Arts and Letters

Malcolm Cowley wrote for seventy years and mainly about his fellow writers. There was a kind of Darwinism in his approach. He explored the natural history of the genus, Scriptor americanus, examining the specimens and exposing them to comparative experience, including his own. The difference between his work and that of the scientifically minded was that Malcolm didn't detach himself; he didn't use a test tube or a microscope, or Sigmund Freud. He had his own measurements, his private imagination, his friendly curiosity, his personal brushes and palette knives and a wide range of emotional pigments. The writers he examined were often his friends. He neither puffed them nor dogmatized. He wanted to know their habits, their tics, their life-styles. His late book with its song-title—And I Worked at the Writer's Trade—deals not only with their texts, their mechanics, their use of words, but the stuff of literary reputations. Why are some writers invariably neglected? Why do others project large images regardless of their substance? Did they somehow share a “sense of guilt”? He liked to describe how they wrote. His books are in certain ways a sociology of writing. He studied the writers' capacity for survival. He looked into their etiology. In his book on the writer's trade he returns to Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Cummings, Faulkner, Wilder, Crane, although five years earlier he had written what we thought was his last word on these specimens. He was always turning back to them and to others: he stayed close to his generation.

Critics have indeed called him the historian of “the lost generation,” using that label casually without bothering to explain it. It had been Gertrude Stein's label for Ernest Hemingway. He belonged to a génération perdue, a war generation, that had skipped maturation, had a cognitive gap, and lacked certain disciplines. Hemingway used Stein's words as the epigraph for The Sun Also Rises—“You are all a lost generation”—and his book simplified its meaning into a generation of frustrated hedonists, impotent, promiscuous, and fatalistic. Cowley saw his personae as far from “lost.” They worked hard, believed in their art, and seemed to struggle with things missing in their own land. One might also say vulgarly that they were “achievers.” He put them into his history of the 1920 “exiles.” They figured in other works. He watched them struggle, escorted those fated to die early into their posthumity, and by the mid-1970s, when they were all gone, produced perhaps his best portraits of them in A Second Flowering—set them down in all their various phases. For Faulkner, Cowley performed a supreme service, that of explicating him to a public not accustomed to Faulkner's kind of virtuosity: he became the geographer of Yoknapatawpha County.

John Peale Bishop, who counted himself an aristocrat, considered Cowley a kind of peasant, writing to Edmund Wilson that he was “the plowboy of the western world who had been to Paris.” Cowley did begin as a kind of provincial. Pittsburgh-born, he grew up largely in the country house of his father, a physician. He spent much time on the land. A paragraph in Exile's Return suggests his ruralism when he describes what lay behind Americans in Paris—“somewhere behind them was another country, a real country of barns, cornfields, hemlock woods, and brooks tumbling across birch logs into pools where the big trout lay. Somewhere, at an incredible distance, was the country of their childhood, where they had once been a part of the landscape.”

When the 1914-18 war came, even before the United States entered it, Cowley left his studies at Harvard and enlisted in the American Field Service. He arrived in France at a moment when the need for ambulance drivers had slackened and accepted a munitions truck instead. This put him under the jurisdiction of the French Army. He saw vivid scenes of action without being allowed to take part. Unlike Hemingway, however, he wasn't eager for the shooting. And when the war was over, he took a different course from other American writers who remained abroad. He went back to Harvard to complete his formal education. This done, he returned to France to complete the informal one of which he had had so brief a taste.

His odyssey in France during the first days of the peace differed also from that of others—from that of Dos Passos or Hemingway, or Edmund Wilson, Dashiell Hammett, or Sidney Howard—who had taken part in some phase of action during the final months. For one thing he didn't confine himself to Paris. He went to Montpellier for more study, then to Dijon and later to Giverny, where old Claude Monet was painting his last pictures. Cowley's life abroad was purposeful and active. He got to know the French of the avant-garde, the Dadaists and the Surrealists, at the height of their brief time of manifestos and explorations of dreams and automatic writing—among others Breton, Tzara, Picabia, Soupault, Aragon. He found them “young, adventurous, human,” like himself. He was more outreaching than the “exiles,” who simply sat at the Dôme, the Select, or the Deux Magots at St.-Germain-des-Prés. At Dijon, he worked in a grape arbor; at Giverny he lived in three rooms above a blacksmith shop. Periodically he went into Paris to see his compatriots.

In due course he met James Joyce, his glaucoma eyes sealed behind a patch and thick glasses. Here was the self-appointed exile from Ireland. Cowley's record of that meeting shows us how far he could see into the reality behind a legend:

[Joyce's] opinions were those of a fourth or fifth rate mind.... It was as if he had made an inverted Faust's bargain, selling youth, riches, and part of his common humanity to advance his pride of soul.... He had achieved genius as cold as the touch at parting of his long, smooth wet-marble fingers.

Very early indeed Cowley saw behind the universal adoration of the Irish artificer, the man shut up in his word-world. This kind of sensual and sensitive discernment would provide the deep humanity in Malcolm's later literary portraits.

Cowley returned to the United States on the eve of the depression and wrote Exile's Return, which dealt with his first large experience of American writers abroad, those for whom the “exile” was decidedly not a Siberia, but the kind of freedom one experiences in foreign countries where one can cut away from native provincialities. The book was ignorantly received by the reviewers who then held the lost generation in contempt. As that generation gained success and power, the book became, and remains, a valuable record of the period, a slide rule against which to measure the autobiographies that followed. Today we can't help contrasting the self-appointed exiles with the genuine ones and the bitterness and uprootedness they had to live through—someone like Nabokov, who was a triple exile by the time he reached a safe haven in the United States. The Left Bank exiles had fled to Europe in the aftermath of the war to escape Prohibition and puritanism and the parochialism of Main Street. Cowley chose as his archetype Harry Crosby, who worshipped death and killed himself in a romantic double suicide. It was a vivid story but it was pathological, and perhaps not the best case history he might have chosen. The subjects of his later literary portraits were better fitted for this kind of examination.

During the 1930s Cowley kept up his writing for any journal that provided a few cents to buy groceries. Later he succeeded Edmund Wilson at the New Republic, where he showed himself a skillful journalist and a sweetly reasonable editor. There are fewer and fewer persons who remember the indignities of those years, the kind of national slum that seemed to exist across the continent during the pre-Roosevelt inertia in the White House and Congress. Even Malcolm, who tried to write about the thirties as a sequel to Exile's Return, resisted telling the story for some twenty-five years: it was too grim, too confused, too complex, too painful. His book finally emerged in 1980 as The Dream of the Golden Mountains: one dreamed utopias during the depression, and joined utopian movements. Cowley must have recognized the phosphorescence of his title, for he added a concrete subtitle: Remembering the 1930s. One didn't want to remember them, and Cowley remembered them only too well. To read his succinct accounts of the Bonus Marchers, the hunger marches, the May Day parades, the shantytowns, the brutalities of big corporations that Franklin Roosevelt finally called "citadels of entrenched greed," is to understand the anger that was generated throughout the nation, and the helplessness, sense of isolation, loneliness, and the quest for comradeship—and golden mountains! In his narrative, he weaves in the fate of Hart Crane and the lives of the Southern Agrarians, reaching for their golden mountains of the past, at Allen Tate's and Caroline Gordon's home on the Cumberland River in Tennessee, and the fate of the writers who swung to the far left. Cowley felt he lost his selfhood by becoming a name on too many letterheads. He chronicled the writing trade of that squalid time. There was a touch of barricade fever in Malcolm, who then wore a jet black mustache and had a thick mass of black hair. He went with other writers to help feed the starving miners during their long strike in Pineville, Kentucky. Edmund Wilson's diary tells how he kept his cool and handed out bottles of milk while a company thug held a pistol to the small of his back. He himself recorded one of his rare displays of belligerence during his Dada days in France, in the old cafe La Rotonde, where the Dadaist group discovered the proprietor took notes on his customers and was a police informer, a mouchard. In the heat of the moment, Cowley delivered a glancing blow to the café owner's jaw and was hauled to prison, where he spent the night. The magistrate who released him accepted the testimony of the customers rather than that of the owner.

Aggression wasn't Malcolm's style, and he finally took Edmund Wilson's advice. Wilson wrote him a long letter in 1938 urging him not to be so trusting of Stalinists. “I wish you would purge your head of politics—revolutionary and literary alike—and do the kind of valuable work of which you're capable. I think politics is bad for you because it's not real to you; because what you're practicing is not politics but literature and it only messes up a job like yours to pretend it's something else.” Cowley accepted this after varied experiences during the alphabet days of the Roosevelt regime, the days of the AAA, CCC, FCA, FERA, HOLC, NRA, PWA, TVA, and so on. There was that barn in Sherman, Connecticut, which he could convert into a home and enough acres for him to get back to hoeing potatoes. But he went on also with his writer's trade.

In the postdepression period he continued to enter into new literary movements; he acted as adviser and editor at the Viking Press; he encouraged the young—John Cheever was one of his protégés—and by late middle age was an elder statesman in the halls of American studies and in our own Academy and Institute, where he was President from 1956 to 1959 and again from 1962 to 1965 and Chancellor of the Academy from 1967 to 1976. I met him in the early 1950s, and from then on our paths crossed constantly. I suppose it was no accident that he asked me to write a preface to the ultimate version of Exile's Return, for I had been a junior among the exiles in the late 1920s. We had many fruitful talks about generational gaps and the earlier rigidities of American criticism.

He was at his best in the essay form. Most of his books are thematic collections of essays. With his extraordinary skill at self-editing he wove his fugitive writings and studies into well-wrought narratives. He wrote always with warmth and sympathy in his even-tempered prose that was free of pedantry. He avoided the duels so common in the critical world. He enjoyed his researches. His constant quest was to capture the solidity of fact within the evanescence of history. I suppose what I'm saying is that he valued truth above all else. He could not write of writers without getting to know them profoundly and like Sainte-Beuve, getting the feel of them, even to tasting and smelling them. He was distinctly in the American grain. When he turned eighty he wrote a charming essay that gave comfort to our nation's octogenarians and, seeking statistics found he was in the mid-eighty bracket for longevity. It stood at about eighty-six. He remarked in his essay that he supposed he would endure to ninety. His estimate was accurate. That was when he left us, and left memories of a well-fulfilled writer with deep loyalties to the writing profession. He was his literary generation's most loyal, but also most objective and sincere, historian.