Gerald Howard’s new book commemorates a career path that, to those familiar with the pauper’s wages and increasing marginalization of contemporary book criticism, borders on the fantastical. “It may be hard to credit now,” he writes in The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature, “but the route to real literary prestige and advancement once ran through the practice of book reviewing.” Cowley climbed to the top of his field, establishing himself as a critic with the power to shape the tastes of several generations of readers. Howard’s warm, knowledgeable biography is a case study in how to construct a literary culture—and a tacit acknowledgment that institutions once devoted to preserving ours are contributing to its diminishment.
Cowley authored several books, but he was better known as an advocate for others. Impressively, he was a seminal figure in two discrete literary cohorts. Born in 1898, he spent four years at Harvard University reading novels, stories, and poems from overseas. In 1910s academia, American literature was thought to be unsophisticated and unworthy of serious attention. Cowley disagreed and began test-driving his “most persuasive insight as a critic and literary historian,” writes Howard, a longtime book editor whose writers included Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, and Hanya Yanagihara. During and after his stint as a World War I ambulance driver, Cowley lived in France, mixing with fellow American writers around his age. These expat novelists and poets, among them Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and E.E. Cummings, were doing fresh, daring work that, as Cowley was among the first to assert, “will be rather important in the history of American letters.” This analysis, sharpened throughout the 1920s and beyond, would prompt The New York Times, in an obituary that ran on its front page in 1989, to characterize Cowley as “the most trenchant chronicler of the so-called Lost Generation of post-World War I writers.”
Over time, Cowley headed The New Republic’s agenda-setting books section, worked as an associate editor and perceptive talent scout for Viking Press, and wrote for all of the day’s leading publications. It’s not an overstatement to say that his supportive reviews and essays were crucial in making and reviving the careers of several major American writers. Foremost among them was William Faulkner, who by 1944 had published 17 books of stubbornly idiosyncratic prose, most of which concerned the goings-on in a fictional Mississippi county; just one of his novels was still in print. Cowley, an admirer who by then had enviable industry clout, took up the matter, “mounting,” Howard writes, “one of the most important rescue missions in American literary history.” As edited by Cowley, the extracts woven together in the nearly 800-page The Portable Faulkner presented, per the book’s cover copy, “the saga of Yoknapatawpha County, 1820-1945.” A dense body of work was now accessible. Further, Cowley penned an introductory essay that, in likening Faulkner’s vision and ambition to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, positioned him as part of a broader artistic tradition. Within five years, Faulkner was a Nobel Prize winner.
Cowley did something similar for Hemingway’s reputation, which was also flagging in the 1940s. In an introductory essay to The Portable Hemingway, which he also edited, Cowley illuminated previously ignored “symbolic depths” in Hemingway’s fiction, Howard writes, packaging it as “teachable” and, for better or worse, ensuring that his stories and novels appeared on high school reading lists for the rest of the century. Cowley’s work on these volumes was part of a major shift in American reading habits. Luminaries from Shakespeare to Dorothy Parker would get the Portable treatment, spurring a postwar boom in cheap paperbacks, which were displayed at all manner of retail outlets and sold by the millions.
Some of this book’s most colorful chapters foreground Cowley’s work as a writer and editor associated with small but spirited journals that flourished during the interwar years. One publication he helped pilot went under when the U.S. Postal Service deemed it smut and refused to ship it. Another, which Howard calls “a kind of MAD magazine written for literary eggheads,” cracked wise about fellow critics and included deliberately awful poems. Meanwhile, there are memorable glimpses of writers at key moments in their careers. A teenaged John Cheever got his start when Cowley, then at The New Republic, published his vibrant fictionalized account of being expelled from school. On the other end of the emotional spectrum, Howard sensitively discusses the mental health struggles that plagued Hart Crane, the poet and Cowley friend who committed suicide in 1932. These were difficult years for Cowley, who, like other members of the stateside political left, defended Joseph Stalin. Though he never joined the Communist Party, Cowley was an ardent supporter at a moment when such affiliations ruined careers. As Howard shows in enlightening detail, his subject would spend the rest of his days answering for his failure to condemn the dictator until the evidence of his many crimes was overwhelming.
This, however, didn’t prevent him from making another big contribution to American literature. As Howard relates, Cowley, by then with Viking, shepherded to publication two novels that would define the counterculture that emerged in the 1950s. The first appeared on his radar in 1953, when Allen Ginsberg got in touch to rave about a manuscript, written on a long paper scroll, by a relative unknown named Jack Kerouac. That Christmas, Howard writes in a cinematic set piece, Cowley took the unwieldy text to his Connecticut home. He “took out the scroll, said to his son, ‘Watch this,’ and rolled it out like a bowling ball.” Cowley recognized Kerouac, who had grown used to rejections, as an exciting voice who “should be published, or he will run the danger of losing that sense of an audience, which is part of a writer’s equipment.” This is smart and true, but Howard, curiously, neglects to flag it as a recurring theme in Cowley’s reviews and editing. By the time Cowley met Kerouac, the importance of a writer-reader nexus would have been on Cowley’s mind for years, at least since his work with Faulkner, whose books had gone out of print in part due to his avowed refusal to write with readers in mind.
Still, Howard’s Kerouac chapter is among the book’s strongest, packed with fascinating details about Kerouac’s working methods—he wasn’t always the carefree improviser he’s been caricatured as—and Viking’s handling of the book, which came out in 1957. Fearful that Kerouac would remove commas that had been added to his light-on-punctuation manuscript, the publisher didn’t send him bound galleys, only showing him the book after it was a retail-ready finished product. Then as now, Howard suggests, this was unheard of. By contrast, Viking’s publicity team did inspired work, placing copies in the hands of hipsters like Marlon Brando and Dave Brubeck, the jazz pianist, and getting him booked on popular TV interview shows. In time, Cowley would perform a comparable behind-the-scenes role in persuading Viking to publish Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Kerouac and Kesey “were as influential in defining the culture of the sixties as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were in the twenties,” Howard argues. “For one man to have discovered, championed, edited, and published two such books in such a short period of time is a remarkable achievement.”
All of the above, Howard writes, occurred only after Cowley secured a $150 scholarship, “which would cover the cost of a year’s tuition” at Harvard University in the mid-1910s. Howard doesn’t do the math for us, but according to the Federal Reserve’s inflation calculator, that’s $4,800 in today’s money. Harvard’s tuition for the current academic year is $59,000, plus room and board—pricey, yet much lower than many other schools. No thinking person longs for a return to higher education as it was constituted in the early 20th century, when its primary goal was to further empower straight white men—the beneficiaries, not coincidentally, of most of Cowley’s fervent support. But today, the cost of college is prohibitive, and university scholarships frequently go to high school students whose families have the wherewithal to hire teams of tutors and test-prep coaches. Those unlucky enough to pay out of pocket will graduate in deep debt.
Against this backdrop, is it still practical to strive for a working life that, broadly speaking, resembles the one Howard describes in this intelligent biography? To support oneself in our easily distracted era by writing about books and ideas (while demonstrating, of course, far greater interest in work by people of other racial and gender identities than Cowley was able to muster)? Theoretically, yes. In reality, however, the obscene costs and barriers to access that define the contemporary college experience effectively funnel students into fields like finance, where they can earn lots of money quickly in order to pay down student loans. “The wages of book reviewing are paltry and inevitably lead to a life of precarity and greatly reduced caloric intake,” as Howard archly puts it. But such a life ought to at least be an option. Many powerful forces are conspiring to drive serious reading into extinction. American universities shouldn’t be among them.
