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Creative Writing and the Cold War University Eric Bennett 25 Creative Writing and the Cold War University Eric Bennett Treating institutionalized creative writing without reference to the aftershocks of fascism and the ideological struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union that emerged after World War II is sort of like discussing the Apollo program as pure science. The international shift in economic and political power beginning in 1945, the material and spiritual carnage of the war, and the global contest it gave rise to profoundly shaped the academic discipline of creative writing. The graduate programs emerged as part of the boom in American colleges and universities during the Cold War, and invoking the Cold War gives us not only a date of birth but a context of huge political, aesthetic, and philosophical significance. Our practices in the class- room today derive strangely but unmistakably from the historical moment in which they were born – a fact crucial to thinking about the present and future of the discipline. In 1940, the nascent Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa stood alone. By 1950, four programs had joined it, those at Johns Hopkins (in 1946), Stanford (in 1947), the University of Denver (in 1947), and Cornell (in 1948). Until the 1960s, these five were the big players, although after the war writers increasingly found posi- tions in English departments as the curriculum expanded. In the 1960s, with the matriculation of the Baby Boom generation, many new creative writing programs were founded, and by 1970 they numbered close to 50. They continued to proliferate at an astonishing rate through to the twenty-first century.1 The second round of programs, founded during the 1960s, derived from the first. The alumni of the original programs sought employment like that of their teachers, A Companion to Creative Writing, First Edition. Edited by Graeme Harper. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. (c) 2013 Kogan Page Ltd. All Rights Reserved 378 Eric Bennett while expanding institutions of higher education, inspired by the success of Iowa, sought teacher-writers to oversee the formation of new departments. At least half of the nearly 50 new graduate programs founded in the 1960s were founded by Iowa alumni (Myers 165). This meant the replication of pedagogical conventions, including the workshop method, a story almost too familiar. A story less familiar, and in fact all but forgotten, is how the original workshops, with large and long-term repercussions, defined and constricted the literary or poetic conventions of the discipline. The workshops of the late 1940s and 1950s enshrined a specific, powerful, limiting view of literature. Broadly, the view reflected the modernist tendencies in favor at the moment – more narrowly, the fears and hopes of 1945. M.F.A. programs ever since have spread that view. To many, the outlook appears roughly transcendent. But it can be assumed that, like all such outlooks, it won’t appear transcendent forever. The dramatists of the Elizabethan stage, the neoclassicist theorists of the eighteenth century, and the poets of the Romantic period, to name a few, thought that they, too, were making literature as it simply had to be made. During the Cold War, creative writers at colleges and universities privileged the particular over the universal, the sensory over the ideational, the concrete over the abstract, the situated over the synoptic, and the personal and the individual over the communal and the collective. It was a preference that blended seamlessly the aesthetic with the political. It was the belletristic imperative of an anti-Communist decade. Some writers with academic posts advanced the imperative with intense self- consciousness; others followed the herd. Before the literary-philosophical story, let’s look at the financial one. In 2013, when those wishing to be read outnumber those wishing to read them, the initial years of the M.F.A. movement boggle the mind. In 1945, the prime financial impetus for institutionalized creative writing came neither from students longing to versify nor from established versifiers yearning to make rent. It came from a powerful organiza- tion that desired to reshape American culture as part of a new global order in which the United States was supreme. This was the Rockefeller Foundation, and to under- stand it one must first understand the climate in which it operated. Higher education changed radically between the Great Depression and the 1960s. American participation in World War II led to an unprecedented partnership between the government and the science faculties at research universities, and the ensuing arms race with the Soviets perpetuated this tie.2 The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, or G.I. Bill, was also pivotal. It sent millions of veterans to college and graduate school throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, adding in bodies what the Pentagon added in grants and contracts. After the Soviets launched the first Sputnik into space in 1957, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, which funded math and science education at all levels, redoubling the boom. The head- count of students in college in 1960 was 3.2 million, about triple what it had been in 1930. With the admission of women and minorities during the 1960s and with the arrival on campus of the Baby Boom generation, the total number of students (c) 2013 Kogan Page Ltd. All Rights Reserved Creative Writing and the Cold War University 379 more than doubled again by the beginning of the 1970s, exceeding 7 million (see Kerr ch. 6). The sciences benefited the most from the boom, but the humanities thrived too. Somebody had to teach composition to engineers in training. And the prosperity of the liberal arts went far beyond that: it reflected a massive postwar commitment to humanistic studies advocated by educators and embraced by veteran students. Benefi- ciaries of the G.I. Bill tended to be older, more experienced, and less prepared aca- demically than their younger peers, and many of them longed to explore life’s big questions in the classroom. They were as likely to study history or English as anything else.3 With Ernest Hemingway at the height of his fame, soldier students gravitated to creative writing classes to transform combat experiences into literature, often with his particular example in mind.4 The novelist Vance Bourjaily, acclaimed in his day for The End of My Life (1947) – which reads now like a Hemingway parody – was a World War II veteran and mainstay on the faculty at Iowa starting in the 1950s. Marguerite Young, reminiscing about her experiences teaching at Iowa in his day, recalled “two teachers who shared the fiction seminar, both ex-Marines and with a very hard-boiled approach to litera- ture. They encouraged bad imitations of Hemingway” (Ruas 113). But in his later years Wallace Stegner, who founded the writing program at Stanford, often waxed nostalgic about the soldier students of the 1940s, seeming to doubt that things would ever be so good again. His alumni included Eugene Burdick, future co-author of The Ugly American and Fail-Safe, and Evan S. Connell, who later wrote Mrs. Bridge and Son of the Morning Star. The novelist Walter Havighurst, who ran courses in creative writing at the University of Miami, Ohio, loved the G.I. Bill generation so much so that he declined a writing fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation in order to stay in the classroom.5 Federal dollars transformed the colleges and universities, but private money played as large a role, especially in the humanities. After Congress created in the 1930s, in response to the Great Depression, a progressive tax scheme and set high rates on the profits of large businesses, many corporations opted to retain control over their profits by establishing charitable foundations.6 Along with the Carnegie and the Ford foun- dations, the Rockefeller Foundation, to which I now return, was at the apex of this historically unprecedented, publicly oriented disbursement of corporate wealth. From the mid-1940s through the 1960s, it underwrote new academic programs across many fields of knowledge and sponsored initiatives that transformed existing ones. The philanthropic face of Standard Oil, in other words, remade ostensibly autonomous institutions from the outside. The Foundation’s Humanities Division believed that the United States lacked a sufficient awareness of other nations, peoples, and languages and had yet fully to develop a degree of culture and a clear set of values commensurate with its military superiority and new global role. The division was directed from 1932 to 1949 by David H. Stevens, an English professor from the University of Chicago, who devoted long hours and large grants to redefining the nature of literary studies in the US. The (c) 2013 Kogan Page Ltd. All Rights Reserved 380 Eric Bennett goal was to raise the level of cultural literacy inside and outside of the academy and to make English departments more belletristic and more concerned with “values.” Such a focus might, in the view of the Foundation, help to avert a third world war and preserve the global stability on which markets depended. Stevens and his Division were especially interested in the role of the writer in society. In 1945 they attempted to seed the Midwest with creative writing programs. This was a time when, with the exception of Iowa – which was not yet “Iowa” – there were no such things. The Foundation sponsored Havighurst (at Miami) to chair a commit- tee to advocate the establishment of the presence of writers on campuses across the region. Havighurst consulted with Paul Engle and Wilber Schramm at Iowa, Robert Penn Warren and Tremaine McDowell of the University of Minnesota, Harlan Hatcher of Ohio State University, Allan Seager of the University of Michigan, and Warren Beck of Lawrence College, and drew up plans for conferences, writing fellowships, and salaries for teacher-writers.
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