A Delicate Aggression

by David O. Dowling

  29. Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs, “A Conversation with Marguerite Young,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 9.3 (Fall 1989), 150.

  30. “Congratulations to New York Book Critic Sam Anderson!” New York Magazine, 14 January 2008.

  31. Nona Balakian, “Marguerite Young—A Celebration,” 9 April 1983, Papers of Gustav Bergmann, SCUI.

  32. Nona Balakian, “Marguerite Young, Innovator,” in Marguerite Young, Our Darling: Tributes and Essays, ed. Miriam Fuchs (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1994), 4.

  33. Quoted in Erika Duncan, “Marguerite Young: The Muse of Bleecker Street,” in Changes: A Journal of Arts and Entertainment [n.d.], Papers of Gustav Bergmann, SCUI.

  34. Quoted in Duncan, “Marguerite Young.”

  35. Vytas Valaitas, “A 1963 picture of Marguerite Young with the manuscript of her notably long novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.” First published in William Goyen, “A Fable of Illusion and Reality,” New York Times, 12 September 1965, BR5.

  36. Miriam Fuchs, ed., Marguerite Young, Our Darling: Tributes and Essays (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1994), xii.

  37. Marguerite Young to Paul Engle, February 1945, PPE SCUI.

  38. Marguerite Young to Paul Engle, February 1945, PPE SCUI.

  39. Marguerite Young to Paul Engle, February 1945, PPE SCUI.

  40. Marguerite Young to Paul Engle, 3 December 1947, PPE SCUI.

  41. Marguerite Young to Paul Engle, February 1945, PPE SCUI.

  42. Marguerite Young to Paul Engle, 11 April 1945, PPE SCUI.

  43. Amy Clampitt, “Out of the Depressed Middle: The Imagination of Marguerite Young,” in Marguerite Young, Our Darling: Tributes and Essays, ed. Miriam Fuchs (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1994), 5.

  44. Marguerite Young to Paul Engle, October 1945, PPE SCUI.

  45. As quoted in front matter of Marguerite Young, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, vol. 2 (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1999).

  46. Balakian, “Marguerite Young, Innovator,” 4.

  47. Marguerite Young to Paul Engle, 3 December 1947, PPE SCUI.

  48. Andrew Levy, The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 128.

  49. Levy, 129.

  50. Peter Merchant, “My Marguerite Young,” in Marguerite Young, Our Darling: Tributes and Essays, ed. Miriam Fuchs (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1994), 16.

  51. Merchant, 14.

  52. Merchant, 16.

  53. Merchant, 15.

  54. Merchant, 15.

  55. Friedman and Fuchs, “A Conversation with Marguerite Young.”

  56. Merchant, 15.

  57. Merchant, 15.

  58. Marguerite Young, “Inviting the Muses,” Mademoiselle, September 1965, 230.

  59. Dennis Joseph Enright, Signs and Wonders: Selected Essays (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), 35.

  60. Marguerite Young, “On Teaching,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 9.3 (Fall 1989), 164.

  61. Marguerite Young, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (New York: Scribner, 1965), 1.

  62. Young, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, 1.

  63. Hardwick, the wife of Robert Lowell, penned the novel in Iowa City while Lowell was teaching at the Workshop. The Simple Truth’s exploration of academic life at Iowa at the time of a lurid murder trial captured her imagination.

  64. Marguerite Young to Leola Bergmann, 4 December 1983, Papers of Gustav Bergmann, SCUI.

  65. Clampitt, 5.

  6. The Turncoat: Robert Lowell

  1. James B. Hall, “Our Workshops Remembered: The Heroic Phase,” 4, [n.d.], RIWW SCUI.

  2. Robert Dana as quoted in Ed Dinger, ed., Seems Like Old Times (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 20.

  3. 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), 162–163.

  4. Zlatko Anguelov, “Robert Lowell,” The Writing University, 5 January 2012, web.

  5. Isabelle Travis, “ ‘Is Getting Well Ever an Art’: Psychopharmacology and Madness in Robert Lowell’s Day by Day,” Journal of Medical Humanities 32 (2011), 317; Richard Poirier, “Our Truest Historian,” New York Herald Tribune Book Week, 11 October 1964: 1.

  6. Robert Lowell, The Letters of Robert Lowell, ed. Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 195.

  7. Steven Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 99.

  8. Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton (New York: Macmillan, 2008), 150.

  9. Richard Tillinghast, Robert Lowell’s Life and Work: Damaged Grandeur (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 29.

  10. Lowell, Letters, 64.

  11. Tillinghast, 52.

  12. William Doreski, The Years of Our Friendship: Robert Lowell and Allen Tate (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 104.

  13. Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011), 167.

  14. Paul Mariani, Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 60–61.

  15. Mariani, 56–57.

  16. “Poet Robert Lowell Sentenced to Prison,” A&E Networks (12 August 2015), web. See also Lowell, Letters, 683.

  17. Lowell, Letters, 683.

  18. David Laskin, Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 99.

  19. After two trials, the evidence of which drew from the accident, Stafford was awarded $4,000; Lowell, Letters, 680.

  20. W. D. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 125.

  21. Snodgrass, 125.

  22. Robert Dana, “Far From the Ocean,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 150.

  23. Frank Bidart, Harvard Advocate 113.1–2 (November 1979), 12.

  24. Tillinghast, 32.

  25. Mariani, 88–89.

  26. Mariani, 183.

  27. Tillinghast, 52–51.

  28. Axelrod, 23.

  29. Snodgrass, 127–128.

  30. Axelrod, 23.

  31. Mariani, 190.

  32. Lowell and Bishop, Words in Air, 97–98.

  33. Mariani, 191.

  34. Hamilton, 168.

  35. Mariani, 188.

  36. Mariani, 182.

  37. Mariani, 189.

  38. Lowell and Bishop, Words in Air, 98.

  39. Lowell, Letters, 296.

  40. Lowell and Bishop, Words in Air, 98.

  41. Jane Howard, “Applause for a Poet,” Life, 19 February 1965, 56.

  42. Judith Baumel, “Robert Lowell: The Teacher,” Harvard Advocate 113 (November 1979), 32.

  43. Mariani, 192.

  44. Levine, 165.

  45. Levine, 163.

  46. Joe Gould, an eccentric American writer during the 1940s whose ambition to write the longest book in history, called “The Oral History of the Contemporary World,” inspired similar reactions toward his authorial madness. Ezra Pound read a fragment of the manuscript and commented on it; Marianne Moore had solicited chapters of it for the Dial in the 1920s, before the journal folded with the stock market crash of 1929. The mental illness Gould suffered from, likely hypergraphia as Jill Lepore conjectures, was “a mania, but seems more like something a writer might envy, which seems even rottener than envy usually does, because Gould was a . . . madman.” Jill Lepore, “Joe Gould’s Teeth,” New Yorker, 27 July 2015, web.

  47. Levine, 163.

  48. Lowell’s poetry was controversial for bringing his insanity into focus, particularly in his writings of the late 1950s in which he ridiculed his parents and revealed his multiple hospitalizations f
or bipolar disorder; Travis, 317.

  49. Lowell and Bishop, Words in Air, 152.

  50. Mariani, 191.

  51. “Bednasek Says He’s Not Guilty of Murdering Beauty ‘I Loved,’ ” Daily Iowan, 13 December 1949, 1.

  52. Elizabeth Hardwick, The Simple Truth (New York: Ecco, 1982), 17.

  53. Hardwick, 16–17.

  54. Hardwick, 78.

  55. Lowell, Letters, 204.

  56. Robert Lowell to Paul Engle, 8 February 1955, PPE SCUI.

  57. Lowell and Bishop, Words in Air, 131.

  58. Lowell and Bishop, Words in Air, 137.

  59. Lowell and Bishop, Words in Air, 131.

  60. Hamilton, 196.

  61. Robert Lowell to Paul Engle, 30 March 1955, PPE SCUI.

  62. Doreski, 104.

  63. Robert Lowell to Paul Engle, 25 April 1952, PPE SCUI.

  64. Hamilton, 196.

  65. Robert Lowell to Paul Engle, 25 April 1952, PPE SCUI.

  66. Mary Jane Baker, “Classes with a Poet,” Mademoiselle 40 (1954), 106.

  67. Jerome Mazzaro, The Poetic Themes of Robert Lowell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), 55.

  68. Quoted in Louis J. Budd, ed., Mark Twain: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 475.

  69. Dana, “Far From the Ocean,” 153.

  70. Baker, 106.

  71. Hamilton, 198.

  72. Baker, 137.

  73. Robert Lowell to Paul Engle, 7 May 1955, PPE SCUI.

  74. Baker, 141.

  75. Robert Lowell to Paul Engle, 25 April 1952, PPE SCUI.

  76. Robert Lowell to Paul Engle, 8 February 1955, PPE SCUI.

  77. Levine, 163–164.

  78. Snodgrass, 139.

  79. Mariani, 225.

  80. Baker, 140.

  81. Dinger, 22.

  82. Robert Lowell to Paul Engle, 3 May 1957, PPE SCUI.

  83. Dinger, 22.

  84. Robert Lowell, Life Studies and For the Union Dead (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 87.

  85. Lowell, Life Studies and For the Union Dead, 86.

  86. Lowell, Life Studies and For the Union Dead, 89.

  87. Lowell, Life Studies and For the Union Dead, 97.

  88. Dana, “Far From the Ocean,” 158.

  7. Mad Poets: Dylan Thomas and John Berryman

  1. Quoted in W. D. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 135.

  2. Snodgrass, 135, Ray B. West, Jr., “Dylan Thomas at Iowa,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 244.

  3. Quoted in Barry Silesky, Ferlinghetti: The Artist in His Time (New York: Warner, 1990), 25, 49.

  4. Quoted in Paul Ferris, Dylan Thomas: The Biography (London: Phoenix Orion House, 2000), 279.

  5. West, 244.

  6. Silesky, 49.

  7. Bill Read, The Days of Dylan Thomas (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964), 140–141.

  8. Clarence A. Andrews, A Literary History of Iowa (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1972), 200.

  9. Ray B. West to Stephen Wilbers, 20 July 1976, RIWW SCUI.

  10. West, 242.

  11. Dylan Thomas, The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas, ed. Paul Ferris (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1985), 765.

  12. Quoted in Read, 137.

  13. Thomas, Collected Letters, 762.

  14. Thomas, Collected Letters, 762–764.

  15. Thomas, Collected Letters, 764.

  16. Ed Glinert, Literary London: A Street-by-Street Exploration of the Capital’s Literary Heritage (New York: Penguin, 2007), 83.

  17. West, 235.

  18. West, 257.

  19. James Nashold and George Tremlett, The Death of Dylan Thomas (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1997), 151.

  20. Hilly Janes, The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas (London: Robson, 2014), e-book.

  21. RIWW SCUI.

  22. Quoted in Read, 150.

  23. Quoted in Alan Norman Bold, ed., Cambridge Book of English Verse, 1939–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 61.

  24. 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), 166.

  25. Levine, 166.

  26. Robert Penn Warren to Stephen Wilbers, 1 September 1976, RIWW SCUI.

  27. Frances Jackson to Stephen Wilbers, 1 March 1976, RIWW SCUI.

  28. Philip Levine to Stephen Wilbers, 19 February 1976, RIWW SCUI.

  29. Philip Levine to Stephen Wilbers, 19 February 1976, RIWW SCUI.

  30. John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 40.

  31. Quoted in Paul L. Mariani, Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 229.

  32. Catherine Lacey, “Henry Doesn’t Have Any Bats,” Paris Review, 6 June 2013.

  33. Emily Dickinson, Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), 111–112.

  34. Richard J. Kelley, ed., We Dream of Honour: John Berryman’s Letters to His Mother (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 251.

  35. Lacey.

  36. William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 412.

  37. Kelley, 256.

  38. Levine, 179.

  39. Levine, 177.

  40. Levine, 165.

  41. Alan Golding, “American Poet-Teachers and the Academy,” A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry, ed. Stephen Fredman (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 69.

  42. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Penguin, 2005 [1957]), 5–6.

  8. Celebrity Faculty: Kurt Vonnegut and John Irving

  1. Kurt Vonnegut, “New World Symphony,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 115.

  2. Kurt Vonnegut to Stephen Wilbers, January 1976, Stephen Wilbers Project, RIWW SCUI.

  3. Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night (New York: Dial, 2009 [1961]), v.

  4. Vonnegut, “New World Symphony,” 115.

  5. Richard Rodriguez, The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (New York: Random House, 1982).

  6. Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage (New York: Random House, 2009), 85.

  7. Thomas F. Marvin, Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2002), 9.

  8. John Irving, The Imaginary Girlfriend (New York: Arcade, 1996), n.p., e-book.

  9. Kurt Vonnegut, Letters, ed. Dan Wakefield (New York: Delacorte, 2012), 78.

  10. Marvin, 9.

  11. William Rodney Allen, Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), 107.

  12. Allen, 107.

  13. Vonnegut, Letters, 123.

  14. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Dell, 1969), 200.

  15. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 203.

  16. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 201.

  17. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., “The Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” in Tomorrow, the Stars, ed. Robert A. Heinlein (New York: Signet, 1953), 39–50; Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., “The Big Trip Up Yonder,” in Assignment in Tomorrow, ed. Frederik Pohl (New York: Hanover House, 1954), 123–138, Science Fiction Collection, Hevelin Science Fiction Collection, SCUI.

  18. Vonnegut, Letters, 100.

  19. Max McElwain, Profiles in Communication: The Hall of Fame of the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication (Iowa City: Iowa Center for Communication Study, 1991), 161.

  20. Paula Rabinowitz, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 25.

  21. Rabinowitz, 59.

  22. Rabinowit
z, 222.

  23. Vonnegut, Letters [n.p., photo caption].

  24. Jerome Klinkowitz, Kurt Vonnegut’s America (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 14.

  25. Faculty Personnel Data Blank, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., 22 September 1965, RIWW SCUI.

  26. Kurt Vonnegut, “Have I Got a Car For You!” In These Times, 24 November 2004, web.

  27. Klinkowitz, 15.

  28. Eric Olsen and Glenn Schaeffer, eds., We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (New York: Skyhorse, 2011), 190.

  29. Olsen and Schaeffer, 222.

  30. Irving, Imaginary Girlfriend, [n.p., e-book].

  31. Irving, Imaginary Girlfriend.

  32. Vonnegut, Letters, 122–123.

  33. Olsen and Schaeffer, 41.

  34. Olsen and Schaeffer, 189.

  35. Olsen and Schaeffer, 189.

  36. Vonnegut, Letters, 106.

  37. Richard Schickel, “Black Comedy with Purifying Laughter,” Harper’s [1st proof, galley 3062], May 1966, RIWW SCUI.

  38. John C. Gerber to Mr. Kurt Vonnegut, 15 April 1966, RIWW SCUI.

  39. Vonnegut, Letters, 132.

  40. Vonnegut, Letters, 106.

  41. Vonnegut, Palm Sunday, 90.

  42. Vonnegut, Palm Sunday, 91.

  43. Vonnegut, Letters, 74.

  44. Vonnegut, Palm Sunday, 288.

  45. Vonnegut, Letters, 131.

  46. Vonnegut, Letters, 119.

  47. Rinehart had supported the Workshop since the 1940s with its fellowship, engineered by Engle, granting the publisher first rights to student and faculty works. The first of these works was Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, which eventually landed with Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  48. Vonnegut, Letters, 129.

  49. Quoted in Robert Scholes, “ ‘Mithridates, He Died Old’: Black Humor and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,” The Hollins Critic 3.4 (October 1966), 8.

  50. John C. Gerber to Mr. Kurt Vonnegut, 2 July 1965, RIWW SCUI; John C. Gerber to Mr. Kurt Vonnegut, 14 March 1966, RIWW SCUI.

  51. Kurt Vonnegut to Stephen Wilbers, January 1976, Stephen Wilbers Project, RIWW SCUI.