A Delicate Aggression

by David O. Dowling

  In addition to quid-pro-quo sexual exchanges, one of the other methods students used to place themselves in the favor of a select faculty member was drug running. The instructor might then invite the student to parties where key publishers and agents, usually from New York, were present. “At Iowa,” according to alumnus Don Wallace, “what they called ‘financial aid,’ was really entrée, access, permission to write, a green light to the publishing world.” The system of preferment began with the selection of Teaching/Writing Fellows, TWFs, or “Twiffs” for short. When “agents came to visit, nonaid students never heard about it.” Outsiders eventually learned of their fate, because “rumor clued us in,” usually through “bitter drunken tales at parties of the shunned.”72

  The most notable of students who supplied faculty with drugs as a form of gratuity was Doug Unger, whose thesis adviser in the 1970s was John Irving. Unger, known for a variety of exploits, including being kicked out of the English-Philosophy Building by Workshop secretary Connie Brothers for sleeping on a couch in the program office over the span of three months, survived “with a shower and a locker to use over at the gym, and three squares at the Student Union.”73 Director Jack Leggett told Brothers, the program’s ever watchful maternal figure of authority, “he’s living in his office, get him out of there.”74 This was not an easy task, since he “hadn’t paid rent for some time on the room [he] was supposed to be renting.” He returned later in the day to discover that Brothers had disconnected the office phone, reasoning that he would seek proper accommodations if only to keep in touch with his contacts. She was right. He moved in with the actress Amy Burk Wright—the daughter of Raymond Carver, the National Book Award finalist and visiting assistant professor at the Workshop in 1973 for one whiskey-drenched year—and he later married her.75

  In addition to his novel method of saving money on rent, Unger’s exploits included trafficking drugs for faculty. He made a monumental investment of time and capital to provide Anthony Burgess with hashish, very much in the form of gratitude. He drove halfway to Chicago, “and fronted a whole month’s pay” to “a guy I knew who had some really primo hash.” Unger knew Burgess preferred it to marijuana, especially while writing music as a means of passing the night away to cope with his chronic insomnia. Unger would take “a discarded page of [his] manuscript and wrap the hash in it and tie it up with a green string like a little birthday gift and pass it to Burgess in his office.” With the connection between the writing and the gift explicit through his imaginative selection of wrapping paper, Unger “made sure there was no charge to him because I admired his writing so much.”76

  Benefits accrued to those who could penetrate the private lives of teachers and win at the favoritism game. In response to Engle’s directive to identify “any good students in your care,” Vonnegut reported that he had introduced Ian MacMillan to his editor at Harper and Row, Roger Klein. The powerful editor “promised to do his best to get Harper’s Magazine to publish something of Ian’s.” “I’m going to see if I can make money start coming out of [Ian’s] ears within the next six months,” he promised Engle, speaking directly to his supervisor’s obsession with professionalizing—and indeed monetizing—the program’s best talent. Even the “shallow and derivative” ones, Vonnegut suggested, with not a little veiled satirical irony, “could probably both make it in Hollywood,” because at least they were “both funny and shrewd.”77 As his desire for literary prestige mounted, Vonnegut’s private correspondence shows he never abandoned his instinct for capital. After hearing news of his friend Richard Gehman’s generous advance for his novel, Driven, he cheered, “$5,267.49 to Gehman!” “Yummy!” he gushed, begging to know “How do these sons of bitches write thirteen books, or thirty-three, for Christ’s sakes—or sell serials to the Post and then to the movies?” He found it “pretty damn demoralizing” that there were “twenty million copies of the Shell Scott books in print” among other signs of thriving competition in the literary market. Inspired to seize his own share of the market, the next month he solicited interest in his novel The Sirens from Macmillan of England, remarking of the agents, publicists, and promoters in the industry, “Boy—did I ever see some pretty whores!”78

  When he was not using the Workshop as his own personal savings and loan—borrowing two thousand dollars at one financial low point during the late 1960s, eventually repaying it decades later in 1989—Vonnegut freely used the Workshop name to promote the careers of fellow writers outside the program.79 He lobbied intensely for William Price Fox, another satirical novelist without academic credentials. The goal in bringing him aboard, he joked, would be to win “a clear majority in the Writers’ Workshop of people with no fucking degrees whatsoever.” He vowed that the Workshop would “make [Fox] a blooming culture hero and millionaire,” just as it had begun to do for himself.80 Working toward the same goal, he pressured his students on several occasions into commercial publication. He urged Gail Godwin to write about a love affair for a women’s magazine in order “to make it as big as Muhammad Ali,” asking in his best advertising voice, “don’t [you] want to be that popular and wise in a magically simple way? I’d like to help.” His advice on how to leverage the popular market amounted to a Faustian proposition daring her to cater to the masses as an avenue toward becoming a distinguished author: “Are you willing to pander to popular tastes in order to be published?” A story about a romantic tryst should not be anything to be ashamed of, nor should it be considered a compromise to one’s artistic integrity, he insisted. Indeed, the cultural cachet of women’s magazines had appreciated considerably since Mademoiselle and Harper’s Bazaar editor George Davis revolutionized their previously lightweight editorial content with the introduction of serious literature, a transformation that began as early as the 1940s. Writing for popular women’s magazines “is how I supported myself for twelve years. I’ve taken jobs a damned sight worse than writing for Hallmark,” he wrote, comparing his own commercial work to Engle’s notorious sale of his own and his students’ writing as greeting card verse and television screenplays for the middlebrow company. “I do not feel dishonored,” he said. “What the hell. You’d be surprised by what you can say in a woman’s magazine these days.” Responding to the market not as a barbarian but as a principled artist, according to Vonnegut, should drive the production of “a good love story, and it will sell.” Although such advice may seem anathema to the Workshop’s elite code, all artists must face the exigencies of the publishing industry; “that’s life,” he wrote before signing off.81

  Vonnegut himself sold a piece from Slaughterhouse-Five to the popular press—Playboy magazine—while at the Workshop in 1967, two years before it appeared in book form and catapulted him to fame. Robie Macauley, the Workshop alumnus and teacher from the 1940s who had been Flannery O’Connor’s close friend, was instrumental in landing it in the men’s magazine. Macauley had just assumed editorship of the magazine’s fiction department, which he would enrich with the same vitality Davis brought to Mademoiselle. During his editorship, in 1965–1978, “Playboy was second only to the New Yorker in prestige as a place for serious writers to display their talents.”82 Such powerful names as Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and Ursula K. Le Guin appeared there. The venue also served as a key stepping-stone in Irving’s illustrious career. Popular crossover magazines featuring serious literature had yielded the desired results of profitability for Vonnegut. He thanked Macauley “for paying me so extraordinarily well” for the early draft of Slaughterhouse-Five, titled “Captured,” and for prestigious placement among the best minds of his generation.83

  Perhaps the most overlooked of Vonnegut’s legacies to Workshop culture is his demystification of the writing process as a professional pursuit. One assignment from November 1965, written in the form of a personal letter addressing students as “Beloved,” asked them to approach literature from the perspective of an editor in the publishing industry. They were not to play the role as if driven solely by profit, “a barbarian i
n the literary market,” or as “an academic critic, nor a person drunk on art.” They were to judge the fifteen stories in Masters of the Modern Short Story in order to learn the essentials of all great authors, according to Vonnegut: “Be yourself. Be unique. Be a good editor.”84 The latter category demanded judgment and sensitivity to audience and markets not typically associated with the Workshop curriculum. The assignment represents how his efforts at professionalizing his students’ careers extended from behind-the-scenes connections to the publishing industry to encompass coursework with professional applications. The gesture worked against the grain of solipsistic introspection, on one hand, and mutual savaging in workshop critiques on the other. One of the beneficiaries of such assignments was Suzanne McConnell, who became the fiction editor of the Bellevue Literary Review and the author of numerous short stories, essays, and reviews in reputable literary magazines.

  But of all Vonnegut’s students who would become “popular and wise in a magically simple way,” and make it as big as Muhammad Ali, John Irving stands out for the achievement of The World According to Garp. “I always knew John would make it big. He was always so preposterously funny.” One of his most notorious exploits occurred at his twenty-fifth birthday party, where he treated guests to what he called the musical score for the future film version of his unfinished first novel. The audacious gesture self-reflexively cast humorous light on the inflated egos and pretentious expectations of celebrity status endemic in the Workshop culture. Beyond self-satire, an element of serious prophecy demonstrated to himself and the Workshop community that his work was destined for a mass audience and adaptation to film. “I often did that, picked the music for the film before I finished the book. Call it my mayhem confidence.” Vonnegut found it irresistible. “Never lose your enthusiasm about your work,” he advised Irving. “So many writers are unenthusiastic.”85

  Such Muhammad Ali–like bravado came back to haunt Irving when he later joined the Workshop as a faculty member, in 1972–1975. The disastrous reception of his novel The 158-Pound Marriage (1974) nearly ruined his career. Originally conceived in Iowa City, the book “was published to resounding silence,” selling “fewer copies than either my first or my second novel,” and the few reviews it received “were argumentative.”86 By 1975, he had committed himself with a renewed sense of humility to the project that would spring his career. His pupil Unger remarked on how powerful a learning experience it was to be “let in on his own creative process.” He “let us read early drafts of his work, such as the false beginning to what later became The World According to Garp, that contained, toward the end, pages that he later wrote around a subject, followed its directions, then, after comprehending what he was truly doing in the book, how he discovered the real story.”87 Without the prestige of the Workshop behind him, the manuscript might have never been published, especially given the poor sales performance of his previous works. John McNally, author of the satirical novel After the Workshop, astutely observes that “the sales of John Irving’s first three novels were terrible,” and therefore “it’s likely that The World According to Garp, his fourth novel, wouldn’t have been published, at least not by a commercial press.” In McNally’s view, “this is where the publishing industry and, in turn, the chain bookstores that order the books and, in turn, dictate print-runs, shoot themselves in the foot.”88 But with the apparatus of the Workshop behind him, a lucrative advance contract was within reach.

  In 1975, Irving was “a long way from finishing the novel, which was to be my fourth, and my first best seller” three years later.89 Although he did not select the score for it, Garp became a major motion picture starring Robin Williams. The production earned $29.7 million on a $17 million budget. His success in film grew with The Cider House Rules, which won the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay in 1999. After Vonnegut and Irving achieved their colossal fame, they “were neighbors” in Sagaponack, in the Hamptons. “He used to ride his bicycle over to my house in the morning for a cup of coffee,” Irving fondly recalled of the man whose creative vision he called “Irreverence for human beings and institutions. Kindness for individuals.”90 To Vonnegut, those individuals at the Workshop consisted of an “extended family . . . relatives of mine for life.”91

  He continued to promote the Workshop and his friends there long after he left. In a blurb for director Frank Conroy’s Body and Soul, a novel considered one of the most powerful evocations of the experience of musical performance, Vonnegut sang the praises of his piano-playing prowess as an extension of his writing skill. Sent as a fax to the Workshop in 1990, precisely when Conroy was “telescope deep” into the writing of the novel that appeared three years later, Vonnegut’s profile of Conroy’s artistry functions as advance publicity for what would be the director’s second—and best—novel after Midair, his 1985 debut in the genre, which received lukewarm reviews. With his signature wit and luster, Vonnegut crafted the piece to double as promotional material on behalf of the Workshop by attesting to the talent and sensibility of its director, whom he aptly characterized as “arch and dainty.”92

  In Timequake, published in 1996, Vonnegut’s alter ego, the science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, dies at eighty-four, the author’s own age at the time of his passing in 2007. The final stretch was not smooth sailing, as he would attempt to take his own life in 1985, and seek medical treatment through what he called “the latest chemical mood music, which is Prozac.” In the past he typically weathered such bouts with grim determination, and would “take down the sail and batten the hatches.”93 Rough seas could be expected, as indicated in his illustration for Slaughterhouse-Five of a tombstone whose epitaph read, “Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt,” a vintage Vonnegut statement, as humorous as it is dark, in one pithy phrase.94

  9 • Infidels: Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo

  Sandra Cisneros, a twenty-two-year-old Latina from a Chicago barrio, sought refuge in the last row of her classroom in the English-Philosophy Building at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She would have fled back to Chicago that fall semester of 1976 had it not been for her confidante, Joy Harjo. “We were just like Indians, sitting silently in the back of the room,” Harjo recalled.1 A Native American member of the Muscogee (Creek) nation with Cherokee ancestors, the twenty-five-year-old Harjo shared Cisneros’s distinction, along with the African-American poet Rita Dove, as one of the first women of color accepted into the program. Hiding on the fringe of the classroom was one of their many compensatory gestures, which included Cisneros’s suggestion that “maybe we should get a drink before class.” But more than self-silencing and alcohol, what sustained them was the confidence that grew from the knowledge that, unlike so many of their classmates, “we are the ones who are publishing—Joy Harjo and I.”2

  A single mother of two children she had in her teens, Harjo bonded with Cisneros to form a safe haven from the program’s prevailing white culture. Since the program’s origin, the vast majority of the student body had consisted of ex-soldiers who valorized and sentimentalized their experience as combat veterans. By the mid-1970s a new wave of students, like the Harvard-educated Tracy Kidder, fresh from the battlefields of Vietnam and Korea, entered a program staffed by army veterans such as Marvin Bell. Workshop sessions spilled over into vigorous competition outside the classroom, in full-contact boxing and wrestling, as well as high-stakes poker. Anthony Bukoski, a classmate of Cisneros in 1976, contended that “all writers should know how to box.” He proposed that “MFA students, the guys anyway, should be required to spar three rounds at least once a week.” Notably, Bukoski was “a big Marine who had lost his front teeth in a fight with another Marine in Vietnam.”3 While the men were immersed in a culture conflating literary prowess with physical domination, Cisneros and Harjo had been the ones successfully landing their work—instead of punches directed at each other—with publishers.

  In preparing her assignments, Cisneros searched for ways to circumvent the workshop method that transformed classrooms
into intellectual theaters of combat. Paul Engle’s founding principle was based on the belief that young writers overestimated their creative powers, a flaw that only astringent criticism could overcome. Such criticism was intended to prepare them for the presumably harsher publishing industry. The method inspired Cisneros and Harjo to conceive of their own alternative approach to creative writing. “You have to have balance, so you don’t savage people,” Cisneros discovered. “There wasn’t balance at Iowa. There was no love,” but instead narrow individualism, precluding “a sense of compassion there.” In class, Cisneros faced either blank stares or a hail of destructive criticism. She responded to the competitive culture by asking herself each day, “Okay, what can I write about now that no one can say I’m wrong.”4 Operating on that impulse, she created the majority of the material she later developed into The House on Mango Street, a series of vignettes in poetic prose based on her upbringing in inner-city Chicago.