Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War
256
Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War
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Overview
Creative writing emerged as a graduate discipline in the United States amid this astonishing swirl of grand conceptions. The early workshops were formed not only at the time of, but in the image of, and under the tremendous urgency of, the postwar imperatives for the humanities. Vivid renderings of personal experience would preserve the liberal democratic soul—a soul menaced by the gathering leftwing totalitarianism of the USSR and the memory of fascism in Italy and Germany.
Workshops of Empire explores this history via the careers of Paul Engle at the University of Iowa and Wallace Stegner at Stanford. In the story of these founding fathers of the discipline, Eric Bennett discovers the cultural, political, literary, intellectual, and institutional underpinnings of creative writing programs within the university. He shows how the model of literary technique championed by the first writing programs—a model that values the interior and private life of the individual, whose experiences are not determined by any community, ideology, or political system—was born out of this Cold War context and continues to influence the way creative writing is taught, studied, read, and written into the twenty-first century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609383725 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2015 |
| Series: | New American Canon |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Workshops of Empire
Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War
By Eric Bennett
University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2015 University of Iowa PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-372-5
CHAPTER 1
The New Humanism
The story of creative writing programs in the United States gains a distinct character after 1945, but it starts earlier. The Iowa Writers' Workshop cites 1936 as its year of origin, and scholars have offered a number of prehistories even to that development. No strong consensus exists regarding a birthdate for the practices we recognize as contemporary. Stephen Wilbers's homespun history of the Iowa Writers' Workshop dips into the regionalist heyday of the 1890s in Iowa City. D. G. Myers's The Elephants Teach situates the emergence of the discipline in terms of the revolution in American higher education that gathered steam after the Civil War and also in terms of trends in progressive education after the turn of the twentieth century. McGurl follows Myers in tracing postwar developments to child-centered theories of learning and presents Thomas Wolfe (the antithesis to later conceptions of a workshop writer) as the grotesque, Romantically diarrheal avatar of those theories.
To these variably illuminating origin stories must be added one more. It is mentioned in passing by Wilbers and analyzed by Myers, but even Myers's excellent account does not give it the kind of attention I believe it deserves. The trunk of the family tree of creative writing programs runs into the roots of the New Humanism, a conservative literary movement that featured prominently in Engle and Stegner's graduate education at Iowa. The New Humanism not only shifted the classroom emphasis (as Myers shows) but prepared the discipline for the Cold War blossoming, with all its epic ambitions and weird fears.
The strength of this argument depends on recognizing that Engle and Stegner, in 1945, were no longer young men. By the time Japan surrendered, they had assumed the administrative positions they would hold for roughly the next three decades and were close to middle age. In their late thirties, their minds were formed, their artistic visions matured, their careers in motion, their prejudices seasoned. The intellectual climate of the postwar era differed greatly from the one ten years earlier, and neither man encountered the new priorities and preoccupations with the impressionability of youth. Instead, how things looked to them — the quiescence of Eisenhower's decade, the ubiquitous ferment of anti-Communism, the sacred elevation of the liberal democratic individual — was significantly touched by views about literature instilled in them long before. For Engle and Stegner had shared in the 1930s a graduate advisor in Norman Foerster, who, from the beginning of the Great Depression until the late years of the war, oversaw the School of Letters at the State University of Iowa. Foerster promulgated the ideas of Irving Babbitt and was the person under whom those ideas, in the late 1920s, had hardened into the New Humanistic creed. Over the lynchpin of this movement, the discipline of creative writing resembles a family affair.
Foerster receives credit in scholarly and casual accounts for making the curricular innovations that eventually led to the Iowa Writers' Workshop. But Foerster's contributions to the discipline transcended logistics and curriculum. He trained Engle and Stegner to hear, with a distinct set of belletristic suppositions, the midnight prognostications of their Cold War colleagues during and after World War II. This part of Foerster's legacy lives quietly in the archival record, in the letters to and from his prize pupils. Foerster, in short, was more than a donnish reformer putting Engle and Stegner on the administrative path toward program directorships; he had a burning conscience whose intensity set fire to others. Understanding that conscience — and the postwar milieu it survived in — requires peering back to the culture wars in which it was most influentially exercised.
Shrillness is timeless. Every age has its vitriol. Twitter's got plenty of gall. The lost generation, the jazz age iconoclasts destined for postage stamps, squinting their eyes in the hereafter, would probably recognize the tone of twenty-first-century cable news. Their own debates rivaled recent ones in tone, but in content and in style were something now unimaginable: complex, literary, freighted with deeply traditional terms and formulations — and the violent rebuttal of those terms. Until the Great Depression, the noise of pitched battle thundered on the printed page. People fought hard over what to make of modernity, modernism, the past, the future, the legacy of technology, and the meaning of texts. After the Great War, the claps andbooms rang out largely from New York City and the Ivy League, and echoed across the country: clashes between businessmen and aesthetes, long-suffering progressives and vested interests, the cynical and the pietistic, the young and the old. Business interests took the White House. The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay transmuted free love into risqué sonnets in the Village and out in Provincetown. The critic H. L. Mencken, having long since found his voice, found a newly attentive audience, mesmerizing undergraduates with ideologically scattershot guff. Undergraduate writers aped him or parroted T. S. Eliot, whose pronouncements from England, changing with the seasons, keep the dour stocked in fresh self-conceptions.
As the postwar decade gathered steam, as corks were popped and locks bobbed, the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks subjected Mark Twain to the invasive scrutiny of Sigmund Freud. The novelist Sinclair Lewis illuminated small-town America in the klieg lights of satire, making attacks on the middle class that were popular with the middle class. His Main Street sold over a million copies and reached in translation readers in a dozen languages. Ernest Hemingway lambasted the Great War and lampooned Sherwood Anderson, who himself had confounded the moral atmosphere of the age of Anthony Comstock. F. Scott Fitzgerald swaddled the cold bones of irony in the warm flesh of romance; the champagne glasses clinked over spiritual chasms too deep not to celebrate in a way. It was a decade that saw both a renaissance in Harlem and a viable candidate for governor in Indiana put up by the Ku Klux Klan. The critic Edmund Wilson called the literary scene a vaudeville. If it was a vaudeville, it was one with gravely serious counterplots.
Rapid changes touched everybody and divided the forward-looking from the backward-glancing. Was the future the solution or the problem? Was the nation halfway to salvation or farther from it than ever before? What to make of rising industries, sprawling metropolises, racy advertisements, voting mothers, unruly daughters, smoking debutants, migrating Negroes, Marx, Marxists, Freud, Freudians, and the unsettling monstrosity of canvasses and symphonies from Europe? Not a bad age for the traditionalist who loved to seethe.
The professor and polemicist Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) was just such a seether. The New Humanism, which began with him and Paul Elmer More, gathered momentum for twenty years starting in the 1910s. In the hands of their disciples, it grew ever simpler and easier to grasp until it burst magnificently into public regard in the late 1920s, vanished almost as quickly, and was extinct from all but the most rarified scholarly carrels by mid-century. For a time, because of the great brief flurry, the movement commanded space in histories of criticism. But virtually nobody today reads the seminal texts, and its twenty-first-century interest is niche.
Yet in 1930, the power of the voice of Irving Babbitt rivaled H. L. Mencken's or even John Dewey's. In a loose partnership with More, Babbitt established a platform from which to denounce materialism in a materialistic age, romanticism in a romantic age, relativism in a relativistic one. He wanted standards and verities, bedrocks and first principles. He sought ways to describe historical change and literary development that didn't cede everything to the flux of atoms and hormones and populations.
An idea central to his writing was that modernity had split the self into catastrophic halves. Humankind's relationship to both matter and spirit had spiraled out of control. Babbitt traced the catastrophe of materialism back to Francis Bacon, whose reform of scientific method helped to usher it in. Three centuries of inductive bean-counting ever after had turned educated people into abject researchers, toadies to dead objects. Physical reality preoccupied the culture at its own expense, blinding the civilized to fuller truths. Knowledge that led to aeroplanes and phonographs did not lead to good men (Babbitt, like his contemporaries, was less interested in how Bacon pertained to women).
The catastrophe of the spirit, meanwhile, Babbitt traced back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the affective vacuum left by scientism, Rousseau had founded what Babbitt considered a bogus religion of the human heart, a sanctification of its trembles, throbs, quakes, and megrims. The French ur-Romantic, according to Babbitt, based the moral on the personal, leaving behind, for all to follow, the wicked example of a man indulging his excesses and neglecting his responsibilities. Rousseau popularized the myth that adults warped children, that society destroyed nobility, that civilization, our deepest wellspring of discipline and restraint, merely limited, corrupted, marred, and thwarted the innate goodness present in babies.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Babbitt looked around him and saw a world ravaged by the dialectic of the naturalistic and the romantic, of Bacon and Rousseau, of material excess and emotional glut. Government, statecraft, art, morality — all had spiraled downward since the Renaissance. The twin fragments of modern consciousness represented dual failures ofwisdom and self-control. Engineering and sentimentality, stuff and gush — together these formed tempestuously converging air masses that yielded the cyclone of the Great War: nerve gas and nationalism, artillery and gross ideals. When the war arrived, Babbitt pointed to it from the lectern as proof he'd been right all along.
Babbitt was neither Platonist nor Catholic; the realm of forms did not interest him, nor Augustine's Christianity. He concerned himself only with whatever evidently is. His method, like Bacon's, worked from particulars. But to Bacon's science he preferred the humanistic empiricism of Aristotelian observation. Aristotle took an interest in matter but also in people. You measured the speed of a bullet; you sized up the character of the man with the rifle. Only with both were you learning something useful.
Babbitt took as his field of observation everything he could get his hands on to read — the history of world literature. By addressing a truer kind of truth, by taking a wide belletristic average, he considered himself to be more scientific than the scientists across campus. For forty years he sifted and sifted through masterworks, unearthing piece after piece of humanistic evidence like an attorney prepping for the endless trial of the ages. He consulted Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, and Aristotle; grazed on Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Goethe. He wanted others to do the same and to be wise about what they assimilated even as they sampled vastly. The great minds of history, in his view, all pointed at a single right way. It was a kind of universalism that depended not only on wide reading but also on specific powers of selection and assimilation (about which he had less to say).
Babbitt's main source of influence today sounds quaint: a rostrum at a university. But at Harvard from the 1890s to the 1930s, reaching the sons of privilege, the leaders before they assumed the mantle of leadership, Babbitt had the morose staying power of an elephant loathing the zoo he was imprisoned in, defying the zookeepers by sticking around, aging into greater righteousness with every year that passed. Undergraduates destined for power drunk up Babbitt like castor oil, quaffed him medicinally — a masochistic draught. Many carried his ideas with them ever after.
T. S. Eliot was not the least. The poet and critic later attained critical eminence by imitating Babbitt's world-historical dyspepsia and making it seem original to himself. Eliot took a lot from Babbitt, just not Babbitt's endlessly expanding circles of literary ecumenism. Long after Eliot's undergraduate days, long after the appearance of The Waste Land (1922), many months after his conversion to the Anglican Church, Eliot still felt the need to rebut his old prof. In 1928 Eliot reviewed Babbitt's Democracy and Leadership, in which Babbitt argued for order, civilization, and social stability founded on tradition — all things Eliot wanted too. But Babbitt's formulas, in Eliot's view, were nonsense.
Babbitt believed in self-willed cultivation, a kind of do-it-yourself propriety. He urged young men to adopt what he famously called the "inner check," a means of policing the self. This meant ethics in the absence of supernatural coercion or motivation. It meant voluntary renunciation of all that public morality was in the process of no longer preventing us from enjoying. It meant a kind of secular libertarian Catholicism cultivated with the help of a gargantuan bibliography.
In Eliot's view, the inner check could never be expected to replace "the outer restraints of kingship, aristocracy, and class." Eliot accused Babbitt of "trying to build a Catholic platform out of Protestant planks." At the time of Eliot's review, Babbitt's arguments had changed little since Eliot's initial exposure two decades earlier. Babbitt's books built and built on the same basic themes. Literature and the American College (1908) heralded a campaign against progressive and scientific trends in higher education; The New Laokoön, An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (1910) theorized a middle ground between neoclassical rules of composition and the naturalistic chaos of nineteenth-century literature; Rousseau and Romanticism (1919) offered the fullest single elaboration of Babbitt's philosophy; Democracy and Leadership (1924) argued for a national future of self-restrained elites rather than expansive socialists; and On Being Creative and Other Essays (1932 — still to come in the year of Eliot's review) located true creativity not in originality but in imitations of human action produced by those with powerful ethical imaginations. "Babbitt's books, like the old ballads," wrote Douglas Bush, another former student, "grew by incremental repetition, and they gained weight and authority from the widening scope of his unswerving purpose."
Eliot could not square Babbitt's strict code with Babbitt's liberal canon, his Puritanism with his erudition. "Professor Babbitt knows too much ... knows too many religions and philosophies, has assimilated their spirit too thoroughly ... to be able to give himself to any." The result was a failure of conviction. "The result," said Eliot, "is humanism" — not a compliment.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Eliot's cultural criticism was to reshape American higher education — even while Eliot did not position himself explicitly as an educational reformer. Babbitt, on the other hand, in the earlier era, focused much of his energy directly on rolling back modernity in the college. He scoffed at electives, which allowed students rather than teachers to decide what was to be learned. He denigrated the scientific spirit of the graduate schools. Above all he denounced Charles William Eliot's transformation of Harvard from a liberal arts college to a modern university. Between 1869 and 1909, President Eliot, a chemist by training, had shifted the curriculum to meet the needs of an industrializing nation and the expectations of the businessmen who were suddenly sending their sons in droves. President Eliot's mantra was education for "service and power" — a phrase to make Babbitt shudder.
Of course Babbitt himself, born the year the Civil War ended, had only ever known the post-lapsarian Harvard Yard. Literature and the American College, his first book, offered a "plan for rehabilitating the humanities" and urged "a substitute for the existing doctorate." Babbitt envisioned a literature that was literary "and at the same time free from suspicion of softness or relaxation." He wanted "a degree that shall stand for discipline in ideas, and not merely for discipline in facts." But the age belonged to facts: facts for industry, facts for history, facts for the makers of dictionaries and treatises on poetry.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Workshops of Empire by Eric Bennett. Copyright © 2015 University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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