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The American Generational Autobiography: Malcolm Cowley and Michael Rossman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

John Downton Hazlett
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In the prologue to his 1951 revision of Exile's Return, Malcolm Cowley (Figure 1) described the first edition of 1934 as “the story of the lost generation” written “while its adventures were still fresh in my mind.”He then added, “since I had shared in many of the adventures I planned to tell a little of my own story, but only as an illustration of what had happened to others.” In fact, this modest description of his method drastically understates the importance of Cowley's own life in the originalstory. In the first edition, he does combine stretches of narrative about his own life — including chapters on his childhood, high-school and college years, exile in Europe, disillusionment with bohemian life, and political conversion — with a narrative of the generation's coming of age. But even the story ofthe collective self that he means to tell — beginning with their early innocence ina pastoral, Edenic America; continuing through their exile and refuge in the religion of art and the subculture of bohemianism; and ending with their final repatriation and salvation via the political and historical insights of Marxism — is in every important respect simply his own writ large. It is a story in which the personal, individualized “I” of conventional autobiography is transformed into a collective “we.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 16 , October 1991 , pp. 421 - 442
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

NOTES

1. Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (New York: Viking, 1956), p. 10Google Scholar. The 1934 edition (New York: W. W. Norton) was entitled Exile's Return: A Narrative of Ideas.

2. For a discussion of these revisions, see Hazlett, John D., “Conversion, Revisionism, and Revision in Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return,” South Atlantic Quarterly 82(1983): 179–88.Google Scholar

3. Gusdorf';s essay was originally published in Formen der Selbstdarstellung: Analekten zu einer Geschichte des literarischen Selbstportraits, ed. Reichenkron, Günther and Haase, Erich (Duncker and Humblot, 1956)Google Scholar. It has since been translated by Olney, James as “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. Olney, J. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 28–48Google Scholar. One influential theorist following Gusdorf's lead is Weintraub, Karl J., The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).Google Scholar

4. Post-structuralists and more traditional theorists of autobiography, while disagreeing over many aspects of the genre, hold in common the belief that the Romantic individual self is central to it. For a discussion of this issue from the post-structural point of view, see Lang, Candace, “Autobiography in the Aftermath of Romanticism,” Diacritics 12 (Winter 1982): 2–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the linkagebetween autobiography and capitalism, see Doherty, Thomas, “American Autobiography and Ideology,” in The American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Stone, Albert (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1981), pp. 95–108Google Scholar; Ryan, Michael, “Self-Evidence,” Diacritics 10 (1980): 2–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Elbaz, Robert, The Changing Nature of the Self: A Critical Study of the Autobiographic Discourse (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987).Google Scholar

5. An example of the feminist response to theorists such as Gusdorf can be found in Friedman, Susan, “Women's Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice,” in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, ed. Benstock, Shari (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 34–35Google Scholar. For an essay that insists on a generic difference between “autobiography” and works that reconstruct a collective identity, see Sommer, Doris, “‘Not Just a Personal Story’: Women's Testimonios and the Plural Self,” in Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography, ed. Brodski, Bella and Schenck, Celeste (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 107–30Google Scholar. For an example of African-American theory, see Butterfield, Steven, Black Autobiography in America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974).Google Scholar

6. For a list of autobiographical works written by other members of Cowley's peer group, see “Biographical Repertory,” in McAlmon and the Lost Generation: A Self Portrait, ed. Knoll, Robert (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), pp. 367–82Google Scholar. The generational theme is present in many of these memoirs.

7. Rossman, Michael, The Wedding Within the War (New York: Doubleday, 1971), p. 296Google Scholar. My reading of Cowley's book is based on the 1934 edition (New York: Norton). Subsequent references to these works will be given in parentheses in the text.

8. For a complete discussion, see Wohl, Robert, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Mariás, Julián, Generations: a Historical Method, trans. Riley, Harold C. (Mobile: University of Alabama Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Spitzer, Alan, “The Historical Problem of Generations,” American Historical Review 78 (1973): 1359–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jaeger, Hans, “Generations in History: Reflections on a Controversial Concept,” History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 24, no. 3 (1985): 273–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Wohl, , Generation of 1914, pp. 207–8.Google Scholar

10. Bourne, 's generational work is collected in Youth and Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside, 1913)Google Scholar. A semi-autobiographical essay by Bourne that might have served as a model for Exile's Return is “The History of a Literary Radical,” in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915–1919, ed. Resek, Carl (New York:Harper, 1964), pp. 184–97Google Scholar. José Ortega y Gasset's most important generational works were El tema de nuestro tiempo (1923) and En torno a Galileo (1933). Other important generational theorists in Europe during the decade immediately preceding Cowley's book include Pinder, Wilhelm, Kunstgeschichte nach Generationen (1926)Google Scholar, Wechssler, Edward, Die Generationen als Jugendgemeinschaft (1927)Google Scholar and Das Problem der Generationen in der Geistesgeschichte (1929)Google Scholar, Mannheim, Karl, “Das Problem der Generationen” (1928)Google Scholar, and Peterson, Julius, Die Literarischen Generationen (1930).Google Scholar

11. See Bourne, , Youth and Life, pp. 1–53Google Scholar, where this idea is elaborated.

12. This idea is echoed by almost all later generational writers. For example, Joyce Maynard (see note 18) writes in her generational autobiography that the 1960s were “not a time when we could separate our own lives from the outside world” (p. 13).

13. See especially Cowley, , – And I Worked the Writer's Trade: Chapters of Literary History, 1918–1978 (New York: Viking, 1979), pp. 8–20.Google Scholar

14. y Gasset, José Ortega, The Modern Theme, trans. Cleugh, James (London: Daniels, 1931), p. 15Google Scholar. This work was first published in America in 1933 by the same publisher who, one year later, published Cowley's book.

15. Compare, for example, Cowley's description of his college experience on p. 35 with Veblen, 's “The Higher Education” in The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Modern Library, 1934), p. 395Google Scholar; with Brooks, Van Wyck on American education in America's Coming of Age (New York: Dutton, 1915), p. 12Google Scholar; or with Bourne, 's account in “The History of a Literary Radical,” pp. 185–86.Google Scholar

16. Exile's Return (1956), p. 11Google Scholar. Cowley's claim in the revised edition that “he had failed to show [the Crosby chapter's] connection with the rest of the [1934] narrative” (p. 11) is incorrect. If anything, his revised edition, which excises central elements of the Marxist conversion narrative, damaged the narrative structure that justified the account of Crosby's suicide. This damage was compounded by his treatment of new “characters” in the revised version. In the 1934 edition, every character was shown in relation to a single generational identity and plot. In the 1951 revision, he introduces new sections on Pound, Cummings, Dos Passos, and Hart Crane, but he fails to show their relation to the original generational plot, and his treatment of them is consequently merely anecdotal. One explanation for this change is that the 1934 Cowley ignored those writers who did not conform to the narrative of generational identity that he thought would insure a place within the canon for his friends. Pound was an exile, but he did not return, and he certainly did not convert to Marxism. Dos Passos was a “premature” Marxist in the 1920s, and his politics became more conservative after he returned from exile. But the 1951 Cowley was in a different political position: no longer an outsider struggling for admission to the canonical club, he was himself an ex-Marxist member of an elite that guarded the canon. Now that his own group of writers was firmly in place, he could afford to recognize those other white, male authors who had succeeded in gaining admission by some other door.

17. This generation's well-known rebellion against rigid sexual codes rarely manifested itself in self-conscious political stances. For the best study of attitudes among the young during the 1920s, see Fass, Paula S., The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920's (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

18. Works that attempt to define a collective self include Hoffman, Abbie, Revolution for the Hell of It (New York: Dial, 1968)Google Scholar; Kunen, James Simon, The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary (New York: Avon, 1969)Google Scholar; Rader, Dotson, i ain't marchin' anymore (New York: David McKay, 1969)Google Scholar; Mungo, Raymond, Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times with Liberation News Service (Boston: Beacon, 1970)Google Scholar and Total Loss Farm: A Year in the Life (New York: Dutton, 1970)Google Scholar; Rubin, Jerry, Do It! Scenarios for the Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970)Google Scholar; Diamond, Stephen, What the Trees Said: Life on a New Age Farm (New York: Delacorte, 1971)Google Scholar; Rossman, Michael, The Wedding Within the War (New York: Doubleday, 1971)Google Scholar; Rubin, Jerry, We Are Everywhere (New York: Harper and Row, 1971)Google Scholar; Maynard, Joyce, Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties (New York: Avon, 1972)Google Scholar; Rader, Dotson, Blood Dues (New York: Knopf, 1973)Google Scholar; Raskin, Jonah, Out of the Whale: Growing Up in the American Left (New York: Links, 1974)Google Scholar; Rubin, Jerry, Growing (Up) at 37 (New York: M. Evans, 1976)Google Scholar; Rossman, Michael, New Age Blues: On the Politics of Consciousness (New York: Dutton, 1979)Google Scholar; Hampl, Patricia, A Romantic Education (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981)Google Scholar; and Harris, David, Dreams Die Hard: Three Men's Journey Through the Sixties (New York: St. Martin's/Marek, 1982)Google Scholar. Subsequent references to these works will be to these editions.

19. For discussion of the concept of “identity politics,” see Alcoff, Linda, “Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” Signs 13, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 282–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bulkin, Elly, Pratt, Minnie Bruce, and Smith, Barbara, Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (Brooklyn: Long Haul Press, 1984).Google Scholar

20. Rossman, Michael, On Learning and Social Change (New York: Random House)Google Scholar and New Age Blues: On the Politics of Consciousness (New York: Dutton).

21. The Statement's approach caused a rift with SDS's parent organization, the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), which represented an older generation of leftists. The best general discussion of this break can be found in Miller, James, “Democracy Is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987)Google Scholar. Miller's book also contains the complete text of The Port Huron Statement in an appendix (pp. 329–74). For the LID point of view, see Harrington, Michael, Fragments of a Century: A Social Autobiography (New York: Dutton, 1973), pp. 132–65Google Scholar. For the SDS point of view, see Hayden, Tom, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Random, 1988), pp. 73–102.Google Scholar

22. Two contemporary analyses of the counterculture are Melville, Keith's Communes in the Counter Culture: Origins, Theories, Styles of Life (New York: Morrow, 1972)Google Scholar and Roszak, Theodore's The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (New York: Doubleday, 1968).Google Scholar

23. I am unable to do justice to Rossman's notions about education here. For his understanding of the relationship between collective identity and cultural change and education, see On Learning and Social Change, pp. 45–50, 69–79.Google Scholar

24. The notion of collective identity as “public theater” may also be found i Cowley' book. See the section “Significant Gesture” (pp. 173–80)Google Scholar that relates a “demonstration” in which Cowley publicly punches a cafe proprietor.

25. For Mungo's view of this, see Mungo, , Total Loss Farm, p. 98.Google Scholar

26. Not all of Rossman's generationalist contemporaries used the genre for these ends. Dotson Rader viewed his i ain't marchin' anymore and Blood Dues as diagnostic — therapeutic tools. By examining his own psyche, he attempts to explain to himself what was destroying the men of his generation. And Raymond Mungo saw his Famous Long Ago and Total Loss Farm as fairy tales of the generational self that provided models by which the young could escape the world of history in which the older generation was trapped.

27. Rossman's stated intention here is remarkably like the one that Cowley provided his readers in Exile's Return: “I want to write what is not somuch a record of events as a narrative of ideas. … The ideas that concern me here are the ones that half-unconsciously guided people's actions, the ones they lived and wrote by” (pp. 12–13).

28. This dialogical feature can also be found in Cowley's book, particularly in the section “The Other Side of the Tracks,” in which Cowley engages in an intragenerational argument with a socialist worker, Karl Pretshold, over generational identity.

29. Critics such as Christopher Lasch, who complain that this generation ought to establish its identity through political activism rather than submerge its identity in a larger cause, ignore the sociopsychological effects of oppression on marginalized groups as well as the role of identity politics in power relations between groups. For marginalized groups, the struggle for power is precisely the struggle to create one's own identity: when one has the power to say who one is, one has gone a long way toward gaining the kind of recognition that leads to economic and social power. See Lasch, , The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Warner, 1979), pp. 277–48.Google Scholar