A Delicate Aggression

by David O. Dowling

  Mass Culture and Professionalization, 1959–2019

  Speaking in Iowa City in 1959 at a conference on “The Writer in Mass Culture” hosted by Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Ralph Ellison considered the vexing question on everyone’s mind. “We can’t really separate the two” categories of high art and low art, he said, highlighting the elitist politics of those who denounce the mass media. Whereas the encroachment of mass media industries and audiences into the world of literature appeared as a direct threat to authors, Ellison assured, “It’s not quite as dismal as it seems.” The mass dissemination of literature may have a democratizing effect. “I don’t believe that you can really in this country separate the political from the artistic,” he added.59 Ellison cited Whitman as a poet of the masses who nonetheless could not reach them very successfully, and Melville, who defied the market with Moby-Dick, but “really suffered for his position.” Seated next to Ellison was Norman Mailer. He candidly admitted, “I’d like everybody to read my books,” as did Ellison, who added an important caveat: “I personally would like to be read by as many people as possible but on my own terms.”60 That common object, inevitably, required a full engagement with the mechanisms of promotion and publicity in the literary marketplace.

  The conference topic of “The Writer in Mass Culture” was not only a subject for Iowa creative writing students to reflect upon. It also was self-reflexive of Engle’s own promotional powers to attract highly publicized literary celebrities recognizable to the wider public whose names had saturated mass media outlets. Ellison, Mailer, Dwight Macdonald, and Mark Harris were present along with Arnold Gingrich of Esquire magazine, a journal designed to bring political and literary topics of learned controversy, ones traditionally reserved for the educated elite, to a popular audience. The Workshop may appear to have built its prestige by separating itself from mass culture “to ensure the maintenance of a literary elite,” as Loren Glass describes it.61 Certainly the University of Iowa provided a protective bureaucratic shield from the immediate financial and professional risks of the free market, but not as a means of escaping the reality of the publishing industry. Rather, the university offered a way of strategically and effectively engaging that industry. Esquire was the perfect sponsor for a conference on “the writer in mass culture,” since it shared the Workshop’s aim to foster a highbrow reputation for acclaimed literature while also reaching as many readers as possible in the mass market. And of course, behind this impressive promotional apparatus that was the envy of most literary agents and publicists at the time, the Workshop’s curriculum offered a training ground tailored to the rigors of the market. But since the training occurred in the context of the classroom, failure was cheap. A disastrous showing at a peer critique would not ruin a fledgling career.

  The institutional shield of creative writing programs has provided an advantage plagued by unique drawbacks for ethnic writers. Although Engle’s penchant for recruiting international students and faculty to the program would lead to his establishment of the International Writing Program in 1967, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop was slow to accommodate such diverse cultural perspectives throughout the Frank Conroy era. The current director, Lan Samantha Chang, recalled being advised by Conroy to stop writing stories with Chinese-American characters if she did not want to be typecast. But like Cisneros during the 1970s, her own culture was her strong suit, the topic into which she could delve deeper than any other. “There was no way I could have written about anything else,” Chang said. The stratospheric career of Workshop graduate Ayana Mathis, an African American from New York who came to the program with her gay Latino friend Justin Torres, began with considerable trepidation. Upon entering Iowa, both harbored serious reservations about the lack of cultural diversity in the place and the program. Mathis became famous for The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, her debut novel that was selected for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 in December 2012 (“I can’t remember when I read anything that moved me in quite this way, besides the work of Toni Morrison,” Winfrey proclaimed); she later accepted an invitation to return to the Workshop as a faculty member. From this position of power, Mathis spoke candidly about the flaws of the learning environment in Iowa. In at least one instance, she recalled being told her writing was somehow less powerful because it was about race. She openly wondered to what extent the cachet of the Workshop played into her success. “I would like to think that Knopf would have published my novel if I’d had a completely different experience and a completely different agent and never went to Iowa.” She speculated to what extent, rather than if, the Workshop fueled her success, confirming that “writers of color [should be] able to take advantage of that kind of access” she benefited from, thus acknowledging Iowa’s very real mechanism of fame.62 Junot Díaz recently denounced his Cornell creative writing education for being “too white,” part of a broader pattern whereby “nothing in creative writing programs begins to even equal the diversity not only of our country but of our readerships,” despite “creating all sorts of opportunities” with their prestige.63

  Students made other compromises in exchange for the professional advantages of a distinctive creative writing degree. The Naropa Institute, originally the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, was notorious for terrorizing its students. At Naropa, founded in part by Allen Ginsberg, one ritual was designed to shake new attendees out of the false sense of security that presumably went with joining an institution of higher education. Instructors would drive individual students high into the mountains above Boulder and abandon them alongside the road, telling them to find their way back to campus, a ritual solo journey into the dark night of the soul to inspire a discovery of their untapped reservoirs of creativity. Sam Kashner recounts such an experience at the hands of Herbert Hunke and Kerouac himself in When I Was Cool (2005). Kashner recalls the challenge being all the more horrifying because he was hallucinating on psychedelic drugs at the time and his mentors refused to furnish him with a map, instead telling him to rely on his spirit to find his way back.

  Although several Iowa students reported that Engle put them to work on menial tasks at his Stone City residence in Cedar Rapids in exchange for special fellowships and financial aid, most could expect their baptism by fire to take place in the classroom pitted with the challenge of surviving the workshop method, the creative writing equivalent of the Hunger Games. The submission of an application to Iowa signified a ritual submission to bureaucratic constraints, a drab environment of Quonset huts, and the bland, often retrograde culture of the Midwest—local barbers refused to serve blacks in Iowa City as late as the 1960s, and the nearest town for an African American to get a haircut was Cedar Rapids—all for the glittering Workshop MFA.64 It was a Faustian deal that young writers readily accepted.

  Competing Programs

  Were it not for the success rate of its graduates, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop’s rural isolation, intense internal competition, and stark army barracks classrooms should have sent prospective students flocking to competing programs such as those at Michigan, Virginia, NYU, Boston University, and Brown. The professional focus of master’s level creative writing did not emerge until the 1960s, with the exception of Iowa, which embraced the mission of fostering authorial careers decades earlier. Although outsiders to the Workshop routinely tried to deemphasize the professional bent of the creative writing MFA—Malcolm Cowley once warned an incoming class at Iowa in 1950 that they should not expect their training to lead to publications that they could parlay into careers—this defeatist view was not shared by Engle.65 Students from the Workshop were far more prolific than those from rival programs, outpacing them with a steady flow of books and articles.

  During the postwar era, the earliest graduate programs shared New Criticism’s objective of “seeing literature from its maker’s point of view,” as Myers describes it. This approach derived from an “attempt at critical understanding conducted from within the conditions of literary practice,” a now largely abandoned m
ethod of teaching the function of the text from the perspective of a producer.66 At Iowa, Wilbur Schramm’s program that coupled criticism with creativity gave way to an entirely new perspective under Engle’s guidance, which pioneered creative writing’s professionalization. Iowa’s MFA program was unique in that, from 1941 on, it never adopted a largely undergraduate model of teaching creative writing as a novel approach to understanding the function of literature, one totally disinterested in producing writers. “Creative writing reached its full growth as a university discipline when the purpose of its graduate programs (to produce serious writers) was uncoupled from the purpose of its undergraduate courses (to examine writing seriously from within),” Myers explains.67 Iowa was the first to forge this template. The undergraduate model of using creative writing to enhance new critical approaches to teaching literature derived from Hughes Mearns, the most prominent proponent for the teaching of creative writing for students in kindergarten through twelfth grade.68 His wildly popular and widely adopted course in creative writing emphasized process over product and the removal of outside pressures, such as teachers and peers, that might interfere with the child’s discovery of the insight within that each already possessed, a view inherited from Emerson’s democratized understanding of divine energy existing in all individuals, according to his concept of the infinitude of private man.

  To Mearns, creative writing was a means of self-expression for its own sake, not for the sake of demonstrating mastery of concepts in English language and literature, and certainly not a means toward a career as a professional author.69 Beginning with Mearns, whose model deeply influenced the goals of most postwar MFA programs, there was a distinct movement away from competition and results, and toward aesthetic experience and process. But at Iowa, this new partnership between criticism and creative writing was wedded to the business of making professional writers, where competition and results came to define both the culture of the Workshop and its curriculum, which fell short of titling its courses “how to publish,” but whose contents and methods were readily transferrable to industry. Teachers at Iowa were candid with their students about the chances of forging a career as a writer. Kurt Vonnegut said he would “pay for a plaque dedicated to the 90 percent of Workshop graduates who don’t go on to become writers,” asking “Can you imagine if 90 percent of the graduates of the Harvard Law School didn’t become lawyers?”70 But the 90 percent rule applied more to other, smaller programs whose publication record among MFA creative writing students is a fraction of Iowa’s. Further, Vonnegut’s comment, and others like it alluding to the long odds and steep demands of the market, did not demoralize Workshop students and send them fleeing for law school. Instead, it paradoxically inspired them to redouble their efforts and fortify their resolve to become members of the successful 10 percent, especially given the privileged access to the publishing industry an Iowa MFA offered.

  In weighing their options among creative writing programs, most candidates, particularly in the 1970s, were well aware of the compromise they faced. On the one hand, the Workshop’s reputation for elite snobbery and the competitive culture among the student body suggested to many that there were paths of less resistance toward a literary career in competing programs. The other concern about Iowa was the allegation that the disapproving and highly critical climate had a homogenizing effect on writing. Indeed, many brilliant works were savaged in workshops for their deviance from the accepted workshop aesthetic that privileged the academic story and poem, usually steeped in world literature, philosophy, and mythological allusion, over other models. One victim was Shoeless Joe author W. P. Kinsella, whose style, which would earn him world fame in popular and literary circles alike, met with a hostile reception at the Workshop. Gordon Mennenga recalled how “Kinsella would put up quite good stories, and people would fall on them with knives because they were too ‘light’ maybe, or too ‘effusive,’ and Kinsella would say, ‘That’s okay. I’ve already published it in Canada.’ ” Sandra Cisneros was browbeaten for similar reasons. “Sandra fell into that trap too. If all her characters had died or thought philosophical stuff, she would have been a star,” Mennenga aptly observed. “I felt that we were always being ‘dampened,’ not encouraged to take any risks, because of the ‘same think’ that went on.”71 On at least one occasion, the Workshop rejected an application whose writing sample contained material that later led to a six-figure book deal, as in the case of Barbara Robinette Moss.72 Showered with major awards and critical acclaim, Moss’s Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter was published by Touchstone of Simon and Schuster and became a national bestseller that reviewers compared to the best work of Frank McCourt.

  More nurturing and accommodating environments tolerating and even encouraging literary experimentation were found in creative writing programs like those at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Montana at Missoula. Iowa by comparison was “a colder harder unknown” to alumnus Don Wallace, who described it as “snotty and East Coast” from the point of view of the cohesive community of his own funky Santa Cruz scene. But Wallace chose Iowa, Quonset huts and all, over Missoula because of its high standards. All “the Santa Cruz writers would get into Missoula,” but the more selective admission into Iowa would offer him a more powerful degree. Iowa’s virtual monopoly drew spite from Montana’s Richard Hugo and other faculty from competing programs. “Go to Iowa,” Hugo advised a student, knowing his own institution paled in comparison to the sheer magnitude of its prestige and attendant professional advantages. “I hate the sons of bitches there.” Students like Sam Kashner opted to attend Kerouac and Ginsberg’s Naropa, a radical choice made in defiance of Iowa, which Beat aesthetes condemned for being rigid and formulaic. Beat writer Gregory Corso once caught wind that the rising star Jayne Anne Phillips was considering applying there. “He grabbed my nose and twisted,” she recalled, telling her “Don’t go to Iowa; you’ll come out of there with your nose all wrong.” Of course, she went.73

  Marvin Bell noted that this younger generation “began to focus on their careers as we had not, and to publish while students, which was rare in my day. They had become professionals,” he explained, “instead of the funky countercultural community of my student days.”74 But much of his nostalgia here is for a Workshop era that never really existed, given its students’ unusually strong showing of publications from the earliest days. The result was the Workshop’s training of market-ready professional authors in a highly selective environment dense with ambition and talent. The irony is that during the 1960s and 1970s, its successes during the Cold War era only expanded, since the countercultural rebels flocked to the program, politely filling out their applications and moving into their spartan Iowa City apartments and dorms. Despite its conformist and careerist reputation, attributes totally anathema to the anti-establishment counterculture of the Age of Aquarius, Iowa remained the first choice among America’s best young writers willing to make such concessions for entrance into this fame factory. High professional standards for students trace back to Engle’s original commitment to a program vigorously engaged with the publishing industry and a faculty stocked with successful practicing authors. His guiding principle, which had a lasting effect on the Workshop’s reputation, for better or worse, was that “in an open society such as ours, writer, businessman, and university can join to make an environment which is useful to the writer, friendly for the businessman, and healthy for the university.”75 Indeed, Engle was innovating the business of letters—a sin many deemed unpardonable—by reimagining the social function of the creative writing circle in light of new developments in capitalism.

  Proceeding through the three major generations of the Workshop, the following chapters focus on selected authors representing both faculty and students and their most significant projects. The biographical impact of works produced in the program considered here span a diverse spectrum of genres including fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, memoir, and journalism. Part 1 details life among the cohort tha
t operated under the leadership of Engle and his senior faculty, Donald Justice and R. V. Cassill. This era extends from the inception of the Workshop in 1936 through Engle’s directorship, from 1941 to 1966, the year of his resignation. Part 2 focuses on the Workshop from the late 1960s through the 1970s, detailing the blossoming of the first powerful and diverse group of writers in the post-Engle era. Their forms of rebellion against the Workshop method would lead to alternative networks that expanded the range of expression, especially for ethnic and women writers, of Workshop literature.

  Part 3 treats the Workshop from the Frank Conroy era (1987 to 2004) to the present. This period was dominated by Marilynne Robinson, who continued to win the lion’s share of literary accolades for her deeply spiritual novels through her retirement in 2016. Anthony Swofford offers his unique perspective on his experience as a student during the Conroy era and as a faculty member at the beginning of Lan Samantha Chang’s directorship, a transition marking a distinct shift toward diversity under her inclusive leadership. The epilogue reveals the city’s and the university’s ongoing efforts to brand themselves with the prestige of the Workshop in light of Paul Engle’s controversial legacy.