As the antithesis of complacent faculty members indifferent to the reception of their writing in the literary market, students like Boyle competed intensely to establish themselves in the publishing industry by landing stories in respectable journals and earning a debut contract with a prestigious press. Many had been groomed for success in this environment, including students such as Rita Dove, a summa cum laude graduate at Miami of Ohio, who carried prestigious awards, publications, and honors upon entrance into the program. Instead, Boyle was closer to the “bone hungry” young Hemingway whose heightened powers of perception were driven by a ravenous ambition. With the same steely resolve Boyle used to overcome his demons—“I used to have a lot of nightmares as an adult and I willed myself not to have them”—he dedicated himself to his craft.40
Boyle knew his success depended on his knowledge of the publishing nexus. He learned very little about the craft of creative writing outside of workshop sessions, which he mainly used as a litmus test for whether to continue nurturing a story to fruition. Noticing that his instructors would congregate at Iowa City bars to discuss the business of literature, including which journals and presses were on the rise and which had faltered given changes in editorial personnel, he made a point of mastering the market. He was streetwise enough to know that great writing would amount to little without an aggressive promotional apparatus behind it, and thus began a relentless marketing campaign on behalf of his own writing that continues to reach its tentacles across transmedia outlets, from his website to social media.
Boyle’s tutelage in the finer points of literary marketing took place at a bar in Iowa City called the Mill on Burlington Street, a short walk up the hill from the Workshop’s location at the time in EPB. Raymond Carver was a fixture there, a larger-than-life figure among Workshop faculty whom students worshipped as “the best short story writer of his time,” and who “amazed and inspired” the young Boyle. His conversations with Carver were never concerned with the structure and method of fiction writing, so much as the challenge of finding remuneration for it. “We didn’t talk much about craft,” he recalled, but focused on “selling stories to little magazines—selling them, that is, once they’d been brought up out of nothing and given shape.” The creative process “was just a given,” an individual “path you took because you were a writer able to assimilate all the stories there ever were and make something wholly different out of them.”41 If the method of creative writing did not bear mention in these off-campus conversations, it was only because attention focused on placing material rather than producing it. John Cheever, also a towering presence among the Workshop faculty at the time, was “very drunk all the time,” and provided no “structural analysis” or details on how to improve, Boyle remembered. “You’re right on track kid, keep it up,” was all he could offer, but to Boyle, it came as encouragement to carry on. To this day, Boyle remains mystified as to how he managed to build his writing without any substantial aesthetic guidance, noting that “somehow, and I don’t know how, my work seemed to come together.” Although his instructors were “very gracious [and] very generous,” he “never got much advice from anyone” in the art of fictional narrative.42
Beyond what he could glean from Carver about placing his stories in the little magazines, Boyle’s mastery of publishing industry networks was attributable to his own relentless investigations. “When I was scrambling to publish,” he explains, “I knew every magazine and every editor, and everything that was going on and all the gossip.” Thoroughly enmeshed in the social matrix of literary publishing, Boyle sought out through informal conversation information essential to his success, including “how to get on with an agent,” and “how to send out a manuscript.” What he was not told, he “found out just by trial and error.”43 To his great advantage in navigating the literary market was his position as assistant fiction editor of the Iowa Review. His supervisor was fiction editor Robert Coover, who was in London at the time, but through extended correspondence became a loyal advocate and mentor to Boyle. They would share thoughts on the ten manuscripts Boyle had screened for him from the bulk of submissions, from which Coover selected three or four to be published in the next issue. Coover indeed was instrumental in springing Boyle’s success, particularly the year after he graduated in 1977, when he “did the whole Eurail thing as a rag-tag hippie trotting around Europe with my wife.”44 When the two arrived in London, they were treated to a warm reception from Coover, who threw a party in their honor to introduce Boyle to several publishing literary insiders. At the London party, Boyle met his agent who landed him his first two book contracts with the reputable publisher Little, Brown, and who later proved instrumental in engineering his Viking deal that cemented his career, making him one of its most lucrative and long-standing house authors.
Intermediaries played a crucial role in Boyle’s rise to fame. He nonetheless has claimed to loathe the use of literary circles to his professional advantage, insisting he has “never cultivated anyone in a position to advance me” and has stayed “strictly away from literary and film circles, choosing rather to speak directly to my audience.”45 He repeatedly casts himself as a lone wolf learning both the craft of writing and its promotion in the publishing industry on his own through trial and error. This is only partially true, but sounds a note that harmonizes with his authorial image as a radical individualist on the fringe, always skeptical of authority and institutions. Yet his deep and abiding dedication to the Workshop represents surrender to institutional authority rather than defiance of it. He claims not to talk to other authors or teachers of creative writing. “I don’t know the other teachers in my own department” at USC “and what they do,” just as he is oblivious to the craft of other practicing authors, confessing, “I don’t hang out with other writers and don’t talk to other writers.”46
His current justification for remaining outside literary circles is calculated to make him appear immersed in the alternative social milieu of his readership. “Have I missed out? Maybe so. But I have been pleased and honored to have a wide readership for my books and it is to that readership that I owe my loyalty.” But gaining that readership to begin with required several crucial relationships with key figures in the publishing industry to spring his career. He acknowledges his benefactors from “grad school rocks like Vance Bourjaily, John Irving and John Cheever, to editors like George Plimpton and Lewis Lapham, and my agent, Georges Borchardt,” whom Coover had introduced him to in London. “They saw me. Plucked me up. Held me. Guided me.”47 Fellow Workshop students had less influence, with the notable exception of one female colleague. When it came to assembling what would be his most controversial story written at Iowa—a scandal that became a local legend and topic of gossip throughout both campus and town—he relied on her intermediary efforts to infiltrate the domain of his subject, which was off-limits to men. The story that followed, and its controversial place of publication, unleashed a lion.
The Grace and Rubies Affair
If Boyle had been so well positioned in the literary market through his fashionable editorship at the Iowa Review, why would his final publication as an Iowa student coinciding with his graduation in May 1977 appear, of all places, in the tawdry pages of Penthouse magazine? The momentous timing of the story, “A Women’s Restaurant,” occasioned something far more respectable since it sounded the final note of his impressive and prolific record at Iowa, one that would leave a lasting impression of Boyle’s impact on the program and literary history. Hardly a paragon of literary renown, Penthouse blights his five years of stellar publications at Iowa that began with his auspicious debut in the North American Review. Boyle’s curriculum vitae, however, was the least of his concerns when he sought a publisher for “A Women’s Restaurant,” a short story version of a roman à clef entrenched in local controversy. As the only Iowa City subject of all of his Workshop writings, the story functions as Boyle’s parting shot at the town’s culture and politics.
“A Women’s Resta
urant” demanded research into Grace and Rubies, a local feminist eatery (originally named without an apostrophe), library, and gathering place that banned men from the premises. But the source of his information was mainly the news media, despite rumors that he infiltrated the establishment in drag. As with his imaginative reconstruction of Battle Creek, Michigan, in The Road to Wellville, Boyle did not spend much time on research for “A Women’s Restaurant.” He admits to having no patience for embedded journalistic investigation. “I am no James Michener, living in Texas for twelve years so he could write about the geology, history, and cattle raising.”48 It was commonly known that the restaurant’s owners recorded the names of its all-female clientele over the age of ten. A life membership, required upon the first visit, entailed signing its bylaws and paying a one-time fee of fifty cents. Such minimal requirements for membership were a thinly veiled means of acquiring legal status as a private club to legitimate the exclusion of men. The nominal fee signaled the political rather than commercial priority of the establishment, in sharp contrast to the exorbitant dues charged at elite men’s clubs such as Augusta Golf Club or Bohemian Grove. Located on 209 North Linn Street in Iowa City, near the famous Hamburg Inn No. 2 that has hosted presidential candidates since the advent of the Iowa caucus in the 1970s, Grace and Rubies opened in 1976 and closed two years later under legal pressure and ongoing resistance fueled in part by Boyle’s story.
By placing the piece in Penthouse, Boyle deviated from his literary pattern of publication in order to make a political counterpoint against the restaurant’s exclusion of men. His satire of the women-only establishment would bite more ferociously in this more uncouth and therefore offensive venue than its relatively sophisticated counterpart, Playboy. Grace and Rubies had raised local opposition based on allegations that it charged too little to be designated a private club bearing the right to exclude certain patrons; editorialists maligned it in the local press as a haven for man-hating feminists. In November 1976, several months after it opened, assistant city attorney Angela Ryan deemed Grace and Rubies “not private,” and turned the matter over to the city’s Human Relations Commission for investigation. Mayor Mary Neuhauser argued that “the 50-cent membership fee” did not “qualify the establishment as a bona fide club.”49 The Achilles heel of the club was that “its membership-selection process had no screening, no interview, no limit to the number of social members, no possibility of rejection, no criteria other than being a woman.”50 That the figures leading the legal assault were women presented a paradox, which appears less ironic in light of their defense against civil rights discrimination. “ ‘I’m just afraid we’ll see several more of these places springing up, and they’ll bar blacks or minorities or other groups,’ ” the mayor argued.51
Cut from the cloth of Poe’s madmen, the obsessive narrator of Boyle’s tale leads the reader through his thought processes as he plots to perpetuate outrageous acts. This protagonist is no murderer and intends no harm, but is obsessed in a way suggestive of Poe’s psychopaths whose elaborate exploits are lovingly told with pinpoint precision. The subtlety, however, was lost on the real proprietors, a lesbian couple named Grace and Rubie, whom he lampoons into an unflattering Dickensian caricature by accentuating their obtuse clash of large/small, dominant/submissive, aggressive/passive, “butch/fem” characteristics. Boyle renders Rubie as a spindly woman with a close-cropped “brushcut” shorn at the behest of her domineering counterpart, “the towering Grace” with “angry eyes.” Rubie “looked like a Cub Scout. An Oliver Twist,” one of Boyle’s several nods to Dickens.52 The protagonist is bent on discovering their inner world, since all he knows he can decipher from the refuse in the trash bins outside the building. He imagines an inner paradise made all the more desirable because he is excluded for his gender, a crime that runs “afoul of antidiscrimination laws,” a phrase suggesting Boyle’s more than casual familiarity with local news coverage of the city attorney’s and mayor’s investigations. His narrator is obsessed with ascertaining “what goes on there, precisely,” which “no man knows.” Since he is a man, he is “burning to find out.”53
After several unsuccessful attempts at entering the feminist enclave, first by simply trying to walk in, then by attempting to sneak in through the back, the narrator of “A Women’s Restaurant” finally resorts to drag. While seducing a lesbian biker girl, the narrator excuses himself to use the restroom. In his drunkenness, he forgets to sit down while relieving himself to conceal his identity. “A head suspended over the door to the stall”—it is Grace, whose “face was the face of an Aztec executioner.”54 He blasts out of the stall sending her into the sink opposite, and scurries out of the restroom, his wig askew. In a madcap scene, he bursts past the patrons, overturning plates and chairs, cutting through the kitchen as Grace screams, “STOP HIM! STOP HIM!” in a full-throated howl of the dreaded male pronoun. But blocking the exit is the “pixie Rubie,” who lowers her right shoulder “like a linebacker” and sends the narrator pinwheeling head over heels, landing with his “face in coffee grounds and eggshells.” In the coda he reflects on his exploit, muses on the pleasures of drag, and considers seriously seeking the assistance of a surgeon so his next entrance could be made with “no dissimulation.”55
Like the reformers of Boyle’s later novel The Inner Circle (2004), the narrator of “A Women’s Restaurant” obsessively and irrationally pursues his quest in a humorous, outlandish plot. The parody of the social scene bears the imprint of his fellow Workshop graduate Flannery O’Connor, who similarly delighted in sending up cultural progressives in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Boyle’s favorite short story. The satiric and “jaundiced eye” O’Connor turns on society informs the method of “A Women’s Restaurant.” In an unmistakable reference to the protagonist of “Good Country People,” Boyle features a girl with a plastic prosthetic leg in his tale.56 The story’s literary import is considerable, but is nonetheless secondary to his political intentions. Although it may well bear the dubious distinction of the most literary work ever published in Penthouse, its agenda was hardly docile or neutral, despite Boyle’s claims to the contrary decades later.57
The placement of the story in Penthouse, Boyle insisted, was prompted by the meager income of five thousand dollars that he and his wife, also a graduate student, earned at the time. He therefore “was happy to publish the story where I could and to receive actual money for it.” The starving-student alibi, however, did not satisfy those associated with Grace and Rubies, whose attorney charged that the business “has been singled out among all the private clubs in this city for harassment.”58 Boyle recalled that “the patrons of Grace and Ruby’s [sic] read the story in print . . . and felt I was attacking them or feminism or their right to privacy.”59 After cataloguing the odd menagerie of patrons, “washerwomen, schoolmarms, gymnasts, waitresses, Avon ladies, scout leaders, meter maids, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, spinsters, widows, dikes, gay divorcees, the fat, the lean, the wrinkled, the bald,” including the O’Connoresque “girl with a plastic leg,” the narrator “finds something disturbing about this gathering of women, this classless convocation, this gynecomorphous melting pot.”60 Many alleged the story was a mean-spirited swipe at the women’s movement, to which Boyle retorted, “It is not a malicious story.”61 He explained, “it does not seek to devastate feminism (tweak it maybe, I’ll admit to that), but in a twisted sort of way, to celebrate it.” He “had a confederate do my snooping for me: a bona fide member of the opposite sex,” whose identity he has refused to disclose but is likely to have been his wife. The concept for the story originated from his Workshop instructor John Irving, who suggested crafting a tale based on “the idea of men in drag vis-à-vis the feminist movement.”62
Grace and Rubies was ripe for satire as a feminist hub in the heart of Iowa City, especially given its division of the sexes. But the joke is also on the infiltrator who insinuates himself into the all-women’s restaurant.63 Although Grace and Rubies restaurant close
d down after only two years in operation, it has been immortalized in an entry on the feminist blog Lost Womyn’s Space. The piece pays homage to the restaurant and takes Boyle to task for appropriating it for “a pornography-obsessed male audience—even in lightly fictionalized form.” The commentator accuses him of “exposing, redefining, and highlighting” not only the club but “all women’s space to this [Penthouse] audience as pornographic girl-on-girl fantasy for the male gaze.”64 Grace and Rubies may have risked liability for discrimination against male patrons, according to journalism student Lynne Cherry, writing in the Daily Iowan in 1977. But activists defended the establishment as a symbol of the women’s movement and its struggles to achieve progress. The drafty dining room is “made to feel cozy by the feeling of comradeship among the members and the cheerful wisecracks issuing from the kitchen.” Boyle’s story never mentioned its function as a headquarters for women’s cultural events. Posted on its walls were “handwritten notices for such things as a club meeting, a costume party, intramural flag football, and a women’s clinic.” Women’s literature, news, and politics overflowed from the library “that consisted of donated books, mostly by and-or about women, and some feminist newspapers.”65 Grace and Rubies drew attention in a 1977 article in Dyke: A Quarterly published a year before the establishment closed. One contributor could see that the restaurant’s days were numbered, but quipped with a note of optimism that “if it takes the commission as long to investigate Grace & Rubie’s [sic] as it does to investigate sex discrimination in employment claims, the restaurant will be around for a number of years, no matter what the outcome.”66
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