A Delicate Aggression
Page 53
9. Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (New York: Scribner, 2000), 87.
10. One scene particularly captured how these volatile ingredients funneled into male authorial ambition. As Glen Schaeffer recalled, “At the time, not a weekend went by that Mailer wasn’t in the news for punching someone in an expensive Manhattan restaurant.” Literature and boxing became seamless, since Mailer’s most recent book, The Fight, detailed the “rumble in the jungle” featuring Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Schaeffer’s Workshop instructor, Vance Bourjaily, claimed that Mailer had trained for his public altercations. At a pig roast he was hosting for the graduate students, Bourjaily suggested only half-jokingly that Schaeffer challenge Mailer to a fight. “We were all drunk,” Schaeffer explained, “and I believe John Falsey egged it on.” Bourjaily’s suggestion was not entirely in jest, since he was a long-standing friend of Mailer’s from his early days in New York City. The aging Mailer, then in his early fifties like Bourjaily, might represent the older generation at the bout billed as “an exhibition at Iowa.” There he could prove “that theirs was the baddest generation.” Schaeffer proposed that he could write up the event as a participatory MFA thesis in the spirit of Frederick Exley’s Fighting Norman Mailer. They abandoned the idea, however, when Schaeffer realized that if he was to trounce Mailer in the ring, he would be maligned for destroying a beloved icon, and if he lost, he and his generation would suffer total humiliation. Olsen and Schaeffer, 182–183.
11. Olsen and Schaeffer, 218.
12. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 261.
13. Smiley’s revelation of the abuse endured by her female classmate behind closed doors points to a pattern of patriarchal control over burgeoning female creativity that traces back to the nineteenth century. In Fanny Fern’s fictional autobiography Ruth Hall, from 1855, we hear of the entrapment of the young, precocious female writer at the hands of an aggressive editor who attempts to seize and monopolize her talent as his own. “Stay!” exclaimed her editor, “placing his hand on the latch,” the symbol of his attempt to lock her into exclusive publishing rights. She eludes him, to his frustration, while he shouts, “I’ll have my revenge” as “the last folds of her dress fluttered out the door.” Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall and Other Writings (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 157.
14. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 261.
15. Mary Ann Cain, “ ‘A Space of Radical Openness’: Re-Visioning the Creative Writing Workshop,” Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? ed. Dianne Donnelly (Bristol, U.K.: Multilingual Matters, 2010), 220.
16. Cain, 221.
17. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (New York: Penguin, 2014), 54.
18. Carmen Haydee Rivera, Border Crossings and Beyond: The Life and Works of Sandra Cisneros (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2009), 22.
19. Olsen and Schaeffer, 227.
20. Olsen and Schaeffer, 200.
21. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 261.
22. T. Coraghessan Boyle, “This Monkey, My Back,” in The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Frank Conroy (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 9.
23. Nakadate, 6–7.
24. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 265.
25. Jane Smiley, “Swiss Family Schaeffer,” Nation, 15 October 2007, 32–36.
26. Olsen and Schaeffer, 78.
27. Olsen and Schaeffer, 99.
28. Josh O’Leary, “Smiley Discusses ‘Prophetic’ Book,” Iowa City Press Citizen, 27 October 2015, 1A-8A, Alumni Files, RIWW SCUI.
29. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 264.
30. Jane Howard, Families (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1978), 247.
31. Howard, 256.
32. Howard, 254.
33. Howard, 222.
34. Philip Roth, “Iowa: A Very Far Country Indeed,” Esquire, December 1962, 132.
35. Howard, 253.
36. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 267.
37. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 264.
38. Howard, 17.
39. Olsen and Schaeffer, 186.
40. Dwight Garner, “Allan Gurganus,” Salon, 8 December 1997, web.
41. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 263.
42. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 262–263.
43. In Good Prose, Kidder recalls how he “said harsh, dismissive things about other students’ stories, precisely because they were no worse than my own, and sometimes even better.” He resolved to “submit as little as possible to workshops” to avoid the abuse he witnessed, such as that of a woman who “after her story had been pummeled a while, stood up and declared to the class, ‘This is a story about a lot of beautiful people, and a lot of beautiful things going down!’ and stalked out of the room.” Kidder recalled his classmates attacking one another’s writing through withering slights that included “ ‘pretentious, sentimental, boring, and Budweiser writing.’ ” Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction (New York: Random House, 2013), 137–138.
44. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 263.
45. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 263.
46. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 264.
47. Stephanie Vanderslice, “Once More to the Workshop: A Myth Caught in Time,” in Does the Workshop Still Work? ed. Dianne Donnelly (Bristol, U.K.: Multilingual Matters, 2010), 31.
48. Olsen and Schaeffer, 100.
49. Quoted in Garner.
50. Jane Smiley, “Jeffrey, Believe Me,” in The Age of Grief: A Novella and Stories by Jane Smiley (New York: Knopf, 1987), 64.
51. Smiley, “Jeffrey, Believe Me,” 65.
52. Jane Smiley, Note to “Long Distance,” in The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Tom Grimes (New York: Hyperion, 1999), 377.
53. Jane Smiley, “A Reluctant Muse Embraces His Task, and Everything Changes,” in Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from the New York Times, ed. John Darnton (New York: Times Books, 2001), 222.
54. Smiley, “Iowa City, 1974,” 267.
55. On December 15, 1973, just two years before Smiley’s composition of “Jeffrey, Believe Me,” the American Psychological Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in the DSM-II Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. “LGBT Rights Milestones,” CNN Library, 30 October 2015, web. This helps contextualize the gender ideology deployed in the story as far more progressive than it appears from a twenty-first-century vantage point.
56. Connie Brothers, interview by David Dowling, 2 November 2015.
57. Jane Smiley, “Curriculum Vita,” Coffee House Press Records, SCUI.
58. Robert McPhillips, “Jane Smiley’s People,” Washington Post, 19 November 1989, 8, Coffee House Press Records, SCUI.
59. Jay Schaefer, “Dentist, Bombs, and a Seducer,” San Francisco Chronicle [n.d.], Coffee House Press Records, SCUI.
60. Michiko Kakutani, “Books of the Times: The Age of Grief, by Jane Smiley,” New York Times, 26 August 1987, C21, Coffee House Press Records, SCUI.
61. Olsen and Schaeffer, 78.
62. Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, 372–373.
63. Jane Smiley, “Say It Ain’t So, Huck: Second Thoughts on Mark Twain’s ‘Masterpiece,’ ” Harper’s, January 1996, 61. This article pioneered the alternative feminist approaches to the American male literary canon, paving the way for recent journalism that has called into question monuments like Henry David Thoreau, as in Kathryn Schulz’s “Pond Scum,” New Yorker, 29 October 2015, web.
64. For a defense of Twain arguing that he should not be held to the standard of “Smiley’s modern political sophistication,” see Doug Underwood, Journalism and the Novel: Truth and Fiction, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 196. Underwood points out that since Twain “is certainly no contemporary liberal,” he should not be expected to be a “model of contemporary political correctness,” especially given “his sentimental view of his Missouri upbringing, his brie
f service with the Missouri troops opposing the Union Army, and his insulting statements about Native Americans in his other works” (196).
65. Underwood, 197.
12. Red High-Tops for Life: T. C. Boyle
1. Eric Olsen and Glenn Schaeffer, eds., We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (New York: Skyhorse, 2011), 230.
2. Olsen and Schaeffer, 230.
3. Jef Tombeur, “An Unpublished Interview with T. Coraghessan Boyle,” Auteurs.net, April 1989, web.
4. T. C. Boyle, World’s End (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988), ix.
5. Elizabeth E. Adams, “T. Coraghessan Boyle: The Art of Fiction,” Paris Review 161 (2012), web.
6. Sandra Cisneros and Joy Harjo, Literary Friendships, American Public Media, 17 May 2005.
7. Paul Gleason, Understanding T. C. Boyle (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 1.
8. Gleason, 1–2.
9. T. C. Boyle, “This Monkey, My Back,” in The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Frank Conroy (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 7.
10. T. Coraghessan Boyle, “Greasy Lake,” in Greasy Lake and Other Stories (New York: Penguin, 1986), 2.
11. Tombeur.
12. Anthony DeCurtis, “T. Coraghessan Boyle: A Punk’s Past Recaptured,” Rolling Stone, 14 January 1988, web.
13. Boyle, “This Monkey, My Back,” 8.
14. Allen Ginsberg, “Howl, For Carl Solomon,” in Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights, 1959), 9.
15. Boyle, “This Monkey, My Back,” 8.
16. Boyle, “This Monkey, My Back,” 8.
17. Adams.
18. Boyle, “This Monkey, My Back,” 8.
19. Adams.
20. Boyle, “This Monkey, My Back,” 7–11.
21. Adams.
22. Olsen and Schaeffer, 231.
23. Gleason, 2.
24. Nelson Algren, The Last Carousel (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973), 77.
25. Olsen and Schaeffer, 79.
26. Scott Rettberg, “Scott Rettberg Interviews T. C. Boyle,” Auteurs.net, 23 November 1998.
27. Connie Brothers, interview with David Dowling, 2 December 2015.
28. Adams.
29. Rettberg.
30. Rettberg.
31. Boyle, “This Monkey, My Back,” 11.
32. Olsen and Schaeffer, 232.
33. Adams.
34. Adams.
35. Judith Handschuh, “T. Coraghessan Boyle,” Bookreporter, 1998–2000, accessed 26 January 2016, web.
36. Adams.
37. Algren, 77.
38. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribner, 2009), 65.
39. Algren, 77.
40. Tombeur.
41. Boyle, “This Monkey, My Back,” 10.
42. Olsen and Schaeffer, 169.
43. Olsen and Schaeffer, 227.
44. Rettberg.
45. Cameron Martin, “T. C. Boyle: An Email Dialogue with Cameron Martin,” Barnes and Noble Review, 9 February 2009, web.
46. Olsen and Schaeffer, 239, 118.
47. Martin, “T. C. Boyle: An Email Dialogue.”
48. Adams.
49. Mark Mittlestadt, “Grace and Rubies ‘Not Private,’ ” Daily Iowan, 27 February 1976, 3.
50. Diane Friedman, “City Holds Keys to Grace and Rubies,” Daily Iowan, 31 August 1976, 6.
51. Mittlestadt, 3.
52. Boyle, Descent of Man, 95.
53. Boyle, Descent of Man, 84.
54. Boyle, Descent of Man, 98.
55. Boyle, Descent of Man, 97–98.
56. Patricia Lamberti, “Interview with T. C. Boyle,” Other Voices 33 (Fall–Winter 2000), web.
57. T. Coraghessan Boyle, Preface to “A Women’s Restaurant,” in The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Tom Grimes (New York: Hyperion, 1999), 306–307. In addition to Irving’s inspiration, Dickens provided Boyle’s model for simultaneously reaching highbrow readers and a mass audience, in a piece flush with literary allusions—“Lysistrata, Gertrude Stein, Carrie Nation” along with Melville and Dickens—but with unmistakable appeal to readers of Penthouse who would delight in a scenario involving an obsessed, Ahab-like monomaniac’s mission to infiltrate the women-only restaurant. Boyle, Descent of Man, 85.
58. Friedman, 6.
59. Boyle, Preface to “A Women’s Restaurant,” 306.
60. Boyle, Descent of Man, 85.
61. A closer examination of Boyle’s stories in the collection Descent of Man reveals a pattern of brutality and sexist attitudes toward women, though thoroughly satirized and obviously not condoned. The title story, “Descent of Man,” for example, begins with the line, “I was living with a woman who suddenly began to stink” (3). It goes on to tell a surreal tale of sexual competition according to the magical realist plot of a love triangle between the jealous narrator, his anthropologist wife, and her chimpanzee subject, who becomes her lover. The story features hilarious instances of the protagonist measuring himself against an ape, a rival who bests him physically and intellectually. Aghast that the creature has cleaned out their provisions, the narrator demands an explanation from his wife, who says he is “a big, active male and that she can attest for his need for so many calories” (14).
Other instances give pause, such as the widely anthologized “Greasy Lake,” in which Boyle’s alarmingly sympathetic narrator nearly commits the act. Set on an empty beach, his story “Drowning” depicts a random act of violence evocative of Camus’s The Stranger. Lacking the humor of “Descent of Man” and the madcap antics of “A Women’s Restaurant,” it evokes the nadir of man’s regression to primitive impulsive violence. The story portrays the violation of a sole sunbather not only by the fat social misfit who encounters her while combing the beach, but a group of fishermen who are the woman’s would-be rescuers. Yet another figure who might save her drowns at sea. The dark view of humanity impinges directly on the violation of the female body, as with so many of the stories in Descent of Man.
62. Boyle, Preface to “A Women’s Restaurant,” 306–307.
63. The piece stands along with Iowa graduate Robert Bly’s men’s counter-movement—yet hardly so pious and self-righteous—as another backlash against first-wave feminism from the Workshop. Like Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, Boyle glories in the physical kinetic ballet of fight scenes—the “Greasy Lake” narrator takes a kick to the face described like a high-stepping majorette—among characters whose motives for brawling are as absurd as they are comic, and often impulsive to the point of social deviance glimpsing a dark nihilistic universe.
64. “Grace and Rubies Restaurant,” Lost Womyn’s Space, 16 December 2011, web.
65. Lynne Cherry, “Grace and Rubies: A Women’s Haven,” Daily Iowan, 31 May 1977.
66. “Our Correspondents: Iowa City,” Dyke: A Quarterly 2 (1977), 86.
67. Olsen and Schaeffer, 310.
13. The Mystic: Marilynne Robinson
1. “Courses,” Iowa Student Information System, University of Iowa, web.
2. Bryan Appleyard, “Marilynne Robinson, Word’s Best Writer of Prose,” Times (London), 21 September 2008, web.
3. Wyatt Mason, “The Revelations of Marilynne Robinson,” New York Times Magazine, 1 October 2014, web.
4. Marilynne Robinson, interview with David Dowling, 13 April 2016, email.
5. “Marilynne Robinson,” The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (Comedy Central), 8 July 2010, web video; “UI Professor on ‘The Daily Show,’ ” Iowa City Press Citizen, 10 July 2010, RIWW UISC.
6. President Barack Obama and Marilynne Robinson, “President Barack Obama and Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation in Iowa,” New York Review of Books, 5 November 2015.
7. Joe Fassler, “Marilynne Robinson on Democracy, Reading, and Religion in America,” Atlantic, 16 May 2012.
8. Abby Aguirre, “The Story Behind President Obama’s Interview with Marilynne
Robinson,” Vogue, 14 October 2015, web.
9. Ross Posnock, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), xiv. Ellison wrote more than two thousand pages of his second novel but never finished it, perhaps the most bizarre quagmire following a famous first novel according to Wil Haygood, “The Invisible Manuscript,” Washington Post, 19 August 2007, web.
10. Emma Brockes, “A Life in Writing: Marilynne Robinson,” Guardian, 29 May 2009, web.
11. Jonathan Lee, “Interview with Marilynne Robinson, 2014 National Book Award Finalist, Fiction,” National Book Foundation, [n.d.], retrieved 1 March 2016, web.
12. Brockes.
13. Marilynne Robinson, “Being Here,” University of Iowa Presidential Lecture, 14 February 2010, web [video].
14. Although the film adaptation of Robinson’s Housekeeping received positive reviews, she objected to Columbia Pictures and director Bill Forsyth’s deviation from her novel’s conclusion. Jason W. Stevens, ed., This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2014), xii.
15. Quoted in Chad Wriglesworth, “Becoming a Creature of Artful Existence: Theological Perception and Ecological Design in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead,” in This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home, ed. Jason W. Stevens (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2014), 101.
16. Jason Stevens, “Marilynne Robinson: A Chronology,” in This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home, ed. Jason W. Stevens (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2014), xiii.
17. James H. Maguire, Reading Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (Boise: Boise State University Press, 2003), 11.
18. Maguire, 11.
19. Wriglesworth, 102.
20. Sarah Fay, “Marilynne Robinson: The Art of Fiction No. 198,” Paris Review 186 (2008), 60.
21. Susan Sontag to Frank Conroy, 6 April 1992, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
22. Frank Conroy to Susan Sontag, 6 April 1992, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
23. Brockes.
24. Karen Armstrong, “Marilynne Robinson’s ‘The Givenness of Things,’ ” New York Times, 7 December 2015, web.