A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation

by Malcolm Cowley

Pages clean and unmarked. Shelf wear from time on shelf like you would see on a major chain. There s scuff inside the cover otherwise the book is in good condition. Immediate shipping.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism

276 pages, Hardcover

First published May 28, 1973

About the author

Malcolm Cowley was an American novelist, poet, literary critic, and journalist. Cowley is also recognized as one of the major literary historians of the twentieth century, and his Exile's Return, is one of the most definitive and widely read chronicles of the 1920s.

Cowley was one of the dozens of creative literary and artistic figures who migrated during the 1920s to Paris and congregated in Montparnasse. He lived in France for three years, where he worked with notables such as Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings and others. He is usually regarded as representative of America's Lost Generation.

As a consulting editor for Viking Press, Cowley notably championed the work and advanced the careers of the post-World War I writers who sundered tradition and fostered a new era in American literature. He was the one who rescued writers such as William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald from possible early oblivion and who discovered John Cheever and goaded him to write. Later Cowley championed such uncommon writers as Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey

His extraordinarily creative and prolific writing career spanned nearly 70 years, and he continued to produce essays, reviews and books well into his 80's.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

To paraphrase Walt Whitman, who better to "understand the large hearts of heroes" than someone who can truly say "I am the man, I suffered, I was there."?

In A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation, Malcolm Cowley strives to help us understand the "large hearts" of close to a dozen post-World War I literary heroes, whose hearts' expanse contained perplexing darkness and obsessive energy as well as generous talents to express a proposed generational outlook (then, though, as after and now, I suspect generational viewpoints were never as pervasively held by the entire generations as the writers and artists--or, perhaps more accurately, their publicists--would have us believe).

And Malcolm Cowley was there. In World War I Cowley was a reporter from the front for The Pittsburgh Gazette and an American Field Service ambulance driver along with Hemingway, Cummings and so many other "lost generation" writers. After the war, he rubbed shoulders among the American literary artist expatriates in 1920's Paris. His first wife, Peggy, apparently was the other half of the only heterosexual relationship of substance (or at all) had by poet Hart Crane, who was a friend of Malcolm and Peggy Cowley and in and of their social circle during the '20s and into the next decade (Hart suicided in '32).

Maybe further reading by and about Cowley will help me eventually take a side on the debate that possibly exists beyond my own mind as to whether his relationships in the "Lost Generation" literary scene were as a true and vital participant or as a hanger-on poseur who later made more hay as a publisher and editor than as a writer. Hemingway put Cowley down in a brief passage in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, but I tentatively suspect Hemingway of using cutting put downs more for stylistic effect than as a reflection of something approaching historical truth (the parenthetical voice in my head that is never silent, and that Hemingway would have hated, interjects at this point that for Hemingway style was truth. He was a painter, not a philosopher). These suspicions, and a better understanding of Hemingway's anti-intellectualism, are also notions I'll reserve bringing into a full flourishing opinion until after I complete further reading. Always further reading.

The book consists of eleven chapters: two bookend chapters set up and sum up this generational literary era (I.The Other War as the alpha and XI.Taps for the Lost Generation as the omega), seven chapters each are devoted to well-known writers (be they mainly poets such as Cummings or Crane or chiefly novelists such as Faulkner and Fitzgerald) and good ol' Hemingway, despite his taking a Kilimanjaro cheap shot at the author, receives two chapters--one focusing on the young writer of the Paris years and the penultimate chapter extolling the virtues of X.The Old Lion during a period of his career where it is fashionable to bash Poppa as having lost his talent.

Besides being an enjoyable and informative read, here's one thing this book did for me: it made me realize how little of this stuff I've read as the older man I am now, as opposed to the couldn't-care-less person I was in high school and college when this stuff was being shoved down my throat in the form of assignments made by English teachers and American Lit professors who I believe fell short in making this writing come as alive as Cowley has convinced me it is, or at least inspired me to believe it now waits to be. And so the book gave me resolve to plunge into reading (in some cases, rereading with older and now new eyes) the works of many of these authors.

I doubt many of you managed to make it through high school, let alone American Lit in college, without being assigned Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby? Although, like some of my contemporaries, many of you might have opted to instead watch the movie, read the Cliff Notes or just said "fuck it" and took the failing grade. Similar might be said of Hemingway and, though assigned to a lesser extent in my experience, Faulkner. And these writers whom I was introduced to yet not sufficiently inspired, it seems, to enjoy during my formal academic years are merely the beginning. I wasn't even finished with Cowley's book when I started in on a copy of U.S.A by John Dos Passos (subject of IV.The Learned Poggius) that I long ago picked up in one of my second-hand book buying frenzies. And I realized that as much as I've heard about Thornton Wilder's play Our Town, I've never seen nor read the goddamned thing (Wilder's work, of which the famous play is but a small slice, is covered in IV.Time Abolished). Although Cowley's chapter on Thomas Wolfe (VIII.Homo Scribens) didn't make me eager to read any of Wolfe's work (other than to surely, I tell myself, someday get back to Look Homeward, Angel) I was fascinated by the portrait of a literary artist as a young man so unquestioning and obsessive as to be pitifully twisted and life a live that is more a cautionary tale for future writers than a story of an author leaving behind timeless works. Wolfe, like Crane, died in his early thirties and while his death was not a suicide, after reading his chapter I felt as though he might have somehow written himself to death.

For obvious and aforementioned reasons, in the chapter on Crane (IX.A Memoir) Cowley is at his most personal and poignant. And, a slight warning, I felt the chapter on Faulkner (VII.The Yoknapatawpha Story) serves almost as much a spoiler, particularly if you're planning to read Absalom, Absalom! any time soon, as an enticement to discover or rediscover him.

Here are some of the larger things this book did for me: it made me realize how much I lack (or am currently unaware of) heroes of the pen that come from my generation. Cue the end of the The Fall's song Repetition, ("My Generation! ... Same old ... My Generation! ... Groovy ... My Generation!") to signify that there may not be a stronger argument for cohesiveness of a generational view or mood since the one Cowley writes about in this book (which might have been a point he himself made either explicitly or between the lines. I can't quite remember and I'm too lazy to research it with a skimming reread). I know I set myself up for an accusation of romanticism when I say that most of the heroes of the pen that I do have are of an entirely different time and breed, even their cynicism seems purer to me for somehow being more fairly earned. It could be I simply need to read more ... further reading. Always further reading.

And, to borrow--if memory serves--a phrase from Charles Bukowski, I am a bit disgusted that I have "no grounding in the classics," any classics. To think that most of these writers began as young Turks who were, if not rebelling against their classics, at least rebelling against their fathers' generation who revered those classics as a matter of good form and rote rather than true emotional connection ... to think that I don't have even a solid grounding in their work. To think that their foundational experiences in storytelling were the likes of Milton or Shakespeare or Balzac while mine were Saturday morning cartoons and comic books before finally graduating on to science fiction short stories. To realize that they were raised on the sweet milk of noble poetry and the good clean air of a far less crappy world while I sat back and sucked up Looney Tunes and potato chips as if there wasn't a difference between the two. This I can't change, but it's not too late to recognize the big difference between "the large hearts of heroes" and whatever tinker toy noisemakers beat beneath the breasts of more docile and rehabbed MFAs such as, say, Rick Moody.

If there's one thing possibly worse than being born too late, it's failing to recognize the power of what once was and, within that recognition, still is.

Oh, I'm sorry. I seem to have gotten carried away.

*****
*****
crap I wrote earlier
Started Sunday morning 12 August 2012 and finished Sunday morning 16 September 2012.

Something I wrote early on in my progress through the book (I believe because goodreads invited me to do so and interweb head that I am, I could not resist the siren call of their UI: Excellent first chapter. Although I find it mildly annoying (possibly because it underscores my lack of worldliness) when French phrases are left to stand on their own without being translated into English (y'know, for us hicks) and I'm sent once again to the great Google.

"Apres la guerre finit!"

"Que je m'ennuie pour la Ville Immense, la Femme superbe et subtile qui s'appelle--tu le sais--Paris." Cummings in a letter to Dos Passos.

Could this possibly mean the following? Bored with the Big City where the babes are as hot as they are crafty and its name is--as you know--Paris.

Ah, that crazy ass Lost Generation crew! Not like the Beats had all the fun.

I am done with this. Review to follow.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting perspective about this post-First World War generation of writers and how that contributed to their lives and writing. Doesn’t include all the writers who are usually mentioned from that period (such as all those who hung out at Shakespeare & Company bookshop) so focus is primarily on American authors. I liked reading about their lives but not all of the author’s analogy of their writing. Cowley’s Exile’s Return was a more interesting book.

[M. D. Hudson · Rating 4 out of 5]

So I am thumbing through a recent issue of Boulevard (Nos. 101-102, 2019) when I come across this rather forbiddingly titled thing: "Selections from The Collected Letters of Eric Miles Williamson Volume I." The Forward - written by the letters' recipient Steve Morgan - warned that "The letters are the work of a burning young writer, who knows that he has something to say...There are constants in the letters, the endless agonies over women and money, the struggle to produce lasting work amidst a throwaway culture...." (p. 183). The letters were written from 1987-2001 and consisted of the agonies of a young fiction writer trying to find his way. Roughly my age, I guessed (I graduated in '86 from college), I was transported back in time by the self-important bloviating of a young literary man on the make:

"The greatest quality of the artist is that he is the only man who can honestly weep when he is happy and laugh when he is not happy.

Art is the refuge of the sane; The only sane man is the artist, and sanity can be defined by the artist only.

Art is expressing the wretchedness of the human race beautifully...

"And one must become one's work before one can ever produce a great work..." (pp. 190-191)

On and on and on it goes. A fully delusional and vain young man myself, I never had enough self-confidence to prattle on in such a Rimbaudian way, and I found my few, glancing encounters with such people to be uncomfortable - I was far too much of a wet end to be of any interest to them.

However, I found the letters interesting and absurd - artefacts from the guttering days of The Great American Novel aspirations of young (white, mostly) males in the fading years of the Reagan Administration. And yet I began to smell a rat:

"If you want to cash in, become a f***ing lawyer. Don't become a prostitute and help perpetuate everything the modern artist strives to ameliorate, bleeds and bares his soul to abolish. Don't join the dark brooding forces of shitbaggery. The muses will slap shut when you make your midnight call..." (p. 194)

But in the same letter, this:

"I must become a productive capitalist in order to repay my student loans, which, I am sad to say, were accumulated en route to getting enough education for becoming one of the lowest paid professionals on the earth of the planet. I am enslaved in the system, and I implicitly embrace the system having borrowed from it and indebted myself to in. In a sense, I have invested in the very system I detest...." (pp. 192-193).

"The sheer pain, exuberance, energy of that book (On the Road) makes me want to just kick ass. I am not destined to pay bills for the rest of my miserable life. I'll be out of debt in about two years, and then, mi amigo, it's on the road for me. I've just about had it with the middle class..." (p. 195).

Oh my! On the road with Jack and Dean - but in about two years after I pay those student loans off (note it took 2 years - college was cheap back then - I know from personal experience). Since I'd never heard of Eric Miles Williamson, it was with trembling fingers that I Googled him - did he flame out, another artist crushed by the Moloch of Amerika? Drink, drugs, motorcycle crash, suicide? Nope. Eric Miles Williamson is a creative writing professor at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley - and he is a doctor with no less than five academic degrees! (He is also noted as being an editor at Boulevard - though he is not on the masthead as far as I could find. Huh!). From what I can tell he still cultivates a latter-day Henry Miller persona but from the air-conditioned confines of academia. So much for overcoming "the dark brooding forces of shitbaggery."


***

Not to pick on Professor Williamson - we all have to make our accommodations with student loans and health insurance. So what does this have to do with Malcolm Cowley's wonderful book The Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation? Maybe not enough, but I find it difficult to write reviews about books I adore without some backing plate to illustrate why the book is so good and, therefore, so important.

Well, Williamson is taking as his model the role invented by Ernest Hemingway - whom Cowley knew and writes about in two separate sections in this book. By 1987 Hemingway's reputation had taken a beating, so it is Henry Miller and Dostoevsky that Williamson goes on about, but Hemingway was the original model. Toxic masculinity! The Lost Generation! You betcha. I wonder how Williamson teaches Papa down there at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley? Or is Papa taught at all, anywhere, these days?

***

The other authors profiled by Cowley have suffered various fates:

F. Scott Fitzgerarld: Thanks to The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald will endure, I think, despite the ravages of time and academic politics. It is a gorgeous, devastating book

Dos Passos: I always feel guilty about Dos Passos - I've read so much great stuff over the years - including Cowley - and yet I could not bring myself to take the plunge...something about a novel called USA that just puts me off. Cowley enthuses provocatively, but I still resist.

e. e. cummings: A baffling fall from prominence, but I just don't know why. Too many poems of iffy quality, perhaps? Too cutsie-pie fey too often (by people who are perhaps not reading him very carefully)? But he wrote some real keepers and for a poet, a couple of keepers is really all that is required, or, apparently, possible. So "Buffalo Bill" will keep him, I think, on the slopes of Mt. Parnassus for all eternity, so I say.

Thornton Wilder: I thought he was a bit of an odd man out for a Lost Generation survey. If it weren't for Our Town, would he be remembered at all? It'd be kind of like including Archibald MacLeish - who wrote a handful of really terrific poems (see "The End of the World" with Ralph the Lion) - achieved a lot in the world of letters and politics, but not too much that really endured in terms of work.

William Faulkner: I am not qualified to opine here. I find him difficult to read, but sometimes when I have a hard time, I am pretty sure the fault is all mine, not the writer's. Cowley is pretty much single-handedly responsible for Faulkner's literary rehabilitation, when he edited and issued The Portable Faulkner.

Thomas Wolfe: Wolfe was still a big deal when I was a young literary type, especially his image, which was this big, burly guy brimming with life, a grapho-maniac who produced mountains of paper lovingly edited by his editor Maxwell Perkins. A literary hero, for sure (with sympathetic commercial publishing house lawyer). This is literary porn at its most basic, and obvious. I really wanted to buy into this, but I recoiled in dismay and boredom from Look Homeward Angel. As prone as I am to self-deception, I just couldn't get on board with this logorrhea. His reputation is curiously defunct these days. Perhaps he just wore everybody out.

Hart Crane: Perhaps the best part of Cowley's book, he was a friend - if such a situation was really possible - with the wildly unstable Crane. Cowley's sympathy as well as his clear-eyed assessment of the man, was my favorite part of the book. A lot of financial transactions (one way, Cowley-to-Crane), places to crash, bail-outs, sympathetic talks, talks down off various ledges...Cowley strikes me as a patient, sympathetic man, willing to endure much in the service of literature, and a friend.

Edmund Wilson: In the brilliant last chapter, "Taps for the Lost Generation" (see below) Cowley acknowledges all the Lost Generation figures he had to leave out - spending a lot of time on Edmund Wilson. And I applaud this. Wilson's problem nowadays is that he was a towering man of letters rather than a poet or novelist. Men of letters (people of letters!) tend to not be very durable - George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken and all the other autocrats of the breakfast table. But I read with enthusiasm everything I can get my hands on written by Edmund Wilson (and he is easy to get hands on - used book stores usually have loads of his books, priced to sell).

***

As I was finishing up this book, I started thinking about the Lost Generation's legacy - what did all this energy and trauma, triumph and tragedy, actually produce? As I formulated an up-to-date ending to Cowley's book I was delighted (and maybe a bit chagrined) to find Cowley already beat me to the punch - the last chapter, "Taps for the Lost Generation" is a shrewd, perhaps brilliant summation of the LG's legacy. According to Cowley, It isn't as profound as you might think. This surprised me, actually. I mean Cowley was a part of the Lost Generation, why would be he so hard on his own legacy? Surprisingly modest. Or did Cowley feel he missed something, and therefore tries here to drag down the whole lot of them? A rather interesting quote from Cowley's Wikipedia page:

"While Cowley associated with many American writers in Europe, the sense of admiration was not always mutual. Hemingway removed direct reference to Cowley in a later version of The Snows of Kilimanjaro, replacing his name with the description, "that American poet with a pile of saucers in front of him and a stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada movement". John Dos Passos's private correspondence revealed the contempt he held for Cowley, but also the care writers took to hide their personal feelings in order to protect their careers once Cowley had become an editor of The New Republic...." Wikipedia

That "stupid look on his potato face..." had to sting. And there is something about Cowley's adherence to Dada that seems a bit desperate, a bit legacy-mongering. Because this book is so fine, I started diving into some of Cowley's other work, and it was underwhelming - a lot of literary hackwork, with a lot of special pleading for his chosen cause, Dada. It seems strange to me, Cowley not being really a Dada-kind of guy - as Hemingway suggests, a bit of a bore, a bit of an ideologue, a bit of... a guy who doesn't quite get it perhaps? Well, I like to think I'm no ideologue, but I sure don't quite get it a lot of the time.

***

Ah well, who gets it? I read this book in 2019, abandoned this review around that time (laziness, fear, life stuff happening), but I pulled it up in 2023 because on the local library discard rack, I found this (with my bibliofool's notations - one of my indulgences during my twilight years):

Malcom Cowley, After the Genteel Tradition: American Writers After 1910, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1937). Description: Stated first edition. Rebound in oxblood buckram with white spine titles, no bindery name, but looks quite recent. Ex-library with stamps, etc.; this was a reference book, for some reason, but it has a clear plastic (empty) pocket. Except for library stamps, etc., condition is excellent since it didn’t circulate, with internal contents slightly toned, perhaps, buckram binding looks brand new. I didn’t have any luck finding other 1937 first editions of this online, but the 1964 Southern Illinois Press reissue comes up quite a lot. Is the first edition scarce? I’m assuming not – Norton was a big company, I’d imagine the press run fairly large, and Cowley isn’t quite big enough for big bucks first editions... Here’s an overview of the book: “Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964. The First Revised and Enlarged Printing....First published in 1937, this volume was the first complete study of the rebel generation of American writers who emerged on the literary scene just before the First World War and dominated it until the Depression years. Some of the authors discussed include, Willa Cather, Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Van Wyck Brooks, Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, Jeffers, Millay, Dos Passos, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe.” (Biblio.com description, 1964 reprint) Interesting to note F. Scott Fitzgerald is not included. Speaking of past literary greats, Van Wyck Brooks first edition (1944) of one of his multi-volume critical volumes is also on the shelf, in original binding, but I did not succumb. I read Brooks in the early 1990s when I felt I was supposed to; he was okay, but even as dimwitted as I was, it seemed a bit musty. Cowley still works for me, sometimes...

It made me happy to find this, and put Cowley back in my literary sights. Cowley in his original form, not a reissue, "the first complete study of the rebel generation of American writers..." Ah, rebel rebel. Who cares? Do you have an MFA, a Ph.D in creative writing? You'd better! Van Wyck Brooks, where are ye?

Sorry this review of "A Second Flowering" is so exceptionally sketchy, but I read it four years ago and the details are hazy. Why is it called "A Second Flowering?" I'm sure I knew, but I've forgotten. But let me just say it's a gem, and you won't be wasting your precious time giving it a whirl.

[Paul W. B. Marsden · Rating 5 out of 5]

A joyous read through 1920’s Paris and beyond by someone who lived through it with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, E. E. Cummings, Dos Passos, Faulkner and others all born between 1894 and 1900. Insightful and in an accessible autobiographical manner that gives rounded portrayals of famous writers.
Recommended.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this. Certainly, I would have enjoyed it more had I read everything referenced.

[Naomi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting to read in its time. A lot has changed in scholarship around the Lost Generation.