The Well-Made Story and the CIA

[Walter Cummins]

During my years in Iowa City I struggled to learn how to write what we called the well-made story. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered I also had been serving the goals of the CIA.

Before that, my assumptions about government control of writers had been shaped by the brutality of executions and soul-deadening physical labor in frozen Siberian gulags. In Iowa my only labor was pounding a manual typewriter, grading undergraduate essays, and—for a time—changing diapers. But the CIA was much more subtle than Stalin. It fought the Cold War by supporting literary magazines like the British Encounter and the Partisan, Paris, and Kenyon Reviews, as well as the teaching of writing. Unfortunately, at the same time the Agency was complicit in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.  That certainly was a blatant act.

To influence what was being written even before submission for print, the Agency slipped funds to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop’ founder Paul Engle, then the only game in town when it came to MFA programs, but eventually the model for the hundreds of others that followed, in great part because many were founded by Iowa graduates who spread across the country. In CIA-speak that might be “infiltrated.”

The beans of the CIA plot were spilled in the 2015 book Workshops of Empire by Eric Bennett, a one-time Workshop student. Thomas Aubry, in The New York Times, explains that the Iowa model endorsed the values of high modernism: “Good literature, students learned, contains ‘sensations, not doctrines; experiences, not dogmas; memories, not philosophies.’”

This was an aesthetic most of us accepted without question. The CIA had been concerned that Cold War writing would follow the model of the political fiction and poetry that reacted to the Depression by supporting Marxist protests and, in many cases, belief in the Soviet workers’ paradise. What concerned us instead was that so much of the now-forgotten work published in magazines like The New Masses was so heavy handed. Even more, we were opposing the “loose baggy monsters” of Victorian fiction with its dominant authorial presence in favor of James Joyce’s belief that authors should just stand offstage paring their nails.

We focused on craft, not politics, with Joyce as one model, the standards of Anton Chekhov behind him. Labor organizer Annie Levin, writing in Current Affairs, claims this creative writing programs’ focus “drained fiction of its political bite.”

The CIA had been concerned that Cold War writing would follow the model of the political fiction and poetry that reacted to the Depression by supporting Marxist protests and, in many cases, belief in the Soviet workers’ paradise.

Such criticism raises a fundamental question about what creative writing is for. We have many outlets for political statements. Should fiction and poetry be among them? Were we wrong to unknowingly submit to the CIA?  

I suppose it’s necessary to define what writing about politics means. Should it just mean including characters’ views and conflicts, or should fiction and poetry take a political stance and support a particular position? I can’t help recalling what an author from a country under a repressive political dictator told me about the impassioned writers producing manuscripts in their oppositional fury: “All those people risking death for bad writing.”

 Of course, the influence of CIA-supported high modernism waned in the later twentieth century with the rise of the Beats and their attacks on prevailing cultural values, with a focus on sex and drugs, and their new approaches to writing. Initially, my cohorts at Iowa rejected their violations of craft; but eventually the Beats won. The Beats morphed into the Yippies and their blatant, mocking political protests. Opposition to the Vietnam war had much to do with that. Even those of us committed to well-made fiction and poetry joined protest marches, burned draft cards, and sent angry letters to editors.

 Now, decades after CIA meddling, we are free to write anything we wish and hope editors somewhere will approve. Those trying to control us are now elected politicians and school boards who fear exposure to certain subjects and ideas—Don’t say gay.

Of course, the influence of CIA-supported high modernism waned in the later twentieth century with the rise of the Beats and their attacks on prevailing cultural values, with a focus on sex and drugs, and their new approaches to writing. Initially, my cohorts at Iowa rejected their violations of craft; but eventually the Beats won.

Back to the well-made story that had been my youthful goal:

That standard for story writing dominated in the mid twentieth century, resulting from the examples of James Joyce’s Dubliners collection and informed by the writing advice of Anton Chekhov, who expressed six points in an 1886 letter to his brother Aleksandr:

1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of political-social-economic nature;

2. Total objectivity;

3. Truthful description of persons and objects;

4. Extreme brevity;

5. Audacity and originality: flee the stereotype;

6. Compassion

Added to Chekhov were the standards presented by Henry James in his novel prefaces and essays about writing, where he complained about verbose and opinionated prose. Instead, writers should closely observe human behavior, motives, and the world around them with the goal of delving into the "whole landscape of human feeling, emotion and passion."

Today, while many stories are variations of the well-made, the story form is open to a wide range of approaches, including the very experimental. Significantly, a developed narrative arc is no longer an expectation. Successful stories instead can create a specific feeling, mood, or "unity of effect."  I doubt that today’s CIA cares.