On Feb. 10, The Chronicle of Higher Education published Eric Bennett’s essay, How Iowa Flattened Literature. Although it is better researched and more erudite than Stephen Bloom’s 2011 critique of Iowa published in The Atlantic, Bennett tilts at the twin windmills of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and International Writing Program in a way that has no doubt ruffled some feathers—to mix a metaphor.
Bennett, a graduate of the Writers’ Workshop, brings up two different topics in this essay: First, he summarizes his research on the founder of both the IWP and Writers’ Workshop, Paul Engle, which reveals that in 1967, Engle solicited a CIA front organization for money. This, along with Engle’s successful fund-raising amongst wealthy, conservative businessmen, is offered as proof of Engle’s ideological conservatism.
How Engle’s politics affected Iowa’s writing programs, Bennett leaves mostly as an exercise for the reader. He wishes to link Engle’s scandalous flirtation with mid-century American neo-liberalism to a more pervasive problem he perceives with writing workshops in general and the Iowa program in particular: that workshops promote a particular type of writing, and worse, that they discourage other, equally worthwhile literary ambitions. The subtitle of the piece sums it up: “With CIA help, writers were enlisted to battle both Communism and eggheaded abstraction. The damage to writing lingers.”
I highly recommend reading the article. It has a peculiarly rarefied sort of lit-crit bitchiness to it — a particularly refined vintage of sour grapes. This might sound like a put-down of Bennett, which I don’t intend — I loved this essay. He snipes at Iowa City literary lions in a way heard only sotto voce in Iowa City, after too many Maker’s Marks at George’s. His words crystallize the main criticism of the workshop-ization of literature, that workshops have homogenized writing and discouraged innovation. My only criticism of Bennett is that he could have spent less time taking the piss out of the éminences grises of Iowa writing programs and more time fleshing out the changes he would like to see, using a more positive tone.
Lest anyone think that the University of Iowa is a bad sport about Bennett’s criticism, the University of Iowa Press is publishing his Workshops of Empire, which goes into depth about the relationship between the Cold War politics and writing programs. I look forward to reading it. Bennett’s career as a novelist may have been deferred, but there’s no doubt he can spin a ripping yarn.
I am dubious about his idea of the ‘harm’ the Workshop has done to writing. For as long as I’ve been in Iowa City and around Workshop people, the tension between the officially-sanctioned aesthetic standards and the more unruly impulses of students has been an overt topic of controversy. One can attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and not end up a cookie-cutter Frank Conroy-approved literary writer. Many people have done so—mystery writer Max Allan Collins being a prime example. He took his MFA from the Workshop and ended up scripting the Dick Tracy comic strip for several years. Hell, David Morrell, who wrote First Blood, the novel that spawned the Rambo movies, is an Iowa Writers’ Workshop alumnus.
Many people have gone through the program, learning literary trade-craft without becoming lit-fic drones. And anyone who thinks $50,000 from the CIA is going to effectively influence the politics of writers has never attended a Workshop party: The writers in the Workshop will disagree about the time of day, at length, with multiple subordinate clauses.
As for Engle’s involvement with the CIA, this counts as a minor revelation. But it doesn’t make me think less of him. It is actually the case that the intellectual and literary freedom afforded writers in the United States is much broader than it is in many other countries. That aspect of American democracy isn’t a bad thing for writers from other countries to experience. The same is true of really good sweet corn. If the CIA wanted to make writers from around the world fall in love with Iowa, I’m sure they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Any ideological victories are less clear-cut and perhaps imaginary.
I didn’t know Engle except to say ‘hi’—I met him when he collaborated with my mother on an orchestral setting of his poetry. I used to run into him around town, most frequently at John’s Grocery, where he is said to have had an open liquor tab to fuel IWP soirees. My impression of him was that the idea of the IWP meant more to him than any ideological agenda. He no doubt did well fundraising with conservative businessmen and the CIA because he knew how to tailor his pitch to his audience, not because he shared a deep political affinity with them.
He was an American patriot but no ideologue. No one who spends his life with writers can afford to be narrow-minded. He truly loved the Workshop and its participants. I don’t think he ever got tired of interacting with writers from all over the world. Engle was a facilitator, not a dictator at the Workshop and IWP. I doubt he cared what anyone wrote, so long as it was good writing. And while it is true that he rates, at this point, as a minor 20th-century poet, no one looms larger in the field of educating writers. Perhaps, as Bennett asserts, Engle has much to answer for, but whatever shortcomings the Workshop method might have, I have a hard time blaming him.
By contrast, Bennett’s depiction of Frank Conroy is the most delicious part of the essay:
Conroy’s arsenal of pejoratives was his one indulgence in lavish style. “Cockamamie,” he’d snarl. “Poppycock.” Or “bunk,” “bunkum,” “balderdash.” He could deliver these quaint execrations in tones that made H.L. Mencken sound like Regis Philbin.
I suspect Conroy’s disdain for David Foster Wallace (Bennett writes in his essay, “Of David Foster Wallace [Conroy] growled, with a wave of his hand, ‘He has his thing that he does.’”) had more to do with Wallace’s take-down of Conroy in his amazing comic essay A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again than it did with Conroy’s opinion of Wallace’s fiction. Wallace exposed Conroy as someone willing to write a fawning puff piece about a cruise line for financial gain—not the sort of thing for which the head of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop would want to be known.
Workshops can actually be good for young writers. They get careful critiques that writers of previous generations only received if they were lucky enough to have good editors. Workshops also connect them personally to other writers, giving them a community in which, maybe for the first time, they’re taken seriously. Many a lifetime friend (and enemy!) has come out of attending a workshop. There are things that one can be taught about writing, and workshops teach them. If authors end up writing books that are smaller and flatter than they should be, they only have themselves to blame.
There is a craft of writing, and an art. A work of art has to transcend the prejudices and limits of the artist’s teachers. The kind of writers good enough to be accepted at the first-string workshop programs around the country are not a random sample of the general populace; they are exceptional and singular. The idea that they are susceptible to group-think seems like a tough sell. But Bennett deserves credit for doing his damndest to sell it.
