The Insider, page 10
A lot of literary limits were reached in that miraculous year of Modernism, 1922. On November 18 of that year, Marcel Proust died, only a few days after having essentially completed his exhaustive self-excavation In Search of Lost Time. Its effect on English readers was delayed, since at the time only the first of its seven volumes, Swann’s Way, had been translated. But Cowley was one of a small number of Americans who had read the four published volumes in French, and a year later he would collect his thoughts on the book for The Dial in his essay “A Monument to Proust.”
It was an acute appreciation, but one also laced with reservations. Cowley praises the book as “a comedy of manners as elegant and artificial as Congreve, and it is a Shakespearian tragedy expanded hugely: embracing all of these categories it is limited by none.” He notes the uncanny quality of the work’s first volume, Swann’s Way, which “makes an appeal to the senses which are inarticulate and fundamental; it goes deeper than reason; it has magic.” But he also sees the book as not being entirely a work of the still-new century: “His age is the one which produced Symbolist poets, Henry James, Debussy…. if any age can claim him it is certainly not ours.” And he notes the extreme conditions of bodily fragility, personal isolation, and unnatural refinement under which the book was produced: “Hatred for natural objects; fastidious ill health; attraction for everything artificial: his life was the sort which might have been imagined by Huysmans or in the Yellow Book.” The price Proust paid for his masterpiece, Cowley judges as radical: “His own death was only a process of externalization; he had turned himself inside out like an orange and sucked it dry, or inscribed himself on a monument”—that monument being the book itself, the creation of which almost entirely superseded Proust’s actual life.
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In March, Malcolm Cowley sat for his exams at the university and was awarded his diploma in French Studies with a mention très honorable. His preoccupation with classicism would continue as he began to work on his doctoral thesis on the tragedies of Jean Racine (1639–99). But the Provençal charms of Montpellier had faded and the excitements north in Paris and points east were calling. In May he was pleased to learn that his American Field Service scholarship had been extended for another year.
The wolf at least temporarily banished from the door, he and Peggy moved to Paris for the next two months. The metabolic acceleration was immediate, Cowley writing to Burke shortly after their arrival that “Paris is like cocaine; either it leaves you tremendously elated or sunk in a brown fit of depression.”
During Cowley’s year of academic rustication his friend Matthew Josephson had plunged into the literary and artistic milieus of Paris with impressive American energy and entrepreneurial zeal. He’d established secure footholds in two key areas: the Dada movement and the world of little magazines. Josephson was key to luring Malcolm Cowley into both.
Matthew Josephson is known more today as a journalist and biographer than as the ambitious poet he was at the start of the twenties. He would go on to write well-received biographies of Émile Zola, Victor Hugo, Stendhal, and Thomas Edison, and a nonfiction work on the buccaneering figures of the Gilded Age, The Robber Barons, still regarded as a classic. By the time of Cowley’s return, Josephson had fully insinuated himself into the Parisian circle of Dadaists and was embroiled in their hijinks.
The Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, along with Richard Huelsenbeck and Jean Arp, had conceived the Dada movement in the midst of the war in Zurich in 1916, staging outlandish and nonsensical theatrical pieces at their Cabaret Voltaire. Tom Stoppard’s brilliant intellectual burlesque Travesties makes sport of the fact that Tzara, James Joyce, and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin were all in that city at the same time. Although there is no evidence that any one of these figures met another, Stoppard imagines an enraged Tzara spitting the words “Dada! Dada! Dada!” in James Joyce’s face for his retrograde belief in the efficacy of art. Joyce imperiously responds, “You are an over-excited little man, with a need for self-expression far beyond your natural gifts. This is not discreditable. Neither does it make you an artist.” In real life, Tzara was spitting “Dada!” in the face of a Western civilization that was at that moment committing mechanized human slaughter on an industrial scale unmatched in human history. Dada’s aggressive nihilism was a calculatedly irrational response to that murderous irrationality. In this context its inspired nonsense made perfect sense. Tzara had the energy and charisma of a true cultural prophet.
In 1919, Tzara moved his traveling Dada circus to Paris to join the editorial staff of the magazine Littérature, a pioneering Surrealist publication begun by the poets Louis Aragon, André Breton, and Philippe Soupault. These Frenchmen had a far sounder claim to belonging to a Lost Generation than any Americans. Something like 1.4 million soldiers, 8 percent of all French men, had died in the war, and as medical officers both Aragon and Breton had had grim firsthand experience of the carnage of the Western Front. For the next few years in Paris the activities of the Dadaists and the Surrealists were basically indistinguishable, as the groups joined forces to épater les bourgeois. Or, more accurately perhaps, écraser: One of Tzara’s manifestos proclaimed, “There is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished. We must sweep everything away and sweep clean.” They went about their work with tireless energy, putting on a series of anarchically inventive and outré balls, theatrical performances, readings, and unclassifiable art stunts that would be judged a failure if they did not manage to cause at least a modest riot or scandal or some kind of physical altercation. Tzara’s very first public Parisian appearance set the tone: reading a newspaper article while the loud sound of an electric bell rendered what he read completely inaudible.
It would be some months before Josephson would usher Cowley into the circle of Parisian Dadaists. First he lured him into the vital and backbiting world of the little magazines, at the center of which sat Gorham Munson.
Gorham Munson, today an obscure minor figure, was born in 1896, the son of a minister. In 1916, his senior year at Wesleyan, he had his first addictive encounter with bohemianism on a visit to Greenwich Village, and in college that fall he was, in his word, “electrified” by his encounters with the magazine Seven Arts, the work of Waldo Frank, Van Wyck Brooks’s America’s Coming-of-Age, and Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. By 1919 he was living in the Village himself, contributing pieces to various magazines and feeling the first stirrings of the American postwar literary revolt. He was a serial enthusiast with a short attention span, having already cycled in short order through liberalism, socialism, Soviet communism, and philosophical anarchism. By July 1921 those stirrings had moved him to book passage to France with his wife.
In his physical appearance Munson presented as a kind of self-caricature, in Cowley’s words “a heavy and dignified young man, already wax-mustached and bald above the forehead”; a pale complexion and round spectacles completed his prematurely professorial affect. This, along with an air of mildly clueless self-importance, may have contributed to his being underestimated. He had two default modes: unmodulated enthusiasm and aggrieved indignation. He had a genuine instinct for talent, and this had led to his friendship in New York with Hart Crane, whose genius Munson recognized very early. It was Crane who wrote to Matthew Josephson in Paris and brokered the first meeting between the two men, in November of 1921 at Josephson’s lodgings. The meeting went well; they had in common the fact that both of them had contributed pieces to the local magazine Gargoyle, one of the first of the new transatlantic reviews springing up. But both men also found it wanting in a number of ways and expressed a vague desire for, as Josephson would write, “something better, a magazine in which new writers of talent, bound together by a common outlook on art and life and who were interested in new literary experiment rather than in repeating old patterns, could exhibit their work.”
Cowley’s recent piece “This Youngest Generation” had lit up Munson’s imagination and provided almost the perfect template for such a publication. Munson had the money saved up—a thousand dollars—to float this enterprise, and Josephson, who knew all the writers mentioned in the article, could pull in their contributions. When on a trip to Berlin in January 1922 he discovered that the hyperinflation of the German mark meant, among other pleasant things for holders of American currency, that five hundred copies of a small magazine could be printed for a mere twenty dollars, Munson agreed to go ahead.
So, what one might call the Wars of Secession began. Munson hit on the title while visiting the famed Secession gallery in Vienna, where the painters, architects, and graphic artists—most famously, Gustav Klimt—of the Vienna Secession group had exhibited their work. He found the word fresh and expressive and appropriated it. The magazine had no connection whatsoever to the Vienna group, but its distinctly Art Nouveau typeface and cover art hinted otherwise. Munson later wrote that “Mars was certainly present at the birth of Secession.” Like so many other little magazines, its editorial policy and raison d’être were conceived in opposition to other groups and publications. In his announcement circular, Munson aggressively promised, “It will, in its early numbers, expose the private correspondences, hidden sins and secret history of its American contemporaries, The Dial, The Little Review, Broom, Poetry, etc. It already notes in current literature very much that demands hilarious comment.” He made good on that incautious promise in the first number of Secession with a broadside against The Dial for its supposed lack of editorial coherence (“It is no wonder a copy of The Dial gives the impression of splitting apart in one’s hand”) and its continued championing of an already declining Sherwood Anderson. He concludes with heavy-handed sarcasm: “The existence of this Yale-Review-in-a-Harvard-blazer is one of the bitter necessities calling for Secession.” Broom and The Little Review would come in for Munson’s contempt in the second number.
Cowley was present at the creation of Secession. Munson’s announcement quotes his essay “This Youngest Generation” as its editorial policy, and the first issue of the magazine prominently featured one poem of his, “Day Coach,” and the second issue two poems, “Play It for Me Again” and “Poem.” But he found Munson’s use of his essay to be a doubtful compliment, and he was made uneasy by Munson’s unbridled attacks on magazines that he was also being published in—especially The Dial. Nor at the time was he entirely sympathetic to Secession’s Dada-slanted contents, with contributions by Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara, and an enthusiastic apologia for Dada’s cultural program and its positive implications for American writers by one William Bray. This piece in particular got up Cowley’s nose and he wrote a sharply critical letter about it to Matthew Josephson, not knowing that he had written the piece under a pseudonym. A correspondence of escalating antipathy followed, culminating in a final letter from Josephson typed Dadaistically on Italian toilet paper.
By the time the Cowleys arrived in Paris in the summer of 1922, Munson had returned to New York after his year abroad. He had delegated the editorial duties of Secession to Josephson, a decision he would come to regret. At around that time, Munson took a long walk with Kenneth Burke, after which Burke became the third member of the editorial triumvirate of the magazine, with the understanding (or so Munson thought) that submissions needed to be endorsed by two of the three principals. Burke would write to Cowley modestly of his “fond hope of making the magazine a nucleus for a self-hypnotizing group of fifteen or so men interested in literature.” Munson had far bigger plans.
Josephson and his wife, meanwhile, had departed Paris for Rome, arriving the day before the historic march of Mussolini’s Blackshirts into the city. They dropped in on the offices of Broom there to pick up some small checks. During their stay they were entertained by the chief editor and bankroller of that magazine, Harold Loeb. Although he was a Guggenheim on his mother’s side, he lived in Europe on a modest income she provided, and underwrote Broom with nine thousand dollars realized from the sale of his bookstore, the Sunwise Turn in New York. He’d started Broom in 1921 with the poet-editor Alfred Kreymborg. Their intention was to build a sort of bridge between the art and literature of America and Europe. The production values of the magazine far outstripped its competition—rag paper, exquisite design, tasteful typography. Kreymborg had just resigned his post over editorial disagreements, and Josephson’s point of view found a ready ear. A job opportunity with a salary beckoned.
Matthew Josephson was nothing if not an operator. In conversations with Loeb he urged on him an editorial policy that was altogether more cutting-edge. He more or less colonized Loeb’s mind. He got a job offer as an associate editor of Broom for his efforts, a post that Gorham Munson himself had been angling for, even though he had attacked the magazine in Secession as “a general merchandise store” and a “kind of clearing house.”
Josephson took the job. Loeb, facing a thousand-dollar-a-month deficit for his magazine, had decided to move Broom’s headquarters to Berlin, where, thanks to hyperinflation, the printing prices were even lower and the quality even higher. After a pleasant summer in the Tyrolean Alps, Josephson and his wife moved to Berlin themselves. He was now on the masthead of two English-language literary magazines, Secession and Broom, which had considerable overlap in contributors and missions.
Back in Paris that summer, Malcolm Cowley took his first step from being a contributor to Secession to a deeper involvement. He and Peggy had a Wanderjahr of their own that summer, through Brussels and Munich and finally Vienna, where he was to deliver the material for the third number of Secession to the printer and proofread it and be on press.
Josephson and Cowley had a scornful opinion of Munson and viewed him as little more than a front man for their own machinations. In New York, Munson, blissfully ignorant of that, proceeded as if Secession was a good-faith partnership. He drummed up an astonishing amount of publicity for a five-hundred-run literary magazine with a subscription list of fifty, including praise from Waldo Frank, a critical trend-piece on “the secessionists” or “the new patricians” by Louis Untermeyer in The New Republic, other articles by Van Wyck Brooks and Edith Sitwell, and editorial comments in The New York Times, The Dial, The Criterion, and similar highbrow publications. With guileless energy and one suggestive semi-manifesto and twenty-five dollars paid to a Viennese printer, he had conjured up a secessionist movement in the wider literary imagination. That no such thing actually existed was almost beside the point.
Delivering the packet of materials for the third number of Secession to the printer in Vienna in September, Cowley and Peggy moved on. He’d been pleased by the second issue of Secession, but even though he had a poem in the third issue, he would write to Burke that it “stinks of bad writing, Dada, and the ghetto.” He particularly disliked Josephson’s heavy-handed fictional chronicle of voyeurism, “Peep-Peep-Parrish,” which Josephson had insolently included against Munson’s wishes, and he declared that “the third number of Secession has to be suppressed and that Matty alone cannot edit another number. Otherwise, to save our self-respect we have got to secede from Secession.” But when the Cowleys next visited the Josephsons for a fortnight in the Tyrolean Alps, Cowley was won over again. The two young literati on the make joined forces for their next target: Broom.
Harold Loeb would be all but forgotten today but for Hemingway’s cruel and anti-Semitic caricature of him as Robert Cohn, Lady Brett’s lover, in The Sun Also Rises. Loeb, a graduate of Princeton, where he was a varsity wrestler, was something of a seeker. He and his first wife had lived for a time at Brocken, a utopian community in upstate New York of people inclined toward a sort of spiritually minded socialism. Later he had managed the famed bookstore in Greenwich Village the Sunwise Turn, a hotspot of advanced anarchistic and artistic ideas. Although Loeb had literary ambitions of his own, Broom had been conceived in an altogether more disinterested and idealistic spirit than Secession. He was not ginning up a school or movement; he was simply trying to find the most interesting literary and artistic manifestations of his time. This openness was both Broom’s weakness and its strength.
Loeb and Kreymborg had cultivated all the right people upon their arrival in Paris in 1921, who looked warmly upon Broom, in part because it paid a competitive per-word rate, in dollars. A reliable cast of high-profile contributors and allies, along with a subscription base in the hundreds, newsstand distribution in the low thousands, and a print run as high as four thousand, made Broom a far more secure presence than Secession in the world of little magazines. The publication that Loeb and his associates put out stood head and shoulders above its competition in circulation and production values, which helped to camouflage the persistent financial challenges that made Broom’s continued existence an uncertain proposition.
Cowley arranged to meet with Harold Loeb in Innsbruck in early September. Cowley had already contributed two of his best early poems to Broom, “Chateau de Soupir” and “Mountain Farm,” and as Loeb would write, “I wanted more from Malcolm Cowley and Matthew Josephson, more from E. E. Cummings,” and new material from Burke, Brown, and Crane. He thought that Cowley and Company “possessed a positive attitude which contrasted strongly with the negation and despair that had obsessed so many of the American literati in recent decades.” Loeb has left a vivid description of the deliberate, slow-talking Cowley as he saw him at this first meeting: “Looking like a cross between Foxy Grandpa and the darker Katzenjammer Kid, Malcolm refused to be hurried. When a question was put to him, the lines between his eyes deepened and the quizzical expression froze. Often the silence seemed interminable. But when he finally spoke, his words meant something.” Cowley came away with a new job as a sort of roving editor and translator for Broom, which he saw, opportunistically, as “a comfortable lever for meeting any one I want to know in Paris.” Future issues of the magazine would now carry the unmistakable imprint of the Cowley/Josephson axis.
