Eric Bennett

I loved both of Eric Bennett's earlier books. His newest, however, is a totally different kinda animal, both in appearance and content. The appearance part first: it's a very portable pocket size, very similar to the Armed Forces Edition (AFE) versions of popular titles and classics that were distributed free of charge to U.S. troops as morale boosters during WWII. Those AFE books, smaller even than the drugstore paperbacks that proliferated in the post-war decades, are collector's items now. Why this unusual format? The title may offer a clue: WELCOME TO THE ELECTION YEAR WAR: A NOVEL. Except there is no election, no war, and whether this is actually even a novel may also be in question.

Which brings us to the content. This is, to say the least, very, very strange stuff. Our narrator-protagonist, Gerald, is one of those failed-to-launch, Gen-X, cellar-dwellers (except he's still living in his upstairs childhood bedroom), still under his parents' roof in Blissfield, Michigan, unemployed, at 32 years old. His three-hundred-plus-page stream-of-consciousness story unfolds over a single day, with frequent flashbacks to his awkward entanglement with the beautiful Angela Engel Torres, to whom he reluctantly lost his virginity in high school. Gerald awakens one morning with "an idea," which gives his parents hope that maybe, finally, he'll find a job. In any case, he dresses carefully, borrows the family car, and is off to the mall - and beyond, far beyond.

Gerald often mentions the "current climate" as he cogitates on his family, his life, and his grand plan - that "idea" he woke up with.

Gerald also loves "big words," and is not hesitant to use them, which may contribute to his being something of a loner, an outcast. Let me be blunt. Gerald is just... well, strange. I don't want to say much beyond this. You'll have to read the book.

As I was reading Gerald's meandering tale, I kept remembering Chance the gardener. Remember him, from Jerzy Kosinski's modern classic, BEING THERE? Well, if Chance weren't quite so dim, if he were better read (Gerald knows Milton, and "Paradise Lost"), a bit delusional, and if he were somewhere in the medium range of the autism spectrum, well, he could have been Gerald. Or maybe not.

Maybe the war here is between good and evil - that "Paradise Lost" thing - or maybe not. Did I say this was a very strange book? If you like 'different,' then you'll like this. Me, I DID like it, although I'm still kinda wondering, What were you smoking when you wrote this book, Mr Bennett?

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (mehr)

Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War by Eric Bennett is a look at the expansion of American creative writing. Bennett is an associate professor of English at Providence College in Rhode Island. He is the author of A Big Enough Lie, and his writing has appeared in A Public Space, New Writing, Modern Fiction Studies, Blackwell-Wiley’s Companion to Creative Writing, The Chronicle of Higher Education, VQR, MFA vs. NYC, and Africana.

The Cold War was a changing point in American thinking. Gone was the idea of a collective society that pulled together to fight fascists and a return to the individual became prominent. Collectivism meant communism and communism was wrong. One only had to look at 1950s Science fiction movies to see this. Collectivism was evil and the hero always an individual who stood apart. Dr. Miles Bennell stood against a town of pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Steve McQueen stood alone against a town that refused to believe The Blob was real. Perhaps without noticing America rejected the collective identity and moved into individualism.

The other great change that materialized during the early years of the Cold War was education. The G.I. Bill put a college education within the reach of many who would not have attended college before. America had an educated public beyond the privileged class. With the rise in education, literature started to rise.

"In magazines large and small, reactionaries competed with radicals for the attention of well-educated readers."

...

"America writers and intellectuals affiliated with that "vital center" believed that the complexity of literature provided an antidote to sloganeering amidst slogans run amok. No more Arbeit macht frei; no more Workers of the world unite! "

Literary modernism grew out of the interwar period and gave rise to writers such as TS Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, who wanted to overturn the discipline of literary form. Stream of consciousness, unreliable narrators, and a mistrust of traditional power became the norm. Opposing the modernism was New Humanism championed by Irving Babbitt. New Humanism fought to capture the glory of the past in literature. The Great Depression, however, damaged the New Humanist movement as the country now saw failure in the ideas of the past and looked for help outside of individual responsibility. Like American politics, American literature was also trapped in a struggle between liberals and conservatives. Workshops of Empire highlights this struggle and the results in literature and the rise of creative writing at the university level.

Bennett covers the history of creative writing and its champions and detractors. He makes an interesting point about the development of creative writing and high taxes. Oppressive tax rates actually encouraged the Rockefeller Foundation to give money to university programs. Creative writing programs, to a great degree, were funded by corporate donations and grants. Bennett also includes biographies of Paul Engle, director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Wallace Stegner, the founder of the creative writing program at Stanford. He concludes his study with a comparison of Hemingway and Henry James.

Today many college educated students and even high school students take courses in creative writing as part of their English curriculum without much thought of its history. The idea of creative writing being part of the English curriculum is coming into question more so today. English is the study of rules and form. Creative writing is self-expression and creative writing is a fine arts degree taught in workshops rather than seminars. This issue has not been settled.

Having a masters degree in political science puts me on the outside looking in on the role of creative writing, but leaves me on the inside as far as the history and the Cold War that influenced it. Workshops of Empire offered me an insight into the change in American writing, education and thinking based on concepts that I already understood but the effects I never noticed in writing. As a latecomer to poetry, I found this book enlightening and an explanation of how writing changed from Whitman to Eliot to Ginsberg to winners of the Iowa Poetry Prize.


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Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War (New American Canon), by Eric Bennett.

WORKSHOPS OF EMPIRE is not a book for the casual reader. But if you are interested in learning something about the origins of the world-famous Iowa Writers' Workshop, then it's worth the work. And reading Bennett's book is "work," or at least it was for me, and I was interested. Because MFA Creative Writing programs have proliferated like rabbits over the past sixty-some years. And Iowa was where it all got started in the post-war years, mostly under the directorship of Paul Engle, a very minor and mostly forgotten poet. Engle's true genius lay in his talent for promotion, public relations, glad-handing and selling - his writing program, that is. He was able to separate the Writers' Workshop from regular university funding and get substantial grants and moneys from wealthy donors, particularly, in the beginning, the Rockefeller Foundation. This separation gave him a certain autonomy in how the program was administered and implemented. I was vaguely aware of this, but what I didn't know - and Bennett lays it all out here - was that the writing program was looked upon as a political tool, with an emphasis on individuality and creativity that would be the antithesis of the dreaded specters of Communism and Totalitarianism. Bennett's research shows that the CIA was also involved in secretly funneling funds to certain organizations and to the little literary magazines, like the Kenyon and Sewanee Reviews, to keep them afloat and provide forums for the new writers coming out of the workshops. I was surprised at the extent of government's role in the early years of the Workshop, but not completely, since I recently read a couple of other books about Iowa's early years, i.e. THE ELEVENTH DRAFT: CRAFT AND THE WRITING LIFE FROM THE IOWA WRITERS' WORKSHOP, edited by Frank Conroy (a former Director); and A COMMUNITY OF WRITERS: PAUL ENGLE AND THE IOWA WRITERS' WORKSHOP, edited by Robert Dana; and A LUCKY AMERICAN CHILDHOOD, by Paul Engle. The best of these is the Dana book.

But Bennett's book is different, primarily in the sheer depth of his research. He looks closely at the pre-workshop years and the literary schools of Naturalism and Humanism - and New Humanism - as well as at some of the icons of literary criticism, men like Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks and other critics whose names I vaguely remember from my own graduate school years. He examines the state of literature and scholarship in the post-war years and into the decades of the Cold War and beyond. Hemingway and Henry James are closely examined as opposite ends of the stylistic spectrum studied by many workshop participants over the years. But the chapters I found the most interesting - and a little easier going - were the ones on Engle at Iowa and Wallace Stegner at Stanford. The two men both studied under Norman Foerster at Iowa in the 20s, but their paths later diverged dramatically, in that Engle never shone as a writer himself, but became instead a champion cheerleader and fund raiser for the Iowa program. Stegner, on the other hand, in addition to directing the Stanford program, also continued to steadily develop his own literary oeuvre in a career that perhaps peaked with the publication of his bestselling novel, ANGLE OF REPOSE. The Stegner chapter focuses more on the man than on the program he helmed, whereas Engle's travels and PR work for the Workshop take more of center stage in that chapter.

What the Stegner chapter did for me was to whet my appetite to go back and read and re-read some of his work. His CROSSING TO SAFETY is one of my favorite novels. But I have never read his WOLF WILLOW, a book that has been languishing on my shelf for years. Bennett's book has convinced me it's time to take it down and read it.

WORKSHOPS OF EMPIRE will never be a bestseller. It is a very special niche book meant for scholars and professors of literature. Taken as such, it's a damn good one, and I will recommend it unreservedly. I'm glad I read it. In publishing WORKSHOPS, the University of Iowa Press has done scholarship a great service, providing yet one more valuable resource to the still-new study of the creative writing movement in America.

P.S. Bennett himself is a 2000 grad of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, which is obviously still viable if Bennett's first novel, A BIG ENOUGH LIE (2015), is any indication. It is an imaginative, compelling and excellent book, which I have given my highest recommendation.… (mehr)

A BIG ENOUGH LIE, by Eric Bennett.

Wow! Where to begin? Because Eric Bennett's fiction debut is a novel that is bursting with big ideas, dense with details and rich in plot and character. But I'll begin with Stephen Crane, because A BIG ENOUGH LIE owes a lot to that literary icon who died over a hundred years ago. First of all, as the blurred cover image suggests, this is a novel about war, the Iraq war specifically, and it is filled with all of the horrific details of that ill-conceived conflict, which may never be over and has come back to haunt us in the past few years. And like Stephen Crane, who wrote so vividly of our own Civil War in his classic novel, Bennett has never been in uniform and has never seen combat. Yet - and again, like Crane - he has managed to give us an utterly convincing portrait of men at war.

When I was a graduate student in English, for one of my seminar assignments, I compiled an annotated bibliography of Stephen Crane and all the critical papers and books that had been written about the man and his work. This was over forty years ago and I think my paper ran over twenty-five pages. I still remember bits and pieces of all that Crane research I read back then and they came back to me this week as I read Bennett's novel. Let's talk names. First of all, the protagonist, the son of a minister in the Florida Panhandle, is named John Patrick Townley, and his alter ego in the 'story-within-a-story' is named Henry Fleming. Stephen Crane's father was named Jonathan Townley Crane. He was a Methodist Episcopal minister. Henry Fleming was, of course, the youthful protagonist of THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE. Later in the story, John Townley assumes the name Patrick Crane. Later still he passes himself off as Henry Fleming, an Iraq War casualty to whom he bears a striking resemblance. The real Lieutenant Henry Fleming, when asked by an Iraqi archaeologist what he is reading, replies, "I have been reading Russian novels here." Crane once said, "Tolstoi is the writer I admire most of all." In other words, Stephen Crane's influence is implicitly obvious throughout both narratives in this fascinatingly complex novel.

But to say that A BIG ENOUGH LIE is simply a modern knock-off of Stephen Crane would be doing it a grave injustice. Because this is an ambitious novel of so many ideas that it literally made my head spin at times. It is an indictment of the war in Iraq, and Bush II and Rumsfeld do not come off well. It pokes some fun at Oprah and her infamous showdown with 'memoirist' James Frey, whose book she made a bestseller. FOX news is lavishly lampooned in Bennett's fictional news anchors and personalities from TEX television. Creative Writing and MFA programs get their share of mixed reviews with Bennett's portrayal of the fictional Midland Writing Program in Indiana, where famous names like Updike, Roth, Mailer and Joyce get bandied about, often in unfavorable terms, by wannabee writers who have mastered the workshop jargon and manners - or lack of them. Literature in general lurks continually in the background - and sometimes the foreground - of both narratives, from THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH to THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, with throwaway mentions of Emerson, Thoreau, Hardy, Pound, Nabokov, Kundera and more. It's almost as if Bennett is trying to include at least a little of everything he has every learned. (A graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Bennett also holds a Ph.D. from Harvard and currently teaches at Providence College.)

But the characters and plot are actually the best parts of Bennett's novel. I won't soon forget the principals here, all fully realized and utterly human types, from John Townley and Marshall Stang (and their alter egos, Henry Fleming and Antoine Greep) to Heather Kloppenberg and Emily White, not to mention many of the lesser cast memebers like Fleming's platoon members Schwartz and Eccles (which name brought to mind Updike's minister from RABBIT, RUN, but no real correlation that I could see). And especially the poor dumb sweet Duckworth, who evoked memories of Steinbeck's Lenny from OF MICE AND MEN (which, no surprise, also gets a mention here).

Other reviewers and blurbs have duly noted that this is a novel about lies, more lies and unforgivable deceptions, on both personal and national, even international, levels. Which is certainly true. But what these lies end up revealing are universal truths about what it means to be human. There is a kind of genius here, both in the scope of ideas, and in the manner in which they are presented. Not since Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya's 2012 novel, THE WATCH have I read such a vividly authentic depiction of the current and ongoing wars and the men that fight them by a non-combatant. Eric Bennett is an author to watch. My very highest recommendation.… (mehr)