On Henry James' "In the Cage"

More than 10 years ago, a conspiracy theory emerged that the CIA, in efforts to tamp down the threat of Communism during the Cold War, funded the emerging—and eventually behemoth—Iowa Writers' Workshop, entangling pencraft with political statecraft so that, according to one former graduate's account, good (and indeed allowable) writing required: "sensations, not doctrines; experiences, not dogmas; memories, not philosophies."

The alleged facts bear out.

Paul Engle, a former director of the University of Iowa program, reportedly did secure corporate and philanthropic donations by pitching his workshop as an anti-Communist culture lab. Looking globally, Iowa enrolled foreign students who would become changed by—and advocate back at home for—this country's brand of liberalism, prosperity, and freedom. The fundraising pitch earned Engle's project $40,000 from The Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950s, and, after his departure, another unknown sum from The Farfield Organization, a now-recognized CIA front that distributed funds mostly across Europe for the arts and literature.

But what does this have to do with our taste in writing? Well, that's where the conspiracy lies.

The Iowa Writers' Workshop championed inward writing, away from politics, class consciousness, and treatise. The response to Communism, in some unproven way, was to avoid any scrutiny of Liberalism. Writing assignments should be about people, their feelings, and the shape and taste and smell of things. No more Leo Tolstoy or his admiration of manual labor which makes equals of us all. No more John Steinbeck or his disdain for land pillagers. Only, as Engle himself once reportedly espoused: "sensations, not doctrines; experiences, not dogmas; memories, not philosophies."

It's a peculiar theory for two reasons. One, the titans of this specific allegation have a weak body of work compared to their counterparts (apologies to Raymond Carver and John Updike but "East of Eden" is nearly blinding in its triumph and there's no point arguing this, and zero apologies to Alice Munro, who was a fucking ghoul). Two, this style of writing is just modernism and modernism predates The Cold War by, uhhhh, a lot of years and a couple of countries.

Which is how we arrive, in reverse, to Henry James.

"In the Cage" is an 1898 novella (110 pages) about a woman working as a telegraphist in a London grocery store who implants herself into her customers' lives so that she may daydream an escape from her fast-approaching marriage to a remarkably named "Mr. Mudge."

"In the Cage" is also ghastly. Much like James, I struggle to find any concrete words to describe the situation itself, and instead can only provide details on the way the situation made me feel, and the situation—that being "reading the book"—made me feel as though, if I were to happen upon a time machine (a working, real time machine), I would visit three dates: 2018 to warn about COVID-19, 9/10 to prevent 9/11, and whatever date Henry James was born to yell at his baby self in his crib.

I hate this novella and I hate its circumference storytelling. Never are we told what happens, only how what happens impacts the unnamed protagonist. A widow's success as a floral designer brings jealousy and sniping. A customer's unasked invitation to dinner conveniently affirms his gentlemanly desires. A mistakenly sent telegraph, which invokes some non-plot about a secret coded number, elicits a haughty superiority that releases the protagonist from her fantasies.

It is remarkable that a concept this interesting can be this drab. The framework is all there: A woman restrained by society is forced to imagine a better life because she knows she has no real choice in ending her engagement. But I honestly cannot tell if James understands this plight or is deeply stupid about it.

That said, the best thing about this novella is likely its influence on modernist writing. That James published this and "Turn of the Screw" in the same year is astonishing, as both prod questions of reality and reliability from readers. Mind you, these stories came months after Bram Stoker's "Dracula," a book about a literal monster and its monster hunters. (But we can't discredit Stoker here. The author suffused his vampire with the public's anxiety of the coming modern age—Dracula's threat is not only that he's a monster but that he's a monster who so easily slips into London's increasingly faceless form of commerce).

This all matters because, 27 years later, Virginia Woolf would write a masterpiece that uproots the entire CIA-Iowa conspiracy plot: It is precisely in how "Mrs. Dalloway" looks inward that it allows us to process everything happening outward.

I will concede, however, that if deployed perhaps as an offensive, psychic weapon against the Soviets, "In the Cage" could have stopped Communism.