‘The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature’
By Gerald Howard
Penguin Press, 544 Pages

Not many literary biographies are cast in the form of heroic narratives. Malcolm Cowley’s life as poet, critic, literary historian, and what used to be called a “man of letters” is the exception, according to Gerald Howard. Even a great biography, such as the one Mr. Howard has written, though, leaves out aspects of a subject by dint of the narrative’s design. 

Mr. Howard supposes that by the mid-1940s “Faulkner and his work seemed destined for oblivion” — that is, until Malcolm Cowley came along. The great Scribner’s editor, Maxwell Perkins, had declared: “Faulkner is finished.” Most of his novels were out of print, and only a few among the literati continued to recognize his immense achievement.

That narrative is not quite right. Faulkner remained a towering figure in France, and by the mid-1940s was gathering the support that would land him the 1949 Nobel Prize. His publisher, Random House, stood by him, even if it was not advancing his career. Mr. Howard knows all of this, but still insists on “oblivion.”

Cowley’s “The Portable Faulkner” jump-started the Faulkner craze, already beginning to burgeon in academia through the efforts of scholars such as Carvel Collins and Warren Beck. Cowley grandly presented Faulkner as a Balzacian figure, creating a powerful legend of the South — though, as Robert Penn Warren pointed out, Faulkner’s work was universal, not provincial or sectional. 

“The Portable,” hailed by Faulkner himself, nevertheless did his novels a disservice in that it fragmented them, thus obscuring the achievement of a writer whose grasp of narrative structure exceeded that of all his contemporaries and that accounted for his longevity in Hollywood.

Cowley had done much the same in “The Portable Ernest Hemingway,” but revealed greater dimensions in an author that earlier critics had overlooked. Hemingway, never one to resist abusing anyone who helped him, disparaged Cowley as much as he praised him. In Mr. Howard’s narrative, Faulkner seems entirely grateful, yet there is this comment he made to an Oxford contemporary: “Dr. Busby, outside of Malcolm Cowley, is the greatest living jackass.”

Cowley got his start at Harvard, mentored by controversial Amy Lowell, who thought his poetry and literary criticism promising and touted him to publishers. Mr. Howard does not say so, but I wonder if her example inspired Cowley’s own missionary project that took him into the 1950s and 1960s as he took up the cause of Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey, creators of a new American literature that Cowley had recognized in his own generation in his classic “Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s.”

In the post-World War II era, universities began to hire writers in residence and establish creative writing programs that engaged Cowley. One of his students, Ken Kesey, observed that Cowley inspired his students to see beyond writers’ rivalries and perfect a devotion to literature itself. 

Mr. Howard does not, however, deal with what happened when a brilliant student, Michael Millgate, my literary mentor, disappointed Cowley. They became estranged when Millgate, a brilliant prose stylist, decided to pursue an exclusively academic career and not the quest to become the man of letters that Cowley himself so courageously exemplified.

Mr. Howard ranks Cowley just below Edmund Wilson as a literary historian and critic, and is much aggrieved that several commentators have sought to diminish Cowley’s contributions to literature by deploring his period of fellow traveler apologetics for Stalin’s regime, including the infamous showtrials in which so many of the original Bolsheviks were put to death under bogus charges of treason to satisfy a totalitarian’s consolidation of power.

Some of the most moving passages of Mr. Howard’s biography deal with the friendship between the poet Hart Crane and Cowley. Crane, often presented as a suicidal, self-absorbed lunatic, selflessly praised Cowley’s poetry, urging him to publish more, and never flagging in his support, not even minding when Cowley did not accept all of his advice.

As Mr. Howard shows, there is much still to learn from Cowley — how he was able, say, after years of painstaking maneuvering, to get stodgy Viking Press to publish Kerouac‘s “On the Road.” Cowley remained, right up to the end of his life, on the alert for the genuinely new in literature and made sure it was published.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography.”