Malcolm Cowley

"...he was mounting one of the most important rescue missions in American literary history..."

Malcolm Cowley was American writer of poetry, essays, and memoirs, as well as an editor. Born in 1898, he died in 1989, thus seeing most of 20th century and watching American literature (as distinct from English literature) come into its own. 

What makes Cowley interesting or important? He's pretty obscure now. Why did Gerald Howard want to write this biography? Cowley's friends with Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Cowley's the literary editor of The New Republic in the 30s, and editor of the Viking Portables in the 40s. It's Viking Portable for Faulkner that Howard is referencing in the sentence at the top; Howard is unwilling to be decisive, but it's been said, and I think it's probably true, without Cowley there's no Nobel Prize for Faulkner.

Cowley was born the son of a doctor in the countryside near Pittsburgh. His Pittsburgh public high school was a good one. He got to Harvard, on scholarship, at an era when that was still a mark against, but he did well there, joining the staff of the literary magazines. But before he finished his degree, and before the US entered the war, he went to France to help out, as did Hemingway, Dos Passos, Cummings, except by the time he got there, there was an overabundance of ambulance drivers, so he drove munitions trucks. He sees only a bit of action as a driver, then returns to Harvard; later he interrupts his studies a second time to join the US Army, but he's still in officer training when the Armistice comes. In 1919, he's a Harvard graduate, but penniless.

What's a young person with literary ambitions to do in 1919? Go to Paris! Cowley wangles a graduate scholarship that pays for him and his first wife, the landscape painter Peggy Baird. He writes a thesis on Racine and improves his French, but he also meets all sorts of literary figures including the French surrealists, Louis Aragon, André Breton, and Tristan Tzara.

He returns to the US, scrapes by on book reviews and translation for a few years. His first book of poems comes out in 1929; he becomes proofreader, then editor, then the chief literary editor for The New Republic. While there he accepts and publishes John Cheever's first story, and sees that two others come out in The New Yorker. The New Republic, with a millionaire benefactor, pays decently well, and that continues even after the Crash.

In 1934, his memoir of the Lost Generation, Exile's Return, appears. 

His first marriage breaks down at the end of the 20s, not helped by affairs and too much drinking on both their parts. His second marriage is a success and lasts until his death.

In the 30s he's not a member of the Communist party, but he's pretty much the poster boy for Fellow Traveller. He goes to Spain and fails to see what the Stalinists are up to, even though Dos Passos tells him they killed my friend Andrés Nin. He signs a letter saying the Moscow show trials were justified and that the victims were indeed guilty. Eventually he changes his mind on Stalin, but it's late. He's eased out of The New Republic and when he takes a job in Washington during World War II, he's almost immediately hounded out of it. 

Then come the Viking years, editing the Portables. He also works as acquisitions adviser, and sees On The Road into print (which required a fight) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (which didn't). He publishes several other books, mostly late in his life.

He dies at the age of ninety.  

Howard's biography came out last year. I read both a positive review and an excerpt from the book and they convinced me to read it. It's an extremely well done biography, good on both the positive things Cowley did, but also solid on Cowley's dismaying relationship to Communism. And I did wonder if Howard wasn't half thinking of himself when he wrote about that rescue mission up above. If you're interested in the history of American literature in the middle of the 20th Century, it's an excellent book to read.

So then I went on to reread a couple of Cowley's more famous books:

Exile's Return

Exile's Return is his history of the Lost Generation ("You are all a lost generation"--Gertrude Stein, the epigraph to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises). It's part memoir, part history, part literary criticism, an easy enough mix because Cowley was in the center of it all.  They all go to France; they all come back. 

How aware of money it was: book reviews paid a dollar each for fifty or hundred words, but you only got paid when the reviews appeared. Meanwhile you could sell those half-dozen review copies for thirty-five cents each, and with the $2.10 in your pocket from six books, "you would buy bread and butter and lamb chops and Bull Durham for cigarettes and order a bag of coal..."

The book ends with a discussion of the suicide of Harry Crosby, a minor literary figure now mostly forgotten, but treated by Cowley as representative. Cowley had access to Crosby's journals and it's sad and touching, but as Cowley admits in the introduction to the second edition of 1951, he mostly wrote about Crosby because he couldn't bear to write about Hart Crane, a much closer friend who also committed suicide.

The Dream of the Golden Mountains

Then I went on to reread his similar memoir of the 30s, which comes out in 1980. It's a much more explicitly political book; well, the 30s were a more political decade. Cowley himself is more involved in the fights over Stalin and Trotsky, whether there should be a Popular Front and if the Socialists were friends or enemies; in the book, which comes out in 1980, he a bit regrets his obsessions of time, and discusses the events of FDR's administration on the literary scene, particularly the Federal Writers Project. 

Another fine memoir.

The View From 80

Well, I put that in the picture, but I'm saving the reread of that one for a few years yet...  😉

Short Reviews: von Doderer, Faulkner, Scholem

Three complicated chunksters all of which I started long posts for. Those posts didn't get finished. (Oh, well.) Time to clear the decks.

Heimito von Doderer's The Strudlhof Steps (850 pages)

This is a fairly new release from New York Review Books, and Vincent Kling won the most recent Wolff Prize for translation from the German for it. The novel came out in 1951 in German, and hasn't previously appeared in an English translation.

The main events take place just before and just after World War I in Vienna. I'm a sucker for the place and time. And, hey, it's shorter than The Man Without Qualities; as a bonus, von Doderer finished it, too. Four sections, each coming to a dramatic climax--who gets married, who gets dumped, who gets a leg cut off by a tram--generally on or near the Strudlhof Steps:

Lt. Melzer features in the subtitle. He likes to drink Turkish coffee on the skin of a bear he shot in Bosnia in 1912; watched his commanding officer (whom he likes) die on the Italian front in World War I; seems almost unmarriageable, but is he?

René von Stengeler is born into a wealthy Protestant family, captured by the Russians in 1916, only making it back to Vienna after the war is over. Does he marry Grete, back from Oslo where she escaped the misery of post-war Vienna by teaching piano? And why does René's sister commit suicide? Because we know she did from the first few pages.

The novel requires tolerance, but pays back. It moves back and forth in time, at first seemingly arbitrarily. You have to accept its terms, and give it space to get started. Characters have last names or first names but not necessarily both, and sometimes merely initials. For example, we never learn Lt. Melzer's (a major character) first name: on page 823, "Sorry, but we don't know Melzer's first name." The narrative voice has a curious diffidence.

Von Doderer's politics were not particularly admirable. He joined the Nazis in the mid-30s, when the party was illegal in Austria. The afterword, by Daniel Kehlmann, says he was quite anti-Semitic at that time. He later turned against the party, but never publicly, and as a WWI veteran, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht, serving in garrison duty, first in Norway, later in France, where he started writing this novel. The publication of the novel was delayed while von Doderer was de-Nazified. René von Stengeler is clearly a self-portrait, and deliberately not a flattering one. What did he think by 1950? I don't know. There are minor Jewish characters in this, and they're treated with real sympathy.

Anyway, I thought it was very good.

William Faulkner's Light in August (480 pages)

I had heard that Light in August was a murder story, the story of Joe Christmas, and, well, it is. Christmas (named for the day his infant form was dropped off at the orphanage) murders his lover. Christmas may have black blood--he doesn't know and we don't know either, but he thinks he does, and though he could pass for white, once he's accused of having a drop of black blood (by his own grandfather, no less) he assumes he does.

But Christmas' story is not the whole of the novel by any means. It's the portrait of a town called Jefferson, and not just the evils of racism, but also the ways racism distorts the life of the town. Nowadays we don't really have any problem contemplating that Jefferson the man may have been a bit racist, but the novel came out in 1932. There's a daring irony to that. Was Faulkner in his heart of hearts free of racism? Certainly not, and I doubt he would say he was. But he knew that problem for a problem, and that counts for something. Percy Grimm, the white captain of the National Guard, is a particularly (dare I say it?) grim portrait of a racist.

And am I the only one who doubted Christmas committed the murder? No, because the Wikipedia article says it's unclear who did it. I don't think that's actually sustainable, and that Christmas really did do it, but I did wonder during the middle of the novel. But maybe that's attributable to too many years of reading mysteries: the obvious suspect is never the culprit.

The town's a mess, and there's nothing to do but escape, but almost nobody does; the only ones who do are Lena Grove and Byron Bunch, running off in a folie à deux: she's looking for the man who got her pregnant and who will never marry her, and Byron's hoping she'll settle for him instead, and meanwhile he'll be there when she (which she won't) changes her mind.

One other thing to be said about this is that, of the great Faulkner novels, I thought this was the easiest read. And that's definitely something... 😉 It's easier than The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom. No chapters from the POV of dead people or madmen. Not the greatest of that quartet, I'd say, which for my money is Absalom, Absalom, but a better starting point. (Though if you include Sanctuary in your list of top Faulkner, I would say that one's a pretty straightforward read.)

Yeah, a classic.

Gershom Scholem's Sabbatai Sevi (929 pages, plus bibliography, notes and index)

Sabbatai Sevi (1626? - 1676) declared himself the Jewish messiah in 1665. (He may have intimated it as early as 1648 but only in limited circles.) Gershom Scholem, Jewish historian and friend of Walter Benjamin, made Sevi the subject of a major book.

Sevi (there should be a dot under the S which I can't figure out how to type, but think Tsevi or Zevi) was born in Smyrna to a middle-class merchant family, studied the Kabbala in Jerusalem, traveled on religious business to the Jewish community in Egypt and later to Constantinople. All lands under the control of the Ottomans at the time. When he began his mission in earnest, Nathan of Gaza was his prophet and explicated the theology of the new movement. Scholem, as a historian of Jewish mysticism, is rather more taken with Nathan than Sevi.

But the stories of Sevi and Nathan are just a small part of this fascinating book. What's surprising is the Europe-wide discussion of these figures, and not just in the Jewish community. Italy, Amsterdam, Morocco, Poland, Hamburg, Egypt are all discussing this new Messiah. English chiliastic Protestants write books about Sevi, who, they think, will lead 10000 Jews from the Lost Tribes across the River Sambatyon, armed with bows and arrows but still invincible. (The River Sambatyon doesn't actually exist, which is why you haven't heard of it.) Samuel Pepys writes about Sevi in his diary! Along with all the women he was shagging. He features in Venetian ambassador's reports and Jesuit Relations. One can imagine Blaise Pascal, roughly contemporary, being discussed across Europe, but it turns out not all Europe-wide discussions were so scientific.

Sevi himself always advocated a peaceful movement. Faith and the perfection of the self would lead to the kingdom of God. There were no armies in his vision.

In fact, I found the reception of Sabbatai Sevi to be more interesting than the biography of Sevi himself. Scholem is inclined to attribute Sevi's messianic proclamations to mental illness, labeling him a manic-depressive. Maybe. But diagnosing mental illness in the present is difficult enough--DSM-III, DSM-IV, DSM-V have different labels, and so will DSM-XCIII--diagnosing it in figures in the past in inherently suspect.

Why could a Messianic movement take root then? Scholem finds the main factor to be the diffusion of Kabbalistic thinking going back to Isaac Luria (1534-1572). But also the Jewish massacres by Khmelnitsky in Poland and the Ukraine take place in 1648. As for the interest in Christian circles, there was a feeling that 1666 should be an important year: the number of the beast plus 1000.

Once in Constantinople, Sevi was arrested by the Ottomans. They were relatively tolerant of Judaism, but weren't prepared to tolerate a figure who was going to lead an army of invincible Jews and put the crown of the world on his head. (If, in fact, Sevi intended these things. Probably not.) He seems to have impressed the vizier and then later the sultan, but still in September of 1666, he was told to convert to Islam or die. Sevi converted. 

Surprisingly this wasn't the end of the movement. A number of Sevi's followers also converted over the years. Sevi was ordered to leave Constantinople, first to Edirne, which was at times the Ottoman capital, then later to Albania. Sevi led his converts, the Dönmeh, also referred to as the Ma'min, or the Faithful, in a new syncretistic religious community influenced both by Judaism and Islam, particularly that of the mystical Sufi orders. Scholem's book ends in 1676, when Sevi dies, but the community survived, centred in Salonica until the Greek-Turkish population transfers of 1922. The Dönmeh were often thought to be hidden Jews, but they were Muslim enough for the time, so they had to go. The story of the Dönmeh would be fascinating, and Scholem had intended to write a book, but didn't live to do so. They do feature in Mark Mazower's book (recommended!) on Salonica, though.

I read the second edition of the book, which came out in 1973, translated by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky. Scholem says in the introduction that he had access to more material by then, and that it superseded the earlier edition.

And why did I read this book now? Well. Did I really need to read one nine-hundred page book about a failed Jewish messiah in order to prepare for another nine-hundred page book about a failed Jewish messiah? Oh, probably not, but that's what I did:

These were all August reads for me, and it's been a while now. Still I wanted to review these because they knock off a couple of challenge items. Light in August was on my original Classics Club list and works for this year's Back to the Classics challenge.

And the other two count for this year's European Reading Challenge:

The Strudlhof Steps is clearly an Austrian book, though it does have scenes in Norway and Switzerland. Sabbatai Sevi spent most of his life in what is now Turkey, but I've already done Turkey this year. Sabbatai Sevi the book ranges across Europe. Still we'll stick Sevi himself, who spent the last eight years of his life in Ulcinje, which was in the Ottoman province of Albania at the time, but is now in Montenegro.

Short reviews, did I say? Well, short-ish...