A Delicate Aggression

by David O. Dowling

  Where was genius for Jane Smiley? As her instructor Henry Bromell demonstrated, it was in productivity. As her friends Barbara Grossman and Allan Gurganus showed her, it came from love and wit. Together, these elements ignited the creative imagination. Perhaps Smiley’s final word on the notion of genius in literature as part of her ongoing efforts to deconstruct and demystify its widely abused and sexist applications to male canonical writers appears in her book Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. In it, she puts Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick to the test. Although she insists in the chapter “Reading a Hundred Novels” that her “list was never intended to be a ‘Hundred Greatest,’ ” she still assesses each with particular attention to how those works “illuminate the whole concept of the novel.” Melville’s mighty book, which many tout as the great American novel, presented a trial she had not anticipated, demanding two separate entries to the single one- to two-page commentary the others on her list receive. She distilled Melville’s technique of maintaining reader interest into a two-pronged strategy focused on “the inherent strangeness of whaling, and the author’s quest (expressed in his varieties of style) to exhaust the spiritual meanings of obsession (or ‘monomania,’ as it was called then).” The length of the novel, she argues convincingly, is due to the time it takes to (re)train his audience. His novel “must be long,” she explains, because “it takes a while for the author to impart to the reader enough information to enable the reader to make sense of everything the author wishes to communicate,” much like Bach retraining his “listener’s ear and listener’s mind to his musical ideas.” She urges that the novel is worth the time and effort to relish “the double strangeness of Melville’s vision—the exotic locale and visionary ideas—above every other joy that novels can afford.” But in a “Note added later,” Smiley recants. She claims that despite its status according to many as “the greatest American novel . . . it clearly didn’t make enough of an impression on me” because she had “internal arguments with the author all the way through.” She wondered why she felt a duty to appreciate Moby-Dick despite not enjoying it, asking whether this was “because the concerns of the novel are extremely masculine and I really don’t care about them.” Revisiting the novel in an attempt to grasp it at a deeper level seemed out of the question. Such a rereading would be “like going out on another date with someone who was okay but not compelling the first time.”62

  As with “Jeffrey, Believe Me,” Smiley’s creative self-discovery even later in life through revisiting classic novels inevitably involved the realization that she had caught herself in a posture of reverence under the spell of the patriarchy. In addition to her disavowal of Melville for the alienating effects of his hypermasculine sensibility, Smiley has also boldly dismantled another mon-ument of the American male literary canon: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. To associate it “with ‘greatness,’ ” she argued, “is to underwrite a very simplistic and evasive theory of what racism is and to promulgate it,” because “no matter how often the critics place in context Huck’s use of the word ‘nigger,’ they can never fully excuse or fully hide the deeper racism of the novel.”63 Her point, made in a Harper’s article in 1996, appeared during the height of the culture wars on academic campuses led by such critics as Jane Tompkins, who deconstructs the gender ideology of the institutional mechanisms of canonization in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. While on the English faculty at Iowa State University, from 1981 to 1996, Smiley had joined the ranks of feminist critics advocating for a reassessment of the male-dominated literary canon to include such works as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall.64 Her argument led the way for a restructuring of critical understandings of our literary heritage, unearthing a forgotten feminist tradition from a politicized perspective akin to the work of activist historian Howard Zinn in A People’s History of the United States on behalf of oppressed and forgotten lives otherwise rendered invisible in traditional histories of the United States.

  Genius, Smiley soon discovered, was hardly natural and innate in certain individuals. Instead, she found it a social and—particularly from her experience at the Workshop—institutional construct. Her two methods of breaking through the facade of sexism and privilege driving both literary canon formation and the selection of teacher’s pets at the Workshop were an emphasis on production in her own creative work, and a painstaking and meticulous dedication to historical truth in her understanding of American literature. Twain’s suggestion that befriending a black person was a panacea for racism, she realized, provided no real solution to the deeper institutional inequities embedded in the structure of society. Barbara Grossman and Jane Howard would prove instrumental in enlightening her to alternative models of literary production, in the process enabling her to transcend the limitations of gender and explore uncharted, and even forbidden, creative territory. Finding humor and satire in Iowa subjects only began with “Jeffrey, Believe Me,” and extended to her novel Moo, which targets “academic writing programs, literary fellowships, and visiting teaching posts” in a way that calls into question the politics of educational bureaucracy, precisely the institutional nexus against which she discovered her voice as a novelist in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.65

  12 • Red High-Tops for Life: T. C. Boyle

  Shortly after his admission to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, T. C. (Tom to his friends) Boyle—eventually the winner of six O. Henry Awards and known for his Pynchon/Márquez-inspired madcap fiction leavened with serious moral import and visceral detail—was feeling exceptionally confident. During the first weeks of fall 1972 as an instructor on his Teaching/Writing Fellowship, his writing reached new heights as he began his simultaneous pursuit of both a Ph.D. in Victorian literature and an MFA in creative writing. Having achieved a rare distinction as a top student in both programs, which did not overburden so much as reinforce his creative development, he felt nearly invulnerable. The workshop method fit his temperament perfectly; its Darwinian scramble for survival resonated with him as both an effective pedagogical tool and an aesthetic concept that he would parlay into his first stories in Descent of Man (1978), a title inspired by Darwin himself. So when a nonregistered “friend” of a student requested to “sit in” on his class, he instantly agreed.1 It was 1972 and Boyle’s roots in the free-spirited culture of Peekskill, New York—one of the most liberal communities in North America at the time—dictated a universal openness to the creative process. As the instructor of record, he was more than willing to flout the layers of bureaucratic approval and highly regulated formalities endemic to large, state-funded educational institutions. An open-door policy seemed apt.

  The “guy who had his story up who asked if he could bring his buddy” sat silently as the class began dissecting his work. Uninitiated into the ritual of workshop sessions that called for pointed commentary on the core weaknesses of the story under scrutiny, the visitor immediately registered signs of discomfort, his face reddening and fists clenching. One venomous comment led to another, cascading into an inexorable torrent. Now squirming and flushed with rage, the student’s friend seemed ready to explode. “You know, the symbolism is so obvious,” one student sniffed with an air of pompous dismissal that positively unhinged the author’s guest. Just then, “the guy’s buddy slams his fist down on the table and shouts, ‘Fuck symbolism!’ ” and erupts into a thundering tirade.2 As the class degenerated into a verbal melee, Boyle ushered the young man out, vowing never to allow guests to attend and cursing himself for his naive openness. From that day forward, he disallowed authors to speak while their work was being discussed. The incident held up an unbecoming mirror to the program’s culture of creative production. The shocked outsider’s Ludovico-like perspective on the classroom dynamic also exposed Boyle’s own conditioning to the program’s sophisticated brutality, a system he had thrived on as a student and now perpetuated as an instructor.

  Boyle’s acculturation to adve
rsity and emotional trauma traces back to his upbringing in working-class Peekskill. Raised by alcoholic parents who drank themselves to death, he was all of twenty-four when his father succumbed to a fatal combination of alcohol-related diseases at the age of fifty-four. Eight years later, when Boyle was thirty-two, his mother passed away at fifty-seven. Profoundly “disturbed in some way about life,” his father drank severely and with the morose resolve of “a sort of suicide” committed “consciously and deliberately.” Boyle witnessed the torturous decline during his formative years and responded with spite, acting “very rebellious and disdainful of them” throughout his adolescence.3 To atone for not reconciling with his father while he was still alive, Boyle dedicated his novel World’s End, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988, “in the memory of my own lost father.”4 Since he “never really had a chance to come to . . . rapprochement with him” because “he was dead before anything like that could happen,” Boyle crafted the novel as “a search for a father, not in an autobiographical sense, but in a metaphorical sense.”5 Fiction offered a space to repair the trauma. In the rancorous household of his youth, the pursuit of higher education toward a professional career, much less literary fame, seemed unthinkable, especially to this son of an orphan with an eighth-grade education and a mother who never attended college.

  The elite learned community of the Workshop—his classmate Joy Harjo called it “the Harvard of creative writing programs”—seemed worlds away from his humble origins.6 Before arriving at Iowa, Boyle taught public high school for four years after earning a bachelor’s degree in English and history in 1968 from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Potsdam. Unlike many of the privileged Workshop students of the 1970s such as Rita Dove, who had been groomed for success in a home and school environment suffused with intellectual culture, Boyle’s house contained no reading material except for the daily newspaper. His one and only undergraduate application went to SUNY Potsdam because its low standards all but guaranteed his admission despite his poor grades. His deplorable high school record ruled out any hope for attending a competitive undergraduate program. In the fall of his freshman year, his original intention to major in music to break into the jazz recording industry derailed when his saxophone audition went awry.7 Literary study thus presented itself as an alternative to dropping out, much less an avenue toward literary renown, wealth, and fame.

  In the absence of sound guidance from his parents, the rudderless Boyle chose a double major in history and English because he believed it was the easiest alternative to music. The degree afforded him few employment options other than high school teaching, so he grudgingly applied at his alma mater Lakeland High School, a humiliating and regressive return to the very building in which he had refused to obey his own teachers in his adolescence.8 Prior to Iowa, education and employment for Boyle were predicated on accessibility rather than quality. Before applying to the Workshop, he had settled for the schools and jobs that were available, much less competed for them. Iowa presented him with an entirely new challenge, mainly because competition, especially career building and self-promotion in the competitive free market, were anathema to the communal freewheeling lifestyle his parents, relatives, and friends had encouraged. Complicating matters further, Boyle “had never been west of New Jersey” and “didn’t know Iowa from Ohio—or Idaho, for that matter,” as he later admitted. Undeterred, “My girlfriend and my dog climbed into the car, we marked out the route on the map, and headed out on I-80.”9 The heaviest thing they carried was the gargantuan monkey on Boyle’s back—a tenacious heroin and Quaalude addiction that had been steadily seizing his will for the better part of a decade.

  Adrift in the Counterculture

  Like Jay Gatsby attempting to elude his working-class roots, Thomas John Boyle changed his middle name at the age of seventeen to Coraghessan in a stroke of self-invention built upon sensational designs for the future. Bent on performing and entertaining his way to success, Boyle had no intention of pursuing a conventional vocation to earn his living. “Job? Who needs a Job? Fuck a job, I’m going to be an artist,” he brazenly proclaimed, his frizzy shoulder-length hair parted down the middle framing mirror shades he “wore at breakfast and dinner, in the shower, in closets and caves,” as he says of his largely autobiographical narrator in “Greasy Lake.”10 As a child of the counterculture, Boyle never encountered any objections to this sort of ambition. The stereotype of rock and roll, red high-tops, drugs, and the New York hippie scene—complete with draft-dodging, free love, and flower power—was the lived reality that influenced Boyle’s defiantly liberal attitude toward his future occupation. Corporate America of the sort Paul Engle cajoled into supporting the Workshop was anathema to this setting. Drug trafficking vied with macramé and artisanal crafts as the preferred sources of revenue in his neighborhood in Kitchawank Colony of Westchester County, New York. Boyle described it as “one of the most liberal communities, certainly, in America,” a place with “many Russian Jews who founded an anarchist colony which later became a Communist colony.”11

  The prospect of teaching high school would have been unthinkable to Boyle before he graduated from SUNY. But in assessing his meager options, it became evident that a teaching position offered, despite its laughably low salary, a ready escape from the Selective Service’s massive draft for the Vietnam War. Boyle never questioned whether, but only how, he might dodge the draft.12 Returning to Lakeland High as a teacher kept him rooted in Peekskill, “where whole blocks were burnt out and boarded up in the wake of the Martin Luther King riots.” Remaining in this community brought with it the liability of exposure to its drug culture that drew him increasingly deeper into its clutches. “I was twenty-one, and I was unreflective and dope-addled, washed along in the hippie current like the spawn of a barnacle.”13 He soon fell in with the hardened junkies and dealers whom he had previously only seen on the street, but never consorted with. From 1969 to 1970, heroin was his cruel mistress. Like the figures Allen Ginsberg envisioned in “Howl” a decade earlier, Boyle epitomized the best minds of his generation, searching “for an angry fix” at dawn “burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.”14

  Just as Ginsberg found literary inspiration from the loss of Carl Solomon to madness, Boyle saw a friend step off the precipice into the abyss. The event “scared the holy sweet literature out of me,” he remembered, a cold blast of arctic wind that alerted him to his own mortality.15 Boyle renounced heroin forever, if only to replace it with the less visible yet powerfully habit-forming magic of Quaaludes. The ride on that train lasted another two years, until 1972, when it gave way to yet another addiction: fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

  That journey through the phantasmagoric nightmare of a double-addiction covering four solid years had the unintended effect of focusing Boyle’s powers of observation like never before. The sheer terror of addiction unearthed a channel to creativity through a glimpse at the dark underside of the counterculture. This deadly serious world challenged the mainstream culture’s tendency to trivialize the hippie lifestyle as the frivolous cavorting of so many feckless tie-dyed clowns in the mud and driving rain of Woodstock. The Vietnam veterans populating Boyle’s first Workshop class had not taken the counterculture seriously until they were exposed to Boyle’s work that extended from “The OD and Hepatitis Railroad or Bust,” published in the North American Review. The story sounded this dark note from a young talent on the rise who had been there himself, a piece rife with the dirty realism he would come to nearly worship at Iowa in the work of Raymond Carver. The tale resonated with Neil Young’s haunting ode to “the needle and the damage done,” especially its final melancholy image of how “every junkie’s/ like a setting sun.”

  The twelve Vietnam veterans of his fifteen classmates in Vance Bourjaily’s class uniformly repurposed their combat experience for creative material. So when Boyle’s story went up for discussion during the first week, the class was disapp
ointed that “it wasn’t about Vietnam” but “about being a hippie in a certain hippie milieu, one who shot dope.”16 Much of the narrative was confessional, expanding on his admission that “I was the hippie’s hippie, and immoral to boot, and never gave a thought about putting a needle in my arm.”17 Since the cool Bourjaily’s classroom presence provided a stabilizing effect—he would routinely stop class to roll a cigarette while his students silently watched—the story did not explode into controversy as it might have in a more contentious class like Frank Conroy’s. His classmates thus approved of the story with reservations. Their opinion had little bearing on the young Boyle anyway, who was far more interested in what his instructors thought of his work. He found himself jonesing for the praise and support of the Buddha-like Bourjaily, and consummate professionals like John Cheever and John Irving, affirmation and encouragement constituting precisely “what a young writer needs to feed his addiction.” With time, the chemical substances yielded to writing as the new source of euphoria and inner power, especially evident in a series of stories that the best heroin highs could never match. They were “mad, absurd, hyperbolic, but mine, all mine”—stories that made him feel “strong, superior, invincible,” armed with an “arrogance” that functioned like a “preemptive strike against his own weakness.”18

  It was then that the new literary addiction took hold according to his formulation that “writing is an obsessive-compulsive disorder.”19 Boyle never quailed at putting up stories early and often in workshop among the older Vietnam veterans, most of whom knew he was a draft-dodger. He established himself as a veteran of another kind of war, this one an inner war of addiction that brought him exhilaration and ecstasy, but at the expense of his body and mind. Although he avoided “the hepatitis train” that claimed his friend, Thorazine treatments became necessary to subdue the vivid nightmares that plagued him. His very sanity hung in the balance in this Faustian deal. If Boyle, more than any other writer of the Age of Aquarius, grew to love the Workshop, it was because, as he said, “I felt a power. I wrote.” The “beauty of this addiction” was that it simultaneously drove out the old chemical dependencies that threatened his longevity and transformed him into a blue-veined zombie, an emaciated victim of a ravenous parasite. Instead, writing grew vitality, extending rather than truncating his life; it assured his survival with sustenance instead of jolting him with temporary euphoria at the cost of physical and mental decadence. As the short stories churned out, he held each one up and admired it as “Something new. Something of value.” He moved on to novels, writing his first, Water Music (1981), in a white heat in 1976. “The addiction was full blown finally and surely terminal now,” blasting out a streak of frenzied wakeful dreaming that eventuated in 104 breathing chapters. Careening with unstoppable momentum, he “began writing in the mornings, seven days a week,” and has “been working on that schedule ever since.”20 The project burgeoned from “having done a Ph.D. in nineteenth-century British literature and reading maybe a hundred three-volume novels” from that era. Thus “going to graduate school at Iowa—first for the MFA and then the Ph.D.—was transformative for me,” especially “as a way of expanding my very limited worldview and improving my writing.”21