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"New World Symphony" is an essay based on the eulogy given by Vonnegut at Paul Engle's memorial service in 1991. It was printed in the collection A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, edited by Robert Dana and published by the University of Iowa Press in 1999. In addition to others, it features articles by Engle's widow Hualing Nieh Engle, Vance Bourjaily, and Gail Godwin, who writes about her time at Iowa when Vonnegut was her instructor.[1]

Summary[]

Dvorak

Antonín Dvořák, 1882

Although his home state has failed the grant Iowa native Engle even "a minor fraction of the honors he deserved", it's common for locals to not recognize the special people among them, whom they assume are just like them. It took "an outsider" like Vonnegut to see that Engle was "a glamorous planetary citizen" like the composer Antonín Dvořák, an outsider who was so unlike those that he impressed when he was in Iowa a hundred years ago. In that spirit, the climax of this memorial service should be a presentation of Engle's work of art "as majestic as Dvořák New World Symphony": Silence. The Writer's Workshops are what remain. When Vonnegut first arrived to teach in 1965, he primarily thought of Iowa as corn, pigs, and the workshop, of which there is now a second, the International Writing Program. In some ways "the desks and file cabinets and duplicating machines of those on-going institutions" are Engle's legacy.

His "symphony", still being created, is all the work by those "who gained or regained self-confidence as artists right here in River City". River City, of course, comes from The Music Man, and like the protagonist of that work, Engle was "virile and exciting, and hilarious, and rascally, and playful, and encouraging, and inspiring". Numerous writers were the product of the program, including Flannery O'Connor, John Irving, Gail Godwin, John Casey, Tennessee Williams, and Jaroslav Kořán, the mayor of Prague and Vonnegut's Czech translator. Engle hired Vonnegut in 1965 despite knowing nothing of his work since he "didn't read that kind of crap". But out of money with six children to care for and his works all out of print, the teaching job saved Vonnegut's life, as it also did for Nelson Algren and Jose Donoso. Saying that "[n]o writer in all of history did as much to help other writers as Paul Engle", Vonnegut points out that to hundreds of writers around the world, Engle "wasn't merely an Iowan. He was Iowa!"[2]

See Also[]

  1. "Kurt Vonnegut: Waltzing with the Black Crayon", Gail Godwin, A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Robert Dana, ed., 1999, pp. 213-222.
  2. "New World Symphony", A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Robert Dana, ed., 1999, pp. 113-115.
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