The Insider, page 1
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Copyright © 2025 by Gerald Howard
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Excerpt(s) from Exile’s Return by Malcolm Cowley, copyright 1934, 1935, 1941, 1951, renewed © 1962, 1963, 1969, 1979 by Malcolm Cowley. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Excerpt(s) from the letters of Malcolm Cowley and from The Dream of the Golden Mountain by Malcolm Cowley, copyright © 1980. Used by permission of Robert Cowley, executor of the estate of Malcolm Cowley.
A portion of this book appeared in somewhat different form in The American Scholar.
Photo credits: Cowley with parents: Newberry Library; Matthew Josephson: Photograph © 1923, Charles Sheeler, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Hart Crane photos: Columbia University Libraries; Both Calder images: © 2025 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Ernest Hemingway in Spain: The Kennedy Library; Alfred Kazin: New York Public Library; Whittaker Chambers in subway station: Wikimedia Commons; Cowley in Foley Square: Bettmann via Getty Images; Cowley, Faulkner, and Dos Passos: Anthony Camerano/The Associated Press; Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady: Jami Cassady Ratto; “BOO!”: Newberry Library; Cowley with granddaughters: Miranda Cowley Heller; Cowley and Kenneth Burke: Newberry Library
Cover design: Tom Etherington
Designed by Christina Nguyen, adapted for ebook by Estelle Malmed
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Howard, Gerald author
Title: The insider : Malcolm Cowley and the triumph of American literature / Gerald Howard.
Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2025. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024061549 (print) | LCCN 2024061550 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525522058 hardcover | ISBN 9780525522065 ebook
Subjects: LCSH: Cowley, Malcolm, 1898–1989 | Authors, American—20th century—Biography | Critics—United States—Biography | Editors—United States—Biography | Literature publishing—United States—History—20th century | LCGFT: Biographies
Classification: LCC PS3505.O956 Z67 2025 (print) | LCC PS3505.O956 (ebook) | DDC 818/.5209 [B]—dc23/eng/20250327
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024061549
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024061550
Ebook ISBN 9780525522065
The authorized representative in the EU for product safety and compliance is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D02 YH68, Ireland, https://eu-contact.penguin.ie.
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CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction: The Cowley Era
One. Boy in Sunlight
Two. Scholarship Boy
Three. The Long Furlough
Four. Lost and Found
Five. Home Again, Home Again
Six. Roaring Boy
Seven. To the Barricades
Eight. Literary Politics
Nine. The Bitterest Thirties
Ten. Pasts, Usable and Not
Eleven. The Portable Malcolm Cowley
Twelve. The Literary Situation
Thirteen. The Counterculture Cowley
Fourteen. The Long Retrospective
Epilogue: Politics and Memory
Photographs
Acknowledgments
Sources
Notes
Index
About the Author
_153771206_
To my beloved wife, Susanne—“Walking through life with you, my dear, has been a very gracious thing”
&
To five good friends, gone too soon: James Atlas, Charlie Conrad, Dan Frank, Duncan Hannah, Peter Kaldheim
“You are one of the people I count on for the future. See that you do not disappoint me.”
—Amy Lowell to Malcolm Cowley, May 10, 1921
“One must be an inventor to read well…. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar”
“A good critic—we cannot help seeing, when we look back at any other age—is a much rarer thing than a good poet or a good novelist.”
—Randall Jarrell, “Poets, Critics, and Readers”
Introduction:
The Cowley Era
In 1944 the careers of two of the most important American literary figures of the past century were at a low ebb.
The more famous of the two was the novelist William Faulkner. Since the early thirties he’d produced an astonishing string of Modernist masterpieces dealing with the tragic and haunted aspects of Southern history, including The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, and the immortal novella “The Bear.” His work had attracted positive and even passionate critical attention, but also a great deal of hostility regarding its difficulties in syntax and narrative structure and its often lurid subject matter. As a result, his sales had been meager, and by 1944 every one of his seventeen books to date was out of print and nearly impossible to find, aside from Sanctuary, a crime shocker that he claimed he’d written in 1931 for a quick payday. His publisher had even donated the printing plates for some of the books to be recycled for the war effort. Faulkner had to spend part of every year in Hollywood as a scriptwriter to support himself, his extended family, and his farm in Oxford, Mississippi, under contracts so draconian that he was not so much employed by Warner Bros. as indentured to them.
Faulkner and his work seemed destined for oblivion. The great Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins had declared that “Faulkner is finished.” But one person refused to accept Perkins’s verdict and was determined to do something to prove him wrong. That person was the critic and editor Malcolm Cowley. Cowley was not famous exactly, but in the literary world, he had been a figure of considerable stature. He’d been in Paris in the twenties as a participant-observer at the birth of the Lost Generation, and as the literary editor of The New Republic, he’d held what was then one of the real power seats in American letters. Then, like so many other American writers, he’d become radicalized by the Great Depression in the thirties and taken a hard left turn politically, becoming an all too visible fellow traveler of the Communist Party. As a result, in 1941 he’d been shunted aside from his editorial responsibilities at the magazine and reduced to mere contributor status, a humiliating demotion that had serious financial consequences. Even worse, in 1942 he’d been very publicly forced to resign from his job in the Office of Facts and Figures in Washington after being hounded by the Dies Committee, Whittaker Chambers at Time, and the right-wing columnist for the Hearst papers, Westbrook Pegler. Banished to rural purdah in Sherman, Connecticut, he was faced with the problem of supporting himself, his wife, Muriel, and son, Robert, and of reviving a literary career in almost terminal disrepair.
Luckily, he was thrown a financial lifeline by the Mellon Foundation: a so-called living grant of five years of income sufficient to live on. Relieved of the pressure of having to churn out freelance articles and reviews, Cowley turned to doing what he always did best: reading. And what he was reading was American literature in all its periods, including the twentieth century, in a quest to grasp its inner nature and its commonalities. One of the writers who attracted his attention most strongly was William Faulkner. It seemed to him that a very great literary injustice had been perpetrated. The critics had really only read Faulkner’s books one by one, and no one had fully grasped that each of his books was part of a much larger project, that of creating the myth and legend of the American South and its guilt-stained history. So Malcolm Cowley began to write a long critical essay to try to correct this injustice, and at a certain point he wrote to William Faulkner in Oxford to resolve some questions he had…
What happened next was arguably the most successful rescue mission in American literary history, one that would reverse Faulkner’s drift into obscurity and lead to his recognition, well into his lifetime, as not just an American classic but a writer of world stature worthy of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
That was hardly the only service Malcolm Cowley performed for American literature. In 1934 he wrote the first, and many feel the best, of the raft of Lost Generation memoirs, Exile’s Return. It set forth the durable template of revolt and reintegration of the artistic Americans who flocked to the Left Bank in the twenties to escape their country’s cultural limitations, only to rediscover the virtues of the country they’d fled. The critical introduction to a 1944 anthology he edited, The Portable He
Malcolm Cowley’s life story from 1898 to 1989 spanned most of what we still call the American Century, and he would be involved with just about everything and everybody of literary consequence during those years. That is not hyperbole; a list would include Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and Cheever, as well as John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, Eugene O’Neill, E. E. Cummings, Ken Kesey, Thornton Wilder, Edmund Wilson, Archibald MacLeish, Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Lionel Trilling, James T. Farrell, Alexander Calder, Dwight Macdonald, Dawn Powell, John Updike, Kenneth Burke, Allen Tate, Conrad Aiken, Marianne Moore, Van Wyck Brooks, Wallace Stegner, Larry McMurtry, Dorothy Day, Mike Gold, Robert Penn Warren, John Berryman, Saul Bellow, and Eudora Welty. These were friends and working colleagues and students and sometimes bitter adversaries, whose work he’d reviewed and edited and championed and published, whom he’d made common cause and feuded with. He’d been with them on the battlefields of France as a volunteer driver during the Great War, in the tearooms and tenement apartments and low bars of bohemian Greenwich Village, in the cafés and boîtes of Montparnasse, fighting the little magazine wars of the twenties and the pitched ideological battles of the thirties, and later, after World War II had ended, creating the American literary canon and taking stock of how far our writing had come. With his passionate commitment to the cause of American literature and his instinct for what was fresh and valuable and likely to last, Cowley was in the thick of it, for longer and with greater influence than just about anybody else.
Malcolm Cowley’s life also provides a vehicle for the larger story that this book tells, that of the triumph of American literature. At the time of his birth, it was considered to be a body of work of minor interest or importance. Certain of our nineteenth-century writers had been taken up enthusiastically in Europe—Cooper in Germany, Poe in France, Whitman in England—but they were thought to be isolated geniuses, not the flowers of a vigorous national literature. To be an American writer was to be regarded as provincial, backward, lacking in artistic polish or value. No one thought it odd when Henry James felt that he had to betake himself to Europe to realize himself as a novelist.
By the time Malcolm Cowley died in 1989, all that had changed, spectacularly. Beginning with Sinclair Lewis in 1930, seven Americans had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, eight if you include T. S. Eliot, which you probably should. There were departments of American literature in universities around the country and across the globe. Writers everywhere looked to America for inspiration. Cowley played a central role in helping this come about.
Malcolm Cowley was generally known as a critic and sometimes as an editor, but he was also an accomplished poet, a skilled translator from the French, a memoirist, a literary historian, a university teacher of writing and literature, and a skilled administrator and all-round operator. The term for this sort of person used to be “man of letters,” a phrase that now has an archaic ring to it, and which is also, with a nod to Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hardwick, et al., sexist. But becoming a person of letters was Cowley’s real ambition as a young writer, and a perfectly reasonable one. There were plenty of these learned and versatile people around for most of his life and he would succeed in turning himself into an admirable example of the type. Also, in his quiet way, a powerful one. Persons of letters used to be influential tastemakers, proposing standards of judgment and applying those standards to the established and the aspiring, the living and the dead. Cowley’s story demonstrates how the system of literary reputation and canon formation worked, and how one determined actor bent it to his tastes and convictions.
The authors and their novels and stories and poems and plays and essays that fill the literary textbooks and anthologies and college reading lists can seem to arrive with the solidity and inevitability of almost papal authority and tautological reasoning. They are in the anthologies because they are great, and they are great because they are in the anthologies. In point of fact, a literary career and a posthumous reputation are unpredictable, dependent on accident and timing and broader shifts in taste. A change can arrive in a moment with just the right (or the wrong) essay in just the right publication, or slowly, the way the tides can either build up or erode a beach over decades. Malcolm Cowley was a player who understood this system as well as anyone ever has. His career is a master class in how the literary Game of Thrones was played in the twentieth century, and, to a certain extent, to this day.
This book has been gestating for a long time. In the early seventies I had newly graduated from college and was suffering from an acute case of the English major blues. It was the dispiriting Watergate/post-Vietnam era; the country was low in the water and so was I. At the end of my college education, I had contracted a passion for American literature and was now reading as much of the stuff on my own as I could manage. I suppose I was, like the American literary intellectuals of the forties, searching for “a usable past” as solace for the squalid national estate and my own frustrations and perplexities.
At just this moment—on Sunday, May 6, 1973, to be precise—I came upon a long and perfectly gorgeous review in The New York Times Book Review by William Styron of A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation by a writer I had never heard of, Malcolm Cowley. So persuasive was Styron about that book’s merits, and so in sync was its subject matter with my reading at the time, that I got myself to the Strand Bookstore to buy a half-price review copy, $7.95 full retail being way beyond my means. In writing so personally and at the same time with such critical acumen about the towering yet often flawed figures of the Lost Generation, this man Cowley acquainted me with a fact my otherwise excellent undergraduate English courses had failed to address: that writers were actual people. In my hero-worshipping frame of mind, this had never really occurred to me.
I was smitten, and in time I would read Exile’s Return with equal avidity and admiration. By 1981, I had gotten myself together professionally and a happy providence arranged for me to begin a job as a trade paperback editor at Viking Penguin, the publisher where Malcolm Cowley was still employed as a consulting editor. One day he was in the office for a meeting and I was introduced to him, whereupon I experienced exactly the same feelings that Billy Crystal felt when he was introduced to Mickey Mantle. In shaking the hand of this deaf and elderly man, I was but one degree of separation from the giants of American literature he’d known and written about so movingly in A Second Flowering. I would meet him casually two or three more times, and a couple of years before his death, I actually became his last editor at Viking, seeing into print the monumental volume The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley and commissioning The Portable Malcolm Cowley.
In 2014, I would review in Bookforum another, even more monumental volume, The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915–1987, edited by the superb scholar of American literature Hans Bak. I tried my best to be as convincing on its merits and importance as William Styron had been. In my final paragraph I made the assertion that, as important as the book was, what was really needed was a biography that could do for Malcolm Cowley what A. Scott Berg’s Max Perkins had done for its subject. Over the course of my career as a book editor, I’d actually been in search of an author to write that book, but no suitable candidate had ever emerged. And then one late afternoon, on a commuter bus heading north on the eastern spur of the New Jersey Turnpike, the fatal thought entered my mind that I needed to write that book, or something like it. I did my level best to make that thought go away, but as you can see from the book you hold in your hand, I was unsuccessful.
