Iowa Writers Research Articles

The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature by Tara Powell (review)

Reviewed by: The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature by Tara Powell Ben Child Tara Powell. The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2011. xi + 266 pp. The question propelling Tara Powell’s new book, The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature, is a familiar one for students [End Page 849] of southern literature and history: how should intellectuals locate themselves in a regional culture that is too often received as a cultural backwater? Or to borrow from W. J. Cash, one of the region’s most famously tortured thinkers, is there an irreconcilable gap between mind of the South and the life of the mind? Wisely enough, Powell sidesteps any attempts at providing an ultimate answer, focusing instead on the function of tropes of the intellectual in fiction and memoir. The result is a wide-ranging book that examines the work of both canonical and noncanonical southern writers and draws out the subtleties of a debate about the usefulness of intellectualism that has legacies extending into the present moment. The book finds a productive subject in the anti-intellectual intellectual, a figure Powell identifies as typically a southern creature dating back to the gentleman scholars of the antebellum period. But the particular variety examined here rises alongside the post-World War II ascension of creative writing as an academic discipline, with the bulk of the writers Powell discusses in detail—Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Tim McLaurin, Doris Betts, Gail Godwin—having a distinct relationship to the academy: they are either aligned with a university or, as Powell writes of O’Connor and Percy, deliberately produced “their best work outside of the academy” (63). Of course, Powell isn’t alone in noticing that one of the key determinants in the character of the literary intellectual in the second half of the twentieth century—southern or otherwise—is the institutionalization of creative writing within contemporary English departments. Hovering between university-paid scholars of literature and their unaffiliated peers, creative writers in the academy navigate an uneasy terrain, one that clearly informs their thinking about the complicated role of the intellectual in contemporary society. For Powell’s southern writers, however, this uneasiness relates to a broader regional discomfort with intellectualism at large and produces a regional adaptation of the campus novel, which includes titles as varied as Louis Rubin Jr.’s The Heat of the Sun (1995), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and Julien Green’s Moira (1951). The book opens with an extended analysis of representations of the intellectual in Flannery O’Connor, a graduate of the then new Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Scanning the breadth of O’Connor’s oeuvre, Powell presents a rich taxonomy of interleckchuls: students (such as Hulga of “Good Country People”), artists (like Julian of “Everything That Rises Must Converge”), and, most dangerously, educationalists (Rayber of The Violent Bear it Away is the clearest example). The book then pivots to one of O’Connor’s intellectual allies, fellow-Catholic southerner Walker Percy, and takes up the “alienated intellectuals” (64) that so often serve as the heroes of his novels. (The interest [End Page 850] in Christian writers navigating the environment of ideas is a recurring motif in the book—Doris Betts is a practicing Christian as well.) From here the scope of the project widens, capturing a number of contemporary writers—most linked to the Chapel Hill area—and, in a chapter that includes perceptive interpretations of Alice Walker and Albert Murray, the tangled histories of literacy and intellectual labor in African American narratives. As an installment in LSU’s “Southern Literary Studies”—a series that has recently featured some pathbreaking work—Powell’s book feels deliberately unfazed by the current dialogue in what Houston Baker has labeled the “new southern studies”: there is no global reach to her analysis, very little consideration of the construction of region, and few traces of critical theory. This is worth mentioning not to judge the book against a standard to which it never aspires but to point out that The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature finds its material in a different set of concerns about the South. It might also signal...

Literary Information Warfare: Eileen Chang, the US State Department, and Cold War Media Aesthetics

So’s essay reconstructs a literary genealogy for the emergence of “information warfare” in the early Cold War period (the 1950s). Specifically, it argues that this form of warfare—which So dubs “literary information warfare”—took shape first and most keenly within the US state’s encounter with Communist China. The essay narrates this story by exploring the United States Information Agency’s (USIA) recruitment of a major Chinese author, Eileen Chang, to the cause of information fabrication and deployment in Hong Kong. It combines this story with a brief history of 1950s US communications studies in which Chang’s work and new theories of information converge through the figure of Wilbur Schramm. Schramm, cofounder of the Iowa Writers Workshop and “father” of modern communications studies, worked with Chang via the USIA. In sum, Chang’s story sheds light on how the US state’s confrontation with Communist China in the 1950s provided the basis and impetus for developing a new model of information theory through the weaponizing of literature.

Three Poems

Born in Guangdong Province on June 20, 1937, Wai-lim Yip moved to Hong Kong, where he began his life as a poet. He soon moved to Taiwan and graduated from National Taiwan University with a BA in 1959, and then earned an MA in 1961 from National Taiwan Normal University. Then in 1963 he traveled to the United States, where he earned an MFA from the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, and later a PhD from Princeton in 1967. He accepted a position at the University of California, San Diego that same year and taught there until his retirement in 2010. Over these many years Yip has published over fifty volumes of critical, scholarly, and poetic work in both English and Chinese; his influence in American poetry circles and abroad is significant and extensive. He has taught or lectured in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, and many other universities across China, and he has been instrumental in setting up Comparative Literature programs throughout Taiwan and China. With several recent conferences in China devoted to his work, Yip has become arguably one of the most important East-West scholar-poets of the last quarter-century.

Contributors

Other| July 01 2013 Contributors Small Axe (2013) 17 (2 (41)): 274–277. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2323454 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Contributors. Small Axe 1 July 2013; 17 (2 (41)): 274–277. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2323454 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsSmall Axe Search Advanced Search Alexia Arthurs is a transplanted Jamaican who lived in New York for twelve years and now lives in Iowa City, where she is working toward an MFA in creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is also working on a collection of short stories.Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné is a poet and artist from Trinidad. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Bim, Anthurium, sx salon, Tongues of the Ocean, and Room Magazine. She was awarded the Charlotte and Isidor Paeiwonsky Prize for First Time Publication by the Caribbean Writer in 2009 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2010. She is currently the poetry editor of Anansesem: The Caribbean Children's Ezine.Kamari Maxine Clarke is professor of anthropology and international and area studies at Yale University, with an affiliation in the Department of... You do not currently have access to this content.

Screw Your Courage to the Sticking Place

Screw Your Courage to the Sticking Place C. Violet Eaton (bio) into the rise, the rinsed-out space the farmgoat caught his death a piece of it took days but that his own design even w/ blood pooling like buttermilk & under & in the blood aer he is calm he is like a wren [End Page 130] C. Violet Eaton C. Violet Eaton studied at the University of Buffalo’s Poetics Program and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the editor of Bestoned, a journal of new metaphysical verse. As Dowser, he occasionally dispatches small editions of “hill drone” recordings from secret locations in Arkansas, the same state in which he teaches poetry and sells used & rare books for a living. Copyright © 2013 Center for Literary Publishing

Dedicated Space

Dedicated Space Christopher Hund (bio) Two, three, four, maybe 25 deer in the side space, the preserve, off the road. Something like deer between us, something lovely to look at, fleet of foot, fleeting as the car. I see no vultures, I see no vultures. Six vultures I see plus one dead deer makes seven. God in heaven. Humming Olds, eight. Vultures scatter carrying sinews away, streamers. The straight line is the best line. The line with jags is the best line. Of all the lines drawn between us most cannot be crossed. A gray pigeon meets us at the front porch, sturdy as funerary. Something takes off between us with multiple legs to run and carry it. All lines between us infinite, inhabited by a different ghost of a specific dead us. So many ghosts between us. [End Page 132] Christopher Hund Christopher Hund lives with his family outside Chicago in a small town caught between the spreading suburbs and rural lake country of northern Illinois. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has recently published the chapbook In Forest Static (Convulsive Editions). He works for a nonprofit healthcare-improvement organization. Copyright © 2013 Center for Literary Publishing

A live event, a life event: The workshop that works

In certain recent critiques, the term ‘workshop’ has been used to describe almost every aspect of our discipline’s pedagogy. The various models might be arranged along a horizontal axis that has as one pole the wholly taught, exercise-based class for beginners and at the other the wholly discursive workshop for advanced students, with a vertical axis that begins with recreational or high-school classes and ascends through the BA to the MA and MFA, and then on to the elite MA and MFA programmes exemplified by the likes of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Alternative axes might calibrate the extent to which a programme is publication- or research-oriented, or to which the pedagogy is premised on a formalist or a ‘sociological’ poetics. This paper attempts a defence of the peer-review workshop by first distinguishing it from other forms of Creative Writing pedagogy, and concludes by offering an understanding of the workshop as an advanced and necessarily formalist pedagogy whose encounter with the work-in-progress requires an openness to its ‘singularity’ and a resistance both to instrumental readings and to prescriptive instruction.

The Refiner's Fire and the Imago Dei:

The Refiner's Fire and the Imago Dei:

Relapse

Relapse Montreux Rotholtz (bio) I put a blue jar over a green beetle. Green does not encompass the color of the beetle. The beetle was the color of slick oil and lethargy. I forgot about the green beetle and it died. That winter we collected jars and little boxes, inlaid with lacquer, carved from soapstone. I kept one of the soapstone boxes in my drawer and ground down its lid with a nail file when no one was looking. I reduced it to dust. I mixed the dust in water and drank it at night, to see what it could induce in me. It formed the box again in my gut. That winter you cut me with a cup you’d broken. That winter we lay under the ice, heard the first bell a town away, sharply struck. [End Page 65] Montreux Rotholtz Montreux Rotholtz is a Seattle native and a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work also appears in Diode, LVNG, and LIT magazine. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa. Copyright © 2012 University of Wisconsin Board of Regents

Pulverizing the Idols: Flannery O’Connor’s Battle with Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung

DAVID Z. WEHNER Mount St. Mary’s University Pulverizing the Idols: Flannery O’Connor’s Battle with Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung Curtis: “My wife and I are going to counseling.” Briscoe: “Yeah, sometimes a shrink can help.” Curtis (somewhat irritated): “We’re seeing a priest.” Briscoe (in his usual blasé manner): “Whatever works.” —Law and Order IF TWO PEOPLE HAUNT FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S LETTERS AND LECTURES IN a negative way, they are Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. References to Freud and Jung and psychoanalysis and psychotherapy continually punctuate her letters, from an undated one in 1950 which jokingly has one of her characters, Enoch Emery, push his analyst out a window because he “was so mad that anyone should defame his daddy,” to one ten years later scolding William Sessions for the “ridiculous results” of his “Freudian technique” (Habit 21, 407). In her library at the time of her death, O’Connor had copies of The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (1937), Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933) and The Undiscovered Self .(1957), and three different books with introductions by Jung. Tellingly, she underlined extensively in Jung’s Modern Man, much more than she did in Freud’s Basic Writings (see Kinney). Her thoughts on Freud remain relatively consistent throughout her letters. In 1955, O’Connor wrote to Betty Hester, “As to Sigmund, I am against him tooth and toenail” (Habit 110), and she did not stray far from that opinion. Her thoughts on Jung, however, prove more ambivalent, especially as they relate to Freud. In April 1956, she wrote again to Hester, “I think Jung is probably just as dangerous as Freud” (Habit 152). Three years later, in December 1959, she claimed, “Jung has something to offer religion but is at the same time very dangerous for it,” and three years after that, in a September 1962 letter, her thoughts on Jung reached their trajectory: “To religion I think he [Freud] is much less dangerous than Jung” (Habit 362, 491). In between these last two letters, on 16 March 1960, after O’Connor had finished The Undiscovered Self, 300 David Z. Wehner she wrote Ted Spivey, “I admire him [Jung]” (Habit 382). O’Connor saw Freud as dangerous for religion for many reasons: one, Freud stood as a great critic of religion, O’Connor a great champion; two, Freud embodied what O’Connor saw as the secular mindset of her times; and, three, O’Connor worried that Americans took up psychoanalysis as a substitute for religion. O’Connor saw Jung as more dangerous than Freud because, whereas Freud at least tried to demarcate a clear line between science and religion, Jung enthusiastically erased such a line, believing that psychoanalysis could complement a religion that no longer addressed modernity’s psychic needs. We can then take O’Connor’s concerns with Freud and Jung and use them to illuminate one of her most-studied stories, “Good Country People” (1955). The story’s main characters, Hulga Hopewell and Manley Pointer, mimic the theological positions promoted by Freud and Jung, positions O’Connor rejected while acknowledging their seductive power. This short story reads as O’Connor’s calling, like the biblical prophets she continually invokes, her people back from worshiping false idols, calling her culture back from thinkers like Freud and Jung.1 Part of O’Connor’s reaction to Freud and Jung corresponds to her reaction to what she saw as the secularism of her times. Her lectures and letters make clear that she envisioned herself as writing in a secular culture. In an August 1955 letter, O’Connor declared, “My audience are the people who think God is dead” (Habit 92) and eight years later in an interview, she alleged, “the man of our times is certainly not a believer” (Conversations 104). In her biography of O’Connor, Jean Cash describes the writer’s secondary education as restrictive and parochial, her college education as progressive and secular (76). This progressive, secular bent continued when she went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and, in 1948, to Yaddo, the artists’ community in Saratoga Springs, New York. At Yaddo, the restrictive and parochial crashed into the progressive...

From Eastanalle to East Asia: George Scarbrough’s Long Journey

REVIEW-ESSAY JIM CLARK Barton College From Eastanalle to East Asia: George Scarbrough’s Long Journey George Scarbrough, Appalachian Poet: A Biographical and Literary Study with Unpublished Writings, by Randy Mackin. Contributions to Southern Appalachian Studies: 29. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2011. 220 pp. $45.00. THE EAST TENNESSEE POET GEORGE ADDISON SCARBROUGH, INVETERATE logophile and philologue, had a habit, as his biographer Randy Mackin recounts in his recent study George Scarbrough, Appalachian Poet, of “flippingthroughthepagesofhisbeloveddictionary—anancientedition about a foot thick and clumsy as a sack of grain—searching for the morning’s new word” (1). The mot juste Scarbrough might have selected for Mackin’s book could well be “compendium”: a condensation of a larger, more complex, subject. Given Scarbrough’s complexity as a human being, and the prolific and varied nature of his literary production, a compendium would seem to be the best medium in which to essay an initial survey of Scarbrough’s life and work. Mackin’s subtitle, A Biographical and Literary Study with Unpublished Writings, indicates his multi-faceted modus operandi and also suggests an intriguing link with another important related work of Appalachian literary criticism and biography, Raymond Cook’s Mountain Singer, the first major study of Scarbrough’s contemporary, north Georgia poet and novelist Byron Herbert Reece. Both books, besides being about similar subjects, feature an appealing and somewhat unusual mix of biography, literarycriticism,selectedpoems,correspondence,andphotographs,and both have an informed but engaging style. Mackin’s book is Number 29 in McFarland and Company’s fascinating and wide-ranging series “Contributions to Southern Appalachian Studies” and is divided into two parts. Part One contains eight chapters dealing with “The Life and Literature of George Scarbrough” and Part Two contains five chapters featuring “Selected Unpublished Poems, Letters and Conversations.” In 444 Jim Clark addition, there is an exhaustive listing of the various magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies in which Scarbrough’s work has appeared, along with a list of awards and prizes, and an extensive bibliography. In writing Scarbrough’s biography, Mackin had the benefit of the complete and generous cooperation of his subject, who made available tohimhisvoluminousjournals,personalletters,andunpublishedpoems, and also sat for interviews. The portrait that arises of Scarbrough’s childhood and young adulthood is not a very pleasant one. A precocious, sensitive, bookish child whose mother taught him to read before he enteredelementaryschool,Scarbroughwasconstitutionallyunfitforthe hardscrabble life, brutal poverty, and hard work of tenant farming and was often mercilessly teased, insulted, and ridiculed by his coarse, semi-literate sharecropper father. His bookishness, along with his incipient homosexuality, made him a perpetual outcast—an intimate stranger to his beloved but highly judgmental, fundamentalist county in rural southeastern Tennessee. As Scarbrough puts it in an interview late in the book, “Biographically, it was rough. Geographically, it was beautiful, absolutely beautiful” (191). Though he studied at the University of Tennessee (from which he eventually received his M.A.), Sewanee, and Lincoln Memorial University, Scarbrough dismisses them all: “Alas, for higher education. I never had any, never found any sign of it in any place I went” (24). The University of Tennessee was “a hick university in a hick town,” Sewanee “an ivory tower of the worst sort,” and Lincoln Memorial University “only a glorified high school” (24). Even the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which he attended in 1957, fares no better, as Scarbrough caustically caricatures his professors there as they “preened a little for the Times photographer who seemed always to be coming to the Writers’ Workshop in those days” (37). Scarbrough’s defensiveness and his obstinate and contrarian character no doubt contributed to his chronic alienation; as he observes in an interview, “As a sharecropper’s son, I had chip on my shoulder which grew to chop block size” (22). Perhaps the finest moment in Mackin’s study is his detailed and perceptive analysis of Scarbrough as a “regional” writer in Chapter Four, “A Small, Comfortable World.” Here, Mackin is at pains to point out the largeness, the variousness, and the complexity of Scarbrough’s brand of regionalism. Scarbrough is a poet of “Eastanalle”—the southeast corner of Tennessee—in much the same way that Wallace Stevens, a poet he 445 From...

The business of literary circles in nineteenth-century America

Introduction As Merchants on the 'Change': The Economy of Literary Coteries, 1807-1864 PART I: LITERARY NEW YORKERS 'An Instinct for Gold': Irving's Knickerbockers Staff Bonds: Bonner's New York Ledger PART II: NEW ENGLAND CIRCLES 'The Section to Which We Belong': Emerson's Transcendentalists Boston and Beyond: Elizabeth Peabody's Promotional Practice PART III: POLITICAL ECONOMY: NORTH AND SOUTH Print Warriors: Garrison's Abolitionists Proslavery and the Pen: Fitzhugh's Apologists Conclusion: The Boston Bellamy Club, Rand's Objectivists, and Iowa Writers' Workshop

A Maelstrom of Discontent

A Maelstrom of Discontent Robert Lacy (bio) Townie: A Memoir by Andre Dubus II (Norton, 2011. 388 pages. $25.95) Andre Dubus III is the son of the late Andre Dubus, a short-story writer of some distinction whose reputation continues quietly to grow. The elder Dubus was crippled when he was hit by a car in 1986, and he died of a heart attack, alone in his home, twelve years later. He had taught writing at Bradford College in northern Massachusetts, where he lived with his wife, Pat, and their four children, two boys and two girls, after being graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the mid-sixties. By the end of the sixties Andre and Pat were divorced, and Andre was living with one of his female students. Cast adrift, Pat and the four Dubus kids began a rocky hand-to-mouth existence that would take them from one run-down former mill town to another along Massachusetts's polluted Merrimack River in what must be as desolate a region of this country as anyone could imagine. Townie is the story of what that existence was like as told by the elder of the two sons, himself already a writer of some note, whose novel The House of Sand and Fog (1999) was an Oprah Winfrey selection and was made into a well-received film. The relationship between father and abandoned son is at the heart of the story and is the best thing about the book. Andre III is seriously conflicted about his father. He loves him but has trouble admiring him, and he resents strenuously his father's [End Page xlvi] relatively comfortable life in college-provided housing on the Bradford campus while he and his mother, brother, and sisters are struggling just to stay alive in the wretched towns their poverty has forced them into. By the book's end the roles of father and son have been reversed, with Andre III taking care of his handicapped father with a patience and solicitude he might have wished for himself in earlier years. Another strength of the book is the author's loving portrait of his mother. Patricia Lowe Dubus was a former high-school homecoming queen in Dubus's hometown of Lake Charles, Louisiana, when Andre the elder wooed her away from another suitor and married her. She followed him through his six-year career as a Marine Corps officer, a career that ended when Captain Dubus resigned his commission to enroll at the Iowa workshop. All four of the Dubus children were born on Marine Corps bases. But the doughty, indomitable Pat of those earlier years seems to have been undone by the divorce that became inevitable once they reached Massachusetts. She takes employment as a social worker, which requires her to commute down to Boston, and in the process she loses control of her family. The children roam wild without her supervision; drugs, alcohol, sex, and violence invade their lives. Wherever they live, the house is a wreck; meals are served out of cans, dirty dishes stack up, grime accumulates, and the tv set becomes the focus of everyone's life. It is in this maelstrom of discontent that the Dubus children measure out their lives until each in turn becomes old enough to leave home. As for Pat, she eventually meets a man who will rescue her from poverty, but not before the damage to her children has been done. By book's end she is tanned, fit, and living with him in Florida. What drives the narrative of Townie, however, is not the father-son relationship or the loving depiction of the abandoned wife and mother. It is the son's determination, and ensuing project, to transform himself from easy prey to steely predator in order to survive in the places in which he finds himself, places where, he tells us, "Kids roamed the neighborhood like dogs," places where, when his father shows up once a week to take him and his siblings out for a movie and a soft drink, he thinks, "it was like being on furlough from a penal colony." Because they are small and weak, Andre...

The "Elephant" and the "Chicks": How Rural Appalachia's First Writer-in-Residence Came and Went

The "Elephant" and the "Chicks":How Rural Appalachia's First Writer-in-Residence Came and Went Elizabeth Lamont (bio) In September of 1926, a thick-necked man in an open-topped Dodge blew onto Lincoln Memorial University's East Tennessee mountain campus. He was thirty eight years old and carried with him a typewriter and wind-up Victrola. He was one of several new professors that President Robert O. Matthews hailed as capable of not only teaching an art but putting it into practice. His list of publications was long enough to suggest he might be of service to a struggling Appalachian college known to assure prospective donors that one of its goals was to foster mountain "Shakespeares." Never mind that Shakespeare was forced to leave school at the age of fourteen due to his father's financial distress, or that questions of whether such magic can be taught and, if so, by whom and how, have dogged creative writing classes since the University of Iowa's 1897 course in Verse Making. Just by naming him Chair of lmu's English Department, Matthews unwittingly had taken sides in a tense debate within the larger academy. He also gave him the title, Writer-in-Residence—only one year after Robert Frost became the first in the nation. Harry Harrison Kroll came to lmu an outsider, not just because he was born beyond the region in Hartford City, Indiana, and spent most of his pre-lmu years in the deep South, but because, as D. G. Myers reminds us in The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing since 1880 (University of Chicago Press, 2006), writers were viewed by the vast majority of pre-wwii faculty as no more qualified to teach the literary arts than an elephant was. On many campuses to this day, Myers notes, "The idea of hiring writers to teach writing has never won unquestioned acceptance." When Kroll arrived at lmu in the mid-1920s, the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, America's most legendary creative writing program, was in its infancy and controversial. Traditional English faculty, including those at lmu who saw the advancement of the literary arts among southern mountaineers as the most effective means of cultural uplift, operated under the assumption that the discipline required a severity of form and intellectual sophistication [End Page 49] best taught by scholars versed in literary classics and aesthetics. Creativity could not be taught, nor could talent, the traditionalists argued. Their suspicion was that writers wanted access to college classrooms not because they could inspire nascent Shakespeares but to secure for themselves the benefits of patronage while pursuing their own art. It wouldn't help that, through an admirable combination of moxie and hard work, the working-class Kroll had, as his biographer Richard L. Saunders puts it, "bulled his way" into Peabody College at the age of twenty-five with only one year of formal schooling (Never Been Rich: The Life and Work of a Southern Ruralist Writer, Harry Harrison Kroll, UT Press, forthcoming). Or that, while pursuing his undergraduate and M.A. degrees, he became the closest thing he could to a writing specialist by taking as many journalism and composition classes as possible but only three in literature. (According to his Peabody transcript, housed in the HH Kroll Papers at ut-Martin, a fourth, on Tennyson, he dropped.) And then there were the thorny issues of taste and class. As Saunders observes, lmu's new writer-in-residence was most "comfortable" with "thrilling and improbable tales" found in "yellow-back dime novels." During his Nashville sojourn, Kroll found profit and inspiration in the city's endless supply of popular or sectarian magazines, so if Matthews had hoped to tone up lmu's Department of English by hiring a writer, his choice was odd. Kroll was no Vanderbilt Fugitive (and proudly so), but the author of works appearing in Detective Story Magazine and Weird Tales. His 1925 M.A. thesis, "A Comparative Study of Upper and Lower Level Southern Folk Speech" is a list of idioms he not always deftly transformed into dialect in future novels. And yet there was this: Harry Harrison Kroll believed that creativity could be encouraged...

University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine

University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine

Richard Yates in Iowa

Richard Yates in Iowa Robert Lacy (bio) Richard Yates came out to Iowa in the fall of 1964 soon after the great critical success of his first novel, Revolutionary Road. The book had received resounding, near universal praise just three years earlier: everyone from Dorothy Parker to William Styron to Tennessee Williams hailed it as a modern American masterpiece. But, by the time Yates showed up in Iowa City that fall, the roar had begun to subside and a slightly harrowed look had crept into the eyes of the young author. It was the look of a man who knew he had to come up with a good encore, and at the time the effort, a new novel-in-progress called “A Special Providence,” wasn’t going well. Moreover, despite all the critical acclaim, Revolutionary Road had sold poorly; and, with bills to pay back East, Yates would probably need money beyond his academic salary. None of this kept him from being a star of the first magnitude in the eyes of his students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, however. I was one of those, having come up from south Texas that fall with my wife and two small children in a Hillman Minx and a U-Haul truck. I’d been working for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times and living in nearby Kingsville. There I had met a young college instructor named William Harrison, who had recently been at the Iowa workshop and soon would have his first short story published in the Saturday Evening Post. It was Harrison who got me into Iowa. When he [End Page 422] heard I’d been accepted he exclaimed, “Hey, you’re in luck! Richard Yates is going to be teaching there this year!” “Who’s Richard Yates?” “The author of Revolutionary Road!” I had never heard of it, but I didn’t say so. By the time I got to Iowa, though, three months later, I’d bought and read the novel and was duly impressed. Yes, indeed, here was a man who knew his way around a story. There was a scramble to get into Yates’s writing section—everybody, it seemed, wanted to study under the man who had written Revolutionary Road—and I had to wait until my second semester to get in. It was like being admitted to a good fraternity, as I recall. Everybody envied you. Yates for those days was tall—at least six feet four or six feet five—and slender and physically imposing. He had dark hair and brooding, near movie-star good looks. In the classroom he was a study in informality. In addition to his workshop classes, he taught, as part of his contract, a course in the modern novel. His method was to sit on the desk at the front of the room, his long legs dangling, a cigarette in one hand and a much-abused paperback edition of the novel under discussion in the other, and hold forth. He was a man of strong opinions. He knew what he liked and what he didn’t like. What he liked was The Great Gatsby, for example, about which he stated, memorably, that although it was a little book it managed to “gain range as it gathered momentum”—an observation that was not only accurate but beautifully put. That was Yates in the classroom. He had the ability to couch his opinions in language that was quotable and hard to forget. Another novel he liked was James Jones’s From Here To Eternity, which, superficially at least, would appear to be the polar opposite of Fitzgerald’s finely crafted effort. About the Jones book Yates said that despite its eight hundred-plus pages it boasted “the narrative pull of a locomotive.” And of course once again he was right, the pull resulting from Jones’s brilliant strategy of shaping his story toward the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as its climax. Yates, who’d been born in Yonkers and brought up in a series of small towns above Manhattan, spoke with what I have come to think of as a classic New York accent. He sounded like a sensitive indoor version...

Slipperiness of Identity

Slipperiness of Identity Mary Pettice (bio) Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays. Eula Biss. Graywolf Press. http://www.graywolfpress.org. 244 pages; paper, $15.00. A little over a year after the election of Barack Obama, one of my students updated her Facebook status, writing, "Stop saying 'Post-racial,' or I will punch you in the jaw." I wondered who sparked her outrage: A naïve liberal? A cynical racist? Or a lazy reporter, dutifully marking the passage of time with yet another year-in-review story? Her outrage, I'm sorry to say, amused me in a decidedly patronizing way; "There, there," I thought, "good for you for being mad at anyone who thought Obama's election marked the end of racism in America." I began reading Eula Biss's brave collection of essays on race in the US, Notes from No Man's Land, with the same kind of patronizing approval that I had for my student. While I was prepared to agree with Biss's arguments, I reserved judgment on whether she had anything new to offer to the conversation. I weighed the novelty of her perspective as a white, privileged woman whose mother had embraced West African religion against her Iowa Writer's Workshop pedigree, and, for a time, I merely admired her skillful and beautiful writing as I traveled over uncomfortably familiar ground. I read protectively, sparing Biss as long as I could from some sort of final dismissal as too earnest, too sorry, too white to matter. But I was wrong—because I'd mistaken her for myself, reading out of a sense of weary and cowardly liberalism, looking over my shoulder to see if anyone noticed who was really being too earnest, too sorry, and too white. Biss is up to something else, something wonderfully mature, intelligent, and new. In these essays, Biss reexamines not only her own history but that of her country, revealing in both delicate, poetic prose and blunt, necessarily emotionless journalism the truths, both painful and triumphant, of the American experiment. As she self-corrects her earlier reading of a children's classic, she offers us a way to read her own story, writing, When I return to Little House on the Prairie now, as an adult, I find that it is not the book I thought it was. It is not the gauzy frontier fantasy I made of it as a child. It is not a naive celebration of the American pioneer. It is the document of a woman interrogating her legacy. Notes from No Man's Land is Biss's interrogation of her own legacy, one that is at once both distinct within the American experience and distinctly American. Biss positions herself as a member of a self-described "mixed" family, explaining how, through marriage and adoption, she has biracial, black, and Cherokee cousins, and black and Chinese half siblings. She lived for a year in Brooklyn with her biracial first cousin; she taught creative writing in inner city schools in New York; she wrote for an African American newspaper in San Diego; she traveled to Mexico; and she studied in Iowa City, where she considered the difference between media coverage of post-storm looting by local university students and by Katrina survivors. But her most enduring connection to non-white culture was nourished by her mother, who left her husband and adopted a West African religion, the Yoruba tradition, and introduced Biss and her siblings to its art and ritual. Biss recalls, "There were weekends when I stood next to my dancing mother in a small, sweaty room that smelled of coconut oil and pulsed with the batá drums of Yoruba ritual." Biss's memories include "salty beans and rice" and singing "in a language we did not understand." Even so, the experience remains embedded in Biss's consciousness and identity. Except, that is, when authenticity threatens to drift away; Biss hints at the slipperiness of identity as she finds herself missing pieces of her own past. She writes, "In college, I remember, the African-dance class humiliated me. Beginning dance students could perform the ritual dances of my childhood better than I could...

Finding Flannery O'Connor's “Good Man” in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Home

Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead is a rich study of need for forgiveness and power of grace. It can also be called, in Rebecca M. Painter's words, a novelized treatise on difficulty of lived virtue (95). (1) ibis novel--in itself but especially as seen in light of Home--gradually reveals how elderly John Ames, who appears at first to be simply a devout and kindly Congregationalist minister, has sinned against his namesake, John Ames Boughton, known as Jack. (2) In course of novel Ames confronts his decades-long rejection of Jack and finally forgives, accepts, and even comes to love him. One way to understand Ames' spiritual journey and Jack's existential questioning is through lens of Flannery O'Connor's A Good Is Hard to Find It seems natural to associate these two writers whose work reflects their Christian faiths. Robinson is a permanent faculty member of Iowa Writers' Workshop, of which O'Connor is probably most famous alumna, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishes both authors. Yet but sympathetic approach of Robinson, a northerner and a Congregationalist, to her subject is very different from O'Connor's, which relies on caricature and satire. Robinson even claims that the influence of Flannery O'Connor has been particularly destructive by leading readers to expect serious fiction to treat religious thought respectfully (A World of Beautiful Souls). O'Connor communicated her Catholic vision by using the grotesque as a primary way to reach unbelieving reader (Hawkins 28); in contrast, in these two novels Robinson shows thoughtful people in ordinary situations working their way to greater receptivity to grace through following both Calvin's teachings and their own charitable inclinations. As Robinson says, Ames' faith is not dogmatic but a process (Interview Part II with Silverblatt). (3) Regardless of whether Robinson intended Gilead as a response to A Good Man it acts as one by using a similar structure and parallel characters, while showing them in a more sympathetic, warmer way. The conventionally characters, grandmother and Ames, dominate first half of each and control information--the grandmother is viewpoint character for most of O'Connor's story, which is written in indirect free discourse, and Ames is novel's narrator--so that readers distrust Misfit and Jack before they appear. These two new characters then engage in debate about Christianity with initial characters. The resemblance between works is brought out by strong echoes of O'Connor's story in passage in which Ames calls Jack a man. In story, grandmother tells Misfit, just know you're a man, and he replies, Nome, I ain't a man ... but I ain't worst in world neither (139). Near end of Gilead Ames writes that he told Jack, ...You are a man,' and he gave me a look, purely appraising, and laughed and said, 'You can take my word for it, Reverend, there are worse' (231). Similarly, when lack tells Glory what Ames has said, she responds, Well, I could have told you you are a man. I've said it in so many words, surely and he replies self-deprecatingly, You're a miserable judge of character. Mine, especially. No objectivity at all (Home 308-09). Gilead climaxes in Ames' acceptance of lack much as O'Connor's A Good Man exists for moment when grandmother realizes her connection to Misfit. Both O'Connor and Robinson want readers to sympathize with their miscreants and to believe in possibility of their salvation. O'Connor wrote that she hoped that grandmother's gesture would grow like mustard-seed in Misfit's heart and turn him into the prophet he was meant to become (On Her Own Work 113). Robinson, similarly, wants her readers to see Jack's goodness, the greatest goodness [being] perhaps awareness of one's own failure to be good (Interview Part II with Silverblatt), a failure which is inevitable because of man's fallen condition. …

Toward a Dialogue on Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Home

A long-time faculty member of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Marilynne Robinson has been recognized widely and consistently for the quality of her fiction: Housekeeping (1980) won the Hemingway/PEN award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer; Gilead (2004) was awarded the Pulitzer as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Home (2007) was a National Book Award finalist and winner of Britain's Orange Prize. In 1987 Robinson's first novel also was made into a film directed by Bill Forsythe, starring Christine Lahti. Three non-fiction works, Mother Country (1989), The Death of Adam (1998), and the forthcoming Absence of Mind (scheduled for release in 2010) develop arguments on a wide range of topics from evolutionary theory to nuclear pollution to John Calvin. As Michael Dirda testifies in his review of Gilead, one rereads Robinson's sentences for their beauty, sometimes for their truth. Moreover, Robinson's courage in confronting contemporary culture in a fresh and unabashedly Christian way draws her readers, reviewers, and scholars into dialogue. Dirda touches on the religious dimension of her prose: It is so serenely beautiful, and written in a prose so gravely measured and thoughtful, that one feels touched with grace just to read Robinson's stories and characters not only delight and instruct but also deeply move us on matters of Christian faith. Perhaps James Wood best articulates the context in which Robinson's writing sounds the chords of American faith: Gilead is a beautiful work--demanding, grave and lucid--and is, if anything, more out of time than Robinson's book of essays, suffused as it is with a Protestant bareness that sometimes recalls George Herbert (who is alluded to several times, along with John Donne) and sometimes the American religious spirit that produced Congregationalism and 19th-century Transcendentalism and those bareback religious riders Emerson, Thoreau and Melville. (Acts of Devotion) To say that we are surprised by the ways in which faith is treated in her narratives is to register our joy at having found in them a voice that echoes such authors yet remains fresh in a time characterized by cynicism, one of Robinson's favorite targets (Robinson). Her achievement has led the Board of the Conference on Christianity and Literature to award Robinson the CCL 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Editors of this journal to devote this special issue of Christianity and Literature to scholarly considerations of her work (Cox). In this issue, Robinson's skill in the essay is apparent in her contribution, Wondrous Love. Here, Robinson urges us to consider our responses to the present cultural moment and reminds us to have faith in narrative, to redouble our confidence in it by avoiding tribalism, resentment, and fear?' As readers also know from reading her nonfiction and essays in Harpers, to name but one of her favorite venues, a Robinson essay is to be savored for the rigor of its argument and the beauty of its textures. As always in her essays, she lucidly revises our understanding of significant texts we should read or re-read, and urges us to resist the conventional. Wondrous Love is no exception and has, among other things, sent me back to my hymnal with renewed appreciation. She urges us to cherish hymn narratives and find the mysteries of our faith anew through them. Robinson argues that like musical notation a also establishes the way in which it is to be read, and, in the largest sense, what it means. By asking us why we are fearful, she urges us to eschew the narrative of decline and to embrace a more meaningful narrative of origins. The scholars in this special journal issue focus mainly on Gilead and Home as we wrestle with two best-selling novels that have engaged readers and reviewers in a vibrant conversation over the past several years. In Gilead, readers meet minister John Ames as he writes to the young son of his old age. …

Middle Man: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers' Workshop

Middle Man: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers' Workshop