It is a difficult task, tangling with ghosts—and that is essentially what David O. Dowling does in A Delicate Aggression. The ghosts are of many types: personalities, famous and otherwise; past eras; circles of influence; sociopolitical pressures; public images; private shames. The history of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is rendered from its beginnings to its current state. Dowling’s portrait is uncompromisingly honest and makes no bones about the dark sides of the program’s success. The result is a complex blend of personality, sociopolitical climate, and innovative thinking about writing, making for an entertainingly dramatic read.Personality drives the book. The book writ large takes its form from the dominant program directors, in three separate eras, who in turn imparted their own flavor to the culture of Iowa City: Paul Engle, for instance, dominates the first section, which takes place from 1941 to 1966. (Engle to some extent actually dominates the whole book.) More specifically, though, the book follows the careers of 18 luminaries from within the Workshop, where the sixth chapter, “The Turncoat,” follows the Iowa career of Robert Lowell.Lowell serves as a useful example of this cameo-style history. His ghost appears long before his own chapter. Chapter Two, dedicated to W.D. Snodgrass, paints a sketchy portrait of Lowell as an underground literary superstar in the repressive, technically-bent, largely emotionless Workshop environment. Before Lowell ever taught at Iowa, Lord Weary’s Castle “sparked a new sensation” among Workshop students. Yet when Lowell arrived, Snodgrass’s admiration was tempered by Lowell’s own abstract and emotionless approach to verse. Moreover, Lowell’s brutal in-class commentary—the defining feature of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop method—interfered with Snodgrass rather than helping him. In the face of defiance from faculty like Lowell, Snodgrass continued to write personal, emotionally rich poetry, which eventually culminated in Heart’s Needle, an account of his split from his wife and young daughter.Lowell himself would later credit Heart’s Needle with paving the way to his masterful Life Studies. The conflict between the Workshop’s methods—which were brutal in the extreme—and the sensitive art that the environment often produced is one of Dowling’s main themes. In Dowling’s view, Snodgrass, along with others, are perhaps best summed up by the mantra “growth through opposition.” The repressive atmosphere and stilted, technical writing that the Workshop encouraged paradoxically created space for confessional poets like Anne Sexton, Snodgrass, and even Lowell himself. These poets, Dowling says, benefited from the Workshop method, even if it came at heavy personal cost.Lowell’s complex portrait in the book serves as a fine example of Dowling’s overall balanced approach. The dominant character in each chapter is given a punchy title—in Lowell’s case “The Turncoat.” (Others include The Star, The Suicide, The Guru, Infidels, The Mystic, and The Warrior.) Though a touch heavy-handed, the title gives us a clue to Dowling’s approach to the “mercurial” Lowell. He was famous for giving out praise followed by stinging comments. He notoriously played favorites, and invited visitors to class when they were sure to praise him. And yet, quoting Workshop student James B. Hall, Dowling reports Lowell “was so sensitive he trembled when he read to us” (63). When Lowell arrived in Iowa, he was fresh off a mental breakdown, and looking to recuperate with his wife in the safety of the university environment. His life had been turbulent and violent, a “checkered past” that was “[i]ntegral to Lowell’s powerful literary persona,” according to Dowling. He was an ex-converted Catholic, and a felon, courtesy of a stint in prison for resisting the draft in 1943. He had a reputation for madness after a public episode on a college tour in 1949. He would post misleading course titles, to encourage enrollment (though this was apparently not uncommon at Iowa). He attracted devotion and revulsion, depending on the student. He was also not known for his ability to teach writing—he was often visibly bored by student works—but was loved for his theatrical teaching style, usually on the subject of literature. This two-faced image was reflected in the way that he reflected back on the University of Iowa and the Workshop. Lowell famously took a stab at the “sterile” Workshop on the dust jacket of Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle, yet despite this condemnation, and his self-described hatred of the “gray-white, monotonous” landscape of Iowa, he would also praise the Workshop years later, saying, “[m]ost of my students have published books” (143).If there is a weakness to Dowling’s book, it is the tendency to engage in the “great man” theory of history; that is, it sometimes leans too heavily on the presence of outsized figures, where certain writers are given harsher or more personal treatment than others. However, it is true that all of these figures cast long shadows—Lowell was one of them—and in large part the Workshop established its reputation on those big names. Successful students were prized and rewarded with increased opportunity, while less talented students were mostly put on the chopping block in brutal class critiques. Dowling is careful to note, though, that even the star students were not immune from such savaging. The founder of the modern Workshop, Paul Engle, was the son of an abusive horse trainer, and was himself more famous as a businessman than as a teacher or writer. Yet his ambitious, almost athletic view of writing as not only craft but competition set the tone for the Workshop ever after. Publication was held as the highest good, and Engle’s efforts were a large part of the program’s success.Dowling is careful to balance credit and criticism. The dark side of the Workshop’s obsession with publishing is discussed at length in a section about Robert Shelley, a talented writer who committed suicide while a student at Iowa. Dowling, using quotes from various teachers and students, convincingly claims that the Workshop population knew how bad Shelley’s condition had become. However, it was also tacitly believed that Shelley’s despondency helped his writing. So no one interfered. Dowling shares some disturbing statistics on mental health and suicide in Workshop graduates; he does not flinch from graphic descriptions of Shelley’s death; and he returns again and again to the mental and emotional cost of the Workshop’s harsh methods. Moreover, he repeatedly underlines how Paul Engle’s obsession with funding and publication permeated the atmosphere of the program. Simply put, in his view the Workshop’s continued success outweighed students’ health. Students suffered for that ambition—Engle reportedly ignored students and faculty who had not published recently—but the faculty of the Workshop suffered, too. The rigid, self-referential aesthetics of the established New Criticism dominated the Workshop’s early approach to literature. And as Dowling puts it in the epilogue, “[r]esistance to commercial writing ran counter to the program’s efforts to develop professional authors” (333). Lowell was notorious for criticizing student works by comparing them to Milton or other classics. The Workshop culture was problematic for writers like Kurt Vonnegut and R.V. Cassill, whose successful work in science fiction and smut was dismissed as lowbrow “mass culture.” Later, program director Frank Conroy would casually dismiss postmodern writers like David Foster Wallace, and dismiss experimental writing as “balderdash.”Exploitation and oppression also figure prominently in Dowling’s account. As he repeatedly makes clear, women were viewed as “secondary citizens” in Iowa City, despite the success of early graduates like Flannery O’Connor. Joy Harjo, Sandra Cisneros, and others also faced racial discrimination. In a culture largely dominated by white male veterans of academia writing the cramped formalist poetry of New Criticism, genre-bending authors like Cisneros, emotional writers like Snodgrass, and members of ethnic minorities like Harjo and Rita Dove all faced diverse and considerable obstacles to success. Sexual misconduct was rife in the program, and implicated professors and students and directors alike. (The epilogue contains a rather ominous aside about Frank Conroy’s sealed file, the only sealed Director’s File, which was opened only after careful culling of “sensitive material” by Iowa staff. In 2024, apparently, the file will be fully opened.)The tensions inherent in what constitutes successful writing are what drive so much of A Delicate Aggression, and what finally make it so entertaining. Dowling’s prose is well-crafted, though the tone at times veers towards overconfidence. It is peppered with vivid description, and the writing enriches the subject he treats. Though he is perhaps guilty of the same personality-worship that plagued Iowa City (by his own evaluation), Dowling nonetheless represents Lowell and the others as complex and very human figures. Even Engle, who gets a fair bit of flack for his money-grubbing, comes out in the end as oddly admirable. More importantly, Dowling’s actual analyses of individual writers never smacks of the personality cult. Figures like Lowell are rendered in painful, exquisite detail, warts and all—Dowling is neither compromising nor muckraking. The tensions of working under duress are perhaps what produced such incredible writers in Iowa City—it is possible that the combined duress of all those ghosts demanded this tactfully cutting work.