The Insider, page 41
In time, Cowley found in the Viking Press a publisher as well as an employer. Of the thirteen books of his own he would publish in his lifetime, not including the anthologies, eleven would be published by Viking, if one includes the reissues and revisions of his first two books. He quickly became, to use an antique phrase, one of the great men of Viking, a multipronged asset to the house, respected, cherished, beloved by its employees.
The effect of this industrial-scale explosion in high culture that the writers and intellectuals were benefiting from was not simply quantitative, but qualitative. As Louis Menand puts it in The Free World, his cultural history of the Cold War, “Most striking was the nature of the audience: people cared. Ideas mattered. Painting mattered. Movies mattered. Poetry mattered. The way people judged and interpreted painting, movies, and poems mattered.” It was a very good time to be a critic. As Randall Jarrell quipped, some people consulted their favorite critic about the conduct of their lives as they had once consulted their clergymen. Critics enjoyed prestige and sway over not just educated but even mass opinion. The flood of cultural production threatened to overwhelm its intended consumers, so they turned to what they felt were the authorities for guidance as to what to read and watch and listen to and what to think and say about it all.
Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination, a collection of critical essays on literary and even popular topics—e.g., the Kinsey Reports and psychoanalysis—was a conspicuous example of why this period would become known as the Age of Criticism. Trilling wrote with a Jamesian style that was at once erudite and elusive. The book’s preface deployed references to the work of Mill, Coleridge, Goethe, Wordsworth, and others with the expectation that the reader would know what he was getting at. When The Liberal Imagination was published in 1950 it sold an astonishing seventy thousand copies in hardcover and eventually over a hundred thousand copies in its Anchor reprint edition.
The pioneering New American Library began its own line of Signet Classics and middle-highbrow nonfiction Mentor paperbacks, taglined “Good Reading for the Millions.” Their editions became high school and college classroom staples for decades, up until the present day. NAL also published an uncompromising mass-market literary magazine called New World Writing, which featured a glittering list of international contributors in fourteen numbers from 1950 to 1961. It was name-checked by Frank O’Hara in his poem “The Day Lady Died,” where he buys “an ugly New World Writing to see what the poets / in Ghana are doing these days.” The back ad copy of Number 5 includes the come-on: “Avant Garde Means You! Avant Garde may sound stuffy—but it only means a reconnaissance party—adventurous people who willingly enter uncharted territory.”
Intellectuals were in demand for other functions besides the USDA-style sorting and grading of cultural output. Menand calls the critic of the day a kind of public health inspector, serving as docent to the eager but still unsure mass audience consuming it. The world had assumed an ominous illegibility that frightened and confused ordinary Americans, so they turned to intellectuals for explanations and even moral guidance.
Far from fading away, the Age of the Crisis of Man had only gathered momentum in the intellectual class. The prestige that its members enjoyed depended on the perception that intellectuals saw things more clearly and penetrated into their meaning more deeply. In the postwar years it was largely an article of faith that they did.
No literary intellectuals proved more adept at trading on this prestige than the group of writers who came to be known as the New York intellectuals, and no magazine wielded more power and influence over this group and the people who paid heed to them than Partisan Review. Its centrality to the lives of the young and serious of this era is captured in Harvey Swados’s bittersweet short story “Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn.” A combat veteran marking time as a census taker looks across a subway car on the sooty Seventh Avenue Local and notices a young woman “deep in Partisan Review. That was what first caught my eye, that and her legs.” He takes a seat next to her and sees that she is reading something by the then highly regarded writer Isaac Rosenfeld. “What do you make of that Rosenfeld story,” he croaks nervously. Certainly not much of a meet-cute icebreaker, but it works: The two end up getting married and raising a family amid the compromises of postwar American life.
The contents of the typical issue of Partisan Review bristled with aggressively argued essays, stern and sometimes brutally dismissive reviews, and fiction and poetry written with the tutelary gods of Mann, Kafka, Eliot, Joyce, Pound, and Yeats in mind. (Kafka Was the Rage was the way the critic Anatole Broyard titled his memoir of the period.) Dispatches from Europe included Jean-Paul Sartre on existentialism; Albert Camus on the myth of Sisyphus; London letters from George Orwell and Arthur Koestler; symposia on “The State of American Writing” and “Religion and the Intellectuals”; Hannah Arendt on the Nazi concentration camps; and Clement Greenberg laying down the iron laws of the development of modern painting. Partisan Review was so ahead of the curve that in December 1948, it ran an essay by Delmore Schwartz asking “Does Existentialism Still Exist?,” years before most people had even heard of it.
Partisan Review did not just wear its anti-communism on its sleeve, it waved it as a banner and used it as a club against anyone it saw as an adversary. As early as the summer of 1946 it was taking The New Republic and The Nation and the short-lived liberal newspaper P.M. to task for being soft on communism and the Soviet threat in an editorial titled “The Liberal Fifth Column.” “We have in our midst a powerfully vocal lobby willing to override all concerns of international democracy and decency in the interests of a foreign power.” This is a sentence that would sit comfortably in the mouth of a HUAC congressman or a Hearst columnist. In a roundup review of little magazines in The New Republic, Cowley took sharp exception to the editorial’s thesis and especially its heavy-handed style: “The mildest judgment one can pass on such writing is that it seems utterly out of place in a magazine distinguished by its interest in literary values.” He was poking a very irritable bear.
The culture of the New York intellectuals was tribal and insular, with a ground note of gossipy spitefulness. They were cocktail party assassins, with an ability to dispatch an enemy with the right poisonous dismissal in the right ear. Their many published memoirs abound in backbiting, feuds, rivalries, long-simmered resentments, score-settling, betrayals, and generalized scorn for opponents. If Cowley had managed to camouflage or expunge his own fellow-traveling with half the skill of the former Trotskyists, he might have been able to join this contentious tribe as an elder statesman and living link to the heroic age of American literature, much as Edmund Wilson, a regular contributor to Partisan Review, had. But his enemies in that camp were grudge holders and would never have allowed that.
The result was subtle but real. Malcolm Cowley was not so much written out of literary history as insufficiently written in. He continued to write for a variety of important publications—among them The New York Times, The Saturday Review, the New York Herald Tribune, New World Writing, and the influential literary quarterlies The Kenyon Review and The Sewanee Review. He became an unofficial adviser to the editors of the lively new magazine The Paris Review, whose young editors were avid for any Lost Generation connection or lore. But the pages of the publications of the anti-Communist cultural left—Partisan Review, and also Irving Howe’s Dissent, The New Leader, and Commentary—were closed to him, and if he was ever mentioned in their pages, it was disparagingly.
Malcolm Cowley was well aware that he had a target on his back. In 1967, nervously anticipating the reviews of Think Back on Us, a collection of his pieces from the thirties, he wrote to Kenneth Burke that he could “hear the Partisan knives on the whetstone.” The inheritor of Partisan Review’s mantle of intellectual authority ever since its founding in 1963 was The New York Review of Books. Malcolm Cowley published several books in the seventies and eighties, some of them important and unique pieces of literary recollection and estimation and personal testimony; those books were widely and, by and large, favorably reviewed in a great many places, but not one of them in The New York Review of Books.
In part it was a matter of style. The cocksure and often ad hominem polemical style of the Partisan Review critics was entirely alien to Malcolm Cowley’s approach. Cowley would sometimes go on the attack himself, but he aimed to correct rather than demolish. His approach as a critic was broadly Emersonian, humanistic, exploratory; he was not dogmatic and he did not come on, as so many of the Partisan Review crowd did, as a lawgiver. He carried his learning, which was considerable, lightly. It would never have occurred to Cowley to sort the creators of American literature into two categories, as Philip Rahv did in his famous essay on “Redskins and Palefaces.” He knew too many writers too well to be so reductive.
Finally, Malcolm Cowley was a genuine man of the country, and the New York intellectuals were terminally urban. The closest they ever came to catching a trout was reading about it in “Big Two-Hearted River.” Cowley simply didn’t fit in; he would recall late in life, “I am and always have been a country boy, a little uneasy in the company of urban intellectuals.” This disparity was one of the reasons that Cowley found his true affinity group among the Southern literati Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren, despite their conservative cultural politics.
Two twinned preoccupations of the literary minded in the postwar decade were the revived interest in the American writers of the twenties and the question of how their inheritors, the younger generation of writers, might respond to their achievement and what they might make of their own experience of war and the new conditions of American life. As early as 1947, Life magazine profiled a clutch of these relative newcomers, including Robert Lowell, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Jean Stafford, Calder Willingham, and Thomas Heggen. Little seemed to link them together as anything resembling a literary generation aside from a reaction against literary Naturalism and the proletarian emphases of the thirties and a fondness for Hawthorne and Kafka as models. A year later Life weighed in again with an editorial titled “Fiction in the U.S.: We Need a Novelist to Re-create American Values Instead of Wallowing in the Literary Slums.” This scolding critique observed that our best writers were now focusing on the sordid and raffish and demoralizing aspects of American life, to the exclusion of its hardworking and reasonably happy citizenry. The piece captures the sense that the new generation of writers was not quite carrying its weight or up to the still ill-defined task that had been assigned to them.
Cowley was also dissatisfied with the direction American fiction was heading. The first target of his critical scrutiny was the novels by Americans who had participated in the war. By 1948 he would already have dozens of such novels to consider; the best and most successful of them were Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, John Horne Burns’s The Gallery, James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, and Thomas Heggen’s Mister Roberts. Weighing their virtues as a group, Cowley granted that these authors had quickly mastered their literary craft, so that “on average they are better written than all but a few of the war novels produced in the 1920s.” He also found that they conveyed a great many facts about the experience of Americans at war: the caste tensions between the officer class and enlisted men; their sexual frustrations and behaviors; their often lamentable attitude toward conquered people as occupation troops; and their feeling that the war, for all its happy military outcomes, had been a demoralizing experience.
Cowley’s final verdict, though, was this: “The truth is that the books are more impressive as a group than they are as separate works of fiction.” Using the works of his Lost Generation comperes as a logical, but perhaps also unfair yardstick, he finds these war novels to be “concerned with using and perfecting the discoveries already made by their predecessors”—specifically Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and, inescapably, Hemingway. Cowley makes a distinction between his wartime generation’s rebelliousness and its search for new literary forms and styles to express its disgust and its aspirations alike, and what he characterizes as this new generation’s “disillusionment” about “the general contrast between our ideals and our performance.” This disillusionment, he argues, accounts for the novels’ conservatism of literary technique, and their authors’ inability to break through and forge a bold new tradition.
Over the next few years, Cowley would extend this negative judgment to the work of many of the postwar American novelists in a series of essays and reviews. In 1949, in the essay “New Tendencies in the Novel: Pure Fiction,” he took the measure of recent novels by most of the writers mentioned in the Life feature, as well as Eudora Welty (The Golden Apples), Saul Bellow (The Victim), Shirley Jackson (The Lottery), and Mary McCarthy (The Oasis). He found it easier to describe their books in the negative; they were neither idealistic nor experimental nor behavioristic nor socially minded, having very little to say about American society. Cowley amplified this critique in his essay “A Tidy Room in Bedlam: Notes on the ‘New’ Fiction.” Adding the work of Paul Bowles, Frederick Buechner, and Caroline Gordon to his specimen jar, he finds the new fiction to be nonhistorical, nonintellectual, apolitical, temporally vague, aloof and ironic in affect and ambiguous in plot, and peopled with characters who have no real functional relationship with American life. As for the writing itself in these books, “the tone…is decorous, subdued, in the best of taste, with every sentence clear in itself.” This is not meant as a compliment.
Cowley discovers the culprit behind this, to him, all too neat and tidy fiction in the growth and reach of higher education. He observes, “There has never been a time when so many practicing authors have been attached to the staffs of American universities.” As students and then teachers, the new or newish writers had enjoyed full exposure to the canon of Western literature and the paradigm-shifting works of early modernism. The tool kit of fiction was fully opened for them; what was left was to apply those techniques to a given situation in an ever more refined fashion. This almost neoclassical purity and correctness, in Cowley’s view, drained away all the robust, felt life and the spirit of adventure and discovery that inform the best fiction. “The result is that we are now reading novels by intellectuals, for intellectuals, about supposedly intellectual, or at least well-educated characters, in which not a single intelligent notion is expressed about the world in which we live.” Cowley excludes from this quietly baleful verdict the works of the war novelists and such books as Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm, which won a National Book Award in 1950 with his support, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which won the same award in 1953.
At bottom, Cowley felt that it was the New Criticism and its sway over the college English departments and the sorts of fiction it valued and devalued and just plain ignored that was really to blame for this state of affairs. He admitted that the practice of close reading and analysis of poems and stories and novels that was the New Criticism’s core practice strongly resembled the French explication de texte method that he’d had “a brain-and-bellyful of” at the University of Montpelier. As a relatively new teacher himself, he’d found that close textual reading beat the historical background method he’d first tried out in terms of classroom efficacy. The art of close reading was the first and best lesson he could impart to his students. For this he offers due praise.
The problems for Cowley arose outside of the classroom. The New Criticism privileged the literary qualities of irony and ambiguity and was ever in search of symbols and mythic patterns in texts. As Gore Vidal put it with witty malice, “They go about dismantling the text with the same rapture that their simpler brothers experience while taking apart combustion engines.” Its canon was severely limited to the duly anointed Modernists whose works were, in a word, teachable. But literature is vast and includes countless works of real value and even greatness that are not suited to this kind of dissection. A method that might work in analyzing a verse by a metaphysical poet would be far less useful applied to long novels.
Meanwhile, their brightest students, the ones most likely to become writers themselves, were being taught that the value of a poem or a work of fiction required the same things that they’d been taught to unearth in the classroom. As Cowley states in a symposium, “It may terrify them; it may stop them from writing at all, or, if they do write, it may cause them to write according to the formulae advanced by whatever New Critic is teaching that year at Princeton or wherever it may be.” He felt that American writing faced the danger of becoming a kind of closed circle, with critically trained writers—and critic-writers, of which there were many—producing ultrarefined and airless work for other such people.
With a postwar vogue for the Lost Generation writers now in full flood, and with a receptive new employer publisher handy, Cowley saw the opportunity for a redemptive do-over. He seized the moment and suggested to Viking that it reissue his one full-length prose work, Exile’s Return. The core of the book, its generational thesis, was still sound, and its firsthand, autobiographical acts of witness were more valuable than ever. As he noted in a letter to Marshall Best, “The book has a sort of subterranean public in the universities and outside of them.” Rare-book dealers reported a steady demand for copies and sold the ones they could find at a hefty price, whereas the copies in college libraries were invariably falling apart and needed to be rebound and mended with Scotch tape. The most important revisions he was contemplating were a new introduction setting the book in historical context, and a new final chapter to replace the badly time-bound political one. Other important changes included more material on Hart Crane to balance the Harry Crosby chapter, which was itself revised to cohere more clearly with the rest of the book; a mention of the Sacco and Vanzetti case; the complete text of Cowley’s mock-heroic ode to the demise of Secession; and a full account of his Parisian visit to Ezra Pound.
