Chronicle of Higher Education, SEPTEMBER 28, 2020
How America Taught the World to Write Small
It exported a literature of individualism and domesticity — not one of
solidarity and big ideas.
By Eric Bennett
In 2017 I flew to Seattle for an Association of Writers & Writing
Programs panel on “Postcolonial Perspectives on Workshops of Empire.” As
the author of Workshops of Empire, I gave concluding remarks, rehearsing
its thesis for what I expected to be the last time.
That thesis goes something like this: Even today, the institutions of
creative writing in the United States reflect their origins in the Cold
War. In the 1940s and 1950s, early advocates for such programs,
including Paul Engle at Iowa and Wallace Stegner at Stanford, shared a
common vision for American culture with the internationalists of the
Truman and Eisenhower administrations and influential philanthropic
foundations. With public and private funding and a nod from the State
Department, Stegner and Engle traveled internationally to promote
American modernist literature — at least, a version of it friendly to
capitalism and hospitable to democracy. Their promotion of American
values fostered a literature of individualism and domesticity and
suppressed a literature of solidarity and big ideas. Insofar as American
writers still render the bedroom or kitchen more deftly than the
zeitgeist or the world situation, they reflect the academic commitments
of a bygone age.
That day at AWP, intoning my pitch, my tail wasn’t quite between my
legs, but it wasn’t wagging, either. I had lost confidence that my
thesis was worth the breath it took to rehash it. A version that
appeared in these pages in 2014 (“How Iowa Flattened Literature”) had
been rebuffed as sensationalistic and conspiratorial. The packaging of
the article highlighted the discovery that the CIA had funded
international writing at Iowa, and this detail distracted from the
larger argument — that ideological complacency had hampered generations
of writers. The essay soured my relationship with the University of Iowa
Press (which was preparing, at the time, to publish my book), provoked
eye rolls among Iowa alumni, and angered Christopher Merrill, the
director of the International Writing Program at Iowa. That week, eager
to minimize the CIA funding, he dressed me down on Iowa Public Radio,
accusing me of speculation, innuendo, and lies.
I had hoped that my research would encourage the bolstering of
historical consciousness in the culture of the American MFA and help
contemporary writers in whatever small way to transcend the narrow
bounds of neoliberal individualism and to write big. But as I discovered
to my astonishment that day in Seattle, the thesis mattered most for
those who had lived through the history I was reciting — not in the
Western hemisphere, but in the East.
The Filipina poet and scholar Conchitina Cruz spoke up, transmuting the
lead of theory into the gold of an astonishing historical example. In
1946, Edilberto Tiempo enrolled at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,
overlapping with Flannery O’Connor. They were the two students in class
(the legend goes) with accents too thick to be understood by their
classmates — both had to have their stories read aloud by others. A year
later, Edilberto’s wife, Edith, matriculated too.
In 1951, having returned to the Philippines, the Tiempos founded a
creative-writing program at Silliman University in Dumaguete. In 1962,
they added the National Summer Writers Workshop. Both programs thrived
and even today remain arbiters of literary prestige in the Philippines.
What’s more, their early literary outlook, adopted straight from the
workshops at Iowa, has shaped literary production in the Philippines for
over half a century, and hardly for the better.
Cruz discusses the Tiempos in a 2017 article in the journal Kritika
Kultura, “The (Mis)Education of the Filipino Writer: The Tiempo Age and
Institutionalized Creative Writing in the Philippines.” She is
unstinting in her conclusions: Via the Tiempos, Iowa flattened
literature in the former American colony. Instructors encouraged their
students to center fiction and poetry on personal and aesthetic
experience rather than on political or historical concerns. Poems,
stories, and novels were to be written in English, not Filipino or any
of the other languages on the islands. “In downplaying the role of
literature in social transformation,” Cruz argues, the Tiempo regime
“authorizes the production of apolitical and de-historicized, if not
assimilationist and antinationalist, literature.”
The panel audience and I did not have to take Cruz’s word for it.
Someone stood up during the Q&A and said, “That’s exactly what happened
to me.” That was Gina Apostol, a novelist from the Philippines who had
attended a Silliman Summer Workshop in 1985. She had long been on the
record with her discontents. In a piquant 2007 essay, she likened the
New Criticism of the 1950s, so influential among the Tiempo set even in
the 1980s, to Spam: an unhealthy American import preposterously offered
up as natural. At Silliman she claims she “felt a kind of castration
(for a woman writer always has balls, you know)” and argued that the
“Filipino short story in English, as defined by Silliman, seemed too
narrow for my — or my country’s — interests.” This was not diffuse
colonial influence. It was lineage and design. What the Tiempos learned
from Engle they codified at the expense of the literary fate of a
nation, and writers today are still fighting it.
The Filipino case, as it turns out, is but one small part of the story.
The United States, an expanding empire after 1945, exerted hegemonic
influence over every nation it courted, bankrolled, invaded, or
assassinated the democratically elected leader of. Creative writing
played its part. A growing group of scholars, from Japan to China to the
United Kingdom to North America, is finally bringing the picture into
view. They’re asking: How much were writers warped and coerced? And how
valiantly did they resist?
The Philippines presents the worst-case scenario: a former American
colony tempted by imperial prestige to embrace and preserve the
anti-ideological poetics that served the interest of the dominant power.
But the Iowa effect has run a fascinating gamut.
In his 2017 American Literary History article “The Invention of the
Global MFA” Richard Jean So likens the literary campaigns of Paul Engle
to the social-scientific campaigns of Wilbur Schramm, the first director
of the Iowa program. After quitting creative writing, Schramm, in the
1950s, became a pioneer in communications studies who promoted
propaganda as a means to train Asians in “empathy” — precisely the
virtue that Engle espoused in the Workshop (Schramm’s bibliography
includes a telling range of titles: from The Story Workshop in 1938, to
The Reds Take a City in 1951, to The Nature of Psychological Warfare in
1954.)
Fiction writers’ preferred tool for engendering empathy (So argues) is
“free indirect discourse,” that is, the bending of omniscient
third-person narration to meld with the voice of a character. It’s a
venerable trick of the trade with a history stretching back to Jane
Austen. Three talented writers affiliated with Iowa — Bai Xianyong, Lin
Huaimin, and Engle’s wife and co-program director, Hualing Nieh — each
assimilated the technique without being dominated by it. “These
writers,” So concludes, “may have all experienced the trauma of exile
that afflicted so many East Asians after the war, and they may have all
come to Iowa to study creative writing, but they adapted what they
learned there, especially [free indirect discourse], to the
particularities of their lived situations.” The tools of the imperial
power, in other words, got appropriated and subverted and put to good use.
The scholar Yi-hung Liu has documented a similarly mixed legacy. Her
dissertation on Iowa suggests that the program often deepened rather
than diminished the political commitments of creative writers from Asia.
In the 1970s, the International Writing Program became a haven for
Baodiao-movement activists — those who assert the right of Chinese
sovereignty over the Diaoyu islands — and did so with the quiet consent
of Hualing Nieh. An Iowa journal, edited by two writers in residence
from Hong Kong, denounced the “two Chinas” proposal as “an international
conspiracy.” “There’s Only One China!” the editorial put it, subtly.
This was not diffuse colonial influence. It was lineage and design.
Often being thrown in together helped writers from different parts of
the Chinese sphere of influence write better. In a recent Chinese
Literature Today article, Po-hsi Chen explores the creative relationship
between Wang Anyi and Chen Yingzhen at the International Writing Program
in 1983, arguing that despite “the anti-communist nature of the IWP,
Chen’s socialist ideals and his religious faith provided Wang with a
concentric framework to first situate China and Chinese literature
within a worldly context.” Iowa, by not being China, gave Wang new
perspectives on China.
The American poet James Shea, who teaches at Hong Kong Baptist
University, demonstrates in a 2019 article in Writing in Practice that
the poet Dai Tian imported back to Hong Kong much from Iowa. Like the
Tiempos, and like countless American creative writers, he learned from
the workshop to be concrete and personal and vernacular rather than
sweeping and thinky and elevated. Like the Tiempos, he founded
creative-writing classes that spread the gospel. But Dai also discovered
in the American milieu of the late 1960s the countercultural currents
that were sweeping away the norms of the early Cold War. Bob Dylan, Joan
Baez, and Allen Ginsberg became influences, and his post-Iowa poetry
strikes a markedly anticolonial tone, protesting British control of his
home city.
In sum, the Iowa experience did for some Asian writers what history can
do for any writer. It transformed how they understood themselves. It
placed them in an alienating context that threw into relief what
mattered least and what mattered most back home. In some cases, the
extended visit helped to wean writers from their slavish assimilation of
Western poetics. For instance, with help from Iowa, the
European-flavored New Literature of 1920s Taiwan and the modernist
resurgence there in the 1960s gave way by the 1970s to a renewed
interest in regional forms of expression. In every case, the time abroad
became one of three or four (or five or 10) ingredients that fertilized
powerful new developments.
Scholars working on the influence of the Iowa writing programs on Asia
recently gathered in a virtual symposium centered in Hong Kong. I gave
opening remarks from my living room in Rhode Island. The prevailing tone
of the conversation, as in almost any scholarly gathering, was critical
of the United States. Yet the symposium itself replayed the script of
international literary exchange that Engle, Nieh, Stegner, and their
colleagues had drafted close to 70 years ago. Even in critiquing the
creative-writing Cold Warriors, we were talking to each other because of
them — from the mainland U.S., from the U.K., from Hawaii, Japan, Hong
Kong, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Who else, that night, was doing
such diplomacy? Surely not Mike Pompeo’s State Department.
The vibrancy of the symposium, the vitality of the new scholarship, not
to mention the artistic fruits of the international-exchange programs
under discussion, have raised for me questions that are almost too
uncomfortable to ask: Was the mid-century idealism actually doomed from
the beginning? Or were there good ideas in there?
Engle and Stegner were progressive New Dealers with a visceral but also
considered hatred of Nazism and Stalinism. They felt horror at all forms
of totalitarianism and political repressiveness; an animating aversion
to racism; and a desire to see economic and social justice for the
marginal and the oppressed. They engaged in the larger campaigns of what
the scholar Greg Barnhisel has called “Cold War Modernism,” the
recasting of a wide movement in the arts for narrow diplomatic purposes
— narrow, but hardly jingoistic. Yet by the 1960s a new generation
regarded men like Engle and Stegner as part of the problem, too cozy
with channels of power that facilitated American imperialism. This
criticism, of course, must be aired. These creative writers, like so
many of their contemporaries, were burned around 1965 by their
righteousness from 20 years earlier, as the Vietnam War gave the
horrific lie to their good intentions. Even so, their careers weren’t
tenures of ceaseless evil. They dealt in mimeographs, not napalm, and
tried to use them for peace.
Their most unfortunate legacy, in my view, is not that they worked to
put America in cultural conversation with the world. It’s that they
succeeded at the expense of American culture (and, as Cruz has
demonstrated, Filipino culture, too). They promised us — through the
creative writers who taught the creative writers who taught us — that
our own little stories are enough. They insisted that you and I do a
kind of civic good by simply giving witness to our immediate experiences.
Hiroshima and Auschwitz gave this orientation overwhelming plausibility,
for a time. Against vast forces of destruction — technological or
systemic — so many lone, distinct, humanizing testimonials appeared to
offer the most potent form of resistance. Since World War II, everything
from Selma to Ferguson has kept such witness alive as a powerful outlet
for important dissent — especially for voices scarcely represented in
the early decades of institutionalized creative writing. But even in the
age of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, the results of making
self-expression the ultimate form of political righteousness (not to
mention of literary art) are, to say the least, mixed. Social media have
metastasized this creed — which originates from many sources, not just
creative-writing programs — to reveal its disastrous narcissism. (A
whole presidency has now based itself on a grotesque preoccupation with
a wronged self.) The problem with exporting literary smallness in 1950
(or 1960 or 1970 or 1980) was not the exportation. It was the smallness
— the putative civic sufficiency of unapologetic selfhood.
That 1950s-style internationalism, under scrutiny at our Zoom symposium
in May, suggests that there may well be specters more ominous than, say,
soft diplomacy. There might be worse things than a State Department that
stocks international reading rooms with books critical of the nation
doing the stocking — which, as Barnhisel and diplomatic historians have
reminded us, the United States did after World War II. The fruitful
interrogation of tragic inheritances and imperfect visions could well be
the only humane politics left for us to practice. It was what the most
sophisticated of the cultural Cold Warriors were committed to and what I
sensed in the air — or the pixels — of the Hong Kong event.
The day of the symposium, in streets almost within earshot of our
conference hosts, clashes between protestors and surrogates from Beijing
were reaching a violent pitch. Everyone on the call seemed to feel the
Chinese Communist Party pressing at the border — even those of us far
from Asia. Meanwhile, in the United States, powerful currents of
illiberalism erode foundations that professors, until recently, have had
the luxury of being so skeptical of. The months since November 2016
reveal that the only thing worse than too much credulousness about the
possibility for reasoned cultural and political exchange — i.e.,
liberalism — might be its demise.
Eric Bennett is a professor of English at Providence College. He is the
author of Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative
Writing During the Cold War (University of Iowa Press, 2015).
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