A Delicate Aggression
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Gerber replied with an outpouring of praise and support that left Vonnegut feeling validated and vindicated. “We are thoroughly delighted that you are getting the notices that your work deserves. I’m joining your fan club, too,” he gushed, “and am having a wonderful time going through your novels”—language that perhaps inadvertently disclosed his delight in the fiction as entertainment rather than appreciation of it as serious literature. Gerber went on to assuage Vonnegut’s “fear that as time goes on, we’ll be expecting Workshop lecturers as well as our more academic types to have Ph.D.’s.” He assured him that such talk was directed more pointedly at Engle, whose highest degree was a creative writing M.A. and whose unilateral allocation of funds without English department consultation had been the object of scorn from Gerber and his unit. “I do think that the Director of the Workshop should probably have the degree,” he affirmed as part of his larger campaign against Engle that effectively dismantled his reign by 1966. Without explaining how or why a Ph.D. should be necessary for directing the Workshop—no director has ever held the degree in the history of the program—Gerber and the English department had targeted Engle’s lack as a weakness. “But beyond that what we need are men who are at once effective teachers and writers of distinction. You eminently qualify on both counts,” he wrote, encouraging him “to stay here for at least an eon or two!”38 Gerber’s support of Vonnegut, he made clear, would not extend to Engle or the Workshop in general. That year, Engle was on his way out, and would soon be known, in Vonnegut’s description, as “the former head . . . a hayseed clown, a foxy grandpa, a terrific promoter who, if you listen closely, talks like a man with a paper asshole.”39 Engle joined forces with Leslie (Hualing) Nieh at the time to establish the International Writing Program, and he fully dedicated himself to it by 1969.
Gerber’s letter is even more bizarre in light of the fact that Vonnegut had no college degree whatsoever. “Nelson [Algren] and I have no futures in the field, since we have no degrees,” Vonnegut wrote his wife. By comparison, “Bourjaily is loaded with them and is a university career man.”40 Vonnegut felt so acutely self-conscious about lacking a degree that he sought to complete his master’s in anthropology from the University of Chicago, a program he had entered on the GI Bill despite lacking an undergraduate degree. He had dropped out of Cornell in his junior year, in January 1942, after being placed on academic probation the previous May for satirical columns in the Cornell Daily Sun. “I was flunking everything by the middle of my junior year. I was delighted to join the Army and go to war,” he recalled.41 Not surprisingly, those columns reflected a pacifist bent with a unique dark humor that would become the signature feature of his fiction, drawing attention from censors for the rest of his career. Chicago received the completed M.A. thesis he finished within the first ten days of his arrival, as a desperate measure to correct the glaring deficiency of any degree in higher education. That deficiency was all the more conspicuous since he had been charged with the task of educating and accrediting students in the most reputable creative writing graduate program in the world.42
At stake in earning an advanced degree was not only credibility among the Workshop faculty and students, but a much needed raise in salary, since he had entered with a contract of a mere $8,500, the lowest salary on the program’s staff. The Chicago anthropology department, however, rejected his thesis comparing narrative rituals in primitive cultures to contemporary short story writing, on the grounds that “it was not valid to compare primitive and civilized societies.”43 Chicago eventually attempted to repair the wound, but only after Vonnegut had achieved worldwide fame following the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five. In 1971, long after he desperately needed a twenty-percent raise, which the master’s degree would have earned him in his Workshop salary in 1965, Chicago awarded him the degree in anthropology based on his novel Cat’s Cradle. The novel had been published in 1963, two years before his arrival in Iowa City. Vonnegut retaliated in his memoir, Palm Sunday, by howling, “the University of Chicago . . . can take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooooooon,” his way of “telling a great university his true feelings.”44
Chasing degrees was pointless, precisely because “the Workshop had always been staffed by professionals, so staffers have almost always been self-educated and worse-educated than you,” according to the hilariously accurate advice he gave to author Dick Gehman, who had just accepted a teaching position in the program. “Forget your lack of credentials,” he said. “The University is perfectly used to barbarians in the Workshop,” and (except for Engle) the administration “thinks nothing of it,” as shown by his correspondence with Gerber. Those lacking degrees were a near majority, he assured him; “Yates has no degree. Algren had one, but tried to hush it up (Journalism B.A., U. of Illinois).” The real credentials that make non-degree holding Workshop faculty “as glorious as any full professor” lie in their connections to the publishing industry, particularly the capacity to function on behalf of the budding writers as a literary agent. Rather than advanced degrees, one’s faculty status would be secure as long as “you know REAL WRITERS and REAL EDITORS in BOSTON and NEW YORK.” Since formal teaching was just a sidelight to this essential function, “classes don’t matter much,” and “the real business, head-to-head, is done during office hours in the afternoons” for the benefit of the students, which itself takes scant time and responsibility. This is because “Mornings are for writing—and so are most of the afternoons.”45 Although Vonnegut may have implored his students to avoid writing like mercenaries of the literary marketplace, hinging every aesthetic decision on its potential salability, he certainly understood the faculty role as informal publicist to ensure handsome profits from their work.46
The formulation that sophisticated audiences could expand beyond narrow niche followings provided an avenue for Vonnegut’s ascendance. In a rare turn of events in publishing, after Scribner’s edition of Player Piano went out of print, Holt, Rinehart and Winston reprinted the novel in 1966.47 Even more striking is for a title to debut in paperback and later move to the literary prestige of hardcover, rather than the industry standard of the reverse. This was precisely the fate of Mother Night, which had disappeared from print after its initial paperback run only to rise again under the reputable imprint of Harper and Row. In a feat that Stephen King and other genre writers have attempted to no avail, Vonnegut had essentially crossed over into the literary establishment. The gatekeeper allowing Vonnegut entrance into such exclusive company in this case was Harper’s, whose review prompted a reconsideration of his work. With all of his works now in print, his star was on the rise.
Even the trade press Dell reissued The Sirens of Titan in Vonnegut’s magical year of 1966. Delacorte/Dell had distinguished itself by offering contracts for both hard- and soft-cover editions, which allowed the publisher to exceed the industry standard for advances and signing bonuses. The crossover model between trade and hardcover proved successful in the hands of Dell’s Sam Lawrence, who signed Vonnegut to a three-book contract for the rights to both hardcover and paperback editions. Vonnegut scholar Dan Wakefield argues that Lawrence’s “faith that writers he believed in who had not yet become big moneymakers would eventually earn back their advances and make his company a profit was borne out—most dramatically of all by Kurt Vonnegut.”48 Yet Lawrence’s decision was not made on faith in the product alone. He also carefully took into account the rising stock of Vonnegut on the literary market, and seized him at the moment of his most precipitous ascent toward the apex of his powers. Cat’s Cradle earned a contract with a New York producer for staging as a Broadway musical, and Peter Sellers of Pink Panther fame commenced filming God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Even Nelson Algren, whom Irving loathed as the antithesis of his beloved mentor, became a Vonnegut advocate. Unlike most Workshop novels produced as Hollywood films, a move typically frowned on in the program as execrable commercial pandering, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater surprisingly won over the elitist Algren. “The novel ha
ppens to be excellent,” he wrote. “It explores the problem of how to love people who are of no use with such fantastic humor that we at first do not realize that it is ominous” as resonant narrative art.49 The paperback writer was now on the silver screen, Broadway, and most important, between hardcovers.
Not surprisingly, at the height of this Vonnegut renaissance, Gerber notified him that he would be receiving a pay raise, one calculated to entice him into remaining permanently at Iowa. His modest original “stipend of $8500 for the academic year 1965–1966” dramatically increased to $11,000 for the following year.50 “In Iowa City I was central and spectacular,” Vonnegut wrote, and “suddenly writing seemed important again.”51 Vance Bourjaily had lobbied for the salary increase in a letter to Gerber, writing, “It is Paul’s and my feeling that he has done and continues to do an excellent job and deserves whatever increase in wages seems appropriate for a man of his high caliber.”52 The sea change in the critical reception of his work was profound, as a miraculous reversal of public reputation had taken place in just one year. Not everyone at Iowa universally accepted Vonnegut as a writer of distinction, and many critics seriously qualified their praise. Jerome Klinkowitz, the first academic to study Vonnegut’s career, remarked how “Critics were confused by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. He was weird. They hated to admit they dug Vonnegut,” in part because doing so breached the divide between high and low art.53
Vonnegut tried to wipe away such critical confusion over the seriousness of his work by claiming that he was writing a historical novel, thereby positioning himself as a writer of more than just science fiction or comedy. “I have a novel about the Great Depression in progress,” he promised, quite falsely, in a letter he wrote to Gerber when he accepted the position, “and will finish it there.”54 Instead, in his first two weeks at Iowa, he would “swim every couple of days, and do pushups and situps, and smoke worse than ever, and write not at all,” except for work on the aforementioned “master’s thesis in anthropology, which I’ve owed Chicago for 18 years.”55 Although he did not write about the Great Depression, his attention turned toward another historical event, the firebombing of Dresden in Slaughterhouse-Five, the seriousness of which he insisted on in the final words of its preface: “I’ve finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun.”56
The preface to the book also sought to preempt any potential bias against science fiction in the literary community, as well as Gerber and his readers, by describing the work as a painful and harrowing look back into the past. Yet the novel itself included such obvious genre conventions as time travel, interplanetary alien life, and futuristic dystopian settings. His own distaste for schlock fiction, on display in the Times Square bookstore scene, also belies a distinct drive for literary dollars, an instinct for capital reaching back to his days in public relations at General Electric. The capitalist in him seeking to control the power base appears in private letters and conversation throughout his two years at Iowa. Unlike such poets as Lowell and Berryman, Vonnegut never had the luxury of serial visiting faculty appointments under the protective patronage, income, and support of well-endowed universities. Before arriving at the Workshop, Vonnegut had been isolated, both professionally and financially, from the web of creative writing programs that had sheltered so many writers from the ravages of the free market. Financially unprotected, he resorted to selling cars to supplement his dwindling royalties. He had been a creature of entrepreneurial America, both in corporate culture and as his own authorial brand as a freelancer, an experience that tempered his outlook on the profession of literature. Thus, when Vonnegut announced to a cluster of students, in his typically humorous yet crushingly sad way, “how hopeless it was to be a young writer living in America—he vouched that advertising was the next big game.”57 They all had been laboring under a mistake, he claimed, since advertising was growing at a rate proportional to the decline of fiction writing.
Whereas such depressing prophecies of creative writing’s demise as a viable means of making a living proved true for the aggregate population of aspiring authors in America, select Workshop students enjoyed the advantage of an inside track to success. “Capitalism will be kind to you one day,” Vonnegut told Irving. His star student turned the statement over in his mind for years after, not sure of its intended meaning. Was he being sarcastic? Did this mean something about the salability of the fiction he was writing, or some future career outside of literature, in one of the lucrative fields he had been touting, like advertising? He finally confronted his mentor, asking, “Did you mean that you thought I was going to write a best seller and make a lot of money on my writing?” Vonnegut looked at him with a knowing smile. “Well, of course that’s what I meant! What did you think I meant?” he shot back.58 His prophecy came true.
Of Cult Heroes and Millionaires
At his parties, Vonnegut let his guard down, riding the euphoria of “belonging to a huge and extended family of artists,” particularly his coterie of students, who impressed him as “so able and interesting . . . that I thought of them, almost from the first, as colleagues.”59 Untethered from his wife and children, whom he had left at home since “there are too many of them to move,” Vonnegut quickly established his home as the epicenter for debauchery in Iowa City.60 Scotch, his drink of choice, flowed like water. He reported with delight to a friend that it cost only “$4.90 a quart.”61 But he did not venture beyond whisky, meat and potatoes, and his conventional New England attire, keeping at bay the vegetarianism, exotic drugs, and tie-dye fashions sweeping through hippie culture in the 1960s. In 2005, he admitted to being “a coward about heroin and cocaine, LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge,” unlike the visiting professor Anthony Burgess, famous for A Clockwork Orange, and others who freely indulged during the era of psychedelic experimentation. “I did smoke a joint of marijuana once with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable,” Vonnegut said, but since it had little effect on him, “I never did it again.” His love affair with Scotch never backfired on him, since “by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic,” which he surmised was “largely a matter of genes.”62 When consorting with figures notorious for drug-fueled mind-expanding experiences, such as Norman Mailer in 1960, he would offer conviviality and libations but typically little else: “we have no horse or Mary Jane, but plenty of gin, God knows.”63
Favoritism among students ran rampant, won from professors in a variety of ways. One student ran drugs for the faculty member he most wanted to impress, while others offered sexual favors that in some cases led to long-standing affairs.64 Vonnegut could provide Scotch for himself. But the other category proved more complex and difficult. In accepting a teaching position at Smith College long after his Workshop stint, he vowed, “I will not do there what I did when in exile in Iowa City in 1965, which was to interfere with a student’s clothing.” In a private letter, he prefaced his comments on the matter by insisting, “Not a word of this to anyone!” He then explained, “women have the power to renew the ambition and wit of men adrift, and have done that twice for me so far, once in Iowa City in 1965, and then Sagaponack,” in the Hamptons on Long Island, New York, in 1991. Both encounters, he claimed, cured him of writer’s block and primed his creativity. “Both times, after sleeping with these angels, I started writing and making pictures again.” He pointed out that “Bellow and Mailer have renewed themselves in this fashion again and again, as though buying new cars,” evoking the elation on the faces of middle-aged male customers he served at his Saab dealership in the 1950s.65 The confluence of creative art and the advent of free love at the time converged in a perfect storm of social and cultural forces. Added to this, Vonnegut’s naturally convivial spirit was in overdrive, in an attempt to entertain his way into the hearts of the Workshop members. If he lacked a degree, and if some had once looked down on his work as mere trade genre fiction, he might win their hearts—if not their money at the poker table—at his wild parties.
One encounter with a student, however, brought about the unintended consequence of a long and lasting love. In a particularly self-reflexive passage in a preface to Slaughterhouse-Five, he remarks, “I taught creative writing in the famous Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa for a couple of years,” during which time “I got into some perfectly beautiful trouble, got out of it again.”66 Much of it was precipitated by a sense that marriage with his wife, Jane, had “become formal and strange, and not at all sexy,” as if he were “the Ambassador from New Zealand presenting credentials to the Foreign Minister of Uruguay.” “I can’t get it up for her anymore,” he disclosed in a private letter to his friend Knox Burger, but he could for “anybody else.” Loree Wilson Rackstraw, a “single mom, with two kids,” was more than just “anybody else.”67 Both agreed to her disclosure of their relationship in her book Love as Always, Kurt: Vonnegut as I Knew Him. “Sustained mostly by the U.S. Postal service” for decades after their first encounter in 1965, Vonnegut’s affair with Rackstraw initiated a far more substantial and mutually gratifying relationship than those typical of Workshop faculty and students, a part of the larger system of privileges and entitlements pervading Workshop culture.68
W. D. Snodgrass attested to the sexual entitlement assumed by the male faculty at the Workshop, such as John Berryman. Riding in the back of Snodgrass’s car to a party, Berryman forced himself on an unsuspecting victim. “Hearing her protests, I stopped the car,” Snodgrass remembered. “John, this is a proper lady who does not like to be mauled,” he warned. Shocked, Berryman wondered what kind of woman did not yield freely to the advances of a male professor. “What? You mean you don’t fuck?” The car fell silent. Berryman then decided to back off, attempting to divert attention from his untoward behavior. “Oh! It’s that word that bothers you: P-H-U-Q-Q. I promise never to use it again,” he said, as nervous laughter spread through the car. The response condoned his pose of “little boy naughtiness.” One of many unwanted acts of sexual aggression on Workshop students, such behavior “might have seriously damaged a number of people, some of them innocent.”69 Although Vonnegut advised incoming faculty member Richard Gehman, “don’t ball undergraduates,” it was only because “their parents are still watching.”70 The comment implied that graduate students, whose parents were not watching, were fair game. Sandra Cisneros put it even more bluntly. “The teachers were completely fucked up. They seemed to think that free booty was part of their compensation package, and these young women, they look up to these writers and think of them as being gods and don’t realize that these are men with no control over their lower [urges].” To her, Iowa was a “dysfunctional” system where “we had the sick preying on the naïve.”71