The Workshop’s current reluctance to commemorate and celebrate Engle seems entirely reasonable in light of his having abandoned the program that was the greatest achievement of his life. The rift with Gerber accounted for why, when Leggett “blew into town in 1969,” Engle was “so indifferent to his extraordinarily successful creation.” At the time Leggett could not fathom Engle’s animosity toward the Workshop. It was not until Leggett invited him to attend the fiftieth anniversary of the Workshop that he fully understood how much Engle’s relationship to the program had chilled. At first declining the invitation, Engle made a surprise appearance, supplying the most pithy and wry reading of his presence there. “His role to the convocation of a half century of Workshop graduates,” Leggett recalled him saying, was “that of the corpse borne through Egyptian festivals to subdue unrestrained revelry.”31 Engle in effect provided his own epitaph, making light of his post-mortem directorship of the Workshop in another self-advertisement winning him instant acceptance at the gathering. Had Engle maintained that good-natured and self-effacing approach to the Workshop, it might have served as an olive branch to encourage greater recognition of his monumental achievements toward building the program.
The hiring of John Leggett extended Engle’s institutional paradigm that was so deeply connected to the publishing industry. Leggett was “a book editor with a Maxwell Perkins role model” whose vision resonated with Engle’s “scheme [that was] similar to that of a quality publisher, seeking the best young writers, hoping to nourish and launch them, yet without that inhibiting commercial risk.” The surrogates for commercial risk and the rigors of the literary marketplace were the students themselves, in many cases more imposing than cantankerous naysayers like Conroy. Leggett stood by his belief in “the weekly exposures, humiliations, and occasional triumphs” as the avenue to success for building a “creative temperament” as the “core for any aspiring life.” Salvation through suffering continues to be a keynote at the Workshop. In a Des Moines Register feature on the program in April 2016, Lan Samantha Chang noted that the workshop model was alive and well. Student Claire Lombardo described the shock of silently witnessing the dissection of one’s work: “like waking up from a nap. You are in a weird stage, in a fugue state, a strange mood the rest of the night.” Critical voices riot inside the heads of Workshop students. Michael Cunningham, an MFA graduate from 1980, admitted that he “perversely loved the agitation it engendered in me” to see “others mangled by the experience” of workshop bloodlettings in which he “often felt more than a little mauled myself.” To the extent that the program continues to be notoriously competitive, it is still Paul Engle’s Workshop. Cunningham recalled one classmate “slapping a story of mine down on a tabletop and announcing to the members of our workshop, ‘This is just pornography.’ ” Although he “passed some bad nights in Iowa City, and some worse mornings,” he felt “enlivened by the proximity of just under a hundred other people ready to come to blows over questions involving the perfection or deficiency of particular sentences.”32
The Pedagogy and Commerce of Frank Conroy
Just as Engle’s own career had been “a long slow slide from full-throated poetic aspiration into monochromatic administrative greatness,” as Eric Bennett aptly described it, Frank Conroy followed a similar course, abandoning his initial authorial vocation for his role as director of the Workshop. His first book, Stop-Time, cemented his fame in 1967. Only decades later in 1993 did he produce his second major work, the novel Body and Soul. Conroy’s tenure as director from 1987 to 2005 is marked by his intimidating presence in the classroom and rigid enforcement of his beliefs about effective creative writing. By contrast, Engle never played such an active role as an instructor. Disgruntled students begrudge Conroy not for overzealous fund-raising and publicity of the sort Engle indulged in, but on stopping innovation that strayed beyond what he considered acceptable. “He shot down projects by shooting down their influences,” Bennett recalled. “He loathed Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, Barthelme. He had a thing against J. D. Salinger that was hard to explain.” Melville and Nabokov, the latter of whom many respected critics consider one of the best prose stylists of all time, were “obnoxious” in his eyes. It is hard to imagine the frustration of any student aspiring to write postmodern fiction or philosophical novels under the tutelage of a man who dismissed David Foster Wallace with a growl and a wave of his hand: “he has this thing he does.” Conroy saved his most lavish diction for the destruction of these writers, and any manuscript up for workshop bearing their influence was “Cockamamie,” “bunk,” “bunkum,” or “balderdash,” withering barbs that shattered many projects and egos.33
John Leggett could humiliate, but no director acculturated classes to habitual savagery more than Conroy. Brady Udall recalled his second showing at workshop after an inauspicious debut dismissed by Conroy as “the worst kind of amateurish yearnings.” He explained how “for the first fifteen minutes of class, Frank allowed my fellow writers to do what comes naturally in a Workshop class—they tore the story to bits.” As Udall silently took his punishment according to protocol, “Frank fidgeted, shook his head sadly, and finally, when he could take no more, held up his hands to halt the proceedings,” proclaiming the story publishable as it stood. This, he insisted, was “a perfect story,” without “a flaw or blemish in it, not even a comma out of place.” He commanded Udall to “send this story off right away,” because it was destined for publication.34 Udall sent “Buckeye the Elder” to Playboy, whose editors proved Conroy right and accepted it at once without revision.
This was not the last of instances where mob rule conspired to undermine brilliant writing at the Workshop. During the previous generation, Leggett observed how difficult it was to find visiting professors capable of controlling this savage group impulse. His three requirements “of a good Workshop teacher” included “the prestige to attract students, an editorial sense that can foster talent . . . and a diplomacy that can keep student savagery from serious bloodletting.” Perhaps most alarming in this schema is Leggett’s unwillingness to reform this combative culture but instead fold it in a mantle of respectability, hoping it might prevent the volcano of envy and vengeance from erupting into a riot. One “tell-it-like-it-is apprentice,” Leggett recalled, “summarized the worksheet of a shy classmate with, ‘But this is just shit, terrible shit,’ ” an instance in a larger pattern of hostile abuse the director had neither inclination nor interest in stopping.35
Prior to Chang’s directorship in the early 2000s, intervention by directors to alleviate hostility was intermittent and incident-specific, never program-wide. Conroy, for example, rescued several others besides Udall from the lynch mob of peer critics. In his homage to Conroy titled Mentor: A Memoir, Tom Grimes recounts the crucifixion of his best writing at the hands of his classmates. “Too many metaphors,” one claimed; “I was lost,” another sniffed; “Do people really talk this way?” someone asked; “If the narrator’s a baseball player, how come he’s intelligent?” Conroy leaped to his defense, but with such intensity that Grimes could not tell whether he “was defending my work, or his judgment?” At stake for Conroy was a symbolic defense of his power. Although he emerged with Conroy’s blessing, Grimes found himself at his desk “the following morning [as] my classmates’ voices rioted in my head. I couldn’t hear my narrator, and if I lost his voice I’d lose the novel.” Stultified, he “worked for six hours and composed two sentences.” Grimes’s great triumph lay in his capacity to “silence the other voices” so that they “never interfered with my work again.”36
Conroy was both muse and antagonist, the object of praise and the subject of bitter derision. When he was a student at the Workshop, Bennett’s desire to write philosophical fiction building toward a postmodern novel of ideas crashed on the rocks of Conroy’s rigid disapproval. On closer examination, Conroy’s disdain for postmodern writers appears to derive in part from his treatment at the hands of David Foster Wallace in a widely read H
arper’s cover story from 1996. Conroy’s condemnation of his students’ Wallace-inspired writing was apparently driven by more than just aesthetics. In the article, Conroy falls victim to the Workshop’s own shame culture that vilified commercial writing as the great taboo. Wallace exposed that Conroy had published “a fawning puff piece about a cruise line for financial gain,” as Kent Williams observed.37 Wallace wrote, as the prelude to his onslaught: “Did I mention that famous writer and Iowa Writers’ Workshop Chairperson Frank Conroy has his own experiential essay about cruising right there in Celebrity 7NC’s [the cruise line’s] brochure?”38
Conroy’s piece, titled “My Celebrity Cruise or ‘All This, and a Tan Too,’ ” is “graceful and lapidary and persuasive,” Wallace submits, but “it is also completely insidious and bad.” The “real badness” is in its complicity with “Megaline’s sale-to-sail agenda of micromanaging not only one’s perceptions of a 7NC but even one’s own interpretation and articulation of those perceptions.” Still more troubling, according to Wallace, is that the project and placement of the piece “are sneaky and duplicitous and well beyond whatever eroded pales still exist in terms of literary ethics.” By “appearing on an inset with skinnier pages and with different margins than the rest of the brochure,” the “essay” creates “the impression that it has been excerpted from some large and objective thing Conroy wrote.” Of course “it hasn’t been.” The cruise line’s public relations liaison admitted that Celebrity had paid Conroy “whether he liked it or not.” Conroy’s own response to Wallace’s questioning about the “essaymercial” was far more forthright. “With a small sigh that precedes a certain kind of weary candor,” the director confessed, “I prostituted myself.”39
By coincidence, Conroy had sailed on the same cruise Wallace reported on for his Harper’s story. Conroy felt especially stung by Wallace’s crucifixion of his “essaymercial” because he had been so forthright about discussing why he wrote the piece. Wallace even allowed that Conroy “answered [his] nosy questions” in a way that was “frank and forthcoming and in general totally decent about the whole thing.” Yet Wallace followed through with the assault mainly because he felt betrayed by the author of the memoir that first inspired him to “try to be a writer.” Wallace was particularly crestfallen to see Conroy’s stagey and pretentious bio accompanying the essay showcasing him as the author of Stop-Time. To Wallace’s horror, the cultural prestige of this “classic” and “arguably the best literary memoir of the twentieth century,” along with its author, had been repackaged into an elaborate celebrity endorsement for the cruise line.40 Wallace’s disillusioning moment is not unlike the many J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield experienced in The Catcher in the Rye. Holden sees through pretentious artists—from Ernie the piano player to his brother D.B. who prostituted his authorial career in Hollywood according to Holden—willing to compromise their talent to pander to the masses. Particularly appalling to him was the positioning of literature as an ad “in such a way that we come to it with the lowered guard and leading chin we reserve for something that is art” or at least something making a sincere effort to be art. That Conroy was no longer attempting art like Stop-Time, but instead using his talent to produce “an ad that pretends to be art,” left Wallace feeling betrayed.41 He found himself in the role of Nick Carraway realizing the artifice behind Gatsby’s radiating smile that, in Fitzgerald’s words, “understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.”42 For Wallace, “an ad that pretends to be art is—at absolute best—like somebody who smiles at you only because he wants something from you.”43
In Mentor, Tom Grimes sings Conroy’s praises, despite cursing him on his first impression, following a speech the new Workshop director delivered in Key West in 1989. “I’ve applied to the Writers’ Workshop,” the young, ambitious Grimes said to Conroy, hopeful to receive some encouraging advice. “Yeah, you and eight hundred others,” Conroy gruffly replied, excusing himself to find a drink, then spotting an old friend to abandon Grimes for good. Furious, Grimes rushed home, ripped Conroy’s Stop-Time off his shelf, and began yanking pages out of it “by the handful” until he had “gutted the thing.” “Fuck Frank Conroy,” he seethed through clenched teeth.44 Grimes tells candidly of his love for Conroy down to the anguish he felt during his mentor’s nervous breakdown and eventual decline as colon cancer closed in during his final years.
Suppressed Evidence: The Conroy File
Paul Engle may have been a lightning rod of controversy at Iowa, but he had nothing to conceal in his official papers regarding his record as Workshop director. By contrast, Frank Conroy’s file covering his directorship has been sealed until 2024, with access granted only through formal application and written permission of the Workshop director. In late August of 2016, nearly nine months after submitting multiple written requests—the first on December 2, 2015, met with four months of silence—I became the first non-affiliate of the program to be granted access to the Conroy file since its placement in Special Collections at the University of Iowa twelve years earlier in 2004. No Director’s Files, from those of the early days of Schramm and Engle to Conroy’s predecessor Leggett, have ever been restricted. Conroy’s arrangement is neither customary nor routine, but instead marks an aberration in the archive. Thus the Workshop’s decision to grant me access was also without precedent.
According to Lan Samantha Chang and her consultants, the reason for the protracted delay in their decision was the presence of material in the file of a sensitive nature, which, if disclosed, might have an adverse impact on the program’s staff, faculty, students, and living writers. “Because we are an active, working writing program, we have important relationships with living writers, and for that reason, papers have been put under restricted access,” Chang said.45 Further, I later discovered that my request coincided with a crisis Chang had not mentioned, one that besieged the program, but had managed to avoid extensive scrutiny in the local media. The turmoil involved the alleged sexual misconduct of Workshop faculty member Thomas Sayers Ellis, who was dismissed from his position during the spring 2016 semester after eleven women testified against him in online statements describing a long history of alleged sexually inappropriate behavior ranging from harassment to predatory violence.46 Whereas the full story appeared in Jezebel, it was buried in the Iowa City Press-Citizen under a headline concealing the cause of his dismissal. Press-Citizen readers had missed the truth, since a rather benign headline described the story as a tepid bureaucratic snafu that eventuated in the university continuing to pay a Workshop professor despite the cancellation of his course.47 The financial injustice, however, paled in comparison to the suffering of Ellis’s long list of victims, from those enduring the emotional discomfort of his alleged inappropriate classroom conduct, to his long-term intimacies in which alleged abuse was severe, chronic, and protracted.
Workshop administration determined to remove an undisclosed amount of material from the file before allowing me access. According to an agreement signed by Frank Conroy and university archivist David McCartney in January 2004, the Directors’ Files series of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is to be closed to the public until January 1, 2024. However, in response to my request to the Workshop, access to the material was granted after a review by Workshop staff.48 What was the nature of the evidence the Workshop carefully removed from the Conroy Director’s File, a box of alphabetically sorted correspondence from the late 1980s through the early 1990s? Conroy’s motives in sealing the document until 2024 of course were private. But the content of the file and the motives for keeping it from public view for such an extended period of twenty years after his death raise serious questions.
The pugnacious school of Norman Mailer, as Jane Smiley pointed out, developed through a boxing cult that took the blood sport as both a metaphor and an embodiment of creative writing. Sexism was rampant in the Workshop. Snodgrass and Vonnegut bore witness to the institutionally engrained ge
nder bias of the veterans who defined the machismo climate, one that persisted throughout Leggett’s era, making for a learning environment that clearly disadvantaged women. Snodgrass recalled not only avoiding John Berryman, but actively fleeing from him because his behavior in mixed company when alcohol was present was “too dangerous.”49
Even in the thoroughly censored and sanitized file to which I was allowed access, evidence of Conroy’s sexism abounded. In a letter to Norman Mailer dated April 19, 1990, Conroy thanked the famous author for visiting the Workshop and delivering a reading of his latest book, one that oozed masculinist gender politics in the vein of the retrograde backlashes against progressive feminism that marked the culture wars of the early 1990s. Conroy registered his allegiance with Mailer in direct opposition to the feminist movement, lauding his friend for his assault on the women, which he described as “a bravaro [sic] performance that has had everybody buzzing and talking.” Conroy especially appreciated how the reading incited “a lot of discussion” that antagonized female students, sparking “a certain amount of feminist outrage at the selection from Tough Guys driving wonderful arguments in the bars where the students congregate.” Far from showing any sympathy for their position, he was overjoyed that the women had been wounded so severely as to cause “a whole lot of energy released,” which he characterized as “good energy, and I’m very grateful to you.”50
A Delicate Aggression Page 47
