Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War (New American Canon)

Academic writing can be stifling and turgid. Bennett's book is anything but that. He traces the history of the Writer's Workshops from their earliest beginnings in the 30's to the 60's but the book is much more than that. It is a history of our literary culture in that period claiming that far from being a period of writers standing apart from the ideologies of national politics and observing them obliquely if at all, they and the workshops were fully engaged in an American ideology that saw communism as a major threat to our freedoms. But in doing so, they neglected the larger humanistic perspective that has characterized American writing since its origins. Highly recommended.

WORKSHOPS OF EMPIRE is not a book for the casual reader. But if you are interested in learning something about the origins of the world-famous Iowa Writers' Workshop, then it's worth the work. And reading Bennett's book is "work," or at least it was for me, and I was interested. Because MFA Creative Writing programs have proliferated like rabbits over the past sixty-some years. And Iowa was where it all got started in the post-war years, mostly under the directorship of Paul Engle, a very minor and mostly forgotten poet. Engle's true genius lay in his talent for promotion, public relations, glad-handing and selling - his writing program, that is. He was able to separate the Writers' Workshop from regular university funding and get substantial grants and moneys from wealthy donors, particularly, in the beginning, the Rockefeller Foundation. This separation gave him a certain autonomy in how the program was administered and implemented. I was vaguely aware of this, but what I didn't know - and Bennett lays it all out here - was that the writing program was looked upon as a political tool, with an emphasis on individuality and creativity that would be the antithesis of the dreaded specters of Communism and Totalitarianism. Bennett's research shows that the CIA was also involved in secretly funneling funds to certain organizations and to the little literary magazines, like the Kenyon and Sewanee Reviews, to keep them afloat and provide forums for the new writers coming out of the workshops. I was surprised at the extent of government's role in the early years of the Workshop, but not completely, since I recently read a couple of other books about Iowa's early years, i.e. THE ELEVENTH DRAFT: CRAFT AND THE WRITING LIFE FROM THE IOWA WRITERS' WORKSHOP, edited by Frank Conroy (a former Director); and A COMMUNITY OF WRITERS: PAUL ENGLE AND THE IOWA WRITERS' WORKSHOP, edited by Robert Dana; and A LUCKY AMERICAN CHILDHOOD, by Paul Engle. The best of these is the Dana book.But Bennett's book is different, primarily in the sheer depth of his research. He looks closely at the pre-workshop years and the literary schools of Naturalism and Humanism - and New Humanism - as well as at some of the icons of literary criticism, men like Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks and other critics whose names I vaguely remember from my own graduate school years. He examines the state of literature and scholarship in the post-war years and into the decades of the Cold War and beyond. Hemingway and Henry James are closely examined as opposite ends of the stylistic spectrum studied by many workshop participants over the years. But the chapters I found the most interesting - and a little easier going - were the ones on Engle at Iowa and Wallace Stegner at Stanford. The two men both studied under Norman Foerster at Iowa in the 20s, but their paths later diverged dramatically, in that Engle never shone as a writer himself, but became instead a champion cheerleader and fund raiser for the Iowa program. Stegner, on the other hand, in addition to directing the Stanford program, also continued to steadily develop his own literary oeuvre in a career that perhaps peaked with the publication of his bestselling novel, ANGLE OF REPOSE. The Stegner chapter focuses more on the man than on the program he helmed, whereas Engle's travels and PR work for the Workshop take more of center stage in that chapter.What the Stegner chapter did for me was to whet my appetite to go back and read and re-read some of his work. His CROSSING TO SAFETY is one of my favorite novels. But I have never read his WOLF WILLOW, a book that has been languishing on my shelf for years. Bennett's book has convinced me it's time to take it down and read it.WORKSHOPS OF EMPIRE will never be a bestseller. It is a very special niche book meant for scholars and professors of literature. Taken as such, it's a damn good one, and I will recommend it unreservedly. I'm glad I read it. In publishing WORKSHOPS, the University of Iowa Press has done scholarship a great service, providing yet one more valuable resource to the still-new study of the creative writing movement in America.