A Delicate Aggression

by David O. Dowling

  Despite the persistence of Cold War rhetoric into the 1970s in Iowa’s writing programs, the Vietnam War and developments abroad complicated the ideological climate and infused it with activism, protest, and defiance of authority. Viebahn was no apologist for the free market; Dove, as mentioned earlier, believed better poetry came from East German writers, and that the capitalist system of West Germany actually functioned as a deterrent to powerful literature. West Germans were bombarded by consumer culture and thus looked upon poetry and the arts indifferently, or as an irrelevant pastime incapable of competing with commercial media.

  Dove’s resistance to being recruited as a soldier for ideological warfare resonates through an early poem she began at Iowa titled “Upon Meeting Don L. Lee, in a Dream.” Using her signature surreal Imagism, she situates herself in the audience of a Black Arts Movement rally. As the intensity from the podium escalates, the speaker’s hair begins falling out, “suggesting the decay of the ideology that Don Lee embodies.”59 Dove’s dissent toward doctrinaire aesthetics not only criticizes his “exclusive celebration of blackness,” it “is a comic feminist putdown of masculine posturing” prone to the sort of “homophobic and racist polemics that Lee preached,” as the critic Pat Righelato aptly explains.60 Dove said of her motivation to dismantle Lee, “I was kind of terrified of being suffocated before I began” a career as a professional author, and thus penned her own poetic declaration of independence.61

  Defying Alice Walker

  The young woman with the flashy fingernails whom Marvin Bell approached at the Bread Loaf conference for writers may have played the naive and eager young apprentice to his tweedy wizened author figure at the beginning of the 1970s. But by the middle of the decade, she had become a force to be reckoned with in the world of American letters, as no less a figure than Alice Walker would soon discover. While Dove was still enrolled at Iowa in 1975, editor Daniel Halpern selected “Adolescence II” along with “Nigger Song: An Odyssey” and “This Life” for The American Poetry Anthology. As an occasion for celebration heralding an auspicious professional debut for the twenty-three-year-old author, the volume’s publication brought the unanticipated result of inciting outrage from one of the most prominent figures in African-American literature. When Dove’s phone rang, she never expected Walker, the author of the famous short story “Everyday Use,” to be on the line. At the time, Walker’s career was on a steady ascent, building momentum toward its zenith. In less than a decade, she would receive both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple, achieving both worldwide fame and a permanent place in the canon of twentieth-century American literature. Walker, who had served on the editorial board for the newly published volume, informed Dove in no uncertain terms that she “refused to read at the book launch in San Francisco because a ‘racist poem’ had been published in the anthology.” To Dove’s horror, Walker went on to identify the poem in question as Dove’s very own Iowa product, “Nigger Song: An Odyssey.” Incredulous, Dove pleaded for an explanation, whereupon she learned that “Alice objected to the use of the word ‘nigger,’ even by a black writer.”62

  With her heart in her throat, Dove hung up the phone, wheeled around and marched toward her typewriter in the cramped apartment on 24 Van Buren Street in Iowa City. Gathering her poise, she typed out “a letter explaining my philosophy about the word.” She defended her intent “to redeem the word, to reimagine it as a black concept,” a deft political move anticipating LGBTQ activists’ later reclamation of the term “queer” from derisive usage. Days later, a letter appeared with a return address reading “Alice Walker.” Her fingers trembling, Dove tore open the letter. Although the tone was stately, it was insistent in its refusal to compromise. The “polite, dignified letter” recognized Dove’s “right to use whatever words I choose but argued that we should not use such words in the company of white people.” Reaching this part of the letter, Dove raised her eyes and quietly made a vow to herself: “No one’s going to put me in that kind of cage—not whites, not blacks, not even myself.” Her dedication to total creative autonomy at that moment was complete. She vowed to write without limitation, to use any language, cross any cultural boundaries, and invoke any subject on her creative journeys. As for the poem Walker denounced for its use of one of the world’s most offensive and politically charged words, she knew her art would rule the day and “defy whatever nefarious purposes people may want to use it for.”63

  Such aesthetic freedom echoed the lifestyle Dove led after she graduated from Iowa in 1977. Two years of intensive poetry training at the Workshop took its toll. She grew weary of the “Workshop poems” she had become so adept at writing. She became impatient and disenchanted with the cadences and sounds of her own poetic voice. The bureaucratic university system—with its rules and competition for Teaching/Writing Fellowships—also contributed to her fatigue. It is not surprising, therefore, that Dove embraced fiction to refresh her creative spirit. She also rejected an opportunity to return to academic life by turning down the most significant job opportunity of her career. The choice between the tenure-track assistant professor position at Florida State University and the prospect of joining Viebahn at Oberlin College in her birth state of Ohio was difficult. While in Ohio, he taught classes in German literature and directed plays; she enrolled in art classes and launched a collection of short stories that later appeared as Fifth Sunday. After two years at Oberlin, they spent two more years abroad in Israel and Berlin, a time she refers to as their “salad days.” The untethered, bohemian freelance life brought them the autonomy and freedom they desired. Her second book, Museum, came to fruition at this stage. After two years overseas she grew concerned that she had lost her poetic edge in English, “the precise tone of a phrase.” Prose offered a more forgiving genre where “the damage was more manageable” than poetry. In 1981, she returned to poetry and the academy, this time as a faculty member in the creative writing program at Arizona State University.64 Although she has moved appointments throughout the remainder of her career, she has maintained academic employment ever since.

  On Iowa Avenue just east of the Pentacrest, Dove’s words appear beneath pedestrians’ feet in a commemorative plaque: “Sometimes/ a word is found so right it trembles/ at the slightest explanation.” The quote is one of a series of immortal lines from famous Workshop faculty and graduates that include Flannery O’Connor and Kurt Vonnegut, embossed on the walkway along the avenue leading toward the majestic golden-domed Old Capitol building. What makes it stand out from these luminaries is precisely what distinguished her formative years at the Workshop—literary art’s liberation from explanation by critics and ideologues intent on binding it to social duty, which, for Dove, defies neat categorization. Like a perfectly chosen word in a poem, Dove’s career at Iowa was as unique as it was irreplaceable. Perhaps most telling of her legacy is the line that follows: “You start out with one thing,” as in her first year at the Workshop before meeting Viebahn and discovering the IWP, “end/ up with another, and nothing’s/ like it used to be, not even the future.”65 She propelled herself toward that future, inspired by the East German poets who delicately, but aggressively, challenged authority and crossed boundaries in their writing: their tacit credo was to expand imaginative horizons beyond the limits of “the larger community censorship of the individual imagination.”66

  11 • The Genius: Jane Smiley

  When Jane Smiley first arrived at the University of Iowa in 1970, she was a newlywed and self-described “graduate student wife” with no particular professional ambition. The phrase “trailing spouse” had yet to be coined, as few dual-career couples existed at that time. Her mind was hardly idle, however, after she and her husband, John B. Whiston, whom she had met as a sophomore at Yale, moved into an idyllic farmhouse outside Iowa City near the rural town of Wellman. Rent was $25 per month, which Whiston’s stipend from the University of Iowa’s graduate program in medieval history helped defray, along with Smiley’s job “mak
ing teddy bears in a factory” for a paltry $1.65 per hour. As with her Workshop classmate W. P. Kinsella, who transformed the vast fields of Iowa into the setting for his novel Shoeless Joe (later adapted into the film Field of Dreams), the magic of “the era of the back-to-the-land-movement” where they could “live a pastoral, idyllic life” had captured her imagination. Organic farming was in its ascendency, preceding the farm-to-table movement by roughly forty years. Prominently displayed on the coffee table was Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (1971), while the domestic farm drama The Waltons, her “favorite show,” played on the television.1 Amid the pleasures of self-reliant days filled with gardening, canning, and drawing energy from solar and wind power came the deep satisfaction of finding wholesome alternatives to technologized commercial agriculture and its mounting environmental degradation. Although the prospect of professional authorship had yet to enter her mind as a viable future, Smiley had already sown the seeds of the creative process. Two decades later she would draw on her memory of this domestic idyll for A Thousand Acres, her tour de force recasting of King Lear in Iowa, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.

  The unexamined life of a trailing spouse in rural Iowa was not worth leading. From her early days standing in line for registration at Yale (on exchange during her sophomore year at Vassar) with a budding young actress named Meryl Streep, Smiley thrived at the epicenter of intellectual and creative culture. Her omnivorous mind is apparent in her publications, which include thirteen novels and biographies of Charles Dickens and John Vincent Atanasoff, the inventor of the computer. Among her nonfiction is a potent 591-page tome, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, which features commentary on no fewer than one hundred classic novels. Her original intent in auditing graduate courses in English at the University of Iowa was to pursue a Ph.D. in Norse literature and culture. Upon her acceptance to the doctoral program in English at Iowa in 1972, she immersed herself in academic research and dabbled in fiction writing as a diversion. But the pastime soon became serious after she shared her stories with some friends from the Workshop, Rush Rankin and Stuart Dybek. Both were spellbound by her natural talent. On their recommendation, she applied to the program and was admitted in the fall semester of 1974.2

  At the Workshop, Smiley soon collided with a culture of literary production less intent on intellectual exploration and more on fierce competition. “In that period,” she recalled, “the teachers tended to be men of a certain age, with the idea that competition was somehow the key—the Norman Mailer period.” The culture of creative writing at Iowa, she learned, patterned itself after Mailer’s notorious conflicts with dissenting critics, disputes that often boiled over into fisticuffs. “If you disagreed with Norman, or gave him a bad review, he’d punch you in the nose,” she said of the norm adopted by the pugnacious Workshop culture. In this group, male students and teachers engaged in boxing—regularly bloodying and knocking each other senseless—not merely as their preferred leisure activity and form of exercise. Instead, boxing served as a ritual integral to a particularly pugnacious strain of the Hemingwayesque ideal of hypermasculine authorial identity. To them, literature was not a body of knowledge to be researched or a craft to be mastered, but a means through which to assert dominance. According to behavioral expectations modeled after Mailer, authors “were supposed to get in fights in restaurants.”3

  The woman who loved horses, grew up reading Nancy Drew, The Dana Girls, and The Black Stallion, and now watched The Waltons while canning her own vegetables thus found herself in a curious dilemma. Hers was not the Raymond Carver hard-drinking school of dirty realism that resonated so well with Vietnam veterans, boxing aficionados, and hardened drug addicts like T. Coraghessan Boyle. Survival for her demanded a firm commitment to “all those years of guarding my stuff—no drinking, no drugs, personal modesty and charm, [and] a public life of agreeability and professionalism.”4 Maintaining this level of professionalism was particularly challenging amid the beery and combative culture of her male colleagues. Instrumental in meeting that challenge was Barbara Grossman, her diminutive confidante with astute business savvy, who eventually obtained a position in the publishing industry powerful enough to launch Smiley’s career toward world fame.

  The Hemingway Defense

  As one of the few women in the program at the time, Smiley remembers the literary men of Iowa City during the early 1970s with a mixure of queasy disdain and comic distance: “The seventies were the years of swaggering male writers, editors, and F. Scott Fitzgerald (the ‘sensitive’ alternative to Norman Mailer—both drunks and as such entirely familiar to me and of no interest).”5 These male icons defined the authorial role at the Workshop, in the process alienating writers like Smiley, whose tactful demeanor and intellectual prowess stood out even among the Ph.D. students in the English department. Sensitive male students who modeled their writing and lifestyles after Fitzgerald meshed with visiting professors such as John Cheever, a bow-tied gentleman inseparable from the flask discreetly tucked beneath his lapel, which kept him inebriated all hours of the day. Cheever embodied the urbane authorial alternative to the “would-be Hemingways and the macho followers of faculty member Vance Bourjaily, who hunted and fished.”6

  Director John Leggett cut a gentlemanly figure, with whom East Coast sophisticates could identify. The Leggett-Bourjaily divide “was perhaps best exemplified by the two Ray Carvers,” according to Eric Olsen. One resembled Hemingway’s own Nick Adams and published in journals like Kayak, “and the [other] Ray Carver was edited by Gordon Lish and published in Esquire and the New Yorker.” Among the male Workshop students, “it was not enough to admire them both,” or vacillate from one to the other: “you had to pick a side.”7 Without a model to emulate, female students were left searching.

  Smiley did not identify with many who regarded the writing life at Iowa City in the early 1970s as an opportunity to “get drunk and stoned and laid—or try to—at the Workshop, because it seemed, that’s what writers did.”8 Dylan Thomas’s madcap antics, along with other charismatic visiting writers who stormed through town like rock stars, reinforced and justified this authorial image that many young men at the Workshop pantomimed. From the perspective of a trade author struggling to enter the ranks of literary fiction, Stephen King describes the 1970s as a time in which writers self-medicated with drugs and alcohol as a token of their need to take the edge off their heightened powers of perception and acute sensitivity. According to the “Hemingway Defense,” which King says has “never been clearly articulated because it would not be manly to do so,” the justification for alcoholism among male authors “goes something like this: as a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don’t give in to their sensitivities.” He explains that “Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink,” reasoning, “How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work?” Any self-destructive pain associated with hard drinking is met with the justification that “I can handle it. A real man always can.”9 Any literary history of Iowa City in the 1970s inevitably courses through the Airliner, the Mill, Mickey’s, and Joe’s Place, watering holes that nurtured these Hemingwayesque fantasies.

  The drinking habits of Smiley’s male classmates at the Workshop fueled the masculinist logic of “the Hemingway defense” during this “Norman Mailer period” when competition prevailed over collaboration. Mailer, boxing, and booze all were essential to the locker-room ethos at the Workshop behind its one-upmanship and ongoing challenges, taunts, and self-aggrandizement.10 Displays of drunken bravado carried over into the workshop classroom. Smiley describes her instructor Vance Bourjaily and others as “writers, not teachers.” Like T. C. Boyle, Smiley could plainly see that “they knew a lot about writing, but hadn’t given a lot of thought to how to communicate what they knew.” She admitted that her disdain was partially a “reaction to those hyper-masculine guys because they did not praise and criticize”
but they “did alienate the students.” Further, “they didn’t analyze” student writing sufficiently. She laments how “we weren’t given the tools to know what was wrong.” Boyle mentioned that instructors like Cheever and Bourjaily could only encourage him to carry on in the most general terms. “We had our instincts, but not tools,” Smiley attested.11

  The few students chosen as favorites received close attention. Boyle spent many evenings conversing with John Irving, his thesis adviser, and Cheever over drinks at the Mill, which was the watering hole of choice for Workshop members in the mid-1970s. Female students were instead subjected to harsh scrutiny designed to test their will, a process rationalized as a pedagogical rite of passage. Smiley recalled that when “one of the instructors had taken a particular shine to the work of one of our fellow students, he expressed his admiration for her potential by devoting himself to trashing her work.” The trial extended throughout the entire semester, and included private workshop sessions. “He would have her into his office, and then subject her to brutal line-by-line criticism, making her defend every word, every phrase.” The instructor claimed his harsh course of action came about because he “held her to a very high standard” and was dedicated to challenging her.12 Smiley knew she was fortunate to have avoided such abuse.13 “Thank God, that I was not this teacher’s pet” and “that I was seen to have much smaller potential.” She thus realized the benefit of being misjudged by male faculty who found her “work was of so little interest that it could be safely ignored by the powers that be (or were).”14