I PROMISED TO write a reminiscence about my two and a half years as a student at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, but this morning I read the mail before going to my desk and, after reading a letter from my twenty-six-year-old son, I could no longer write about my life in a good place from mid-January 1964 until mid-August 1966. I was going to write that I learned much at Iowa, more even than I knew I was learning then, and always I was learning. I was deeply grateful to my teachers and to my faculty friends who were not my teachers in classrooms but taught me anyway. When I left Iowa and began teaching more than a graduate assistant’s load, my gratitude became awe. I truly did not understand how those men had given so much of themselves in the classroom, in conferences, and in bars and their homes and our homes and on the phone.
Here’s what my son, Andre III, wrote from New York City:
I saw two men sleeping on a grate in front of the Waldorf-Astoria last Friday night. It was around midnight and I was just walking around. … One of the men was black, the other white. Both were clean shaven. Both were in work clothes and long Salvation-Army-looking overcoats. Both had shoes. Both looked and smelled sober while they slept. They had their duffle bags in their laps. And I’m convinced they did not know each other. They looked like two strangers sharing some warmth. Women in fur coats and men in five hundred dollar suits and coats did not even pause in their banter as they passed them on their way to a stretch limousine and dinner. Did you read about Evelio Javier today, the Harvard-educated Marcos foe and provincial leader of Aquino’s campaign, who was chased across a town square in that country by six masked gunmen then slaughtered in an outhouse in somebody’s backyard? He was forty-two. It happened in San José de Buenavista. What did Anne Frank write in her diary? “In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.”
Peace, Pop.
These days I barely have the heart, the will, to do something as insignificant as writing fiction. I cannot write about something as trifling as my life at Iowa, where my first wife and I thought we were poor because we had four children and a twenty-four-hundred-dollar a year assistantship and surplus food every month and I sold blood for twenty-five dollars a pint every three months and earned a hundred dollars a month teaching the Britannica Schools Correspondence Course; in my final year Richard Braddock and Paul Engle gave me a thirty-six-hundred-dollar assistantship, and we were no longer eligible for surplus food. Our children never knew we were poor. And of course we weren’t. As Joe Williams said during his performance at a jazz club near here, about nine years ago: There’s poor, and there’s po’.
I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad. Only the privileged — those with homes and food and the luxury of time in a home — are touched, moved, sometimes changed by literature. For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy. What do stars look like on a clear cold winter night, when your children are hungry, are daily losing their very health; or when, alone, you look up from a heat grate? Of course in cities at night you can’t even see the stars.
C. J. Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously is not only one of the best novels I’ve read in decades but the only one I recall that confronts mass poverty and the callousness of the powerful, the wealthy, and the futility of those who do not despise the poor, who even love them, grieve for them, and can do nothing. Yet still it is a novel, of no use to the poor unless they can eat it, drink it, wear it, use it as a home, and still that is not enough. I believe Koch would agree. There is much pain in his book. Perhaps that is one of the reasons he now lives in Tasmania.
My new young wife and three-and-a-half-year-old daughter and I are living now on nine hundred dollars a month, because I tried to follow the example of my Iowa teachers, and after eighteen years, exhaustion and high blood pressure drove me to retirement, to normal blood pressure and serenity; and still we are not poor. Tonight I watched a movie on the VCR. Even as I write this I am listening to Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor with Joan Sutherland and Pavarotti, on a Panasonic stereo cassette player, and I am wearing ear phones so I will not wake my sleeping family. I am not hungry. My wife and daughter are not hungry.
We are warm. Outside ice covers the bare branches of trees, and earlier they shone in the light from our one neighbor’s house; so did the ice-covered snow under the trees, and between our houses. I stepped outside and looked for a while at that shining white beauty in the peaceful quiet here on the hill in the country. Then I stepped back into the warmth of the kitchen and now, hours later, I remember R. V. Cassill saying: Nature isn’t lethal; it’s indifferent. And I sit with a pen and a notebook and Sutherland and Pavarotti while across the land cold air and frozen snow are lethal: for my indifferent country has made them so: made them silent air raids on our people.
We were not poor at Iowa City, my brave young wife Pat, and me, and our children: Suzanne, born in 1958; Andre in 1959, Jeb in 1960, Nicole in 1963. We had all the time we wanted to spend with each other and with our new and good friends. We had time to read, to talk, even to think. We had time, my wife and I, to make love and a place where we could read about and talk about our Church’s opinions and pronouncements about artificial birth control; and to decide that we could resort to contraception and still receive the Catholic sacraments. We had time to love each other, to understand better the complexity of marital love, and to try to achieve what we understood. So we had time to fail; and our later failure, nearly four years after leaving Iowa City, probably began there. But we suffered no more than our friends whose marriages ended. We will never know what our children suffered, and can only hope they are healed now; or will be: if there is complete healing, so long as memory exists.
Our children did not know we had very little money, and they did not know their parents would fail. Nor did we. One day there was an ice storm and when it was over the six of us looked out the living room window at the sparkling trees. We were all very young then, and had lived only on Marine and Navy bases and in small towns, and none of us knew that such beauty was, in the wrong nation, a killer of human beings. I see us now at that window: the red-haired little girl, the two blond boys, the blond girl and the blond mother and me, and I know that the only poverty afflicting my wife and me in Iowa City was youth: educated, Caucasian, never affluent but always safe youth. We knew about blacks, and because we had lived and had two sons at Camp Pendleton, California, we knew about migrant Mexican workers. But at the window we believed in the promise of these moments with our children, and believed that all white Americans could feel as we did, our six bodies pressed together as we exclaimed and pointed and murmured, and looked through cold glass at that afternoon’s lovely gift from the sky.
1986