#Maybe you could even say Continental Americans for a big broad term

[artemis-crimson]

I don’t think I have petty hated something as much as everyone saying USAmerican. I want to lobotomize everyone who uses that fucking phrase and peaceably euthanize whatever useless fecal homunculus came up with that stupid goddamn by putting a potato gun full of anthrax in their mouth and pulling the trigger.

[criticalotterstudies]

As for the hype, it followed the money and attracted more of it. The publishing moguls Henry Luce and Gardner Cowles Jr. conceived of themselves as fighting a battle of ideas, as they contrasted the American way of life with the gray Soviet nightmare on the pages of their newspapers and glossy magazines. Luce published Time and Life, Cowles published Look and several Midwestern newspapers, and both loved to feature Iowa: its embodiment of literary individualism, its celebration of self-expression, its cornfields.

Knowing he could count on such publicity, Engle staged spectacles in Iowa City for audiences far beyond Iowa City. He read memorial sonnets for the Iowa war dead at a dedication ceremony for the new student union. He convened a celebration of Baudelaire with an eye toward the non-Communist left in Paris. He organized a festival of the sciences and arts. Life and Time and Look transformed these events into impressive press clippings, and the clippings, via Engle’s tireless hands, arrived in the mailboxes of possible donors.

In 1954, Engle became the editor of the O. Henry Prize collection, and so it became his task to select the year’s best short stories and introduce them to a mass readership. Lo and behold, writers affiliated with Iowa began to be featured with great prominence in the collection. Engle marveled at this, the impartial fruits of his judging, in fund-raising pitches.

The Iowa Workshop, then, attained national eminence by capitalizing on the fears and hopes of the Cold War. But the creative-writing programs founded in Iowa’s image did not, in this respect, resemble it. No other program would be so celebrated on the glossy pages of Look and Life. No other program would receive an initial burst of underwriting from Maytag and U.S. Steel and Quaker Oats and Reader’s Digest. No other program would attract such interest from the Asia Foundation, the State Department, and the CIA. And the anticlimax of the creative-writing enterprise must derive at least in part from this difference.

...

These first three categories were the acceptable ones. But Category 4 involved writing things that in the eyes of the workshop appeared weird and unsuccessful—that fell outside the community of norms, that tried too hard. The prevailing term for ambitious pieces that didn’t fit was "postmodernism." The term was a kind of smackdown. Submitting a "postmodern" story was like belching in class.

But what is a postmodern story? In those years, Robinson was already in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction, as were Jayne Anne Phillips (alumna) and Bobbie Ann Mason, model citizens of the M.F.A. nation. Joy Williams and Stuart Dybek were certainly not Victorians nor modernists nor best sellers. What was it that you weren’t supposed to do?

At the time I considered Freud and Rabelais my favorite novelists. Later I understood that I was being annoying. But I thought then, and still think now, that the three-headed Iowa canon frustrated as much as satisfied a hunger for literature that got you thinking. Iowa fiction, published and unpublished, got you feeling—it got you seeing and tasting and touching and smelling and hearing. It was like going to an arboretum with a child. You want exactly that from life, and also more.

People at Iowa love to love Prairie Lights, the local independent bookstore. In Prairie Lights I found myself overwhelmed by the literature of the senses and the literature of the quirky sensing voice. I wanted heavy books from a bunch of different disciplines: on hermeneutics, on monetary policy, on string theory, on psychoanalysis, on the Gospels, on the strange war between analytic and Continental philosophers, on sexual pathology. I was 23. I knew I wanted to write a novel of ideas, a novel of systems, but one also with characters, and also heart—a novel comprising everything, not just how icicles broken from church eaves on winter afternoons taste of asphalt (but that, too). James Wood did not yet loom over everything, but I wanted to make James Wood barf. At Prairie Lights, I would have felt much better buying the work of Nathan Englander (alum) if it had been next to that of Friedrich Engels. I felt there how I feel in bars that serve only wine and beer.

...

What was he talking about? He probably didn’t know exactly. Soon Engle would make the Communist conversion; soon after, he would convert back. His youthful exuberance could fit itself to the ideology nearest at hand. Sway, image, ethos, and glory attracted him: the raw power of words. In American Song, in 1934, when he was still a darling of the conservatives, he envisioned the American poet launching poetry into the sky like a weapon:

What did this even mean? It meant that the poetic and the public, the personal and the national, could still fuse in the right words. It was a dream that, after 1939, would vanish almost as quickly as Communism in America.

When Engle got back from England, the figure of T.S. Eliot—his hard poems, his oblique criticism, his antagonism to dialectical materialism—had long since embarked on its path to ascendancy on American campuses. The United States, the last power standing, would need some high culture of its own, and Eliot set the tone. The New Critics, his handmaidens, were waiting to infiltrate the old English faculties.

Within 10 years, modernism would win an unadulterated victory, and difficult free verse would sit alongside epics and sonnets on the syllabi. The day would belong to Robert Lowell, writing as a latter-day metaphysical. Engle—in his commitment to soaring iambic lines, to the legacy of Stephen Vincent Benét, to the open idiom that had so recently remained viable—would look like a has-been.

But it was not in Engle’s character to stand still or look back. His gut told him something that most educated citizens would have to learn from sociologists: that the postwar era belonged to institutions. The unit of power was no longer the great man but the vast bureaucracy. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" had satirized the bold lyrical speaker; that voice now sounded hushed, tiny, tragically diminished, none of which appealed to a mind as brawny and sunny as Engle’s. The unit of power was no longer the poem.

But it could be the poet as a concept, a figure, a living symbol—and therefore, implicitly, the institution that handled and housed the poet. Engle began working long hours at Iowa. His new poems, when he wrote them, merely burnished his credentials as an administrator, patriot, and family man. Many were sonnets, earnestly passé, and his audience included political patrons, present or prospective. (The politician W. Averell Harriman received flattering sonnets; after Kennedy was assassinated, and despite the advice of candid, unimpressed first readers, Jackie Kennedy received memorial verses.) Between the mid-1940s and the early 1960s, Engle transformed the Writers’ Workshop from a regional curiosity into a national landmark. The fiery spear-shaft of American song would take the form of an academic discipline. The fund-raising began.

Engle constantly invoked the need to bring foreign writers to Iowa so they could learn to love America. That was the key to raising money. If intellectuals from Seoul and Manila and Bangladesh could write and be read and live well-housed with full stomachs amid beautiful cornfields and unrivaled civil liberties, they would return home fighting for our side. This was what Engle told Midwestern businessmen, and Midwestern businessmen wrote big checks.

Engle borrowed tactics from the CIA long before their check arrived in 1967. At the time, the agency sponsored literature and fine arts abroad through the Congress for Cultural Freedom to convince the non-Communist left in Britain and Europe that America was about more than Mickey Mouse and Coca-Cola. The CCF underwrote Encounter magazine and subsidized subscriptions to American literary journals for intellectuals in the Eastern bloc. Some of the CIA guys were old Iowa graduates from the early 1950s—including the novelists John Hunt and Robie Macauley—and Engle probably first connected with the CIA through Hunt.

By the mid-1960s, Engle had grown remote from the domestic workshop, and so lost control of it. He let it go its own way and founded the International Writing Program with the help of the Chinese novelist Hualing Nieh, who would become his second wife. In retrospective accounts, Engle presented this founding as a sudden idea, a spontaneously good one. But it marked the culmination of the logic of 20 years of dreaming.

...

What did Conroy assault us in service of? He wanted literary craft to be a pyramid. He drew a pyramid on the blackboard and divided it with horizontal lines. The long stratum at the base was grammar and syntax, which he called "Meaning, Sense, Clarity." The next layer, shorter and higher, comprised the senses that prose evoked: what you tasted, touched, heard, smelled, and saw. Then came character, then metaphor. This is from memory: I can’t remember the pyramid exactly, and maybe Conroy changed it each time. What I remember for sure is that everything above metaphor Conroy referred to as "the fancy stuff." At the top was symbolism, the fanciest of all. You worked from the broad and basic to the rarefied and abstract.

Although you could build a pyramid without an apex, it was anathema to leave an apex hovering and foundationless. I’ll switch metaphors, slightly, since Conroy did too. The last thing you wanted was a castle in the air. A castle in the air was a bad story. There was a ground, the realm of the body, and up from it rose the fiction that worked. Conroy presented these ideas as timeless wisdom.

His delivery was one of a kind, but his ideas were not. They were and are the prevailing wisdom. Within today’s M.F.A. culture, the worst thing an aspiring writer can do is bring to the table a certain ambitiousness of preconception. All the handbooks say so. "If your central motive as a writer is to put across ideas," the writer Steve Almond says, "write an essay." The novelist and critic Stephen Koch warns that writers should not be too intellectual. "The intellect can understand a story—but only the imagination can tell it. Always prefer the concrete to the abstract. At this stage it is better to see the story, to hear and to feel it, than to think it."

Since the 1980s, the textbook most widely assigned in American creative-writing classes has been Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction. Early editions (there are now eight) dared students to go ahead and try to write a story based on intellectual content—a political, religious, scientific, or moral idea—rather than the senses and contingent experience. Such a project "is likely to produce a bad story. If it produces a bad story, it will be invaluably instructive to you, and you will be relieved of the onus of ever doing it again. If it produces a good story, then you have done something else, something more, and something more original than the assignment asks for." The logic is impeccably circular: If you proceed from an idea, you’ll write a bad story; if the story’s good, you weren’t proceeding from an idea, even if you thought you were.

...

Why has the approach endured and thrived? Of course, it’s more than brute inertia; when institutions outlive their animating ideologies, they get converted to new purposes. Over the past 40 years, creative writing’s small-is-beautiful approach has served it well, as measured by the discipline’s explosive growth while most of its humanities counterparts shrink and cower. The reasons for this could fill many essays.

For one thing, creative writing has successfully embedded itself in the university by imitating other disciplines without treading on their ground. A pyramid resembles a pedagogy—it’s fungible, and easy to draw on the board. Introductory math and physics professors like to draw diagrams too, a welcome analogy for a discipline wishing both to establish itself as teachable and to lengthen its reach into the undergraduate curriculum, where a claim of pure writerly exceptionalism won’t cut it.

Specialization is also crucial, both for credibility’s sake and to avoid invading neighboring fiefdoms, and today’s creative-writing department specializes in sensory and biographical memory. The safest material is that which the philosophers and economists and sociologists have no claim on, such as how icicles broken from church eaves on winter afternoons taste of asphalt.

And it’s easier to teach "Meaning, Sense, Clarity" than old literature and intellectual history. Pyramid building fosters the hope that we can arrive at the powerful symbol of a white whale, not by thinking it up ahead of time, but by mastering the sensory details of whaling. "Don’t allegorize Calvinism," Conroy could have barked at me, "describe a harpoon and a dinghy!"

The thing to lament is not only that we have a bunch of novels about harpoons and dinghies (or suburbs or bad marriages or road trips or offices in New York). The thing to lament is also the dead end of isolation that comes from describing the dead end of isolation—and from using vibrant literary communities to foster this phenomenon. In our workshops, we simply accept it as true that larger structures of common interest have been destroyed by the atomizing forces of economy and ideology, and what’s left to do is be faithful to the needs of the sentence.

To have read enough to feel the oceanic movement of events and ideas in history; to have experienced enough to escape the confines of a personal provincialism; to have distanced yourself enough from your hang-ups and pettiness to create words reflecting the emotional complexity of minds beyond your own; to have worked with language long enough to be able to wield it beautifully; and to have genius enough to find dramatic situations that embody all that you have lived and read, is rare. It’s not something that every student of creative writing—in the hundreds of programs up and running these days—is going to pull off. Maybe one person a decade will pull it off. Maybe one person every half century will really pull it off.

Of course, we live in an age that cringes at words like "greatness"—and also at the notion that we’re not all great. But ages that didn’t cringe at greatness produced great writing without creative-writing programs. And people who attend creative-writing programs for the most part wish to write great things. It’s sick to ask them to aspire but not to aspire too much. An air of self-doubt permeates the discipline, showing up again and again as the question, "Can writing be taught?"

Faced with this question, teachers of creative writing might consider adopting (as a few, of course, already do) a defiant rather than resigned attitude, doing more than supervising the building of the bases of pyramids. They might try to get beyond the senses. Texts worth reading—worth reading now, and worth reading 200 years from now—coordinate the personal with the national or international; they embed the instant in the instant’s full context and long history. It’s what the Odyssey does and what Middlemarch does and what Invisible Man does and what Jonathan Franzen’s and Marilynne Robinson’s recent novels try to do. But to write like this, you’re going to have to spend some time thinking.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Iowa-Flattened-Literature/144531