The Critic as Catalyst
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The Critic as Catalyst
The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915–1987.
Edited by Hans Bak.
Harvard University Press, 2013.
Hardcover, 848 pages, $40.
Hans Bak rightly calls Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) the “chronicler of the lost generation.” His pioneering literary history, Exile’s Return, first published in 1934, combined an astute assessment of the lasting literary work of the 1920s with an evocation of the cultural climate that had produced it. Cowley corresponded with the best critics, poets, and novelists—including Kenneth Burke, Conrad Aiken, Alfred Kazin, and Ernest Hemingway, to name a representative handful. Cowley established himself as an arbiter of contemporary literature during his tenure (1930–40) as literary editor of the New Republic, and after suffering through a period of character assassination in the early 1940s, revived his own reputation and, more importantly, that of a great American writer with The Portable Faulkner (1946).
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When the Great War broke out, hope and innocence were not the only two things that were lost. All sense of normalcy was lost, thrusting many, if not all, into a state of utter confusion. Everyone, not just writers, was forced into a infantile state where he or she needed to relearn everything they grew accustomed to.
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The term was coined by Hemingway, and refers to the generation of young people during and after the WWI. As war swept away everything on its way, youth felt disillusioned, disengaged in life. Old materialistic values destroyed, but new not built yet, leaving many young men and women in the unstable in-between state.
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The lost generation were lost in a variety of ways. They lacked the moral ground of previous generations—though this is often the story—had little economic footing and seemed to a group headed aimlessly into the future.
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Is it possible that the term “lost” is used for the many people that died? An entire generation of young adults who had been taken too soon, leaving the nation without people to help build the future?
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Lost could also refer to their place in history. This generation came into existence between two wars, during the Depression.
The ‘lost generation’ is full of those that are struggling to follow the path of ‘good’, to avoid sin, and to follow the usual path in society.
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The lost generation is the generation living between WWI and the Great Depression. These people were lost in time and place because of the life they had to live. Many, disillusioned by what surrounded them, had to revisit their beliefs and life choices, which were opposed to the older generation. Also making them “lost” as unexperienced and different, as the older generation portrayed them.
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Cowley is not as well known or as respected as his coeval, Edmund Wilson (1895–1972)—in part because Cowley remained, to borrow Mr. Bak’s word, a “fervent” and unrepentant fellow traveler for what could be considered an inexcusably protracted period. Cowley believed the accused in the 1935 Moscow trials were guilty and did not credit evidence that Stalin trumped up the indictments to eliminate his old Bolshevik rivals. Cowley scoffed at philosopher John Dewey’s commission, which exposed Stalin’s perfidies and deceits. And when he finally did acknowledge Stalin’s crimes, Cowley took refuge in the defense many ex-fellow travelers adopted: His heart was in the right place. It seemed to him that the anti-fascist Soviet Union had to be supported, no matter its faults.
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Another possible word is peer.
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Coeval is the best word but it fails to connote how Wilson and Cowley were sort of colleagues who tried to find their way in a milieu plagued by existential angst.
It means of the same age and time. And I think it is a very well used word because it shows how peers can be equal regarding the time they lived, but not be of the same opinions. It is used specifically to introduce the equal age, and not to go beyond, so in this context coeval works best.
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As coeval from Latin means literally ‘equal at age,’ it might explain the importance of this exact word in this context, as both writers were of the same age, but had very different approach to life.
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The word coeval can imply that the two writers were just in the same generation. If another word was used, such as rival, peer, or acquaintance, it would have a different meaning. The reader can assume that the two writers were enemies, friends or indifferent towards each other.
Contemporary holds a wider meaning, belonging to the time frame of decade, or even century.
‘Coeval’ seems more specific regarding age similarity. Maybe coeval is a better fit in this context.
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As he’s saying that Cowley wasn’t as well known or respected, he supports it with vocabulary that demonstrates his observations. He intentionally enhances Edmund Wilson’s status by referring to him as ‘coeval’.
Cowley’s letters do little to change the verdict of history; indeed, they make him seem all the more culpable, because Edmund Wilson and others, in letter after letter, kept trying to make him see that as literary editor of the New Republic, he had to take a stand against the Stalinists. Instead, Cowley simply sidled away from politics—especially in 1942, after Congressional attacks on his loyalty forced him out of his position as an information analyst in the Office of Facts and Figures. Cowley, who described himself as a country boy, went to ground, taking up a rural life of writing, hunting, and gardening in Sherman, Connecticut. From that retreat he conceived The Portable Faulkner and persuaded Faulkner that it was time for an omnibus volume that would reveal the towering achievement of the Yoknapatawpha saga. At the time, most of Faulkner’s novels were out of print. The legendary editor Maxwell Perkins told Cowley that Faulkner’s reputation, once so high, seemed incapable of rising again. The same might be said of Cowley, although Mr. Bak does not make that connection. It seems obvious, though, that settling on Faulkner, who stood aloof from the New Deal—to say nothing of fellow travelers—was a means of finding a back door into the utterly transformed literary and political landscape of Cold War America, in which Cowley’s work had become suspect.
This sentence makes a transition from background information into a short critique of what the biography does.
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Cowley as many other young American writers of ‘lost generation’ didn’t feel the connection to materialistic values of his country and traveled all over the world, lived in Europe in search of new life to hold on to. His blind support of Stalin regime, a manifest of evil terror and oppression, points out just how highly unstable that time was.
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Cowley retreated from the conflict and chose not to acknowledge the political issues at hand because he had unpopular opinions that would perhaps get him in trouble.
The unstable times brought Cowley to try and find something new and meaningful to hang onto, to reveal new values and ideas that he could make his guidelines to a more fruitful life. However, he did not see how his neediness to find a home for his mind and ambitions lead on for him to become blind to what he was following.
This is not to suggest that Cowley’s connection to Faulkner was less than genuine. On the contrary, both men were agrarians, and Cowley’s lifelong friend Allen Tate was one of the staunchest members of the writers group that published the agrarian manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand (1930). The Portable Faulknerturned out to be not only a tribute to a great writer who, in short order, would win the Nobel Prize, but also an account of modern history viewed through the prism of a South that had suffered occupation and devastation. In 1955, when he visited Japan as a U.S. cultural ambassador, Faulkner was able to relate to that nation’s defeated people in ways no other American writer—and perhaps no other public figure, save General MacArthur—could. Without corresponding with Cowley, who knows when, if ever, Faulkner would have played his part on the world stage.
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A traditional way of viewing land as a valuable asset, and investing effort into its cultivation.
Cowley had an attachment towards land, countryside and enjoyed rural life.
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In the most literal sense, the way agrarian is used within this context seems to refer to more than just rural living. In this particular passage it seems to hint at more conservative and traditional ideologies, rather than rural.
Leaning towards life in an agrarian society, where cultivating land and the economics wrapped around farms, crops and domestic animals are the main means of productivity and labor. Land is seen as a value and is used in it’s best natural way.
A very nice contextualization of a historical event that relates to the biographer. This demonstrates the reviewer’s authority.
This line suggests that Cowley played a huge role in resuscitating Faulkner’s literary (as well as cultural) role. The relationship can be called symbiotic, as both Cowley and Faulkner were reintroduced into the literary and political culture. Although, it seems as if Cowley only managed to establish Faulkner to an elite status while remaining in relative obscurity.
Unlike his political efforts to excuse tyranny because he thought he was serving a good cause, Cowley’s literary efforts were honest and forthright. When Faulkner went on to produce novels that did not measure up to his greatness, Cowley said so. Even more importantly, Cowley moved on, discovering new writers like Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey. He regarded them as originals and helped get them published, even though he considered Kesey a diamond in the rough and Kerouac a second-rate Thomas Wolfe. Cowley’s letters create a remarkably immediate sense of the literary periods through which he passed. Along the way, he attempted to shape public taste not only through his own writing, but in his editor’s reports to his employer, Viking Press. His comments about the world of publishing suggest that the more things change the more they remain the same: In the mid-1950s, he complains about paperback publishers helping to destroy the market for hardcovers, and about book review pages shrinking in size. In 1956, he grumbles, “there are only editors who calculate how much a book might possibly earn.”
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Cowley grew more and more frustrated as he witnessed the publishing world turning into the materialistic house for profit, and editors interested in sales more than books. He remained loyal to creative interesting writing, gave his honest opinion if he disliked work and gave a way to young original writers.
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Cowley did not just complain about the change in the publishing world, he did something about it. He did all he could, personally, by giving “original” writers a chance at being published. Most people would just complain about the change in publishing and how people were in it for the money in an opinions piece for a newspaper. Since Cowley did something about it, he stands out, respectably, from the rest. It’s weird to think that these struggles are still seen today. Publishers want originality and are constantly fighting against ebooks; “the more things change, the more they remain the same.”
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Cowley is described as someone who enjoyed things “the way they were.” In a sense, he resisted change in the publishing world.
The diction of this paragraph paints a clearer picture of Cowley, “the periods through which he passed.” He seems like a traveler through literary movements and historical settings.
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He supported younger writers and new movements in writing, but his support for change did not extend to new means of disseminating their works.
Cowley demonstrated a genuine passion for true publication and print for the love and essence of writing and change rather than profit. He was very aware of his surroundings and was frustrated by the changes he’d witnessed in the writing world.
Cowley was upset that the true passion for writing has become a soulless business. He wanted the publishing world to go back to it’s roots and not be something done only for profit, but for art and honesty.
Like Wilson, Cowley stands as an enviable relic of a bygone age. Although he occasionally taught for short periods in universities, he denounced academics—especially the New Critics, who deprived literature of its context and sense of history. The idea that an author’s comments on his own work should be discarded, in what was dismissed as an “intentional fallacy,” struck Cowley as appalling. The author’s commentary was not the last word, to be sure, or Cowley himself would have been out of business. But to suppose that the critic could arm himself just by reading a work of literature seemed to defy common sense. Or, as he put it in a letter to critic Newton Arvin (who himself taught at Smith), “Intrinsic or ‘pure’ criticism is largely make-believe.” Words changed their meanings over time; when an author wrote a certain work was important, and how that author was responding to other authors was also significant. In short, critics could not do without historical, psychological, and biographical approaches to literature.
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New Critics believed that no historical or biographical approach towards literally criticism was necessary, as if reading of just a writer’s work would give enough insight. And also suggested the writer’s own comments on his work were purposely misleading, therefore should be disregarded.
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The New Critics took a drastically different approach to writing and analyzing literature. They disregarded context and author’s intention and focused largely on the text that was supposed to speak for itself, regardless of time period. As the meaning would apparently change over time.
It is a tribute to this collection and to Cowley that Hans Bak emulates his subject’s literary method, setting down enough about the man, his times, his work, and his contemporaries to perfect a comprehensive and compelling portrait.
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It establishes the authority of the critic. As Cowley’s life was pretty controversial, why should this review be taken into account. And this short paragraph gives this particular answer. As Rollyson’s other biographical subjects were complicated and often misinterpreted, he has an experience in handling them very well.
It imparts the meticulous steps taken to show every aspect of Cowley. This establishes credibility for readers.
It compliments the author in a way that shortly and sweetly describes his work, establishes his authority, and finally summarizes the impact that he’s had on literature.
It creates authority and liability for the author. It demonstrates to the readers that this is a legitimate source, especially this is important due to the controversial life Cowley lived, with many opinions on it as well.
The last paragraph gives us the confidence to know that Hans Bak was absolutely knowledgeable enough about Malcolm Cowley’s work for us to count as reliable.
Carl Rollyson, biographer of Amy Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, and others, is currently at work on a biography of William Faulkner.
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