Within the nineteen-thirties and forties, younger ebook critics on the make used to crowd exterior the workplace of Malcolm Cowley, the literary editor of The New Republic, within the hopes of his consideration. Cowley—who had established himself because the historian of the Misplaced Technology par excellence with “Exile’s Return,” a memoir of dwelling in France alongside the not-yet-famous writers Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, amongst others—was undeniably one of many few males in American letters who outlined the style of the studying public. He may assist a struggling author hold the lights on, or, even higher, anoint them. The unhappy younger literary women and men he plucked from the gang had been thus invited into the ranks of the nation’s tastemakers.
Figuring out what the nation did and didn’t learn was the by way of line of Cowley’s profession. He was an important discoverer and nurturer of expertise: Jack Kerouac, John Cheever, and Ken Kesey had been among the many writers he championed, and, of the critics he commissioned to supply evaluations at The New Republic, many—together with 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 up to date French literature, and a creative-writing teacher at Stanford. He was additionally a canny business operator—a person who knew find out how to play the completely different components of the publishing machine in opposition to each other within the pursuits of labor he needed to advertise. His most cited act of heroism could have been his effort to revitalize the profession of William Faulkner, who had slipped into obscurity after the Second World Struggle, by publishing an influential version of his work whereas at Viking Press, however he additionally saved fires lit for Walt Whitman, Nathanael West, Sherwood Anderson, and his shut good friend Hart Crane. (Broom, a short-lived journal that Cowley helped edit, printed Crane alongside the likes of Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens.)
In a 1963 problem of Esquire, a tart article known as “The Construction of the Literary Institution” discovered Cowley to be close to “The Sizzling Heart” of energy. 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 middle, tracing his involvement with “nearly all the pieces and everyone of literary consequence” throughout what we now name the American century. Howard does greater than spotlight the methods wherein—by way of the advice of residency recipients, the publication of essays and books, the mentoring of scholars, or the revival of out-of-print works—Cowley formed particular person literary careers. Moderately, as Howard, a former ebook editor himself, sees it, Cowley’s agitation for the reason for his nation’s literature additionally helped to vault what was as soon as seen as a minor, regional custom right into a world-historical one. Cowley’s life story demonstrates not simply how reputations are constructed (and destroyed) but in addition how “one decided actor” managed to bend a complete canon “to his tastes and convictions.”
When Cowley was born, on the finish of the nineteenth century, American literature was broadly thought of a sideshow act. Mark Twain could have been one of many century’s most well-known males, however the prevailing sentiment was however to deem his nation’s literature “provincial, backward, missing in creative polish or worth,” Howard writes. Nervousness surrounding the nation’s cultural marginality was widespread. Surveying the final century or two of American literary output, one noticed a fragmented corpus that mirrored a nation extra simply understood area by area than as an entire.
In April, 1917, in the course of his undergraduate research, at Harvard, Cowley sailed to Paris to volunteer within the warfare effort, following within the footsteps of his classmates John Dos Passos and E. E. Cummings. Working as a driver on the entrance, he was considerably insulated from the horrors of the ditch, however he witnessed the carnage a mortar shell may inflict. His time in France ended within the fall, and he was again within the states by November. When he landed in New York, he determined to proceed his “lengthy forlough”—away from faculty and from gentility—in Greenwich Village. From this level on, he could be carefully connected to the cultural lifetime of downtown bohemia, socializing with the likes of Eugene O’Neill and Dorothy Day. (In 1919, he returned briefly to Harvard, acquiring his diploma the subsequent yr.) Among the most entertaining scenes of Howard’s biography recount this intense interval, when Cowley determined, considerably unwisely, that essentially the most direct path to affect was freelance ebook reviewing. He was perpetually broke, and when he wasn’t panhandling for assessment assignments from editors or pawning assessment copies (and, in a single dire occasion, his Phi Beta Kappa ring), he would often work as an additional in an O’Neill play. By his early twenties, his byline recurrently appeared in well-regarded publications, and whereas a lot of this work was humdrum, in accordance with Howard, one will get a way from the writers he engaged with—Katherine Mansfield, Amy Lowell, and Marcel Proust amongst them—of Cowley as somebody caught between the magic of European modernism and the earthier American custom.
From the start of his public life as an mental, Cowley could be preoccupied with questions on, as he put it, the “clusters” and “constellations” that distinguish one cohort from one other, and the way one would possibly unite the disparate strands of American literature into an identifiable motion. These issues would come to the fore in an essay he printed in 1921, at twenty-three, shortly after he gained a scholarship to pursue graduate research in France, the place lots of his friends had moved to flee a souring nationwide temper and the spectres of Prohibition and the Palmer Raids.
