Close Quote
Although official histories and memoirs by affiliates of the program tend to skirt the topic, suicide was a concern at the Workshop.45 One remarkable case in Shelley’s cohort was the death of poetry Workshop graduate James Cox. James Sunwall described the loss of his classmate Cox as a particularly tragic incident after Shelley’s passing. Sunwall reconnected with Cox after graduation, reminiscing about the compromised employment they were forced to endure for the sake of their young families. Cox supported his wife and three boys by shelving his dignity and working as a “bellboy at the Jefferson Hotel” in Iowa City; Sunwall swallowed his pride and accepted a position as an orderly, as did Snodgrass.
The sacrifice seemed entirely worthwhile, given the comfortable faculty positions Sunwall and Cox secured after both had returned to the Workshop to earn their Ph.D.s. With Sunwall at the University of Florida and Cox at nearby Florida State, “We got together and talked frequently of the Workshop, our friends, our teaching and writing.” Sunwall described how “our last all-night session centered around the recent suicide of Hemingway.” They concurred that it made no sense. “What a thing! No author, we agreed, could be more renowned in his own time, honored to the very limit possible for a writer in America. And yet?” Like the unknowing and astonished people on the pavement stunned by Richard Cory’s suicide in Robinson’s poem, they were nonplussed. “Such was the tenet of our talk,” Sunwall remembered morosely. “I have remorsefully gone over it again and again in the years since.” Sunwall, echoing the guilt Carrier felt for failing to intervene on behalf of Shelley, wondered if “there was something more I could have said or should not have said?” Following their last discussion about the curious case of Hemingway’s self-destruction, “one week later, at the hour of the first meeting of his class that fall, Jim Cox joined Bob Shelley and Ernest Hemingway.” Sunwall commemorated his friend by referring to a decade punctuated with such tragedy, mourning the passing of these powerful creative minds. “The decade of the Workshop for me,” as he understood that passage of time, “was marked by Bob Shelley and Jim Cox, those two echoing rifle shots like quotation marks enclosing it.” This occupational hazard specific to creative writing—despite the rewards of “the birth of literature” through the assistance of “such skillful midwives as Ray [B. West], Paul [Engle], and Verlin [Cassill]”—came in the “warning . . . that creativity must always carry a mortal risk.”46
Sunwall’s reminiscence came at the request of Workshop historian Jean Wylder in the early 1970s. Wylder was so struck by his touching eulogy that she asked him to elaborate, but he demurred. “Frankly, I do not want to write more than I did, on the last months of his life. It was too sad,” he explained. “Jim, indeed, got very disturbed, ill, and depressed,” and sought psychiatric treatment. But, “he was released too soon,” meaning that, in effect, “the doctors killed him,” in Sunwall’s estimation. He reported that “Jean and the boys,” Cox’s surviving immediate family, “must have felt Jim’s death as a terrible and final rejection.” Wylder shared Sunwall’s letter with John Leggett, the Workshop director at the time. She attached a handwritten note to the letter, mentioning that James B. Hall had referred to Cox’s suicide as an event that haunted faculty and students alike. “Everyone in the late 40s and early 50s felt that same nagging guilt he talks about here—could we have done something or said something to have kept it from happening?” Leggett wrote back at the bottom, “Very interesting—we’ll have to tell that” in the project that Wylder would never complete, a story that also went untold in the history Stephen Wilbers compiled in the late 1970s and published as The Iowa Writers’ Workshop: Origins, Emergence, and Growth (1980).47
Sunwall’s recollection of Cox’s sad end speaks to the profound guilt suffered by Workshop members following the loss of their classmates and colleagues to suicide. There was an awareness among them that the culture of creative industry inhered a perilous set of risks. The acute sense of responsibility in Shelley’s loss came directly from the way in which the lines of his poetry foretold his own self-destruction, staring back at his survivors in the aftermath as a clear warning they could have heeded. But the relentless culture of literary production inculcated at the Workshop disinclined them to intervene. What Richard Stern, an Iowa MFA from 1954, called “the ferocious gamesmanship of the Iowa Fifties” had meant that “we weren’t much in the world,” preoccupied with the latest manuscript in progress, worrying over the scansion of their sestina for Lowell or series of sonnets for Justice, and polishing their post-symbolist syntax and neo-metaphysical conceits for Carrier. Such immersion could yield an appalling blindness to the suffering of others. Stern noted this capacity for barbaric insensitivity when he hurried up the hill with others after class to the requisite gossip sessions over drinks at Kenney’s, the Airliner, and the Mill, oblivious to the chalk outline of a body they passed over, the victim of a shooting recently removed from the crime scene only hours before.48 Stern’s image describes a Workshop culture so self-absorbed that no one stops for the dead. Worse, little is done to prevent them from dying.
This was a group that looked after one another intellectually and aesthetically, if not in terms of their mutual physical and mental health. Mutual aid often took the form of “passing annotated texts to each other” and savaging shared enemies both in workshop and behind the scenes. Workshop students of the early fifties—Shelley included—“lived day to day: the provincial enchantment of narcissism, relieved by the lyric narcissism of your friends, collaborators, semblables-presque-freres [similar-almost-brothers].” He too was “flipping through two-hundred books a week to pass exams,” he too “partied, wrote, worked on the WESTERN REVIEW,” maintaining a frenetic work schedule in which he rarely stopped to notice that he, like his classmates, “seldom left Iowa City.”49 By placing his demons in plain view inside the space of his poetry, the mask concealing his suicidal impulses proved all too effective. In this environment his anguish was less a cause for alarm than for a celebration of the brilliant art it produced. Shelley—the true inventor of confessional poetry, whose main confession was his desire to end his life—in the end, never left Iowa City. Like his writing, Shelley’s death was inextricably woven into the cultural fabric of the Workshop, a community capable of creating and conditioning its own Richard Cory.
4 • The Professional: R. V. Cassill
In 1948, Ronald Verlin Cassill built his house in Iowa City with his own hands. At under two thousand dollars, it was more economical to construct a home in late-1940s Iowa City than to rent an apartment near the University of Iowa’s campus. He did it much in the way he wrote his twenty-four novels and seven collections of short stories—with steely resolve and textbook precision, combining Hemingwayesque craftsmanship and Thoreauvean economy. When he began construction, Cassill was enrolled at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, attending class in “old army fatigues and GI boots with mud on them—before it was fashionable to dress that way.” He meticulously managed every detail himself “from his own architectural design—building it board by board, digging the foundation, pouring the cement, laying the roof, putting in the furnace ducts and electrical wiring.” Since he had barely enough money for furniture, the house felt empty and cavernous except for his paintings, “his second art: delicate watercolors of the Iowa countryside and oil portraits of his friends.” The works he had no room to display he gave to classmates like Jean Wylder, who cherished her watercolor depicting “a field of wheat gently blowing in the summer wind seen from his window.” As an Iowa native, Cassill was in his element, living for little else besides literature and art. But as Wylder recalled, “Iowa traditionally has not been kind to its own.”1
Cassill published his first short story at the age of eighteen before entering the University of Iowa as an undergraduate art student. He drew recognition for his technical mastery and spare economy of style, earning an Atlantic First Award. He steadily built upon this auspicious beginning, eventually establishing himself am
ong the literary elite as editor of the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and later the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction.2 It was not by coincidence, then, that when facing the most threatening crisis of his career, during which his credibility as a faculty member of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop hung in the balance, the consummate craftsman vowed to “take a hammer” and “personally destroy” the local establishments he was convinced were harboring conspirators bent on destroying him.3
The dispute that shook the very foundation of his academic and authorial integrity during the spring semester of 1963 was just the beginning of the turmoil precipitating Cassill’s permanent withdrawal from the Workshop and deeper renunciation of his birth state, alma mater, and employer. The break was permanent and irreversible, severing all ties to the forces that had built his personal and professional identity. He did not go quietly, instead venting his disdain in a 1965 Esquire piece later expanded into “Why I Left the Midwest,” the closing essay of his 1969 collection, In an Iron Time.
Parisian, Artist, Novelist
Cassill never envisioned his Iowa MFA as training for a faculty appointment at the Workshop. “When I first came to the State University at Iowa,” he explained, “I had no good reasons for registering there, but the good reasons emerged—as if they had been the basis of my prior decision—in the course of time.”4 After four years of teaching at the Workshop, from 1948 to 1952, a period during which his works focused on serious literary fiction, Cassill went to Paris to pursue training in art at the Sorbonne. Throughout the 1950s, as he focused his creative energies on art, Cassill’s writing took a distinct turn toward popular trade fiction. The sexually liberated environment of France encouraged Cassill to venture into popular erotic fiction with such titillating titles as The Wound of Love (1956), My Sister’s Keeper (1961), and Night School (1961). His pace of production increased to an average of more that one novel per year, a rate more reflective of a purveyor of pulp than a serious literary artist. These works represented a vast departure from “New Mexican Sun and Other Stories,” his MFA thesis at the Workshop directed by Engle and Wilbur Schramm. To support himself and his growing family, he spun out racy yarns like Left Bank of Desire and carnal tarts such as Taste of Sin and Lustful Summer that made use of his immediate surroundings.
The move into the mass market, however, was not entirely mindless, nor was it a renunciation of his aesthetic for the profit motive. Instead, it reflected his desire to converge the popular novel with the novel of ideas. Great literature, Cassill believed, could sell on a large scale and appeal to broad audiences, leveraging recognizable structures and tropes for deeper, more nuanced meanings. Even in his literary works such as The Eagle on the Coin, about a coalition that seeks to appoint an African American to the school board of a small midwestern town, we see Cassill intellectualizing popular idioms, like jazz, from urban and African-American culture. He freely ventures into settings such as “a dive . . . with people whose minds swung like reeds gracefully in any direction—music, sex, art, politics—while they got drunk.” His artist’s attention to detail reveals an unmistakable erotic dimension that he later developed in his popular novels. One sees this in his description of his character’s seersucker suit, “colored but transparent like an oil film on water above the stream bed,” creating “an illusion” whereby “the pucker of the ripple on the surface reflects the sky and hints, too, the guessed shape of the stone underneath.”5 Clem Anderson similarly renders a complex character study of a self-destructive writer modeled after Dylan Thomas, perhaps the most recognizable and charismatic literary figure of the 1950s to have simultaneously won both critical and popular acclaim. The novel renders addiction, alcoholism, and the antics of the mad poet in living color, but not at the expense of probing the fatal nature predisposed to some creative minds. Similarly, Dormitory Women’s subject of the gradual decline of a young woman into total insanity is much more serious than the one suggested by the lurid cover promising “an explosive novel of sex on campus.”6 Through both literary and popular elements, the narrative’s attention to the character’s disturbing interiority anticipates the tortured unraveling of Toni Morrison’s protagonist in The Bluest Eye.
Such experimentation in Cassill’s aesthetic was certainly a factor of his Parisian environment, in which genre divisions between high and low culture were far less ossified than in the U.S. market. This more liberating artistic environment combined with the economic necessity of supporting his wife and two children to reshape his writing. No longer was he reticent about sex and crime blending with psychological and social realism, or about intrigue and sensationalism giving way to incisive cultural critique. In Paris, Cassill was free to engage these forms as he had never done before, without heed to the cultural stigma attached to the commercialization of literature. So when he returned to Iowa to resume his post at the Workshop in 1960—just then entering its halcyon days of commercial solvency by way of lucrative publishing fellowships—the severe culture shock of a far more rigid and disapproving Iowa climate awaited.
Workshop Payola
The Workshop Cassill departed in 1952 was a shadow of the one he encountered upon his return from Europe in 1960. Cassill had just arrived when Engle secured a fellowship from Harper and Brothers, for $2,500, designed to harvest publications from Workshop students and faculty. Engle had used the same formula as when he negotiated a similar contract with Rinehart & Company, whose first fellowship went to Flannery O’Connor. Rather than investing in just one talented student per year, Harper instead spread its financial resources to ten different Workshop members, offering the awards based on merit, regardless of student or faculty status. Cassill rejoiced at the opportunities that awaited him in Iowa, a place flush with publishing options and financial support for his writing, not to mention a steady salary for teaching. The Workshop had transformed in his absence into a powerhouse of literary production, a fortress of institutional security. This financial backing was precisely what Paris—despite its aesthetically stimulating environment—was lacking.
In a 1960 letter to Engle, Evan Thomas, the director of general books for Harper and Brothers, explained the carefully designed terms and incentives of the prestigious fellowship. “We will give twenty-five $100 options to the first twenty-five college faculty members (or really accomplished students) who come to us with an outstanding piece of material, either fiction or nonfiction,” he noted, stipulating that “student material submitted will first of all have faculty approval,” and can come in the form of “either a short story, or a chapter of a book, or an article.” This contract guaranteed Harper a virtual monopoly of exclusive rights to first refusal over Workshop material, since “The $100 will not be returnable, but it will constitute part of whatever sum may be later agreed on as an advance against earnings in a book contract.” The nonbinding contract came with the incentive to land a project with the peerless publisher for instant status among the literary elite. The prize would “obligate the recipient to give us the first chance at his or her first (or next) book project,” ostensibly for a lucrative advance contract, with the built-in incentive that “if the book project turns out to be a novel and comes along in time for our Novel Contest, it can also be in the Contest.” This arrangement is a much more sophisticated corporate strategy than the one Engle established with Rinehart publishers immediately after taking over the Workshop. Thomas promised that “in attracting attention to Harper’s anxiety to get closer to the new young writers—or to so far unpublished faculty members—it will be more than worthwhile.”7 The spread of the award across the best twenty-five works produced by faculty and students of the Workshop in any given year cornered the market for fiction, but not on poetry or instructional material.8
After signing what amounted to a collective advance contract with Harper and Brothers for Workshop members, Engle had entered into a new set of negotiations with Dodd, Mead and Company, “to discuss any kind of general trade editorial advisory relationship with book publish
ers.”9 By 1960, thanks to Engle’s relentless marketing campaign, publishers were courting him. Within a week they struck a deal. The appropriately named R. T. Bond offered the Mead Fellowship in Creative Fiction “on a three year basis at $1500 a year, as you suggest. We should like to assign $500 of this amount to an outright gift and $1000 to an advance against royalties earned by the award winner.” But unlike the Harper deal, the terms of the Mead contract moved into potentially unethical territory, anticipating precisely the Britannica conflict in which Cassill would become embroiled by 1963. Sensing an opportunity to capitalize on the rising value of Workshop manuscripts in the publishing industry, Engle demanded personal compensation for each fellowship. Bond agreed, “As to the $500 for each fellowship book, payable to you, that, too, is satisfactory.” Engle’s request for direct payment to him built in a cash incentive making him the functional equivalent of a one-man talent agency much less the director of an academic unit. “But we have one note of caution here,” Bond warned, wary of the appearance of bribery, “perhaps unnecessary—namely, that we don’t want to involve you in anything resembling payola. This, as we say, is probably unnecessary since, in return for the payment of this amount we may easily expect editorial work on the books beyond your academic duties.”10 Bond rationalized the direct $500 payment to Engle, rather than the Workshop, for each fellowship book as a quasi salary incentive, making him an unofficial employee of Dodd, Mead and Company.
Engle was ostensibly being paid off directly for fellowship books, similar to the payola scams record labels used to bribe underpaid radio disc jockeys to increase the air time received by their clients. Bond’s awareness of the unlawfulness of the arrangement did not, however, prevent him from discovering a way around it. He thus suggested that his payments to Engle should be framed as compensation for “editorial work on the books” beyond his “academic duties.” Of course, the process of teaching creative writing already involved editorial work, often of a much more rigorous sort than that performed in the publishing industry, thus making the suggestion a facile cover for a clearly underhanded deal. With Harper already committed to twenty-five fellowship books per year, Engle was in an especially powerful position when Mead approached him, and thus did not hesitate to profit personally on his unprecedented bargaining power. The other way to cover up the bribe, Bond suggested, was to call it a royalty. In the case that “there still might be a suggestion of payola here,” he proposed to Engle, “we can make the payment as an over-riding royalty of 2 ½ percent against the books payable as a total sum of $500.” This would function as an effective cover for any appearance of payola, since “such a [royalty] formula has been sanctioned a thousand times in the textbook field, although at a lower guarantee.”11 The Dodd, Mead–University of Iowa fellowship in fiction thus came to fruition through a self-justifying allusion to royalty schedules typical of the textbook market, a field of the publishing industry Engle and the Workshop had yet to capitalize on at this point.
A Delicate Aggression Page 13