84. “Ayana Mathis: 2013 National Book Festival,” Library of Congress National Book Festival, Library of Congress, 14 January 2014, web video.
Epilogue
1. Plaque Dedicated to Paul Engle, Literary Walk, Iowa Avenue, Iowa City, Iowa.
2. Paul Engle’s Plot, Oakland Cemetery, Iowa City, Iowa (Photo by Travis Vogan).
3. Loren Glass, “Middle Man: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” Minnesota Review (Winter/Spring 2009), 10.
4. Zlatko Anguelov, “Paul Engle,” The Writing University, web.
5. Paul Engle, A Lucky American Childhood (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), ix.
6. Tom Grimes, ed., The Workshop: Seven Decades of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (New York: Hyperion, 1999), 707.
7. In 2000, then governor Tom Vilsack designated October 12, Engle’s birthday, as “Paul Engle Day,” naming him “Iowa’s Poet of the Century.” Merrill persuaded UNESCO to establish two projects that bear Engle’s name, the Paul Engle Prize, an annual literary award first given to Workshop faculty member James Alan McPherson in 2011, and the Glory of the Senses high school essay contest.
8. Frank Conroy to Jack Leggett, 10 May 1990, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The stigma of Engle was behind Conroy’s refusal of an offer from highly acclaimed poet and Workshop alumnus Robert Dana to provide a one-day workshop and reading from his latest book. Dana had been a longtime Engle ally, making his otherwise reasonable bid unconscionable to Conroy, who disingenuously alluded to “the sad news of the current budget crunch” despite the Workshop’s flush financial situation. The Workshop, as he reported to former director John Leggett, in fact “was in fine shape” financially, enjoying “four years of the highest salary increases in the College of Liberal Arts.” Frank Conroy to Robert Dana, 7 October 1991; Frank Conroy to Jack Leggett, 10 May 1990, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
9. Glass, 10.
10. “The Mighty Big Ten Versus the Ivy League” [Advertisement for Holiday] Michigan Alumnus 73.13 (16 February 1957), 230.
11. Ed Dinger, ed., Seems Like Old Times (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 21–22.
12. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to Paul Engle, 6 November 1962, PPE SCUI, Box 8.
13. “A Day Celebrating the Friends of the Writing Program at The State University of Iowa,” 18 September 1962, PPE SCUI, Box 8.
14. “11 Students at S.U.I. Win Industries’ Writing Grants,” Des Moines Register, 24 November 1960, PPE SCUI, Box 8.
15. J. M. Hickerson to Paul Engle, 28 March 1960, PPE SCUI, Box 8.
16. J. M. Hickerson to Paul Engle, 28 March 1960, PPE SCUI, Box 8.
17. Another emblematic instance of Engle’s use of Workshop student writing for public relations appeared in a promotional piece published in the magazine Transmission: Northern Gas Company. The full-page advertisement for the Workshop trumpeted, “Writers with the creative urge find fertile ground for literary development at the State University of Iowa’s . . . [in large letters below] WRITERS’ WORKSHOP.” The text below continues the pitch: “In the Workshop a writer is exposed to intensive discussion and demonstration of all elements of writing as well as to an extensive sampling of the literature of all times and all countries.” Following the advertisement is a short story titled “Beany” credited to Workshop student Andy Fetler. Northern Gas Company was of course one of Engle’s many corporate sponsors. In this case, as with the agreement contracted with advertising agent J. M. Hickerson, Inc., students’ writing functions as advertising. [Advertisement for Iowa Writers’ Workshop], Transmission: Northern Gas Company 10.1 (1962), 15, PPE SCUI.
18. Robert Dana, ed., A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), ix.
19. Kurt Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut Letters, ed. Dan Wakefield (New York: Delacorte Press, 2012), 132.
20. Joan Rattner to Paul Engle, 16 March 1960, PPE SCUI, Box 8.
21. Popular audiences with literary or high cultural pretensions formed Engle’s target market for publicity, as seen in the libretto of an opera he wrote for Hallmark’s Hall of Fame television program. In bringing high culture to the masses, Engle worked closely with Webster Schott at Hallmark, who also read the manuscript of his book Western Child and offered suggestions. Webster Schott to Paul Engle, 28 March 1960, PPE SCUI, Box 8.
22. The prospect of teaching creative writing as the primary means of living presumably supplemented by royalties from one’s publications, according to Workshop MFA Geoffrey Wolff, suggests that the employment of creative writers by the academy is corrupt. Real authors, he argues, need no institutional shelter from the market. “Those who can’t, teach; those who can, sell to Dreamworks and Disney,” he urges, noting “it’s always risky to accuse others of selling out,” typically novelists such as Workshop graduates Max Allan Collins and David Morrell brokering deals with movie producers for their work. Geoffrey Wolff, “Communal Solitude,” in The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Frank Conroy (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 107. The justification of selling to Disney as validation of one’s literary worth is evident in Director Frank Conroy’s promotion of his students for the Disney Studios’ Apprenticeship Writers’ Program with Walt Disney Pictures and Television. Judy Weinstein to Frank Conroy, 18 January 1990, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
23. “The Writer in Mass Culture,” Transcript, SCUI; Dorothy Collin, “Four Writers Will Speak at 2-Day Session,” Daily Iowan, 4 December 1959.
24. Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature Staff, in conversation with David Dowling, Iowa City, Iowa, 13 October 2015.
25. Nicholas M. Kelley, “Mapping the Program Era: Sample Data Visualizations,” The Program Era Project, 31 May 2016, web.
26. Eric Bennett, Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015), 112, 196 n. 114.
27. Bennett, 112.
28. “Engle Denies Charges of Red Ties,” Tuxedo, N.Y., 9 November, A.P. “Paul Engle Denies He Has Un-American Committee Listing” [newspaper clippings, n.d., no journal titles], PPE SCUI.
29. Grimes, The Workshop, 708.
30. Grimes, The Workshop, 708.
31. Grimes, The Workshop, 709.
32. Grimes, The Workshop, 707, 710, 714.
33. Eric Bennett, “How Iowa Flattened Literature,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 10 February 2014, web.
34. Grimes, The Workshop, 654.
35. Grimes, The Workshop, 709.
36. Tom Grimes, Mentor: A Memoir (Portland, Ore.: Tin House, 2010), 31.
37. Kent Williams, “Workshop Woes: A Supposedly Bad Thing the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Did to Literature,” Little Village, 20 February 2014, web.
38. David Foster Wallace, “Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise,” Harper’s (January 1996), 41.
39. Wallace, 42.
40. Wallace, 42–43.
41. Wallace, 43.
42. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925 [2004]), 54.
43. Wallace, 43.
44. Grimes, Mentor, 8–9. As described in chapter 15, Reza Aslan similarly was appalled at the deceptive bait-switch tactic by which Conroy lured him into thinking he was a “pet” only to blindside him with a humiliating vivisection in his first showing at workshop. Aslan swears by Conroy’s teaching, insisting that all the knowledge necessary for his authorial career he acquired in the director’s seminar. Reza Aslan, “Reza Aslan Reading, Live from Prairie Lights,” 7 April 2005, University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections, Iowa Digital Library.
45. Email correspondence, Lan Samantha Chang to David Dowling, 8 June 2016.
46. Ellis is an African American, which co
mplicates the racial dynamics of the narrative of what Joy Harjo characterized as a predatory atmosphere in the program between male faculty, most of whom where white, and their female students, one that traces back at least to the 1950s. Eric Olsen and Glen Schaeffer, eds. We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (New York: Skyhorse, 2011), 64.
47. Jia Tolentino, “Is This the End of the Era of the Important, Inappropriate Literary Man?” Jezebel, 28 March 2016, web; Jeff Charis-Carlson, “Writers’ Workshop Professor Still Employed After Classes Canceled, Reassigned,” Iowa City Press-Citizen, 11 May 2016, web. For the testimony of the eleven women alleging sexual misconduct perpetrated by Workshop faculty member Thomas Sayers Ellis, see “Reports from the Field: Statements Against Violence,” VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, 6 March 2016, web.
48. David McCartney, email correspondence with author, 11 November 2017.
49. W. D. Snodgrass, “Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors,” in A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Robert Dana (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 144.
50. Frank Conroy to Norman Mailer, 19 April 1990, RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
51. Tolentino.
52. Paul Engle, ed., Midland: Twenty-Five Years of Fiction and Poetry, Selected from the Writing Workshops of the State University of Iowa (New York: Random House, 1961), xxii.
53. Anguelov.
54. Snodgrass, 124.
55. Paul Engle, A Lucky American Childhood (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), xxiii.
56. Engle, A Lucky American Childhood, xxi; “ ‘Yes’ Is the Basic Attitude at S.U.I., Atkinson Finds,” Des Moines Register, 12 May 1961, PPE SCUI. Atkinson was the New York Times reporter who had published a feature story on the Workshop in 1961.
57. Grimes, The Workshop, 707.
58. Mike Klein, “This Place in Iowa Makes World Famous Writers,” Des Moines Register, 13 April 2016, web.
59. Connie Brothers, interview with David Dowling, 2 December 2015.
60. A number of strenuous arguments to the contrary have arisen in defense of the Workshop on the issue of uniformity of writing in an institutionalized setting. Frank Conroy, for example, denied these allegations in a two-page typed statement apparently intended for public relations purposes that appears in his Director’s file. In it, he objects to the charge—perhaps most visibly made by Nelson Algren in 1973 in The Last Carousel—that “first novels of short-stories are shallow, naïve, slick, and jejune, so the argument goes, because they were written in Workshops made up of graduate students who know nothing about life and hence have nothing to write about.” Conroy insists, “its [sic] a facile argument that sounds okay until one examines the rather arrogant assumptions that lie behind it,” namely that “some other environment exists—a garret, perhaps, with attendant poverty, loneliness and despair—that would turn out better writers.” He debunks the idea that “a Golden Age” existed “before workshops, when people learned in the school of hard knocks and produced great stuff.” His points are compelling until he overextends himself with the claim that “most first novels of fifty years ago are forgotten now, and weren’t any better than contemporary work. I dare say they were worse.”
In justifying contemporary literature, Conroy of course is defending his own dual role as contemporary author and facilitator of contemporary literary production as director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But he contradicts his sweeping defense of contemporary literature in his attempt to refute the assertion that “Conformism! Writing by committee!” lurks behind the system of weekly meetings, presided over by an older writer, of young writers reading and responding to each other’s work. Conroy alludes to his experience as reviewer for the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, “in which I read thousands of manuscripts”—all contemporary—“from all over the country and noticed more conformity, and especially conformity to the aesthetics of the marketplace,” posited as a far more pernicious source than a creative writing program, “in non-workshop writers than I did in those writers attending the numerous MFA programs spread out over the nation.” A litany of Iowa Writers’ Workshop authors then follows as evidence of the eclectic nature of such programs, yet not successfully disproving the allegation of conformist writing since each was trained in a radically different era: “its [sic] hard for me to connect people like Flannery O’Connor, John Irving, Tracy Kidder, Jayne Anne Phillips, Ethan Canin, or T.C. Boyle, except that they’re all fine writers.” Frank Conroy, circa 1989 [n.d.], RIWW SCUI, Series V, Box 1, Director’s Files, access under permission of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
61. Klein.
62. Ethan Canin, “Smallness and Invention; or, What I Learned at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” in The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, ed. Frank Conroy (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 26.
63. Grimes, The Workshop, 716.
64. Grimes, Mentor, 220.
65. Grimes, The Workshop, 717.
66. Laurie Van Dyke, “Both Engle Captors Nabbed,” 4 August 1959, Cedar Rapids Gazette; Laurie Van Dyke, “Paul Engles Tell Gazette of Ordeal,” 2 August 1959, Cedar Rapids Gazette, PPE SCUI.
67. Van Dyke, “Both Engle Captors Nabbed”; Van Dyke, “Paul Engles Tell Gazette of Ordeal.”
68. Paul Engle, “Introduction” to Midland, manuscript draft, PPE SCUI.
69. Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night (New York: Random House, 1969), v.
Index
Abdullah, Nick, (i)
Absence of Mind (Robinson), (i)
Academy of American Poets, (i), (ii)
Adams, Jon Robert, (i)
“Adolescence II” (Dove), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The (Twain), (i)
Affliction (Banks), (i)
After the Workshop (McNally), (i)
Age of Grief, The (Smiley), (i)
“Agosta the Winged Man” (Dove), (i)
Alcott, Louisa May, (i)
Algren, Nelson, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)n60
Ali, Muhammad, (i)n10
All My Pretty Ones (Sexton), (i)
All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque), (i)
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, The (Chabon), (i)
American Beauty (film), (i)
American Child (Engle), (i), (ii)
American Gothic (Wood), (i), (ii)
American Poetry Anthology, (i), (ii)
American Psycho (Ellis), (i)
“American Scholar, The” (Emerson), (i), (ii)
Amis, Kingsley, (i)
Amis, Martin, (i), (ii)
“And in My Heart” (Cassill), (i), (ii)
Andreasen, Nancy, (i)
Andrews, Clarence, (i)
Andrews, Norton, (i)
Angel in the Forest (Young), (i), (ii), (iii)
Angelou, Maya, (i)
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), (i)
Antaeus, (i)
Apocalypse Now (film), (i)
Aslan, Reza, (i), (ii), (iii)n44
Atlantic, (i)
Auslander, Joseph, (i)
Bach, Johann Sebastian, (i)
Bachelard, Gaston, (i), (ii)
Bad Boys (Cisneros), (i)
Baker, Desmond, (i)
Baker, Leona May, (i)
Baker, Mary Jane, (i), (ii)
Balakian, Nona, (i), (ii)
Baldwin, James, (i)
Ball, Lois Harjo, (i)
Bamboo (Bowen), (i)
Barclay, Winston, (i)n72
Barden, Dan, (i)
Barn Blind (Smiley), (i)
Barnes, Roslyn, (i), (ii)
Barr, John, (i)
Barth, John, (i)
Barthelme, Donald, (i)
Baudelaire, Charles, (i)
Bausch, Richard, (i)
Beat movement, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Beckett, S
amuel, (i)
Bednasek, Robert, (i)
Beethoven, Ludwig van, (i)
Bell, Martha, (i)
Bell, Marvin, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
Bellamy, Edward, (i)
Bellevue Literary Review, (i)
Bellow, Saul, (i), (ii)
Beloved (Morrison), (i)
Belvin, Bill, (i)
Bemelmans, Ludwig, (i)
Benedict, Pinckney, (i)
Bennett, Eric, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Bergholz, Susan, (i)
Bergmann, Gustav, (i)
Bergmann, Leola, (i)
Bergzorn, Bernard, (i)
Bernhard, Thomas, (i)
Berryman, John, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii); aesthetics of, (i); drinking habits of, (i), (ii); Lowell’s work viewed by, (i); psychological troubles of, (i), (ii); severity of, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v); Thomas’s influence on, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Bidart, Frank, (i)
“Big Trip Up Yonder, The” (Vonnegut), (i)
“Bird Frau, The” (Dove), (i)
“Birthmark, The” (Hawthorne), (i)
Bishop, Elizabeth, (i)
Black Arts Movement, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Black Dialogue (journal), (i)
Black Hawk Down (Bowden), (i)
Black World (journal), (i)
Blaine, Ed, (i)
Blake, William, (i), (ii), (iii)
“Bloodfall” (Boyle), (i)
Bloom, Stephen, (i)
Bluest Eye, The (Morrison), (i), (ii)
Blue Orchard, The (Taylor), (i)
Blutschwestern (Viebahn), (i)
Bly, Robert, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)n63
Bode, Richard, (i)
Body and Soul (Conroy), (i), (ii)
Bogaards, Paul, (i)
Bond, R. T., (i)
Bonnefoy, Yves, (i)
Booker Award, (i)
Borchardt, Georges, (i)
Boswell, James, (i)
Botteghe Oscure, (i), (ii)
Bourjaily, Vance, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)n6, (vii)n10; machismo of, (i); Smiley’s recollections of, (i), (ii), (iii); Vonnegut backed by, (i), (ii)
Bowden, Mark, (i)
Bowen, Howard, (i), (ii)
Bowen, Robert O., (i)
Boyle, Kerrie, (i)
Boyle, T. C., (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii); absurdist style of, (i), (ii), (iii); authorial role viewed by, (i); Cheever and Irving cultivated by, (i), (ii), (iii); drug addiction of, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); entrepreneurism of, (i), (ii); feminism lampooned by, (i); loyalty of, (i), (ii); as teacher, (i), (ii), (iii); upbringing of, (i); Workshop methods embraced by, (i), (ii)
A Delicate Aggression Page 55