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