Smiley recognized those inquisitions as displays of dominance designed to intimidate at the symbolic nexus of bureaucratic authority—the faculty office. In sharp contrast to the office as a site for the reinforcement of teacher-pupil and master-apprentice roles, the collegial exchange of trade secrets took place off campus. Perched at the hill on Burlington Street near campus, the Mill functioned as a site free from institutional authority, hierarchy, and rank. There faculty shed the role of teacher, falling back on their identity as practicing writers; students played the part of apprentices to the literary trade. Recent pedagogical research by Mary Ann Cain describes such settings as constituting “a space of radical openness” characterized by informal exchange and mutual trust.15 Top women students instead were systematically disempowered of the impetus “for representation, not simply as individuals but also in various forms of collective action.” According to Cain, such collective action “demands and creates space for the kinds of courses and curricula that would disrupt their relationship to the academy, specifically the binary social relationships (teacher-student, expert-novice) that structure institutional hierarchies.”16
At stake in this pedagogy in which Smiley dreaded becoming the teacher’s pet was a gender power dynamic rooted in an uneven and highly contested politics of space. Along with Smiley, Workshop women such as Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo were all too aware of such confrontational meetings female students endured in the offices of male faculty members. Heightening that awareness was Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, which had been taught in the program during the mid-1970s. Bachelard prompted Cisneros to politicize this otherwise apolitical aesthetic. Bachelard observed how violence functioned as a significant dimension of creative space in which “the imagination acts not only on geometrical dimensions, but the elements of power and speed.” Space, he observed, could take on both sublime and monstrous qualities forming “an aggression,” like the intensified spaces for learning at the Workshop, in which “there is a sign of violence in all these figures [of creativity] in which an over-excited creature emerges from a lifeless shell.”17 The paradoxical presence of violence and aggression in creative scenarios, however, could not convince Smiley that their place in the Workshop’s social dynamic was somehow natural. She was acutely aware of this social construct, just as Cisneros was in her rejection of Bachelard’s class-biased view that houses were somehow universally tranquil spaces, a point eliding the turbulent one of her own underprivileged upbringing.18
Although her instructors were largely indifferent to Smiley’s extraordinary talent—which enabled her own escape from their control—her classmates clearly recognized it. Doug Unger noted “that a few fellow writers were going to have huge success and were on their way: T. Coraghessan Boyle, Allan Gurganus, Jane Smiley, Richard Bausch.”19 Although she typically held herself aloof in class much as Flannery O’Connor had the generation before, she would defend fellow students on occasion who were treated particularly unfairly. John Leggett, the Workshop director who also taught a graduate seminar, prefaced one class with an especially cruel barb at a story about a bizarre body builder by the young Glen Schaeffer, who felt the piece represented his best work. “I guess there’s a fashion in contemporary literature for the incomprehensible and preposterous and we have a booming example of that today—anybody want to visit the scene of this crime?” Leggett announced. Eager to rile the class, the class wit George Lewis shouted, “Light the torches! Get the monster!” Schaeffer’s heart sank as he slid down in his chair, wishing to disappear. To his surprise, a measured and professional voice emerged from the back row. The individual “who spoke up for me in class” was “Jane Smiley,” Schaeffer recalled. His rescuer “sitting in the back of the room” had earned the respect of the student body because “she’d been posted on a Fulbright to Greenland” as part of her doctoral research. To his astonishment, she articulated the work’s strengths better than he could have at the time, praising its capacity for “invention.”20
Smiley deliberately positioned herself at the back of the class to downplay her obvious strengths to the instructor, in this case Leggett, for fear of becoming his pet. Preferred students distinguished themselves to their instructors through an imaginative array of methods, including dressing fashionably to project an image of a precocious young author. Ensembles did not need to be “up-to-the-minute, expensive, or straight out of Vogue.” Instead, attire was “distinct and chosen with an eye toward standing out from the crowd,” according to Smiley. One preferred student in particular had taken to wearing “an elaborate brocade dressing gown when he was alone at home.” Smiley instead wore unpretentious, average-looking ensembles specifically intended to blend into the background, “whether that was jeans and sweaters or peasant dresses (remember, this was the seventies) and Birkenstocks.” By contrast, pets “dressed as if every day was a special occasion,” costuming themselves for distinction, and conducting themselves in a manner calculated to impress teachers and visiting editors.21
Smiley explains that “the pets were able to distinguish themselves in an attractive way,” and were “knowing” in that they reciprocated “the use to which the teachers and editors thought of putting them.” They “didn’t wait until the day the teachers and the editors introduced themselves to bone up on the work of that person.” The pets however were not the only knowing students in the Workshop. Others “sensed what was at stake, but couldn’t act on their knowledge.” These “mavens or nerds,” as she calls them, “were not petted—this was where the style and the manner came in.” For her part, Smiley “did not feel like a pet,” nor did she “feel like a nerd,” since she did receive an occasional “passing pat on the head.” On the margins, she “felt free and happy and more or less out to lunch.” She pressed on with her work and “cared hardly a thing for most of the teachers or the editors,” but instead “adored” her “fellow students.” Boyle, on the other hand, went to considerable lengths to insinuate himself into conversations with Carver and Cheever at the Mill, whom he regarded with awe even decades later when he wondered “why the local historical society hasn’t affixed little brass markers to the stools they perched themselves on” while “draining glasses and lighting cigarettes” as paragons of the Hemingway defense.22
Communal Living
At the time of her entrance into the Workshop in the fall of 1974, Smiley had a reputation among her peers as a Vassar graduate who, during the summer of 1970, had lived near New Haven in a leftist commune with radical student activists from Yale. She was also known for completing two years of study toward a Ph.D. in English specializing in Norse literature.23 If Smiley had deliberately made herself obscure in the eyes of her instructors, she actively embraced her fellow students. They admired her intellectual accomplishments, distinguished by an impressive body of research that she later used to construct The Greenlanders, originally drafted as an 1,100-page manuscript and later culled to a spry 558 pages. But as a creative writer, her confidantes knew she was vulnerable. Stretching out her lanky six-foot frame on the floor of her close friend Barbara Grossman’s teaching/writing fellow office, she “lamented that I wasn’t a genius, would never be a genius, the years of genius were long past (I was twenty-seven).” Grossman, who was twenty-four at the time, listened to Smiley’s litany of self-doubt while perusing the workshop stories for the day. “She knew I would get over it,” Smiley recalled.24
Smiley not only possessed the intellectual prowess to succeed upon her entrance to the Workshop; she also had been no stranger to living in close-knit communities of intellectuals. After her admission to the doctoral program in December 1972, the following spring she and Whiston ventured abroad to Europe, where they hitchhiked throughout the continent, eventually landing at the L’Abri Fellowship outside Lausanne, Switzerland. This strict Calvinist commune, founded eighteen years earlier, had transformed in 1973 into “an intellectual fundamentalist sect,” according to Smiley. Its right-wing leanings, furthermore, had become commercialize
d in a way that inadvertently influenced the ideological formation of evangelical American political conservatism. This rigid cultish community, furthermore, fervently defended the aristocracy and social hierarchy against the populist adoption of secular humanism. Although Smiley found them “more or less harmless,” the experience galvanized Whiston’s Marxist leanings in opposition to the elitist core principles of the remote Swiss commune.25
Soon after the L’Abri Fellowship interlude, Whiston parted ways with Smiley to do political activist work on behalf of rural laborers. He fell out of love with her when he discovered “his true love was for Marxism.” In leaving Iowa, he abandoned not only his marriage, but also his academic career. “He didn’t think grad school was political enough so he went to Montana to organize workers,” Smiley explained. Rather than follow him to the remote northern Rockies, she “stayed in Iowa City and got involved with a guy who tended bar at the Mill.” Hers was a “typical Iowa City story: come with one person, leave with another.”26 In the middle of her study for the MFA at the Workshop, her divorce became official in 1975. By 1978, she married the historian William Silag, whom she had met at Iowa City. The divorce from Whiston had the effect of releasing Smiley from domestic commitments to enable her full immersion in the social matrix of the Workshop’s literary community.
With its hypermasculine hegemony, the Workshop represented another sort of intellectual fundamentalist sect. But Smiley discovered a circle of friends who affirmed its function as a “community to meet like-minded people” for socialization essential to authorship, especially as a channel toward professionalization into the publishing industry. The myth of the isolated author appears largely fabricated in light of how “nearly everyone who succeeded was part of some sort of literary group. There is hardly anyone who thrives on being solitary,” she observed, situating the Workshop among literary collectives such as “Virginia Woolf and her circle,” “Thackeray and his friends,” and the New York City coteries from Washington Irving’s Knickerbockers to today’s Greenwich Village. Creative writing thrives in such cohesive enclaves, according to Smiley, for whom “the idea that you would somehow not thrive in a more communal environment is absurd.”27
The literary circles Smiley mentions as the historical forerunners to the Workshop, however, were all deinstitutionalized, informal social networks. Although many may have called themselves clubs, such as James Fenimore Cooper’s Bread and Cheese Club of the early nineteenth century, none were affiliated with higher education and accredited programs in large state-funded universities forwarding a broader academic mission. With institutionalization comes the threat of sterilizing the creative process, a dilemma Smiley circumvented by learning “to ignore her teachers.” She instead tended to her classmates’ ideas “and didn’t care too much about what my teachers thought.” In a talk she gave in Iowa City in 2015, she backed the importance of “paying attention to what your fellow students say, because they’re going to be your readers, and because your professors are going to die.”28
Despite these efforts to minimize her instructors’ impact on her creative development, Smiley was acutely aware of the beneficial ways they could influence her writing. She thus selected her instructors with great care. Those who might thwart creativity were faculty who reminded her of her parents—understandably enough—who represented a generation out of touch with the new sensibility of the Age of Aquarius. With that new outlook came the need for an instructor whose methods were amenable to developing female authors. The patrician John Ward “Jack” Leggett, a graduate of Phillips Academy and Yale, had served as editor and publicity director at Houghton Mifflin in Boston from 1950 to 1960 and as editor of Harper and Row in New York until 1967 before he came to Iowa. He had been recruited for the Workshop faculty to provide a sense of gentility and propriety to a faculty that English chairman John Gerber and President Virgil Hancher had deemed too bohemian and habitually unaccountable. The epitome of bland, Leggett struck Smiley “as someone who would have shown up at a party given by my parents— preposterous, well mannered and educated, always kind, frequently ironic and even rueful, but not vivid enough to capture my attention.” Worse still was Vance Bourjaily, who “seemed even paler” from her perspective. For her, “there could not be,” with one notable exception, “an interesting person” among the faculty “from University City.”29
Only Jane Howard, a young, free-spirited staff writer for Life magazine, stood out as potentially interesting, even though she was primarily a journalist with no experience writing fiction. “Having never published a paragraph of fiction or taught anyone anything, could I be qualified?” she asked Leggett. “Don’t worry,” he insisted, “come anyway.” She arrived when it was “so humid that envelopes sealed themselves shut, on the same day Gerald R. Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, on the same day Evel Knievel tried in vain to catapult himself across the Grand Canyon.”30 Howard was hired to teach for one semester, which happened to coincide with Smiley’s arrival in the fall of 1974. Howard’s mix of anthropological and sociological theory with immersive journalistic reportage appeared in her 1978 book Families. In it is what Smiley calls “a chapter about us” as part of a larger study of rituals and gatherings that reveal how families are not dying, but evolving in new ways. Under the pseudonym “Philippa,” Smiley appears as a cohesive figure of their group in Iowa City. Howard excerpts a personal letter from Philippa describing the formation of their circle. “The Workshop afforded us an official relationship to one another—random, as in families, and somewhat ritualized,” Smiley told Howard. She explained that “every group on the verge of becoming a clan needs someone who does the drawing together, who is conscious of the group’s potential a little sooner than the others are,” identifying their own vital roles in the process since “you and I are both avid drawers-together.” She had originally been responsible for drawing Howard into her circle with Grossman and Gurganus. “If you will remember,” she reminded her, “I bearded you in your den and virtually pressed friendship on you.”31
Howard was grateful for Smiley’s forward invitation to join their circle of friends, a gesture that broke social norms of interaction. No one asked instructors fifteen years their senior to dinner with the bald overture, “I want to make friends with you,” effectively leveling the teacher-pupil hierarchical space between them.32 Howard’s portrait paid tribute to their bond that inspired creativity despite being in a place ham radio operators referred to as “zeroland” and whose divorce rate, as Howard put it, was “four out of three,” and was “not modern enough to support chapters of Al-Anon, Weight Watchers, and advanced classes in Transcendental Meditation.”33 Their group thrived despite Philip Roth’s bromide in which he had warned visitors to “take plenty of synthetic fabrics, otherwise you’ll never get the smell of hamburgers and French fries out of your woolens.” Citizens of Iowa, Roth pointed out, “stand up and salute decorum and restraint,” yet “what is new is hideous: the new girls’ dormitory, like watered-down Reno, the new police station, like cut out cardboard, the tract houses, like more cardboard.”34 Despite such cultural deficiencies, Howard’s final proclamation was as endearing as it was validating: “The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, whose students and teachers spend four regular and uncounted spontaneous hours together every week, has probably spawned as many healthy clans as any institution in America.”35 Ironically, Smiley felt the piece had signaled Howard’s permanent departure from her and the program, in effect “officially putting us in the past tense.”36 The heartfelt tribute to Iowa, Smiley realized, was Howard’s way of atoning for breaking ties to the Workshop where she taught for only one semester.
In Howard’s class, Smiley felt instantly at home. “She was a character,” unlike the bland Bourjaily and uninteresting Leggett, “and we became friends instantly.” She was particularly drawn to her New York City sensibility and the way “she would say anything and then laugh.” But more than her personal characteristics, Howard’s affiliation with the Upper West Side’s colle
ctive of female authors particularly appealed to Smiley. Her apartment at the hub of writers’ haunts such as Zabar’s, H&H Bagel, and the New Yorker movie theater combined with her status as Life magazine writer to make her “an emissary not from the New York male literary scene but from the New York female social scene.” This attribute, along with her infectious laugh, friendly disposition, and classroom demeanor that was pure fun, struck Smiley as a welcome relief from the high-stakes pressure of Bourjaily’s and Leggett’s seminars. “It was clear, though, and a relief, that she neither knew what she was talking about, fictionwise, nor had any plans to lever us into fancy literary journals.” Fourteen years her senior, Howard was much less like a parent than “that sister who had broken away, gotten herself a wilder, happier life, and was now returning to tell us about it.”37 That New York City life reaffirmed for Smiley the importance of understanding authorship as an intrinsically social enterprise. Howard gloried in her stories of the Upper West Side literary scene, regaling her students with details about the pleasures of writing in a community characterized by mutual support and lively exchange. The myriad friends whom she frequently housed had alarmed Smiley when she later stayed at Howard’s apartment, because each possessed their own duplicate keys, trafficking in and out at will. The apartment functioned more like a collective than a private residence, making for a dynamic social network that captured Smiley’s imagination. She immortalized the scene in her novel Duplicate Keys, which dramatizes this culture and the vibrant characters who surfaced unexpectedly at the apartment.
Howard testified on behalf of a writing life amenable to women. She stood witness to a liberated, decidedly nonviolent, creative space that might be construed as the 1970s version of A Room of One’s Own. The life of a professional woman author, Howard’s example revealed, had its benefits given the right social environment, material comforts, and creative autonomy. In Families, Howard describes her New York writing life as nothing short of utopian. “I’d be a fool not to like eleven windows overlooking the river, plenty of jade plants, bright colors, more books than I’ll ever find time to read, records that I’ll never really listen to, recipes that I’ll never cook.” Access to stimulating conversation with practicing professional women authors was within an effortless “short walk or bus ride away.” Others “tend to fetch up as houseguests, which is fine as long as they let me carve four solitary hours out of each day.” Although some solitude is necessary for authorship, she asserted, “A place too long unpeopled can get to smelling tomblike.”38 This inherently social model of writing characterized by creative autonomy and horizontal relations was irresistible to Smiley.
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