LitCity

In a video interview with Andre Dubus III, he speaks briefly of living with his father, Andre Dubus, neighbors to Kurt Vonnegut: 

We lived in Iowa City and I taught two freshman rhetoric classes four mornings a week, then came home to eat lunch and write. I wrote in my den at the front of the house, a small room with large windows, and I looked out across the lawn at an intersection of streets shaded by tall trees. I was trying to learn to write stories, and was reading O’Hara and Hemingway as a carpenter might look at an excellent house someone else has built. … Kurt Vonnegut was our neighbor. We had adjacent lawns; he lived behind us, at the top of the hill. One day that summer he was outside on his lawn or on his front porch four times when I was outside, and we waved and called to each other. The first time I was walking home from teaching, wearing slacks and a shirt; the next time I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt I had put on to write; then I wore gym shorts without a shirt and drove to the track; in late afternoon wearing another pair of slacks and another shirt, I walked up to his house to drink. He was sitting on his front porch and, as I approached, he said: ‘Andre, you changed clothes more than a Barbie doll.' Kurt did not have a telephone. That summer the English Department hosted a conference, and one afternoon a man from the department called me (to pick up) Mrs. Ellison at the train. She did not like to fly. I went up to Kurt’s house, and he came to the back door. I said: ‘They want us to pick up Ellison at the airport. Then his wife at the train.' He said ‘Swell. I’ll drive.’

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Robert Lacy remembers his time in Iowa, in his essay “Richard Yates in Iowa”: 

Marv’s was where he gathered with some of his students--Jim Crumley, Andre Dubus, Jim Whitehead, Ted Weesner, myself, others--after class. We looked forward to those gatherings in Marv’s, but not as much as Yates seemed to. We married students had wives and kids to go home to, and he didn’t. It was something he used to remark on: “Guess you guys are leaving, huh?” he’d say. “Got to get home to the little woman, right? Nobody wants to have another one with me? Just one?” “Better not, Dick,” we’d say, and out we would go, leaving him sitting in the booth alone.

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Dubus writes about his stay in Iowa in his essay collection Broken Vessels: Essays.

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.

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John Irving remembers his time in Iowa, in the collection Trying to Save Piggy Sneed:

Andre Dubus and James Crumley were also students at the Writers’ Workshop then. I remember a picnic at Vance Bourjaily’s farm, where a friendly pie-fight ensued; Dubus or Crumley, bare-chested and reasonably hairy, was struck in the chest by a Boston cream pie. Who threw the pie, and why, escapes my ever-failing memory--I swear I didn’t do it.

   

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Robert Lacy remembers his time in Iowa, with Richard Yates, Paul Engle, Kurt Vonnegut, Andre Dubus

We did a great deal of partying in those years. It seems to have been a partying era. And one of the places we partied most often was the little white frame house on Brown Street, not far from the campus, where Andre Dubus lived with his wife, Pat, and their four kids. Andre had resigned his commissions as a captain in the Marines to come to Iowa and study writing. He and Pat were on welfare and received government-surplus food such as cheese and rice and peanut butter. Their house had a big kitchen with a wooden picnic table in it that served as the dining table. We would gather around that table, drinking and talking and snacking on government cheese. Verlin Cassill and Kurt Vonnegut and sometimes even Paul Engle, the Iowa workshop’s founder and director, used to appear at these parties -- Engle once arriving with a mixed case of gin and whisky he’d purchased with workshop money from the state-run liquor store on the other side of town. Yates could often be found asleep on the couch in Dubus’s front room. He would have spent the afternoon drinking alone at the Airliner and would be using the Dubuses’ sofa to sleep it off.

 

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