The Man Who Helped Make the American Literary Canon

In the nineteen-thirties and forties, young publication critics connected the marque utilized to assemblage extracurricular the bureau of Malcolm Cowley, the literate exertion of The New Republic, successful the hopes of his attention. Cowley—who had established himself arsenic the historiographer of the Lost Generation par excellence with “Exile’s Return,” a memoir of surviving successful France alongside the not-yet-famous writers Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, among others—was undeniably 1 of the fewer men successful American letters who defined the sensation of the speechmaking public. He could assistance a struggling writer support the lights on, or, adjacent better, anoint them. The bittersweet young literate men and women helium plucked from the assemblage were frankincense invited into the ranks of the country’s tastemakers.

Determining what the federation did and did not work was the done enactment of Cowley’s career. He was a large discoverer and nurturer of talent: Jack Kerouac, John Cheever, and Ken Kesey were among the writers helium championed, and, of the critics helium commissioned to nutrient reviews astatine The New Republic, many—including Mary McCarthy, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, and Muriel Rukeyser—would spell connected to person storied careers. By midlife, Cowley was esteemed arsenic an exertion and essayist, a nimble translator of modern French literature, and a creative-writing teacher astatine Stanford. He was besides a canny manufacture operator—a antheral who knew however to play the antithetic parts of the publishing instrumentality against 1 different successful the interests of enactment helium wanted to promote. His astir cited enactment of heroism whitethorn person been his effort to revitalize the vocation of William Faulkner, who had slipped into obscurity aft the Second World War, by publishing an influential variation of his enactment portion astatine Viking Press, but helium besides kept fires lit for Walt Whitman, Nathanael West, Sherwood Anderson, and his adjacent person Hart Crane. (Broom, a short-lived mag that Cowley helped edit, published Crane alongside the likes of Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens.)

In a 1963 contented of Esquire, a tart nonfiction called “The Structure of the Literary Establishment” recovered Cowley to beryllium adjacent “The Hot Center” of power. Gerald Howard’s caller biography, “The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature” (Penguin Press), zooms successful connected Cowley’s spot astatine that center, tracing his engagement with “just astir everything and everybody of literate consequence” during what we present telephone the American century. Howard does much than item the ways successful which—through the proposal of residency recipients, the work of essays and books, the mentoring of students, oregon the revival of out-of-print works—Cowley shaped idiosyncratic literate careers. Rather, arsenic Howard, a erstwhile publication exertion himself, sees it, Cowley’s agitation for the origin of his country’s lit besides helped to vault what was erstwhile seen arsenic a minor, determination contented into a world-historical one. Cowley’s beingness communicative demonstrates not conscionable however reputations are built (and destroyed) but besides however “one determined actor” managed to crook an full canon “to his tastes and convictions.”

When Cowley was born, astatine the extremity of the nineteenth century, American lit was wide considered a sideshow act. Mark Twain whitethorn person been 1 of the century’s astir celebrated men, but the prevailing sentiment was nevertheless to deem his country’s lit “provincial, backward, lacking successful creator polish oregon value,” Howard writes. Anxiety surrounding the nation’s taste marginality was widespread. Surveying the past period oregon 2 of American literate output, 1 saw a fragmented corpus that reflected a federation much easy understood portion by portion than arsenic a whole.

In April, 1917, successful the mediate of his undergraduate studies, astatine Harvard, Cowley sailed to Paris to unpaid successful the warfare effort, pursuing successful the footsteps of his classmates John Dos Passos and E. E. Cummings. Working arsenic a operator connected the front, helium was somewhat insulated from the horrors of the trench, but helium witnessed the carnage a mortar ammunition could inflict. His clip successful France ended successful the fall, and helium was backmost successful the states by November. When helium landed successful New York, helium decided to proceed his “long forlough”—away from schoolhouse and from gentility—in Greenwich Village. From this constituent on, helium would beryllium intimately attached to the taste beingness of downtown bohemia, socializing with the likes of Eugene O’Neill and Dorothy Day. (In 1919, helium returned concisely to Harvard, obtaining his grade the adjacent year.) Some of the astir entertaining scenes of Howard’s biography recount this aggravated period, erstwhile Cowley decided, somewhat unwisely, that the astir nonstop way to power was freelance publication reviewing. He was perpetually broke, and erstwhile helium wasn’t panhandling for reappraisal assignments from editors oregon pawning reappraisal copies (and, successful 1 dire instance, his Phi Beta Kappa ring), helium would occasionally enactment arsenic an other successful an O’Neill play. By his aboriginal twenties, his byline regularly appeared successful well-regarded publications, and portion overmuch of this enactment was humdrum, according to Howard, 1 gets a consciousness from the writers helium engaged with—Katherine Mansfield, Amy Lowell, and Marcel Proust among them—of Cowley arsenic idiosyncratic caught betwixt the magic of European modernism and the earthier American tradition.

From the opening of his nationalist beingness arsenic an intellectual, Cowley would beryllium preoccupied with questions about, arsenic helium enactment it, the “clusters” and “constellations” that separate 1 cohort from another, and however 1 mightiness unite the disparate strands of American lit into an identifiable movement. These concerns would travel to the fore successful an effort helium published successful 1921, astatine twenty-three, soon aft helium won a assistance to prosecute postgraduate studies successful France, wherever galore of his peers had moved to flight a souring nationalist temper and the spectres of Prohibition and the Palmer Raids.