Malcolm
Cowley, the only child of a homeopathic physician, was born in Belasco,
Pennsylvania, on 24th August, 1898. A successful school student, Cowley
won a scholarship to Harvard in 1915.
While at university Cowley contributed to the Harvard
Advocate and attended lectures by Amy
Lowell.
In
1917 Cowley left Harvard to drive munitions trucks for the American
Field Service in France. While on the Western
Front Cowley wrote articles about the First
World War for The Pittsburgh Gazette.
Cowley
returned to the United States in 1918 and the
following year married the artist, Peggy Baird.
He continued with his studies and graduated from Harvard
in
1920. For the next few years he wrote poetry and book reviews
for The
Dial and
the New
York Evening Post.
In
1921 Cowley moved to France and continued
his studies at the University of Montpellier. He also found work with
avant-garde literary magazines such as Broom
and Secession. While in France
he became friendly with American expatriates such as Gertrude
Stein,
Ernest
Hemingway and
Ezra Pound.
Cowley
returned to the United States in August 1923
and went to live in Greenwich Village
where he became close friends with the poet Hart
Crane. As well as writing poetry Cowley found work as an advertising
copywriter with Sweet's Architectural Catalogue.
He also translated seven books from French into English.
In
1929 Cowley published Blue Juniata,
his first book of poems. Later that year he replaced Edmund
Wilson as
literary editor of the New Republic.
Cowley's
marriage broke up in 1931 and Peggy went to live with Hart
Crane. This ended in tragedy when Crane committed suicide by jumping
from the ship Orizaba on 27th
April 1932. Two months later Cowley married
Muriel Maurer.
Coming
under the influence of Theodore
Dreiser,
Cowley became increasingly involved in radical politics. In 1932 Cowley
joined Mary
Heaton Vorse,
Edmund
Wilson and
Waldo
Frank as
union-sponsored observers of the miners' strikes in Kentucky. The
men's lives were threatened by the mine owners and Frank was badly
beaten up. The following year Cowley published Exile's
Return in 1933. The book was largely ignored and sold only
800 copies in the first twelve months.
In
1935 Cowley and other left-wing writers established the League of
American Writers. Other members included
Erskine Caldwell, Archibald
MacLeish,
Upton
Sinclair,
Clifford
Odets,
Langston
Hughes,
Carl
Sandburg,
Carl Van Doren, David
Ogden Stewart,
John
Dos Passos,
Lillian
Hellman and
Dashiell
Hammett.
Cowley was appointed vice
president of the League of American Writers and over the next few
years Cowley was involved in several campaigns, including attempts
to persuade the United States government
to support the republicans in the Spanish Civil
War. However, he resigned in 1940 because he felt the organization
was under the control of the American
Communist Party.
In
1941 President Franklin
D. Roosevelt appointed
Archibald
MacLeish as
head of the Office of Facts and Figures. MacLeish recruited Cowley
as his deputy. This decision soon resulted in right-wing journalists
such as Whittaker
Chambers and
Westbrook Pegler writing articles pointing
out Cowley's left-wing past. One member of Congress, Martin
Dies of
Texas, accused Cowley of having connections to 72 communist or communist-front
organizations.
MacLeish
came under pressure from J.
Edgar Hoover,
head of the FBI, to sack Cowley. In January
1942, MacLeish replied that the FBI agents
needed a course of instruction in history. "Don't you think it
would be a good thing if all investigators could be made to understand
that Liberalism is not only not a crime but actually the attitude
of the President of the United States and the greater part of his
Administration?" In March 1942 Cowley, vowing never again to
write about politics, resigned from the Office of Facts and Figures.
Cowley
now became literary adviser to Viking Press. He now began to edit
the selected works of important American writers. Viking Portable
editions by Cowley included Ernest
Hemingway
(1944), William
Faulkner (1946)
andNathaniel
Hawthorne (1948).
In
1949 Cowley returned to the political scene by testifying at the second
Alger
Hiss trial.
His testimony contradicted the main evidence supplied by Whittaker
Chambers.
Cowley
published a revised edition of Exile's Return
in 1951. This time the book sold much better. He also published The
Literary Tradition (1954) and edited a new edition of Leaves
of Grass (1959) by Walt
Whitman.
This was followed by Black Cargoes, A History
of the Atlantic Slave Trade (1962), Fitzgerald
and the Jazz Age (1966), Think Back
on Us (1967), Collected Poems
(1968), Lesson of the Masters
(1971), A Second Flowering (1973),
The Dream of the Golden Mountains
(1980). Malcolm
Cowley died
on 28th March 1989.
(1)
Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return (1934)
When the war came the young writers then in college were attracted
by the idea of enlisting in one of the ambulance corps attached to
a foreign army - the American Ambulance Service or the Norton-Harjes,
both serving under the French
and receiving French army pay, or the Red Cross ambulance sections
on the Italian front. Those were the organizations
that promised to carry us abroad with the least delay. We were eager
to get into action, as a character in one of DOS
Passos's novels expressed it, "before the whole thing goes belly
up."
In Paris we found that
the demand for ambulance drivers had temporarily slackened. We were
urged, and many of us
consented, to join the French military transport, in which our work
would be not vastly different: while driving munition
trucks we would retain our status of gentleman volunteers. We drank
to our new service in the bistro round the corner. Two weeks later,
on our way to a training camp behind the lines, we passed in a green
wheatfield the grave of an aviator
mort pour la patrie, his wooden cross wreathed with the first lilies
of the valley. A few miles north of us the guns were booming. Here
was death among the flowers, danger in spring, the sweet wine of sentiment
neither spiced with paradox nor yet insipid, the death being real,
the danger near at hand.
It would be interesting
to list the authors who were ambulance or camion drivers in 1917.
DOS Passes, Hemingway, Julian Green, William Seabrook, E. E. Cummings,
Slater Brown, Harry Crosby, John Howard Lawson, Sidney Howard, Louis
Bromfield, Robert Hillyer, Dashiell Hammett - one might almost say
that the ambulance corps and the French military transport were college-extension
courses for a generation of writers. But what did these courses teach?
They carried us to a foreign
country, the first that most of us had seen; they taught us to make
love, stammer love, in a foreign language. They fed and lodged us
at the expense of a government in which we had no share. They made
us more irresponsible than before: livelihood was not a problem; we
had a minimum of choices to make; we could let the future take care
of itself, feeling certain that it would bear us into new adventures.
They taught us courage, extravagance, fatalism, these being the virtues
of men at war; they taught us to regard as vices the civilian virtues
of thrift, caution and
sobriety; they made us fear boredom more than death. All these lessons
might have been learned in any branch of the
army, but ambulance service had a lesson of its own: it instilled
into us what might be called a spectatorial attitude.
(2)
Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return
(1934)
When we first heard of the Armistice we felt a sense of relief too
deep to express, and we all got drunk. We had come through, we were
still alive, and nobody at all would be killed tomorrow. The composite
fatherland for which we had fought and in which some of us still believed
- France, Italy, the Allies, our English homeland, democracy, the
self- determination of small nations - had triumphed. We danced in
the streets, embraced old women and pretty girls, swore
blood brotherhood with soldiers in little bars, drank with our elbows
locked in theirs, reeled through the streets with bottles of champagne,
fell asleep somewhere. On the next day, after we got over our hangovers,
we didn't know what to do, so we got drunk. But slowly, as the days
went by, the intoxication passed, and the tears of joy: it appeared
that our composite fatherland was dissolving into quarreling statesmen
and oil and steel magnates. Our own nation had passed the Prohibition
Amendment as if to publish a bill of separation between itself and
ourselves; it wasn't our country any longer. Nevertheless we returned
to it: there was nowhere else to go. We returned to New York, appropriately
- to the homeland of the uprooted, where everyone you met came from
another town and tried to forget it; where nobody seemed to have parents,
or a past more distant than last night's swell party, or a future
beyond the swell party this evening and the disillusioned book he
would write tomorrow.
(3)
In April 1931 Theodore
Dreiser invited a group of left-wing
writers to his home. Malcolm Cowley wrote about the event in his autobiography,
The Dream of Golden Mountains (1934)
Dreiser stood behind a table and rapped on it with his knuckles. He
unfolded a very large, very white linen handkerchief and began drawing
it first through his left hand, then through his right hand, as if
for reassurance of his worldly success. He mumbled something we couldn't
catch and then launched into a prepared statement. Things were in
a terrible state, he said, and what were we going to do about it?
Nobody knew how many millions were unemployed, starving, hiding in
their holes. The situation among the coal miners in Western Pennsylvania
and in Harlan County, Kentucky, was a disgrace. The politicians from
Hoover down and the big financiers had no idea of what was going on.
As for the writers and artists - Dreiser looked up shyly from his
prepared text, revealing his scrubbed lobster-pink cheeks and his
chins in retreating terraces. For a moment the handkerchief started
moving.
The time is ripe,"
he said, "for American intellectuals to render some service to
the American worker." He wondered - as again he drew the big
white handkerchief from one hand to the other - whether we shouldn't
join a committee that was being organized to collaborate with the
International Labor Defense in opposing political persecutions, lynchings,
and the deportation of labor organizers; also in keeping the public
informed and in helping workers to build their own unions. Then, after
some inaudible remarks, he declared that he was through speaking and
that we were now to have a discussion.
(4)
Malcolm Cowley, The Dream of Golden Mountains (1934)
In July he (Theodore Dreiser) made an expedition to the Western Pennsylvania
coalfields, where the National Miners Union, organized by the Communists,
was conducting a hopeless strike. He issued a violent and merited
rebuke to the American Federation of Labor for neglecting the miners.
Early in November, in his capacity as chairman of the NCDPP, he led
a delegation of writers (Malcolm Cowley, Edmund Wilson, Waldo Frank,
Mary Heaton Vorse) into Harlan
County, Kentucky, another area that the Communist union
was trying hard to organize.
Harlan was a classical
example of labor warfare in a depressed industry. The market for coal
had been shrinking, with the result that the operators had tried to
protect their investments by cutting wages, and also - since the miners
were paid for each ton they produced - by using crooked scales to
weigh the coal. In 1931 very few of the eastern Kentucky miners were
earning as much as $35 a month, after deductions.
Even that miserable wage was paid, not in cash, but in scrip, good
only at the company store and worth no more, in most cases, than fifty
or sixty cents on the dollar.
The United Mine Workers
- John L. Lewis's union - had withdrawn from the field, apparently
on the ground that the situation was hopeless and that the miners
couldn't afford to pay their union dues. Then the Communists had stepped
in, as they often did in hopeless situations, but their meetings were
broken up by deputized thugs armed with Browning guns.
(5)
Malcolm
Cowley, The Dream of
Golden Mountains (1934)
A few weeks later there was more talk of revolution when the Bonus
Expeditionary Force descended on Washington. The BEF was a tattered
army consisting of veterans from every state in the Union; most of
them were old-stock Americans from smaller industrial cities where
relief had broken down. All unemployed in 1932, all living on the
edge of hunger, they remembered that the government had made them
a promise for the future. It was embodied in a law that Congress had
passed some years before, providing "adjusted compensation certificates"
for those who had served in the Great War; the certificates were to
be redeemed in dollars, but not until 1945. Now the veterans were
hitchhiking and stealing rides on freight cars to Washington, for
the sole purpose, they declared, of petitioning Congress for immediate
payment of the soldiers' bonus. They arrived by hundreds or thousands
every day in June. Ten thousand were camped on marshy ground across
the Anacostia River, and ten thousand others occupied a number of
half-demolished buildings between the Capitol and the White House.
They organized themselves by states and companies and chose a commander
named Walter W. Waters, an ex-sergeant from Portland. Oregon, who
promptly acquired an aide-de-camp and a pair of highly polished leather
puttees. Meanwhile the veterans were listening to speakers of all
political complexions, as the Russian soldiers had
done in 1917. Many radicals and some conservatives thought
that the Bonus Army was creating a revolutionary situation
of an almost classical type.
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