Malcolm Cowley was one of the most important literary critics and editors of the twentieth century. In a dozen books and over a thousand articles, he helped shape the canon of modern American literature. As an editor, he rescued William Faulkner from obscurity, revised the reputation of Walt Whitman, discovered John Cheever and Ken Kesey, and published Jack Kerouac’s On the Road when no one else would. Most importantly, he chronicled the so-called Lost Generation of American writers in Paris—Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and others—who led our national letters into modernism.
When Cowley is discussed today, one usually hears the adjective “forgotten” or “neglected” attached to his name. Few critics are still read fifty years after their deaths, and Cowley’s prominence peaked nearly a century ago between the end of the Roaring Twenties and the start of the Cold War. It would be a mistake, however, to consider him a bypassed historical figure. His writing still bristles with intellectual energy and irresistible emotion. Preparing this review, I mentioned his name to two literary friends, one younger than I am, the other older. Without prompting, each launched into a lyrical recollection of the first time they had read Exile’s Return, Cowley’s memoir of his early years as a writer in Paris and New York. “It changed my life,” said the younger. “It made me feel that there was nothing more important than being a writer.” Cowley may be neglected by the average reader, but among writers he remains an inspiration.
The young Gerald Howard had a similar first encounter with Cowley. He was “smitten” by a different book, A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation. Half a century later he still remembers the time and place—May 6, 1973, in the Strand Bookstore in New York City. In the intervening half-century, Howard has had a notable career in literary publishing at Doubleday, where he worked with writers such as Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, and Paul Auster. But his career started at Viking in the 1980s, where Howard met his literary hero. Then in his ninth decade, Cowley occasionally visited the Viking offices as a consulting editor. Eventually Howard served as editor for Cowley’s final book a couple of years before the author’s death.
Now retired, Howard has published his first book, The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature. The first full biography of its subject, The Insider is superb in every respect. In an age of overlong, underwritten, and often rambling accounts of authorial lives, Howard offers a deeply researched and lucidly written chronicle of Cowley’s complicated career. The pacing and organization are exemplary. Howard never loses the narrative thread. The biography has one lengthy digression, which I will discuss later, but even that side trip is engrossing.
Born in 1898 in a Pennsylvania farmhouse, Malcolm Cowley had an unusual background for a New York literary powerbroker. His father was a Swedenborgian homeopathic physician. His mother was a German Catholic who had escaped the domestic servitude of being the eldest daughter with eleven siblings. The couple lived in genteel poverty with a carefree disregard for their only child whom they left alone on the farm for an extended period on at least one occasion. Although he spent part of the year in Pittsburgh, where his father had a precarious practice, Cowley felt most at home in the countryside. From childhood, he was a self-sufficient loner who easily managed the chores of rural life. A photograph at age four shows the tyke holding a shotgun. He especially loved fishing, a skill which later helped feed his family during the Depression. Despite his cosmopolitan education, Cowley remained a country boy. “Look at the hands if you get a chance,” poet John Peale Bishop wrote critic Edmund Wilson in a letter—“the plowboy of the western world who has been to Paris.”
Cowley entered Harvard in 1915. A public-school kid on a scholarship, he remained an outsider among the privileged preppies, but he knew his intellectual worth. He finished second in his freshman class. He had already determined his literary vocation. “I wanted to write poems,” he recalled. “I wanted to write novels. . . . I wanted, in short, to be a man of letters.” He failed to win a place on the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, but he made the cut for the Advocate, the literary magazine whose recent contributors had included Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot. From the first, Cowley demonstrated the prolific productivity that characterized his career, publishing poems, reviews, and vignettes. He eventually became president of the journal.
Cowley was too restless for academic life. When America entered World War I in early 1917, he didn’t wait to be drafted. Cowley volunteered as a driver for the American Field Service in France. It proved a dangerous job. He drove military supplies to the front. In Europe for the first time, he also saw Paris, read French poetry, wrote dispatches for stateside publications, and visited bordellos. The women of the night added to his education in an unexpected way; he read Baudelaire’s poetry to them, and they corrected his pronunciation. Cowley loved the wartime intensification of his life. “The poison of danger” made his previous existence seem intolerably dull.
Cowley returned to America a changed man. He no longer fit into the middle-class world of his youth, but he wasn’t sure how to reinvent his existence. Over the next few years, he served in the U.S. Army, married a painter, finished Harvard, and moved to Greenwich Village to be a writer. His wife, Peggy Baird, was a hard-drinking divorcée eight years his senior, and the couple lived in bohemian squalor. (They would divorce twelve years later.) Cowley wrote reviews for a pittance, often just a dollar per piece. He earned an extra thirty-five cents by selling his review copy to a bookdealer. He struggled to make enough to eat each day. He also worked as an extra and eventually wrote catalogue copy. How artists survive became one of Cowley’s great themes. “Money,” he declared, “is the central problem of a young writer’s life, or of his staying alive.” Gerald Howard is excellent in conveying the manic-depressive atmosphere of Village life in the 1920s where, to quote Cowley, bohemians lived “on borrowed money, on borrowed time, in a borrowed apartment.”
In 1921, Cowley had his big break. He received an American Field Service Fellowship to study in France. The dollar was high. Europe was cheap. He and Peggy lived comfortably in Giverny with frequent trips to Paris. In Greenwich Village, Cowley had aspired to become modern. In Paris, he found himself in the center of international modernism. His friends included Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound, Stein, and E. E. Cummings. Fluent in French, he also entered the boisterous avant-garde world of the Dadaists and surrealists where he befriended Tristan Tzara and André Breton. Although the term would not exist for another few years, Cowley had joined the Lost Generation of expatriate American writers. Their lives and work would provide the subjects for much of his best writing. He was not as talented or innovative as they were, but he understood them because he had been both bruised and awakened by the same generational experience of war, deracination, and rejection of bourgeois mores.
When Cowley returned to America two years later, he was again impecunious, but he had matured as a writer and knew important people in the literary world. He also had an ambitious sense of his literary future as a major poet and perhaps novelist. In the meantime, he would support himself as a critic and copywriter. But for Cowley, the question soon became not only how to live but where. He disliked literary Manhattan, “where every one is so blandly engaged in cutting every one else’s throat.” He yearned to escape to the country. In 1926, he rented a ramshackle farmhouse in Sherman, Connecticut, for ten dollars a month. He divided his time between town and country—impoverished in both places. He initially spent winters in New York and warmer months in Connecticut. Later, he would spend three days a week in his office in Manhattan and the other four in his farmhouse. Cowley would stay in Sherman for the next sixty-three years. In fact, he is still there in the town cemetery.
Success came steadily. In 1930, Cowley replaced Edmund Wilson as the literary editor of the New Republic, the leading journal of liberal opinion. It was the golden age of print culture when weekly magazines had a huge impact on public and political opinion. Within a few years, Cowley was writing for nearly every issue—not only reviews but often editorials. The Insider expertly chronicles Cowley’s relation to both American cultural and political life, especially in the complicated period from the Depression to the Cold War.
Cowley crossed another major milestone in 1929; he published his first book, Blue Juniata, a collection of poems. For fifteen years he had worked seriously on verse. He had labored to make this personal, indeed autobiographical, volume an important debut. Blue Juniata was a commercial and critical success. Reviewers greeted him as a major voice of his generation. Cowley, however, almost immediately stopped writing poetry with any regularity. Over the years, he occasionally added new poems to new editions of Blue Juniata, but he forsook verse as a major medium. Howard writes of Cowley’s abandonment of poetry that “Nothing is harder to explain or predict than the workings of literary inspiration and productivity.” I offer one plausible explanation. When Cowley saw his first book in print, this critic of penetrating taste found it good but not good enough to compare with the other debuts of the 1920s—Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings. Cowley shared his generation’s “dream of producing a masterpiece.” He had tried in poetry and failed—just barely but decisively. His greater talent was in prose.
A few years later Cowley wrote his masterpiece, Exile’s Return (1934). The prose memoir describes his nomadic life in World War I and subsequent years in France and America. He interwove his personal experiences with stories of his contemporaries, including Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound, Stein, Crane, and other émigré writers of his generation. Everything Cowley had learned as a critic and poet found full expression in this vivid and compelling memoir. The book has remarkable immediacy; it gives the impression of witnessing literary history as it unfolded. Exile’s Return allows us to feel the excitement of a cohort of young authors who risked everything to write to the utmost of their talents. Some would triumph. Others failed. Some died trying.
The next period of Cowley’s career is troubling, even for his admirers. As the Depression deepened, he had a political awakening. In 1932, he witnessed the brutal suppression of a coal strike in the area around Harlan County, Kentucky. He felt that he was living in history and that America’s economic collapse, Howard writes, was leading to “a revolution of some form, however ill-defined.” The key phrase here is “ill-defined.” Cowley’s political conversion was idealistic, emotional, and vague. Many writers of his generation moved toward Marxism in the thirties, but few wandered there so long or aimlessly as Cowley. He became literary America’s most notable “fellow traveler.” He never joined the American Communist Party, but he actively supported their causes and campaigns. His mainstream liberal status gave credence to the notion that the Popular Front, which was controlled by the party, spoke for a broad coalition of Americans.
Cowley signed petitions, coauthored public letters, spoke at rallies, marched in protests, and chaired committees. A man of action, he found his sudden eminence intoxicating. He never doubted that Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union represented the world’s best hope for the future. Meanwhile his contemporaries, such as Cummings, Wilson, and John Dos Passos, distanced themselves from the party line. Cowley saw no reason to doubt Stalin’s methods in the Moscow Trials when “Trotskyites” were condemned to death for treason. In 1937, he was a League of American Writers’ representative at the World Congress of Writers in Spain. There was a communist purge occurring all around him—soon to be the subject of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Cowley saw only what his communist handlers pointed out.
By the time the United States entered World War II, the gullible Cowley had become the kicking boy of both the non-communist left and the traditional right. Still in Stalin’s thrall, he lost his editorial position at the New Republic, though he continued to write reviews. The crisis came in late 1941 when Archibald MacLeish appointed Cowley Chief Information Officer for the newly created Office of Facts and Figures. Aided by an FBI investigation that linked him to seventy-two Communist Party or front organizations, Congress and the press roasted him alive. It didn’t matter that the accusations were inflated; the Roosevelt administration wanted him out. Cowley’s resignation became national news. Broken and broke, he fled with his family to Connecticut never again to write directly about politics.
Cowley slowly redeemed himself by writing about literature as he always had. Even during his most radical days, Cowley had never let ideology play a significant part in his literary judgment. His imagination was poetic, not political. His relationships with artists existed outside partisanship. He had, for example, worked on Exile’s Return while staying with arch-conservative Allen Tate in rural Tennessee. Cowley even joined Tate to attend a reunion of the Fugitive poets, Southern agrarian traditionalists who were dedicated to fighting communism (and nearly every other progressive trend). Having enjoyed his stay in the remnants of the Confederacy, he returned to New York to continue his political campaigns. Not only could this incident not happen today; it could hardly have happened to anyone else in 1933. Cowley was an aesthete. No wonder his politics were so well-meaning but incoherent.
In his years of exile Cowley did some of his most influential work. He had a genius for writing long essays of advocacy for the authors he loved. Howard calls him “a master middleman of literature,” but that phrase seems too flat; Cowley was a salesman of the sublime. Finishing one of Cowley’s great essays—on Fitzgerald or Hawthorne or Whitman—one wants to put down everything else and read the author in question. When Cowley combined his critical and editorial talents to help direct the new Viking Portable series, thick anthologies that presented a selection of a writer’s best work, he changed the American canon. His first undertaking, The Portable Hemingway (1944), renewed the writer’s relevance just as his career had started to dip. His Portable Faulkner (1946) had even greater impact. He championed the Mississippi author who had only one book in print and made a compelling case for his artistry. The book instigated a national revival of Faulkner’s career. Six years later the novelist won the Nobel Prize.
The postwar years marked a steady enlargement of Cowley’s career. He published a series of important books, including The Literary Situation (1954) and A Second Flowering (1973). He taught everywhere from Yale to Stanford. He curated the Fitzgerald revival. The best-selling Viking Portable Library eventually grew to 125 volumes, including a Portable Malcolm Cowley in 1990. The series was a landmark of mid-century American intellectual life.
Cowley worked at Viking in various capacities from 1949 to 1989. His later years had two unexpected triumphs: He published Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). The story of these two countercultural classics creates the great digression and longest chapter in Howard’s biography in which Cowley is just a supporting character. The change of focus would be annoying if the chapter weren’t so entertaining, especially in Kerouac’s case. Howard knows every detail of On the Road’s slow and weird path to the best-seller list and enduring success as the signature novel of the Beat movement.
Cowley died in 1989 at the age of ninety. By then, he had received nearly every honor to which a literary critic might aspire, including the presidency of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He had outlived his major contemporaries. Fitzgerald had died at forty-four, Hemingway at sixty-one, Faulkner at sixty-four, Cummings at sixty-seven. (Hart Crane had killed himself at thirty-two.) Cowley published eight new books after reaching seventy, most notably –And I Worked at the Writer’s Trade (1978). He could never fully understand his political mistakes, even after writing a book about the period, The Dream of the Golden Mountains (1980), but his accomplishments overshadowed his blunders. Fitzgerald said there were “no second acts in American lives,” but Cowley managed three—adventurous young writer, duped idealist, and grand old man of American letters. It was characteristically nice of him to give us a happy ending.