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...  😉