The Dream of the Golden Mountains: Remembering the 1930s by Malcolm Cowley (review)

Book Reviews (p. 36). Continue the characters do, but in the course of the play one senses an increasing disintegration of social structures (cf. Pozzo's helpless blindness and Lucky's bestial muteness), values, and interpersonal relationships. The only possibilities of escape from the universal "mess" which Beckett forces his audience to see lie in literary creation itself and in the sardonic laugh which detaches us from the tragedy of the human condition by making us recognize its fundamental absurdity. JAMES P. GILROY, University of Denver Malcolm Cowley. The Dream of the Golden Mountains: Remembering the 1930s. New York: The Viking Press, 1980. 317 p. Malcolm Cowley's newest book is a personal account of the complicated motives behind the political radicalization of American writers and intellectuals during the early years of the Great Depression. The book alternates chapters describing the public events Cowley wrote about for The New Republic magazine, such as the 1931 Harlan County Kentucky coal strikes and the 1932 Bonus Army march on Washington, with chapters describing encounters with literary groups prominent in the era. Cowley writes with insight of the Southern Agrarians , urban intellectuals active in John Reed clubs, the League ofAmerican Writers, and individuals like Scott Fitzgerald, Hart Crane, and Theodore Dreiser. The book's main theme reflects Cowley's judgment that the Communist political movement, which cynically used American writers and which briefly engaged Cowley's own political passions, deeply betrayed the ideals for which he and other writers stood. Like the "Religion of Modern Art" that Cowley saw develop in its most extreme form in the 1920s as a dehumanizing fanaticism consuming its devotees, the "religion" of Communism also became dehumanizing consuming the intellectuals who swore fealty to its programmatic hypocrisies. Another theme emerges in the book. Part of Cowley's personal anger toward the often ruthless capitalism that governed America in the early century resulted from industrial despoliation of the American landscape and big business insensitivity to the impact of environmental degradation on the human psyche and welfare. In the 30s Cowley was called a communist for his ecological concerns, though in fact he never actually joined the party and was often critical of its policies and practices. Today he would be called an environmentalist. The Dream Of The Golden Mountains reminds us of a historical truth that has been submerged by the sometimes reductive and vicious polemics of modern American political debate. Much ofthe art ofthe 1930s, including "political" novels like Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night, Faulkner's Light In August, Henry Miller's Tropic o/ Capricorn, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, numerous other literary works and Cowley's own writing, arose out of a literary community that felt a deep sense of personal and historical 274VOL. 34, NO. 4 (FALL 1980) Book Reviews crisis and was motivated by a profound humanistic idealism. When the academic study of art begins again to view literature as a mirror of human history, this book should stand as the wisest, most temperate guide through a complex era of modern cultural history. JAMES M. KEMPF, USAF Academy Richard Beale Davis. Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585-1763. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978. 3v, 1810 p. $60.00. With an investment of over twenty-five years, Richard Beale Davis has created a masterpiece of intellectual and cultural history that will pay dividends to students of the colonial South for many years. Winner of the 1979 National Book Award, the three-volume Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585-1763 is a model of scholarship: judiciously organized, thoroughly indexed, painstakingly annotated, and gracefully written. Davis's purpose is simple: to demonstrate the existence of an intellectual South and to establish this South as a vital and active participant in the shaping of American culture. Davis's first volume discusses the discovery and history of the colonial South, the role education played in its development , and the presence of the Indian as a force in southern life. The second volume includes a thorough discussion of books, libraries, reading, and printing; religion; the sermon and religious tract; and science and technology . The third volume addresses the fine arts in the life of the southern colonist...