SPRING 2009 3

NOTES FROM 21 SOUTH STREETGet With the Program: Creative Writing in the Twentieth CenturyRichard Beck

In 1964, two years ater the publication o hisdebut novel,

one flew ove he Cuck’ Ne,

Ken Kesey let Caliornia on a cross-country roadtrip. He took recording equipment, hallucinogenicdrugs, and a dozen riends. Kesey drove east in partto escape the loneliness o novel writing, but hewas also putting both physical and symbolic spacebetween himsel and the creative writing programat Stanord, rom which he had graduated in1962. He took his education with him, though:the Merry Pranksters drove a school bus.There is a provocative irony in the act that

one flew ove he Cuck’ Ne

—one o thetwentieth century’s loudest anti-institutionalnovels—was written or class credit. That irony,Mark McGurl writes in his book

the PgamEa: Pwa fcn an he re  CeaveWng,

lies at the heart o the last hal-century o American ction.McGurl’s argument that the advent o creativewriting “stands as the most important event inpostwar American literary history” is an importantone, and it is going to be controversial. The rstgraduate-level creative writing program began in1936, and there are now more than three-hundredo them scattered throughout the country, withour hundred additional degrees oered toundergraduates. Admissions are competitive; asMcGurl writes, students love creative writing“suspiciously much.” The estimated success rateor creative writing graduates—that is, how manyactually go on to write or a living—is roughly onepercent. (It is ninety percent or medical schoolgraduates.) Each year, thousands o studentsvoluntarily put themselves in debt or whatamounts to a slightly modied extension o theircollege education. It is hard to imagine what thecountry’s literature would look like without it.

4 THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

*** Anyone can write alone or ree on weeknights;what creative writing students go broke or is theworkshop. We think o writing as a private struggle,but that is now out o date. Creative writing is bothsocial and theatrical. Seated at a large seminartable with a dozen peers, students receive advice,respond, debate the wording o a particular line,all under the parental gaze o the creative writinginstructor. McGurl writes that the workshop’ssociability is alternately “supportive and savage.”Like colleges, creative writing programs alwayspresent themselves as nurturing communities,but students know that every word and attitudeis subect to brutal scrutiny. Their teachers havebeen happy to dish it out. Flannery O’Connorbelieved that teaching was a negative exercise:“We can learn how

n

to write.”O’Connor graduated rom the country’s mostprestigious writing program, which was also therst. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop began in 1936,and it was a long time in the making. The clearestpoint o origin or creative writing as an academicdiscipline is Wendell Barrett’s course in AdvancedEnglish Composition, which he began giving atHarvard in 1884. Students who had previouslybeen asked to compose themes on given topics—“Can the immortality o the soul be proved,”say—were now asked to write daily assignmentson whatever they wanted, the only criteria being“that the subect shall be a matter o observationduring the day when it is written . . . and thatthe style shall be fuent and agreeable.” With his Vandyke beard, walking stick, and spats, Barrettwas not only a teacher o creative expression butalso a charismatic model o creative

beng.

By itssecond year, his course was attracting one hundredand ty students.Barrett described his class as an “educationalexperiment,” and within thirty years hisormulation could be ound at the heart o theprogressive movement in American education. In1894, a thirty-ve year old philosophy proessornamed john Dewey arrived at the University o Chicago. The Pullman Strike, which was takingplace at the time, brought him into contact withthe social scientist jane Addams. One o the goalso Addams’ social settlement Hull-House, oundedin 1889, was to help prepare the poorest memberso Chicago’s rapidly expanding immigrantcommunities or lie as Americans. Addamsrequently ound that the ideas they generated orguest lecturers and other educational programs

SPRING 2009 5

were more useul than her own. Hull-Housebecame a model or collaboration and pluralismthat would resonate throughout the rst hal o the twentieth century.By 1894, Hull-House was resonating withDewey as well. “There is an image o a schoolgrowing up in my mind all the time,” he wrote. “Aschool where some actual & literal constructiveactivity shall be the centre & source o thewhole thing.” Two years later, Dewey oundedhis own educational experiment, the UniversityElementary School o the University o Chicago,which would eventually become the still-amousLaboratory School. The children there did notlearn anything that they did not also do. Theycooked lunch, or example, which provided anoccasion or teaching arithmetic by requiringstudents to weigh and measure ingredients,and they also built little smelters and workedwith iron. One o the consequences o Dewey’sexperiments was the conceptual marriage o learning and doing, and his ideas on education,in slightly modied versions, are how creativewriting programs explain and ustiy themselves.They are literature laboratories, and stories areexperiments in creativity.It wasn’t until the decades ollowing World War II, when the student populations o Americanuniversities began to resemble the ethnically diverseresidents o Hull-House, that creative writingreally ound its place. In 1946, the President’sCommission on Higher Education advocated aradically expanded public role or the universityin American lie. The GI Bill sent millions tocollege, presenting universities with what PaulBuck would describe in

Geneal Eucan n afee scey

as an “unimaginably varied” set o tasks: “How can general education be so adaptedto dierent ages and, above all, diering abilitiesand outlooks, that it can appeal deeply to each?”Creative writing, with its emphasis on ways o knowing instead o bodies o knowledge, was parto the answer, and it was olded into the expandingmulti-versity. Across the American cultural landscape, thevalue o creativity was appreciating. Throughoutthe 1950s, a C.I.A.-unded organization calledthe Congress or Cultural Freedom organizedexhibitions o Abstract Expressionist artthroughout the Western bloc o Europe, wherethey were intended to dazzle the nearby Soviets.The painter-cowboy jackson Pollock, a drunkenmonument to the very idea o the lone hero-artist,led the charge. We think o the 50s as the greatera o American conormity, but no other decadedid more to make individual artistic expression aspecically American value. By 1961, creativityhad secured its place as a public good; Raymond Williams wrote that “No word in English carriesa more consistently positive reerence than‘creative.’” He was right (and still might be). In the1960s, the number o graduate writing programsmultiplied by ten.***Paul Engle was a poet, editor, and translator,but he is mostly remembered or the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which he ran or twenty-our years. Hebelieved that “good poets, like good hybrid corn,are both born and made.” Others have had doubtsabout “made.” Flannery O’Connor wrote that“the ability to create lie with words is essentiallya git.” That’s not very encouraging, and it getsworse. Philip Roth, who taught at Iowa in the 60s,believed that one o the creative writing instructor’sresponsibilities is to “discourage those withouttalent.” In the most radical critiques, the creativewriting program actually smothers talent ratherthan encouraging it. What the Iowa Workshoplacks in creativity, the letist novelist and one-timelover o Simone de Beauvoir Nelson Algren wrote,it makes up in “quietivity.” Like many people whoworry that creative writing programs are useless oreven harmul, Algren taught at a creative writingprogram. (He is also rumored to have lost some$35,000 playing poker in his spare time on theIowa plains.)Throughout the last hal-century, two Americanwriters have embodied Engle’s equation or goodction: Ernest Hemingway (made) and WilliamFaulkner (born). The

de Mne rege

oncepublished a photograph o Engle typing awaywith a whip curled within easy reach, and oneimagines that when he used the whip it was tomake students write more like Hemingway. Onecreative writing commonplace is “Show, don’t