In the nineteen-thirties and forties, young book critics on the make used to crowd outside the office of Malcolm Cowley, the literary editor of The New Republic, in the hopes of his attention. Cowley—who had established himself as the historian of the Lost Generation par excellence with “Exile’s Return,” a memoir of living in France alongside the not-yet-famous writers Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, among others—was undeniably one of the few men in American letters who defined the taste of the reading public. He could help a struggling writer keep the lights on, or, even better, anoint them. The sad young literary men and women he plucked from the crowd were thus invited into the ranks of the country’s tastemakers.
Determining what the nation did and did not read was the through line of Cowley’s career. He was a great discoverer and nurturer of talent: Jack Kerouac, John Cheever, and Ken Kesey were among the writers he championed, and, of the critics he commissioned to produce reviews at The New Republic, many—including Mary McCarthy, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, and Muriel Rukeyser—would go on to have storied careers. By midlife, Cowley was esteemed as an editor and essayist, a nimble translator of contemporary French literature, and a creative-writing instructor at Stanford. He was also a canny industry operator—a man who knew how to play the different parts of the publishing machine against one another in the interests of work he wanted to promote. His most cited act of heroism may have been his effort to revitalize the career of William Faulkner, who had slipped into obscurity after the Second World War, by publishing an influential edition of his work while at Viking Press, but he also kept fires lit for Walt Whitman, Nathanael West, Sherwood Anderson, and his close friend Hart Crane. (Broom, a short-lived magazine that Cowley helped edit, published Crane alongside the likes of Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens.)
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In a 1963 issue of Esquire, a tart article called “The Structure of the Literary Establishment” found Cowley to be near “The Hot Center” of power. Gerald Howard’s new biography, “The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature” (Penguin Press), zooms in on Cowley’s place at that center, tracing his involvement with “just about everything and everybody of literary consequence” during what we now call the American century. Howard does more than highlight the ways in which—through the recommendation of residency recipients, the publication of essays and books, the mentoring of students, or the revival of out-of-print works—Cowley shaped individual literary careers. Rather, as Howard, a former book editor himself, sees it, Cowley’s agitation for the cause of his country’s literature also helped to vault what was once seen as a minor, regional tradition into a world-historical one. Cowley’s life story demonstrates not just how reputations are built (and destroyed) but also how “one determined actor” managed to bend an entire canon “to his tastes and convictions.”
When Cowley was born, at the end of the nineteenth century, American literature was widely considered a sideshow act. Mark Twain may have been one of the century’s most famous men, but the prevailing sentiment was nevertheless to deem his country’s literature “provincial, backward, lacking in artistic polish or value,” Howard writes. Anxiety surrounding the nation’s cultural marginality was widespread. Surveying the last century or two of American literary output, one saw a fragmented corpus that reflected a nation more easily understood region by region than as a whole.
In April, 1917, in the middle of his undergraduate studies, at Harvard, Cowley sailed to Paris to volunteer in the war effort, following in the footsteps of his classmates John Dos Passos and E. E. Cummings. Working as a driver on the front, he was somewhat insulated from the horrors of the trench, but he witnessed the carnage a mortar shell could inflict. His time in France ended in the fall, and he was back in the states by November. When he landed in New York, he decided to continue his “long forlough”—away from school and from gentility—in Greenwich Village. From this point on, he would be closely attached to the cultural life of downtown bohemia, socializing with the likes of Eugene O’Neill and Dorothy Day. (In 1919, he returned briefly to Harvard, obtaining his degree the next year.) Some of the most entertaining scenes of Howard’s biography recount this intense period, when Cowley decided, somewhat unwisely, that the most direct path to influence was freelance book reviewing. He was perpetually broke, and when he wasn’t panhandling for review assignments from editors or pawning review copies (and, in one dire instance, his Phi Beta Kappa ring), he would occasionally work as an extra in an O’Neill play. By his early twenties, his byline regularly appeared in well-regarded publications, and while much of this work was humdrum, according to Howard, one gets a sense from the writers he engaged with—Katherine Mansfield, Amy Lowell, and Marcel Proust among them—of Cowley as someone caught between the magic of European modernism and the earthier American tradition.
From the beginning of his public life as an intellectual, Cowley would be preoccupied with questions about, as he put it, the “clusters” and “constellations” that distinguish one cohort from another, and how one might unite the disparate strands of American literature into an identifiable movement. These concerns would come to the fore in an essay he published in 1921, at twenty-three, shortly after he won a scholarship to pursue graduate studies in France, where many of his peers had moved to escape a souring national mood and the spectres of Prohibition and the Palmer Raids.
“This Youngest Generation,” which appeared in the New York Evening Post, contains observations that Cowley would refine for the rest of his life. It crystallized what Howard calls his “most persuasive insight”: “that the American writers who were coming of age in the postwar years, particularly those who’d chosen to expatriate themselves to Europe, constituted a literary group distinct from the generations that had come before.” Cowley knew that the Great War’s shadow was inescapable, and while this insight was hardly original (as Virginia Woolf wrote, more famously, “on or about December 1910 human nature changed”), he was uniquely sensitive to the ways in which that shadow impressed itself on the writing of his contemporaries. The essay was not rosy or complimentary; he knew that his peers had not written anything of note—yet. But what made the Americans in Europe distinct from their forebears, he argued, was that they wrote of the American experience as a global condition. Their misspent years on the Left Bank, or in the trenches of the French countryside, revealed to them their home’s entanglement with the affairs of the world. They invited, more than others before them, an exchange of ideas with the Continent, and also desired to reinvent American writing along these lines.
In 1934, Cowley would expand his essay’s ideas in his best and most meaningful book, “Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s,” which documents how his cohort forged a literature in the crucible of national disaffection, war, and exile. It’s a remarkable and unusual work—alternating between first and second person, its account is at once intimate and general. The book’s sociological rendering draws heavily on personal material, like Cowley’s memories of hanging out in cafés and bars in Montparnasse and the Village, or watching Hart Crane drunkenly compose poetry, or procuring stamps for an ashen James Joyce. Cowley presents as a Joe Schmo who has miraculously appeared at the right place at the right time. But it also has a definite thesis: Cowley’s contemporaries were the “first real” generation in “the history of American letters,” because its members “belonged to a period of transition from values already fixed to values that had to be created”—one that reflected their “common adventures,” and a “common attitude” of longing and alienation from parochial, middle-class life (and art) in America. He saw the writers among whom he dwelled as creating a “new literature” modelled after French influences, such as Flaubert, while “extending in different combinations through the work of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, Stephen Crane.” The Lost Generation looked back at “a tradition that had been broken for a time,” and reëstablished it, by fusing modern influences from Europe.
“Exile’s Return” ’s more riveting passages feature Cowley writing, with a refreshing frankness, on the giants in his midst, and also the Dada rabble-rousers he befriended in Paris. The early European modernists had built monuments to their mastery of the novel, but these works were flawed by their limited appeal for readers who couldn’t untangle their webs of references or submit to their works’ overwhelming need for attention. Joyce possessed an “intolerable genius”; Proust, in writing “In Search of Lost Time,” had “turned himself inside out like an orange and sucked it dry.” What the young Americans offered was writing that, unlike these forebears, could better reflect the feeling of living in the present, and could also, by avoiding the seductive but stultifying impulse to turn art-making intensely inward, be legible to those outside what Cowley called “the religion of art.”
“Exile’s Return” appeared in the fifth year of the Depression, a time when Cowley’s circle was becoming increasingly radicalized. Many had joined the Communist Party or were, like him, fellow-travellers who felt it was their duty to join hands with the working class. As Cowley proclaimed in a letter to the poet Allen Tate, “The conception of the class struggle is one that renders the world intelligible and tragic . . . a world possible to write about once more in the grand manner.” He threw himself into political activity, lending his name to open letters and visiting some of the fronts of class conflict, from miners’ strikes in Kentucky to the streets of Barcelona in the middle of the Civil War. But he was not the most adept political observer, and his star would briefly implode when he picked the wrong side of the debate that would tear apart the left, the battle between Trotsky and Stalin. Among other things, Cowley wrote a piece for the New Republic about the Moscow show trials that, according to Kazin, “condemned” the defendants. A letter he received from Edmund Wilson, his predecessor at The New Republic, in 1938 best sums up how many felt about Cowley by the end of the decade: “What in God’s name has happened to you?”
By the start of the Second World War, it was possible that politics would truly ruin Cowley’s life: he was hounded in the press, lost many friends and jobs, and was even targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Cowley was left, for a time, immiserated, resorting to hunting squirrels on the grounds of his house, in Sherman, Connecticut, to feed his family.
But then he began inching his way back up to the highest precincts of American letters. His first lifeline was an assignment to profile the editor Maxwell Perkins, for this magazine, in 1944. Perkins was responsible for helping to introduce Cowley’s compatriots (most famously, Fitzgerald) to the American public. In a way, he was the blueprint for what Cowley would become in the following years, when he disavowed formal politics and fully committed himself to a no-less-ideological enterprise: the promotion of modern American writing.
In 1944, in a deus-ex-machina-like turn, Cowley was awarded a five-year grant from the Mellon Foundation, money that allowed him to chart a new course. Until then, as a magazine editor and a freelance writer, he had been chained to the hamster wheel of the publishing calendar. With no deadlines, he was able to reinvent himself as a literary historian. He began working as a talent scout and a consulting editor at Viking, which invited him to help edit their “Portable” books—an influential paperback series of introductory collections of major authors’ works. Like many domestic industries, publishing was flush with resources, shored up by the wartime economy. In every G.I.’s rucksack, nestled between rations, were novels.
Cowley’s tenure at Viking produced what is arguably the most lastingly consequential of his editorial efforts: collecting and reprinting a number of Faulkner’s most significant pieces of writing, and, in the process, creating a more complete picture of his corpus for historians and academics to debate. His success was by no means predictable. After the war, Faulkner was an unlikely candidate for canonization. His books were out of print. While he was never an obscure writer, he was not roundly celebrated, either. Maxwell Perkins himself had told Cowley, “Faulkner is finished.”
Across Howard’s biography, a routine plays itself out: Cowley decides that a figure, whether it is a forgotten writer or an unproven one, deserves more attention, and he mobilizes. Viking rebuffed Cowley’s idea at first, but then he got to writing, placing two essays about Faulkner in important magazines. It was enough to convince the publisher that “a flurry of highly positive critical activity” was unfolding. The project was green-lighted. In “The Portable Faulkner,” Cowley proffers an interpretation which would become the standard, one that elevated Faulkner from a Southern-gothic writer into a key player in American modernism. Less than a decade after the collection appeared, Faulkner would receive a Nobel Prize, and he would say, “I owe Malcolm Cowley the kind of debt no man could ever repay.”
The impression produced by Howard’s biography is of Cowley as a Zelig-like character present at every important moment in American literary life. Yet for a man who so intimately understood how to build a reputation, his own standing suffered greatly in the years after his death, in 1989. His politics are certainly one reason. And, though the political currents that all but sank him have evolved, they have not done so in ways conducive to a Cowley revival. In 2014, shortly after the publication of his letters, the volume’s editor, the scholar Hans Bak, speculated that Cowley’s obscurity might owe to the so-called canon wars of the nineties, in which academics tussled over the diversity of college syllabi, which skewed toward the dusty tradition of “Great Books.” Cowley, Bak said, “had constructed a canon of American literature dominated by white male writers . . . an entire image of the story of American literature which has sort of been subverted.”
The writer Susan Cheever, who knew Cowley through her father, John—whom Cowley picked out of the slush pile—thinks that Cowley was forgotten simply because most editors are. They aren’t the stars, after all. Editors may be invoked in acknowledgement pages or awards speeches, but they don’t much inhabit the public imagination of literary life.
Still, not all editors have—or are able to take on—the task Cowley gave himself: to believe so earnestly and powerfully in the work of his peers that he spent his life making sure they would not be forgotten. That his work can be boiled down into a reading list traversed without enthusiasm by most high-school seniors is hardly his fault. If anything, “Exile’s Return” is a book that belongs on those lists, too. That book is a skeleton key that unlocks a sense of how much work was required in order for a generation to agitate for their own writing. If Cowley stood for anything, it was the idea that a national literature could not exist without the toil of true believers who committed themselves, regardless of the caprices of sales or critical reception, to bettering their countrymen through good books. ♦
