Cowley's Reclamation Project

By Stefan Kanfer

--AND I WORKED AT THE WRITER'S TRADE by Malcolm Cowley

Viking; 276 pages; $12.50

"Deponent states: My name is Malcolm Cowley and I am by profession a literary historian."

That introduction suggests a chalky professor lamenting the decline of English since the invention of the cathode-ray tube. In fact, the author is also a lively raconteur, poet (Blue Juniata), critic (A Second Flowering) and living history of the liberal temper. At 79 he is older than the century, and wiser. He has witnessed the failure of his early radicalism and watched favorite writers fall into neglect and obscurity. Yet, almost alone of his generation, he remains unafflicted by bitterness. Every chapter of --And I Worked at the Writer's Trade reveals a humane and spacious man.

The amalgam of autobiography and critique begins with a theory of literature. Happily, this soon gives way to anecdota and reminiscence. Once a fellow traveler, Cowley quickly discerned the moral abyss of Stalinism. But he refused to condemn those who remained on the barricades. In one of the most quoted valedictions of the '30s, he wrote:

Think back on us, the martyrs and

the cowards,

the traitors even, swept by the same

flood

of passion toward the morning that

is yours:

O children born from, nourished

with our blood.

For his pains, Cowley recalls, "I was . . . excoriated in The Daily Worker and caricatured in The New Masses (as a soldier with a whisky flask in his hip pocket and a chamberpot on his head, offering a fascist salute to J.P. Morgan)."

The same sense of irony enlivens the author's view of American writing. In a history of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he describes a long forgotten poet and overstuffed shirt. Appointed permanent secretary of the Academy, the litterateur wrote a formal acceptance to himself, signed: "Very respectfully yours, Robert Underwood Johnson."

Occasionally, Cowley's fondness for categories makes him a man of numbers instead of letters: he finds five preconditions for a literary generation, four stages in the composition of a story. But he never abandons his book's true aim: the reclamation of three underrated authors and friends: Robert M. Coates, Conrad Aiken and Erskine Caldwell. Of the trio, Coates is the least read and the most appealing. Parisians of the '20s remembered the tall redhead bicycling through the streets: "He looked like a flag," one of them said. Coates was The New Yorker's art critic and the author of acute social novels and stories (The Farther Shore, The Hour After Westerly). One encomium on his work is contained in an aside: "Once a scholar asked to see his letters from Gertrude Stein. 'Sorry, but I didn't keep them,' Coates answered. 'That's funny,' the scholar said. 'Miss Stein kept your letters.' "

Conrad Aiken was so withdrawn he made Emily Dickinson look like a publicist. When he was about to graduate from Harvard, Aiken was elected class poet. He refused the honor, fled from college and took up residence in Italy. Later he wrote that "life was to be lived offstage, behind the scenes, out of view." For the next 60 years he composed piercing verse, and fiction that Freud admired. Academic honors were not accompanied by fame; Aiken once described himself accurately as a "dubious horse [who] has always been the last in the list of the also-ran--he never even placed, much less won, nor, I regret, have the offers to put him out to stud been either remunerative or very attractive."

Caldwell, author of Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre, is scarcely unread. But, as Cowley indicates, the supersales have been his undoing: "There is an unfortunate tendency . . . to dismiss the books as having been too popular, and to forget that they made a contribution to American letters--not to mention their having added a chapter to American folklore."

These reappraisals are generous but not exaggerated; Cowley knows that work persists beyond the late trend and the modish critique. He also knows that the ways of writers can be as intriguing as their books. A chapter merrily details the rituals authors use to get unblocked: Ernest Hemingway sharpened 20 pencils; Willa Gather read a passage from the Bible; Thomas Wolfe and Thornton Wilder walked to exhaustion. A final, melancholy chapter examines the destructive behavior of such masters as Hemingway, who betrayed his kindest friends and William Faulkner, who confessed, "If a writer has to rob his mother he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies." Yet, says Cowley, their art redeems them all--besides, a true art ist cannot be a guilt-free villain because he knows his flaws better than the world does. Concludes the literary historian: "No complete son of a bitch ever wrote a good sentence." By that standard, Malcolm Cowley is a saint: his book is filled with fine ones.

-- Stefan Kanfer

Excerpt

" 'Fiction writing is a kind of magic,' Angus Wilson says, 'and I don't care to talk about a novel I'm doing because if I communicate the magic spell, even in an abbreviated form, it loses its force.' One of the interviewed authors--only one, but I suspect there are others like him--makes a boast of his being superstitious. 'I will not tolerate the presence of yellow roses,' Capote says--'which is sad because they're my favorite flower. I can't allow three cigarette butts in the same ashtray. Won't travel on a plane with two nuns. Won't begin or end anything on a Friday. It's endless, the things I can't and won't. But I derive some curious comfort from these primitive concepts.' Perhaps they are not only comforting but of practical service in helping him to weave his incantations. I can't help thinking of the drunk who always carried a ventilated satchel. 'What's in it?' said his neighbor on a bus. 'Just a mongoose. To kill snakes.' The neighbor peered into the satchel and said, 'There's nothing in it. That's an imaginary mongoose.' The drunk said, 'What about the snakes?' "

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