A Delicate Aggression

by David O. Dowling

  Just weeks before the publication of Poems from the Iowa Poetry Workshop that featured his work so prominently, Shelley brought his life to an abrupt end. His poems in that volume, particularly “Evening in the Park,” earned him recognition that even Engle had not anticipated. Engle’s preface to the Workshop’s half of the special Poetry issue dedicated to MFA poets points out that “The Iowa poems are not the selected best of a year or two,” as was the case for his rivals at Washington, “but those available this autumn. In the spring of 1951, the best poems of the season were published in a booklet, Poems from the Iowa Poetry Workshop, and various others from the class have been eliminated by acceptance for Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and other magazines.”26 Engle, the master of publicity, spun a liability into an asset by promoting the sale of the booklet and arranging for its review in the same issue. He also covered for his overexposure of his students’ work in a cheap publication by a local press—the booklet appeared under the imprint of Iowa City’s Prairie Press and was priced at $1.00—by boasting that his students could produce enough quality verse to fill an entire thirty-three-page volume plus half an issue of Poetry in addition to assorted other single publications. What he overlooked in the process of touting the quantity of his program’s aggregate literary production was the quality of his singular greatest talent, Robert Shelley. Indeed, the previous publication of “Evening in the Park” in the booklet should have disqualified it from appearing in Poetry. But on the strength of its writing, it breached the editorial chasm and found its way into the pages of Poetry by way of Ghiselin’s positive review. “Though success of this kind depends primarily upon insight, it is impossible without technical skill of the kind Shelley” displays in the poem, he raved.27 Shelley did not live to see the greatest accolades he would receive from the literary establishment during his short career. He did not even live long enough to see his poems in the spring 1951 booklet, which appeared just three weeks after his death.

  Living Death

  The afternoon of Wednesday, April 25, 1951, seemed just like any other at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Engle was busy checking proof sheets for Poems from the Iowa Poetry Workshop, while students were busy preparing their final projects for the end of the semester. Shelley had wowed his classmates with the new forms he had discovered in his metaphorically rich lyricism, emerging as the first of the Workshop’s lyrical confessional poets. His work confirmed that “there was always either a sense of direct surface narrative or else a musical and lyric thrust to carry you through the poem.” Based on his innovations, “most of us there at Iowa” began to “put the subrational up on the surface of the poem” due to Shelley’s influence, Snodgrass recollected.28

  As graduation approached, Shelley faced a moment of truth, in both a personal and a professional sense. His stellar record at Iowa made him a highly sought-after candidate for faculty positions in creative writing programs such as at the University of Utah, which was primed to extend him a job offer given his ringing endorsement in Poetry from its director Brewster Ghiselin. The prospect of entering professional life, however, plagued him with self-doubt. Engle’s edited booklet of Workshop poems and the special issue of Poetry were in progress but had yet to materialize by late April. The appearance of these publications bearing direct evidence of his imminent success would have alleviated his stress. Compounding his anxiety was concern over the professional impact of disclosing his homosexuality. His faculty mentor Warren Carrier acknowledged that Shelley was struggling with making his sexual orientation publicly known.

  With the exception of Shelley’s roommate, William Stuckey, no one was aware that he had sought medical help for his condition. After his suicide, “Friends of Stuckey said they knew no reason for his action.” Few realized that “he had been taking treatment at the Psychopathic Hospital” at the university during “the last week” before his death. Most were stunned to learn “he was a patient at the hospital last year, police said,” and that he had received treatment for his mental illness dating back to his first two semesters at the Workshop.29 Whereas Workshop members were surprisingly oblivious to his ongoing medical treatment, they were all too aware of Shelley’s inner pain, because it was etched in his verse. If students knew anything intimate about each other, it was primarily through their writing, the object of their obsessive pursuit of literary success.

  “Harvest” clearly signaled Shelley’s impending suicide. Morbid images of “last year’s ash” combine with visions of death as “the scraps of summer were all hauled away/ To shifty piles out back and left to rot,” corpse-like, as remnants to be removed.30 Carrier spoke for many when he confessed that Shelley’s death was “a sad event for which all of us who knew him felt guilty.”31 The collective guilt was inescapable because no one had cared enough to intervene despite widespread intimate knowledge of his personal pain through his writing. James Sunwall conversely felt faculty and students, himself included, were the equivalent of the admiring “people on the pavement” in Robinson’s “Richard Cory” who “looked at him” with admiration, yet were blind to his colossal inner struggle.32 Shelley “carved” his verse “to portray/ The fire within, the sickly grin without.” Alternative perspectives on conventional understandings of gender unambiguously blazed through his writing. “We recognized high heels and cast-off dress;/ Nudged each other, laughed at masks they wore—/ The very things we’d tried to dispossess.” Struggling with these forbidden identities, Shelley sought solace in a rifle blast.33

  On what seemed to all a routine Wednesday at the Workshop, after attending class in the barracks on the banks of the Iowa River, Shelley quickly withdrew to his apartment at 1209 Kirkwood Avenue in Iowa City. He knew the apartment would be empty, since his roommate Stuckey had a seminar in the early afternoon every Wednesday. Shelley fumbled for his key and unlocked the door, his mind racing. The act itself would have to be quiet and discreet; no onlookers, no witnesses, no drama. But the effects, he knew, would have the entire campus staring in amazement, blinking their “eyes/ At pieces of snowmen falling from the skies.”34 Practicality struck him as something of a curse. Would Stuckey’s .22-caliber gun be powerful enough? It was a rifle no less, making the act that much more difficult to pull off. A weak gun could work anyway, especially through the temple rather than the roof of the mouth, the method Hemingway would use ten years later with a much more powerful shotgun in his new home in Ketchum, Idaho. Shelley rose and opened Stuckey’s closet, peering on tiptoes at the top shelf. Like a good midwestern boy, Stuckey had brought his beloved boyhood hunting rifle with him to college at Washington University, and did not fail to remember it on making the move to Iowa City. Iowa’s rural locale would certainly bring opportunities to hunt deer and turkey, and at the very least squirrels and chipmunks. The last thing he imagined it would do was to provide his roommate and closest companion with the instrument of his own destruction.

  Reaching up, Shelley pulled the gun off the shelf and removed it from its case. Stuckey kept the rifle clean, locked, and never loaded while in storage. Shelley remembered from his own youth the procedure for loading the rifle. He methodically broke the barrel and dropped the ammunition into the chamber. His movements by now were unwavering and even precise. This was the tool. He felt its power in his hands as he headed into the bathroom, conscious of the mess he was about to make and Stuckey’s horror at its discovery. Seated on the edge of the sink in their cramped bathroom, he anchored the heel of the gun on his instep, resting the end of the barrel against his right temple. He reached down and eased his thumb onto the trigger.

  No neighbors reported hearing the loud crack of the gun’s report. Stuckey, returning from campus, found the door unlocked and assumed Shelley was at his desk poring over his work as usual. Discovering his typewriter standing silently at attention, Stuckey called out instinctively. Pushing the bathroom door open, he shuddered and recoiled from the catastrophe before him. Blood pooled on the floor beside the dropped gun as Shelley lay grotesquely contorted ag
ainst the edge of the tub. Stuckey, now fully aware of what had happened, reached for his roommate, his feet slipping on the blood-slick floor. He could immediately see that “the bullet entered his right temple and went completely through his head, emerging from the left temple,” as the student newspaper, the Daily Iowan, reported the next day.35 The steady crimson streams had been flowing for hours from both sides of his head. What he took to be the lifeless body of his roommate, to his horror, moved almost imperceptibly. Shelley’s chest was gently expanding and contracting in shallow breaths; he was very much alive. The .22, it turned out, was not powerful enough after all. Struggling to maneuver him into a more comfortable position, Stuckey winced and gagged at the soaked clothing—spongy to the touch—that clung from his friend. Frantic efforts to revive him were to no avail; Shelley was totally unconscious, his face slack and eyes firmly closed, caked with drying crimson. Without the capacity to speak, he was trapped in a body that cruelly would not die, sentenced by his own hand to the living hell of a botched suicide. Sensing a chance for survival, Stuckey sprang out of the room to dial for an ambulance, his trembling fingers barely able to make the call.

  After making the call at 3 P.M., Shelley’s distraught roommate greeted the ambulance that soon arrived with lights flashing and sirens blaring. By 3:20, neighbors and onlookers gathered, curious about the commotion. Whispers and downcast eyes immediately spread through the crowd as Shelley was carried on a stretcher into the waiting vehicle, his face hideously matted with fresh and half-dried blood from the hours-old bullet wounds. The ambulance sped away to the university hospital, where Shelley was rushed to the emergency room and prepared for surgery. Stuckey paced in the lobby as police and journalists from the Iowa City Press-Citizen and the Daily Iowan student paper peppered him with questions. During surgery, Shelley’s faltering vital signs persisted late into the night. Doctors labored nonstop for over seven hours to repair his shredded brain tissue, their efforts hampered by his excessive blood loss and fluttering pulse. Shelley drew his last breath at the staggeringly late hour of 11 P.M., when his body finally released its ferocious grip on life. The Johnson County coroner’s autopsy report indicated that he had pulled the trigger sometime around 1 P.M., two hours before Stuckey encountered him, protracting his torturous last day to an agonizing ten hours total after receiving the self-inflicted wound. “It was this lingering” that Carl Hartman, who had worked with Shelley as an editorial assistant on the Western Review, “still recalled painfully.”36 Here, finally, was the “dark bird with a bleeding breast/ Returning to his lair,” the death Shelley foretold in “On My Twenty-First Birthday.” Staring “with my brain’s furrowed eye/ To the long limbed boy I left behind,” Shelley sees himself in his youth with eyes “Bright with madness, in which I stripped him naked/ And so unmanned myself.” The stark realization of his madness, and his “unmanned” sexual identity, had perpetually sent him back to poetry to “make my music with help/ Of new beasts rushing up a bone-dry stair.”37

  The coroner described the death as “a suicide due to ill health,” and the Press-Citizen reported that Shelley had been a patient “for 30 days last year” at the University of Iowa’s psychiatric hospital.38 The Daily Iowan described the incident starkly in a front-page headline, “Student Kills Self with Hunting Rifle,” tastelessly positioned next to a voluptuous actress preening full-bodied on stage in a bikini and high heels. Staff reporter Charles Nickell had taken the photograph at MacBride Auditorium during opening night of a student comedy series of short productions called Kampus Kapers. Shelley’s pulse stopped less than an hour after the curtain lowered on the raucous show. The frolicsome performance took place about a mile from where the shot rang out at 1209 Kirkwood Avenue earlier that afternoon. Ironically, the skit pictured on the front page of the paper next to the story of Shelley’s death bore a significant relation to the Workshop. It was “a satire on authors and publishers who turn out midget books at the rate of 100 an afternoon,” a thinly veiled spoof of the Workshop’s increasing commercialization that the literary accomplishments of Shelley ostensibly contradicted.39 No mention of Shelley’s peerless record and high standing in the program appeared in the adjacent article reporting the news of his death.

  In Memoriam

  If the Daily Iowan and Look magazine had missed the significance of Shelley’s brief literary life, the poetry establishment had commemorated its full value with deep appreciation. Shelley’s biography was in his poetry; he seems to have written his epitaph in his lyrics. Ten years after his death, Shelley held a prominent place in Engle’s collection of the best writing of the first twenty-five years of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. As with his powerful showing in the Poetry issue of 1952 and the booklet of Workshop poems in 1951, Shelley received due acclaim that he never lived to see. He bears the honor of having three poems in the volume, “Harvest,” “Evening in the Park,” and “On My Twenty-First Birthday,” a distinction shared by only a few authors. Following Shelley in the anthology with three of his own poems is Snodgrass. The accident of alphabetical order that positioned him after Shelley in the volume could not have been more fitting, since it was Snodgrass, after all, who carried on the legacy of Shelley’s signature style. “On My Twenty-First Birthday” signals another death, this one of his old self, the “long limbed boy” left behind in his youth. His protracted struggle for sanity appears in his realization of “how long I have tried to clear the stables of his heart.” Writing for him was a release of the madness on to the page, the source of his art voiced when “now I turn the key and hear and await the roar . . . of new beasts,” metaphors for his never-ending parade of demons.40

  While he was alive, Shelley inspired Workshop poets like Snodgrass, intent on bringing his new mode of self-disclosure to their own verse. Shelley infused new life into a cadre of young writers, whose sporadic attempts at branching out from routine modes had been systematically stymied by often brutal remediation in workshop sessions. Insights tended to be funneled into a uniform style. “We had all been writing in a neo-Symbolist, neo-Metaphysical style,” Snodgrass admitted, noting, “it is very strange to marry the Metaphysicals and Symbolists, but that is what we were trying to do.”41 To distill such a highly abstracted approach into intimate direct expression as Shelley had done was entirely novel, breathing new life into the program, and setting the course for the confessional school of poetry.

  In his death, Shelley was also an influential source of inspiration. He left a distinct impression on classmates such as Donald Petersen. Petersen wrote a seven-poem ode to Shelley, printed in Poetry in December 1953, as a tribute to his beloved classmate. The sonnet sequence is written with a fierce directness that Shelley would have admired. Shelley had already published in all the right places associated with refined literature on his arrival at the Workshop, particularly in such journals as the Western Review. His work therefore did not bear the stigma of “being published in the ‘wrong’ places” that were routinely shunned at the Workshop. Although he had written journalism and produced a popular play, Shelley was immune to having his “new workshop manuscripts . . . worked over very carefully by the experienced people in the back rows,” students who took it on themselves to keep up standards. “The most damning criticism of any manuscript,” according to Hall, “was, ‘It’s slick,’ ” that is, “commercial by calculation, or—worse—by a fault of authorial mind.” The paradox that faced students was that while “everyone understood one was to publish—of course,” a tidal wave of resistance pushed against that urge in that “We seriously questioned the point at which a manuscript was ‘ready.’ ” Shelley himself was an arbiter of such standards for poets. Most upstarts eager to send out a manuscript for publication after a favorable showing at workshop would be told, “Ace, it’s not ready. Work on the last scene some more.” In this context, “Rewriting was a fetish. It was well known that one now-famous author [Flannery O’Connor] did at least 25 versions of the first page of every story.”42

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sp; Unscathed in a minefield of struggle and contention, envy and resistance, Shelley seemed untouchable. Immune to assaults on his literary integrity and prolific publication record that could have raised questions about his commercial leanings—and to Engle’s belief that any good creative writing program “should be a place where the too sure poet can be knocked down a few times”—Shelley remained, in the eyes of admirers like Petersen, a voice and vision out of time.43 “The Stages of Narcissus,” written by Petersen “to the memory of Robert Shelley,” aptly describes how he was admired and sought after in the highly contentious market for new poetic insight. “He might go on/ Pretending he did not know,” but he was “considered a thing of some refinement, sought/ For all his wit or common sense alone,/ While in their secret cells they railed and fought/ Like stray dogs yapping over a choice bone.” But his inner turmoil came from precisely this scrutiny, especially in “how the eyes peered out at him and made him dread/ The will to live which terrorized the dark.” His confessional introspection is evident in how in “the still pool he had his second birth/ Studying his imagery in fateful springs,” leaning in “more closely, hunching his thin spine.” The seeds of his destruction Petersen aptly captures in his tortured sexual repression and fear of public derision, leaving him “With no fair love, no marriageable heart.” Misunderstood like Richard Cory, “By day the world pursued him and he fled/ To its dark night where the pure waters start,” drowning in his own pain.44