I no longer write Frank ’s words on my classroom’s blackboard as frequently as I did. Instead I say, “Every good story contains a clock, a period of time during which all dramatic events must begin and end. After Holden Caulfield is kicked out of Pencey Prep, he has three days to get home for Christmas. Nick Carraway rents a cottage beside Gatsby’s. Summer begins when he arrives; fall arrives when he departs. The seasons contain the story. Understanding how time operates in your story will help you write it.” As I speak, I see students jotting down what I’ve just said, making notes. It’s taken me thirty-five years, but, in my idiosyncratic way, I can now talk to young writers. And, as the program’s director, I’ve matured the way Frank must have matured, by learning that we are all simply writers who travel in the same literary universe.
Two years after I became the program’s director, a colleague at work told me that Katherine Anne Porter’s childhood home, located ten miles from the university, had been put up for sale. Many critics consider Porter one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers. She won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her fiction, but I hardly knew her work. Nevertheless, I felt obligated to do what I could to keep the house she’d lived in from vanishing.
The small, nineteenth-century building stood on a corner lot in Kyle, Texas, ten miles from campus. The town’s population: 2,000. The town: nothing more than a central Texas railroad line’s way station. I’d made an appointment to look at the house. Carroll Wiley, a fund-raiser for the university, accompanied me. Standing on the street, we saw a weather-stained clapboard shack listing on the brittle stone foundation beneath it. In her fiction, Porter describes the house as a Southern mansion, a kind of Tara.
A pecan tree shaded the weedy backyard, and a rotting lean-to had fallen onto a pile of rusted gardening equipment. The porch’s roof and floor were soggy; a torn, decaying sofa, covered with dog hair and damp to its core, sat near the rear door. Cobwebs from the low eaves brushed my head as I stepped inside. The small kitchen had been remodeled in the 1950s with tin cabinets, a yellow Formica countertop, and a porcelain sink. I scanned the dining room’s maple floors and its casement windows. The room gave off a serene vibration. With sunlight and some white curtains, it could be pleasant. Off the parlor was a sitting room; through that a small bedroom with an unattractive built-in closet, but a surprisingly spacious bathroom, which I later discovered had been the bedroom Porter had shared with her three siblings, as, back then, everyone in the family had used an outhouse.
Carroll stood next to me, waiting. “Well, what do you think?”
“It’s a mess,” I said. Then, with a comic sense of hope, I added, “Let’s save it.”
I said this quixotically, but perhaps karma guided me because Sam Lawrence had been Katherine Anne Porter’s publisher. In the same way he convinced Frank to write
Body & Soul
, he’d convinced Porter to finish her only novel,
Ship of Fools
.
But preserving the house—which she described, in a letter to a friend, as a “dreary little place, empty, full of dust, even smaller than I remembered it”—would be expensive. So, Carroll, I, and a few Kyle residents formed a committee and announced our preservation efforts. Between April and September, we raised $35,000. As the house alone cost $75,000, we decided to have a fund-raiser in the backyard. In ninety-degree heat, I outlined my vision to twenty people seated on folding chairs. I explained that I saw the house as a writer’s residence and a place to bring visiting authors. “Let them use Katherine Anne Porter’s childhood home,” I said, “to extend literature.” After I finished speaking, a tall gentleman approached me and said, “I’m very interested in this.” Then he left.
He was Bill Johnson. During the Great Depression, his father had purchased Kyle ranchland for nine dollars an acre. Through the thirty-five-hundred-acre ranch ran the Blanco River, where Porter had swum and fished in a deep green pool called “Halifax Hole.” Later, she wrote about the place in her novella
Noon Wine
. By the time I met Bill, he ran his family’s multimillion-dollar foundation. Wanting to do something for Kyle, he wrote a check to buy the house. Then we began to restore it.
We replicated historical detail as best we could. We agreed that the front porch had not originally rested on concrete, so we jettisoned the cement and set the porch on wooden posts. Then we balanced the house on a new foundation and screened in the back porch. At that point, I estimated that we needed another $400,000 to complete the renovation and $1,000,000 to operate it and fund a visiting writers series. I was hesitant to proceed until we had money to cover both.
One evening in his office, where we’d been meeting, Bill said to me, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.” He’d contribute $400,000. Then, if we needed $25,000 a year to cover initial operating expenses, he’d handle that as well. Bill had discovered personal, cultural, and historical threads he didn’t wish to see broken. By preserving the house, we were weaving these threads, and then the weave grew more intricate.
Curt Engelhorn, the fourteenth-richest man in the world, was the son of Porter’s childhood friend Erna, who had lived across the street from the house. At seventy-one, he lived in Switzerland, but his sister Elizabeth owned a ranch in west Texas. Her close friend, Mary Giberson, said to me, “You know, Curt’s coming through town. I think he might like to see the house where his mother played.” Three months later, Curt arrived. As he walked through the rooms of the small house he, like Bill, may have sensed the thread stitching us all together, because, after I wrote him a letter requesting a gift, he gave us $1,200,000.
Two years later, the house was designated a national literary landmark. At the ceremony, Tim spoke about Katherine Anne Porter. As I listened and contemplated the improbable story of preserving her house, I thought of Frank, Sam Lawrence, and me, and how mysteriously all of our lives had been woven together. And how the weave continues to add new colors as writers come to read their work, hold classes for MFA students, and pay homage to Katherine Anne Porter’s ghost.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
P
ublishing a fiction anthology by Iowa graduates was Leigh Haber’s idea. She was an editor at Hyperion, the firm owned by Disney to which Pat Mulcahy had defected when she left Little, Brown. Leigh called Henry and asked him to recommend an editor. When he named me, Leigh agreed. I was certain I could do a good job, yet I’m still shocked whenever I see my name below the anthology’s title. But I told Henry and Leigh I wouldn’t edit the book without Frank’s approval. So Henry contacted Frank to ask for it.
“At first,” Henry told me, “Frank thought I was asking him to edit the book.”
Frank explained that he couldn’t take on the project as he was already editing an essay collection by Iowa grads called
The Eleventh Draft
.
Henry said, “There was an awkward silence when I told him I was asking for his blessing for you to edit the anthology.”
Briefly flustered, Frank answered, “Oh. Of course, Tom. Absolutely.” Then he gave Hyperion permission to use the workshop’s name “in connection with the sale, advertising and promotion of the book.”
I decided to select stories from 1930 to 1999, write a foreword, and add a brief overview of the workshop’s seventy-year history. Every writer or writer’s estate would receive the same compensation for reprint rights, $500, and every living author would contribute a three- to five-hundred-word preface to his or her story. All profits would be donated to provide scholarships to workshop students. I wanted Frank to write an introduction, too, but I didn’t know what would be a reasonable fee. So I called and asked “How much? ” thinking Frank would say $1,500.
He answered, “For you, my friend, $3,000,” which was the exact amount he’d paid me for my
The Eleventh Draft
essay. He’d simply taken back my money. Plus, I gave him five thousand words, and he returned twelve hundred.
“Bastard,” I said, while Frank laughed, softly.
I knew he’d write a succinct, graceful introduction. Elegant brevity defined Frank’s nonfiction. But, at the time, I didn’t know that anxiety also accounted for his concision. Several years later, he described his feelings in, ironically, an essay entitled “Observations Now” that begins:
“I think most people who attempt to write with a degree of seriousness are curious about others doing the same thing. Writing is a lonely enterprise, after all. Some seem comfortable in the mental solitude.”
But, Frank admitted:
I am uncomfortable writing, and I know a number of writers (although I won’t mention them) who feel the same way. The isolation, self-doubt, perfectionism and other idiosyncratic impediments to action—some completely irrational, almost like superstitions—mix in various ways in various people to create something close to dread at the sinister urgency of the blank page. For myself, once I’m up and moving, if not running, through the lines, I zip back and forth between feeling okay and feeling terrified. Once in a while I am exhilarated, but more often it is as if my inner self, my sense of myself, is at risk. Something like the tension one might feel watching the ivory ball circumnavigate the roulette wheel after having made a large, foolish, impulsive bet.
Given this, it’s odd that Frank chose to become a writer, but, as he said, a writer’s life is irrational. True, elation sometimes makes its way from a writer’s fingertips to his or her heart and, for a moment, the writer believes that he or she has fashioned a chain of perfectly conjoined words. But the feeling recedes. Then the sublime seems trite, the harmonious dissonant, and perfection imperfect. Writing’s daily difficulties humble a writer; few writers earn a living from their work; fewer still receive accolades; and, at best, two dozen a century are remembered. So what compels us to do it: a naïve but persistent hope for transcendence through art?
In his anthology introduction, Frank wrote:
When I was a kid of eighteen I went to Paris. I had very little money, lived in an Algerian slum, ate so badly I lost half the hair on the back of my head from a vitamin deficiency, got robbed, got beaten up, and endured various other hardships. Nevertheless, I stayed, because I had read about prewar Paris—about Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, and all the others who used to hang out in “Boul Miche” at The Dome or The Select. Surely it would all start up again now that the war was over. I wanted to meet artists, I wanted to connect with the literary ex-pats I assumed must be there. But of course I was too late. There was no doubt an artistic community, but it was no longer open and welcoming, if indeed it had ever been as open as I imagined.
Dejected, Frank returned to the States, but he never forgot his youthful literary longing. Concluding his introduction, he added, “It has never surprised me that young American writers want to come to the Iowa Workshop. A place to read, write, and talk, a place to test ideas and to experiment. A literary community of some sophistication. Of course they want to come.”
By the time I entered the program, twenty-four new students came each August. Many of us published, many didn’t. Of those who did, I could choose very few to represent each decade. Between June and October of 1998, I read eighty story collections (having decided that novel excerpts would be less satisfying to readers). I wanted to present a variety of voices, subjects, styles, and sensibilities to refute the widespread notion that a formulaic “workshop story” existed. Tacitly, the anthology asked readers to decide whether Denis Johnson’s work differed from Jane Smiley’s work, or if Jayne Anne Phillips mimicked Raymond Carver.
Also, I felt the anthology needed to give the reader a sense of time, place, and student experiences, rather than simply being another soulless compilation of stories. So, I solicited recollections from graduates. Some had hated the workshop. A few griped about being overlooked. A famous Latina author accused the workshop of racism, which I asked her to write about, believing her remembrance would provide a unique perspective on the late 1970s; she politely refused. Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham recalled “a fellow student slapping a story of mine down on the table and announcing to the members of our workshop, ‘This is just
pornography
.’” James Hynes wrote that, “In many ways, being at the Writers’ Workshop was like being in high school again. It was a cliquish, judgmental place, where your reputation could be decided in a moment. You weren’t judged on your hair or clothes, however, but on the contents of your bookshelf.” Despite these comments, though, a singular theme emerged. “What I loved best about the Workshop,” Tom Barbash wrote, “was that it was, and still is, a place where writing is sacred, paramount.” Cunningham added, “I actually walked around at night sometimes and stood for a while under certain lighted windows, knowing that inside someone I admired was struggling to put something down on paper, and that what was getting put onto paper might, in fact, be extraordinary.” Occasionally, something was. Flannery O’Conner’s classmate, Jean Wylder, remembered that “On the opening day of class, Flannery was sitting alone in the front row, over against the wall. She was wearing what I was soon to think of as her ‘uniform’ for that year: plain gray skirt and neatly ironed silkish blouse, nylon stockings, and brown penny loafers. Her only makeup was a trace of lipstick. [The writer] Elizabeth Hardwick once described her as a ‘quiet puritanical convent girl from the harsh provinces of Canada.’” But, several weeks later, “after Flannery finished reading her story, we sat there until Andrew Lytle gave meaning to our silence by saying Workshop was over for the day. For once, there was not going to be any critical dissecting.” Later that day, Wylder and a classmate went around Iowa City, picking flowers from people’s front yards. Then they walked across town and carried them to the cramped, second-floor apartment where O’Connor lived.