"On occasion, however, some sociological speculation wouldn’t have gone amiss. Exactly how and why writers like Cowley, white and male but radical in their receptivity to Marxism, were able to overlook so much difference in their conception of American society, is a question the book could have afforded to address."
This question can be addressed briefly but very tellingly at a first order. Malcolm Cowley and his key literary cronies involved themselves in the war effort (WWI). Cowley, Hemingway, and Dos Passos drove ambulances. Fitzgerald joined the Army. Falkner changed his name to Faulkner and managed to join the Canadian Air Force, then lied about his time in the service and "paraded" around in a uniform after the war, and flew private planes through his later life. Cowley helped Faulkner win the Nobel three years after he got the Portable Faulkner published. If you want a clear-eyed take on the racist Faulkner's writing read the great progressive critic Maxwell Geismar about Faulkner and his work. None of this establishment literary cohort were ever politically arrested or even much surveilled, except Dos Passos briefly after the war, and later Hemingway a bit during the time of the Spanish Civil War and WWII, superficially.
On the flip side, though Cowley knew them all well, the actual greatest novelists of the time, Mike Gold and Claude McKay and Agnes Smedley, received no Portable editions from Cowley and all were deeply and actively opposed to American involvement in WWI and the war itself and were heavily surveilled and all were politically arrested. And they all were contributors to and/or editors of the literary and cultural magazines that were shut down by the government during WWI and restarted under other names some years thereafter. Included among this group was anarchist and brilliant literary critic Emma Goldman, who was deported, after first being imprisoned and charged under the espionage act, as was Agnes Smedley.
Cowley's group became the establishment and cold warriors, the ones who taught and gave talks in the colleges, as part of the Cold War MFA crew. Meanwhile, McKay, Gold, and Smedley, socialists and progressive populists, each wrote novels in the 1920s greater than The Great Gatsby, in every way, and were falsely smeared as inartistic and excessively propagandistic by the Cold War Red Scarce McCarthy Era liberal-conservative establishment for decades thereafter, with effects felt to the present day, in a society-wide cultural war that has been wholly revived by Trump today.
In time, Latin American and decolonization and multicultural literature would partly pick up where these diverse "proletarian" socialists left off, partly rebelling against the Cold War liberal-conservative mentality though not entirely. And here we are today.
The author of THE INSIDER wishes to thank you for this kind and perceptive review. It is very nice to be understood.
Gerald Howard
What a fun read. Really interesting stuff!
Wow! So engaging. Thanks.
"politics is bad for you,” he told Cowley, “because it’s not real to you.” -- sums up many of the Stalinist Americans of the era
"On occasion, however, some sociological speculation wouldn’t have gone amiss. Exactly how and why writers like Cowley, white and male but radical in their receptivity to Marxism, were able to overlook so much difference in their conception of American society, is a question the book could have afforded to address."
This question can be addressed briefly but very tellingly at a first order. Malcolm Cowley and his key literary cronies involved themselves in the war effort (WWI). Cowley, Hemingway, and Dos Passos drove ambulances. Fitzgerald joined the Army. Falkner changed his name to Faulkner and managed to join the Canadian Air Force, then lied about his time in the service and "paraded" around in a uniform after the war, and flew private planes through his later life. Cowley helped Faulkner win the Nobel three years after he got the Portable Faulkner published. If you want a clear-eyed take on the racist Faulkner's writing read the great progressive critic Maxwell Geismar about Faulkner and his work. None of this establishment literary cohort were ever politically arrested or even much surveilled, except Dos Passos briefly after the war, and later Hemingway a bit during the time of the Spanish Civil War and WWII, superficially.
On the flip side, though Cowley knew them all well, the actual greatest novelists of the time, Mike Gold and Claude McKay and Agnes Smedley, received no Portable editions from Cowley and all were deeply and actively opposed to American involvement in WWI and the war itself and were heavily surveilled and all were politically arrested. And they all were contributors to and/or editors of the literary and cultural magazines that were shut down by the government during WWI and restarted under other names some years thereafter. Included among this group was anarchist and brilliant literary critic Emma Goldman, who was deported, after first being imprisoned and charged under the espionage act, as was Agnes Smedley.
Cowley's group became the establishment and cold warriors, the ones who taught and gave talks in the colleges, as part of the Cold War MFA crew. Meanwhile, McKay, Gold, and Smedley, socialists and progressive populists, each wrote novels in the 1920s greater than The Great Gatsby, in every way, and were falsely smeared as inartistic and excessively propagandistic by the Cold War Red Scarce McCarthy Era liberal-conservative establishment for decades thereafter, with effects felt to the present day, in a society-wide cultural war that has been wholly revived by Trump today.
In time, Latin American and decolonization and multicultural literature would partly pick up where these diverse "proletarian" socialists left off, partly rebelling against the Cold War liberal-conservative mentality though not entirely. And here we are today.