The poetic voice that speaks from the grave appears in the American tradition in Emily Dickinson’s equally bleak image of the passage from life to death in “I heard a fly buzz when I died.” Jarrell’s remains are unceremoniously hosed out of a turret and Dickinson’s senses abruptly shut down: “And then the windows failed—and then/ I could not see to see,” after their last perception is a random fly rather than a grand vision of the gates of heaven.33 A quiet rage—directed at the machine in Jarrell and at an indifferent deity in Dickinson—sounds a note of frustration and protest, at the cold inhumanity of the military-industrial complex in the former and the hollowness of conventional antebellum Congregational Christian dogma in the latter. Berryman similarly protests against the cosmic injustice of the disproportionately high numbers of brilliant poets that rank among the prematurely deceased.
During his darkest hours in Iowa, horrific visions of death menaced Berryman. Repeatedly awaking bolt upright in bed to a bombardment like Jarrell’s black flack and nightmare flares, Berryman struggled to ward off the demons. In a letter to his mother dated April 9, 1954, he described how he had “been suffering lately from terrible waking-nightmares and fear of death.” The bleak self-diagnosis pivoted on the fulcrum between a subconscious he could not control and the rational conscious life embodied by his identity as a professional poet and intensely dedicated faculty member of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. To shape the uncontrollable demons into art was the challenge, a formidable one given the horror welling up from the trauma of his father’s suicide during his youth. The trauma was exacerbated in adulthood by watching his best friends and most admired poets pass before their times. Like William Blake, who turned his mad visions into the beautiful nightmares of his lyrics and visual art, Berryman buoyed himself on the conviction that “life is, all, transformation,” a phrase that appears in his letter to his mother with the resolve of a survivor.34 At times in The Dream Songs he marveled at his own capacity to endure: “I don’t see how Henry, pried/ Open for all the world to see survived,” figuring himself as the voice of Henry, described in the prologue as one who “has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third.” Asked once if he was Henry, Berryman acknowledged that he was indeed, noting however that his created poetic identity is free from the suffering of living: “Henry pays no income tax” and “Henry doesn’t have any bats” like the ones “that come over and stall in my hair.”35
Berryman’s dark humor, also notable in Blake, kept him afloat, even if it still left him rudderless. During one class at the Workshop, Berryman recited from memory Blake’s “Mad Song,” which skewers the condition of the romantic idealist. The poem reflects Berryman’s core aesthetic and self-effacing humor that enabled him to cope with life as mad poet. “I turn my back to the east/ From whence comforts have increased,” Blake writes, “For light doth seize my brain,/ With frantic pain.”36 The dark humor in the lines satirizes the singer’s self-imposed incarceration within the parameters of time and space and attempt to escape it by chasing after night. Berryman’s best moments in his own poetry similarly draw back from despair to mock it, not unlike Herman Melville, who routinely checked his own excesses through comic inversion, as when he skewers Ishmael’s romantic idealization of life aboard a whaler by placing him under the command of the mad Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick.
As with Sexton, poetry kept Berryman alive. One can see him rescue himself from despair within the poems themselves, as in “Dream Song 36.” Precisely when he is about to succumb to the dark notion of life as a curse to be endured while all the brilliant literary minds have died, his tone shifts. He adopts the vernacular and philosophy of a tough-minded and world-weary survivor, and quiet assurance prevails: “Now there you exaggerate, Sah. We hafta die./ That is our ’pointed task. Love & die.” Without the capacity to rally himself in the space of his poetry in this way, Berryman declined rapidly. In his last days, his depression and alcoholism finally interfered with his ability to write and perform at readings and lectures. Similarly, changes in Sexton’s pharmaceutical therapy—particularly her shift to Thorazine—intended to treat her depression only sapped her energy and dulled her creative edge. Without poetry, or more precisely with poetry in a severely compromised fog, she and Berryman had little to live for.
Had he remained at Iowa, a different John Berryman, both poet and man, would have surely emerged. Despite his complaints to his mother about the alienating environment—“I detest Iowa City,” he wrote—he qualified his otherwise damning impressions: “I don’t like the people here much, but have nothing against them.” The truth is that he was thriving at the Workshop in spite of himself: “Several of my students are good enough to be worth the trouble,” especially Philip Levine and Anita Phillips. Behind the mask of the disagreeable curmudgeon was his admission that “everyone [is] very pleasant” and that his work in the classroom was both painstaking and satisfying, a labor of love he deeply valued. He had spent a great deal of time “setting up my courses, at which I’ve worked very hard and am teaching beautifully,” an edifying yet exhausting enterprise that “has not left me much energy.”37
Such creative burning Berryman identified with the brilliant flare that was Dylan Thomas’s soaring Welsh-English voice, possessing a rhythm and wit of striking alacrity, tenderness, and verbal agility. The Workshop in Berryman’s seminar hardly drummed the individualism out of students or formalized their writing. Thomas’s meeting with students delighted in their diversity of voices and experiences; he would also be hard to imagine as a scold demanding regular meter. If Berryman had been harsh, it was only because “Even a class as remarkable as this one will produce terrible poems, and I am the one obliged to say so.”38 But what marked both mad poets was their openness and encouragement of young talent. As we saw, Lowell had discouraged Snodgrass on early drafts of Heart’s Needle, demeaning what others considered courageous self-disclosure and emotional verve in treating the subject of his separation from his daughter. “Snodgrass,” he groused, “you have a mind; you mustn’t write this tear-jerking stuff.”39 Berryman gave opposite advice, never condemning early drafts as sentimental, and always pushing the metrical and formal limits of his syntactical expression. Levine received such guidance from Berryman, who inspired experimentation and unusual subjects, which the more formally inclined Lowell detested, tending instead “toward poetry written in formal meters, rhymed, and hopefully involved with the grief of great families, either current suburban ones or those out of the great storehouse of America’s or Europe’s past,” as Levine described. Levine’s poetry would thrive under Berryman’s eclectic, inclusive approach, inviting and validating his poems on subjects from his working-class background in Detroit. But Berryman never neglected or ignored the use of formal meter as an object of experimentation itself. “He even had the boldness to suggest that contemporary voices could achieve themselves in so unfashionable and dated a form as the Petrarchan sonnet,” testifying to how “he was all over the place and seemed delighted with the variety we represented.”40
Just as Dylan Thomas did “not go gentle into that good night,” Berryman would himself be among “The high ones” who “die, die. They die.” These mad poets burned through Iowa City, forever changing the place, upsetting the belief that literary professionalism necessitated the production of uniform workshop verse. Instead of suppressing subjectivity and idiosyncratic individual perception, Berryman encouraged it in his classes, and Thomas embodied it in his madcap visit and virtuoso reading. Both undermined the common assumption that teachers like Lowell had standardized poetic form, when both Levine’s and Snodgrass’s training and publications suggest otherwise. Their work, like their mentor, did not fit the description of the Workshop’s production of the disciplinary “quintessential form of literary professionalism” responsible for generating “the academic poem of the 1950s and early 1960s,” a species of writing “densely textured, tonally restrained, traditional in meter and
form, replete with classical and mythological allusion and symbol.”41 In fact, Berryman’s aesthetic liberated his students to draw from traditional metrical forms and the rich symbolism of classical mythology—particularly according to the models of Shakespeare and Blake—to find a personal voice, like the ones Levine and Snodgrass discovered. His eclecticism indeed anticipated the Language writing movement of the 1970s that rose in opposition to the academic poem advanced by such writers as Lowell. In this manner, Berryman shared more with the Beats, as did Thomas. That aesthetic also demanded a full-bodied immersion in the creative process, one that left personal lives in ashes. Berryman and Thomas, whose madness was their poetry, embodied Jack Kerouac’s “mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like the fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”42
Flannery O’Connor at Amana Colonies, with Robie Macauley (with camera) and Arthur Koestler, 1947 (Wikimedia Commons)
R. V. Cassill with a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 1960 (Courtesy of the University of Iowa Library Archives)
Pulp fiction by R. V. Cassill, 1954: one of many attempts to supplement his income (Wikimedia Commons)
Paul Engle with Iowa Writers’ Workshop students, circa 1950s (Courtesy of the University of Iowa Library Archives)
Paul Engle (left), with Ralph Ellison, Mark Harris, Dwight Macdonald, Arnold Gingrich (standing), and Norman Mailer, at the Writer in Mass Culture symposium (sponsored by Esquire) at the University of Iowa, December 4, 1959 (Courtesy of the University of Iowa Library Archives)
Paul Engle (right), presenting Midland: Twenty-Five Years of Fiction and Poetry, Selected from the Writing Workshops of the State University of Iowa (1961) to President Virgil Hancher at the University of Iowa, May 11, 1961 (Courtesy of the University of Iowa Library Archives)
Paul Engle at a reception for the anthology Midland, Iowa Memorial Union, University of Iowa, 1961 (Courtesy of the University of Iowa Library Archives)
Peace March in protest of the Vietnam War, Clinton Street, Iowa City, 1960s (Courtesy of the University of Iowa Library Archives)
Robert Lowell, above, January 1, 1965 (Photo by Elsa Dorfman; Wikimedia Commons)
Kurt Vonnegut, left, February 17, 1972 (Wikimedia Commons)
Margaret Walker, Poetry MFA 1942, the first African-American graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, returned to Iowa to train as a fiction writer under R. V. Cassill. Jubilee, her doctoral thesis from 1966, was published by Houghton Mifflin. (Courtesy of the University of Iowa Library Archives)
Jane Smiley, October 31, 2009 (Wikimedia Commons)
T. C. Boyle, May 19, 2013 (Wikimedia Commons)
Marilynne Robinson, April 21, 2012 (Wikimedia Commons)
PART 2
THE WORKSHOP IN THE AGE OF
AQUARIUS (1960s–1970s)
8 • Celebrity Faculty: Kurt Vonnegut and John Irving
In mid-1960s suburban Cape Cod, Kurt Vonnegut—whose ink sketches and signed monographs now command up to five thousand dollars each—was unknown and his books were out of print. “I was rescued by Paul Engle’s Writers’ Workshop in the mid 1960s,” Vonnegut recalled, “and he didn’t know me, and I don’t think he had ever heard of me. He didn’t read that kind of crap.”1 As an eleventh-hour replacement for Robert Lowell, who “decided not to appear” for his visiting teaching position arranged for the fall of 1965, Vonnegut leaped at the opportunity. “I needed the money. I needed the stimulation. I needed the change in scene,” especially from an environment devoid of literary life. “My neighbors on Cape Cod didn’t read me, didn’t read anything, so I had felt like a pointless citizen there,” he said.2 The Workshop held promise to transform the forgotten paperback writer into a famous literary author. The exploit, however, was not without its hidden perils. “We are what we pretend to be,” according to his ominous warning in Mother Night, “so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”3
In scrambling for a replacement for Lowell, Vance Bourjaily, one of Engle’s trusted advisers, “assured [Engle] I was indeed a writer, but dead broke with a lot of kids,” Vonnegut recalled. He had six children under his care, three of his own, and his sister’s three boys he had adopted when she and her husband died within twenty-four hours of each other. This burden compounded the desperation attendant to being “completely out of print and scared to death.”4 The unlikely leap from freelance popular fiction writing to the world-renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop presented Vonnegut with precisely the opportunity to win the serious recognition he had longed for as well as the financial stability he desperately needed.
Suddenly immersed in a community of elite writers, Vonnegut embarked on a self-conscious effort to reinvent himself. With most of his training in science, “he had not read many of the great novels his colleagues had been fond of discussing.” Like the young Richard Rodriguez taking it on himself to read the top one hundred canonical works of literature to build his literary success in the white community one book at a time, a syndrome he called “the scholarship boy,” Vonnegut similarly began reading classics to socially assimilate.5 His self-imposed “crash course in reading” was one of many signs of the self-consciousness he felt on his arrival in Iowa City for the fall semester of 1965. Reaching middle age “before I went crazy about Blake,” he turned “forty before I read Madame Bovary, forty-five before I had even heard of Céline.” Although he “grew up in a house crammed with books,” he “never had to read a book for academic credit, never had to write a paper about it, never had to prove I’d understood it in a seminar.” In literary criticism, he was out of his league. “I am a hopelessly clumsy discusser of books. My experience is nil,” he confessed.6 As the Vonnegut scholar Thomas F. Marvin points out, “For the first time in his life, he was expected to talk about writing, which forced him to think more deeply about his creative process.”7 He reached for anything he could find, including golf metaphors, to try to explain the proper form and rhythms of the game of creative writing. The challenge alone would have been formidable enough, had his arrival not been accompanied by whispers that he was a lowly purveyor of popular genre fiction, “a science-fiction hack” as one Workshop student alleged.8 That particular slur would have gone unchallenged had it not been for Vonnegut’s star student, John Irving, who rushed to his defense, precipitating a barroom brawl—a classic dramatic scene from 1960s Iowa City—over the aesthetic integrity of his beloved mentor.
Paperback Writer
In the years before his arrival in Iowa City, Vonnegut’s enterprising journalistic bent had been visible in an early column he wrote for the Cornell Daily Sun, which led him to try his hand at popular magazine fiction as a way of sustaining his wife and children on Cape Cod. When he shared his work with Norman Mailer, however, he knew instantly that the stigma of the pulp market would make it difficult to enter the ranks of intellectual culture. “You are right in saying that what I write is slick,” he replied to Mailer.9 This realization did not prevent him from discovering that trade paperback publishers, with their generous advance contracts and signing bonuses, could provide an even richer source of revenue than magazines. Further, his magazine publishers began dropping out of business with alarming regularity.10
As the periodical press accommodating science fiction withered, the paperback market exploded. An outline and a first chapter, Vonnegut soon learned, could earn him an advance of three thousand dollars. He began to resemble the “Paperback Writer” of the Beatles’ 1966 hit single about a man whose prolific outpouring of material is matched only by his shameless promotion of it: “If you really like it you can have the rights/ It could make a million for you overnight.” On swivel racks in drug stores, bus depots, and train stations sat Vonnegut’s first novels, The Sirens of Titan and Mother Night, along with his short story collection, Canary in a Cat House. “I was building a power base,” he later admitted
, “with sleazo paperbacks.” With six children to raise, he knew his methods had to be ruthless. “This society is based on extortion, and you can have anything you want if you have a power base.”11 Although Cat’s Cradle earned a favorable critical reception after its release in 1963, his work remained virtually invisible. “I wasn’t even getting reviewed,” he recalled. “Esquire published a list of the American literary world back then and it guaranteed that every living author of the slightest merit was on there somewhere. I wasn’t on there . . . [and] it made me feel subhuman.”12 Any literary recognition of the hardcover editions of Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater were rendered meaningless, as they too went out of print. The Faustian deal—prestige in exchange for the steady income of trade genre fiction—left him penniless.
A Delicate Aggression Page 23
