Despite holding off Engle’s invitation to return to Iowa City and join the Workshop faculty, Young maintained close contact with him, utilizing his network of connections and financial resources for career advancement. Her solicitation of Engle’s support for the Guggenheim in her letter of December 1947 had the desired effect, as she received the fellowship the following year. Her surprisingly direct request revealed a commercially savvy side of Young that understood the system of rewards and advancement in the literary market. That business sense belied her otherwise detached appearance. “If you have the inclination ever,” she implored him, “I wish you’d do me a favor! Write to Mr. Moe and beg him to give the Guggenheim to me for Miss MacIntosh, My Darling—won’t you—and tell him as specifically about you and it as you can.”40 Her tone lowered to a conspiratorial whisper. “Paul,” she wrote, “you are responsible for all my good fortunes—you are the one who started me off on the right road.”41 She needed him now.
Engle delivered. He both published a glowing review of Angel in the Forest and stirred support for her Guggenheim award. “That was a beautiful review,” she gushed, “and I thank you. It will undoubtedly be quoted in the advertising,” she added, knowing that his intention was to provide commentary on the book with an eye toward its commercial promotion. She catalogued the journals that favorably received the book, “N.Y. Post, Sun, World-Telegram, Chicago papers, Saturday Review, etc.,” lamenting that the New York Times “panned it.” Engle’s review proclaimed that Young wrote like an angel, an assertion that also appeared in the Saturday Review in a notice by Ben Ray Goodman. “He couldn’t have seen yours,” she said, basking in the glow of their nearly identical expressions of praise, which captured precisely the ethereal quality she had hoped to convey. Complimenting Engle’s review “for its discernment and balance,” she chided a notice on the work by Orville Prescott, who, in his bombast and trumpery, “blew his head off” in her estimation. Plans for promotion were firmly in place, she reported with resolve, to bring this book to the literary community and beyond, to the masses. Speaking engagements at the Boston Bookfair were to follow a week in New Harmony, Indiana, dedicated to “Life magazine which will do a picture essay on ‘Angel.’ ” Fame was upon her, and she adored the adulation. “I’ve been wined and dined and beflowered until my knees groan.”42 She dressed the part to promote the work. The poet Amy Clampitt remembered her angelic ensemble of “a coronet of primroses to match an improbably mod dress of the same color” at a party celebrating the publication of Angel in the Forest.43
The following fall of 1945, Young returned Engle’s favor with what she called her best “commercial review” for his book of poetry American Child. She dashed off a letter to him after she had “just mailed to the Chicago Sun my three-page review,” assuring him that it was designed to reach a mass audience. “I deliberately evaded literary criticism” in order to establish “some value for you in the practical realm—a commercial review, suggesting the book as a Christmas gift, for example.” Buoyed by a healthy advance on Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, Young was in a position to repay the favor of Engle’s earlier positive review. She felt secure in her new identity as a “Scribner’s author with Max Perkins as my editor.” Her literary success had a financial measure, an equation that had always resonated with Engle. “I received a huge advance from Scribner’s, one which assures my independence for at least another year or so.” She allowed that “the novel progresses, but slowly,” estimating not “to be finished for at least another year.”44 In fact it was another two decades before the novel finally appeared, under Scribner’s imprint, in 1965, making it one of the most ambitious works in the history of American literature. The Nashville Banner heralded Miss MacIntosh, My Darling as “the most important work in American literature since . . . Moby-Dick.”45 The comparison was apt, since Young’s tome, like Melville’s, and Proust’s for that matter, “is too long for general consumption now.” Melville’s admirers, who included Pablo Picasso, did not surface until seventy years after the publication of Moby-Dick, and Nona Balakian predicted that “just as it took fifty years for Proust’s work to reach public accessibility,” Young’s universal recognition would have to wait, since “Miss MacIntosh is to our era what Proust’s work was for an earlier one.”46
Iowa lacked the literary legacy of New York, but it held a distinct advantage in the sustained aesthetic collaboration between faculty and students built into the institution. With no students or close colleagues in New York, the gloomy past of places like Fire Island, by contrast, could haunt her with its transfixing energy. She regretted, for example, not sharing her visit to Fire Island with Engle, “a beautiful, desolate place—off the coast of which, as you remember Margaret Fuller drowned with a cargo of marble statues.” Fuller, an author possessing a similar mystic bent grounded in journalistic powers of observation, epitomized the romantic intensity of Young’s ambition. She saw authorship embodied in “the ocean there [that] is wild and fierce and transcendental,” a force that generates creativity. “I find my novel flourishes best in a salt world!” Young effused, only to realize that, in Greenwich Village, “Alas, there is no salt here.” Europe beckoned as an escape from her narrow confines. “My orbit is a small one—I hardly ever go above Fourteenth Street—and when I do it’s a great adventure,” she explained to Engle. Flashing a wild urge to “go far, far away—maybe to Judea,” she joked, “Maybe I’ll become a citizen of Judea. What do you think?”47
Although Judea did not make her itinerary, Rome did. There she met the magisterial Marguerite Caetani, Princess di Bassiano. Young was enamored with Caetani and her literary journal Botteghe Oscure. She later capitalized on the connection to secure the publication of her story “The Opium Lady” in its tenth issue. Young further utilized Caetani’s blessing on returning from Europe to Iowa City on the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship that Engle arranged for the completion of her novel. Playing the role of literary agent, Young made certain to promote the best of her students’ work for publication in Caetani’s journal. One of them, Peter Merchant, recalled how Young’s workshop method brought about the unexpected result of his being published in the Botteghe Oscure and other literary periodicals, despite that pedagogical method’s defiance of the program’s more conventional approach to professional development.
Although it was not Greenwich Village, the Workshop that Merchant encountered included a clear sense of togetherness. “The closer one approaches the Workshop itself—its offices, its students—the more concentrated this sense of a truly literary community becomes,” as critic Andrew Levy observed. In the main offices, Merchant was overwhelmed with signs of this insular enclave on bulletin boards showcasing the famous writers and their children—“Workshop babies”—born or conceived in Iowa City; the phone ringing with calls from Nobel Prize winners; bookshelves loaded with volumes penned by Iowa alumni and faculty. But unlike Young’s prior residence in Greenwich Village, in the heart of one of the world’s most diverse and densely populated urban centers, Iowa City’s tiny population magnified the insularity of the creative writing collective represented at the Workshop. Without the distractions of New York City’s endless boroughs and neighborhoods full of culture and commerce, Iowa City’s rural isolation intensified the intimacy of students and instructors alike, distilling and concentrating both camaraderie and competition. Students were well aware of the futility of the workshops themselves as learning experiences. They understood that “if [they] wanted constructive criticism of [their] work, the last place to go would be a community of recent college graduates all wanting to be writers, all competing for the same slender perks.”48 No one understood this paradox better than Young, whose workshops conformed to protocol in form only.
Not Killing Your Darlings
Peter Merchant’s tutelage under Young typifies how the construction of creative community at the Workshop cracks under the pressure of “an urban planner’s equivalent of the ambivalent rejection of the romance of the artis
t, and the uneasy embrace of literary professionalism,” as Levy notes. “The dream of authorship is so strong that it moves the landscape.”49 Young firmly believed that the path to that dream was not through depersonalized writing obsessed with omission. As in her advice to Merchant that he should expand rather than condense his writing, guidance that was also integral to Murray’s and Kellner’s creative development, she instead felt the dream of authorship was rooted in the depths of the psyche. There, she believed, the writer must surrender conscious control of narrative convention. “Stop being afraid of yourself,” she advised Merchant. “Let go. Explore the phantasmagoric below the surface. Allow your unconscious to take over.”50
Merchant had been trained from the beginning to “cut your darlings—you have to prune your rosebush ruthlessly.” After doing just that with his first assignment, he handed it to Young marked up, with line after line crossed out. He offered to retype it, but she said she could read it in its current state. Next to every omission, Young wrote, “As was.” “I tried to cut all the dead wood, and you want me to keep it?” Merchant asked, exasperated that she would have him undo his painstaking pruning. She retorted, “You’ve crossed out the best parts of your writing.” His rational mind had interfered with his most probing insights. He had cut the line, “She saw the sun glittering on the hothouse roofs and wondered why they didn’t crack from the heat,” claiming it was “nonsense. Hothouse roofs don’t crack from sunlight.” Young would have none of this, asking him rhetorically, “Her fear of sex has nothing to do with her fantasy about glass shattering? Come, now.” Merchant then went about implementing her suggestion to “put back all those fantasies. You can cut the logistical realities—they don’t matter and they’re dull.”51 In less than a month, the manuscript swelled beneath his hand to three hundred pages.
Merchant’s manuscript was the subject of a mini-workshop of three students, Bruce Kellner, Carl Van Vechten (who would later become Gertrude Stein’s biographer), and Richard Kim, selected by Young. The group gathered at his house and listened as he read deep into the night, finishing at 2 A.M. The consensus was that it was a beautiful story, but the denouement was lacking. “You will suffer, and then you’ll find it,” Kim said, in a prophecy that came true. The concluding chapter had been rejected by Merchant’s publisher and proved troublesome. Then, Merchant wrote, in a rush of creative energy fueled by Young, “suddenly and effortlessly, I typed the last chapter in about two hours, and that was it.” The key was the discovery of his unconscious that unlocked the fantasies of his characters. Merchant was now aware that his training under Young was not without its professional and financial rewards. “By the end of the first year, I sold my story . . . to a British publisher,” a feat that made him “wild with excitement and pride.”52
Much to the surprise of others in Merchant’s workshop class, publication flowed freely from Young’s unorthodox approach to teaching. One of Merchant’s classmates (unnamed in his account), “a wiry tough Iowan with a caustic wit,” arrived in the class deeply skeptical of Young’s methods, openly smirking at her mystical flights. He secretly showed Merchant a scathing parody of Young he had written that cruelly mocked her fascination with the “phantas-ma-goric.”53 After receiving his work, Young calmly invited the abrasive youth to her home to discuss ways of improving the story. After “a long session with her,” they went for a beer at Kessler’s. Leaning on the bar, he stared straight ahead. “I’ve changed my view,” he said, his once mocking voice now earnest and full of resolve. “There’s more to my story than I’d thought,” he realized, tacitly acknowledging that there was also more to Young than he had thought. After deep revisions, under her expert guidance, the piece landed in the pages of Botteghe Oscure, the aesthetic purveyor of precisely the “phantas-ma-goric” fiction he had sent up. The journal paid him “what seemed to us all an enormous sum.” To Merchant’s astonishment, the satirist “was the first of our group to be published.”54 Young’s acumen for literary business also enabled her to realize, in retrospect, that her 1,200-page magnum opus escaped her intended audience, because “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling would have sold many more copies had I published one volume at a time.”55
In addition to understanding the pragmatics of establishing a viable literary career, Young knew the motivation to write drew from a well of deep psychological need. In one workshop, she asked “Why do you all write?” One student paraphrased Samuel Johnson by saying, “Anyone who doesn’t write for money is a blockhead.” Another cited Milton’s maxim that “Fame is the spur” driving all authorship. Others rendered more personal motives. “Because my father never listens to me,” one confessed. Immortality was the reason another student took up the pen, who proclaimed, “Before I die, I want to leave behind, ‘one poem as cold/ and passionate as the dawn,’ as Yeats said.” Young leveled her eyes at them. “You all write,” she said, “because you want to be loved.”56
Young herself wrote to be loved; she taught as a form of expressing her love. Merchant was astonished by the time and energy she committed to her students, especially since the “professional survival” of faculty “depends little on their teaching, and a lot on their own publication.”57 Her encouragement to Iowa students like Murray to “try on a style,” was rooted in her belief that “style is thinking.” She refused the assumption shared by many elite writers at the Workshop that talent was innate. Like Emerson’s concept of the infinitude of private man, she instead believed in a radically democratic notion of creative power that is “almost a commonplace, something that almost everyone shares—and most people dream.” The difference between Merchant before he encountered Young and after his tutelage followed the pattern of the hundreds of students she mentored at Iowa. They first approached her as “dully neutral” writers, each with “a very active tollkeeper, turning many things back,” a symptom she diagnosed as a fear “of writing what he really thinks and feels.”58 The Workshop culture, in her view, tended to play on such inhibitions. Working against this institutional norm, she propelled her students to new levels of creative achievement.
Young suggested to all of her students that, as D. J. Enright said of Thomas Mann, “it takes a sound realist to make a convincing symbolist.”59 Powerful creative writing, she urged, is “based upon a close observation not only of the inner world of sleep and dreams, but of the outer world of contemporary and historical event which saves the writer from mechanical fantasies.”60 Reportorial observation of her contemporary world, such as the weary passengers stepping off the midnight bus in Iowa City, provides access to the interiority of the characters in Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. “The bus-driver was whistling, perhaps in anticipation of his wife.” She envisions him driving “erratically, perhaps because of the heavy mist” and veering “off into a ditch,” a scene unmistakably drawn from the endless sea of farmland surrounding Iowa City, where he “and his three passengers would be killed, our dismembered heads rolling in a corn field of withered corn stalks.”61 Her overstuffed apartment brimming with tokens of her imaginary life bespoke the bus driver’s real identity as a “bachelor, perhaps even some mad Don Quixote chasing windmills.”62
In Iowa City, her closest friends Gustav and Leola Bergmann kept up a vigorous correspondence with her for decades beginning in the 1950s. As late as December 1983, long after Young had left the Workshop, she revealed to Leola a secret desire she would never act on, but one that speaks volumes of her affinity for the community of academic life. “I always thought I wanted to write an academic novel,” she confessed, “but know that without limitless years ahead and other commitments, I never will.” Too deeply committed to her biography of Eugene Debs, and nearing the end of her life, she knew this dream was out of reach. The works she had read in this genre convinced her she could do better. “Have you read Katherine Shattuck’s Narrowest Circle? Or did you read Elizabeth Hardwick’s novel about that tuxedo murder?” she said, alluding to The Simple Truth.63 It alerted her to how one “can do better than the latter
which evoked perception in favor of abstraction and generality,” areas she considered her strong suit.64 Instead she pressed forward with her Debs project, which took on a life of its own, exceeding in manuscript pages and notes her gargantuan project of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. In the absence of a novel of ideas to write, the Debs manuscript was a nonfictional substitute, a capacious intellectual journey through history and culture, indicative of that seemingly unlimited “well of energy” her neighbors in Greenwich Village identified nearly a half century before. Although she passed away in 1995 before completing the epic three-volume history, Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs appeared posthumously under the editorial care of Charles Raus. As she lived out her final years in the Village, she became something like a literary Rip Van Winkle—a figure from a bygone era, beloved and endearing, flush with fascinating tales from the past. After first meeting her on Bleecker Street, the Iowa-born poet Amy Clampitt aptly remarked that Young “was and still is, part of the neighborhood, a lingering monument to a literary bohemia that has all but vanished.”65
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