Today, Workshop insiders such as Anthony Swofford concur that Lan Samantha Chang’s “gentle leadership” marks a sea change in the gender and ethnic politics of the program. Her progressive influence highlights by contrast her predecessor Conroy’s extension of the patriarchal dominance of the Engle era. The Ellis firing in spring 2016 therefore represented a major setback in this slow healing process. “The program has a history of male poets becoming involved with students; a repetition of that history—let alone a worse version of it—wouldn’t do,” according to the first published report of Ellis’s dismissal. Therefore, immediately after the post by the advocacy organization VIDA disclosed the testimony of eleven of Ellis’s victims, “classes were canceled, and by the time spring break was over, the week after the post went up, he’d been officially replaced.”51 Chang’s leadership seemed to mark the end of the “important, inappropriate literary man” until Ellis arrived in Iowa City on a visiting professor appointment from his previous posts at Sarah Lawrence College and Case Western University, marking a grim return of the heyday of the “Saint” Ray Carver period that reached its zenith under Leggett, and whose legacy continued with Conroy.
“This book is the result of a vision,” Engle proclaimed in his introduction to Midland: Twenty-Five Years of Fiction and Poetry, Selected from the Writing Workshops of the State University of Iowa.52 That vision, he argued, was not intuitive. But for all his insistence that the success of the program was the result of careful planning rather than serendipitous whim, “a conscious thing [that] didn’t just happen by chance,” his subconscious reconfigured his work for the program into not so much a dream, but a nightmare he disclosed one drunken evening to a cluster of listeners that included Workshop student W. D. Snodgrass and world-famous poet Robert Penn Warren.53
In the dream, Engle was a prisoner of war frenetically performing for his captors “an especially degrading punishment” with more alacrity and agility than any of his fellow inmates. Placed naked clasping his ankles atop the camp’s outer rock wall six feet off the ground, Engle was forced to step through a series of small depressions one foot at a time without losing hold of his ankles. The awkward and nearly impossible task exposed him in a debasing spectacle of absurd Kafkaesque struggle for the guards’ amusement. Yet Engle’s performance carried special power to assuage the enemy and improve conditions materially for his starving fellow inmates. Engle successfully transformed this one-man act in the theater of the absurd into a calculated deception, one richly symbolic of his speeches and engagements to promote the Workshop. This was not just a single nightmare, but a recurring dream, one that ended each time with the guards “no longer jeering” but looking on “with amazement and admiration” at his uncanny skill. The dream’s Cold War allegory left Snodgrass “astonished not only by its horrors,” but shocked that Engle “would recount it at a party where so many would understand,” including the distinguished poet and southern gentleman Robert Penn Warren, who was serving as a visiting faculty member at the time. Stunned by the richness of this metaphorical self-disclosure, Snodgrass, who had been perfecting his own confessional poetry at the time that would eventually distinguish his career, lamented, “if only his poems had offered such revelations!”54
Like his dream—and galling confession thereof—Engle took a hard look in the mirror at the beginning of his 1996 autobiography, A Lucky American Childhood. “Ask Engle what he thinks of Paul, he’ll say:/ I’m a real bastard in a beautiful way,” he wrote in the poem titled “Paul Engle.” Literature and violence are inextricably bound in this self-portrait, as his “hand gives you a poem or breaks your jaw.” His willingness to lower himself into the dirt and place his hand in the fire to fuel its embers does not make him a miracle worker. “I can’t move mountains” with mystical god-like force, “but I can make light” with unglamorous determination at his own peril. These final lines of the stanza encapsulate the enigma of his life he would inscribe on his tombstone.55
The embattled, frenetic “life-crammed, people-crowded” directorship of Engle, whom the New York Times described in 1961 as “everywhere at once, his shoulders hunched and his head poked forward like a running back,” gave way to the cult of Raymond Carver under Leggett until 1987.56 Conroy’s acerbic command then yielded to Lan Samantha Chang’s compassionate leadership, marking a significant advance from “the largely male, booted long-haired, laden with experience of war itself or of escaping it” Workshop of the 1970s, as Leggett described it. The effort now, which has had varying results, is to reverse the climate that alumni like Sandra Cisneros and Jane Smiley endured, in which “if one or two young women students turned up for a discussion of the worksheet, they rarely lasted the whole session,” as Leggett attested.57 Chang cites Tony Marra, Justin Torres, and Angela Flournoy as examples of successful students who have diversified the program.58 Longtime staff member Connie Brothers, who has a vivid recollection of the Leggett and Conroy eras, pointed out that for the first time in the Workshop’s history, gender balance has been achieved. Although it has been “extremely difficult” for women and ethnic students at the Workshop in the past, she said, it is “very encouraging” to see such progress.59
Despite that progress, some aspects of the Workshop still bear Engle’s influence. Workshop sessions continue much in the way he originally designed them. There is little room for novels of ideas, as the institutionalization of creative writing threatens to homogenize student fiction and poetry.60 Bennett’s complaint that he was not allowed to pursue political allegory under Conroy is visible today in faculty member Ethan Canin’s edict to “plot your way into an idea, don’t idea your way into a plot,” as he told one young woman whose story was up for workshop in April 2016.61 Canin conducts workshop sessions with an almost scientific approach. Yet Canin himself, as a student in the program in August 1982, retreated from “the stultifying pressure of observation”—of the very sort he orchestrates today in workshop sessions—by ceasing writing “immediately and almost completely.” Because he was so uncomfortable with the fact that “everything I wrote was going to be looked at” in such a highly contentious forum, “for a year and a half, I wrote nothing,” he confessed, fulfilling assignments by handing in old stories he had written in college.62 Even Canin, now one of the figureheads of the program who regularly delivers standing-room-only readings at Prairie Lights Bookstore, found the climate for literary production so unbearable that he wrote not a single word throughout three semesters of coursework as a Workshop student. As Canin’s current teaching emphasis on the primacy of plot indicates, few Orwellian political allegories and Joyce-inspired experimental narratives have been produced at the Workshop, or are actively encouraged today. The primacy of character, Marilynne Robinson’s mantra in the classroom, constrains Workshop pedagogy, which is surprisingly averse to experimentation and genre bending, as Cisneros’s experience operating at the edge of prose and poetry attests.
Competition and survival, although rarely acknowledged explicitly, remain fixtures of Workshop culture. Writing in the late 1990s, faculty member R. V. Cassill, who witnessed the evolution of the program from its inception in the early 1940s, observed that “a constant urgency over all these years and among all groups was the articulated or barely hushed compulsion to publish.” Publication continues to be the most universally recognized way for students “to justify themselves as part of the group, and to justify whatever anguish and effort might have brought them to the Workshop.”63 The Workshop in many ways still abides by what Conroy “said over and over”: “the writing life is hard,” a mantra that graduates such as Fritz McDonald “resented.”64
From the Quonset huts of the early 1940s, the prevailing ethos of the program has suggested that the best writing occurs under duress. Engle embodied that principle in an incident that took place one summer at his country retreat in Stone City near his hometown of Cedar Rapids. This “tableau of rural serenity not much interrupted by Paul’s weekly trips in to Iowa City to meet his summer class
and interview potential students,” as Cassill described it, came under serious threat in August 1959 when two criminal escapees from the nearby penitentiary held Engle and his family hostage.65 When he returned home from Iowa City with his older daughter Mary, he discovered his wife and younger daughter Sara gagged and tied to chairs, and his refrigerator raided of its “cold drinks.” Wielding large carving knives taken from the kitchen, the young men, twenty-five and twenty-one, warned Engle, “If you do exactly like we say, nobody will get hurt.”66
Engle persuaded the men to untie his wife so she could make him dinner. As she prepared the meal, one of the captors responded to Mrs. Engle’s question about what careers they wanted to pursue, mentioning he “would like to be a writer and had done some writing. He didn’t have a typewriter anymore, though, because he had sold it to get money to escape,” as she told reporters. Upon hearing that one of the men harbored literary aspirations, Engle sprang into character. He told them he had work to do, which they allowed. “So Engle sat down at his typewriter and tossed off two book reviews for the Chicago Tribune. He wrote about 800 words in all. The reviews were of ‘The Buffalo Soldiers’ and ‘The Tender Shoot.’ ” Perhaps most telling was that Engle said he “had no trouble writing” under these circumstances, stalling the men until police arrived.67 Threatening circumstances driven by a palpable sense of fear was the condition he created for aspiring young authors, which was supposed to teach them that writing is “accomplished only by the old and bitter way of sitting down in fear and trembling to confront the most terrifying thing in the world—a blank sheet of paper,” filled only through the urgency to survive.68
Engle’s vision for the Workshop traces back to his Gatsbyesque boyhood aspiration for outlaw fame, as seen in his well-thumbed copy of Hopalong Cassidy. As we learn at the conclusion of Fitzgerald’s novel, the book is also a token of Gatsby’s original ambition, whose raw authenticity bears a complex paradoxical relation to the revelation of his faux library after his death. In the process of creating and conditioning the world’s most powerful creative writing program, Engle became the architect of his own plaguing nightmares and the scourge of his enemies. The Workshop, along with its vast array of imitators, created American literature, for better or worse, for more than three-quarters of a century. Careers depended on the program’s prestige to take flight; signal moments in literary history—from O’Connor’s Wise Blood and Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle to Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Robinson’s Gilead—relied on this vital community and its powerful connections to the publishing industry. However, the perils of institutionalizing literary art into a systematic process of production surfaced in instances such as the creative block Rita Dove experienced upon graduation. For her, like many others, escaping the critical voices of workshop sessions was essential to carrying on a fruitful career as a professional writer. The influential workshop method and the program’s celebrated legacy as the clearinghouse for contemporary literature and American culture thus come with a cautionary undercurrent checking the runaway dreams of professional authorship and literary fame. As Vonnegut’s haunting warning from Mother Night inscribed on the Literary Walk on Iowa Avenue attests, “We are what we pretend to be. So we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”69
NOTES
Introduction
1. Ed Dinger, ed., Seems Like Old Times (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 60.
2. Richard J. Kelly, ed., We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 251–259.
3. Paul L. Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 286.
4. Philip Levine, The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).
5. Philip Levine, “Mine Own John Berryman,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 164, 168, 185.
6. Dana, 226.
7. Eric Olsen and Glenn Schaeffer, eds., We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (New York: Skyhorse, 2011), 97–98.
8. Rosemary M. Magee, ed., Conversations with Flannery O’Connor (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987), 43.
9. Dana, 16.
10. Quoted in Zlatko Anguelov, “Tennessee Williams,” The Writing University (10 January 2012), web.
11. Earl G. Ingersoll, ed., Conversations with Rita Dove (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 17.
12. Dinger, 123–124.
13. Olsen and Schaeffer, 259; Dana, 51.
14. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), 173.
15. Papers of Paul Engle, Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa. Hereafter, PPE SCUI.
16. Paul Engle, ed., Midland: Twenty-Five Years of Fiction and Poetry, Selected from the Writing Workshops of the State University of Iowa (New York: Random House, 1961), 1.
17. Dana, ix.
18. Engle, 2.
19. Dana, 38.
20. Dana, 39.
21. Engle, 4.
22. Stephen Wilbers, “Paul Engle: An Imaginative and Delicate Aggression,” Iowa Alumni Review 30 (1977): 8–13.
23. Dana, 39.
24. Dana, 46.
25. Dana, 29.
26. Edward J. Delaney, “Where Great Writers Are Made,” Atlantic Monthly, 16 July 2007, web.
27. Delaney, 1.
28. D. G. Myers, The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880 (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996), 146. Records of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa. Hereafter, RIWW SCUI.
29. Myers, 165.
30. RIWW SCUI.
31. Edmund Skellings to Stephen Wilbers, 10 May 1976, RIWW SCUI.
32. Crumley, whose The Last Good Kiss (1978) is regarded as one of the most influential crime novels of the late twentieth century, earned his MFA from the Workshop in 1966, just one year before founding the creative writing program at Colorado State University.
33. A sampling of the raw data from the 1976 survey conducted by Stephen Wilbers illustrates the widespread influence of Iowa graduates and faculty on the development of creative writing programs. Thomas Rabbitt (MFA, Iowa, 1972) founded the MFA program at the University of Alabama, which was officially approved in November 1973. Rabbitt was the director with five faculty members, a total of twenty degree candidates, and four degrees awarded annually. William Harrison and James Whitehead, both Iowa MFAs, were the key figures in the founding of the program at the University of Arkansas in 1964. Philip O’Connor, Iowa MFA, helped establish the program at Bowling Green State University in 1968. Mark Strand, Iowa MFA, was a co-founder of the Brooklyn College program, established in 1974. The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, was saturated with Iowa MFAs, including Joseph Langland, Andrew Fetler, Richard Kim, and Robert Tucker, who made up half of its faculty in 1976. The University of Northern Iowa program (established 1961) was run by Loren Taylor, 1951 Iowa MFA, whose professional standards learned at the Workshop seemed to eclipse bureaucratic dysfunction. “I have had 3 students who have published in the last three years (two novels and poetry), but the result has not been because of any concentrated program of our department,” he admitted. The effort, according to the Iowa model, was to professionalize, although there was not always a direct correlation between institutional cohesion and student publication toward professional careers. RIWW SCUI.
34. Myers, 146.
35. RIWW SCUI.
36. James L. West, III, American Authors and the Literary Marketplace Since 1900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
37. Ben Harris McClary, “Washington Irving’s Literary Pimpery,” American Notes and Queries 10 (1972): 150–151. The pejorative diction of the title arises from McClary’s discovery of Irving’s proposal to aid a friend’s career by att
empting to place a manuscript, as if it were his friend’s, with a publisher given to him several years earlier by a Boston businessman. It is “quite good,” he assured his friend, and would go far to launch his career. Before the findings in this research, McClary was not so damning about the ethics of Irving’s business dealings, tracing his promotion of several authors through archival letters in an earlier study titled “Washington Irving’s Literary Midwifery: Five Unpublished Letters from the British Repository,” Philological Quarterly 46 (1967): 277–283. McClary’s finding, though provocative, is not typical of Irving’s business practice that, however aggressive, was not so grossly unethical.
38. Stephen King, “Acceptance Speech: National Book Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters,” The National Book Foundation (20 November 2003), web.
39. Tom Kealey, The Creative Writing MFA Handbook: A Guide for Prospective Graduate Students (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 22.
40. RIWW SCUI.
41. Jim Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).
42. Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (New York: Knopf, 2005), 196.
43. RIWW SCUI.
44. Myers, 61.
45. Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 [1973]).
46. William Wallace Whitelock, The Literary Guillotine (New York: John Lane, 1903), 252.
47. Susan Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business: American Women Authors in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 144.
48. Engle’s income for his books Poet’s Choice and On Creative Writing was $1,593.09 from E.P. Dutton and Company for a five-month period ending in April 1965. An Old Fashioned Christmas garnered steady royalty checks, yet scant earnings for Poems in Praise are on record, with many checks like one for American Child from Dial Press dated June 30, 1959, worth as little as $11.09. Engle sold 29,268 Valentine cards for Hallmark Inc. in February 1967 (receipt dated March 31, 1967), securing a tidy $7,317 for his efforts; Hallmark had established a lucrative relationship with him several years earlier, with a steady stream of checks coming during the 1960s for more than $500. Christmas cards were his cash cow, as seen by his first Hallmark payday of $184.50 on January 20, 1961. Engle’s creative writing fed greeting card and television industries. The Golden Child aired on television, was published in Guideposts (a white middle-class Protestant general interest magazine), and was rehashed into a greeting card by that journal. A letter dated October 14, 1960, from Glenn D. Kittler of Guideposts indicates a business relationship with Engle. Engle also dabbled in popular sports poetry, netting a substantial $2,000 advance for a poem on the Kentucky Derby for Sports Illustrated, as revealed in a letter from Percy Knauth dated April 23, 1961. Though considerable time and effort went into them, none of these publications are mentioned in Wilbers or Clarence A. Andrews, A Literary History of Iowa (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1972). It is also worth noting that his Random House receipts are minuscule compared with those of his mass market productions. Poems in Praise, for example, earned him $20.16 in royalties on August 4, 1961 (as indicated in a letter from Jane Wilson of William Morris and Company, his agent). PPE SCUI.
A Delicate Aggression Page 48
