May 24, 1999

WRITERS ON WRITING

Despite Tough Guys, Life Is Not the Only School for Real Novelists

By KURT VONNEGUT Jr.

he occasion for this piece is the publication by the University of Iowa Press of "A Community of Writers," essays and recollections regarding the university's writers' workshop, collected and edited by Robert Dana, the poet and retired Cornell English professor. I taught full time at the workshop in 1965 and 1966 and began writing my novel "Slaughterhouse-Five" while there.

Fred R. Conrad/ The New York Times

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I had gone broke, was out of print and had a lot of kids, so I needed the job most desperately. So did two other writers who took up temporary residence in Iowa City along with me, Nelson Algren and the Chilean José Donoso. I would later say of Paul Engle, who not only ran but personified and electrified the workshop for many decades, "The Coast Guard should give him a medal for all the drowning professional writers whose lives he's saved."

A year after I got there, Engle rescued an economically drowning Richard Yates, one of the most excellent writers I ever met, a second time. Engle, himself a poet, administered CPR in the form of a salary to poets, too: George Starbuck, John Berryman, Marvin Bell, James Tate, Robert Dana, Donald Justice and Robert Lowell, just to name a few.

And even though that was a third of a century ago, as I write, the names of students as well are fresh in my mind: Andre Dubus, Gail Godwin, Barry Jay Kaplan, Rick Boyer and John Irving and John Casey and David Nilob, again, just to name a few.

And Tennessee Williams and Flannery O'Connor long before my time. One wonders what ever became of them.

When the subject of creative writing courses is raised in company as sophisticated as readers of this paper, say, two virtually automatic responses can be expected. First a withering "Can you really teach anyone how to write?" An editor of this very paper asked me that only two days ago.

And then someone is almost certain to repeat a legend from the old days, when male American writers acted like tough guys, like Humphrey Bogart, to prove that they, although they were sensitive and liked beauty, were far from being homosexual. The Legend: A tough guy, I forget which one, is asked to speak to a creative writing class. He says: "What in hell are you doing here? Go home and glue your butts to a chair, and write and write until your heads fall off!" Or words to that effect.

My reply: "Listen, there were creative writing teachers long before there were creative writing courses, and they were called and continue to be called editors."

The Times guy who wondered if anybody could be taught how to write was taught how to write by editors. The tough guy who made students and their instructor feel like something the cat dragged in, possibly spitting on the floor after having done so, almost certainly, like me, handed in manuscripts to his publisher that were as much in need of repairs as what I got from students at the workshop.

	WRITERS ON WRITING
	This article is part of a series in which writers explore literary themes. Previous contributors have included John Updike, E. L. Doctorow, Jane Smiley, Sue Miller and Annie Proulx.

If the tough guy was Thomas Wolfe or Ernest Hemingway, he had the same creative writing teacher who suggested, on the basis of his long experience, how the writer might clean up the messes on paper that he had made. He was Maxwell Perkins, reputedly one of the greatest editors of fiction who ever lived.

So there you have it: A creative writing course provides experienced editors for inspired amateurs.

What could be simpler or more dignified? Or fun?

When I quit a good job at General Electric to become a freelance writer 15 years earlier, there were only two degree-awarding graduate programs in creative writing in which short stories or poems or novels were accepted in lieu of theses: Iowa and Stanford.

I had attended neither one. To have done so would have been good for me. Vance Bourjaily, a permanent rather than transient member of the workshop faculty in my time, said he regretted not having apprenticed at Iowa or Stanford when he was starting out as a novelist. That would have saved him, he said, the several years he wasted trying to find out all by himself the best way to tell a story.

Much is known about how to tell a story, rules for sociability, for how to be a friend to a reader so the reader won't stop reading, how to be a good date on a blind date with a total stranger.

Some are more than 2,000 years old, having been posited by Aristotle. I paraphrase Aristotle: If you want to be comical, write about people to whom the audience can feel superior; if you want to be tragical, write about at least one person to whom the audience is bound to feel inferior, and no fair having human problems solved by dumb luck or heavenly intervention.

And let me say at this point that the best creative writing teachers, like the best editors, excel at teaching, not necessarily at writing. While I taught at Iowa in the company of literary celebrities, the most helpful teachers there were two lesser-known writers named William Cotter Murray and Eugene Garber.

There are now at least 100 creative writing programs in American colleges and universities, and even in Leipzig, Germany, as I would discover when I was there last October. That the subject is taught anywhere, given the daunting odds against anyone making a living writing stories or poems, might appear to be a scandal, as would be courses in pharmacy, if there were no such things as drugstores.

Yes, and our biggest secret about the Iowa Writers' Workshop was that it was one of the greatest teachers' colleges in the world.

The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one's soul to grow. So the proliferation of creative writing courses is surely a good thing. Most came into being in response to demands by college students during the 1960's that their courses make more use of their natural impulses to be creative in ways that were not emphatically practical.

When I taught at Harvard for a year, for example, that was because students had asked for what they called "a creative track."

Chuffa, chuffa, chuffa.

Choo choo. Woo woo.

When I taught at Iowa, then Harvard, then City College, here is what I tried to get away with, only in effect, not actually: I asked each student to open his or her mouth as wide as possible. I reached in with a thumb and forefinger to a point directly beneath his or her epiglottis. There is the free end of a spool of tape there.

I pinched it, then pulled it out gradually, gently, so as not to make the student gag. When I got several feet of it out where we could see it, the student and I read what was written there.