The Man Who Helped Make the American Literary Canon
In the nineteen-thirties and forties, young book critics on the make used to crowd outside the office of Malcolm Cowley, the literary editor of The New Republic, in the hopes of his attention. Cowley—who had established himself as the historian of the Lost Generation par excellence with “Exile’s Return,” a memoir of living in France alongside the not-yet-famous writers Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, among others—was undeniably one of the few men in American letters who defined the taste of the reading public. He could help a struggling writer keep the lights on, or, even better, anoint them. The sad young literary men and women he plucked from the crowd were thus invited into the ranks of the country’s tastemakers.
Determining what the nation did and did not read was the through line of Cowley’s career. He was a great discoverer and nurturer of talent: Jack Kerouac, John Cheever, and Ken Kesey were among the writers he championed, and, of the critics he commissioned to produce reviews at The New Republic, many—including Mary McCarthy, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, and Muriel Rukeyser—would go on to have storied careers. By midlife, Cowley was esteemed as an editor and essayist, a nimble translator of contemporary French literature, and a creative-writing instructor at Stanford. He was also a canny industry operator—a man who knew how to play the different parts of the publishing machine against one another in the interests of work he wanted to promote. His most cited act of heroism may have been his effort to revitalize the career of William Faulkner, who had slipped into obscurity after the Second World War, by publishing an influential edition of his work while at Viking Press, but he also kept fires lit for Walt Whitman, Nathanael West, Sherwood Anderson, and his close friend Hart Crane. (Broom, a short-lived magazine that Cowley helped edit, published Crane alongside the likes of Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens.)
In a 1963 issue of Esquire, a tart article called “The Structure of the Literary Establishment” found Cowley to be near “The Hot Center” of power. Gerald Howard’s new biography, “The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature” (Penguin Press), zooms in on Cowley’s place at that center, tracing his involvement with “just about everything and everybody of literary consequence” during what we now call the American century. Howard does more than highlight the ways in which—through the recommendation of residency recipients, the publication of essays and books, the mentoring of students, or the revival of out-of-print works—Cowley shaped individual literary careers. Rather, as Howard, a former book editor himself, sees it, Cowley’s agitation for the cause of his country’s literature also helped to vault what was once seen as a minor, regional tradition into a world-historical one. Cowley’s life story demonstrates not just how reputations are built (and destroyed) but also how “one determined actor” managed to bend an entire canon “to his tastes and convictions.”
When Cowley was born, at the end of the nineteenth century, American literature was widely considered a sideshow act. Mark Twain may have been one of the century’s most famous men, but the prevailing sentiment was nevertheless to deem his country’s literature “provincial, backward, lacking in artistic polish or value,” Howard writes. Anxiety surrounding the nation’s cultural marginality was widespread. Surveying the last century or two of American literary output, one saw a fragmented corpus that reflected a nation more easily understood region by region than as a whole.
In April, 1917, in the middle of his undergraduate studies, at Harvard, Cowley sailed to Paris to volunteer in the war effort, following in the footsteps of his classmates John Dos Passos and E. E. Cummings. Working as a driver on the front, he was somewhat insulated from the horrors of the trench, but he witnessed the carnage a mortar shell could inflict. His time in France ended in the fall, and he was back in the states by November. When he landed in New York, he decided to continue his “long forlough”—away from school and from gentility—in Greenwich Village. From this point on, he would be closely attached to the cultural life of downtown bohemia, socializing with the likes of Eugene O’Neill and Dorothy Day. (In 1919, he returned briefly to Harvard, obtaining his degree the next year.) Some of the most entertaining scenes of Howard’s biography recount this intense period, when Cowley decided, somewhat unwisely, that the most direct path to influence was freelance book reviewing. He was perpetually broke, and when he wasn’t panhandling for review assignments from editors or pawning review copies (and, in one dire instance, his Phi Beta Kappa ring), he would occasionally work as an extra in an O’Neill play. By his early twenties, his byline regularly appeared in well-regarded publications, and while much of this work was humdrum, according to Howard, one gets a sense from the writers he engaged with—Katherine Mansfield, Amy Lowell, and Marcel Proust among them—of Cowley as someone caught between the magic of European modernism and the earthier American tradition.
From the beginning of his public life as an intellectual, Cowley would be preoccupied with questions about, as he put it, the “clusters” and “constellations” that distinguish one cohort from another, and how one might unite the disparate strands of American literature into an identifiable movement. These concerns would come to the fore in an essay he published in 1921, at twenty-three, shortly after he won a scholarship to pursue graduate studies in France, where many of his peers had moved to escape a souring national mood and the spectres of Prohibition and the Palmer Raids.
