowa farming. Just as O’Connor had emerged from the South with the dark orchestral movements of Poe and Faulkner resonating through her, Engle had been cultivating his image as a poet who “sings with the full, long breath of a young Walt Whitman,” as the New York Herald Tribune Book Review anointed him.38

  When Engle accepted $250 to write a five-hundred-word piece on the American dream for a scholastic magazine on international cultures, he appeared not only the Cold War ideologue generating grist for the propaganda mill.39 He was also a man eager to exorcise the ghosts of his impoverished past, plagued by memories of how his “Mother had to beg [Paul’s father] for enough money for groceries so that he himself could eat. It was humiliating to see her ask,” he recalled, and “to see how reluctantly he gave her a dollar.”40 Engle’s television, magazine, newspaper, and film deals—along with others involving educational publishing giants like Britannica—suggest that his interest in expanding the Workshop into mass culture was precisely such a compensatory drive. This furious momentum propelled him to become the first to engineer consciously a literary empire by harnessing the simultaneous economic growth of corporate American and entertainment media industries.41 The Workshop creates value for itself by entering the mass market with a literary brand designed to elevate it above trade publishing. Engle’s mission was to signal to the world that all roads of contemporary literature pass through Iowa. To achieve that end, he would need to tap into the most advanced mass communication and marketing technologies available.42

  Although O’Connor appreciated Engle’s enthusiasm in the classroom and his powers of managing publicity, she was skeptical of his editorial judgment. In her view, he teetered perilously close to disingenuous salesmanship. Robie Macauley, O’Connor’s friend, recalled laughing at Engle’s “mannerisms and pretensions” as a mild rebellion against the knowledge that he ultimately held power over them as “the moving force behind the workshop.” Macauley explained that O’Connor had the utmost respect for Engle as a teacher, but was unable “to take him very seriously as a critic.” This was because “she thought that his suggestions for revision in Wise Blood were off the mark.”43

  O’Connor’s “The Geranium,” the first of the six stories that made up her MFA thesis, testifies to how “the men gave her a hard time” in class, especially in their objection to its suicide ending, which she was forced to excise. Her classmate Norma Hodges had read the story and was “flabbergasted” at its brilliance, and was left wondering why the men had disapproved of its dramatic concluding scene of a despondent old man plummeting to his death from atop a tall building. Hodges found the suicide “mythical,” while “They all went, ‘No . . . couldn’t happen . . . it’s too much,’ and so on.” Reading before her mostly male peers, “her broad Southern drawl” instantly elicited their disdain. “After a few lines, groans arose from the oval of chairs and the story was given to a man [Macauley] with more recognizable diction.”44 Her work often received “less attention than it deserved,” because the mostly male World War II veterans showed an obvious bias toward their own tales of combat, as Kay Buford remembered.45

  Engle imagined the Workshop fostering a sense of community in which it is “a heartening help where there are others facing the same problems and the same hopes.”46 This of course implies that such mutual support would take place outside of the creative process, between and after classes as a means of consolation rather than through collaboration and co-authorship. Engle originally made no pretensions that the program offered a space for collaborative creativity, the way many institutions have reimagined the Workshop’s pedagogical model thereafter. He instead cast it as a necessarily painful bout of solitary production. Interestingly, as the program grew, not only did alternative collaborative approaches surface, but an understanding of writing as edifying addiction (much less excruciating labor) emerged as well.

  If the Workshop faculty and student body provided the congregation and priests O’Connor never met at St. Mary’s, the program primarily functioned as a social system to reinforce her deeply individualistic aesthetic practice. Indeed, O’Connor’s cloistered process of production responded precisely as Engle had hoped all students would to the criticism of workshop sessions. The goal was not to drive students into isolation out of a sadistic desire to crush their individuality, as some have suggested, but to force a serious self-critical examination of one’s work precisely to withstand competition in the publishing industry.47 Publications, in this sense, set the standard
of excellence not “as student work but as regular work in competition with that of professional writers.” This Engle later argued was “one of the most forward-looking steps a university in this country has taken.”48 To that end, his colossal ambition grew, hinging on a deal with an opportunistic publisher and the promise of his star student.

  The Rinehart Debacle

  Students and faculty in the Workshop functioned as stand-ins for the editorial boards of the many publishers to whom they would submit their work. Training for publication, Engle insisted, was built into the workshops, because in them, “the manuscript is not treated as a theme, but severely as if it were being submitted to a professional editor.”49 If he could convince publishing companies that the program was serious, and that the writing it produced came from a systematic screening process in which “students are told that their writing is bad if it is bad,” the Workshop would build prestige by offering its students an inside track to publication. Publishers found the program particularly appealing precisely because it functioned as a kind of talent agency that vetted the best writers. “As a result, we have kept a good many untalented people from thinking they were writers,” a feature that “certainly spares editors many a weary hour,” he quipped.50 Only the strong survived, according to this Darwinian mentality, and Engle’s strongest—and most publishable—was Flannery O’Connor.