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Malcolm Cowley's Path to William Faulkner
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
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In October 1938, Edmund Wilson advised Malcolm Cowley to get out of politics, both “revolutionary and literary alike… because what you're really practicing is not politics but literature…. ” Within two years, in the wake of the Hitler—Stalin pact and war, Cowley had withdrawn from radical politics. In early 1940, politically confused and dispirited, he wrote to Wilson:
I am left standing pretty much alone, in the air, unsupported, a situation that is much more uncomfortable for me than it would be for you. Since my normal instinct is toward cooperation. For the moment I want to get out of every God damned thing.
Cowley publicly announced his resignation from the League of American Writers in August 1940. He had helped to create the League in 1935 and had once been one of its officers. Deciding to avoid all further public political debates, he retreated to his Connecticut farmhouse. “Anyone who was as close to the radical movement as I was is going to be deeply shaken by breaking connection with it,” he explained to his close friend Kenneth Burke. “At that point the religious metaphor is absolutely accurate. You leave a church, and like a defrocked priest you can't think about anything else for a while.”
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References
1 Edmund Wilson to Malcolm Cowley, 20 10 1938 from Edmund Wilson: Letters On Literature and Politics, 1912–1972, ed. Wilson, Elena (New York, 1977), p. 310Google Scholar. Cowley, Malcolm, And I Worked At The Writer's Trade: Chapters of Literary History, 1918–1978 (New York, 1978), p. 155Google Scholar.
2 Malcolm Cowley to Kenneth Burke, 17 December 1940 quoted in Shi, David E., Matthew Josephson, Bourgeois Bohemian (New Haven, 1981), p. 207Google Scholar. (See also note 9, below.)
3 Cowley, , And I Worked, p. 158Google Scholar. For long quotes from his letter of resignation, see “In Memoriam,” New Republic, 103 (12 08 1940), 219–220Google Scholar and the League's response and Cowley, 's rejoinder, New Republic 103 (26 08 1940), 279–80Google Scholar. For a revisionist analysis of left-wing cultural politics in the 1930s, see Schwartz, Lawrence H., Marxism and Culture: The CPUSA and Aesthetics in the 1930's (Port Washington, N.Y., 1980)Google Scholar.
Cowley never joined the Communist Party, though he did register to vote as a Communist His political affiliations during the 1930s are outlined in detail in letters to Robert Heilman, English Department, University of Washington: 8 November 1948 and 21 November 1949. (These letters are in the Malcolm Cowley Papers at The Newberry Library. Cowley had been invited to teach at the University and wanted Heilman to know of his past political background.)
4 New Republic, 112 (22 01 1945), 121Google Scholar.
5 ibid., p. 122.
6 New Republic, 112 (02 5, 1945), 180Google Scholar.
7 ibid.
8 Cowley, , “Spender, Auden and After,” New Republic, 107 (5 10 1942), 419Google Scholar. See also Cowley, , “Success Story: 1930–39,” New Republic, 107 (6 07 1942), 25–26Google Scholar; Cowley, , “Reading In Wartime,” New Republic, 107 (14 09 1942), 361Google Scholar; and Cowley to Stanley P. Young, 11 April 1944 (Cowley Papers).
9 For a long discussion of his break with the radical movement and his future literary plans, see Cowley to Burke, 17 December 1940 (Cowley Papers). For a recent assessment of Cowley's analysis of his generation, see Simpson, Lewis P., “Malcolm Cowley and The American Writer,” Sewanee Review, 84 (Spring 1976), 221–247Google Scholar — a review of Cowley, 's A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation (1973)Google Scholar.
10 For a succinct analysis of Cowley's view of the importance of myth and psychology, see Cowley to Burke, 9 December 1948 (Cowley Papers).
11 “Not Men: A Natural History of American Naturalism,” Kenyon Review, 9 (Summer 1947), 431Google Scholar.
12 ibid., p. 429.
13 ibid., p. 428 and pp. 434–35-
14 New Republic, 102 (15 04 1940), 510Google Scholar.
15 New Republic, 106 (29 06 1942), 900Google Scholar. Cowley was referring to his New Republic review of Absalom, Absaloml (4 November 1936). He had also reviewed Pylon and The Wild Palms, seeing Faulkner at the time as a Southern aristocrat and a narrow regionalist whose reactionary politics and difficult style placed him in the second rank of writers.
16 Cowley, , The Faulkner-Cowley File: Letters and Memories, 1944–1962 (New York, 1966), p. 6Google Scholar. Cowley's first letter of inquiry to Faulkner is not extant; it was probably written in February 1944. Clearly, The Portable Faulkner (1946) was crucial to the novelist's post-war revival and its genesis is, in large part but not completely, described in The Faulkner-Cowley File.
In January 1944, Cowley had discussed Faulkner's reputation with Max Perkins while researching a New Yorker profile on the famous Scribners editor. Perkins told Cowley that the novelist had no publishing future despite his extraordinary talent:
My only fear about him is that he has fallen into a certain position which is not nearly as high as it should be, and once that happens to a writer, it is extremely difficult to change the public's opinion. Anyone would be proud to publish him, but I would only be afraid that we could not do better than his present publishers to satisfy him. [Quoted in Berg, A. Scott, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (New York, 1978), p. 530Google Scholar.]
17 Cowley to Stanley P. Young, 11 April 1944 and Young to Cowley, 17 April 1944 (Cowley Papers). The contract stipulated that Cowley had to devote his full-time efforts to research and writing; so after fifteen years with the New Republic, he resigned as of 4 June 1944. He was permitted to free-lance but had to pay back to the foundation 20% of those fees. See Cowley to Mary Mellon, 3 June 1944 (Cowley Papers). For a statement of his planned Faulkner study, see Cowley to Mary Mellon, 18 August 1944 (Cowley Papers).
18 The New York Times Book Review (29 October 1944), 4. For Smith's acceptance of the Faulkner essay, see Smith to Cowley, n.d. [probably early August] and 25 August 1944 (Cowley Papers). Smith was one of Faulkner's early publishers and one of the novelist's closest personal friends; it is not surprising that he readily accepted Cowley's essay.
19 The New York Times Book Review, 4.
20 The Faulkner-Cowley File, pp. 14–19 (Faulkner's letter is dated November 1944, pp. 14–17).
21 The Saturday Review Of Literature, 28 (14 April 1945), 13.
22 ibid., pp. 14 and 16.
23 Tate was giving Cowley several months advance notice since the contest was not to be announced publicly until April 1945; Tate also told Cowley that his chances of winning the contest were excellent. See Tate to Cowley, 6 December 1944, 11 December 1944, and 13 January 1945 (Cowley Papers).
24 Cowley did make minor changes in this essay to reflect this criticism but the influence of Tate and Gordon is more clearly seen in the essay that became the introduction to the Portable. See several letters not dated, (probably 1944 or early 1945), from Gordon to Cowley. See also Tate to Cowley, 9 February, 7 March, 11 April, and 7 May 1945 (Cowley Papers). For earlier discussions about art, see Tate to Cowley, 9 May 1934, 12 December 1934, 17 December 1934, and 26 April 1936 (Cowley Papers).
25 As the prize winning essay in the Prentice-Hall/Sewanee Review contest, it was also published in Tate, Allen, ed., A Southern Vanguard (New York, 1947)Google Scholar; quotation from p. 27.
26 ibid., p. 17.
27 The Faulkner-Cowley File, p. 27.
28 ibid., p. 62 and pp. 20–75. There is yet another essay based on this research on Faulkner, , “An Introduction to William Faulkner,” in Aldridge, John, ed., Critiques and Essays on Modern Fiction 1920–1951 (New York, 1952), pp. 427–446Google Scholar. For an explanation of the publishing history of the essay and its importance in Cowley's rediscovery of Faulkner, see Cowley to Aldridge, 28 November 1950 (Cowley Papers).
29 Gordon, Caroline, “Mr. Faulkner's Southern Saga,” The New York Times Book Review, (5 05 1946), 1Google Scholar. For Cowley's commentary about the early reviews and criticism of the Portable, see The Faulkner-Cowley File, pp. 92–95. Also Robert N. Linscott, a senior editor at Random House, had read Cowley's The New York Times Book Review essay and liked it but told Cowley that with the wartime paper shortage and Faulkner's small audience there was no immediate prospect of re-issuing the out-of-print novels. See Linscott to Cowley, 31 October and 8 November 1944 (Cowley Papers).
30 Warren, Robert Penn, “William Faulkner,” in Hoffman, F. J. and Vickery, Olga, eds., William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism (New York, 1960), p. 112Google Scholar (originally published in the New Republic (12 and 26 August 1946)). Warren had been following and applauding Cowley's work on Faulkner. See Warren to Cowley, 2 March 1945, 29 August 1945, and 2 May 1946 (Cowley Papers) — the last written after he had read the Portable. Also Warren had asked Cowley's help in preparing a special issue of Kenyon Review on Faulkner to appear in the fall of 1948. See Warren to Cowley, 18 July 1946 (Cowley Papers).
31 For example, in 1945, he was commissioned to do two more chapters in Literary History of the United States (making a total of three chapters) and in 1949, he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Also by the end of the decade he was receiving invitations to teach and lecture at major American universities, was hired by Harold Guinzburg, president of Viking Press, as an advisory editor at a salary of $300 per month, and was receiving lucrative assignments from The New Yorker and Life. Cowley had palpable proof of his new stature within the literary establishment
32 On anti-Stalinism, Trotskyism, and art for art's sake, see Irving Howe, , “The New York Intellectuals: A Chronicle and a Critique,” Commentary (10 1968), 29–51Google Scholar; Barrett, William, The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (New York, 1982)Google Scholar; and Cooney, Terry A., “Cosmopolitan Values and the Identification of Reaction: Partisan Review in the 1930's,” The Journal of American History, 68 (12 1981), 580–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.