A Delicate Aggression

by David O. Dowling

Swofford’s tutelage under Conroy was pivotal in the development of his understanding of the memoir’s generic affinity with literary journalism from the vantage point of the privileged observer and ethnographer. Conroy, who was director of the Workshop when Swofford attended as a student, had also ascended to fame in his early thirties with a debut memoir that placed him at the forefront of the genre. Conroy’s Stop-Time, like Jarhead, received enough “fame and credibility [that] stemmed from the 1967 memoir” to last his entire career.32 Swofford would spend years just as Conroy did struggling to regain his literary voice. But what he learned from Conroy at the Workshop was a respect for Stop-Time’s accomplishments, particularly its unflinching depiction of an absentee alcoholic father and painful upbringing by an itinerant mother who fell in with a drifter. As an instructor, “Frank’s decorous spine controlled the modes and moods of the room,” Swofford told me. His course had such a profound impact on his creative development that, he confessed, “I still have the yellow pad that I took notes on for his workshop. I reread it a few times a year” to revisit to the core principles of “the art of storytelling” as he learned them from this “master teacher.”33

  With Conroy on his MFA thesis committee, Swofford’s supervisor of the project was Chris Offutt. Offutt’s disarming and affable bearing in the classroom was the opposite of Conroy’s intimidating tactics and Joy Williams’s exacting, intensely professional workshops. Williams was notorious for running “her workshops as though she were a NY editor who’d never met the writer who had tossed a manuscript through the transom,” Swofford recalled in an interview with me. Although “a few egos were battered” in her workshop, he was convinced it was worth having “that mind working on one’s writing.” Offutt’s class was a collaborative and upbeat exchange, by comparison, with the instructor providing “a bottomless well of enthusiasm for the truly crazy attempt we were all making at becoming working writers.” Reflecting back, he realized Offutt had “played a pedagogical trick on us by letting us think we were his peers, and thus raising the bar to heights we might not otherwise have reached.” Swofford benefited from “his attention to story, world, and word discipline” in ways he had not anticipated.34

  Offutt’s mentorship of Swofford at Iowa from 1999 to 2001 is thus a curious pairing. Where precisely would a Kentucky-raised graduate of Morehouse State with no military experience overlap in Swofford? At first glance, Offutt’s work bears little relevance to Swofford’s interest in transmuting his Gulf War experience into literary narrative. When Swofford first met him in Iowa City, Offutt had published the regional short story collections Kentucky Straight (1992) and Out of the Woods (1999) and the memoir The Same River Twice (1993). His next memoir, No Heroes, was in progress when he was mentoring Swofford at the Workshop. Beside his collegial approach to teaching, how could Offutt’s nostalgic naturalism in his celebrations of his Kentucky home—“When I feel lonely, I go to the woods . . . that’s shagbark hickory my favorite tree . . . I got a little bit of owl in me”—have been the guiding force behind Swofford’s magnum opus?35

  Offutt himself was a privileged observer of his own father’s career as a mass market writer of pornographic novels. Swofford’s MFA thesis, “Escape and Evasion,” is rife with raw sexuality that challenged the program’s relatively liberal standards. The Workshop historically had been open to erotic detail in student writing, with some instructors even teaching its proper technique, as in R. V. Cassill’s own interest in literary erotica. Offutt’s New York Times feature, “My Dad, the Pornographer,” is a frank disclosure of his publication of licentious literature bearing such titles as “Bondage Babes” and “Sex Toys” with Greenleaf and Orpheus in the 1960s and Grove Press in the 1970s and 1980s. Totaling more than four hundred novels, his work even included an erotic comic titled Valkyria. Offutt’s father wrote “pirate porn, ghost porn, science fiction porn, vampire porn, historical porn, time-travel porn, secret agent porn, thriller porn, zombie porn, and Atlantis porn.”36 It seemed that there was nothing Offutt had not seen from an insider’s vantage point in the world of forbidden fiction by the time he began mentoring Swofford.

  Director’s Cut

  Sexuality abounds in the fiction Swofford wrote for his MFA thesis. It is a violent weapon in the hands of a predatory homosexual named PFC Brockner in the title story “Escape and Evasion.” The story of the fictional Ether Bandit serial rapes that take place on a Marine base is told from two alternating perspectives split between Brockner’s psychopathic sadistic rendition and Sergeant Savine’s narrative. Savine is ostensibly the voice of heterosexual normativity, a leader of a sniper unit like Swofford’s USMC Surveillance and Target Acquisition/Scout Sniper platoon. As an extension of Swofford himself, he is written sympathetically in blunt contrast to Brockner, who is a savage preying on a series of young Marines he systematically stalks, etherizes, and violates. Gritty and nearly unbearable scenes of bloody rapes fill the story, which begins with the cracked Brockner fantasizing about forcing himself on his recruiting officer after being asked the requisite questions for new enlistees at the time: “Do you now or have you ever had homosexual tendencies? Are you now or have you ever been engaged in a homosexual relationship?” His unspoken response is that he “will gladly take you back to the head, the head as you call it, and show you” that homosexual sex “is not necessarily a relationship and absolutely more than a tendency.”37 Such screening for homosexuality, according to Swofford’s narrative logic, is entirely justified to prevent the entrance of such toxic individuals into the military. After Savine and his men follow the trail of the brutal attacks on innocent young recruits, they retaliate by accosting Brockner and allowing his victims to exact their gruesome revenge with a flashlight that leaves him “a mess, blood and muscle tissue exploding from his insides out.” Brockner is depicted as taking perverse pleasure in the attack. Savine prevents him from hemorrhaging to death by applying “a pressure bandage to his wound and injecting him in the hip with two morphine syrettes.” The twist ending depicts Brockner recovering in the infirmary and finding his name on “the Division crime blotter as another victim of the Ether Bandit.”38 The counter-assault therefore backfires, as the real Ether Bandit, who epitomizes the view of homosexuality as a toxic threat in the military, thus lives on safely disguised as a victim in the unit.

  Offutt, having grown up in an environment of radical tolerance and no-holds-barred experimentation in literary sexuality, was perhaps the most likely of any Workshop faculty member to condone Swofford’s overtly homophobic story, which formed the culminating project of his Workshop training. Swofford’s MFA thesis reads like the director’s cut of Jarhead, venturing into territory Hollywood never would have. Indeed, it is telling that the title story in his MFA thesis, “Escape and Evasion,” appeared in Sex for America: Politically Inspired Erotica (edited by Stephen Elliot) in 2008, just one year after Swofford’s foray into romantic genre fiction in Exit A. Viewing the film Jarhead in 2015 in Iowa City, Swofford remarked, “the thing that shocked me about watching the film just now, having not seen it in a decade, was just how sexist and homophobic the world was.” On the one occasion where Swofford has differentiated his book from the film, which he otherwise typically praises for its fidelity, he insisted, “I’m pretty sure my book isn’t that sexist and homophobic.” It is ironic that he would find “there’s something about seeing the rendering of it on film that felt . . . dangerous and unsavory,” especially since those words apply equally to the politics and aesthetics of his own MFA thesis.39

  Swofford returned to the Workshop as an instructor in 2007 after two years as a celebrity in the media spotlight. In the wake of the film, he received more critical acclaim and toured the television talk show circuit, including an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in April 2003. In April 2016, he told me that when he “taught at the Workshop in 2007 shortly after Sam [Lan Samantha Chang] took over the directorship,” he was afforded a unique “perspective on the generational and cultura
l shift” that took place between his cohort at the end of the Frank Conroy era and the new one under Chang. He characterized the change in leadership as progressive, and “important if one is to consider the history of the Workshop and the idea of it moving forward.”40 Workshop secretary Connie Brothers, who had been in the main office for several years before Conroy arrived, confirmed the sentiment, noting that many minority and women writers in the program had distinct disadvantages during the Conroy era. She remembered Swofford as a “wonderful addition” to the Workshop since he had “just come back from fighting in the Gulf War,” and was “working on a nonfiction book.”

  Swofford may have been working on a nonfiction memoir, but his MFA thesis consisted of short stories, ones nonetheless containing eight pages that went directly into Jarhead. In the mid-1990s, the second major nonfiction writer, John D’Agata, was admitted by Jorie Graham into the poetry Workshop, where he took courses while enrolled in Iowa’s nonfiction writing program. Conroy’s own masterpiece Stop-Time, it should be remembered, is nonfiction but “reads like a novel,” as Brothers observed.41 Stephen Bloom, an Iowa journalism professor and Conroy’s friend who shared a booth with him most afternoons at the Chesapeake Bagel Company in downtown Iowa City, said, “the book was the best kind of fiction because it was numbingly true.”42 Conroy, one learns in Stop-Time, was an abused child who endured bizarre and brutal treatment at the hands of his deranged father.

  When Conroy arrived at the Workshop in 1977–1978, he hardly took the program by storm. “He had never taught before and was feeling insecure about it,” Brothers recalled. It was not until years later, after he returned in 1987 to take over as director, that he allegedly drove one student to tears and made another faint with his vitriolic criticism during two particularly spirited workshop sessions. But Brothers qualifies the legend by pointing out that the student who collapsed had been to the dentist earlier in the day, and was “still feeling a little woozy” from the medication. “When her story [for workshop] came out, he probably said something quite harsh, and she did faint,” Brothers confirmed. Conroy was chosen over several candidates for the directorship mainly on the strength of his work as an administrator with the National Endowment for the Humanities literature division. He remained as director for the next eighteen years, until his death in 2005. “What’s important about the Workshop is who is admitted, and who you get to teach,” Brothers observed. “Frank was excellent at choosing who to admit, and was amazing at selecting faculty. Strong students and teachers create success that reproduces itself.” A major strength was his connection to the publishing industry. Conroy’s “strong opinions” during workshop sessions meant that if a story came up “and he hated it, and he said it, the result definitely damaged some people, because they thought they were tougher than they were.” She went on to explain, “if you write something from your soul, and somebody tells you it isn’t good enough, it can’t help but hurt you. Some people thrived on that atmosphere and some people didn’t.”43 Swofford, who had survived boot camp, was one of the students who thrived in this environment.

  Swofford in fact appreciated the discipline Conroy emphasized, noting how he “always ran professional and polite workshops that had only one concern: the quality of the writing.”44 According to the old Paul Engle approach to creative writing pedagogy, Conroy was convinced only strict and severe discipline could lead to that quality. Swofford recalled Conroy saying “on the first day that writing was about character and that character was wrapped in discipline.” He explained, “For Frank, character was sitting at the computer or with that yellow pad until you were totally exhausted,” a view of the creative process as necessarily laborious and painstaking.45 This approach to literary production as a torturous trial of self-sacrifice only increased students’ psychological and emotional investment in their writing, correspondingly heightening the damage suffered and losses incurred by the barbs they received during workshops.

  Attending the Workshop with Swofford and writing under Conroy’s supervision in the late 1990s was Reza Aslan, currently a professor of creative writing at UC Riverside. Speaking at the famous Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City on April 7, 2005, one day after Conroy had passed away, Aslan told of how he was actively recruited, or perhaps poached, by the director. “This is exciting work, young man,” Conroy said in a low growl, his voice rough from decades of cigarettes and Scotch. Aslan’s fiction had exceeded his expectations. When Aslan enrolled and attended his first workshop with Conroy, he thus volunteered to be the first to put up his work, submitting the exact same piece that Conroy had found so brilliant. Terribly underestimating his new mentor, Aslan assumed the piece would be praised since “he had already given it his blessing,” leading him to believe “I was the pet.” “So I turned it in with all confidence.” What he received was “two and a half hours of abuse, I mean the worst kind of abuse.” Aslan explained, “he absolutely destroyed this text, at one point—and I’m not making this up—he actually started reading passages in a funny voice to emphasize how bad my writing was.” He joked that unlike one infamous student, he “managed not to faint,” but still felt “tricked” and “bamboozled.” Conroy later asked him “how I liked my first workshop experience,” a kind of baptism by fire. Aslan, trying to put on a brave face, “lied and said ‘oh, it was great, I learned a lot!’ ” Conroy said, “I’ve been doing this for twenty years. I know who’s got it and who doesn’t. You’ve got it, but the problem is you don’t know how to write.” Aslan said, “he was right. And in the next thirteen weeks he taught me absolutely everything I know about writing.”46

  Conroy’s salty classroom demeanor should not overshadow how consistently he fought for and defended his students. Pinckney Benedict, for example, earned the James Michener Award for 1988–1989, an esteemed distinction that granted $7,000 paid out in monthly installments for one year beginning in September 1989. The stipulation, Conroy made clear, was that he must reside in Iowa City and “not take other employment, and teaching in particular is out, while you hold the fellowship.”47 Benedict did precisely that when he realized that the grant’s monthly payments of a paltry $583 could barely sustain him. Once Michener himself discovered that Benedict had taken a teaching job at the Hill School, a private boarding academy for ninth through twelfth grade, he became livid. “Laboring through the third version” of his current manuscript, Michener found it particularly irksome to “compare my very hard work with his teaching in a school for the sons of millionaires,” something that “struck me as so out of proportion that I had to protest to Nelson, our money watchdog.”48 Conroy promptly replied with a gracious mea culpa, apologizing that such an egregious indiscretion “happened on my watch,” and offering to return the grant. With tact and diplomacy, he assured Michener’s watchdog Nelson that his student Benedict “feels bad about the situation, and would, I’m sure, return the Michener-Copernicus money over time if so directed, although it might take quite a while.”49 Based on such a compelling appeal and forthright confession, Michener took his cue from Conroy to assume the role of the gentleman patron and assured him that “certainly Benedict should not even think of returning the money,” instead suggesting he should pass along the proceeds “when he’s hit a big novel” to benefit “those about to make the same effort.”50

  Life After Jarhead

  The progressive cultural shift marked by Lan Samantha Chang’s directorship in the wake of the Conroy era seemed ahead of Swofford’s gender politics, at least as portrayed in the pages of Exit A. The Daily Iowan criticized those politics in the novel’s hypermasculine protagonist Severin Boxx, “the son of a colonel, resident of Yokota military base, and star linebacker of his high school football team.” These details prompted the reviewer to ask sarcastically, “masculinity anyone?” In addition, the novel played into the romance genre for women readers so stereotypically that it appeared the author “forgot to make his characters human,” in what reads like “a recycled romance movie,” a point also made
in Vollmann’s Times review. The Daily Iowan review appeared on the day of his scheduled reading and signing for Exit A at the Prairie Lights Bookstore. “If you happen to attend” the reading, the reviewer snidely suggested, “patiently wait through the sections of Exit A. Then raise your hand and politely ask him to read something from Jarhead.”51

  As of recently, Swofford was in the process of relocating to the West Coast after several years raising his new family in New York.52 His career hangs in the balance, but promises new ventures given the vibrant multimedia landscape. Television and film projects are in the offing, and his marriage to Christa Parravani has yielded several opportunities for professional collaboration. He contributed to Parravani’s reading event, for example, for her powerful memoir titled Her about the loss of her identical twin sister.53 His legacy with the Workshop remains that of a warrior-author at the turn of the twenty-first century, a product as much of Frank Conroy’s embattled classrooms as the battlefields of Kuwait. Swofford’s epigraph in Hotels most poignantly captures the heaving tumult of a reception that canonized him in the early 2000s and crucified him by the end of the decade and into the next. Thomas Bernhard’s words epitomize his career: “War is the poetry of men, by which they seek to gain attention and relief throughout their lives.”54 War, poetry, and attention continue to be the heaviest things he carries on his path—in literature and life—toward the relief of ever elusive peace.

  15 • The Voice: Ayana Mathis and Mass Culture

  Harpo, the multiplatform billion-dollar entertainment production company, is a palindrome for Oprah. Although the company may not appear to bear the name of Oprah Winfrey—the most significant force behind the migration of literature into popular culture—its ethos and brand values mirror the identity of the former daytime talk show host who runs its operations. With each recommendation for her book club accounting for more than one million additional copies sold, “The Oprah Effect” (also known as the “Oprah bump”) creates instant bestsellers.1 In 2007, Business Week reported that, for driving book sales, “no one comes close to Oprah’s clout: Publishers estimate that her power to sell a book is anywhere from 20 to 100 times that of any other media personality.”2 Her sway over a massive audience has given her a profound literary influence, as Ayana Mathis discovered one brilliant autumn afternoon in Paris in early October 2012, when her mobile phone rang.