The Insider, page 23
The world of literature was increasingly consumed by urgent debates about its purpose, especially in relation to politics. No figure more tirelessly personified this era than Malcolm Cowley. A survey of his extracurricular activities in the political realm in the thirties is astonishing.
Malcolm Cowley signed and often helped to write manifestos, statements of support, and letters of protest. He signed a letter protesting the Fish–Dies Bill calling for the expulsion of noncitizens who could be shown to believe in the abolition of private property and a system based on common ownership (i.e., Communists). As a member of the Writers and Artists Organizing Committee in Support of the International Labor Defense of the Scottsboro Boys he signed a letter to the governor of Alabama protesting their outrageous conviction for rape and sentences to death by electrocution. He was one of ninety-eight writers urging American citizens to express their moral outrage at the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets by the Fascist rebels against the democratically elected Spanish Republic. As part of the executive committee of the League of American Writers, he signed a letter addressed to President Roosevelt in support of the Federal Writers’ Project, which was then (in 1937) under political attack. Along with 180 other writers, artists, actors, and professors, he signed “A Statement” by American Progressives on the Moscow Trials” supporting the guilty verdicts against Nikolai Bukharin and other figures as just and necessary actions taken “in the international fight of democracy against fascism.”
As the chairman of the American Committee for the Struggle Against War, Cowley was one of the leaders of a parade through the Financial District to South Street, where he addressed a rally against Japanese aggression. (“We have shown these capitalists that we are not going to fight their wars for them.”) He addressed an anti-Hitler rally of fifteen thousand Communists and sympathizers in Madison Square Garden on the suppression of opponents to Hitler’s government and assailed Nazi terrorism as “a picture of the best capitalism has to offer in the present stage of the crisis.” Along with such prominent publishing figures as Alfred A. Knopf and Warder Norton he attended a reception at the New School to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Communist publishing house International Publishers. He was one of the “Committee of Sponsors” of the Twentieth Soviet Anniversary Ceremonies held at Carnegie Hall of all places, at which the Soviet ambassador Alexander Troyanovsky was awarded the Golden Book of American Friendship with the Soviet Union. He joined five congressmen, Earl Browder, William Z. Foster, A. Philip Randolph, and a familiar roster of writers on the Mother Bloor Celebration Committee to organize festivities for the seventy-fifth birthday of the legendary Communist activist and labor organizer.
Along with Sidney Hook and Joseph Freeman, editor of The New Masses, Cowley spoke on “Culture in a Communist Society” at a symposium sponsored by the League of Professional Groups. With Freeman and Granville Hicks he served on a panel discussing “The American Literary Scene” from the liberal and the revolutionary point of view at Webster Manor, Mike Gold moderating. At “A Frank and Open Discussion Which Concerns Every Honest Supporter of Peace and Freedom!” at the Mecca Temple, he addressed the question “Where Do the Liberals Stand?” with Mauritz Hallgren, author of Why I Resigned from the Trotsky Defense Committee, and three other pro-Soviet writers. In early 1937 he chaired a panel at the Mecca Temple titled “Spain in Defense of Freedom” of three writers—Ralph Bates, Anna Louise Strong, and Robert Minor—who were eyewitnesses to the war. He chaired a panel of four “progressive cultural leaders” on “Lenin’s Contribution to Modern Thought” on the occasion of the fourteenth anniversary of his death, arranged by the American Friends of the Soviet Union.
This is far from a complete list of the whirl of such activities that Malcolm Cowley threw himself into for almost an entire decade. There was something reflexive and indiscriminate about his near-automatic participation in whatever he was solicited for. When he was questioned by a government agent a few years later about specific front organizations he had been associated with, his memory consistently failed him. These may in some cases have been convenient lapses, but it is likely the associations had been made in a rote and absent-minded fashion.
It is no accident, as Marxists like to say, that the majority of these actions and events have been gleaned from the pages of the Party’s newspaper, The Daily Worker, in advertisements, listings, and news items. Few of these failed to include the identifying line “literary editor of The New Republic,” signaling that these front organizations had captured the support of a powerful influencer in a high temple of liberalism. As a result of his tireless and enthusiastic activities, Cowley came to be seen as the very model of the “fellow traveler”—a term generally understood to apply to those people who were sympathetic to the Communist cause and the Soviet Union even though they were not formal members of the Communist Party, like Cowley and most of his cohort. In his book Literature and Revolution (1923), when Leon Trotsky used the term to describe a type of doubt-beset literary supporter of communism, he sniffed suspiciously, “As regards a ‘fellow traveler,’ the question always comes up—how far will he go?”
In the American context, the term at first had friendlier connotations. When Mike Gold, no ideological softie, returned from the Kharkov Plenum on revolutionary literature in Russia in November 1930, he declared with uncharacteristic latitude that it was of vital importance to enlist all friendly intellectuals into the ranks of the revolution. The doors should be opened wide to fellow travelers. As the thirties progressed, especially as the hostility to ideological wayfarers and dissenters gave way to the inclusive we-the-people stance of the People’s Front, fellow travelers were not just cultivated and welcomed by the Party, they were seen as key to a strategy of attracting broad support in a country generally indifferent or deeply hostile to Marxism. Later, in the forties and fifties, as the atrocities of Stalinism were revealed and a Red Scare gripped the country, “fellow traveler” became a term of distaste and opprobrium and would dog Cowley for the rest of his life.
It is not a term he ever attempted to avoid. As he would write decades later, “I would never be more than a fellow traveler, and yet I was an ardent one at the time, full of humility, the desire to serve, and immense hopes for the future.” The disasters of the early years of the thirties had paradoxically expanded the range of historical possibilities in a kind of sudden great awakening, where the close-at-hand things like intimate relationships fell away to reveal glorious vistas of social potential that evoked an uncharacteristic rapture in Cowley’s prose: “There were mountains rising into the golden sunlight. We could not reach the mountains alone, but by joining forces with the working class we might help to build a bridge for ourselves and for all of humanity.”
Why, then, did Malcolm Cowley never formally become a member of the Communist Party? Because, as he later explained, he had what he called “reservations.” One was that the Party itself, with its strict discipline and austere task-orientation not unlike a religious order, was not all that welcoming to writers and intellectuals because “they had ideas of their own” and were never likely to behave like the Party’s hardworking loyal foot soldiers. “They wouldn’t have me…except in return for a greater sacrifice of freedom than I was prepared to make.” The “sacrifice” was not of time or effort but of his need, his right, to think matters through for himself. But his strongest reservation had to do with his bedrock loyalty to literary standards. While he felt—and publicly stated on many occasions—that the revolutionary movement could be helpful to writers by ending their isolation and enlarging their perspectives, he was put off by the mostly hack writers who carried CP cards and the clichéd language of the Party press. “Nobody actually a Communist seemed to write good English prose.”
Cowley would continue to produce book reviews and literary commentary of a high order throughout the decade, but a certain amount of cant and special pleading began to creep into his work as his revolutionary fervor took hold. One example is a piece entitled “How the Russian Revolution Influenced Me as a Writer,” which appeared in The Daily Worker on September 23, 1934. It contains the following sentences: “The Russian Revolution means more to me now than any other event in history…. The revolution is still the most important event not only in history but in current affairs. The battle for the liberation of the working class in other countries is being fought today chiefly in Russia. When it has been won there so thoroughly that the cotton mill hands in North Carolina and the tenant farmers in Alabama all know the success of it and cannot any longer be filled up with lies about famine and collapse in Russia—then will come a new stage of the revolution in the rest of the world.” He contrasts the putatively vast audience enjoyed by contemporary Russian writers with that of the Americans who “address their work to a small audience of snobs.”
A second example is a poem that appeared under the title “A Poem for May Day” in The Daily Worker on April 30, 1936, seven days before it also ran in The New Republic under the title “The Last International.” Cowley labors to evoke an apocalyptic and Goyaesque battle between the resurrected legions of the proletariat dead, “betrayed and bastinadoed, burned at the stake / slow-starved in prison or exile, buried alive,” and the forces of oppression and reaction personified by “barons…and bankers and archbishops / driven before the whirlwind of the dead.” Here the Social Muse speaks in the secondhand language of revolutionary exhortation.
For most of the thirties, Malcolm Cowley lived in a state of paradox and contradiction. His social conscience, awakened by firsthand experience, ignited in him an urgency and a genuine passion for political change and economic justice. The times in America seemed to demand some kind of revolution in the affairs of men, and to so many on the literary left, the Communists had the most convincing and compelling program for getting there. So he joined those literary intellectuals he called “the men of good will” and made himself as useful as he could, in any way he could. But his literary conscience ran deep, and he understood that even his fellow-traveling loyalties to Communist causes entailed a surrender of intellectual independence. Cowley’s most profound and lasting loyalty was, first, last, and always, to language, and the ways that Communists deployed that precious resource seemed to him to debase its currency. The tension between these two realms would escalate year after year for him in ways that were exceedingly painful.
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Somehow, during these years of professional advancement and personal transformation and hectic and at times near-daily political activity, while performing a full-time job editing a book review section for a weekly periodical and writing reviews and occasional commentary and essays himself, Malcolm Cowley managed to write a 308-page book, Exile’s Return. A near-century after its 1934 publication, it remains in print in an edition revised in 1951, and has stood the test of time. It is the foundational text of that flourishing academic and pop cultural industry, Lost Generation Studies.
The timing for Cowley’s composition of his first prose work was fortunate. The memories of his literary generation’s experiences were still fresh. But the advent of the Depression had created a decisive historical chasm between a fraught now and a suddenly distant then. And the field was clear for Cowley’s pioneering effort; no real consensus about the Lost Generation’s achievements existed.
The germ of the idea for the book traced back to his first tentative generational statement, “This Youngest Generation,” for the New York Evening Post in 1921. By the fall of 1929, Cowley had begun discussions with the firm of W. W. Norton for a collection of some twelve essays on aspects of the Lost Generation’s experience by various contributors for the sum of one hundred dollars per, with the unpromising title Whither and How.
Matters began to take more definite form in the early spring of 1931 when Cowley wrote to Elizabeth Ames at Yaddo, telling her that “Mr. Matthew Josephson came forward with an exciting idea, that of writing a cooperative volume of literary memoirs in order to illuminate the intellectual and social background of the present generation of writers,” and suggesting that Yaddo might serve as the locus of a conference for five or six of the contributors. Ames assented, and so the week before the mansion opened for its regular guests, Cowley, Josephson, Kenneth Burke, Robert Coates, John Wheelwright, and Evan Shipman, a horse-playing drinking buddy of Hemingway’s, arrived for their conference. Decades later he would recall, “At Yaddo we had a high old time. Evan Shipman found a horse room and a bootlegger. We talked, we explored the countryside, and I wrote. Some of the others pretended to write, but they didn’t get anything done. I was launched on my book.” What had begun as a collective consideration of the American literary situation was now to be the work of one man.
Like any sensible memoirist, Cowley began at Yaddo with his most surefire material: the fisticuff-enhanced contretemps at the Rotonde in Paris, which had already taken on a legendary cast. By the end of that summer he had made enough progress to fill five substantial serializations in The New Republic over the autumn of 1931: “Exile’s Return,” an overview of his attitudes and those of his writerly cohort as they made their way to Paris and eventually back to the States; “Significant Gestures,” exciting Left Bank adventures among the Dadaists; “Coffee and Pistols for Two,” the little magazine wars and the painful demise of Broom; “Women Have One Breast,” censorship battles with the U.S. Postal Service and the Ernest Boyd feud; and “Manhattan Melody,” about the peculiar miseries and indignities of literary life in New York.
The pieces were fresh, thoughtful, and candid, with a tone of disillusion without bitterness. They portrayed the ambitions and achievements and failures of the Lost Generation with an insider’s intimacy that attracted attention, most of it positive.
Three days after the final installment of November 18 of the work in progress in The New Republic this brief item appeared in The Saturday Review of Literature: “Recently, we mentioned Malcolm Cowley’s articles in The New Republic, and we are now able to state that they will appear in a book to be called ‘The Lost Generation,’ which W. W. Norton & Company will publish in the Spring of 1932.” The announced pub date was wildly overoptimistic. Progress was frustratingly slow for author and publisher alike through that dark and hectic year, as Cowley’s increased responsibilities at The New Republic and his newfound political commitments ate up all his time; only two installments of the book saw print in the magazine that fall, about his generation’s educational experiences and his ambulance service in the Great War. So he resorted to taking limited leaves of absence to work on the book, leaving the book section in the capable hands of Otis Ferguson and Robert Cantwell.
His first ten-week book sabbatical, in the spring of 1933, arrived courtesy of his friends Allen Tate and his wife, Caroline Gordon, who arranged for pleasant (and free) lodging on a farm called Cloverlands, owned by one of Gordon’s Tennessee cousins, on a tract of land called the Meriwether Connection. Cowley left New York for the nine-hundred-mile drive in his Ford roadster the morning after a large and peaceful May Day parade and rally at Union Square. On his second day on the road he stopped in Towson, Maryland, for a one-day stay with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and their daughter, Scottie, who were renting a large house on a parklike estate called La Paix.
Scott was in the final stages of finishing the novel he’d been struggling with for eight years, titled at that time The Drunkard’s Holiday, the book that would become Tender Is the Night. Zelda was in a fragile state after a mental breakdown that had resulted in a stay at a sanitarium. Her stabs at writing and then ballet dancing having failed, she was now trying her hand, no more successfully, at drawing. Cowley was dismayed by her appearance. Where once she had been the very incarnation of magnetic vivacity, “now there was hardly a trace of beauty or silkiness. Her face was emaciated and twitched as she talked.” After she went to bed that evening, Cowley and Fitzgerald settled down in the underfurnished and uncarpeted living room—Cowley seated in a creaky armchair with a bottle of bootleg whiskey on the side table, Fitzgerald standing and declaiming, with a glass of what he said was water that he paused several times to refill—for a conversation that stretched into the early morning hours.
Fitzgerald did most of the talking. He recalled Zelda’s salad days as “the belle of Montgomery” whom he met at the Governor’s Ball, musing that “sometimes I don’t know whether Zelda isn’t a character that I created myself.” He humble-bragged about his peasant roots and “a streak of pure vulgarity that I like to cultivate,” and said that Edmund Wilson had him reading Marx. He sandbagged Cowley by slyly asking, “What did you think of The Great Gatsby?” Shockingly, Cowley had not read the book and was eventually forced to confess that. His confession unleashed an aggression in Fitzgerald: He dragged Cowley to his study to point out a foot-high pile of manuscript pages for his novel (“It’s good, good, good,” he boasted) and later brought his face right up to Cowley’s like a prosecutor and asked accusingly, “What do you know about writing? Did you ever write a book half as good as The Great Gatsby?” Then suddenly the aggression stopped and Fitzgerald sheepishly confessed that the glass of “water” he’d refilled multiple times was in fact 50 percent grain alcohol. With that, his natural courtesy returned and a tired Cowley was shown his room for the night.
When Cowley awoke the next morning Fitzgerald was already at work with his secretary in his study. After a brisk horseback ride with Zelda and then a visit with John Dos Passos, who was recovering from rheumatic fever at Johns Hopkins Hospital, he drove away from La Paix on the next leg of his journey, Scott, Zelda, and Scottie waving goodbye from the porch. At a tourist home in Virginia that evening he made a long entry in his notebook about the haunting visit. The memory of that brief visit gave Cowley plenty of food for thought as he drove west to Tennessee to finish his account of the glories and failures of the literary twenties.
