The Insider, page 48
Tom Guinzburg would call On the Road and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest two of the books, along with The Grapes of Wrath and Death of a Salesman, that would define the history of the Viking Press over the decades. Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey were as influential in defining the culture of the sixties as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were in the twenties. For one man to have discovered, championed, edited, and published two such books in such a short period of time is a remarkable achievement.
Fourteen.
The Long Retrospective
The broad pattern of Malcolm Cowley’s life in his last quarter of a century on earth did not differ greatly from the one he had established in the years following the war. He continued his work as a consulting editor for Viking, focusing for the most part on the Portable Library and the Viking Critical Editions. As late as the early eighties, when he was in his early eighties, he would come into the offices on Madison Avenue every month from Sherman for a Portables meeting and to transact other business. To many of the younger staffers, he was a kind of curiosity; to others he felt like a visitor from a bygone era, to be regarded with awe. The late distinguished Viking editor in chief Elisabeth Sifton recalled that, despite the challenges of his increasing deafness, he was alert, fully on top of the trends in academia and literaria as they might affect the sale of current and prospective Portables, and a hard-headed judge of market realities.
Cowley was wont to boast that he’d published more books after the age of seventy than he’d done before. The arithmetic backs him up on this claim, if just: By 1967 he’d published six books—actually five and a half, as one of them was a collaboration: Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518–1865, published in 1962 with the journalist Daniel Mannix.
From there on, he would publish eight more books, if one includes the Cowley–Burke correspondence. Admittedly a number of these latter books were either collections of previously published essays and reviews, or drawn from earlier writings that he repurposed. But two of them, The Dream of the Golden Mountains and The View from 80, were original works, and A Second Flowering, his prose portrait gallery of Lost Generation figures, while drawn in good part from earlier writing, flows beautifully as a unified work.
The two major themes of Cowley’s final decades were these: to offer a retrospective on the works and days of his heroic literary generation, and sometimes, when needed, a vigorous defense; and to come to terms, finally, with his political misjudgments of the thirties, and what kind of guilt he should feel about them. The former task was one of the pleasures of his old age, even if it involved the melancholy duty of memorializing the honored dead, many of them his friends, as he outlived almost all of them. The latter was the internal work of his own conscience, but it was often summoned by attacks from his enemies and critics, which continued to his death in 1989.
Though Cowley had published two books that were vital to the culture of what we call the sixties, a good deal of the excitements of that decade passed him by. He describes himself in that period as “a detached observer, a deaf man gardening in the country and writing about books.” Much of what contact he had with younger Americans was in the somewhat artificial milieu of the college classroom. He did recognize that the sixties generation was indeed “a real generation,” but they were not really his people and their fights were not his fights. In 1977 he would publish an essay titled “Reconsiderations—the ’60s,” which proved that he’d been reading the work of the newer writers, but he concluded that the whole project of the sixties had run out of energy and would have little effect on American culture going forward. This was not his opinion alone, of course. He’d been quite alienated by the behaviors of the student radicals, writing this to Wallace Stegner in 1969 about “the great unwashed, unbarbered proletariat of graduate students”: “And to think that these jerks, with their ignorance of everything that isn’t ‘relevant,’—i.e., that happened more than ten years ago—will soon be on the faculties of American universities!”
Unsurprisingly, then, Cowley would soon absent himself from the college campus. His last formal and longish-term teaching engagement was in 1973, when he taught American literature at the University of Warwick for a semester. The students didn’t know him from Malcolm Bradbury or Malcolm X, he recalled. From that time forward, although he would still do one-off lectures and panels at various colleges for pay, his teaching career was over.
For a time, Cowley gamely kept up with the new writing, maybe more out of habit than genuine interest. He did pick out Cormac McCarthy early on in his career as a writer to watch, writing to his editor Albert Erskine about his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, that “he tells a story marvelously, with a sort of baresark joy as he rushes into scenes of violence…. he also loves language, in the way that Faulkner did.” (Erskine had been Faulkner’s last editor at Random House.) He was not at all enchanted by what he called “the American black-humor-and-catastrophe novelists,” with the exception of Thomas Pynchon, whom he deemed “brilliant.” He also saw merit in the work of Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas McGuane, Harry Crews, Reynolds Price, and Robert Coover. One writer, though, who loomed large over American fiction in the sixties and seventies whom Cowley could not abide was John Barth, writing to Bernard Bergonzi that “I bogged down night after night in Giles Goat-Boy till I said to myself, ‘This is spinach and to hell with it.’ ”
The truth was, Malcolm Cowley was never going to sign on to Barth’s theory and practice of “The Literature of Exhaustion.” Cowley’s critical approach was entirely alien to postmodernism, post-structuralism, self-referential metafiction, the death of the author, the antinovel, and anything whatsoever to do with the new French literary theory. He was finally, he confessed to one correspondent, “unable to read the new fiction,” and to another, “It’s a new world in which the books themselves seem long-haired and bearded, and I don’t know that I feel at home in it.” As far as Malcolm Cowley was concerned, the future of literature would have to take care of itself. Time’s arrow was pointed backward.
The lengthy list of deaths of Cowley’s friends and associates in this period began on July 2, 1961, with the shocking death of Ernest Hemingway at the age of sixty-one. The obituaries stated that he’d accidentally shot himself while cleaning a shotgun, but he’d actually turned the gun on himself to commit suicide, a fact that his wife, Mary Hemingway, would confirm only years later. This hit Malcolm Cowley with particular force. The man who was synonymous with the Lost Generation, the first American to have become the most famous writer on earth, left an absence that Cowley struggled to comprehend. In public, though, he was unflagging in his loyalty and critical advocacy. He served for years as one of Mary Hemingway’s most trusted advisers in the matter of which of Hemingway’s unpublished works should see the light of print and in what order. In 1967, Cowley, with his keen scent for the literary winds, picked up that Hemingway’s stock was falling, and he wrote one of his most impassioned pieces, “Papa and the Parricides,” in his defense.
Death had not been good for Hemingway’s career. Without his living presence in the world, scholars and critics felt free to say some things about his work that they’d probably been thinking to themselves for years: that a lot of it had been overvalued. Cowley notes that respected critics like Leslie Fiedler and Stanley Edgar Hyman had whittled down the canon of Hemingway’s work genuinely worth reading to The Sun Also Rises and an indeterminate number of stories, mostly the early ones. Dwight Macdonald had excluded even the novels from serious consideration, asserting that Hemingway was essentially a short-story writer and really just that. Out the window went A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea. Something similar was happening in academia, where the stories alone were being assigned and seriously studied. Cowley frames this as the result of a kind of critical one-upmanship—“I am even more discerning than you are because I exclude even more than you do.”
Taking in the larger picture of determined attempts to shrink Hemingway and his work down to size, he resorts to the metaphors of jackals circling around the carcass of a dead lion, and the primal Freudian ritual murder of the literary fathers. This latter process he believed was happening not just to Hemingway but to other Lost Generation figures. He concludes, “My protest is simply in defense of American literature. This is vastly richer now than it was when Hemingway started writing, but it is not yet so rich that it can afford to disown and devalue one of its lasting treasures.”
The deaths of his friends and colleagues in his last decades came in blows: William Faulkner and E. E. Cummings in 1962; Van Wyck Brooks in 1963; John Dos Passos in 1970; Edmund Wilson in 1971; Ezra Pound in 1972; Conrad Aiken in 1973; Thornton Wilder in 1975; Alexander Calder in 1976; Bruce Bliven in 1977; Matthew Josephson in 1978; Allen Tate in 1979; and Marshall Best and Archibald MacLeish in 1982. With each death a part of his literary, intellectual, and emotional life was leaving him. As he would put it in 1977 in a letter to his old classmate Jacob Davis, “My address book reads like a necrology.”
Some of these deaths he would mourn privately; others he took as the occasion to memorialize the departed figure in print, including Cummings, Wilson, Aiken, and Bliven. Edmund Wilson was a special and complicated case. Their careers had mirrored and intersected with each other’s in so many ways. In their generation, Wilson had clearly been the dominant critical figure, and Cowley, while never competitive with Wilson precisely, was always aware of who stood where in the literary pecking order. Cowley would write about Wilson twice after his death, once for The New Republic in an obituary of sorts, and once for The Saturday Review in 1977, a review of his posthumous Letters on Literature and Politics. Both pieces hit all the right notes, tick off all the pertinent facts, tell all the right stories, deliver all the appropriate superlatives, but they lack one conspicuous quality that Cowley was skilled at summoning when he felt it: affection.
Cowley may have been a bit short of warmth for Edmund Wilson, but the older critic provided him with a good example to follow in the matter of tending to his literary legacy. Wilson was an orderly and assiduous self-curator, and he left a mighty shelf of books behind, the majority of them collections of the essays, reviews, journalism, poems, parodies, and plays that he’d written. Cowley began his own self-curation later in life, but he would make up for lost time in his own assemblage of a substantial shelf of books.
The publishing part of the long retrospective began in 1966 with the Viking publication of The Faulkner-Cowley File, a deft assemblage of letters and interstitial narration that tells the tale of how the Portable Faulkner volume came into the world and the effect it was to have on Faulkner’s career and the resulting friendship between the two men. In 1967 came the publication of the collection Think Back on Us: A Contemporary Chronicle of the 1930s, edited and introduced by the scholar of American literature Henry Dan Piper. Piper had the idea for the book because he needed some kind of sourcebook for college reading on the intellectual, social, and literary history of the thirties, just then coming back into view. Cowley’s work from the decade, almost all of it published in The New Republic and divided into “The Social Record” and “The Literary Record,” filled the bill splendidly. Its publication was well received and proved that Cowley’s work could survive the passage of thirty years. Cowley also deserves credit for allowing Piper to reprint some political pieces from the decade that place his overenthusiasm for the revolutionary cause and his short-sightedness about Stalinist Russia on display—something Wilson was not willing to do. Piper followed up that book in 1970 with a companion volume titled A Many-Windowed House: Collected Essays on American Writers and American Writing. A collection of fifteen critical essays on American writers ranging from Hawthorne, Whitman, and James to Frost, Brooks, Pound, and O’Neill, the book demonstrates Cowley’s gifts as an Americanist.
The collecting of Cowley was taken up by Viking later in the decade, at his suggestion and by his own editorial hand, with the publication of —And I Worked at the Writer’s Trade: Chapters of Literary History, 1918–1978. The book manages to hang together as an episodic sort of survey of the American literary enterprise from the First World War to the present. The book’s opening essay, “ ‘And Jesse Begat…’: A Note on Literary Generations,” is Cowley’s fullest explanation of his core idée fixe about the generational progression of American literature.
The Times Book Review gave it a splashy send-off, and an equally long and prominent interview with George Plimpton ran in the same issue. By this point, Malcolm Cowley was in certain circles regarded as a national literary treasure and attention was being paid. Seven years later, Viking would publish a similar volume, The Flower and the Leaf, compiled and introduced by Donald Faulkner, filled with essays and reviews and reminiscences.
Cowley’s 1973 book A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation might have been published as another collection, consisting as it does, for the most part, of previously published work. But he applied himself with great skill to creating a seamless reading experience, a warm and often magical book. The idea for the book dated back to the early fifties, with the same cast of Lost Generation subjects, save Hart Crane: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Cummings, Wilder, Wolfe, and Dos Passos. Cowley’s introduction, “The Other War,” about the effect the experience of the Great War had on his generation, is arguably the most moving piece of writing he ever did.
The reviewers greeted the book rapturously. William Styron put it eloquently in the Times Book Review: “It is unthinkable that this beautiful, honest book will not be read as an indispensable companion piece to the work of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Wolfe, and all the rest, as long as they are read and have bearing upon men’s common experience. Ave atque vale!” Vincent Sheean, a distinguished member of Cowley’s generation himself, asked, “How many generations ever had a true chronicler at the deep heart’s core?” Even Cowley’s old critical adversary Clifton Fadiman wrote him an enthusiastic letter of praise. It is a book that deserves rediscovery.
One of the dubious honors that attend literary longevity is that the survivor can become regarded as something like a vending machine of anecdotes and facts about the distinguished departed by biographers, scholars, graduate students, and the merely curious and intrusive. Cowley took on this burden diligently and for the most part with good humor, with the occasional complaint registered. In 1978 he wrote to Allen Tate, “People come round here with tape recorders to tap, tap, tape my memories as if I were a National Scholarly Resource. The National Endowment for the Humanities ought to provide me with a secretary.”
The interviewing had actually begun a little ominously in 1955 when a Yale graduate student in American Studies by the name of Thomas Kennerly Wolfe questioned him, along with James T. Farrell and Archibald MacLeish, for his PhD thesis titled “The League of American Writers: Communist Organizational Activity Among American Writers, 1929–1942.” We know that author today as the swashbuckling, white-suited New Journalist Tom Wolfe. The thesis of his thesis is that the League was a front organization of the Communist Party, whose aim it was to manipulate the system of status and other career rewards to keep the literati in line and inside the big ideological tent that was the People’s Front. He was not wrong. About the last thing Malcolm Cowley would have wanted to talk about on the record in 1955 was his fellow-traveling past, and his testimony is cautious and quite hedged about.
Wolfe would be succeeded in the next decades by dozens of other interviewers, and Cowley’s cooperation with them, sometimes willing and sometimes weary, is testified to by his prominence in the pages—text, acknowledgments, and indexes—of unnumbered biographies, cultural histories, literary studies, journal articles, and long unread graduate theses. Of particular note is his almost ubiquitous presence in the pages of Daniel Aaron’s classic 1961 history of the literary politics of the thirties, Writers on the Left.
The most painstaking, most halting, and most painful work of Malcolm Cowley’s last decades, however, was really internal: arriving at some sort of self-understanding about his political positions and miscalculations of the thirties. In 1982, he would write with blunt frankness to Kenneth Burke, “God, how blind we were in the 1930s.” The difficult problem he faced was how to say something as straightforward as this in public without being pilloried yet again. “Now I’ll have to face up to my own errors, and that without encouraging the Cold Warriors.” Those two conflicting imperatives lend a note of ambivalence to everything he would write on this subject.
This process began in earnest in 1965 with the publication of an essay suggestively titled “The Sense of Guilt” in The Kenyon Review. This was an essay that was as much about a feeling as it was about actions. It flirted with becoming a confessional, but always pulled back.
Cowley reached an important inflection point in 1968 when he read the historian Robert Conquest’s definitive history of Stalin’s murderous purges, The Great Terror, and wrote an almost anguished review of it for The Washington Post Book World. He concedes that Conquest proves beyond any doubt that Stalin’s trials were rigged and that their victims were innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted and executed. This forces him to reflect on his own past and that of the other “men of good will” in that crucial period. He concludes that, even if their influence on Stalin would have been negligible, “most of us did nothing” and their “silence…now seems close to complicity.” In his review, he accuses himself and his fellow liberals in the period of a middle-class naivete about the ways of tyranny, and offers a personal confession “to what might be called my astute gullibility.” “Astute,” he means, in his careful reading of the trial record, but “gullible in the sense that I missed the telltale signs of fraud and coercion.” This was an apology, but with an excuse and an odd adjective attached.
