The Insider, page 18
Although late in her life Peggy Cowley would claim that Crane’s suicide attempts were not entirely serious, she realized that her lover was beyond her control and they needed to return to the States, where help from his friends and family would be possible. They booked passage on the Orizaba—the same ship Crane had come to Mexico on. And after some typically frenzied attempts on his part to procure the necessary funds for passage, he and Peggy sailed from Veracruz to New York with what worldly goods they had. On a stopover in Havana, bad luck struck when a box of matches exploded in Peggy’s hand and burned her so badly she almost lost a finger. Bandaged up by a doctor and heavily sedated for her acute pain and told to rest, she was unable to keep tabs on the agitated Crane, who started drinking and went on an all-night tear. What exactly happened was unclear, but he may have propositioned a cabin boy or some sailors in their quarters and he turned up badly beaten and without his wallet or ring. Then he almost succeeded in climbing over the ship’s railing before someone tackled him and he was locked up in his cabin.
The next morning, after having her wound freshly dressed, Peggy returned to her cabin to find a contrite Crane there in his pajamas. He had only faint memories of what had transpired the night before, but he knew it had been humiliating. “I’m not going to make it, dear. I’m utterly disgraced,” he declared. Peggy told him he’d feel better after he’d gone back to his cabin and dressed and freshened up. “All right, dear. Good-bye,” he replied.
Shortly thereafter, Hart Crane walked up to the stern railing of the promenade deck in a coat and pajamas. He folded his coat over the railing and then vaulted over it into the sea. The cries of “Man overboard” went up, and Crane was seen briefly swimming, “strongly,” an eyewitness said. Had he decided at the last moment to try to save himself? Life preservers were thrown into the water and lifeboats lowered, but by then he was lost sight of, and for two hours the Orizaba slowly circled in a fruitless search before giving up and resuming its northward course. And so Hart Crane suffered an early death by water, like the Romantic poet Shelley, to whom he’d often been compared. “Poet Lost at Sea” the newspaper headlines would blare. Peggy Cowley wired a radiogram to her husband that day at The New Republic: “Hart committed suicide meet me.” He was at the pier as the Orizaba docked in New York.
Hart Crane’s suicide was neither a mystery nor a surprise. There are no real unanswered questions about it. But it arrived as shattering news nonetheless. No one was more shattered than Malcolm Cowley. As radically different as they were from each other in temperament and sexual preferences and literary taste, they’d been true brothers in the poetic arts. One of the few books that Crane had managed to carry along with him on his last voyage was his signed copy of Blue Juniata. Of all of Crane’s critics, Malcolm Cowley was the most sympathetic to his achievements and the least inclined to take him to task for his shortfalls. Those achievements were on poignant display in “The Broken Tower,” a permanent contribution to American poetry. How painful it was for Cowley not to be able to tell his friend what he’d achieved, that a man who had written such a great poem had every reason to hope for his future, not despair of it. “It’s a love poem and it is really tremendous,” he would conclude a heartsick letter to Allen Tate five days after word of Crane’s death reached him. He was one of the few people who knew who had inspired the poem, the person to whom such lines as “And so it was I entered the broken world / To trace the visionary company of love” were addressed. Malcolm and Peggy would be united in their own private mixture of grief and unreasonable guilt. And the imagery of the tower would have immediately cast his mind to that evening in Brooklyn Heights when he and Crane and Allen Tate formed their poetic bond on the waterfront.
Cowley did what he could under the circumstances. He wrote to Morton Dauwen Zabel at Poetry to explain the botched submission of the poem and got his permission to print “The Broken Tower” in The New Republic instead. It ran on June 8, 1932, on the same page as an elegy, “To Hart Crane,” by John Brooks Wheelwright. The month before, he wrote an unsigned tribute to Crane in the front of the book, “Death of a Poet.” Part obituary, part diagnosis of the conditions that led to his demise, part appreciation of his work, it ended by framing his suicide as “a poem of action which the world could interpret in its own fashion.” If Cowley’s own poetic impulse had been operative at the time, he might have written his own elegy to his dead doomed friend, something in the vein of Milton’s “Lycidas” or Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.” Instead he turned to prose, memorializing his friend in essays and reviews and memoirs for the rest of his life, pieces full of love and regret and fondness and dismay and appreciation and the kind of unresolved, unending sorrow that a suicide leaves in its wake.
And so the twenties truly ended for Malcolm Cowley two years and five months after the calendar said they had. The failing economy would accomplish what he and his fellow literary insurgents had been unable to. Earlier in the decade the Aesthetes had been firing their peashooters at the unbreakable steel and plate-glass facade of American industrial civilization, to little effect. Now “the Depression was like a crash of breaking glass that let in the cold night air.” He would recall, “In the literary world as in the country at large, 1930 was the strangest year of the century,” as seemingly everybody did their best to ignore the disaster taking hold. At its end America would be broken and literature could no longer be thought of as a private affair. It was about to go public and political, almost overnight.
Seven.
To the Barricades
Somewhere on the bookshelves or in the attics of aging history and English majors can be found copies of a comprehensive anthology of American writings from the 1930s titled Years of Protest. It dates from 1967, when the decade of the thirties was just beginning to acquire its antique patina and serve as fodder for the classes that the book was intended to serve. Most people today would consider the book’s cover image all too much “on the nose,” but it suits our purpose. The illustrator has rendered a figure of a white male in a suit, standing astride a manual typewriter in a stance of impassioned oratory, left hand clenched in a fist, the index finger of the right hand pointing out forcefully in either accusation or exhortation. The message is clear. Where once the writer was thought to be a figure in an ivory tower, spinning the dross of isolation and inner contemplation into works of exquisite, if hermetic, beauty, he now had burst forth with urgent energy into a world in crisis, and in need of him.
Malcolm Cowley fits the role of that writer perfectly. With startling speed he would transform himself from the beau ideal of the aestheticized twenties into a literary action figure, a man in ceaseless motion riding a wave of cultural and political revolution. He was to be found at the bloody crossroads where literature and politics met, an intersection more ubiquitous in the thirties than in any other decade of American history. Cowley would throw himself headlong into every activist arena and forum, countless panels, picket lines, conferences, congresses, strikes, parades, in city squares and packed auditoriums and church basements and the back rooms of low bars, wherever the new literary language of class revolution was spoken.
Everywhere he went, Cowley carried with him the prestige of his close association with the luminaries of a literary generation that would come to be seen as equal in achievement to that of the American Renaissance of Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville. He would be a key figure in the fashioning of that critical assessment. His perch as the chief literary editor and spokesperson for The New Republic gave him power and sway among the influential classes of the left. That power, and a certain naivete in political matters, would cause him to make many bitter enemies both on the right and in some sectors of the radical left, leading him to be labeled, with some justice, a Stalinist fellow traveler. It would be a label he would seek to shake for the rest of his life, but it stuck—not least because it was true. The dramatic, strife-torn, and idealistic thirties were Malcolm Cowley’s great decade. They were also nearly his undoing.
* * *
Malcolm Cowley was elected to the editorial board of The New Republic on March 26, 1930, less than six months after first being hired, and made his first appearance on the masthead in the November 19, 1930, issue. He was joining distinguished company: the managing editor, Bruce Bliven; the business and economics thinker George Soule; the professor of literature Robert Morss Lovett; the drama critic Stark Young; and Edmund Wilson. Among the powerfully influential contributing editors could be found Jane Addams of Hull House fame; the pragmatist John Dewey, by far the most famous philosopher in the country; the visionary urbanist and social thinker Lewis Mumford; the famed critic of the popular arts Gilbert Seldes; and Rexford Tugwell, at the time a professor of economics who in two years would join FDR’s “Brains Trust” and become a key architect of the New Deal. Cowley had arrived at the very center of American intellectual life, a prominent perch that he would soon turn into his bully pulpit.
By 1930 The New Republic had established itself as the most important journal of politics and ideas in the country. Its circulation was small, no more than twelve thousand readers at the time, but they were the right twelve thousand people. People who took ideas seriously, people in a position to spread and amplify those ideas and, in many cases, put them into concrete action. The magazine had been founded in 1914; one of its first editors was Herbert Croly, the social philosopher whose influential 1907 book The Promise of American Life had attracted the attention of a number of those right people. Chief among them was Theodore Roosevelt, who adopted a phrase that appeared in it precisely once, “the new nationalism,” as the slogan of his insurgent Bull Moose Party run for the presidency in 1912. Croly’s book became a bible for the progressive movement.
Progressivism is often taken to be identical to liberalism, but it was not. The two philosophies did overlap in their opposition to the vast power of the corporate monopolies of the day. An activist and increasingly centralized federal government would be the only entity able to bring such combines to heel and break them up into manageable entities. Government would also take on the responsibility for ministering to the health and education and safety of Americans through expansive programs and for increasing their prosperity by means of large-scale economic planning, including the nationalization of key industries. The direct election of U.S. senators, the introduction of a graduated income tax, and suffrage for women were other elements of the progressive platform.
But progressivism was a top-down movement, one where elites made the big decisions and which was deeply hostile to class division and social disorder. It was more than comfortable with such noxious ideas as eugenics and restricting immigration to the so-called Aryan races of northern Europe. And it was the “progressive” Southerner Woodrow Wilson who segregated the federal government and praised D. W. Griffith’s racist paean to the Ku Klux Klan, The Birth of a Nation.
The New Republic was the brainchild of Croly and two other men, the economist turned journalist Walter Weyl and the young Walter Lippmann, who had shed the socialism of his Harvard years to make a glittering reputation with two impressive big-statement books, A Preface to Morals (1912) and later Drift and Mastery (1914). They found the ideal backers to bankroll their ambitious plans in the persons of cultivated banker and businessman Willard Straight, who had worked for both Teddy Roosevelt and J. P. Morgan, and his wife, Dorothy Whitney, of the New York Whitneys, heir to her father’s vast fortune made in streetcar lines and investments in Standard Oil. If these high-minded individuals ever contemplated that much of what would appear in TNR was inimical to their class interest, it never interfered with their generous and constant financial support of the enterprise. Nor did the couple ever interfere editorially. Willard Straight died in 1918 of influenza at the Paris Peace Conference; his widow met the brilliant English agricultural economist Leonard Elmhirst two years later and they married in 1925. The couple’s hands-off support continued unabated, and their disinterested generosity meant that for much of its long life The New Republic operated blissfully and even uniquely free of financial strain.
The editors of The New Republic were far more inclined to tinker with the economic and governmental arrangements of the American people than with their editorial template, which never varied from one weekly issue to the next. The layout and type design were austere and lacking in visual interest; photographs and line drawings rarely if ever appeared. It was printed on cheap, fingertip-lacerating butcher paper. Advertising was sparse. In Cowley’s words, “Advertisers were tolerated, but there was no attempt to please them,” with ads for books, lecture series, and culturally enriching junkets squeezed into the last two or three pages. The front of the book began with unsigned leaders and editorials on political and cultural topics of the day, followed by longer signed articles, mostly on weighty matters of politics or economics or international relations.
The so-called back of the book, the domain that Cowley was to inherit, was for reviews of books for the most part, but also of plays, films, and musical performances, and wide-ranging essays on culture. From the distance of almost a century, the content of the front of the book can seem time-bound, sometimes mind-numbingly granular and technical (foreign bond issues, long-forgotten treaties, banking regulations). The back of the book in issues from those years, in contrast, still gives off a feeling of lively engagement, wit, and erudition.
The twenties were not good years generally for the front of the book. The confidence and élan vital of liberal progressivism had been sapped by the bitter disappointment of the punitive Treaty of Versailles and the assaults on civil liberties perpetrated by the Wilson administration, which at one time had actually heeded the counsels of TNR. Wilson was succeeded by three successive business-minded Republican presidents disinclined to fiddle in any way with an economy delivering widespread prosperity and a soaring stock market. The American people had little taste for the kinds of high-minded reform and scolding lectures that were the progressives’ stock in trade; they were content to cash in, let the good times roll, and make the kind of whoopee that Prohibition, newfound mobility, and loosening morals made possible. Politically, TNR and progressivism were stalled, to the point that Herbert Croly was reduced in 1924 to wanly defining the magazine’s goal as “less to inform and entertain its readers than to start little insurrections in the realm of their convictions.” This was a far cry from proclaiming the promise of American life.
But the twenties ushered in a literary renaissance as well, and that was very good for the back of the book. The brilliant Edmund Wilson joined TNR as an associate editor and chief book reviewer in 1926 and quickly gave it a strong jolt of intellectual energy, setting the agenda for the range of duties the magazine’s future literary editors would undertake. He regularly contributed articles and reviews himself on subjects as varied as Harry Houdini, the radical cartoonist Art Young, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, his literary contemporaries Ernest Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, and John Dos Passos, and the deficiencies of American literary criticism, which he would do much to repair. He would later testify that the task of writing regularly on a wide range of subjects for the educated but not specialized audience of TNR helped create him as the writer he became. The same would be true of Malcolm Cowley.
At this time Malcolm Cowley took another crucial step in establishing his domestic stability and long-term happiness when he met and moved in with the fashion writer Muriel Maurer, shortly after he and Peggy began their divorce proceedings. Maurer had grown up in Yorkville, the German section of Manhattan, and attended public schools there. But she dropped out of high school at age sixteen to begin work. Her first job was working for Henry Miller in the personnel department of Western Union as his secretary; someone had spied her reading Crime and Punishment in the file room and told Miller she was just the person for the job. She eventually would become the fashion editor for a newspaper called the Dry Goods Economist and then a buyer for Saks Fifth Avenue and other stores. She and Cowley made a fast and strong connection, and they would be married once Cowley’s divorce was final. He and Muriel would remain married for the rest of their lives; her love and support made his successes and, at times, recoveries, possible.
Cowley had been hired to replace associate editor T. S. Matthews, who was moving on to Time magazine, where he would become one its most powerful editors. His duties were the mundane but crucial ones of copyediting and proofreading, as the standards of the magazine in those departments were felt to have fallen badly. One of the first tests of Cowley’s blue-penciling skills was to edit a series of articles by John Dewey; “I was appalled by reading his prose in the raw,” he remembered. Dewey saw proofs of the heavily worked-over pieces and returned them without comment. Apparently, editing Dewey’s tangled copy was a trial by fire all junior editors had to undergo.
Another job of Cowley’s was to go to the printers on Tuesday to put the magazine to bed, along with the assistant he had inherited, a young Martha Gellhorn, whom he would describe as “a Bryn Mawr girl with literary ambitions and a lot of yellow hair.” Perhaps dreaming of a glamorous future that would include a globetrotting career as a journalist and a stormy marriage to Ernest Hemingway, the details of typesetting and printing did not much engage her, so he eventually took to sending her home earlier and doing the job himself. Gellhorn was heading out the door in any case, and when her replacement, the highly competent Betty Huling, proved more than up to the tasks assigned her, he left those Tuesday chores to her and began to attend the editorial meetings that also took place on those days.
