The Insider, page 46
Malcolm Cowley was not involved in any of these publication activities and had left the States for an academic appointment abroad in October. But he followed the critical response to On the Road with keen interest. As he had predicted, opinions were mixed and sometimes sharply divided. There were some good, appreciative reviews in magazines and newspapers across the country—nothing as lyrical and joyous as Millstein’s, though, and most of these reviewers felt the need to point out Kerouac’s shortcomings.
A good many reviewers and columnists manifested the American tendency to resort to mockery and moral panic when something challenging and unconventional comes their way. An example of this barrage of scoffing condescension would be Robert Ruark, a sub-Hemingway novelist of the manly man variety and a powerful syndicated columnist. Donning the I’m-just-a-regular-Joe costume so useful to a certain type of scribe, he wrote that “what I am by the beat generation is just that—beat. If ‘beat’ means defeated, I don’t know what they are defeated by, or for what reason. All I gather is that they are mad about something.” Ruark sneers that On the Road was “not much more than a candid admission that [Kerouac] had been on the bum for six years” and concludes, “It’s a good word—‘kick.’ And where the whole sniveling lot needs a kick is right in the pants.” No wonder young people hate adults.
Of greater consequence were the attacks that came from the literary intellectuals, the ones who really understood what was at stake in the rise of the outlaw sensibility Kerouac and Ginsberg and the other Beats were expressing. At the front of the pack was Partisan Review, which grasped that this new crowd, which hadn’t read any Marx and didn’t worship at the shrine of T. S. Eliot and made no apologies about it, was muscling in on the avant-garde territory that it considered its turf. Their designated attack dog was Norman Podhoretz, who’d made it from Brooklyn across the river to Columbia, where he studied with Ginsberg and Kerouac’s old professor Lionel Trilling, and across the Atlantic to Cambridge, where he studied with F. R. Leavis, and then back to New York, where he quickly became a made man among the New York intellectuals, aka the Family.
His piece in the Spring 1958 issue, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” was such a durable attack on Beat writing that it was included in the Viking Critical Edition of On the Road. In Podhoretz’s view the older Bohemianism of the teens and twenties was a repudiation of the provincialism and hypocrisy of American life and “a movement created in the name of civilization: its ideals were intelligence, civilization, spiritual refinement.” The Bohemians of the fifties, in contrast, he sees as primitives in thrall to pure instinct, spontaneity, irrationalism, woolly mysticism, crank philosophies, and unearned sentimentality about the supposed simple happiness of the darker races and white rural Americans. Norman Mailer’s notorious ode to hipsterism, “The White Negro,” and the phenomenon of switchblade-toting juvenile delinquents are dragged in as if they were somehow the peace-loving and completely nonviolent Ginsberg and Kerouac’s fault.
Podhoretz’s piece is a literary sophisticate’s assault on On the Road that manages to score points while missing the biggest point of all: the sadness and sweetness and thwartedness at the heart of the book, and the openness and masculine vulnerability of Kerouac’s writing. Louis Menand calls attacks of this sort “a crude misreading.” “The Beats weren’t rebels,” he observes. “They were misfits.” On a regular basis in American literary history, the misfits end up having their say. As Menand writes, On the Road is “exuberant, hopeful, sad, nostalgic; it is never naturalistic. Most of all, it is emotionally uninhibited…. The Beats were men who wrote about their feelings.” Jack Kerouac was a man who had lots of feelings, far more than the ordinary American male, and he courageously committed them to paper for the world to see. “Life is holy, and every moment is precious”—no American writer since Whitman had risked writing anything this direct. This, and not the go-man-go caricatures of the book, is what brings tens of thousands of new readers to On the Road every year and fuels the still flourishing literary cult of Jack Kerouac.
Malcolm Cowley was not in touch with Kerouac much if at all after the publication of the novel, and he had very little to contribute editorially in Kerouac’s future dealings with Viking. Cowley had spent years as a middleman between Kerouac and Viking, conducting a kind of editorial shuttle diplomacy between a writer and a company with scant sympathy for each other’s needs. Kerouac had jumped through every hoop that Cowley had required, while receiving rejections from him, some of them curt, for new novel after new novel. His first editorial experience with Robert Giroux had been something like an idyll; this one, in contrast, had been a protracted slog. Perhaps they’d had enough of each other.
Viking, with a paradigm-shifting commercial success on its hands, now wanted another book from Kerouac as quickly as possible. Novels that Sterling Lord had been frustratingly unable to place were now being sold with ease. Grove Press had quickly picked up The Subterraneans, which it published in 1958, and Doctor Sax, which it put out in 1959; Avon, a mass-market publisher, would bring out Maggie Cassidy as a paperback original in 1959. Suddenly the market for work by Jack Kerouac—now that there was such a thing—was about to be flooded with books by him of, it seemed, lesser quality than On the Road. Luckily, Viking had on submission one of Kerouac’s best novels, The Dharma Bums, and they signed it up with dispatch. Like all of his fiction, it was autobiographical and concerned the time Kerouac spent in 1956 with the poet, outdoorsman, and student of Zen and Native American cultures Gary Snyder. The Dharma Bums was another exercise in male bonding, this time with far fewer kicks and far more spiritual questing, with Snyder/Japhy Ryder in the Dean Moriarty role, moving about in hiking boots instead of hot cars, and spouting koans instead of monologues.
The Dharma Bums was both different from and similar enough to On the Road to suit Viking’s purposes perfectly, and it found immediate and enthusiastic favor with in-house readers. Keith Jennison, probably Kerouac’s closest friend there, enthused that “this new book by Jack Kerouac seems to me to be a great advance over ON THE ROAD…. this time Jack comes much closer to swimming in the sea of language (his phrase) than drowning in it.” Catharine Carver, newly arrived from Partisan Review, wrote, “I think this is miles and even worlds ahead of ON THE ROAD; in fact, I’m quite overboard about it…. We ought to be proud and delighted to publish this book.” Which Viking did, bringing it out in October 1958, a brisk seven months from submission. Helen Taylor once again did the editing. Kerouac was stuck with a bill for $519.45 in author’s alterations when she added or restored many dozens of dozens of commas and other changes to the galleys without asking his permission. Cowley never saw the manuscript. When he did finally read The Dharma Bums he didn’t like it much; he thought it was underpopulated and short on story.
The Dharma Bums received, on balance, more favorable reviews than On the Road. The shock of the new, however, had worn off Kerouac and the Beats, and the book sold modestly in hardcover. It was the last book by Jack Kerouac that Viking would publish for almost half a century. Tom Guinzburg had become his main point of contact at Viking, and he had every reason to want to continue publishing Kerouac’s work into the future. But his editors kept writing negative and sometimes scathing reports on the books he and his agent were submitting. By February 1959, all of the submissions were sent back to Sterling Lord, and Viking and Jack Kerouac were quits.
In the years to come, Malcolm Cowley would in certain circles, particularly among Kerouac’s friends and loyalists, be seen less as the hero of the saga of On the Road’s long march to publication than as Jack Kerouac’s nemesis and underminer. The source of a lot of this will be found in the rollicking and more than a little drunken “Writers at Work” interview that Kerouac did with the poets Ted Berrigan and Aram Saroyan, the year before his death. Kerouac states, “In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with On the Road and The Dharma Bums, I had no power to stand by my style for better or for worse. When Malcolm Cowley made endless revisions and inserted thousands of needless commas…why, I spent five hundred dollars making a complete restitution of the Bums manuscript and got a bill from Viking Press called ‘Revisions.’ Ha ho ho.” Later he makes much the same claim about Cowley’s having fiddled without permission with the text of On the Road, the same claim he made to Allen Ginsberg in a letter written the day he first received his finished books, declaring, “Oh shame! shame on American Business!”
Some of Kerouac’s biographers and commentators have carelessly taken complaints like these about Cowley’s putative actions at face value, but they are not true. It was Helen Taylor who put the clamps on Kerouac’s prose for Viking in both books. In later years Cowley would become more than a little defensive about all this, responding in Jack’s Book that “Jack and his memory are very, very unfair to me. Blaming me for putting or taking out commas or caps and what-not in On the Road. I really didn’t give much of a damn about that.” He would always be a Viking loyalist, though, and he would never try to divert blame to anyone else.
To sort out the instances where Cowley stood tall as Kerouac’s editor and where he failed him requires an understanding of Cowley’s position vis-à-vis the Viking Press. In the years between the time he read the earliest typescript of On the Road and the day it was genuinely accepted, he had to play a double game if he was ever going to get it published. If he’d done what Maxwell Perkins had famously done when Scribner’s was balking at Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise—essentially threatening to quit if he could not sign it up—he would have fatally undercut his own position at Viking and possibly not had his consultant’s contract renewed. Cunning was called for, not bluster. That strategy caused Jack Kerouac a lot of pain. If Cowley had been in the Viking offices full-time, it is certain that he would have insisted that Kerouac have the chance to read and correct the galleys of On the Road. But he wasn’t. There is no getting around the fact that Viking as a house pushed Kerouac around and at times condescended to him and his friends and his book. The divisions in the house expressed themselves in its behavior. But Malcolm Cowley himself never ever did anything like that. His caring for Kerouac might on occasion have been avuncular and paternalistic and even intermittent, but he really did care.
Malcolm Cowley was the perfect editor for On the Road, but the wrong editor for Jack Kerouac. His sometimes blunt and impatient rejections of other Kerouac novels prove that he could never be for him what Max Perkins had been for Thomas Wolfe. He had no interest whatsoever in Kerouac’s interest in Buddhism, and he never took the enterprise of the Legend of Duluoz seriously. (He referred to it as “interminable” in one of his in-house Viking memos.) Cowley was a man whose own credo as a writer was that he hated to write and loved to rewrite; Kerouac could be brought to revise, but at heart he fiercely trusted his first thoughts and initial inspirations. Cowley was also a man who’d written his master’s thesis on Racine; Kerouac’s temperament was Romantic, privileging perception and feeling over form.
Still, on this one occasion, these two figures went to war against the forces of conventional opinion and won a great victory. Nothing else Malcolm Cowley did had anything like the effect that his advocacy for On the Road had, not even his revival of Faulkner’s career. Once On the Road came out in its Signet paperback editions, the book would be read by millions of people, and for a high percentage of the younger ones it lodged in their hearts and minds as a gateway to at least the possibility of another life. There is a very bright straight line of influence between Kerouac’s book and soulful troubadours such as Bob Dylan and Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen. Jack Kerouac was and remains a conductor of that core American value, freedom.
* * *
And then Malcolm Cowley did it again.
The story of how Ken Kesey’s first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, came to be published is a shorter, simpler, and happier tale. It began in a classroom in Palo Alto. The Stanford Creative Writing Program was one of Malcolm Cowley’s most reliable academic employers and something of a happy hunting ground and second home for him. In the first real flush of what Mark McGurl would term “the Program Era” in American fiction, the Stanford MFA program ran neck and neck with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in prestige and output of talent. The program had been inaugurated in 1945 by the novelist and teacher Wallace Stegner, who would make the claim that he was one of the inventors of creative writing as a formal field of study. He himself had been one of the first people to earn a master’s degree in creative writing from Iowa. He’d moved west to Stanford from teaching jobs at Harvard and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vermont, and he found that many of his students were older veterans studying on the GI Bill, married with children and domestic responsibilities. His wife, Mary Stegner, recalled that “he said they needed a place where they could write and talk, like a coffee house in Europe.” So he devised the creative writing workshop, where fledgling writers would read and critique one another’s work in a spirit of sometimes competitive camaraderie. The seminar table would become the formalized academic stand-in for the literary café society that had previously been the seedbed of movements and writers.
The Stanford program was generously supported from its inception by E. H. Jones, a rich Texas oilman with a love of literature, and the brother of a Stanford English professor. His endowment made possible the Stegner Fellowships, which provide living stipends for promising candidates in fiction, poetry, and playwriting to study for their degree. Many Stegner Fellows have become marquee names in American literature over the decades. Wallace Stegner was not only an innovator in the field of creative writing, he was a very able administrator and academic politician, and his program flourished. One of his assets was his own stature as a highly regarded novelist of the American West, which helped him hire the sort of high-profile instructors who would in turn attract the most talented and promising of the aspiring writers. Malcolm Cowley was just the kind of teacher Stegner wanted.
Cowley first came to Palo Alto at Stegner’s invitation to teach in 1956. The two men quickly became close friends, and Cowley would return to Stanford for repeat appointments in 1958 and 1959, becoming a fixture there. He taught writing diligently, if less formally than a credentialed academic might. He modeled his classroom efforts on the way Archibald MacLeish was doing it with Harvard students, including his son, Rob. As he wrote to Stegner, “Archie’s great trick is to make the students feel that they are a very selected group, entitled to meet the great men [sic] of literature. That sets them up, and they become very serious about their writing and about tearing apart one another’s work.” This was a trick easy for him to pull off himself. His student at Stanford, Larry McMurtry, recalled that “gossip about the great does as much as anything else to pull young writers into the great stream of literary endeavor.”
Cowley was also on duty as a literary scout for the Viking Press. For an ambitious young novelist, admission to Cowley’s classroom would not only be the opportunity to rub shoulders with a legendary editor and Lost Generation personage and hear firsthand tales of literary gossip and glory, it was also like buying a lottery ticket to a Viking contract. In 1958 one of his students, Dennis Murphy, had won that lottery when Viking published, very successfully, his first novel, The Sergeant.
In the fall of 1960, Cowley returned to Stanford, where the nowlegendary roster of fellows and MFA students was so starry that a Paris–Palo Alto comparison becomes almost obligatory. They included Ernest Gaines; Peter Beagle; Larry McMurtry; Robert Stone; the young Australian Christopher Koch, future author of The Year of Living Dangerously; Wendell Berry; and Tillie Olsen. (Cowley had published a piece by Olsen back in 1934 in The New Republic, “Thousand Dollar Vagrant,” and he had had her in his first class at Stanford in 1956. She would at his behest sign a contract with Viking for a novel, but the famously blocked Olsen never finished it.) The talent in the room was just tremendous, even if you don’t include the most famous—some would say infamous—fellow of them all, Ken Kesey.
Ken Kesey at the time was a rough-hewn, heavily muscled young man who presented as something of a hick. He’d grown up on a dairy farm in Oregon, and a lot of that muscle was the result of the strenuous chores he’d had to do growing up, like wheeling heavy cans of milk and cream around and lifting them onto trucks and picking beans at six cents a pound. He understood and relished physical labor more than most writers. In 1958 Kesey and his wife and high school sweetheart, Faye, had moved into a cottage on woodsy Perry Lane, the home of what passed for the cultural avant-garde at Stanford in the late fifties. Larry McMurtry called it “a hotbed of low-rent revolt.” In his classic Kesey chronicle The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe has great fun sending up the social set there, people appalled by America’s grotesque tail fin civilization, enviously smitten by those civilized Europeans who had so clearly, they’d solemnly intone, “mastered the art of living.” Naturally, the sandal-and-natural-fabric-wearing Perry Lane sophisticates found Kesey, who used words like “bub” and “caint” in conversation like a displaced Okie, charmingly in need of polishing and condescended to him and Faye at every communal occasion. Little did they know that they had a true cultural visionary in their midst who would take over the scene and remake it in his image.
