The American Man of Letters

Malcolm Cowley’s latest book—and his last—is his best and will prove the most enduring. These letters have been expertly edited by Hans Bak, an established hand in the field, and by Cowley’s son, Robert, an extremely effective and professional team that could not have been improved. There is a full battery of notes and a full index, making this book exceptionally easy to read and use. Anyone who knows Cowley’s other books will still be grateful for this book’s comprehensiveness. Nobody could have expected a more detailed or better book. It is an encyclopedia of American literature and literary history from 1915 to 1987, written by an extraordinarily learned man, who wrote clearly and cogently from the beginning of his career until the end.

The narrative here is smooth, yet charged with momentum, which is unusual in a collection of letters. Just over halfway through the book, Cowley says, “I won’t emulate Yeats, but I think one of the noblest projects for anyone in any age is to find a shape in his life.” These letters illustrate the shape of the life of one of America’s most earnest and intelligent men of letters. Enjoined to write a “retrospective evaluation” of his career six years before he died, Cowley states, “The aims, so it seems to me, have always been to celebrate American literature and to defend American writers as a community within the larger community.”

It is this ideal of the literary community that is the common thread running through these letters. Cowley had a regular correspondence with Kenneth Burke, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and three major editors—Pascal Covici, Hiram Haydn, and Albert Erskine—to whom he wrote about writers he revered (not without some reservations) and new writers on the horizon who had piqued his curiosity. Here you’ll find countless passages on Hemingway, Wolfe, T. S. Eliot, and Louise Bogan; but Faulkner, as one would think, gets the lion’s share on the major American authors considered in this book. Cowley also shows great interest in the burgeoning careers of Ernest Gaines, Ken Kesey, and Cormac McCarthy. He writes to Erskine at Random House, “Cormac McCarthy is a new talent, and I congratulate you on finding him. … He tells a story marvelously, with a sort of baresark [sic] joy as he rushes into scenes of violence.” In the sixties Cowley grieved the loss of old friends, especially Ernest Hemingway; soon after his suicide in July of 1961, Cowley writes to Conrad Aiken:

I mourn for Hemingway. He could be as mean as cat piss and as sweet as a ministering angel. It’s hard to think that so much vitality, vanity, unflagging zest, eagerness to excel in everything, willingness to learn and study and finally teach everything, ability to participate in other people’s lives—that all this should simply vanish. … When he conquered certain weaknesses of character, when he stopped being a coward, when he became more or less the image he had created of himself—at that point he pretty well stopped being a writer. Let’s nurse our vices and neuroses; it’s dangerous to cure them.

Writing to Allen Tate on the death of R. P. Blackmur in 1965, Cowley speaks directly about the interdependence of the literary community: “all of us who started writing in the twenties had some curious feeling of closeness, of having shared the same perilous undertaking. And we all seem diminished when one of us goes.” To his principal correspondent and closest friend, Kenneth Burke, he speaks of the “fraternity”: “all of us survivors of the 1920’s.” One of those survivors, but perhaps not so chummy with the fraternity, was Eliot, whom Cowley champions: “I disagree with Karl [Shapiro] when he talks as if T. S. Eliot were the central figure in a dire conspiracy. Eliot has been a man of very great personal authority ever since he was an undergraduate at Harvard...