The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1987

by Malcolm Cowley, Hans Bak (Editor), Robert Cowley (Foreword by)

Overview

Critic, poet, editor, chronicler of the “lost generation,” and elder statesman of the Republic of Letters, Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) was an eloquent witness to much of twentieth-century American literary and political life. These letters, the vast majority previously unpublished, provide an indelible self-portrait of Cowley and his time, and make possible a full appreciation of his long and varied career.

Perhaps no other writer aided the careers of so many poets and novelists. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Kerouac, Tillie Olsen, and John Cheever are among the many authors Cowley knew and whose work he supported. A poet himself, Cowley enjoyed the company of writers and knew how to encourage, entertain, and when necessary scold them. At the center of his epistolary life were his friendships with Kenneth Burke, Allen Tate, Conrad Aiken, and Edmund Wilson. By turns serious and thoughtful, humorous and gossipy, Cowley’s letters to these and other correspondents display his keen literary judgment and ability to navigate the world of publishing.

The letters also illuminate Cowley’s reluctance to speak out against Stalin and the Moscow Trials when he was on staff at The New Republic—and the consequences of his agonized evasions. His radical past would continue to haunt him into the Cold War era, as he became caught up in the notorious “Lowell Affair” and was summoned to testify in the Alger Hiss trials.

Hans Bak supplies helpful notes and a preface that assesses Cowley’s career, and Robert Cowley contributes a moving foreword about his father.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674051065
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	01/06/2014
Pages:	848
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.20(h) x 2.50(d)

About the Author

Hans Bak is Professor of American Literature and American Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Beyond the Dry Season ix

Editor's Preface xxv

Abbreviations xxxix

I Harvard, World War I, Greenwich Village, 1915-1921 1

Harvard, 1915-1917 1

France, 1917 11

Harvard and Greenwich Village, 1917-1921 17

II Pilgrimage to Holy Land-France, 1921-1923 49

III The City of Anger-New York, 1923-1929 108

Dada in New York, 1923-1925 108

Freelance, 1925-1928 129

The End of a Literary Apprenticeship, 1929 156

IV The Depression Years-Literature and Politics, 1930-1940 165

The Red Romance, 1930-1934 165

Hart Crane † 1932

The High 1930s: Unity and Discord on the Left, 1934-1937 100

The Fading of a Dream, 1938-1940 236

V The War Years, 1940-1944 274

War-and Washington, 1940-1942 274

Retrenchment and Rehabilitation, 1942-1944 314

VI The Mellon Years, 1944-1949 332

Literary History of the United States (1948)

VII Literature and Politics in Cold War America, 1949-1954 396

Yaddo 1949

The Revival of the 1920s

Ernest Hemingway, 1951-1951

VIII Worker at the Writer's Trade, 1954-1960 464

Jack Kerouac, 1953-1957

Tillie Olsen, 1958-1960

IX The Sixties 542

The Sixties: Old Left, New Left, and the Community of Letters, 1960-1965 542

The Sixties: Retrospection and Consolidation, 1966-1970 585

X Man of Letters, 1970-1987 617

Notes 699

Acknowledgments 765

Index 771

Editorial Reviews

Cowley's best letters—they are alternately frisky, warm, pushy and ruminative—are collected now in The Long Voyage…Consistently busy on a multitude of fronts, Cowley wrote letters that are grainy with gossip and ringing observations…

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

10/07/2013
A committed, contentious life at the center of American letters comes alive in this scintillating collection. The book follows Cowley (1898–1989) from his 1920s salad days as a poet and critic in New York and Paris, immersed in fierce literary squabbles over the emerging modernist aesthetic; through his 1930s reign as the New Republic’s literary editor, when he discovered Marxism and drew (not unfounded) accusations of pushing a Stalinist line that dogged him during and after World War II; to his postwar efforts to champion old masters and newcomers, from Fitzgerald and Faulkner to Kerouac and Kesey. Cowley’s letters fizz with gossip, bawdy jokes, lurid anecdotes, witty reflections—“A sort of natural phenomenon like Old Faithful geyser that sends up a jet of steam and mud every hour on the hour” is his characterization of Kerouac’s bursts of automatic writing—and perceptive criticisms of authors he knew well. (“When became more or less the image he had created of himself... he pretty well stopped being a writer.”) Ably contextualized by editor Bak’s extensive biographical insertions, these missives convey the intense passions aroused by the aesthetic and political upheavals of the 20th century through the pen of one of the era’s leading literary intellectuals. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Cowley was perhaps the greatest literary cross‐pollinator of the 20th century. It’s impossible to imagine the American canon without him… Cowley’s best letters—they are alternately frisky, warm, pushy and ruminative—are collected now in The Long Voyage… Many are to his childhood friend from Pittsburgh, the philosopher of language Kenneth Burke, and to his lifelong confidant Allen Tate. This volume also records his end of correspondences with Faulkner, Kerouac, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dawn Powell, Lionel Trilling, Louise Bogan, Edmund Wilson and multiple others… Consistently busy on a multitude of fronts, Cowley wrote letters that are grainy with gossip and ringing observations, almost from the beginning.

New York Times - Dwight Garner

[A] vast and rich omnium-gatherum of epistolary activity… Cowley [was] one of the most important and influential men of letters (or freelance literary intellectuals, if you prefer) of the twentieth century… [He had] an immensely influential critical and editorial career that spanned seven decades… [Cowley] is nowhere near as famous or well regarded as he deserves to be… Bak’s commentary and notes are helpful, to the point, jargon-free, and superbly well-informed, and the letters themselves have been selected and judiciously edited to form an almost biographical narrative. Because the book focuses on letters that illuminate Cowley’s involvement with both literature and politics, the private man barely makes an appearance, but that absence is more than made up for by his son Robert Cowley’s foreword, a moving act of filial piety and a shrewd assessment of the shape and significance of his father’s career. And why should anyone produce an 850-page volume of Malcolm Cowley’s letters, and why should you care that someone did? Because, simply put, the American literature of the twentieth century would look considerably poorer and less interesting without his activities as a critic, editor, and memoirist, and our broader understanding of American literary history much less clear… If you don’t reckon with Malcolm Cowley’s works and days, you can’t really understand how American literature ascended to its rightful place among the great literatures of the world, or how it was made.

Bookforum - Gerald Howard

Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) may be one of the most important (and unheralded) literary figures of the twentieth century. His critical track record for fostering genius and capturing the sensibility of the Lost Generation now receives a spotlight, thanks to savvy editor Hans Bak.

Barnes & Noble Review

Cowley earned, many times over, his status as the grand old man of American letters. Did anyone do more to establish the current canon of the major writers of the twentieth century? Did anyone do more than Cowley, as the indefatigable consulting editor for Viking, to identify new talent among the following generations?… Did anyone work harder behind the scenes of influential organizations (the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Yaddo, countless book prizes, and so on) to support writers in need and reward deserving achievement?… He ultimately belonged, like Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Faulkner, to what his friend Hart Crane called ‘the visionary company,’ and not as a fellow traveler but as a full member.

New Republic - Christopher Benfey

Malcolm Cowley—who was there, at the inner ring—is an eloquent voice in helping us to know how twentieth-century American literature got made. This selection from a lifetime of letters only confirms how indispensable he was and is.

Paul Hendrickson

[This is a] vast collection of letters, sensitively compiled and annotated by [Cowley’s] biographer, Hans Bak… At his best he wrote from an empathy that few contemporaries shared.

Times Literary Supplement - Marc Robinson

Hans Bak’s selection of Cowley’s letters will interest anyone with specialized knowledge of American literature during its 20th-century apogee… The Long Voyage [is] a fine memorial of those high days when book reviewers were not afraid of showing their intelligence and discrimination, and wrote pieces that changed the way the educated segment of nations thought.

The Spectator - Richard Davenport-Hines

[Cowley] set to work almost singlehandedly reviving the stature of William Faulkner, whose name had faded and whose 17 novels and short story collections were out of print. The exact cause and effect can never be proved, but Cowley’s 1946 book The Portable Faulkner is seen as one factor leading to Faulkner’s 1949 Nobel Prize for literature… The Long Voyage gives us a much broader and clearer picture of Cowley as someone who, to use his own phrase, ‘worked at the writer’s trade’—and did so honorably.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - George Fetherling

Malcolm Cowley was one of the most important (and easily the most omnipresent) literary figures of the past century… Cowley’s was a long, eventful and controversial life, amply documented in his letters… Bak has done on the whole an astounding job of effectively boiling down Cowley’s voluminous correspondence… To delve into Cowley’s letters is to get a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse at how the literary life, with its glittering prizes, really operates… This volume is a permanent addition to American literary history the likes of which we may never see again. If the telephone made letter-writing a luxury, email and texting have rendered it as obsolete as the manual typewriter, and we as readers are undoubtedly the poorer for it. That is all the more reason to cherish this invaluable collection.

Chicago Tribune - Tom Moran

Boswell of the ‘lost generation,’ literary editor of The New Republic, and champion of authors from Fitzgerald and Faulkner—whose career he resuscitated—to Kerouac and Kesey, Malcolm Cowley lived a long life and wrote a ton of letters debating, critiquing and defending the state of American literature. (Kenneth Burke, Allen Tate, Conrad Aiken and Edmund Wilson were among his closest interlocutors.) The majority of the letters in this collection have never before been published… His collected letters amount to a heady portrait of American literary and intellectual life in the twentieth century.

New Yorker blog - Rachel Arons

Cowley’s letters carry the style he had in all of his writing, featuring a very American, cynical, go-getter voice and an uncanny facility with a sharp closing line… The Long Voyage is also a reminder of a time, not long ago, when literature had a more central place in the cultural conversation… Bak has done a masterful job with this collection… Cowley has never quite been forgotten, but the work he did was often as hidden as it was influential. This collection will remind readers of 20th-century American literature of the key role Cowley played in its development, and might perhaps spur them to read some of Cowley’s own works.

Los Angeles Review of Books - Greg Barnhisel

Bak’s a fair-minded and microscopically well-informed guide to the material… Cowley’s correspondence also makes it possible to get a sense of him as a fairly stylish performer in his day, a sense that’s harder to get from the stuff he wrote for publication.

Harper’s - Christopher Tayler

Now, at last, we can see the history of twentieth-century literature, which he helped to shape, through Cowley’s own eyes.

City Journal - Adam Kirsch

The Long Voyage is a must-own for any devotee of American literature.

Texas Observer - David Duhr

This is a grand reunion. They are all here—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hart Crane, Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, and all the rest—presided over by the indefatigable and conscientious intelligence of Malcolm Cowley, the great friend and critic and chronicler of American writers and their work. These wonderful letters amount to the diary of American literature in the twentieth century.

Lance Morrow

01/01/2014
As a poet, editor, literary historian and memoirist, Cowley (1898–1989) had his finger on the pulse of American literature for most of the 20th century. He helped both to revitalize the reputations of established authors, such as William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Walt Whitman, and to bring forth new works by younger writers, including Jack Kerouac's On the Road and Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. In this collection, editor Bak (American literature & American studies, Radboud Univ.; Malcolm Cowley: The Formative Years) gathers approximately 500 letters culled from Cowley's papers in Chicago's Newberry Library, most previously unpublished. Correspondents include Kenneth Burke (a childhood friend), Allen Tate, Conrad Aiken, Edmund Wilson, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Tillie Olsen, and almost anyone who was anybody in American literature. The arrangement is generally chronological, though some letters are grouped together by correspondent (Hemingway, Kerouac, Olsen) or by theme (Crane's death, the Yaddo Affair, the Fitzgerald revival). In addition to his literary activities, the letters shed light on Cowley's politics, including his ties to communist front organizations in the 1930s, his reaction to the Moscow Trials, and his fight to preserve his reputation during the McCarthy era. VERDICT This title will appeal to students of modern American literature, particularly those familiar with Cowley's oeuvre.—William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY

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