by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

The Case for Malcolm Cowley

“I would like to write about the books of today from the standpoint of the classics, and to write about the American classics as if they were books that had just appeared.”

That’s Malcolm Cowley: critic, publisher, editor, literary journalist, sponsor of writers, bon vivant.

In the new Bookforum Gerald Howard (who has worn most of the hats Cowley did in a standout career as an editor with Viking, Norton, and Doubleday) depicts Cowley as the exceptional American man of letters; without quite saying so, he persuasively places Cowley above Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Maxwell Perkins, et al.

Here’s the brief for Cowley: wrote first account of the “Lost Generation” (Exile’s Return, 1934); edited the books section of the New Republic in the Thirties, possibly the best review section in American literary history; rescued William Faulkner from neglect and pointed him toward a Nobel Prize; published a short story by the eighteen-year-old John Cheever; recognized, published, and championed Jack Kerouac’s On the Road; did the same for Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; canonized Perkins – editor of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Wolfe – in a two-part New Yorker profile.

As if that isn’t enough, Cowley also inadvertently nudged American Catholic writing into a midcentury major phase.  In the Village after the war – the Great War – he moved in the same circles as Dorothy Day, and his account (in Exile’s Return) of the war in bohemia between the artists and the activists goes to the root of the war then taking place in Day’s own character.

When Cowley was putting together a revised edition of his memoir in 1950, he reached out to people who figured into the story; and the episode figures into my book The Life You Save May Be Your Own.  Day, then the “anarch” of the Catholic Worker on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, paid a visit to Cowley in Princeton, where he was teaching.  She and Cowley swapped recollections; and she saw Caroline Gordon, another figure from their circle, who had since become a Catholic and a theologically strident literary theorist.  After she returned to New York she resolved to freshen up her own memoir from the Thirties, From Union Square to Rome.

It had been hastily written and was incomplete; it concluded with her conversion, saying nothing of Peter Maurin, the Catholic Worker, hospitality, round-table discussions, communal farms, pacifism, World War II, the atomic bomb, the newspaper, or “On Pilgrimage” – saying nothing of the state of the world or of her life since she became a Catholic.

The revision became a substantially new and deeper book: The Long Loneliness, the book through which most of us now know her.