THE REVIEW

By Eric Bennett
SEPTEMBER 28, 2020

I
n 2017 I flew to Seattle for an Association of Writers & Writing Programs panel on
“Postcolonial Perspectives on Workshops of Empire.” As the author of Workshops of
Empire, I gave concluding remarks, rehearsing its thesis for what I expected to be the last
time.

That thesis goes something like this: Even today, the institutions of creative writing in the United
States reflect their origins in the Cold War. In the 1940s and 1950s, early advocates for such
programs, including Paul Engle at Iowa and Wallace Stegner at Stanford, shared a common
vision for American culture with the internationalists of the Truman and Eisenhower
administrations and influential philanthropic foundations. With public and private funding and
a nod from the State Department, Stegner and Engle traveled internationally to promote
American modernist literature — at least, a version of it friendly to capitalism and hospitable to
democracy. Their promotion of American values fostered a literature of individualism and
domesticity and suppressed a literature of solidarity and big ideas. Insofar as American writers
still render the bedroom or kitchen more deftly than the zeitgeist or the world situation, they
reflect the academic commitments of a bygone age.

That day at AWP, intoning my pitch, my tail wasn’t quite between my legs, but it wasn’t wagging,
either. I had lost confidence that my thesis was worth the breath it took to rehash it. A version
that appeared in these pages in 2014 (“How Iowa Flattened Literature”) had been rebuffed as
sensationalistic and conspiratorial. The packaging of the article highlighted the discovery that
the CIA had funded international writing at Iowa, and this detail distracted from the larger
argument — that ideological complacency had hampered generations of writers. The essay
soured my relationship with the University of Iowa Press (which was preparing, at the time, to
publish my book), provoked eye rolls among Iowa alumni, and angered Christopher Merrill, the
director of the International Writing Program at Iowa. That week, eager to minimize the CIA
funding, he dressed me down on Iowa Public Radio, accusing me of speculation, innuendo, and
lies.
 PAT KINSELLA FOR THE CHRONICLE

I had hoped that my research would encourage the bolstering of historical consciousness in the
culture of the American MFA and help contemporary writers in whatever small way to transcend
the narrow bounds of neoliberal individualism and to write big. But as I discovered to my
astonishment that day in Seattle, the thesis mattered most for those who had lived through the
history I was reciting — not in the Western hemisphere, but in the East.

The Filipina poet and scholar Conchitina Cruz spoke up, transmuting the lead of theory into the
gold of an astonishing historical example. In 1946, Edilberto Tiempo enrolled at the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop, overlapping with Flannery O’Connor. They were the two students in class
(the legend goes) with accents too thick to be understood by their classmates — both had to
have their stories read aloud by others. A year later, Edilberto’s wife, Edith, matriculated too.

In 1951, having returned to the Philippines, the Tiempos founded a creative-writing program at
Silliman University in Dumaguete. In 1962, they added the National Summer Writers Workshop.
Both programs thrived and even today remain arbiters of literary prestige in the Philippines.
What’s more, their early literary outlook, adopted straight from the workshops at Iowa, has
shaped literary production in the Philippines for over half a century, and hardly for the better.

Cruz discusses the Tiempos in a 2017 article in the journal Kritika Kultura, “The (Mis)Education
of the Filipino Writer: The Tiempo Age and Institutionalized Creative Writing in the Philippines.”
She is unstinting in her conclusions: Via the Tiempos, Iowa flattened literature in the former
American colony. Instructors encouraged their students to center fiction and poetry on personal
and aesthetic experience rather than on political or historical concerns. Poems, stories, and
novels were to be written in English, not Filipino or any of the other languages on the islands. “In
downplaying the role of literature in social transformation,” Cruz argues, the Tiempo regime
“authorizes the production of apolitical and de-historicized, if not assimilationist and
antinationalist, literature.”

The panel audience and I did not have to take Cruz’s word for it. Someone stood up during the
Q&A and said, “That’s exactly what happened to me.” That was Gina Apostol, a novelist from the
Philippines who had attended a Silliman Summer Workshop in 1985. She had long been on the
record with her discontents. In a piquant 2007 essay, she likened the New Criticism of the 1950s,
so influential among the Tiempo set even in the 1980s, to Spam: an unhealthy American import
preposterously offered up as natural. At Silliman she claims she “felt a kind of castration (for a
woman writer always has balls, you know)” and argued that the “Filipino short story in English,
as defined by Silliman, seemed too narrow for my — or my country’s — interests.” This was not
diffuse colonial influence. It was lineage and design. What the Tiempos learned from Engle they
codified at the expense of the literary fate of a nation, and writers today are still fighting it.

T
he Filipino case, as it turns out, is but one small part of the story. The United States, an
expanding empire after 1945, exerted hegemonic influence over every nation it
courted, bankrolled, invaded, or assassinated the democratically elected leader of.
Creative writing played its part. A growing group of scholars, from Japan to China to the United
Kingdom to North America, is finally bringing the picture into view. They’re asking: How much
were writers warped and coerced? And how valiantly did they resist?

The Philippines presents the worst-case scenario: a former American colony tempted by
imperial prestige to embrace and preserve the anti-ideological poetics that served the interest of
the dominant power. But the Iowa effect has run a fascinating gamut.

In his 2017 American Literary History article “The Invention of the Global MFA” Richard Jean So
likens the literary campaigns of Paul Engle to the social-scientific campaigns of Wilbur
Schramm, the first director of the Iowa program. After quitting creative writing, Schramm, in the
1950s, became a pioneer in communications studies who promoted propaganda as a means to
train Asians in “empathy” — precisely the virtue that Engle espoused in the Workshop
(Schramm’s bibliography includes a telling range of titles: from The Story Workshop in 1938, to
The Reds Take a City in 1951, to The Nature of Psychological Warfare in 1954.)

Fiction writers’ preferred tool for engendering empathy (So argues) is “free indirect discourse,”
that is, the bending of omniscient third-person narration to meld with the voice of a character.
It’s a venerable trick of the trade with a history stretching back to Jane Austen. Three talented
writers affiliated with Iowa — Bai Xianyong, Lin Huaimin, and Engle’s wife and co-program
director, Hualing Nieh — each assimilated the technique without being dominated by it. “These
writers,” So concludes, “may have all experienced the trauma of exile that afflicted so many East
Asians after the war, and they may have all come to Iowa to study creative writing, but they
adapted what they learned there, especially [free indirect discourse], to the particularities of
their lived situations.” The tools of the imperial power, in other words, got appropriated and
subverted and put to good use.
The scholar Yi-hung Liu has documented a similarly mixed legacy. Her dissertation on Iowa
suggests that the program often deepened rather than diminished the political commitments of
creative writers from Asia. In the 1970s, the International Writing Program became a haven for
Baodiao-movement activists — those who assert the right of Chinese sovereignty over the
Diaoyu islands — and did so with the quiet consent of Hualing Nieh. An Iowa journal, edited by
two writers in residence from Hong Kong, denounced the “two Chinas” proposal as “an
international conspiracy.” “There’s Only One China!” the editorial put it, subtly.

This was not diffuse colonial in uence. It was lineage

and design.
Often being thrown in together helped writers from different parts of the Chinese sphere of
influence write better. In a recent Chinese Literature Today article, Po-hsi Chen explores the
creative relationship between Wang Anyi and Chen Yingzhen at the International Writing
Program in 1983, arguing that despite “the anti-communist nature of the IWP, Chen’s socialist
ideals and his religious faith provided Wang with a concentric framework to first situate China
and Chinese literature within a worldly context.” Iowa, by not being China, gave Wang new
perspectives on China.

The American poet James Shea, who teaches at Hong Kong Baptist University, demonstrates in a
2019 article in Writing in Practice that the poet Dai Tian imported back to Hong Kong much
from Iowa. Like the Tiempos, and like countless American creative writers, he learned from the
workshop to be concrete and personal and vernacular rather than sweeping and thinky and
elevated. Like the Tiempos, he founded creative-writing classes that spread the gospel. But Dai
also discovered in the American milieu of the late 1960s the countercultural currents that were
sweeping away the norms of the early Cold War. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Allen Ginsberg
became influences, and his post-Iowa poetry strikes a markedly anticolonial tone, protesting
British control of his home city.

In sum, the Iowa experience did for some Asian writers what history can do for any writer. It
transformed how they understood themselves. It placed them in an alienating context that threw
into relief what mattered least and what mattered most back home. In some cases, the extended
visit helped to wean writers from their slavish assimilation of Western poetics. For instance, with
help from Iowa, the European-flavored New Literature of 1920s Taiwan and the modernist
resurgence there in the 1960s gave way by the 1970s to a renewed interest in regional forms of
expression. In every case, the time abroad became one of three or four (or five or 10) ingredients
that fertilized powerful new developments.

S
cholars working on the influence of the Iowa writing programs on Asia recently gathered
in a virtual symposium centered in Hong Kong. I gave opening remarks from my living
room in Rhode Island. The prevailing tone of the conversation, as in almost any
scholarly gathering, was critical of the United States. Yet the symposium itself replayed the script
of international literary exchange that Engle, Nieh, Stegner, and their colleagues had drafted
close to 70 years ago. Even in critiquing the creative-writing Cold Warriors, we were talking to
each other because of them — from the mainland U.S., from the U.K., from Hawaii, Japan, Hong
Kong, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Who else, that night, was doing such diplomacy? Surely
not Mike Pompeo’s State Department.

The vibrancy of the symposium, the vitality of the new scholarship, not to mention the artistic
fruits of the international-exchange programs under discussion, have raised for me questions
that are almost too uncomfortable to ask: Was the mid-century idealism actually doomed from
the beginning? Or were there good ideas in there?

Engle and Stegner were progressive New Dealers with a visceral but also considered hatred of
Nazism and Stalinism. They felt horror at all forms of totalitarianism and political
repressiveness; an animating aversion to racism; and a desire to see economic and social justice
for the marginal and the oppressed. They engaged in the larger campaigns of what the scholar
Greg Barnhisel has called “Cold War Modernism,” the recasting of a wide movement in the arts
for narrow diplomatic purposes — narrow, but hardly jingoistic. Yet by the 1960s a new
generation regarded men like Engle and Stegner as part of the problem, too cozy with channels
of power that facilitated American imperialism. This criticism, of course, must be aired. These
creative writers, like so many of their contemporaries, were burned around 1965 by their
righteousness from 20 years earlier, as the Vietnam War gave the horrific lie to their good
intentions. Even so, their careers weren’t tenures of ceaseless evil. They dealt in mimeographs,
not napalm, and tried to use them for peace.

Their most unfortunate legacy, in my view, is not that they worked to put America in cultural
conversation with the world. It’s that they succeeded at the expense of American culture (and, as
Cruz has demonstrated, Filipino culture, too). They promised us — through the creative writers
who taught the creative writers who taught us — that our own little stories are enough. They
insisted that you and I do a kind of civic good by simply giving witness to our immediate
experiences.

Hiroshima and Auschwitz gave this orientation overwhelming plausibility, for a time. Against
vast forces of destruction — technological or systemic — so many lone, distinct, humanizing
testimonials appeared to offer the most potent form of resistance. Since World War II,
everything from Selma to Ferguson has kept such witness alive as a powerful outlet for
important dissent — especially for voices scarcely represented in the early decades of
institutionalized creative writing. But even in the age of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, the
results of making self-expression the ultimate form of political righteousness (not to mention of
literary art) are, to say the least, mixed. Social media have metastasized this creed — which
originates from many sources, not just creative-writing programs — to reveal its disastrous
narcissism. (A whole presidency has now based itself on a grotesque preoccupation with a
wronged self.) The problem with exporting literary smallness in 1950 (or 1960 or 1970 or 1980)
was not the exportation. It was the smallness — the putative civic sufficiency of unapologetic
selfhood.

That 1950s-style internationalism, under scrutiny at our Zoom symposium in May, suggests that
there may well be specters more ominous than, say, soft diplomacy. There might be worse
things than a State Department that stocks international reading rooms with books critical of the
nation doing the stocking — which, as Barnhisel and diplomatic historians have reminded us,
the United States did after World War II. The fruitful interrogation of tragic inheritances and
imperfect visions could well be the only humane politics left for us to practice. It was what the
most sophisticated of the cultural Cold Warriors were committed to and what I sensed in the air
— or the pixels — of the Hong Kong event.

The day of the symposium, in streets almost within earshot of our conference hosts, clashes
between protestors and surrogates from Beijing were reaching a violent pitch. Everyone on the
call seemed to feel the Chinese Communist Party pressing at the border — even those of us far
from Asia. Meanwhile, in the United States, powerful currents of illiberalism erode foundations
that professors, until recently, have had the luxury of being so skeptical of. The months since
November 2016 reveal that the only thing worse than too much credulousness about the
possibility for reasoned cultural and political exchange — i.e., liberalism — might be its demise.
 We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors
or submit a letter for publication.

Eric Bennett
Eric Bennett is a professor of English at Providence College. He is the author of Workshops of
Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War (University of Iowa
Press, 2015).

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