A Delicate Aggression

by David O. Dowling

  Engle also had a well-thumbed copy of Hopalong Cassidy. And like Gatsby, he harbored the larger-than-life ambitions of a humble midwesterner. Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1908, he trained to be a Methodist minister and preached briefly in a church on the edge of town, but “Heard no call,” according to his curriculum vitae. When he abandoned the ministry, he also lost faith in mystical understandings of vocation and professional development.15 After earning his M.A. in creative writing from the University of Iowa in 1932, Engle dedicated himself to a more systematic method of professional development, in defiance of both the divine calling his earlier religious training demanded and the visionary epiphany required of authors. Rejecting romantic notions of authorship and creative writing came naturally to Engle, because he had just renounced the ministry’s mystified sense of professional attainment based on being “startled by a voice speaking from heaven,” as he sneeringly described it in 1961.16

  The man of letters, Engle insisted, must necessarily also be a man of business, as William Dean Howells also imagined. Engle’s delicate aggression was equal parts genteel grace and opportunistic capitalism. Like a college coach recruiting young talent, he lured some of the best creative writers out of the bohemian culture idealized in Greenwich Village, Parisian cafés, and City Lights Books, the haven of Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation, where literary circles defined themselves in opposition to formal institutions and bureaucracies. In doing so, he offered not only aesthetic but also professional development, primarily measured in the Workshop through publication, fame, and the ultimate prize of earning a living as a professional author through the production of fiction and/or poetry. Engle tirelessly solicited funds for his fledgling program from Maytag and Amana, as well as a Chicago ice cream manufacturer he once persuaded to help finance a festival on Baudelaire.17 The Workshop’s glittering prestige is the result of his chameleonic politics—he backed Kennedy’s Cold War and the Communist party at various intervals—and his relentless promotion of the program, which took place in a hog shack in his backyard that he converted into an office where he conducted business, attending to correspondence and finances for hours every night. His dedication to building a financial base for the program was consonant with its pedagogical emphasis on development through accretion rather than sudden visionary enlightenment.

  The workshop method according to the legacy of Engle’s pragmatic Darwinian principle refused to coddle the egos of young romantic visionaries. Stand-ins for the potentially dismissive professional publishing industry’s editors and critics would be the students themselves. Engle’s model of training through the delicate aggression of harsh critique in workshops rankled students raised on alternative models and understandings of artistic creativity according to more communal models drawn from ethnic feminist approaches. The legacy of Engle’s whip that lay beside his typewriter as a symbol of the martinet authoritarianism of the older era began to crumble beneath pressure from students like Cisneros and Joy Harjo. Criticisms of the Workshop from the earlier era by such reputable figures as Robert Lowell also signaled an underlying discontent with the prevailing ethos of the Workshop despite its spectacular results in the way of publication records, awards, and celebrity careers it produced. Engle’s Gatsby-like raw ambition, therefore, would not necessarily translate to all students, as the beginning of a more communal and mutually supportive model of writing began to take hold.

  Engle’s resistance to the notion of a divine calling as the catalyst for career development provided the foundation for his own professional advancement as well as the establishment of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Both came at a time when bureaucratic efficiency, rather than mystical belief, ruled the business world. Engle would transform himself into the impresario, bureaucrat, agent, promoter, and publicist of the Workshop and its students into industry-savvy professionals with a tenacity and business acumen rarely seen in the literary world. Trading “the abrupt and ecstatic experience of Saul on the road to Damascus” for “steady development at the University of Iowa” was his radical anti-visionary model.18

  Engle recognized that writing increasingly made its home with free market enterprise and thus depended on large sources of revenue outside of the academy, which itself offered aspiring writers at least minimal shelter from the rough seas of the free market. Gertrude Stein fed the starving Ernest Hemingway in Paris just as Ralph Waldo Emerson provided the real estate and financial backing for his protégé Henry David Thoreau’s experiment at Walden Pond. The University of Iowa and a dizzying array of sponsors would supply similar patronage and protection from the ravages of the competitive market, while Engle would assume the role of literary agent and publicist relentlessly promoting the program and its students in the publishing industry with dogged, sometimes shameless determination.

  The deliberately anti-romantic setting on the shores of the muddy Iowa River amid the drab and hopelessly mundane architecture of Iowa City was the antithesis of literary inspiration. A set of army barracks left over from World War II served as classrooms, their corrugated steel roofs radiating stifling heat during the hot months, silencing discussion with the drumming of loud rain, and freezing with ice and snow in Iowa’s cold seasons. The workshop method itself took many aback. Robert Bly remembered being stunned by the bureaucratic sterility and military efficiency of its rituals, particularly that “it seemed beneath the dignity of art to mimeograph poems” and circulate them for critical feedback during class. Others shared Bly’s sense that a poem should, of all things, exist outside the circuits of bureaucracy and business, and should never take on the corpse-like quality of so much paperwork embodied in “that strange thing, blue dittoed poems.”19

  The setting and materials reinforced the anti-romantic approach toward creative writing Engle’s Workshop had in store for its students. To “workshop” a poem or story meant subjecting one’s writing to the scrutiny of the entire class. Collectively, Bly recalled, “we didn’t attack the teacher . . . in general, the aggression went against each other.”20 This was according to Engle’s design, and according to his assumption that the work of writing and development of a professional literary career was rigorous and acutely painful, a free market enterprise far removed from the lavish luxury of pre-industrial artistry produced under the protective enclave of a single patron with commercial or political power. The workshop was intended to replicate the ruthless, often savage, rigors of editorial and critical scrutiny of precisely the sort that devours so many neophytes with fragile egos and lofty ideals. By throwing each student “into competition with those around him” who operate with the understanding that writing “is a difficult art not only worth an absolute commitment of faith, time, and energy, but demanding it,” Engle sought to simulate “the imperatives of the marketplace.” According to the workshop method of instruction, the aspiring writer “finds that the students around him are alert to his faults” while pitted in a hostile environment designed to provide “a manner of publication without losing too much blood.”21 The army barracks on the east shore of the Iowa River hardened young writers for the battlefield of the publishing industry. Engle’s bullwhip curled beside his typewriter is richly symbolic of “the delicate and imaginative aggression” he felt was essential to literary production.22 Demystifying romantic notions of literary production through the hard glare of peer criticism fostered a climate of envy, paranoia, and ruthless competition.

  A Delicate Aggression explores students’ diverse methods of enduring Engle’s Workshop without the loss of too much blood. During Engle’s era, from 1941 to 1966, students congregated at Kenney’s and other local watering holes to commiserate about their struggles, often wondering who among them would emerge from the pack. Irene Kenney, the pub’s proprietor, was a round-faced matron who would dispense wisdom for the down-and-out gambling-addicted Philip O’Connor and others. She often played the role of mother, sister, friend, and adviser, providing the sympathetic ear and universal acceptance missing from the incessant
sparring and defensiveness of the classroom workshop environment. Other refuges of communal relief from the tension of the classroom-barracks known as the Quonset huts included a paperback bookstore run by graduate students called the Paper Place, the Renaissance II Coffee House, and Dave’s Fox Head Tavern. Alcohol-fueled softball also provided self-medication and escape, as students divided themselves into teams of Poets versus Fiction Writers in games that alleviated the strain of the literary competition that dominated their lives.

  Those who did achieve a measure of literary success were often maligned as sell-outs or deemed unworthy of their accolades. Many students directly benefited from Engle’s vast connections in the publishing and entertainment media industries while others slipped through the cracks. Some found stories they had written for class published in high-profile and lucrative journals like Life and Esquire, thanks to Engle’s negotiations on their behalf. Others wrote screenplays for the Hallmark Hall of Fame television series, all gigs arranged by Engle that paid handsome financial and professional dividends.

  Legitimate literary achievements, such as W. D. Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle, led to gossip and envy. Legend had it that Bly “regularly brought a snake to class with me in a gunnysack, and whenever someone began to criticize a poem of mine, I would take the snake out and lay it on the table.” Although he denied the story, he allowed that its very existence made one “feel several kinds of fear” that characterized life in the Workshop classroom.23 Social groups that formed in response to the isolating and individualistic classroom dynamic included ones spearheaded by more eccentric faculty members who enjoyed playing the role of magnetic guru. Marguerite Young’s innovative novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling attracted her own coteries of students, exhorting them to model her fanciful embellished style, self-described as “on the side of angels.”24 Faculty members who subscribed to a more linear approach to teaching writing harbored resentment toward Young. Engle himself drew fire from regular English department professors for running his program as his own fiefdom bankrolled with scholarships and housing stipends from deals he independently brokered with fanciers and corporations. One English professor made a habit of pausing on his way to university football games to shout a litany of profanities at Engle’s front door.25

  The Workshop evolved from Engle’s original vision to adapt to an increasingly diverse literary culture, and toward alternative models of literary production that would still cater to the interests of industry. The contentious ecosystem of the Workshop persisted throughout later generations, as some tension boiled over into controversies that brought scandal, particularly during the Engle era. Much of that controversy derived from the Workshop’s historic ambivalence toward the writer’s role in mass culture, despite its production of scores of careers in popular media industries such as journalism, TV, and film. The careers of the figures of this book speak to the Workshop’s influence over literary and mass culture from the early 1940s to the present. Like no other creative writing program, Iowa both shaped the course of literature and set the terms for its migration into popular culture.

  The Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Literary History

  The Iowa Writers’ Workshop has dominated its peer creative writing institutions in higher education since 1941 and has maintained its status as literature’s most potent producer of fame to the present day. As the Workshop’s status rose after World War II, the famous writers gathered. In the past quarter century, Iowa MFAs have published more than three thousand books, compared with most programs, where the volumes by their creative writing graduates number in the hundreds.26 In one five-year span, the program produced two Pulitzer Prizes, won by Marilynne Robinson in 2005 and Paul Harding in 2010. Creative writing programs emulating the Workshop have proliferated, with more than three hundred now in existence, growing from the original five established in the 1940s, including at Iowa, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and the University of Denver.27 Their numbers rose from a mere half dozen to forty-four by 1970, followed by a massive surge that topped one hundred by 1980.28 The growth was exponential, a kind of “pyramid scheme,” as the Workshop faculty member Donald Justice described it, whereby Iowa-produced MFAs in turn founded new graduate programs in creative writing.29 Iowa graduates established at least twenty-five new programs, including those at high-caliber institutions such as Stanford, under the direction of Iowa alumnus Wallace Stegner in 1947.30 Iowa’s “structure of the program of worksheets, open discussion seminars, and flexible credit is excellent and widely copied,” according to Workshop graduate Edmund Skellings, who admitted to “using it myself for three writing programs of my own founding.”31 The Iowa effect was all too apparent for one survey respondent, asked to name the degree of his program’s founder, in this case James Crumley of Colorado State University in 1967.32 “How coincidental,” he quipped, “he took his MFA from Iowa Writers’ Workshop.”33

  Historian D. G. Myers has compared this proliferation of creative writing programs to an “elephant machine,” a phrase drawn from American industrial parlance of the mid-twentieth century referring to a machine that makes a machine.34 Iowa was the Ur-elephant machine of creative writing. But did it function only as a mechanism for reproducing itself, where the graduates would simply go on to establish more institutions like Iowa’s where they would concentrate on teaching? Myers focuses on how educational features of creative writing programs replicate themselves, whereas my concern is the curriculum’s extramural impact on professionalization into the publishing industry. Myers concludes that “the elephants teach.” But Workshop graduates were not trained to teach—no course in pedagogy has ever appeared on the Iowa curriculum—but to write, publish, and become powerful figures in mass culture. Echoing Iowa’s central mission of producing professional authors, as opposed to teachers or administrators, the first line of the creative writing program curriculum description for the University of California, Irvine, reads, “Aim: To aid the development of students into professional writers.”35

  This book is the cultural and industrial history of the Workshop told through the dramatic events that shaped the writing careers of its students and faculty. The key to the program’s success from its origin has been the maintenance of an active and intimate relationship with the publishing industry. Engle was not just an academic entrepreneur, busy raising funds and writing press releases for his program to compensate for receiving no state financial support in the first twenty years of its existence. He was also a media entrepreneur, actively creating publishing opportunities to advertise the Iowa brand, support students financially, and initiate them into the literary marketplace. Starting in the 1940s, Workshop faculty and students have fostered a culture of literary production focused on results measurable by publication through emphasis on the importance of writing for a discriminating audience. This meant faculty and administration mentored as much as they marketed their students, performing the dual function of instructor and career counselor/literary agent. Lucrative funding in the form of scholarships and tuition assistance had never been instituted in creative writing programs with the zeal of Engle’s Workshop. Historians of modern authorship point to the postwar era as a period of intense professionalization of the trade that necessitated authors’ dependence on agents and intermediaries because the old patronage system had yielded to an increasingly competitive free market. The rise of corporate capitalism and conglomeration across the media landscape meant the small publishers and unconnected independent authors alike were extremely vulnerable to economic ruin in the literary marketplace.36 Enter the university creative writing program, which at Iowa covered financial burdens during two-year residencies in which young writers could market their wares with the sparkling veneer of the Iowa brand. But how did Iowa develop that prestige from Wilbur Schramm’s obscure Program in Creative Writing?

  In a word, Engle poached it. Using an analogy he himself was fond of, Engle recruited talent like an athletic coach—with a missionary’s zeal—to fill the ranks of his facul
ty and flesh out the student body. The mythic luster of reputation is difficult to parse; but in Iowa’s case, it was the result of deliberate construction. Tactics like robbing other programs on campus of their skilled writers—Flannery O’Connor was originally enrolled in the School of Journalism when she arrived on campus—were not enough, however. Acculturating students to the publishing industry was essential. The workshop method in which writers offered their work for group discussion had long been in use by amateur clubs at Iowa, such as the Zetagathian, Erodelphian, and Hesperian Societies. But these dilettantish rhymers’ clubs and literary cliques would give way to a more professional and competitive—often hostile and contentious—model in the corrugated cold steel of Engle’s Quonset huts.

  The imperative to produce market-ready publishable prose faced Workshop members with the conundrum of reconciling their artistic vision with the demands of the industry, a dilemma that has vexed writers at least since the Industrial Revolution. Many authors since that time have successfully navigated this tension. Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Harriet Beecher Stowe were all bestsellers who also enjoyed critical canonization. Irving freely embraced what he called “the romance of trade,” approaching the literary profession with a notorious “nose for gold,” in the words of his jealous literary rival James Fenimore Cooper. Less charitable was one twentieth-century literary historian who described Irving’s publicity engine as a “literary pimpery.”37 But Irving was revered rather than reviled by his contemporaries, mainly since authorship as a profession had yet to exist except as an ancillary activity to one’s main occupation.