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

847 Pages·2014·3.52 MB·English

by  Malcolm Cowley

The Long Voyage

Th e Long Voyage
Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915– 1987
edited by hans bak
(cid:13)
foreword by robert cowley
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, En gland
2014
Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Book design by Dean Bornstein
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Cowley, Malcolm, 1898– 1989.
Th e long voyage : selected letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915– 1987 /
edited by Hans Bak ; foreword by Robert Cowley.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978- 0- 674- 05106- 5 (alk. paper)
1. Cowley, Malcolm, 1898– 1989—Correspondence. I. Bak, Hans, editor of
compilation. II. Title.
PS3511.A86Z48 2014
813'.52—dc23
[B]
2013012605
For Ella And Saskia

Contents
(cid:13)
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 27
II Pilgrimage to Holy Land— France, 1921– 1923 49
III Th e City of Anger— New York, 1923– 1929 108
Dada in New York, 1923– 1925 108
Freelance, 1925– 1928 129
Th e End of a Literary Apprenticeship, 1929 156
IV Th e Depression Years— Literature and Politics, 1930– 1940 165
Th e Red Romance, 1930– 1934 165
Hart Crane † 1932
Th e High 1930s: Unity and Discord on the Left , 1934– 1937 200
Th e Fading of a Dream, 1938– 1940 236
V Th e War Years, 1940– 1944 274
War and Washington, 1940– 1942 274
Retrenchment and Rehabilitation, 1942– 1944 314
VI Th e Mellon Years, 1944– 1949 332
Literary History of the United States (1948)
viii Contents
VII Literature and Politics in Cold War America, 1949– 1954 396
Yaddo 1949
Th e Revival of the 1920s
Ernest Hemingway, 1951– 1952
VIII Worker at the Writer’s Trade, 1954– 1960 464
Jack Kerouac, 1953– 1957
Tillie Olsen, 1958– 1960
IX Th e Sixties 542
Th e Sixties: Old Left , New Left , and the Community
of Letters, 1960– 1965 542
Th e Sixties: Retrospection and Consolidation, 1966– 1970 585
X Man of Letters, 1970– 1987 617
Notes 699
Ac know ledg ments 765
Index 771
Foreword: Beyond the Dry Season
(cid:13)
Robert Cowley
Th ere are moments when I am convinced that the letters written by my fa-
ther, Malcolm Cowley, constitute his most noteworthy literary achieve-
ment. He might have denied that claim, arguing that the letters w ere mainly
a conv en ient way of persuading, explaining, and advising, and w ere intended
as nothing more. What literary merit they had, he might have added, was
merely a natural byproduct of clear thinking and writing of the En glish lan-
guage in equal parts. As for their extraordinary number, blame it on the
happy accident of a long life. Th at may be true, but reading through this se-
lection, I have become increasingly impressed. It is also true that his literary
generation, not a “lost” one by a long stretch, was a generation of letter writ-
ers: people like Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and Edmund Wilson were
correspondents whose daily output was as varied and prolifi c as my father’s.
Still, when I saw that windowless manuscript vault in the Newberry
Library in Chicago, I was unprepared for the bounty of documents that con-
fronted me. All my father’s papers, which include not just his own letters,
manuscripts, working fi les, and family photographs but also letters written to
him, fi ll 178 gray archival cartons stored on open shelves; if you w ere to place
them side by side, they would extend for seventy- seven feet. (Th ere are even
more of my father’s papers in other archival collections, including those at
Yale and Princet on.) Th e editor of this book, the indefatigable Hans Bak,
and the archivists at the Newberry estimate (as he writes elsewhere) that my
father’s letters in the Newberry collection alone add up to some 25,000
items. If, from that total, you subtract Christmas cards, directions on how
to fi nd my father’s h ouse in western Connecticut, and recommendations
about where to spend the night, still hundreds, indeed thousands, of sub-
stantial letters remain. Th at does not count the much larger number of let-
ters my father received from correspondents literary and otherwise for over
seventy- fi ve years. You can consider the entire collection a matchless por-
trait of the literary situation in the twentieth century. Th is book is, to be
[ ix ]