Beer Party in Iowa
by Maria Pilar Donoso

Reprinted from The World Come to Iowa: The Iowa International Anthology published in 1987 by the Iowa State University Press to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program.

The classic drink at university parties in the United States is beer. Large quantities of beer are drunk directly from the can, designed especially to allow comfortable ingestion without dirtying too many drinking glasses that later would have to be washed.

And it was a beer party that Jane and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., decided to give in honor of Saul Bellow, not yet a Nobel Prize winner, on a Saturday night during the winter of 1966, after a conference the famous writer gave at the University of Iowa auditorium in Iowa City.

At this time Kurt Vonnegut as well as Nelson Algren, Vance Bourjaily, and the Irish novelist Bill Murray, the Filipino Ben Santos, and the Chilean Jose (Pepe) Donoso, my husband, were professors in the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, one of the most important in the country. This institution can boast of having among its professors and students many of the best known names in American literature.

For this celebration in honor of such a distinguished writer, the guests would be a mix, not only professors but also students in Kurt's classes, close friends, and the most talented participants in other classes or workshops. Thus, there were also whiskey, scotch or bourbon, so well-liked by Americans, and gin and vermouth for dry martinis, fashionable drinks at that time.

The Vonnegut house, shared with Eddie and Nannie, their teenage daughters, was not particularly elegant but it was spacious and warm, especially that night with the hidden, lighted fireplace in the great living room filled with lights and animated conversations. It seemed almost beautiful. Outside, light snow was falling, sprinkling the windows with white flakes.

There were many people, all of them writers, some already devoted professors, and the rest students aspiring to be writers, or men and women at least married to writers, or who were teaching literature.

Americans, I remember reading in an intellectually sociological essay, are the ''party givers,'' the greatest party organizers in history. Thus, social life in the academic world is important, not only I believe in Iowa City, but also at Princeton University and Dartmouth where we went years later. For Americans, giving and attending parties is a moral obligation, almost a civic duty. It would be unthinkable not to invite the foreign professor, the visiting lecturer, the neighbors, the colleagues and partners, and the parents of the children's friends. Any excuse that acquires the category of inescapable obligation is valid. In the U.S., parties are given for welcomes and farewells, the beginning and the end of the year, for the return of a son and the farewell of a daughter or a friend, for weddings, birthdays, and anniversaries, even for funerals; any reason is valid.

The poet Paul Engle, then director of the Writers' Workshop and now consultant to the International Writing Program, tells me proudly in a letter that to celebrate the opening of the academic year 1983-1984, Hualing Nieh, his wife and director of the program, managed to organize ten dinners in ten consecutive days (seventy guests at the largest, and ten or twelve at the others). This done, of course, without domestic help, only a woman, usually from one of the Amish communities in a nearby town, who the following days would unload the dishwasher and clean up the mess from the night before. And of course, through it all, Hualing doesn't stop fulfilling all other obligations required by her position.

At the Vonnegut home that night's fuss was made on behalf of the author of Herzog (to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977), where love for literature, friendship, and drinks was happily shared. Jane tells me in a letter that she remembers that that night ''there was a lot of good old lusty Iowa drinking ...,'' a difficult phrase to translate. Perhaps it meant that ''much was vigorously drunk, Iowa style.''

Kurt Vonnegut, the host and author of books as popular and famous as Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five, Slapstick, and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, among others, is a very tall man, of singular aspect. He doesn't look like anyone except himself, without having any particular characteristic or special trait to distinguish him from others. Neither do his features or color acknowledge any of the ethnic currents, such as the German that proclaims his name. Perhaps his hair might be an outstanding feature: a chestnut-colored crop of hair, as curly as Harpo Marx's under which one is shielded rather than hidden. His eyes, very lively, almost frightened, light up when something impresses him, reflecting a sad and secret tenderness.

The year of the party Kurt was barely into his forties and had arrived in Iowa preceded by strictly university fame. Cat's Cradle was a best seller only in that area. He was a ''cult writer,'' a writer admired and followed by small groups who felt for him a form of veneration that had been transformed into a cult (even though his first books such as The Sirens of Titan did not ''deserve'' critics' attention since they were included in science fiction genre, and this genre was not yet considered serious literature). During the two years that Vonnegut spent with his family in Iowa, his fame began to grow rapidly, so by the time he left or shortly afterwards he was already one of the greatest sellers in the country and one of the critics' favorites. At that time literary criticism would include him in a group of the ''black humorists'' — writers of black humor, or ''gallows humor, scaffold humor,'' next to John Barth and others less known. It was during the second year of my stay in Iowa City that Kurt began to write Slaughterhouse Five, one of his most important books.

I remember the excitement, and the dose of envy with which we shared the news that the mail, cable and telephone brought him daily: a Boston editor offered him $70,000 for his next book, instead of the $3,000 that his publisher had advanced him for his next three books; a Hollywood motion picture company was interested in the rights to one or two of his books; the New Yorker wanted a short story; the New York Review of Books was dedicating two pages to him; the Time correspondent wanted an interview; foreign editors were interested in translating him. Everything comes meme le bonheur the French say, and although things improved greatly for Pepe in the years ahead, at that time it seemed impossible, and we were content with sharing and affectionately envying. The students, writers in blossom, were also partakers and the ''motors'' of the excitement generated around Kurt's works that acquired more followers day by day. His workshop was the most popular and well attended from which more notable writers left: John Irving (The World According to Garp), Gail Godwin (The Old Woman), John Casey (An American Romance), Nick Meyer (The Seven Percent Solution), and others who now share with him a preponderant place in the country's letters.

At the party Kurt assumed the assigned role of the host. He would mix and serve drinks in the living room corner, achieving control of his shyness in that way, that shyness that's always with him; in front of the typewriter, in front of his friends and students, and at the bar in his house, with a straight drink of whiskey that he'd drink as if it were a prescribed medicine.

Shortly after I arrived, I went up to the second floor to fix my hair, messed up by the snowflakes that decorated it ephemerally on the stretch between our car and the house. There I found Jane talking to Saul Bellow about his books, while both stood in line to go into the same bathroom that was also my objective. Jane included me immediately in the conversation, in the same order as was the line, telling me that she had just asked Saul which of his books was his favorite. Bellow answered without hesitation: Henderson the Rain King.

(That afternoon Pepe and I had attended Bellow's conference in an overfilled auditorium. I remember that I listened attentively and left satisfied, specifically with what he said about American universities, that they were the antennas of the twentieth century in his country, that it was there that the most significant artistic movements were produced, and the most important works were created in any field. Perhaps it is not totally true, or only partly true, that important things do happen in centers as lively as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, as many critics believe; Bellow's belief is within reason. The activities of the American universities exceed the purpose of teaching and learning of different professions as practiced in Chile and the majority of other countries in the world. In the United States they're very active cultural centers, and life in their ''womb'' is truly enriching.)

After fulling our needs in our respective turn in the line and preceded by Bellow, who had already gone down, Jane and I went together to welcome Nelson Algren and his wife, Betty. That year Algren was the star of the campus: the most famous writer, the most original professor, and the one who aroused the most curiosity. He was also the oldest at fifty-seven years of age and had just married an actress much younger than he and from whom he became separated at the end of his teaching year in one of the workshops. Nelson Algren produced a great sensation in Iowa City, and I was not unaware of that enthusiasm; on the contrary, I was fascinated at knowing and almost sharing living quarters with this being whose personality interested me more than his books, which I seriously tried to read without ever succeeding. Too difficult, too sordid, almost heavy. I was interested above all in his relationship with Simone de Beauvoir.

One evening, weeks after the Vonnegut party, Nelson and Betty invited us to dinner at their apartment on Muscatine Avenue. Before leaving the house Pepe told me repeatedly: ''Don't bring up the subject of Simone de Beauvoir, please, PLEASE!'' Since I still played the role of the submissive wife, I promised him, against my will, of course, not to do it. And I tried, by playing with the cat and drinking two dry martinis instead of one. But temptation was stronger than my good intentions, so I asked Nelson about her anyway. ''By the way of NOTHING!'' said Pepe after, between fury and amusement as a result of my indiscretion. Nelson answered me without batting an eye and spoke of her with great enthusiasm and admiration. ''Beauvoir is a great gal...we had great times together, and I showed her the electric chair and everything...yeh, Beauvoir is quite a gal.'' Interesting to hear someone speak about this woman that way, one of the great intellectual women of our times, a brilliant essayist and novelist of great talent. Interesting also to hear a writer so ''visceral,'' so opposed to Sartre, the pure intellectual and companion of her whole life, speak of her so. Listening to someone who loved her and whom she loved the way one loves physically, with the force of instinct and with passion. Listening to the one who loved her as a ''woman'' calling her ''the Beauvoir'' as if she were a comrade and referring to her a ''a gal,'' a girl, simply to bring her near familiarity and tenderness.

Although Vonnegut is a very timid human being, the night of Saul Bellow's party he was quite relaxed and animated. Perhaps this was because the guests were professors and students, everyday characters, who freed him of the tensions produced by meeting new people.

One of the students, Gail Godwin, arrived later in the evening, when the party was running on its own rhythm. She arrived along, wrapped in a black raincoat and a long white scarf. ''I wanted to look lonely and dramatic,'' she wrote me a few months ago, when I got in touch with her to finalize my memoirs. Gail approached John Irving and asked for a scotch, more appropriate to her appearance as a femme fatale than the classic can of beer, then launched a long conversation with him. Impossible to imagine then as I observed them, that in time they would be two of the most brilliant figures on North American fiction of the 1980s.

The World According to Garp, the first of Irving's works, accomplished great success among critics and readers as well. It was a national best-seller and gave John the fame that continues to grow. Small in height and athletic in bearing, he would not be suspected of such success either because of his appearance or his way of being; simple, without pretensions, he would become one of the ''lions'' of letters in his country. Gail, on the other hands, could be. She was already outstanding among the other students because of her sophisticated personality and worldly appearance.

The Schrader brothers, Paul and Lenny, were also invited to the party. Lenny was Pepe's student and asked permission to bring his brother Paul who was studying in the film and broadcasting department. Both have also succeeded, especially Paul, who is one of the outstanding cinematography directors of our times. His films Taxi Driver, American Gigolo, and The Yakuza (based on a novel by Lenny) among others, have deserved the applause of critics and public, as well as awards where they have been presented.

The Vonnegut party lasted into the wee hours, until the last can of beer fell into the garbage can, clinking all the other cans — so many others that preceded it. I'm sure many other things happened that I don't remember, or that I was unaware of, until the last car sped away leaving behind a trail of white smoke in the cold dawn.

Reprinted from The World Come to Iowa: The Iowa International Anthology published in 1987 by the Iowa State University Press to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program.