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

My Time

Jean and I could become acquainted with other young poets and their wives. There were the Bill Belvins, the Jack Meades, the Don Petersens, and, as I remember it, the W. D. Snodgrasses. (I had come to Iowa ostensibly to teach an undergraduate course in fiction writing; funny how Paul knew from the start that I would end up a poet.) Paul whispered to me that the best of the young poets were Petersen and Snodgrass; I understood him to be pointing out the competition - a very friendly and happy competition, it was to turn out. In the same way he tried to steer me and the other new student writers into courses at the university taught by professors more or less sympathetic with the workshop, for there were more of his colleagues than there should have been who were not at all sympathetic and who were, not to mince words, Paul's enemiesand , by extension, ours. It was told of one of Paul's colleagues that, Paul's house lying on this professor's way home from the Saturday afternoon football games, the unhappy man would stop in the street, emboldened by drink, and shout out taunts and curses at the writers' workshop. I am sorry to say that I never witnessed this performance myself, but I am sure that any writer who heard the tale would have considered it plausible enough. One final instance of Paul's great kindness should complete the picture. I had arrived in the dead of winter with few warm clothes; my overcoat was an uncle's GI overcoat, which did not fit. Paul asked if I might have any use for a winter suit, and took me out to Friendly Avenue to tryon one of his that he claimed to have outworn . It was still a fine suit, heavy green tweed, warm enough for the Iowa winters, and though it did not really fit me, I was very glad to have it and to wear it right through till spring. That it had been Paul's gave it, to my mind, a certain distinction that more than made up for the poor fit. I hope it is obvious that Paul was a generous man. He gave Jean and me a warmer and richer welcome than we were ever to receive anywhere else, even at those schools where, later, my presence had been somewhat zealously sought. A few years later Paul was to rescue me from the wilderness of teaching in barren little schools that did not appreciate me and that I did not appreciate. I have always felt that Paul was the first perDON A L D JUS TIC E 29 son in a position of authority able to appraise me with a pure eye and to want to give me a proper chance to prove myself. For Paul was never one to be prejudiced by any of the ordinary preconceptions : what he liked in others was talent, as he saw and registered it, and in this he had an extraordinarily quick eye. (Such prejudices as he had, so far as I was ever able to detect any, were two. He seemed to be remarkably fond of bringing to these shores young British writers - it was easy to theorize that this was due to his years at Oxford [his Oxford oar was mounted above the door of his famed hog-house study] - and other foreign writers, especially from Asia or from behind the Iron Curtain [a preview of his founding ' some years later, the International Writing Program, which was to institutionalize these interests of his]. The second prejudice was simply that he did not in those years - not for long anyhow-· tolerate people who drank too much.) My rescue came about in this way. In 1957 Paul conceived the very odd idea ofcelebrating the centennial ofthe publication ofLes Fleurs du Mal in Iowa City, of all unlikely places. The bizarreness of the idea was surely part of the charm of it for Paul. The upshot was that a number of scholarly papers on the subject of Baudelaire - including mine, dashed off on the train the night beforecame to be delivered one warm day in the senate chamber of Old Capitol, an appropriately handsome setting; Harry Duncan - master printer - printed not only a handsome program for the occasion but also a pamphlet of poems by young workshop poets as a tribute to the great French poet; and best of all- the climax of the...