Luminaries flocked to this otherwise unknown rural outpost in large part thanks to Engle’s business acumen, promotional savvy, and relentless will. The Workshop transformed Iowa City into “a Rive Gauche, rising out of the infinite plains and truck stops of mid-America,” in the words of his successor John Leggett.6 Both town and university have recently been rebranded specifically to draw on this prestige. Engle’s successor in the International Writing Program (IWP), Chris Merrill, spearheaded the movement for Iowa City’s designation as a UNESCO City of Literature. Soon after that designation became official, the University of Iowa branded itself the “Writing University.”7 In conjunction with the City of Literature organization, the IWP, rather than the Workshop, is now the keeper of Engle’s memory.
But deeper causes lurk behind his lack of lasting accolades. His undisguised competitive drive for capital built the economic foundation so crucial to attracting the world’s most acclaimed literary talent. That strength in promotion and fund-raising, however, was considered unbecoming to many in the world of letters who saw him as an uncouth businessman. In the early 1990s, for example, Director Frank Conroy expressed a sentiment shared by many at the Workshop when he confessed to Leggett his disappointment that “the new [Michener] fellowships” would be “named, unfortunately, after Paul Engle.”8 Despite Engle’s instrumental role in building the program into the powerhouse that it continues to be today, his memory has all but vanished from both Dey House (the program’s headquarters) and the broader Workshop culture. “Few graduates know anything about him, and none read his poetry,” as Loren Glass noted.9 Yet the Workshop continues to bear his legacy of intense competition played out in a culture of triumph and shame in the workshop method he institutionalized.
Competition was fundamental to Engle’s original vision for the program. “The Ivy League has had the past, the Big Ten will have the future,” he predicted in the February 1957 issue of Holiday magazine, fighting words that were reprinted in the Michigan Alumnus. Members of the Ivy League retorted by alleging that Big Ten institutions such as Iowa were “educational rabbit warrens.”10 By the 1950s, the Workshop’s reputation had already been established based on the names of such distinguished authors as Flannery O’Connor. Alumnus Robert Dana recalled how “the Workshop during the ’50s was Paul Engle’s homegrown, popcorn version of the Paris sidewalk café.” Engle’s homespun manner could pass for eccentric charm to some, or appear crude and off-putting to others. During a visit to the creative writing program at what was then called Arizona State College in Flagstaff, for example, the faculty treated him to a breakfast of “whole grain pancakes with real maple syrup.” His hosts were shocked when Engle “licked the can” because “the syrup was so good he did not want to miss those drops.” When the topic of conversation turned toward his extensive speaking tour on behalf of the Workshop, Engle sounded like the itinerant confidence man of Mark Twain’s “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg,” a charlatan who specializes in fleecing unlettered bumpkins. “In the boonies,” he said with a smirk, “one can get away with the most outrageous statements, as long as one wears a jacket and tie.”11
Publicity
In his role as the Workshop’s impresario, Engle knew no bounds. In 1963 he wrote to First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy requesting that she appear on campus for a promotional event to support the program. A personal letter from the White House, signed “Arthur,” from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., special assistant to the president, noted that he “passed the letter from President Hancher and the Baudelaire pamphlet on to Mrs. Kennedy.”12 Engle had invited her to be Honorary Chairman of the Twenty-Fifth Fine Arts Festival to be held in Iowa City in the summer of 1963. Although the first lady demurred, she was just one of many world-famous celebrities he fearlessly courted; he was unafraid to ask for the world. Decades later the pattern reversed itself when the White House began reaching out to the Workshop, as President Barack Obama tapped Marilynne Robinson on several occasions for awards and visits.
Another major event during the early 1960s, billed as “A Day Celebrating the Friends of the Writing Program at The State University of Iowa,” featured the “Special Guest: Bennett Cerf, President, RANDOM HOUSE,” as the program read.13 In 1961, the Workshop’s influence over canon formation had reached the publishing industry, as seen in Random House’s agreement to “publish a large anthology of poetry and fiction by the best writing talent from the Iowa writing program.” Near that time a collection titled New Poets of England and America appeared. “Over one-third of the American poets were from the S.U.I. program in writing,” the press reported. “A similar example would be the naming of one-third of the All-American players in football from one university,” Engle boasted in one of the many sports analogies he favored to rationalize dominance and competition.14
The establishment of such a dominant position over the literary world required an unusual array of public relations tactics, many of which exploited Workshop students. The J. M. Hickerson advertising agency, for example, struck a deal with Engle for a “Portrait of Iowa campaign” proposed on March 28, 1960. The firm agreed to “create and run a series of 12 unusual, distinctive and ‘logical’ advertisements about Iowa during a period of 12 months, each advertisement to consist of illustrations by an Iowa artist, copy by a student in Paul Engle’s creative workshop, and signatures of 12 sponsors.” The ad broker offered to place the series in the New York Times, with its massive circulation at the time of 614,169 commanding a cost of $36,540 for twelve “Dominant ads.” For access to the Wall Street Journal’s affluent 609,922 readers, the price was $68,400 for a dozen ads, and $101,232 for twelve full-page spreads.15
The power of the Workshop brand, particularly in leveraging promotion for Iowa businesses, was the cornerstone of Hickerson’s plan. “Sponsors seeking out-of-Iowa business now could expect to profit rather quickly,” he suggested, while others “seeking Iowa business from new citizens of Iowa could expect to profit later.” “Promotional possibilities are tremendous!” according to the unctuous pitch, as companies “willing to shell out $400 or more per month for 12 months” included “the Des Moines Register and Tribune, Viking Pump, Boss Hotels, Electrical Companies of Iowa, Maytag, the Iowa Bar Association, Amana, Iowa Bankers Association, and Collins Radio.” Hickerson suggested that “copy for this pattern advertisement can be written here, although the idea of the campaign is to have the copy written, at least drafted by a creative workshop student.”16 The main objective was of course commercial rather than pedagogical, as evidenced by the willingness to credit Workshop students for writing that was actually produced by the advertising agency. Ghostwritten ad copy bearing Workshop student bylines designed for salability meant the Workshop name, rather than the students’ writing itself, carried the greatest value as a promotional tool in the advertising series. Language polished by ad agents bearing students’ names presented a PR opportunity for the Workshop of the sort Engle had spent his career devising.17
The vast majority of Engle’s time and energy was spent orchestrating such arrangements with advertising agents, publishers, business, and government agencies. He had little time for his own writing; his own teaching, by most accounts, was intermittent. Robert Dana, one of his greatest allies, even found his demeanor “enigmatic, and contradictory, and hard,” recalling a man who cut an intimidating figure on campus. Engle often strode past his own faculty and students “in the university library without so much as a nod.” His disdain for writers who “hadn’t turned in any good work lately or published it anywhere” was notorious.18 Yet faculty members were well aware that “graduate assistants write his books for him,” as Vonnegut leaked in correspondence to the incoming instructor Richard Gehman, with the impish caveat to “burn this letter.”19
Engle’s use of graduate students often involved lucrative deals with magazine and newspaper publishers. Joan Rattner, special features editor of This Week Magazine, responded to Engle’s pitch letter, suggesting he contribute to the series “Words to
Live By.” The journal, the editor notes, “has achieved enormous popularity and has had as contributors such people as Joseph Auslander, Somerset Maugham, Aldous Huxley and Frank Lloyd Wright.” She offered $250 for 250 words on an inspiring quote, especially one offering affirmation “in these days of open cynicism about moral and spiritual beliefs.” The reach was considerable: This Week was “distributed by 42 leading U.S. Sunday newspapers to a combined audience of over 13,000,000 families—the largest magazine audience in America.”20 Engle promptly spurred his charges.21 Such activity remains hidden from view at Dey House today, largely because it threatens to undermine the program’s current focus on maintaining its elite literary reputation.
The prevailing literary view of mass culture as a problem rather than an opportunity clashed severely with Engle’s financial tactics. Resistance to commercial writing ran counter to the program’s efforts to develop professional authors for whom writing could be the primary occupation and source of income, ideally without resorting to teaching for an added layer of financial security.22 Some Workshop MFAs clearly deviated from the standardized literary writing of their training by venturing into genre fiction, as in the case of mystery novelist Max Allan Collins. Collins made his career at the heart of popular culture by scripting the Dick Tracy comic series. David Morrell, another Workshop graduate, also found success in popular culture. Working in a stairwell office on the third floor of the English-Philosophy Building, Morrell composed First Blood (the novel that spawned the Rambo films starring Sylvester Stallone) while enrolled in the MFA program. Unlike the vast majority of English and Workshop faculty, former English department chair Brooks Landon considered the office sacred ground, claimed it as his own, and has occupied it for decades since.
Collins and Morrell, however, were exceptions to the anticommercial sentiment in the Workshop culture. Engle attempted to legitimate commercial writing in the program without sacrificing literary prestige, as seen in his promotion of lucrative literary journalism through deals such as Esquire’s sponsorship of the 1959 symposium “The Writer in Mass Culture.” The magazine seemed to provide the solution to how “all widely-published writers have faced the constant issues of art and the marketplace.” Esquire pursued literary prestige with its goal “to encourage fine writing at its source.” By bridging the gap between “the huge circulation magazines [that] quite naturally want works which will be popular” and “the literary quarterlies [that] attract a very fine, but small and specialized audience,” the journal represented the ideal publication to be associated with the Workshop as Engle envisioned it.23 Through this middlebrow industrial logic, Esquire leveraged creative writing programs to recruit fresh literary talent for its pages.
The Workshop continues to show reluctance to embrace its growing visibility in mass culture. Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature staff attested to the ongoing resistance to its sanctioned efforts to publicize the program. Uncooperative Workshop faculty members have frustrated UNESCO’s primary function, which is to celebrate and promote Iowa City’s literary culture. One UNESCO staff member suggested that many affiliated with the program worry that UNESCO’s promotional mission will eventuate in “tour buses full of visitors converging on Dey House,” turning it into the American equivalent of Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of Shakespeare, which has become a highly commercialized and popular tourist destination.24
The concern is that the ongoing function of the institution cannot sustain active tours and visitors coursing through the facilities. Most of the other nineteen cities bearing the City of Literature distinction, which include Dublin and Prague, have literary reputations not isolated to a single government-funded institution but spread more organically throughout various districts and local haunts unique to their civic cultures. These decentralized urban literary cultures contrast with that of Iowa City, which is highly concentrated in one exclusive academic unit. The city’s underground press, to which UNESCO is blind, vanished in the late 1970s. In this sense, Iowa City is not so much a city of literature as an institution of literature housed in a midwestern Big Ten university, surrounded by corn fields and hog farms. Iowa City, the second UNESCO City of Literature named in 2008, after Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2004, only has a literary history insofar as it is connected to the Workshop. On a civic level, the vast majority of literary lines of ascent run through the program. Workshop authors account for more than two-thirds of book readings and signings at Iowa City’s famous Prairie Lights Bookstore, named after City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, which served as the hub of the Beat Generation. Current data visualization projects on the Workshop suggest how future research might digitally map the constellation of its faculty and graduates who have helped establish the literary reputations of the other nineteen UNESCO Cities of Literature.25 Most Cities of Literature in essence revolve around Iowa City, and more specifically, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Empire
The vast power and influence of the Workshop have recently come under the scrutiny of Workshop graduate Eric Bennett, who wrote an essay published in the Chronicle of Higher Education in February 2014 titled “How Iowa Flattened Literature.” Bennett charges that the program systematically narrows the focus of literature, an argument that can be traced back to his animosity toward the former director Frank Conroy’s teaching style, expressed through a powerful description of Conroy in his King Lear phase, flailing at his demons and snarling at invisible forces. But it generated the most serious controversy for discussing how Engle had accepted a financial contribution from a source funded by the CIA, when the International Writing Program received funds from the Farfield Foundation in 1967, although Bennett himself admits that there is no firm evidence that Engle was aware that the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was in fact a CIA front. “More than a few readers interpreted the Chronicle piece as evidence of conspiracies,” Bennett says, but he “found no evidence that the CIA money influenced writing at Iowa.”26 Bennett insists that some readers unfairly characterized him as a conspiracy theorist.
Bennett may disavow the insinuation that “spies and spooks” shaped the writing in Engle’s program, but he remains firm in his contention that the Workshop director’s “vision . . . was both shaped and motivated by the Cold War.” He takes a broad view of cultural assimilation of Cold War ideology, pointing out “the intellectual and ideological climate particular to two decades of American history, starting in 1945.” That climate describes a pattern of values “both harder and more important to understand than a conspiracy theory.”27 This logic undermines Bennett’s intent to peg the Workshop as a conspicuous participant in that intellectual and ideological climate. Hardly a factory of uniform doctrinaire Cold War cultural production, the Workshop was typical of the era’s many cultural institutions that gathered funding from government sources. Engle’s patriotism, more ordinary than extraordinary for its time, did not necessarily make him an ideologue. His internationalist bent and abiding conviction in free expression across cultures is evident in his indefatigable work on behalf of the International Writing Program. It is ironic indeed that during his lifetime he was accused by affiliates of the House Un-American Activities Committee of “connections with Communist front groups,” whereas after his death others linked him to the CIA, each representing polar opposite factions in the Cold War.28
Enter John Leggett, Gentleman Publisher
Such sensationalistic—often contradictory—portraits of Engle’s political identity stem from deeper resentment toward his ruthless pursuit of capital through the commercialization of the Workshop brand and willingness to commodify its unique artistic charisma. More than his politics, this commercial zeal made him a lightning rod for controversy during his lifetime. John Leggett, the director between the Engle and Conroy eras, from 1969 to 1987, likened Engle to a kind of P. T. Barnum, a “great literary showman” who was the antithesis of the English department chair John Gerber, “the consummate academic statesman” and “The Silver Fox.”29
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