A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers' Workshop

Mentors, Fomenters, and Tormentors [Includes Image Plates]

And when I came to Iowa City in the mid-eighties to give a reading and a talk to members of the International Writing Program, a favorite memory is of a lively, loquacious dinner in a Chinese restaurant on the outskirts oftown to which Paul and Hualing had invited , oh, a few people.... I didn't know Paul that well, probably, finally, though I always liked him. (I was also very full of myself at the time and may have been hard to know.) My first year at Iowa was the program's last year in the huts by the river and his last as director, and I never actually took a course from him. But he made a huge impression on me, that father to so many writers, and I'll always be grateful to him. In the week Paul died, I was visiting the James Wright Festival in Martin's Ferry, Ohio; there I had the opportunity to pay-my homage to the poet who has meant so much to me. And when I heard that Paul had died at O'Hare, between planes, on his way somewhere, as I said my prayer for him it seemed to me that it was somehow appropriate for death to come to him this way - while he was still in the saddle, or had his boots on (or whichever expression might fit). He who had told me I could see for myself is gone, but his example lives on in me and in the many other writers whom he honored , at the times in their lives when they were most in need, with his tireless generosity and support. God rest him. 112 P A U LEN G L E, IMP RES A RIO KURT VONNEGUT New World Symphony I want to scold the state of Iowa at least a little bit. You did not accord Paul Engle a minor fraction of the honors he deserved. But you were simply being human. Saint Matthew said: "A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country." Matthew was speaking of every locality on Earth. How can anyone seem remarkable who was born where we were born, grew up as we grew up, who looks like us, who talks like us, who jokes likes us, who eats like us, who makes the same dumb mistakes that we do? Why should you have paid homage to Paul Engle, when you could see him every day, if you wanted, and he was no dumber or smarter, or a better or worse dresser, than your brother Frank or your cousin Ed? So it takes an outsider like me to give his word of honor that Paul Engle, in addition to being one of you, was a glamorous planetary citizen on the order of Duke Ellington or Charlie Chaplin, say. Or Martha Graham, the great dancer and choreographer, who died ten days after Paul died. Or Antonin Dvorak, another great artist, who wowed your great-grandparents when he lived and worked in Iowa precisely because he was so much unlike them. Very well. Let the climax of this memorial service be the performance, or the reading, or the viewing, or whatever, of a work of art by Paul Engle which is obviously as majestic as Dvorak's New World Symphony. Silence. Nothing. What remams are the Writers' Workshops. And those have always been here, haven't they? Like the river and the old State Capitol? Before I came to Iowa City to teach in 1965 and '66, I could name only three things I knew for sure about your state: Corn, pigs, and the Writers' Workshop. There was only one such world-famous workshop then. Now there are two, the newer one for authors from other nations, the International Writing Program. There wouldn't be a Writers' Workshop worth a nickel here if Paul Engle hadn't committed his whole body and soul to their creation. So are the desks and file cabinets and duplicating machines of those ongoing institutions - the New World Symphony, so to speak, that he left us? You think I'm nuts? His New World Symphony, which is an Old World Symphony, too, or simply a World Symphony, is the enormous body of literature created, and which is still being created, by men and women who gained or regained self-confidence as artists right here in River City. Excuse me, I...