It's always going on about "What about Stalinism?!" and doesn't tell you anything. It even parrots Robert Conquest's book.
See for yourself.
In the introduction to his new book, The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature, Gerald Howard confesses to a rather surprising sentiment.1 Howard, a veteran New York book editor, was, he informs us, an English major when he attended college, but it was not until some time after his graduation in the early 1970s that, encountering Cowley’s Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation (1973), with which he was “smitten,” he realized “that writers were real people”—a fact that “had never really occurred” to him owing to his “hero-worshipping frame of mind.” (One wonders: had he never been assigned a literary biography to read?) Later, he perused Exile’s Return (1951), Cowley’s memoir of the American literary scene in the 1920s, “with equal avidity and admiration”; still later, as an editor at Viking Penguin, he had the pleasure of commissioning The Portable Malcolm Cowley (1986) and editing The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley (1988). Howard’s surprising confession appears in the closing paragraph of his introduction: “I have come to love his era,” he writes, “and Malcolm Cowley too.” Gerald Howard loves Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989), an important detail to keep in mind as one makes one’s way through this compendious (487 text pages) and, in certain ways, exceedingly curious volume.
Doubtless it is futile to seek to make sense of the alchemy whereby one person becomes the object of another person’s disproportionate affection. But one thing that’s reasonably clear from the start is that Howard has considerable regard for Cowley’s literary criticism and, more broadly, for the way in which his work as a critic, editor, anthologist, and lecturer helped define, disseminate, and promote American literature as a whole and, in particular, certain writings of his own time, most notably the works of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other cutting-edge young novelists of the interwar years. So significant a part did Cowley play in this process, in Howard’s estimation, that he actually refers to the period during which Cowley was professionally active as “The Cowley Era.” Now, to suggest that Cowley was the central figure on the American literary scene during the greater part of the American century is to make a colossally brazen claim; others who could with at least equal justification have been credited with occupying key roles in this story include Maxwell Perkins of Scribner’s, the editor of such writers as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe; Edmund Wilson, who as the editor of The New Republic and a book critic for The New Yorker helped establish the careers of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Vladimir Nabokov, among others; and Alfred Kazin, whose pathbreaking study On Native Grounds (1942) provided a comprehensive critical account of American fiction from William Dean Howells onward. (A longer list of candidates for this honor would include Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, and Lionel Trilling.)
Howard’s claim for Cowley’s importance is especially audacious given that Cowley is today largely a forgotten figure, even among the well-read: literary friends of Howard’s, he admits, have misheard his answer to the ubiquitous question “What are you working on?” thinking that he was writing about Malcolm Lowry, the English novelist. Indeed, it is perhaps because of Cowley’s obscurity that Howard has, as he tells us, eschewed a “standard-issue biography” and instead given us a book in which his chief objective is to tell the story of American literature and its growing international reputation over the course of the twentieth century while using the figure of Cowley to tie it all together. To a limited extent, this is indeed the kind of book that Howard has written: there are long passages here—for example, on the poet Hart Crane, who was a close friend of Cowley’s (and, briefly, a bedmate of Cowley’s nymphomaniacal first wife, Peggy Baird, who was the only woman Crane ever slept with), and on Jack Kerouac, whose awful On the Road Cowley proudly shepherded into print—that in an orthodox literary biography would be considered unwarranted digressions. Also, as Howard admits in his introduction, he touches “only glancingly” on Cowley’s personal life—as a result of which we never get a well-rounded sense of Cowley or anyone else.
But despite Howard’s claim, The Insider is basically a biography. There’s a long (too long) chapter on Cowley’s rather uneventful boyhood in Belsano, Pennsylvania, followed by a detailed account of his years at Harvard, which were interrupted by periods in the bohemian subculture of Greenwich Village—where he met and married the aforementioned first wife (they divorced in 1932, whereupon Cowley wed his second wife, Muriel, with whom he remained until his death)—and as an ambulance driver on the front in wartime France. It was during this early sojourn in New York that Cowley clambered onto what Howard calls “the hamster wheel of reviewing”; for a time, Howard reports, the young Cowley was in the habit of dropping into the Manhattan offices of The Dial early in the morning to pick up three books, all of which, by noon of the same day, he had read, reviewed, and sold at a bookstore. We are presumably meant to see this as an admirable feat of youthful prolificity; instead it strikes me as an example of sheer irresponsibility: no one can read, digest, and judiciously review one book, let alone three, within such a brief time. The word hack comes to mind; questions of character begin to arise.
From 1921 to 1923, Cowley was in Europe, mostly in Paris, where he encountered a number of literary luminaries, among them Hemingway, who became a close chum; after returning to New York, he nimbly climbed the ladder of the literary establishment, becoming a regular reviewer for, then an associate editor at, The New Republic. For many years, he edited the “back of the book”—i.e., the culture pages, as distinguished from the “front of the book,” which was devoted to hard news. Cowley’s preoccupation with literature, however, ended with the arrival of the Great Depression. Almost overnight, his mind swarmed with thoughts of revolution: taking part in “panels, picket lines, conferences, congresses, strikes, parades” and joining more Communist Party front groups than even he, perhaps, could keep track of, he began to write in “the new literary language of class revolution.” Howard describes Cowley as having been “labeled, with some justice, a Stalinist fellow traveler.” With some justice? Cowley was the very model of a 1930s fellow traveler—which is to say an ardent, unambiguous Stalinist who, while never officially joining the Party, was as obedient to the latest Kremlin directives as any card-carrying Communist. This is, after all, a man who wrote in The Daily Worker that the October Revolution had been “the most important event . . . in history,” who declared in The New Republic that the Soviet Union had “the most democratic system that ever existed” and was “the most progressive force in the world,” and who was described by Eugene Lyons (the United Press’s man in Moscow from 1928 to 1934 and the first Westerner to interview Stalin) as “the Number One literary executioner for Stalin in America.”
For such a man, the term “fellow traveler” seems not, as Howard suggests, partly valid, but, rather, preposterously inadequate. Which raises the question: what are you to do if you’re a biographer whose subject—whom you profess to love, and whom you want your readers to love as well—spent a decade of his career shamelessly shilling for Stalin? Howard provides several answers. For one thing, you cite your subject as an example of Orwell’s statement that “a writer does well to keep out of politics”—as if being a cold-blooded, lockstep Stalinist were simply a matter of being involved in politics. You make a point of the fact that he was only one of “hundreds of . . . writers” who took their marching orders from the Kremlin—as if that excuses anything. (Does anyone today defend Nazis in such a fashion?) A related ploy: you present your subject as a noble soul who, during the “idealistic thirties,” was driven by his prodigious “social conscience” to join a movement populated by (in Cowley’s own words) “men of good will.” You remind the reader—more than once—that your subject never officially joined the Communist Party. You maintain that, having never visited the Soviet Union and having not been fluent in Russian, your subject was a victim of ignorance about life under Communism. Cowley himself proffered this excuse decades later, asserting that he’d known “nothing about Russia except from printed accounts.” How, then, one wants to ask Cowley, could he have sounded off about it, for so long, in such an authoritative manner? (As it happens, I’ve just read the memoirs of the songwriter Vernon Duke, who was one of many Russian refugees in New York from whom Cowley could have heard in harrowing detail about the Bolsheviks’ obscene transgressions. But like many American leftists today, Cowley was too much in thrall to an ideology to be capable of having his mind changed by mere facts.)
Then there’s this dodge: despite Cowley’s Stalinism, proclaims Howard, his
most profound and lasting loyalty was, first, last, and always, to language, and the ways that Communists deployed that precious resource seemed to him to debase its currency.
What? During the 1930s, few writers took a back seat to Cowley when it came to debasing language in the Party’s service. In 1938 he wrote an essay entitled “There Have to Be Censors.” (Howard calls this “a low point.” Not really: for Cowley, the entire decade was a low point.) Repeatedly, he wielded his cultural power to reprove Moscow’s critics and reward its lapdogs. For example, after John Dos Passos witnessed Stalinism in action during the Spanish Civil War, he left the Party—and Cowley punished Dos Passos’s apostasy by savaging his novel Adventures of a Young Man (1939); by contrast, when Hemingway produced pro-Soviet propaganda in the form of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Cowley celebrated it. Similarly, when the formerly Stalinist Partisan Review was revived in 1937 as a nominally anti-Communist—but, in its early years, somewhat Trotskyist—quarterly, Cowley was quick to blast its editors for their insufficient deference to Stalin. (Years later, in his 1952 novel Yet Other Waters, James T. Farrell depicted Cowley as Sherman Scott, a book-review editor who uses his exalted position to flog anti-Communists ruthlessly.)
Mainly, though, Howard deals with Cowley’s Communism by—quite simply—acknowledging it fully, and even taking him to task for it, but always writing about it in a distinctly dispassionate manner, as if to suggest that Cowley’s views and actions were less appalling than they really were. Take Howard’s account of the Spanish Civil War, during which Cowley, like other leftist writers, traveled to the front. Howard doesn’t try to conceal Cowley’s “rote and unquestioning acceptance of the Communist-dictated Popular Front version of events” or “his inability to perceive how the Soviets had taken control of the policies of the civil war”; he even points out that whereas Orwell, for one, wrote honestly about the Stalinists’ mass murder of Catalonian revolutionaries—which constituted, in Howard’s own words, an “eruption outside the Soviet Union of the Stalinist terror that would become a defining feature of twentieth-century totalitarianism”—Cowley, in his dispatches from Spain, didn’t so much as hint at any of this nefarious activity. Still, Howard attempts to mitigate his subject’s culpability by underscoring that Cowley’s views on the Spanish war “were shared by the vast majority of American literati” and by emphasizing Cowley’s purported empathy, as evinced by his declared wish to adopt war orphans (he never did so) and his lifelong claim that he was “haunted” by the “men of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion.”
In addition to the war in Spain, the late 1930s also brought the Moscow show trials (1936–38), in which members of the nomenklatura were found guilty of plotting against Stalin before being summarily executed. There were widespread doubts at the time about the legitimacy of these proceedings (years later, it was definitively proven that they were a sham), but a 1936 New Republic editorial, probably written by Cowley, “dismissed out of hand the possibility” that the defendants’ confessions might have been coerced or tortured out of them. In 1937 Cowley served up an “even more vehement endorsement of the truth of the trials.” And after Dos Passos, Wilson, and other literary eminences organized a hearing to study the case of Trotsky—the most prominent of the defendants, and the one who’d escaped punishment (at least for the time being) because he’d fled to Mexico—he was found innocent. But even following this, and despite Cowley’s private admission to Wilson that he considered the trials only “about three-quarters straight,” he once again publicly insisted—this time in The Masses—on the trials’ legitimacy. In response, an exasperated Wilson shot off a letter to Cowley lambasting him for “plugging the damned old Stalinist line.”
Then, in August 1939, came the Nazi–Soviet Pact. Instantly, American Stalinism evaporated—with one prominent exception. While other fellow travelers and Party members abandoned Moscow tout de suite, Cowley hung in there, defending Stalin’s deal with Hitler as an understandable act of geopolitical realism. Soon enough, however, he caved: in February 1940, The New Republic ran an unsigned statement, written by him, in which it renounced Stalin. To be sure, Cowley’s devotion to Stalin exacted a price: relieved of his editorial duties, he was reduced to writing a weekly book page; as Howard puts it, “he had been removed from a power seat in American letters.” Tough: at least he wasn’t executed, like the defendants in the Moscow trials. On that topic: even after the Nazi–Soviet Pact, Cowley couldn’t bring himself to say publicly that those trials had been bogus: in January 1940, reviewing In Stalin’s Secret Service, the memoirs of W. G. Krivitsky, a former Soviet spy, Cowley yet again reiterated his stand on the issue—whereupon Wilson, in yet another angry missive, accused him of “Stalinist character assassination of the most reckless and libelous sort.” Not until 1968, when Robert Conquest proved beyond doubt in The Great Terror that the trials had been fraudulent, did Cowley finally throw in the towel.
Cowley spent much of the rest of his life talking about his decade of hardcore Stalinism—lying about it, playing fast and loose with the facts about it, and occasionally apologizing (sort of) for it. But to a large extent he seems never to have learned his lesson about the virtues of Communism vis-à-vis democracy. After the end of World War II, while other Americans were celebrating victory and/or trying to take in the unspeakable revelations about the Nazi death camps, Cowley professed to be disturbed by (in Howard’s words) “the soulless triumph of consumer capitalism,” America’s supposed “cruelty” to Germany and Japan, and “the want of sympathy and the want of imagination that are coming to distinguish this country.” Compared to where, exactly? (After the Marshall Plan went into effect in 1948, did he happen to notice that while the United States was spending a fortune to rebuild Western Europe, the ussr was enslaving the people of the Eastern Bloc?)
Howard plainly feels sorry for the post-war Cowley:
Malcolm Cowley may have wished that he could be done with politics, but politics was by no means done with him. This would become painfully clear very quickly.
Poor Cowley, having to pay the price for a decade as an unscrupulous Kremlin mouthpiece! Howard quotes a letter in which Cowley laments that if his Stalinist record were to be held against him, “it would make it very difficult for me to sell articles, get lecture dates or find an editorial job.” Good heavens: after all that he’d done, what on earth made him think he deserved any sort of work that involved the dissemination of facts and opinions? (Did it ever occur to him to wonder how a pro-American writer would be treated in post-war Russia?) At one point Howard describes Cowley as one of many “prominent liberals” who, after the war, were under attack from the right—this, after Howard has spent almost two hundred fifty pages documenting Cowley’s committed, unrelenting Communism. Howard furthermore characterizes the post-war criticism directed at Cowley and other Stalinists as a product of “fevered habits of mind.” How striking that while Howard’s account of Cowley’s Stalinist period is, as noted, supremely dispassionate, he doesn’t hesitate to use words like “fevered” when referring to the attitudes of decent Americans toward Cowley’s erstwhile perfidy.
Cowley, as it turned out, didn’t need to worry about finding work after his fall from grace at The New Republic. Even while the war was still on, the Roosevelt administration tapped him for a lucrative position at a new government agency run by Archibald MacLeish. Among those who expressed outrage at his appointment were Congressman Martin Dies of the House Un-American Activities Committee, whom Howard gratuitously describes as “notorious and long-winded”; the columnist Westbrook Pegler, whom Howard calls “a rabid anti-Communist” (Howard never calls Cowley, or any Communist, “rabid”); and Whittaker Chambers, whom Howard accuses of delivering “an ugly sucker punch” for drawing attention, in a review for Time of one of Cowley’s poetry collections, to lines that Howard himself admits are “agitprop-heavy.” In fact the real “sucker punch” in this instance—and a truly shabby one it was—was delivered by MacLeish, who in retaliation for the review bad-mouthed Chambers to Time’s publisher, Henry Luce. (Old Communist habits die hard.) MacLeish also managed to obtain Cowley’s substantial fbi file and showed it to him. Howard contends that the file provided “a chilling glimpse of the surveillance state that J. Edgar Hoover had created.” No, what’s chilling is that MacLeish violated protocols and shared confidential documents with a longtime Soviet tool.
Although Cowley, under pressure, soon quit the government job, a generous five-year stipend from the Bollingen Foundation (why were such institutions so eager to throw money at Stalinists?—sorry, stupid question) soon enabled him to refocus on American literature. Over the next few years, he edited The Portable Hemingway (1944) and The Portable Faulkner (1946), edited and wrote introductions to anthologies, gave lectures, taught courses, and was eventually taken on by Viking Press, where he edited a 1951 book on “anti-Communist hysteria.” A sanitized (i.e., de-Stalinized) edition of Exile’s Return was published the same year. As the post-war era progressed, and what Howard calls “rabid anti-Communist paranoia” (there’s that word “rabid” again) faded in mainstream liberal culture, Cowley gradually resumed his exalted place in the literary hierarchy, exerting influence in the awarding of Bollingen Prizes and Guggenheim grants and serving as the president of the American Institute of Letters and as the chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1963, a diagram in Esquire put him near the “Hot Center” of the “American Literary Establishment.” Excited to play a role in the flowering of a counterculture, he edited Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957)—about which Truman Capote famously said, “That’s not writing, that’s typing”—and Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962).
Then, in 1980, came his memoir The Dream of the Golden Mountains, a wistful look back at the days when he and others had been swept up in the beautiful reverie of Stalin worship. The mainstream press embraced the book; only on the right did reviewers have the bad taste to mention that Communism was, in fact, a rather unpleasant phenomenon. In The American Spectator, Kenneth S. Lynn noted that the book’s “overriding purpose” was “to rehabilitate the myth that the 1930s was an era of revolutionary brotherhood”; in Commentary, Robert Alter observed that rather than view his own sometime radicalism “confessionally, as a God That Failed,” Cowley depicted it “as a noble but naive illusion of his youth” and thereby conveyed “little of the ruthlessness, the orgies of character assassination, the readiness to prostitute literature, the willingness to abandon individual conscience, that went on in the name of loyalty to the revolutionary cause”—aspects of the Communist life in which, Alter added, Cowley “was frequently enough involved.” Ten years later came The Portable Malcolm Cowley, from which Cowley’s editor—Gerald Howard himself—conscientiously omitted the huge chunk of Cowley’s oeuvre that might expose just what a fool and a knave he had been in the 1930s.
And now that selfsame Gerald Howard has given us The Insider—and the timing is well-nigh impeccable. In 1990, when Howard put out The Portable Malcolm Cowley, some judicious pruning was still necessary to obscure just how devout a Communist the man had once been. These days, such efforts aren’t really necessary. The kind of people who are likely to buy The Insider are members of a political party that in recent years has migrated very far to the left; New York, the major market for books like this, has just sworn in a socialist mayor. Today Howard’s confession, in his introduction, that he loves Cowley will not cause any eyelashes to bat; what truly sophisticated American, in the era of Bernie Sanders, who swore in Zohran Mamdani, doesn’t love an old Communist? It’s telling, really, that while Howard apologizes, in that introduction, for the fact that “Cowley’s life and career and milieu were very white, very middle class and sometimes privileged, very male, and very heterosexual”—as well as for Cowley’s indifference to black literature and his use, in his writing, of such offensive terms as “lady novelist” and “pansy”—he seems to take it for granted that readers, or at least the readers he wants, will take his subject’s Stalinism in their stride, and that perhaps they, too, will come away from his book loving Malcolm Cowley. Alas, he’s probably correct: reviewing the book in the November 19, 2025, issue of The New Yorker, Kevin Lozano, the associate literary editor of The Nation, not only entirely buys Howard’s outsize claims for Cowley’s cultural importance (Lozano’s piece is entitled “The Man Who Helped Make the American Literary Canon”) but also treats Cowley’s unreconstructed Stalinism as nothing more than an unfortunate career move (“his star would briefly implode when he picked the wrong side of the debate that would tear apart the left, the battle between Trotsky and Stalin”). Who can doubt that the American literary establishment, with few exceptions, will share Lozano’s morally bankrupt view?
