The Insider, page 13
Cowley addressed the most urgent issue of the scarcity of funds by re-upping with his old employer Sweet’s Architectural Catalogue. This was, if not a defeat, certainly a strategic retreat. He faced the same painful dilemma that has bedeviled freelance writers without an independent income or a generous patron almost since the invention of movable type. If he chose to live on the income of his writing alone, he would still have to compromise by writing at least part of the time to the demands of the literary marketplace. By taking an office job, he freed himself of those demands, but at most one-fifth of his time could be devoted to “writing for its own sake, to the disinterested practice of the art of letters.” The problem with the office job solution, as it took him a while to realize, was that writing that “ceases to have a functional relationship to one’s life” can become, like a hobby, a kind of compensation for the qualities lacking in one’s day job.
Machine Age America had looked fresh and vital from across the ocean, but once back in its maw it felt considerably more challenging. Cowley and Josephson’s ambitious but also quixotic and ill-formed plan had been to somehow transplant to New York the attitudes and activities of the Dadaists that had been so energizing in Paris. They had the idea of hiring a theater for “a literary entertainment” of attacks on and burlesques of the leading writers and critics of the day, interspersed with irrelevant activities “that would show our contempt for the audience and the sanctity of American letters.” Thankfully, such an event never took place. Central to the plans of Cowley and Josephson in particular was keeping Broom alive as “an organ for the good prose, experimental verse and violent polemics” they felt the age required or deserved. They had found the prevailing literary scene in New York dull and conservative and were determined to shake things up with some advanced guerilla tactics of a European sort.
The magazine had a near-death experience early in the year. Loeb had finally run out of funds in putting together the March issue of Broom and he’d sadly called it quits, conclusively enough that letters of condolence from Cowley, Kay Boyle, and others arrived in the mail. But Josephson refused to accept Broom’s demise, and he and Cowley quickly devised a plan to move its operations to New York with them, downsize it to a quarterly of sixty-four pages an issue with a reduced trim size, and cease paying contributors or staff (really just the two of them, with other unpaid “board members”). In agreeing to this plan, Loeb essentially ceded all editorial and business control of Broom, although he had some nominal editorial input, which was usually ignored. It really was no longer his magazine.
Matthew Josephson may have been deficient in tact but certainly not in energy and savvy. He immediately set about the transplanting and reviving of Broom as his sole job. Working out of his apartment on King Street in the Village, he dunned bookstores and distributors for moneys owed; secured a line of credit from his “printing tycoon” brother-in-law covering half of the printing costs; set about raising four thousand dollars in new capital from him and other interested parties; solicited advertisements and new subscribers; performed the multifarious and sometimes crushing editorial tasks that putting out even a so-called little magazine entailed; and even, with his wife and two hired boys, shipped out 2,500 copies of the March 1923 issue of Broom, which had languished in the former office for weeks.
For most of 1923, Josephson was working on Broom for ten to twelve hours a day, with moral support but small practical help from Cowley, who was working similar hours at Sweet’s with little time to spare. He somehow managed the small miracle of producing Broom, Volume 5, Number 1, August 1923, the first issue printed in the States. The masthead lists as “American Editors” Slater Brown, Malcolm Cowley, and Matthew Josephson, and the contents feature a valedictory essay by Loeb that celebrates the fact that “Broom is able at last to give up its vagabond career and settle in the country to which it belongs.” He identifies Broom’s literary circle as a group whose “centre is a nucleus of American writers of the youngest generation,” all of whom share “a whole-hearted disapproval of the generation that preceded them.” The contents include a crime fiction pastiche by Cowley, “Snapshot of a Young Lady,” a typically hectoring essay by Josephson, “Towards a Professional Prose,” and part of his translation of Apollinaire’s mock-epic “autobiography” The Poet Assassinated.
In early October, Sweet’s Architectural Catalogue was sent to press and Cowley had the time to turn his attention to Broom and pick up at least some of the editorial slack. Contrary to the quarterly plan, there were three more issues to come in 1923, September, October, and November, and they contained significant work from William Carlos Williams, Robert Graves, Wallace Stevens, Louis Aragon, and E. E. Cummings. There was even an excerpt from the legendary Village “character” Joe Gould’s History of the Contemporary World, perhaps the only evidence in print that he had written a small portion of that elusive work. As a publicist, Josephson proved to have a positively Munsonian knack for attracting attention. Louis Untermeyer in The New Republic condemned the Broomists as unfortunate examples of “Young Anarchy” in American letters. Burton Rascoe interviewed Josephson for his “Bookman’s Daybook,” where he got off such lines as “First of all, we are against all the dead lumber which critics like you have been touting” and extolled the virtues of the writing in commercial advertising over the “shopworn” work of Elinor Wylie, Sinclair Lewis, and Anatole France. The Dial would dub the Broomists “skyscraper primitives.”
It was fun for Cowley and Josephson and Company to create a stir and annoy the right people, but they realized that outside of the hothouse literary world, their provocations “had the effect of a few people firing off peashooters at the unbreakable plate-glass-and-steel façade of our civilization.” Freed from his time-sucking office drudgery for a few months, Cowley “had time to think of literary matters” and that crystallized a growing discontent. The October issue of Broom had been intended to be a collection of political manifestos, but as the Broomists were by and large bereft of anything resembling political ideas, it was, he felt, “a sad affair.” Feeling adrift in the growing complacency of their prosperous country, he and Josephson contrived a sort of last-ditch, Five Families conclave of various parties involved in Broom and Secession in an Italian restaurant/speakeasy under the shadow of the El on Prince Street, in an attempt to reenergize their diffuse movement and “brew some stronger liquor.” One is reminded of the line from Animal House: “I think this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture.”
In a letter summoning Kenneth Burke to the October 19 meeting, Cowley wrote that “Brown, Burke, Coates, Cowley, Crane, Frank, [Ramon] Guthrie, Josephson, Munson, Sanborn, [Isidor] Schneider, [Jean] Toomer, Wescott, Williams” had all been invited to the “catholic meeting.” Frank, Toomer, and Williams did not attend. Neither did Gorham Munson, who was recovering from an illness in Woodstock and still stewing over various insults and editorial cock-ups and the fact that Josephson and Cowley had transferred all their energies to the rescue of Broom, at Secession’s expense.
In his absence Cowley had asked Munson to send a statement to be read at the meeting. He did, but instead of addressing whatever diffuse issues were at hand, he produced a lengthy and blistering attack on Matthew Josephson’s abilities, opinions, and character, calling him “an intellectual faker” and urging the assembled writers not to have any truck with him or his magazine. “Because his feelings were intense, Munson was betrayed into using a pompous style,” Cowley relates. Midway through his reading aloud of the letter, his sense of absurdity got the better of him and he began to declaim theatrically in a manner that heightened the pomposity, and “the effect was unfortunate.” The group was already liquored up on bootleg whiskey, and Munson’s friends, especially Crane, deep in his cups, took vigorous exception to Cowley’s disrespectful behavior. What was meant to be “a general discussion of our problems” devolved into a disorderly rout, with arguments breaking out all over and everyone yelling over one another. “How can you people expect to accomplish anything when you can’t even preserve ordinary parlor decorum,” Glenway Wescott asked. At eleven thirty the meeting dispersed, all parties angry and dispirited. A drunken Josephson took a swing at Crane in the street, but missed, hitting James Light instead.
Josephson took umbrage at Gorham Munson’s umbrage, declaring his letter libelous. The war of words continued until Josephson decided to take direct physical action. He traveled the hundred miles north to Woodstock to stay with Slater Brown in his frigid cabin, and from there presented himself at the home of Murrell Fisher, where Munson was still recovering from the flu. The two literati decided to “take it outside” to a muddy meadow nearby, Fisher presiding as timekeeper and referee. After an exchange of feeble and inefficient blows, they fell to the ground and wrestled clumsily in the mud for a few minutes until both of them wheezily called it quits.
Broom was not done in by this ludicrous wrestling match but by the inability of its editors to rally their circle into the sort of coherent collective action that would have given it shape and momentum. The issues of the magazine they were able to eke out still had some excellent things in them, but the larger point of the exercise was becoming increasingly vague and uncertain. After the Prince Street disaster, the two editors suffered even more demoralization. It fell to the U.S. Postal Service to deliver the final coup de grâce.
In those days a man known to history only as “Mr. Smith” was employed both by the postal service as a censor and by the publishers of some pulp sex magazines of large circulation to read their stuff before printing, to be sure they had not crossed the line in explicitness. The rule was that only one woman’s breast could be mentioned per story; two or more would trigger the wrath of the postal authorities. The November 1923 issue of Broom contained a story snatched from the slush pile, titled “An Awful Storming Fire” by a Chicago paperhanger named Charles L. Durboraw. It renders with a kind of primitive and naive surrealism, but also great clarity, the details of a street corner pickup of a woman by a working man. Mr. Smith read it too late to stop any issues of Broom from being mailed, but, upset by the story, he sent a warning letter to Broom citing Section 480, Postal Laws on Printing and Mailing of Lewd Filthy Matter, telling them that a repeat offense would mean their second-class mail privileges would be revoked.
Unfortunately the January 1924 issue of Broom was on press when the letter arrived. It included a story by Kenneth Burke titled “Prince Llan” that is, by most standards, virtually unreadable. However, the first page contains the following sentences: “Their breasts were tight up beneath their shoulders. Their breasts, they stood out firm like pegs. When they walked, one could note their sitters, how they undulated.” Breasts, plural, two of them. That much Mr. Smith could read and understand. On January 14 the postal department informed the editors that the new issue was “unmailable.” Fifteen hundred copies of the magazine would be returned to them upon a pledge not to mail any copies.
Josephson, alert to any opportunity for publicity, fired off a telegram to a meeting being held that night at Madison Square Garden to protest something called the Clean Books Bill making its way through the New York State legislature. (The bill would be defeated by the opposition of the Senate majority leader, Jimmy Walker, future good-time mayor of New York City, who told his colleagues, “No woman was ever ruined by a book.”) He managed to get The New York Times to report at some length on the banning in an article in which he was quoted as claiming that he and his fellow editors had been surprised and had no idea what might have upset the postal inspectors.
This was a disaster from which Broom could not recover. The much-needed moneys from subscribers and out-of-town bookstores and distributors were forfeit. Six heavy bags containing the copies were delivered to Dominick Street and hauled to the cellar. The best Cowley and Josephson could do with them was to deliver a few hundred copies to New York bookshops, who sold them out quickly once word of the trouble got out. The rest of the copies were disposed of as scrap. The American Civil Liberties Union offered to contest the ruling in court, but the editors were too broke and too broken to pursue legal action. Cowley confessed in a disconsolate letter to Loeb that for “the first time I found myself absolutely impotent, absolutely unmeasured to the work in front of me.” Broom had reached the end of the road.
Malcolm Cowley and Matthew Josephson took this as a larger defeat than just the demise of a magazine. It represented for them their wider inability, in Cowley’s words, “to re-create the atmosphere of intellectual excitement and moral indignation that had stimulated us in Paris among the Dadaists.” This project had always been impractical. They’d tried with Broom to extol some of the virtues of our business civilization, only to discover that our business civilization did not particularly care about being extolled by a group of avant-garde writers with fancy European ideas.
Josephson, finally tired of getting by on a pittance, devised a radical solution: He borrowed the money to buy a respectable suit of clothes and took a job in a booming Wall Street firm as a stock analyst and writer of market letters for clients and, eventually, as a stock broker himself. “Can anything have been more fantastic?” he asks in his memoir. Well, no. He turned out to be a quick learner and reasonably good at it for the two or so years he pursued this career, until the stress of his clients’ losses from his second bear market and a spell of ill health drove him from Wall Street and back into the arms of literature.
Cowley had one more battle left to fight on the fields of literature. Tellingly, the final issue of Broom, in January of 1924, coincided with the inaugural issue of H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan’s new magazine The American Mercury. Put out by Mencken’s brilliant publisher Alfred A. Knopf, it had secure financial backing and a circulation multiple times that of Broom. By 1924, Mencken had so weaponized his signature mockery that he was as feared as he was famous. The American Mercury fully reflected his inability to take anyone or anything seriously except his own aggressively proclaimed set of prejudices. The voice of his magazine, satirical, taking relentless and withering aim at anything it deemed to be fair game or a sacred cow, was in many ways to be the sound of the twenties, or at least of its emergent audience of aspiring sophisticates. Mencken in his introductory editorial would characterize the Mercury’s intended readers as “the normal, educated, well-disposed, unfrenzied, enlightened citizen of the middle minority.” Cowley would put all this more bitterly: “The American Mercury, with its easy incredulity, its middle-agedness, its belligerent philistinism, was the expression of a prevailing mood.”
The attitudes and antics of the younger avant-garde writers offered the magazine a ripe target, and Mencken took advantage of it. “Aesthete: Model 1924” by the Irish literary journalist Ernest Boyd is a composite portrait and broad burlesque of “This Youngest Generation,” a kind of cartoon rendering of Cowley’s seminal essay, with a nasty edge. Boyd’s semi-fictional Aesthete is a writer still on the near side of thirty who has gone through the familiar stages of his generation’s literary development: an Ivy League education that bestowed a light smattering of actual literary knowledge and a heavier coating of de haut en bas attitude; a few temporary radical ideas on loan from the pages of The Masses; just enough experience of war to make his posture of worldly disillusionment faintly plausible; travel to Paris and critical time spent in the Left Bank cafés where the taste for advanced French literature and Dadaist cultural combat takes hold; and repatriation to Greenwich Village, where he edits “the luxurious pages of [a] magazine that makes no compromise with corrupt popular taste or, indeed, ordinary intelligibility.” The Aesthete stands accused of facile provocations: “What could be easier than to caper in front of the outraged mandarins waving volumes of eccentrically printed French poetry and conspuing the gods of the bourgeoisie?” Also intellectual incoherence in regard to the technological progress he extols: “Thus it becomes possible simultaneously to compare Gertrude Stein with Milton and to chant the glories of the machine age in America.”
“Aesthete: Model 1924” is often snide and overdone, but it landed with an audience already cued to dislike those French- and poetry-spouting phonies. Henry Luce’s new weekly newsmagazine Time, having already perfected its editorial contempt for anything it didn’t like or understand, snickered that it “gave Mr. Boyd the intense satisfaction of stirring to obscene and frenzied anger a whole Greenwich Village nestful of half-baked literati whose baseless pretentions to significance it is Mr. Boyd’s spirited but impersonal mission in life to deny.”
The Broomists and their allies were annoyed at what felt like a cheap shot. Cowley himself would later assert that the piece was “based on the early careers of Gilbert Seldes, Kenneth Burke, Edmund Wilson, and Matthew Josephson, with touches borrowed, I should say, from John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, myself, Gorham B. Munson and John Farrar”—the editor of The Bookman. Maybe so, but the figure whose résumé checks off the most boxes in Boyd’s satirical scheme is quite clearly Malcolm Cowley himself. In Exile’s Return an agitated Cowley claims, also unconvincingly, “a noble disinterestedness in my anger”—nothing to do with me!—an assertion belied by his public declaration concerning Boyd that “he ought to be punched in the jaw.” This threat got around, and when Cowley telephoned Boyd in his Gramercy Park residence to request an in-person meeting to lodge his objections, Boyd refused. This triggered a quick rage in Cowley, who “delivered three round oaths before hanging up.” A supposedly apologetic note from Cowley the next day did nothing to disperse the tension in the air, probably because it contained the sentences “I only meant to say that you were a sneak, a coward and a liar. In this description of your character, fortunately, the two of us seem to agree.”
