A Delicate Aggression

by David O. Dowling

  Robinson’s resistance to the tide of popular culture extends to her defense of humanities-based education against pressure to train the future American workforce for competition in the global economy. On a frosty December evening in 2015 at the Englert Theatre in Iowa City, she delivered a lecture titled “The American Scholar Now,” which was billed as an appraisal of the current state of higher education in the spirit of Emerson’s scathing jeremiad from 1837, “The American Scholar.” Her aim, like Emerson’s, was to “raise radical questions about the nature of education, culture and consciousness, and about their interactions” in order to diagnose how “there is a splendor inherent in human beings that is thwarted and hidden by a deprivation of the means to express it, even to realize it in oneself.” An “unconscious surrender” to widespread conformity, especially to prevailing materialistic standards of traditional occupational aspiration, formed her main concern.58

  Firmly in the role of Emerson, Robinson took direct aim at one of the guests of honor, Bruce Harreld, who was seated in the front row. Harreld had just been hired as the new president of the University of Iowa amid a firestorm of controversy. His appointment was unilaterally imposed by the regents despite the faculty’s nearly unanimous opposition to it and ardent support of other viable candidates for the position. With no experience in university administration, Harreld, whose accomplishments exclusively lie in the business world as a corporate CEO and IBM executive, received vocal resistance from the university community. The faculty officially censured him and Workshop students joined the graduate employee union in a public statement claiming, “the hiring process was hijacked by the Board of Regents,” which “underscores their view of the university as a business rather than an educational institution,” a broader pattern Robinson’s lecture later emphasized.59

  In the lecture, published the following March in Harper’s as “Save Our Public Universities,” distinct echoes emerge of Robinson’s admiration for midwestern universities’ historic role as a counter to the slave economy. “If it seems to be failing now,” the university system still maintains these seeds of hope in its original principles. The failure, she urged, was due to how administrators “have forgotten what the university is for, why the libraries are built like cathedrals and surrounded by flowers.” Instead of “the stripping down of our society” and universities “for the purposes of our supposed economic struggle with the world” according to capitalist measures of prosperity, we need to see their future “as a tribute and an invitation to the young, who can and should make the world new, out of the unmapped and unbounded resource of the mind.” The funneling of higher education into business imperatives appears in “the many fields that are influenced by economics, for example psychologies that subject all actions and interactions to cost-benefit analysis, to—the phrase should make us laugh—rational choice.” This trend directly threatens creative writing, which “is utterly, hopelessly anomalous by these lights,” prompting its practitioners “to run for cover to critical theory.”60

  A similar argument appears in “Humanism,” her essay from 2015 in The Givenness of Things. In it, she more stridently laments how “we are less interested in equipping and refining thought, more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield measurable enhancements of material well-being—for those who create and master them at least.” She deplores how “we are less interested in the exploration of the glorious mind, more engrossed in the drama of staying ahead of whatever it is we think is pursuing us,” sentiments echoing Emerson’s warning regarding the effects of capitalism’s encroachment into intellectual culture.61

  On a biographical level, Robinson’s Emerson-inspired address lamented the imposition of the business world’s economic standard on humanitarian intellectual culture as a way of offering her own appeal on behalf of the rural contemplative life. The measure of a university’s “success in vaulting graduates into upper tiers of wealth and status” dangerously elides how “many of its best and brightest prefer a modest life in Maine or South Dakota, or in Iowa.”62 Education, she reminds us, thrives in such locations without the materialistic trappings and capitalist mentality of major urban centers. Her own career embodies how a thriving literary life is possible on the prairie she extols through the spiritually vital John Ames in the final pages of Gilead.

  The closing appeal in Robinson’s lecture echoed Emerson’s emphasis in “The American Scholar” on the importance of higher education as a process of “exercising the highest functions of human nature.”63 The challenge she posed was “to find in oneself the grandeur that could make the world new” despite the current funneling of intellectual pursuits into economic models that too frequently results in an “unconscious surrender or failure to aspire.”64 Her transcendental measure of success directly challenges the financial one President Harreld represents. In 1837, one decade before the University of Iowa’s founding, Emerson similarly exhorted his listeners to break from pressure to conform to conventional vocational aspiration inclined toward “a vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism” visible in the acquisitive pursuit of “display and immediate fame.”65 Robinson’s opposition to the transformation of higher education into training for the future labor force resonates with Emerson’s warning against the increasingly narrow specialization of the occupations. He sees this process in the reification of humanity into its tools of labor, whereby “the priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship.” Under these industrial circumstances, the American scholar becomes “a mere thinker” without action, “or still, worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.”66 For both Robinson and Emerson, the intrusion of the methods and objectives of business culture into the context of humanitarian education can stymie creative powers. This view counters Paul Engle’s vision of acculturating Workshop students to the “delicate aggression” of the literary marketplace. Creativity might falter in an industrial setting, Emerson argued, due to “disgust for the principles on which business is managed,” a condition liable to turn the most spirited minds “of the fairest promise” into “drudges” or make them “die of disgust.”67

  Discipline

  The example of Robinson’s own creative process—a rigorous isolated discipline galvanized against the distractions of popular culture—sets an imposing if not unreachable standard for her students, especially for those not sharing her solitary temperament. Many envy her almost monastic dedication to the literary life, one that harkens back to Flannery O’Connor’s devotion to the craft. “I have this sense of urgency about what I want to get done,” Robinson explains, “and I discipline myself by keeping to myself.”68 When faculty or students invite her to dinner or a social gathering, she typically demurs. “Lots of people go out to dinner after workshop,” she said in 2004, with fifteen years’ experience as a faculty member. “I have no small talk, none,” she confessed, wincing at the thought of attending a social engagement with her colleagues.69 Maggie Conroy, Frank Conroy’s wife, provided much of her companionship over the years. Robinson spent an hour every evening on the phone with her mother until she passed away. Her social distance appears a factor of her intensely contemplative life.

  The rigor of Robinson’s instruction could be quite daunting to young writers. Reza Aslan, currently one of the world’s foremost experts on Islam and Christianity, “went to the Workshop primarily to work with Marilynne Robinson, and I think of her as a genius.” But once in her classroom, he became “very, very disappointed in her as a teacher,” because “she doesn’t have too much patience for those who deviate from what she has to say” and “doesn’t appreciate experimentation in fiction at all.” He speculated that her lack of encouragement derived from her own aesthetic, as seen in her “prose that’s so polished and clean you could eat off it.” He found her rigidity unbearable, pronouncing her “very closed off and very much living in the wrong century.”70 Robinson has explained her approach: “Through the discipl
ine of introspection . . . the mind—this deeper mind—makes selections on other terms than one’s front-office mind,” noting that the key to creative writing is “finding access to your life more deeply than you would otherwise.”71

  When pressed to describe precisely how students can develop their writing, Robinson stressed—in her uniquely Emersonian way—nonconformity to “the same dialect that is being spoken around them” according to the culture’s prevailing literary conventions in both contemporary and classical fiction. Literary rebellion for its own sake she equates to “breaking China,” a form of “being creative, when in fact it’s as subservient to prevailing norms as . . . obedience to them would be.”72 In “Diminished Creatures,” an essay from 1999, Robinson laments the stultifying effects of the concept of genius represented in a pantheon of canonical literature. As in Emerson’s “Representative Men,” she objects “to the habit of treating such works as categorically different from anything we ourselves can aspire to.” We “feel the thinking of Whitman and Dickinson,” she argues, and in turn “they help us feel our own.”73

  The worst of student vices is “underachievement,” according to Robinson, in the sense that one “has a good thing to give, but denies it.” Students can find this expectation severely intimidating, especially when compounded by pressure to develop an uncanny “peripheral vision of the world” while not just revering classical literature, but regarding it as an attainable model for their own writing. Her bearing in class Micah Stack has described as “a beatific presence”; her vocabulary, according to Lan Samantha Chang, the current Workshop director and a former student of Robinson’s, was arresting. Chang has “vivid memories of sitting in the classroom making lists of words that she used that were not typical,” and “watching,” awestruck, “her sentences fly through the air.”74

  Although Robinson purports to “do no harm,” her student Thessaly Le Force explained while interviewing her professor: “There are times in workshop when you point out a fundamental problem with a story,” administering a deft and fatal blow, whereby “the story can just lose its head.” This was not just her own private impression, but one shared by the class in general: “We call it the guillotine.” Le Force testified, “Intellectually, it’s as if you pull the bottom out of a story and the whole thing falls away.” Hearing this for the first time, Robinson took it as “a learning experience.”75 A similar sentiment overwhelmed Thoreau when his mentor Emerson directed him to feed the manuscript pages of his poetry into the fire, signaling the end of his poetic apprenticeship under the Concord sage.76 While on one hand fulfilling the hardline Iowa tradition established by Paul Engle of caustic criticism toward student writing, Robinson has moved progressively in the classroom to dismantle the credos of “show don’t tell,” “write what you know,” and “good characters are never interesting.” Her against-the-grain approach to the literary marketplace un-teaches the presumption that successful student writing “must project forward the dominant styles and trends of the decade” if it is “to be published and acknowledged.”77

  Robinson stands out among Workshop faculty of the Frank Conroy era as the first to bring the Bible, God, and the writings of John Calvin, Herman Melville, and Ralph Waldo Emerson into the classroom. “These days people read the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Scriptures, to condemn them, if they read them at all,” she notes.78 Calvin enters her teaching the way he influences her writing, primarily as “a misunderstood humanist” with “secularizing tendencies,” akin to the “celebrations of the human one finds in Emerson and Whitman.”79 Contemporary and ancient astronomy dramatize her conviction that “the place of humankind in such a universe is exalted.”80 For her, literatures of antiquity, Copernicus, Ptolemy, and Galileo showcase the universe, “the constant at work in it all.” She is perhaps more blissfully out of touch with the latest trends in contemporary fiction and critical theory than any Workshop faculty member. Despite being one of the world’s most renowned novelists, she confesses, her “favorite genre is not fiction.”81 By transforming fact and knowledge into faith and feeling, Robinson situates her work in relation to atmospheric science: “to take into account what is simply true, that the reality science describes, whether macrocosm or microcosm, is elegant, exuberant, fantastical, virtuosic.”82 She is curiously antique yet distinctly relevant to our modern culture in ways no literary agent would ever imagine possible, operating on a cosmic scale of existential significance worthy of Emerson himself.

  14 • The Warrior: Anthony Swofford

  There is a dark scene in Jarhead—Anthony Swofford’s 2003 chronicle of the 1991 Gulf War later made into the blockbuster film that brought him acclaim—in which Swofford describes how he nearly committed suicide. The tableau depicts the Marine sniper “standing in the middle of my own barracks room, placing the muzzle of my M16 in my mouth and tasting the cold rifle metal and the smoky residue of gunpowder.” He had just endured “a torturous thirteen weeks of bootcamp” during which he read his mother’s letters, pondered the infidelity of his girlfriend back home, and sunk into despair. This “move toward my sister,” whose serial suicide attempts and institutionalization for depression affected his formative years between the ages of twelve and fourteen, seemed inevitable. Justifications came with alarming ease. They included the broad “history of my family and of the species” along with more immediate “rumors of the enemy’s superior fighting skills.” Each was a mere tool of the suicide, which had taken on a life of its own. “The suicide’s job,” he realizes, is not “to know, only to do,” a sentiment echoed by the poet Anne Sexton, who wrote that suicides are “Like carpenters,” because “they want to know which tools./ They never ask why build.”1

  The legendary “pink mist” U.S. Marine Corps Surveillance and Target Acquisition Scout Snipers revere as the token of “a proper head shot” now threatens to become Swofford’s own. Locked and loaded, his weapon is on “burst,” which means it will send not one but three rounds through his head, leaving little chance for a botched effort. Just as he is about to obey the command of the suicide’s will, his platoon mate Troy bursts through the door. Survival, in this case, is a matter of running, which Swofford does at the behest of his fellow Marine. Troy yanks the weapon away. “I need to go for a run,” he says. “You coming?”2 The two venture out into the desert night, circling the base at its outer fringe, their boots slapping the sand rhythmically and their lungs filling with hot Saudi air.

  Running with Troy is a ritual of survival, but one tinted with the dark realization that he could never outrun depression and suicidal impulses. Tellingly, the men do not run a linear route, but in circles, an apt metaphor for the cyclical nature of his disease. “We run in silence . . . and the hours pass, and even though we’re going in circles,” he begins to recover, feeling like he is “running away from whatever I left back in the barracks.” But he soon realizes he is “swirling around the thing until it becomes part of the swirl, and the swirl becomes a part of me, and I’m still a part of that small sickness . . . but it no longer has me bent over at the waist, chewing the muzzle of my rifle.” His bouts with the disease are not over. He fears “maybe someday in the future I will revisit the sickness, but for now I’m done with it.”3 In his 2012 memoir, he recounts another moment when he “sat on the couch for eight hours thinking about killing myself.” He “had the rope and the sturdy beam, and any one of thousands of trees to choose from. But,” in a more protracted and isolated trial than the kinetic aerobic ritual of survival he shared on his all-night run with Troy, he “chose to live.”4 At Iowa, he would learn to cast the experience as something wider than himself. His training had effectively prepared him to become the author of the definitive narrative of the Gulf War, the next volume in the annals of classic war literature after Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

  Carrying New Weight

  It had been nearly a decade since Swofford had seen combat in Kuwait in the Gulf War when he unearthed his ruck, a case containin
g his belongings that accompanied him during the deployment. “After six or seven moves, and eight and a half years after [his] discharge,” he dusted it off to inspect its contents. The things he carried during war he carried through community college in Sacramento, then to undergraduate school at UC Davis, and now to Iowa City and the famed Writers’ Workshop. He did not have to carry these things with him, as many Marine veterans happily sold their rucks to any army/navy store for an easy profit of three hundred dollars cash, which to him at the time was “the equivalent of an outrageous bar tab.” The economy of scale for an outrageous bar tab, however, would change dramatically soon after his graduation from the Workshop. The financial windfall occurred when Jarhead was published by Scribner and produced by Universal Pictures under the direction of Sam Mendes, whose American Beauty in 1999 won five Oscars. Swofford’s skyrocketing fame and fortune in the wake of the critically acclaimed book and wildly popular film escalated his definition of an astronomical nightclub bill to five thousand dollars, the tab for one particularly raucous evening at a famous strip club in Las Vegas, as he confessed to his appalled father.5 The escapade was one of many alcohol- and drug-fueled spending sprees that squandered a significant portion of his Jarhead earnings, as he described it later in Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails: A Memoir.

  The thing Swofford carried to Iowa City in his ruck with the most potential value to him as a Workshop student was his war journal, a resource he knew would be invaluable in the development of his writing, one that might distinguish him from his talented and credentialed peers. Prior to the journal, Swofford’s only other creative writing consisted of “bad poetry” that at this stage was worthless to him.6 Pulling the journal from the bottom of the ruck beneath his gear, he was crushed to discover that its entries were “sort of scant.”7 Looking back in 1999 in earnest on a war that ended in 1991 would prove challenging indeed, especially with the intention of mining his memories for literary gold.