A Delicate Aggression

by David O. Dowling

  Whereas the Workshop for many inflicted wounds that left permanent scars, this literary boot camp functioned as a method of chemical detoxification for Boyle. If his friend’s overdose in Peekskill had scared the literature out of him, then the Workshop continued that process through an academic challenge of a caliber he had never faced. In his first creative writing workshop in high school he discovered a sense of triumph in winning over a potentially hostile audience. He presented a short play for discussion titled “The Foot,” precisely the admixture of mad, absurd, and hyperbolic elements that would become his signature aesthetic. As at the Workshop, his classmates were “unanimous in their contempt for one another and by extension one another’s work.” The story nonetheless drew laughs from his otherwise hostile peers and teacher, who could not resist the bizarre dark humor of his drama depicting a Florida boy devoured completely by an alligator except for his fully intact foot—shod in a neatly tied sneaker—that his grieving parents keep as a memento prominently displayed on their living room coffee table. His cinematic eye for distortion and inversion anticipating the bizarre humor of the Coen brothers and echoing the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez had set the blueprint. “Instant audience” approval meant positive reinforcement, a combination that made the workshop system ideally suited to Boyle’s aesthetic development.22

  Boyle’s belief in workshops began with “The Foot” and extended to Iowa’s premise of subjecting young writers to unrelenting discipline under the hard glare of criticism. He thrived on the challenge, lived for the fight, and reveled in the way victory left him “flushed with the sort of exhilaration that only comes from driving the ball over the net and directly into your opponent’s face.” His domination of the Vietnam veterans at Iowa workshop sessions was particularly satisfying, since he had spent the war teaching high school as a means of avoiding combat.23 They had every reason to loathe this hippie runt with scraggly long hair, but his voice and fearless eyes gave no quarter. Alighting with sinister charm, he could disarm them in an instant, his long sloping nose a cross between Charles Dickens, Charles Manson, and a court jester.

  In the 1970s, behind the dissenting view of the Workshop as an escape from parental authority, the responsibilities of marriage, jobs, and the rigors of the literary marketplace, lurked the specter of Vietnam. What were these pseudo-aesthetes doing in Iowa, other than shirking their duty? Nelson Algren asked in The Last Carousel, his 1972 collection of nonfiction pieces that included a particularly venomous vivisection of the Workshop. “The longer I hang on here the longer I stay out of Vietnam,” he heard one student say while he taught there with Kurt Vonnegut in the late 1960s. “It’s a respectable way of dropping out,” another admitted. Certainly Boyle had used his high school teaching job the same way—“after college I was teaching to avoid the draft,” he admitted—and had successfully brokered his prestigious North American Review publication of “The OD and Hepatitis Railroad or Bust” for admission to the Workshop. While on the faculty at Lakeland High School, he began writing without any preparation, “went into it cold and did a lot of drugs, and being a crazy young hippie, I began to send them out.” Since all his literary heroes had some connection to the Workshop as instructors or students, he decided to apply there, sending “OD” and another story, “Drowning,” which later appeared in Descent of Man. On the strength of both, he was admitted. His literary circle in which these stories were produced would appear to reinforce playwright Ed Bullins’s contention, to which Algren attached his ringing endorsement in 1972, the year Boyle entered the Workshop: “It would be healthier for a writer to socialize with drug addicts than with a clique of hacks,” according to the premise that “writers in groups are with few exceptions the most impotent and pernicious of tribes to infest the planet.”24 Boyle indeed thrived creatively, if not physically and mentally, when he socialized with drug addicts—and became one himself—while writing the two pieces that earned him admission to the most prestigious writing program in the world. But where his example deviates from Algren’s maxim is precisely in his efflorescence within the Workshop environment.

  It was there that he discovered the thrill of becoming a professional author. When the South Dakota Review paid him twenty-five dollars for “Drowning,” he was ecstatic at monetizing his creative talent in this first step toward professionalization: “$25 for the product of your brain? You could buy a lot of beer in Iowa City back then for that,” he quipped.25 As with Robert Lowell during the 1950s, Boyle used Iowa as a place to reclaim a sense of stability and seriousness toward the craft. During the particularly turbulent interludes in Lowell’s life in which he had served in federal prison, gone berserk in public on several occasions, and destroyed relationships with those close to him, he made steps to return to Iowa to recalibrate his sensibility and achieve the poise necessary to regain his top form as a creative writer. But Boyle’s life was far less erratic and changeable than Lowell’s, instead progressing along a surprisingly linear trajectory launched precisely upon his publication of “OD” and admission to the Workshop. Lowell had thirty-nine different addresses and myriad faculty appointments throughout his life. Boyle, by contrast, had only one job offer, from the University of Southern California, which commenced in 1978, the year after he graduated from Iowa. He has remained on the faculty ever since and continues into his late sixties at the rank of full professor. Unlike such capricious figures as Lowell, Boyle has been exceptionally loyal in his personal and professional lives, remaining with his first and only wife, whom he married in the late 1970s. He made a similar lasting and seemingly unbreakable vow to his publisher Viking Penguin, which has brought out, with one exception, all of his twenty-five titles since he signed with them in 1984. The Workshop indeed had the same sobering effect of reining in an otherwise untamable creative vision and lifestyle to match. Those seeking cultural stimulation in the Workshop environment would be deeply disappointed in the boxy buildings and blank-faced agrarians of the larger setting. Conversely, they would find cosmopolitanism in the eclectic and elite faculty and students if not in other programs on campus such as the International Writing Program, as Rita Dove had done.

  Boyle imprinted on Iowa, which provided the setting for him to rid himself of his addictions and discover his craft. In the process, he launched one of the most prolific and successful publication streaks with a major press in the history of the program. Iowa indeed changed his life and sowed the seeds of his success. He recently returned for a reading, and later mentioned how he appreciated the audience’s presence, regardless of “whether they’re nice people or not, or whether they’re idiots, who cares? There they are, they’re living and breathing.”26 Refusing to judge Iowa in this manner should not be confused with a sense of distance or alienation from the program, which his own daughter Kerrie attended and graduated from at his behest. Her picture at graduation, beaming arm in arm with her father in the bright May sunshine, adorns the Dey House office of long-standing Workshop secretary Connie Brothers. The framed photo hovers just over her shoulder as she sits at her desk, a cherished memento in an office cluttered with decades of memories and artifacts of the program’s writers; she glows when asked about it. She recalled how Boyle had appreciated taking John Irving’s class, because “John never read from a book; he always read from whatever he was working on that was in progress.”27 Brothers was something of a surrogate mother to Boyle at Iowa, as she held a deep appreciation of his unique voice and creative talent. By contrast, Boyle’s own mother barely read or understood his fiction. While listening to him read “Heart of a Champion,” his parody of the Lassie television series he called “one of the funniest stories I’ve ever written,” “she never cracked a smile.” When he finished, she solemnly declared, “that was moving.”28

  Boyle recalls his days at Iowa as “the time when I became serious about writing—as [about] my life.” His intensity toward the craft was not simply a means of making a living as a professional author so much as it was a process o
f finding an alternative to the self-destructive life he had been leading. He describes himself before Iowa as “a degenerate, writing sporadically, and listening to a lot of bad habits” that mired him in a spiral of addiction. When writing became steady rather than sporadic, he found success, first in the immediate feedback at Workshop from his peers and instructors, and then from his flawless grades. He is “very proud” that he maintained “a perfect 4.0 in all of my graduate work,” and that he was perceived as one the program’s best students. In the process he found himself maturing emotionally and professionally, realizing that this was what he “wanted to do” and thus “pursued it vigorously.” Undergraduate school, by contrast, was “like punishment.” In this way, “Iowa bailed me out.” The program “started a whole new phase in my life,” Boyle recalled.29

  The jeremiad of his life follows a recovering addict’s master narrative, complete with abject self-loathing. “I was stupid, just a defiant, dope-shooting, heroin-shooting, car-driving maniac, and I just thought that that was the way to be.” He lived like “some sort of existential hero,” such as Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the protagonist of Camus’s The Stranger, or little Alex the violent teenage hooligan in A Clockwork Orange. He flatly proclaims, “Now I’m rejecting that attitude. I’ve seen another face of life,” and found something sacred—his own creativity—at the Workshop. His addiction, however, did not abruptly cease once he arrived at the Workshop. Instead he sought psychiatric treatment from a variety of “shrinks” who “thought I was a very disturbed youth.” The Thorazine they prescribed was brutal, even to a hardened heroin addict, “a pretty heavy drug” that had contributed to the suicide of the poet Anne Sexton the decade before. He explains how he rejected it “finally and everything else” in an effort “to make something else” out of his life “which is more traditional and more satisfying for me.” The solution was in his own creative talent: “I became dedicated to my art,” and in the process “grew up at about the age of twenty-five or so. I went to Iowa to escape New York” and its “very bad drug scene.”30

  Instant Audience

  With the wretched New York drug scene safely behind him, Boyle turned his sights with the zeal of a recovered addict on literary achievement in the Workshop. An early photograph of him at his typewriter captures the moment. Disheveled, and not a little annoyed by the photographer’s request to have him turn away from his work for an instant to face the camera, he looks out with monomaniacal piercing eyes, mischievous and hot on the trail of an invisible narrative yarn, rechanneling the chemically driven absurd, mad, and hyperbolic hallucinations into literary art. He looks the part of the hippie, but one riveted to his cause, unwilling to yield to any distractions in his way, “betraying friends and ex-lovers and dreaming like a zombie over the page” until his vision comes to life.31

  The system of rigorous peer and instructor feedback in class meant that his work would receive what he called an “instant audience.”32 This informal means of publication in workshop sessions provided immediate results in a controlled, experimental environment for a sense of the work’s potential reception in the literary market. The savage individualism and petty sniping did not deter him from capitalizing on precisely the workshop method’s function as envisioned by Engle decades earlier. Boyle found value in Engle’s original vision of the workshop method as a manner of publication simulating the pointed criticism one could expect from editors of presses like Little, Brown or Viking and reviewers of the New Yorker or the New York Times. Boyle’s conception of authorship derived directly from his narrative persona of wise-guy performer and entertainer, brimming with the sort of fearless pluck and panache that made him an instant star of workshop sessions.

  For Boyle, authorship was predicated on Dickensian performance, the literary equivalent of crowd surfing into the hands of the audience, giving oneself body and soul in a transparent act of complete surrender. To him, Charles Dickens epitomizes this dedication to authorship as performance art. “You have to envy him his famous readings,” Boyle has said, because “he was [the] Mick Jagger of his day, the movie, the stage show, and all the rest, all rolled into one.” He envies that power Dickens possessed, which “we poor pathetic scribblers can only dream of in these techno-obsessed days.”33 Boyle’s website, launched in the late 1990s, typifies his conception of authorship as a process of self-disclosure and immediacy with his readers. He regularly posts commentary with photographs from his private domestic life, one even featuring him curled up in bed in a beany. In 1995, his outrageous live appearances captured the attention of the New Yorker, which portrayed him as “a skinny man in his late 40s, with bushy hair and a goatee who dressed like he was 25 and had a dead-black morbid outlook on life and twisted everything into a kind of joke that made you squirm.”34 His public image embodies the wise-guy narrators that his readers adore. Boyle’s loyalty to his readers is evident everywhere on the site, especially in his prompt, authentic, and thorough replies to their queries. Among literary authors, he was an early adopter of Twitter to leverage his popularity on social media to expand his reach. This brand of authorship synthesizes the elements he always admired in Dickens, “a quintessential artist who was a very popular author, and who also wrote brilliantly and well and originally.”35

  On writing as performance, Boyle casts the authorial role as profoundly social, contrary to the widely accepted sense of the occupation as detached solitary endeavor. Instead, he thrives on “getting up onstage and doing everything I can to engage and entertain an audience.” Charges that he is nothing more than a standup comic, a kind of literary court jester, rankle him. He laments that he has “been misunderstood and even reviled in some quarters, as if literature is some sort of priesthood and by making people laugh and writhe I’m somehow an apostate.” He argues that “literature is alive, a living, vital art form that needs to appeal to its audience—not pander to it, but appeal to it in the highest and lowest way.” Bringing literature to the audience as he does rescues it from becoming “exclusively the province of the academy, of intellectuals,” whereby “the average person’s experience of [it] is in the odious form of a classroom assignment.” This formulation of authorship poses a dilemma for Boyle in the digital age, for “Who can achieve the conscious-unconscious state of the reader when everything is stimulation, everything is movement and information?” The worst nightmare for authors is to allow the culture to relegate them to a role “like Kafka’s Hunger Artist, performing astonishing feats for a nonexistent audience far more interested in life and vitality.” Digital culture’s promise of instant gratification stands as formidable competition to “our antiquated and self-indulgent arts” such as literature.36

  The antiquated self-indulgence of authorship, former Workshop instructor Nelson Algren alleged in the early 1970s, was cause for scandal. Algren estimates that “Of the eighty-odd students whose work I read at Iowa at least thirty were too disturbed, emotionally, to write coherently in any language,” he complained. “Only two used English lucidly; and neither of these was native-born.”37 Much of the problem, he insisted, came from the lack of powerful and successful models among the faculty whom students might emulate. Faculty writing was lax, he claimed, because professors could depend on a steady salary unlike the youthful Hemingway in Paris under Gertrude Stein, for whom “Hunger was good discipline. You could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were heightened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow hungry.”38

  Without such vulnerability in the free market, Algren argued, a pernicious complacency sets in whereby the steady university salary decouples creativity from the financial consequence of critical reception. Such salaried positions eliminate the entrepreneurial scramble of authorship, and thus the prospect of critical failure as a threat carrying real economic consequences. Algren points out the influx of authors in unusually high concentrations at creative writing programs like Iowa’s, where they lack a financial incentive to produ
ce quality work to reach a paying audience. The New York Times made a similar point about the financial dividends that accrue to the teaching-writer at the expense of literary quality: “Iowa City is the place where a poet can relax in the knowledge that a regular paycheck will come in no matter how badly the book goes.” Algren adds, “That it can go badly enough to embarrass readers, without stopping a paycheck, is demonstrated by the founder-poet’s odes to fried rice,” a swipe at Paul Engle’s less-than-stellar corpus that includes such nuggets as Corn: A Book of Poems, from 1939.39