Compared with the rest of the Workshop faculty, Howard’s teaching methods stood out as the most transparent, spontaneous, and disarming. Unlike her male colleagues, she carried her intellectual prowess with a journalist’s wit and populist aplomb. By comparison, Smiley had visiting faculty such as Gordon Lish, Ted Solotaroff, and Stanley Elkin to choose from, all of whom were martinets in the classroom, old-order pedants who did not hesitate to crack the whip. Lish “was hard on you,” Smiley remembered, Solotaroff “was into that too,” and Elkin “used that ‘who do you think you are?’ teaching method.” These abrasive tactics were as repellent as they were ineffective, according to Smiley, who deeply opposed such attempts “to arouse your pride and challenge you to greatness” to the exclusion of the “more cooperative . . . teaching style [she] preferred.”39
Barbara, Believe Me
Jane Howard did not initially take Jane Smiley under her wing. She “took to Barbara” Grossman, Smiley’s friend, instead, “and then took me in.” Grossman was essential to Smiley’s success in navigating through the Scylla and Charybdis of faculty members like Elkin and Lish. Since she had been vying for Gurganus’s attention and approval, Smiley was miffed when he paused to ask “a short person to join us” on a walk from campus into town. At the time, Grossman seemed to represent an obstacle between Smiley and the charismatic Gurganus with his Gatsbyesque smile—“simultaneously merry, welcoming, rueful, and irreverent”—and a personal style that was “archaic, elegant, and pale.” Along with this charm, his experience as a second-year student in the program distinguished him as a potentially valuable guide to the foreign territory of the Workshop. He had become something of a local legend when his instructor John Cheever sold his story “Minor Heroism” to the New Yorker without telling him beforehand.40 Walking up the hill, the two women flanked Gurganus—the six-foot Smiley on one side and the five-foot Grossman on the other—talking only to him and not each other. The diminutive Grossman was all but invisible to Smiley who was straining to find something to “come up with to impress His Elegance.” Suddenly, Grossman popped out in front of them, squared her shoulders before Smiley and said, “Want to be friends?” as if she were Tom Sawyer proposing an irresistible business venture to Huck Finn.41
With her bold and authentic self-introduction, Grossman set the keynote for a lasting friendship that would form the foundation of their literary circle. Smiley’s connection to Grossman was a milestone event with profound implications for her social life and professional career. In the two years before joining the Workshop, Smiley did not identify with campus culture at Iowa, which “was still reverberating from the late sixties—the plate glass windows of the university bookstore had been broken so many times in antiwar riots that they had been replaced by cubbyholes.” She felt disconnected from the activist fervor on campus in the early 1970s. Whereas no lasting political effect remained from the Vietnam War protest era, certainly the social impact was visible in how “students lived together in loose, commune-like groups.” In those groups, drugs circulated freely, since everyone seemed to have “a roommate who devoted himself to smoking and/or growing marijuana,” while sexual promiscuity was viewed as “a token of solidarity.”42 Whereas none of these radical commune-like groups had appealed to Smiley, Grossman’s circle suited her temperament ideally. In particular, the class taught by Jane Howard had a revitalizing influence that profoundly shaped her creative development.
Howard’s class with Grossman set the blueprint for Smiley’s literary success. In it she learned more about the craft from her classmates than her instructor. Her own writing for the class amounted to “enigmatic seventies stories, vaguely threatening and fragmentary,” tales that had elicited responses she was ill-equipped to understand or retain. Her classmates’ stories, however, including Grossman’s tale of a teenage girl who resorts to eating the body of her boyfriend on a canoe trip gone awry, were alive with intrigue. Smiley’s vivid memory of their best tales testifies to the depth and intensity with which she originally read them. Unlike Tracy Kidder, who rarely put his stories up for workshop sessions and instead attacked his classmates’ work with cutting criticism, Smiley found the imaginative power of her peers inspirational.43 In addition to Grossman’s grisly tale, she admired Bob Chibka’s capitalization of all nouns and Joanne Meschery’s depiction of a vindictive mother who sends her daughter a nightgown sewn shut at the bottom as a sign that she should stop having children. A story by Tom Boyle later published in Descent of Man as “Bloodfall” transfixed Smiley with its depiction of seven members of a commune who dress in white and sleep through cataclysmic plagues culminating in a downpour of bloody rain that drenches and reddens their crisp white uniforms.44
Such powerful writing among her peers inspired Smiley’s own work the following spring semester of 1975. Howard had returned to New York City, where she would resume writing for Life and begin Families. Gurganus was preparing to graduate with other second-year students who were dear to her. The social terrain of the Workshop had shifted under her feet, leaving her without a trusted faculty mentor. Grossman led Smiley to consider taking a course from visiting writer Henry Bromell, an Amherst College graduate and author of The Slightest Distance (1974), published by Houghton Mifflin. Bromell offered Smiley the technical expertise in fiction Howard had lacked. His lofty credentials, however, were not intimidating; a befuddled presence decentered his authority as their instructor. Smiley recalled that although he was their teacher, Bromell “was just the same age as every boyfriend I had ever had.” Playing the role of veterans, Smiley and Grossman considered him the novice finding his bearings in his new life of teaching and writing in the Midwest. “We showed him around.” In this way, Bromell “expanded our group instead of floating above it.”45
If Howard had offered Smiley a glimpse into the ideal lifestyle for a woman author during the 1970s, then Bromell demystified the process of literary production for the most powerful presses of the publishing industry. Whereas other male professors had badgered her into publishing in “fancy journals” in class, the understated Bromell inspired by example in informal settings. She read his book, for example, and discussed it over dinner with him in a watershed moment that “shortened the distance between the impulse that brought us to Iowa City and the potential realization of that impulse.” Production, in the end, prevailed over the mystified concept of genius to Smiley. Bromell enabled her to see through the facade of the self-appointed sages of the program who bestowed their wisdom from above. Unlike other instructors, “he had nothing to bestow upon us except the tangible evidence that what you really had to do was write that book and that was way more valuable than genius.”46
Something in Smiley opened up, giving way to a surge of creativity she initially rode for the sheer thrill of it. What began as a kind of “daring joke” to her amazement sustained itself through an entire narrative. “Jeffrey, Believe Me” was Smiley’s breakthrough story, written in Bromell’s class. He had inspired her without trying to inspire her; he had shown her the way to success without telling her in any prescriptive way. Production, she realized, could be stymied by excessive self-consciousness and a halting overemphasis on perfection. Smiley had established a relationship with Grossman and others in Bromell’s class she described as “congenial” and “very forgiving of one another.” This was contrary to the Elkin and Lish “who do you think you are?” approach to creative writing pedagogy, “designed to ‘toughen’ students so that they could withstand inevitable adversity and criticism as artists.” Smiley thus found an outlet from this approach tailored to war veterans “for whom the humiliations of boot camp and the paint of the basketball court were easily internalized metaphors.”47 Writing in a state of constant fear stymied production for Smiley. “You can’t be a novelist by being a perfectionist because if you are never satisfied, you won’t get the book written.” The key, she realized in Bromell’s class, and in the writing of “Jeffrey, Believe Me,” “was production, not perfection.”48
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“Jeffrey, Believe Me” stands out among Smiley’s Workshop writing for the unique character that emerges through the narrative voice of the story, a cracked figure of suave elegance. That persona grew out of Smiley’s lavish yet intimate dinner parties for which she would dim the lights, play Sinatra, and don a “lace-covered vintage satin nightgown from the twenties or thirties,” a slinky number ideally suited to the candlelit formal ambiance. The meal itself she prepared from Gourmet Cookbook and served on fine china. What if I were to seduce my gay friend on such a night, she mused? The scenario she drew out clearly had such fine feasts and Gurganus in mind, a Navy veteran who went on to win the Lambda Literary Award in 2001 for fiction that celebrates or explores LGBTQ themes. Of his days in the Navy, he says, “imagine 4,000 men, ages 18 to 23, floating around in the South China Seas for 35 days” to fathom “the mischief and the energy and the volatility and the testosterone and the erotic swill.”49 Smiley is careful to point out that her story “was all fiction,” but not without a serious and deep connection to the dinner party persona that she donned for guests as a kind of entertainment piece. As an imaginative extension of herself at these parties, the narrator seduces the character of Jeffrey, whose preference for men and occupation as a builder of model boats parallels Gurganus’s own gender preference and work as a meticulous assembler of fictional worlds. The key to the story’s success was how Smiley had “gotten inside the mind of a woman who had done something I would never have done.” The protagonist draws the unsuspecting guest into her web with fine food, conversation, prodigious amounts of alcohol, and marijuana-laced brownies. “You must have felt hungry, because you had another,” the narrator says of her dessert generously “lathered with icing” and baked with “dope ground into marijuana flour . . . disguised by a double dose of double Dutch.” When he reaches for a third, she “wanted to ask, ‘And why do you prefer men, Jeffrey?’ but I merely said, ‘You smell good,’ and got up to clear the table.”50
The loving description of Jeffrey echoes her own admiration of the dashing Gurganus as a New Yorker–published prodigy and pet of the program. “Really, you have done handsomely,” she says in apostrophe. Gurganus originally trained to be a painter; his fictional counterpart, Jeffrey, plays three instruments. Like Gurganus, “everyone agrees you are a raconteur, and yet a temperate man” with a “graceful and generous mind.” He is effortlessly successful with an endless list of minor virtues: “you leave proper tips, you hang up your clothes, you are not too proud to take buses.” As the narrator builds the profile, she stops herself short, “not wishing to embarrass you.” She shows restraint by dropping “the subject, adding only that we both know what a remarkable child you were and that you have been steadily successful.”51
This was not the first time Smiley had creatively woven her friends into her stories at her own peril. “Long Distance” is the fictionalization of “a story told to me by a drunken date” about an extramarital affair he had with a Japanese woman while he was abroad teaching in Osaka. “He gave me permission,” Smiley recalls, “but when I later showed him the story, he never spoke to me again.” The depiction of the affair and its painful aftermath in which Smiley’s friend rejects the woman’s plan to live with him in America—“she had all sorts of expectations that I couldn’t have fulfilled”—caused the woman to break down completely, crushing “every single one of her strengths, everything she had equipped herself with to live in a Japanese way.” After the story was published, another of Smiley’s friends who appears as a character in it was approached without warning by his pastor who asked if he knew the author. “It took six months for the brouhaha to die down.”52 Smiley’s penchant for inciting scandals through her fiction appears in her article titled “Can Writers Have Friends?” “Jeffrey, Believe Me,” unlike these other stories, is in a curious way nothing Gurganus would ever be ashamed of, as it embodies Smiley’s conviction that creative writing, at its best, is “not an object or a possession. It is an act of love.”53
If not for Barbara Grossman, this story that began as a “daring joke” might have remained unpublished. Indeed, Smiley composed it originally to circulate privately among her intimates as an extension of the self-consciously camp theater of their formal dinner parties. She kept it private “for a few days,” she explains, but soon realized, “I liked it. The woman’s voice was consistent from beginning to end; the dinner seemed detailed and plausible.” Greater aspirations for the story mounted. She slipped it to Grossman during a workshop session to abate the tedium of listening to “an older male” read at the head of the classroom. Barbara “placed it quietly on her desk and began to read it, surreptitiously removing each page when she was done with it.” As the instructor at the head of the class droned on, Barbara suddenly burst out in laughter, “a disruptive and wholly inappropriate bark,” drawing the stares of everyone in class, to which she “smiled deflectively.” The outburst was the sincerest endorsement Smiley could have imagined, one that indicated the story was ready for publication. Feeling like she had “just received the best compliment ever,” she knew from that moment on, “I was on my way.”54
Grossman’s reflexive validation of “Jeffrey, Believe Me” represented more than her recognition of the story as an inside joke drawing on their mutual familiarity with Gurganus. The prophetic moment anticipated Grossman’s role as Smiley’s future editor who would later acquire her first novel, Barn Blind, for publication at Harper and Row. Prior to its publication, Grossman had encouraged Smiley to submit “Jeffrey, Believe Me” to Triquarterly, where it appeared in the fall of 1977. This was precisely the sort of elite journal her male instructors had used to intimidate her. Now, entrance into it seemed as smooth as the 1930s satin nightgown—and seductive narrative persona—she effortlessly slipped into. Grossman both inspired Smiley’s breakthrough story and provided the key industry connection behind the publication of her debut novel that followed.
The story functions in some senses as evidence of Smiley’s response to the combative, male-dominated nature of the Workshop, representing her way of reclaiming the patriarchy’s seduction narrative from a female point of view. “Jeffrey, Believe Me” was remembered by Connie Brothers as one of Smiley’s breakthrough stories that defied her image as an author of domestic farm dramas, the wholesome fan of The Waltons raised on Black Beauty and Nancy Drew books. In the story, homosexuality is treated as a curiosity to be explored and even conquered, forbidden terrain like feminism in T. C. Boyle’s “A Women’s Restaurant.” Although the ethics of the story seem dubious, one should note that she conceived it in a pre-Stonewall cultural context.55 “Jeffrey, Believe Me,” according to Brothers, marked a milestone when the Norse and medieval literary scholar ventured into the sort of perversity and antic absurdity typically associated with Boyle’s fiction. The story affirmed the range of this “tall and confident” writer capable of “pushing the boundaries like Tom Boyle,” as Brothers recalled.56 Just as Boyle had ventured into Penthouse with “A Women’s Restaurant” while he was at Iowa, Smiley published a story titled “Good Intentions” in Playgirl in 1979, two years after the appearance of “Jeffrey, Believe Me” in Triquarterly.57 Squarely operating in the genre of female erotic fantasy fiction, her Playgirl publication offers further evidence of Smiley’s willingness to appropriate the opposition’s method in the gender war.
The reception of The Age of Grief, in which “Jeffrey, Believe Me” appeared, was instrumental in establishing Smiley’s reputation in the world of letters. The Washington Post claimed in 1989 that although she had written four novels, including The Greenlanders, a fourteenth-century epic saga, her “reputation is based primarily upon The Age of Grief.”58 The San Francisco Chronicle described the seduction tale in the volume as “a woman’s narrative explanation of how and why she tried to seduce her gorgeous male friend, who prefers men.” The reviewer credited her for engaging serious themes but leavening them “with humor and short sentences and many precisely described moments tha
t give the reader a rush of authenticity.”59 The New York Times, however, held her Workshop training against her, alleging that some of the volume suffers “from a certain constriction, as though dialogue and events were being crammed into a neat and preconceived package.” But “Jeffrey, Believe Me” was not a “Workshop story” in the sense of standardized uniformity, the prose equivalent of the “Workshop poem” Rita Dove inadvertently found herself writing in the wake of her training. Smiley conceived the story specifically as a project to be enjoyed outside the parameters of coursework and workshop sessions. The reviewer nonetheless appreciated its unique contribution to the volume as a “silly mannered monologue about a woman attempting to seduce a gay male friend.”60
Having broken into such fresh creative territory, Smiley began to dread the onerous task of completing her dissertation. She accosted her Ph.D. adviser, declaring that she “wasn’t looking forward to writing [her] dissertation.” “Good,” he replied, “Because I’m not looking forward to reading it.”61 Not content to walk away from years of research empty-handed, she persuaded Leggett to accept a creative thesis for her Ph.D. Given her trajectory toward creative writing, he was happy to accommodate her request. She soon leveraged the degree into a tenure-track faculty position in the English department of Iowa State University in Ames, some two hours west of Iowa City.
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