The Insider, page 7
Flag of our country, strong and true
The sky is rosy with your bars;
But as they fade it turns to blue
And radiant with your stars.
And as I watch the setting sun
I call to God apart,
“Give me the soul of Washington,
And give me Lincoln’s heart!”
Cowley earned his sole gentleman’s C for his military training, and by the time he returned to Cambridge the government had decided that all able-bodied college students were to serve in the military. So instead of resuming his studies, Cowley reported to Harvard’s Student Army Training Corps and then applied to the Field Artillery Officers’ Training School at Camp Taylor in Kentucky and was accepted. He frolicked for a week in New York with his friends before reporting for duty. En route to Camp Taylor he’d had the encouraging news that Amy Lowell had sold three of his poems to Harriet Monroe at Poetry—“Moonrise,” “Barn Dance,” and “Danny”—for twenty dollars for the bunch. They were all published in the November 1919 issue, the first appearance of Cowley’s poetry in an independent, nonstudent literary magazine, a triumph for an undergraduate writer.
Cowley was at Camp Taylor when the armistice ending the war was signed on November 11, 1918. Released from his service, but still awaiting formal demobilization, he would spend the next ten months in New York at the intersection of Grub Street and Bohemia, before returning to Harvard for a final semester. He would have to make his financially pinched way as a beginning writer and would live the sort of freewheeling, artistically adventurous style of life that would disturb his parents and tarnish his profile once back in staid Cambridge.
In calling this period in his life and that of so many people of his age and inclinations “the Long Furlough,” Cowley implied that the end of the war had released them from a life of danger and responsibility into one full of leisure but without clear direction. The war had left them “with a vast unconcern for the future and an enormous appetite for pleasure.” Naturally, many of them had gravitated to the southern reaches of New York, “the homeland of the uprooted,” as he put it. They came to Greenwich Village, he remembered, less for the Bohemian style of life and thought than because the lodgings were cheap and it was a convenient place to launch their careers. He describes his life at the time as a rinse-and-repeat cycle of waking up in soiled sheets in a borrowed apartment and turning the fifty cents borrowed the night before into breakfast for two; borrowing another half buck for a cheap bottle of sherry for that next night’s revels; a revolving menu of rides on the Staten Island Ferry, dances at Webster Hall, talkative poker games, boozy times at the Hell Hole, and impromptu parties.
Cowley describes what he calls the doctrine of the Greenwich Villagers as almost a consciously formulated program centered on freedom of thought and expression, unfettered sexual behavior, gender equality, abandonment of middle-class notions of guilt and shame, and the virtue of constantly moving on. He remembers that time as a kind of war between these principles and the bourgeois values espoused by The Saturday Evening Post: “Industry, foresight, thrift and personal initiative.” The utterance of any one of those words would have gotten you tossed out of the Hell Hole.
In fact the culture war going on in the United States was more widespread and viciously repressive even than Cowley’s words suggest. The historian David Brion Davis has written, “The years from 1917 to 1921 are probably unmatched in American history for popular hysteria, xenophobia, and paranoid suspicion.” The declaration of war against Germany and the successful Bolshevik revolution had unleashed a flood of jingoism and fear and hatred of the other, which caused ambient waves of hostility toward just about anyone who did not toe the all-American line. The passage of the Espionage Act in 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 gave the government almost unlimited powers to pursue, silence, and jail anyone who spoke or wrote against the war or other current policies. The beloved Socialist leader Eugene Debs, who’d received 6 percent of the popular vote in the 1912 presidential election, was arrested and then convicted of sedition in 1918 and sentenced to a ten-year term in prison. The postmaster general had virtual carte blanche to refuse to send publications he deemed offensive through the mails and he used it against magazines nationwide, especially those of a pacifist or leftist persuasion. The Palmer Raids of 1919 rounded up suspected anarchists and Bolshevists nationwide and deported them with scant regard for due process and their civil rights.
A considerable part of this repression and persecution was directed at the freethinking and -living Greenwich Villagers. So when Cowley in Exile’s Return notes that the Village he’d moved to was rife with “former people”—former anarchists, former Socialists, former Wobblies, former pacifists and conscientious objectors, former editors and writers for political magazines like the fabled and now former Masses—now engaged in new, apolitical, more Bohemian activities, he is registering a cultural defeat that reached far outside the borders of the Village. But Greenwich Village, he would note, turned that defeat into a kind of victory when, with the help of the burgeoning mass media, its habits and styles and preoccupations—short hair and smoking for women, gin-fueled cocktail parties, self-conscious Freudian chatter about neuroses and the evils of sexual repression, a loosening of earlier standards of decorum and propriety in favor of an Oh-you-kid naughtiness—infected middle-class America.
Malcolm Cowley’s stance that he was never a fully committed citizen of Bohemia but really just visiting is undercut by the fact that he would fall in love, move in with, and then marry one of the most thoroughly liberated spirits inhabiting the Village. The artist Marguerite Frances Baird, known as Peggy, had previously been married to the one-legged poet Orrick Johns. One biographer of Dorothy Day calls Peggy “a real-life version of Christopher Isherwood’s Sally Bowles.” Attractive and stylish—some say she was the first woman in the Village to bob her hair—she was sexually free-ranging and had had many affairs, including a fling with Eugene O’Neill. Dorothy Day had been introduced to Peggy by her probable lover Mike Gold and they became close friends and would remain so for the rest of their lives. Peggy, who regarded sex as “a barrier to be broken down” and affairs as “incidents in an erotic education,” was bemused by Day’s relative sexual reticence.
A committed suffragette in the years leading up to the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, Peggy spent ten days in a Washington, DC, jail in 1917 for demonstrating on behalf of women’s right to vote. Undeterred, she convinced Dorothy Day to accompany her and several other women on the train to DC to picket the White House. On November 10, some forty women walked through Lafayette Park and were greeted by a jeering crowd and the police, who herded them into paddy wagons. Booked and then released with a warning, they came back again the next day to demonstrate, and this time an exasperated judge sentenced them to serve their terms at an infamous prison, the Occoquan Workhouse, just outside the city limits, which lived up to its reputation for brutal treatment. In protest the women went on a hunger strike; some of them were actually force-fed by tube. After ten days the strike was called off and the women were transferred back to a city jail and then freed, the government having realized that the spectacle of “respectable” middle-class women being treated so harshly was a bad look. Peggy Baird was no mere Village artiste; she was someone with the courage to stand up for her convictions.
Not long after this, Peggy Baird met Malcolm Cowley at a Christmas party at the Lights’ apartment. The attraction was swift and strong and by January 1919 they had become lovers and were soon, in Cowley’s old-fashioned words, living in sin in an apartment at 16 Christopher Street, “a dreadful, dreadful, dark hole.” On the surface this instant romance seems a bit unlikely. Baird had eight years on Cowley, was disorderly in her living habits where Cowley was neat and punctilious, artistic rather than intellectual, spontaneous, and always up for a boozy gathering or an all-night poker game while he would be toiling on his writing at his neatly arranged workspace off in a corner. It is a fair guess that their original connection had a strong erotic component to it; Baird had considerably more sexual experience than Cowley, but as the photos from that time show, he was a handsome young man with a brushed mustache and full head of hair. On top of that, he had the attractive aura of someone with talent and the innate ambition to make the most of it.
Peggy’s openhearted Bohemian inclusiveness and acceptance helped to sand down some of the snobberies Cowley had picked up in his time at Harvard. She also helped to launch him on his career as a freelance reviewer. A former lover of hers had been Clarence Britten, the literary editor of The Dial, one of the most venerable of the country’s little magazines. It had been founded in 1840 as an outlet for the writing of the New England Transcendentalists and had undergone various changes of editorial direction since then. At this time it was largely political in focus. Cowley visited Britten in his office and the editor pushed half a dozen novels across his desk, with the instruction “Try reviewing these, but don’t give them more than a hundred words apiece.” The pay would be a dollar each if accepted. Cowley carried the books to a bench in Union Square and spent some hours hastily making notes for the reviews he would bang out the next day. He then took the review copies to a secondhand bookstore on Fourth Avenue and sold them for thirty-five cents each; that $2.10 bought some Bull Durham tobacco for hand-rolled cigarettes and bread, butter, and lamb chops for the evening meal.
In this way Malcolm Cowley first climbed onto the hamster wheel of reviewing. Soon he would make his way to other offices in town, a notebook of clippings under his arm. One of those offices was that of Francis Hackett, the literary editor of The New Republic, “a big, red-faced Irishman looking like Jupiter in pince-nez glasses.” He was sitting at a scarred and book-piled desk that would be Cowley’s desk ten years later. “Miss Updike, perhaps you can find a book for this young man,” he instructed his assistant. Miss Updike picked out a novel titled Victorious by Reginald Wright Kauffman and handed it over “as if she were pouring a saucer of milk for a starved kitten.” Cowley would write a five-hundred-word review for the then-lordly sum of ten dollars; it was a hastily produced novel of the Great War that, based on his own experiences, he found wanting. This was the first of hundreds of such reviews and essays that he would write for the magazine. He would always remember the vulnerable and strapped young man he was in 1919 when he was in Hackett’s position in the thirties and offer many kindnesses to his young successors who would come calling, clip book in hand. In the early thirties Miss Updike would become his own assistant and Cowley would give reviewing work to Francis Hackett.
The wages of book reviewing are paltry and inevitably lead to a life of precarity and greatly reduced caloric intake. He had to pawn his solid gold Phi Beta Kappa key for three dollars, “the price of three good dinners in 1920.” He began to produce reviews with great efficiency and his turnaround time was impressive. Robert Morss Lovett, who would later share the masthead of The New Republic with him, remembers that Cowley would appear at The Dial as soon as it opened to pick up three books. By noon those reviews were handed in, his check drawn and cashed, and the review copies sold. One of the ways he would augment his income was to find work as an extra in O’Neill productions at the Provincetown Players: “I was paid ten dollars a week to be a black ghost in The Emperor Jones and a white ghost in a revival of Where the Cross Is Made; I never aspired to play the part of any living person.” When he caught the deadly influenza that was killing millions of people across the globe, he came perilously close to becoming a real ghost himself. Luckily his friend Lionel Moises, a colorful journalist for the New York Journal and a lover of Dorothy Day’s, dropped by his apartment and found Cowley in a delirious state. “He cradled me in his arms as if I were a rag doll and carried me to the hospital, just like a Pieta,” in all probability saving his life. By this point Cowley, a six footer, was down to 130 pounds.
One day, having skipped breakfast, he was crossing Sheridan Square when he lost consciousness for a brief moment and fell onto the sidewalk. Shaken, he picked himself up and went into a nearby lunch counter and spent his last dime on a cup of coffee and a stale bun. Sitting there, the counterman impatiently asking “Anything else?” he realized the unsustainability of this way of life. He unfurled the want ad section of the newspapers and found some salaried work, first as a theater critic for a giveaway weekly and then as a copy editor and proofreader for Iron Age, an industrial catalogue. This gig paid a decent salary for the time, $42.50 a week, and had the added benefit of giving him his first immersion in the protocols of typesetting and printing, a great deal more complex and literally hands-on process in those days. His intimate sense of the processes and realities undergirding the production of printed matter would inform his future criticism and the essays he would produce about the book trade.
Cowley and Baird were now living in a run-down tenement at 107 Bedford Street whose boarders constituted a full menage of Village types—artists, writers, leftists. They once had to spring their landlady from jail for passing a bad check, which would have made being late with the rent on occasion less stressful. He wrote in his memoir Exile’s Return, “Some drizzly morning late in April you woke up to find yourself married (and your wife, perhaps, suffering from a dry cough that threatened consumption).” In fact, Malcolm Cowley, in the parlance of the time, made an honest woman of Peggy Baird on August 12, 1919, and she did suffer, then and later, recurrent bouts of ill health from various ailments.
However, marriage and monogamy were by no means synonymous in those circles. Peggy and Cowley devised a modus vivendi to accommodate her spontaneity and his disciplined neatness and work ethic, but there would be affairs. On one occasion, when they’d been married less than a year, this led to the unfortunate discovery that they both had contracted syphilis. In those days before antibiotics, the disease could eventually lead to madness and death, so they both had to subject themselves to a most unpleasant course of treatment with the new wonder drug Salvarsan over six months. The bitterness this engendered can be easily imagined and it infuses “Free Clinic,” a poem Cowley would soon publish that captures the grim atmosphere of the place where he and Peggy would have to report for their weekly injections. The marriage survived this experience and would last a sometimes rocky twelve years, but it was never the same after it.
Cowley delayed telling his parents about his marriage when he visited Belsano shortly thereafter. When he did, they both expressed their vehement disapproval in different ways; his mother “burst into sudden hysteria, collapsed on the floor, tore at her breasts,” while his father fumed in his calmer fashion. Peggy Cowley was everything his mother did not want in a daughter-in-law: an older, already divorced “New Woman” of doubtful morals and indifferent domestic habits, and irreligious. This was flagrantly not the reason they were sending their only son to Harvard, and no further financial support would be offered on that front. For the balance of their marriage, Cowley and Peggy would see his parents for only short visits to Belsano.
Cowley probably could have graduated from Harvard right then with a wartime diploma, but he was determined to complete his course of study and earn a full academic degree for reasons of ego and economics. His sense of self-worth was still closely tied to his academic prowess and he wanted Harvard’s prestigious stamp of full approval. Peggy stayed back in New York and then lived with Conrad Aiken in Yarmouth on the Cape for two months, where her short hair (a sign of cultural radicalism then) and flexible morality upset the neighbors, while Cowley returned to Cambridge in October to complete his degree in one grueling semester, taking on a load of six courses and putting aside his own writing while he buckled down. Money as ever was a problem, especially with no help from home, but he squeaked by with a scholarship of two hundred dollars from the Harvard Club of Western Pennsylvania and a fifty-dollar loan from the college.
Harvard, however, did not return Cowley’s regard in his final semester. His fellow students had gotten wind of his unconventional life among the freethinkers of the Village and his marriage to one of them, and they disapproved. Painfully, his friend S. Foster Damon in particular disliked Peggy, who’d moved in with him by Christmas, and their friendship cooled. In addition, he’d written an editorial in the November 1918 issue of the Advocate mocking the wartime hysteria in Congress and elsewhere over the supposed threat of socialism, which came off as suspiciously Bolshevist at Harvard. This would be the first time a political opinion would subject Malcolm Cowley to opprobrium, and not the last.
He would remember the impact of this snobbery and conservative prejudice in 1967 in a letter to Jacob Davis. He’d been a big literary man on campus as a result of his editorship of the Advocate, “invited to the Lampoon punches and the Crimson punches and various other affairs that were actually amusing.” But, he said, “When I came back to college in the fall of 1919, I was treated as if I had smallpox.” On the strength of his Advocate editorship he’d been admitted to the Signet literary society, a staid and prep-school-dominated group. It offered the advantage of an affordable meal plan, but it was there that the snobbery manifested itself most strongly. “When I went to the Signet to eat because I had no money and could sign chits there, ice formed in the fireplace.” Cowley concludes, “I had a complete view of the Harvard social system, going up and coming down. But it didn’t leave me with a deep love for the class of 1919.” (He would avoid class reunions for most of his life.) He summed up his Harvard experience this way: “I went through Harvard on scholarships, and at Harvard I was almost but not completely an outsider; if I had been a complete outsider I should have suffered fewer humiliations.”
