A Delicate Aggression

by David O. Dowling

  Teaching at the Workshop and editing the Iowa Review placed Boyle in a position of gatekeeper for the first time in his life. In that role, he would deal with pitched histrionics of one particularly irate classroom visitor and screen hundreds of manuscripts for the Workshop’s most influential journal. The disarming humor of his fiction, and the sheer mastery of its artistry, speak to his capacity to keep the wolves off his scent in the controversies that have arisen during his career, especially the one precipitated by his story about Grace and Rubies.

  Boyle’s legacy to the Workshop is his loyalty to the program and the craft—one job, at USC, one publisher, Viking—throughout a long and fruitful career characterized by an unusually open relationship with his readers, as his online presence shows. His willingness to leverage digital media, especially as an aging baby boomer, to expand the scope of his audience speaks to the versatility and vigor with which he has built his impressive career. Unlike Workshop veterans such as Kurt Vonnegut who have enjoyed massive audiences only to face charges of hack writing in predictable mass market genre fiction forms, Boyle has effortlessly pulled off a stunt worthy of Dickens himself by writing literary narrative with an exceptionally broad appeal. “There is a very fine distinction between these things, literature and genre fiction,” he mentions, “for language and for what’s going on under the surface.” The best writers “take you some place you’ve never been before.” At Iowa, he meshed that wide-open spirit of exploration beyond genre conventions with discipline, rigor, and craft, initiated by his own drive to escape his addictions and replace them with a creative one fueling his vitality. The velocity of his record is all the more remarkable in light of the playfulness he maintains, as seen in how “he still wears red Converse high-tops.”67

  PART 3

  THE FRANK CONROY ERA AND

  BEYOND (1980S–PRESENT)

  13 • The Mystic: Marilynne Robinson

  On a sultry opening day of the fall 2012 semester, students poured into Marilynne Robinson’s seminar on Problems in Modern Fiction. Room 224 of North Hall—perched on the east bank of the Iowa River near the Workshop’s Dey House—had never seen so many occupants. With every seat filled, students vied for standing room at the back wall and sat in the aisles. Although such seminars in creative writing at the University of Iowa typically attract no more than twenty students, skyrocketing demand for the course more than tripled that number in the wake of the Pulitzer Prize–winning publication in 2004 of Gilead, Robinson’s second novel since her cult classic Housekeeping appeared twenty-four years earlier. Even with the enrollment limit raised to forty students, twice the usual number for such courses, Robinson accepted eighteen more, for a total of fifty-eight on the final roster. The runaway popularity of the course—it filled at a record seventy students by spring 2013—was just one of the many local signs that the instructor’s career was undergoing a full-blown renaissance.1

  Not only Iowa’s student body had discovered Robinson. Her publication of Home, the prequel to Gilead, in 2008 won the Orange Prize for Fiction in the United Kingdom, cementing her status as a world-class author “considered as essential as Nabokov and Conrad.” That year, the Times of London proclaimed Robinson “The World’s Best Writer of Prose.”2 Among her most devoted readers was Barack Obama, who, in an unprecedented gesture by an American president, assumed the role of journalist and conducted an interview with Robinson that appeared in two installments in the New York Review of Books, in the autumn of 2015. Moments after he had placed the National Humanities Medal around her neck in July the previous year, the president confided, “Your writings have fundamentally changed me, I think for the better, Marilynne—I believe that.”3

  The most powerful writers among the Workshop student body have chosen to work with Robinson. When I asked her about her mentorship of Ayana Mathis and Paul Harding, whose stellar critical and popular success has raised the standard even among Workshop graduates, she was modest about her role in their ascent. Insisting instead on crediting the faculty at large, as well as the extraordinary talent of the incoming students at the Workshop, she initially refused to pinpoint any specific influence she may have had on their work except to note, “as it happens, Paul and Ayana chose to work closely with me.” However, she had “no doubt that they also profited from the advice of my colleagues.” Lowering her guard, she disclosed that although they were particularly strong, both needed “an attentive reader” along with “the kind of advice about the special psychological and emotional demands of writing that I could give them from my own experience with this very difficult art.” This demanding process of creative development for them was not the painless organic one Marguerite Young had fostered in the previous generation. “The essential point” for Robinson in her tutelage of these future powerhouses was “to encourage confidence in the project the writer is strongly drawn to,” no matter how incongruent with market demands or literary trends. Her focus was to help each of them “find the writer he or she should become. My teaching method comes down to attempting to be a sensitive reader and critic.” Again portraying modesty, she quipped, “I am happy to take credit for what Paul and Ayana have done and will do, but the credit really belongs to them.”

  Emerson similarly dismissed any suggestion or implication that he was behind the success of any of his protégés, including Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. But for them, as with Harding and Mathis, the literary mentor they selected changed their lives. Robinson allowed that her two best students’ decision “to work closely with me” proved to be the most pivotal of their literary careers not only for the aesthetic guidance she provided, but also for crucial connections to the New York publishing industry that included Ellen Levine’s powerful literary agency.4

  Like other Workshop instructors, Robinson’s ascendance to world-class notoriety has relied on the power of commercial media—despite her principled renunciation of it—to expand her audience. Among former and present Workshop members, however, she is the last to embrace digital communication as a means of promoting her professional career, lacking the sort of aggressive online marketing and leveraging of social media of T. C. Boyle and Ayana Mathis, for example. Yet through the status of her Workshop affiliation, she has landed her most potent media events, particularly the Obama interview and her appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in 2010 to promote her book Absence of Mind. Stewart’s producers sought her out as a provocative contrarian voice challenging the assumption that science and religion share nothing in common. The interview ended with Stewart asking, “Who’s right?” in the debate between science and religion, to which she dryly replied, “I am.”5

  Other notable media entities have sought out Robinson. Bob Silvers, the former editor of the New York Review of Books, first reached out to her on behalf of President Obama, who called the move an “experiment.” Prompted by his desire to use his final days in office to “have a conversation with somebody who I enjoy and am interested in,” he tapped Robinson because she was “first in the queue.”6 Suddenly she found herself an accidental media celebrity, an unusual role for the self-described “unfashionable” defender of mainline Protestantism and ardent critic of materialism and the new atheism.7 Robinson composes deeply interior novels about dying rural preachers, in longhand with ballpoint pens and legal pads, and is a fierce opponent of popular media culture, so it comes as a shock to see her celebrated by Vogue and featured in the digital magazine Vice in an interview with a former student. Her appearance with Obama went viral as an offbeat rhythm in the digital news cycle, as “precious few are the moments when brilliant, cult-y fiction writers ascend to the all-important status of Trending Topic.”8

  Levine’s Trident Media Group, which represents Robinson, has provided Workshop members with much of the publishing-industry support that Paul Engle had provided earlier. Without the prestigious Workshop affiliation that gained her privileged access to Trident, the tepid reception of her first novel Housekeeping in 1980 might have meant there
was little hope for the resurrection of her career as a novelist nearly a quarter century later. Further, her time away from fiction was not a case of losing the creative impulse or knack for the craft. Nor did she suffer from intense media attention before 2004 of the sort that robbed Ralph Ellison of the solitude necessary to write another novel after the colossal achievement of his Invisible Man, a National Book Award winner that one critic called “the most important novel since World War II.”9 Housekeeping posed no such dilemma, because the book initially had attracted so little attention. The project began as a series “of extended metaphors” of the sort she had been analyzing in her doctoral dissertation on Shakespeare at the University of Washington. “I just kept writing these little things and putting them in a drawer.” After several months, she pulled “out this stack of things and they cohered.” She could see “what these things implied” and “where the voice was.”10 Once she assembled it into a coherent narrative, she assumed it was “too private a novel” to ever be published, much less reach a wide audience. But she persisted in finding a publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, only to be warned that it might not be reviewed.11 It was indeed reviewed, but only narrowly. Housekeeping barely survived after clearing its first print run of thirty-five hundred copies, after which “it finally straggled into paperback. There was one bidder. It could have expired.”12

  During her hiatus from the novel from 1980 until 2004, Robinson did not face the fruitless struggle of Ellison, whose career as a novelist sank under the gargantuan weight of his unpublishable two-thousand-page manuscript. Nor was she devising a project, like Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, specifically to overcome creative paralysis in the wake of her first novel’s success. She had initially received no outpouring of praise for Housekeeping from overzealous critics like those who heralded Chabon as the next F. Scott Fitzgerald—and in the process froze him in his tracks—after his debut title, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Robinson’s creative will was impervious to such external forces. Instead, she deliberately embarked on a series of nonfiction projects in theology, cultural criticism, and environmental activism. Dissatisfied with her doctoral training, she sought more. When she joined the faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as a visitor in 1989 knowing little about the state, and with no intention of remaining longer than a few semesters, she instead found precisely the environment for such research. The trilogy of novels, Gilead (2004), Home (2008), and Lila (2014), which together form the crowning achievement of her career, would not have been possible without her immersion in theology and ethics throughout the 1990s. “I stayed” to become a permanent member of the Workshop faculty in 1991 “because I learned to love the place,” she said, describing the decades as “very fruitful years for me because the customs and culture of the Workshop support the kind of life writing requires.”13 Free from distraction in this rural setting, she could pursue a contemplative life, yet one bent on combating fear in its most repugnant cultural and political manifestations, in the process valorizing and reclaiming mainline Protestantism for the socially liberal left.

  Banned in Britain

  After the publication of Housekeeping, Robinson spent the next two and a half decades writing mostly nonfiction, much of which she admitted consisted of unfashionable theological inquiries into John Calvin and political polemics. Her defense of culturally and politically unfashionable positions carries an unapologetic boldness, as seen in Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution, published in 1989, just two years after Housekeeping’s motion picture release.14 A more calculating author, such as T. C. Boyle, might have sought to capitalize on the film by producing another novel. Besides the small word-of-mouth cult following for Housekeeping, the only audience Robinson captivated in the wake of the film consisted of litigious detractors of Mother Country. The incendiary invective incited a lawsuit from Greenpeace and drove Britain to threaten an embargo. Her assault on Greenpeace stunned environmentalists who deem the organization unassailable. Yet she has launched similar critiques of the Nature Conservancy and the Sierra Club, alleging that “the most important issues are not in the conversation,” which instead fixates on how consumers should “stop using spray or other ridiculous minor things that won’t add twenty minutes to the world’s life while” other “horrible depredations” go unchecked. Her relentless focus on larger issues exposes the flaws of seemingly benign conservation organizations, highlighting for example the naive proposition of “saving the whale without saving the sea.” She has concluded that “there is no environmental group whose methods or priorities I consider useful. Zero.”15 Such courage infused her major works to follow. In the wake of the libel suit, Robinson refused to redact passages in Mother Country in which she condemned the British government and Greenpeace for toxic waste in Britain.16 The British government retaliated by banning the book in the United Kingdom.17

  The lawsuit absorbed considerable time and energy. Robinson’s unwillingness to compromise to reach a broader readership speaks to her commitment to crusading for justice over promoting herself to elite British literary circles and their attendant critical communities. Henry David Thoreau, whom Robinson cites along with Emerson, Dickinson, and Melville as having the greatest impact on her work, shared this professional ethic that placed social reform before self-promotion. The jail time Thoreau served for his refusal to fund the Mexican-American War, for example, subordinated his reputation in the literary marketplace for the higher principle of civil disobedience. Further, his assault on the industrial intrusions into what he considered the pristine sanctuary of Walden Pond—with the shrieking steam engine violating the quiet woods and railroad track lacerating the land—parallels Robinson’s staunch defense of the natural environment in the latter-day muckraking of her Harper’s exposé journalism that fueled Mother Country. Her investigative reportage revealed that the British nuclear reprocessing plant of Sellafield had systematically covered up its practice of pumping radioactive waste into the Irish Sea.18 Still worse, Greenpeace was fully aware of the practice yet abetted it by distributing “false information about its role in chartering legislation to stop the disposal of toxic waste at sea.” Despite the accolades she has received from her literary novels, “she still calls” the journalistic Mother Country “the most important thing she has ever written.”19 She stated, “if I could have written only one book, that would have to be the book.”20

  The 1989 lawsuit against Robinson’s British publisher for Mother Country could not have come at a worse time. That year she had separated from her husband and was undergoing plans for divorce while independently raising their two boys. The book had received mixed reviews, with some critics denouncing it for being excessively strident and one-sided. Its supporters, however, generated a groundswell of support strong enough to land it on the list of finalists for the National Book Award in 1989. Much of the support for the book derived from the radically liberal community around Skidmore College, where she taught for the New York State Writers Institute. By spring of 1991, the Workshop’s director Frank Conroy extended her an offer to join the permanent faculty. Among Robinson’s supporters was the highly acclaimed author Susan Sontag, who addressed Conroy regarding her hiring. Since Sontag had been in self-exile overseas without her mail forwarded in order to finish her novel The Volcano Lover, she had missed the news. She also regretted missing “the chance to recommend Marilynne Robinson for a permanent post at Iowa,” adding that “Iowa would be very lucky to get the author of Housekeeping!”21 Conroy replied, “She got it. With tenure. We’re all very happy, needless to say.” Not missing the opportunity to book her for a speaking engagement, he asked, “Is there any way I can lure you out here for a visit/reading next fall?”22

  With the new position at Iowa and her divorce and libel suit settled, Robinson welcomed the opportunity to settle west, if not precisely in the region of her upbringing in Idaho, certainly in a rural community situated near the leafy Mississippi River valley. There she could be ensconced in nature
as Thoreau was at Walden Pond and contemplate what Emerson called the infinitude of private man. At least one critic has found Robinson’s pattern of literary production “sporadic” and “willfully eccentric,” especially given her predilection for retrieving mainline Protestantism in an era of cultural materialism that has called into question conventional religion.23 She has assumed the less than popular stance of defending Christianity from such imposing figures as Richard Dawkins, who delivered a slashing criticism of the damage incurred by organized religion, measured in human lives beginning with the Holy Wars, in The God Delusion of 2008. Before Dawkins, Jack Miles’s God: A Biography in 1995 led the attack on the Bible’s status as ultimate moral authority and evidence of a benevolent deity by casting it as a carefully crafted work of literature whose main character is God himself.

  Much more than her affinity for long sentences and challenging vocabulary inspired by Herman Melville—she identified Ishmael, the narrator of Moby-Dick, as her single favorite character in all of literature—this decidedly unfashionable quality of Robinson’s extends deeper, to her predilection for the writings of John Calvin. She defends Calvin for “the power of the metaphysics and the visionary quality of his theology,” particularly his “admiration of what the human mind does.” She objects to “positivism that rejects anything—the self, the soul, or God—that cannot be explained empirically” in her essay collection The Givenness of Things.24 Her predilection for nineteenth-century homiletics and Emersonian modes of rhetorical expression stem from an epiphany she experienced while teaching Moby-Dick at the Workshop at the age of forty-five. Melville’s vision of Calvinism inspired her reading of The Institutes, the text that initiated her exploration of Reformed theology.25