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Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s
The adventures and attitudes shared by the American writers dubbed "The Lost Generation" are brought to life here by one of the group's most notable members. Feeling alienated in the America of the 1920s, Fitzgerald, Crane, Hemingway, Wilder, Dos Passos, Cowley, and many other writers "escaped" to Europe, some forever, some as temporary exiles. As Cowley details in this intimate, anecdotal portrait, in renouncing traditional life and literature, they expanded the boundaries of art.
400 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1951
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1636 people want to read
About the author
Malcolm Cowley
163 books32 followersMalcolm 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 65 reviews
March 11, 2025
The Sacred Cowley, a dull, colorless writer and Outsider, shares some worthy notes. What I remember about Cowley is that his soon-to-be-exwife Peggy was determinedly "romancing" Hart Crane in Mexico and was w him on the boat when Hart jumped overboard. ~~ (The heart has its reasons, or something like that).
Cowley attained a thimble of fame in Paris, 1923, by socking the proprietor of the Rotonde -- and managed to avoid 6 months in jail. Robert McAlmon later wrote that Cowley soon returned to America to join The New Republic where Cowley "continued being duly ponderous..." thereby offending yet another editor who kept McAlmon from getting published here.
Cowley ends his weighty notation with a long section on Harry Crosby, who really has little to do w his text. He said he was too overcome by Hart Crane's death to focus on him. (Aw, we understand)...Like everyone else, Cowley probably fell a bit in love w Harry -- drop-dead looks, super-rich, super-fun-crazy, and post W1, he had no inhibitions at all. Cowley couldn't figure out Crosby, but he did inspire Geoffrey Wolff's Crosby bio, "Black Sun."
Cowley attained a thimble of fame in Paris, 1923, by socking the proprietor of the Rotonde -- and managed to avoid 6 months in jail. Robert McAlmon later wrote that Cowley soon returned to America to join The New Republic where Cowley "continued being duly ponderous..." thereby offending yet another editor who kept McAlmon from getting published here.
Cowley ends his weighty notation with a long section on Harry Crosby, who really has little to do w his text. He said he was too overcome by Hart Crane's death to focus on him. (Aw, we understand)...Like everyone else, Cowley probably fell a bit in love w Harry -- drop-dead looks, super-rich, super-fun-crazy, and post W1, he had no inhibitions at all. Cowley couldn't figure out Crosby, but he did inspire Geoffrey Wolff's Crosby bio, "Black Sun."
June 7, 2022
Exile’s Return could have been several interesting books. It’s major flaw was that Cowley tried to compress them all into one. Memoir, history, literary criticism, and philosophy of art all co-exist within its pages. Any two of theses might have worked smashingly, but attempting all at once played hell with pacing, and produced a jumbled mass. The whole was less than the sum of its parts, but those parts did have real moments of interest worth exploring.
Crowley was at his best with his short histories. He gave a quick overview of bohemians, placed them firmly in the romantic tradition, and noted that;
“bohemia is a revolt against certain features of industrial capitalism and can exist only in a capitalist society.”
His chapters on the history of Dada were also intriguing, particularly as he played around the edges of this movement himself. He related an amusing incident when having E.E. Cummings as a dinner guest, Crowley attempted a Dadaist gesture by setting several of his books on fire in his hearth. He noted that it was a poor gesture, as the fire only smoldered, and that Cummings proved the better Dadaist when he urinated on the fire to put it out.
What isn’t here is any vibrant portrait of the Exile’s community in France. Crowley is much more interested in his philosophical musing about what drove a generation into voluntary exile, how the experiment failed, and what brought them home. He himself was back in America by 1923, an event which happens at the halfway point of his book. While piece of his theories are interesting, as a whole it is rather muddled, and consists entirely of his projection of his ideas of motivation onto other’s lives.
This is a book more suited to browse for its bits of gold rather than to read through. Usually, when I find that I am skimming large sections of a book I don’t recommend it at all. But in the case of Exile’s Return the interesting bits are truly excellent despite the dross that surrounds them, and it may be worth your while to give it a look despite its flaws.
Crowley was at his best with his short histories. He gave a quick overview of bohemians, placed them firmly in the romantic tradition, and noted that;
“bohemia is a revolt against certain features of industrial capitalism and can exist only in a capitalist society.”
His chapters on the history of Dada were also intriguing, particularly as he played around the edges of this movement himself. He related an amusing incident when having E.E. Cummings as a dinner guest, Crowley attempted a Dadaist gesture by setting several of his books on fire in his hearth. He noted that it was a poor gesture, as the fire only smoldered, and that Cummings proved the better Dadaist when he urinated on the fire to put it out.
What isn’t here is any vibrant portrait of the Exile’s community in France. Crowley is much more interested in his philosophical musing about what drove a generation into voluntary exile, how the experiment failed, and what brought them home. He himself was back in America by 1923, an event which happens at the halfway point of his book. While piece of his theories are interesting, as a whole it is rather muddled, and consists entirely of his projection of his ideas of motivation onto other’s lives.
This is a book more suited to browse for its bits of gold rather than to read through. Usually, when I find that I am skimming large sections of a book I don’t recommend it at all. But in the case of Exile’s Return the interesting bits are truly excellent despite the dross that surrounds them, and it may be worth your while to give it a look despite its flaws.
November 15, 2020
You have left the stage and you did not even bow.
Such concludes a letter Cowley wrote to himself, amidst the poet's perambulations, his inability to find solace or create an eternal Art. Such was his quest. Quixotic, perhaps, but not as a pejorative.
Much of this book is gossipy. It also attempts to repudiate Wilson's Axel's Castle thesis about the how integral Symbolism is in Yeats, Joyce and Proust. My interest was honestly waning. He then devotes considerable space to Hart Crane and Harry Crosby. I loved both sections immensely.
My reading of this should be through the prism of the rather bad Hulu series High Fidelity. I will take Nick Hornby's original thesis: it isn't what you're like, it is what you like that is important. This idea which once pulsated for me is now a risible echo. It is put to even worse use by the Hulu adaptation. Yet my viewing was in itself compelled by this strange age. It is a time of anxiety and malady. We are all suffering and the strain is showing. Call me bedraggled and I did read this over a weekend of uncertainty.
Such concludes a letter Cowley wrote to himself, amidst the poet's perambulations, his inability to find solace or create an eternal Art. Such was his quest. Quixotic, perhaps, but not as a pejorative.
Much of this book is gossipy. It also attempts to repudiate Wilson's Axel's Castle thesis about the how integral Symbolism is in Yeats, Joyce and Proust. My interest was honestly waning. He then devotes considerable space to Hart Crane and Harry Crosby. I loved both sections immensely.
My reading of this should be through the prism of the rather bad Hulu series High Fidelity. I will take Nick Hornby's original thesis: it isn't what you're like, it is what you like that is important. This idea which once pulsated for me is now a risible echo. It is put to even worse use by the Hulu adaptation. Yet my viewing was in itself compelled by this strange age. It is a time of anxiety and malady. We are all suffering and the strain is showing. Call me bedraggled and I did read this over a weekend of uncertainty.
January 18, 2015
This is the story of the so-called lost generation of American writers, of their alienation from their American roots, their attempts to replace America's "mechanical values" with moral values by escaping to Europe. Of their struggles to reconcile their need for self-expression with their need to make a living. The crass money values of America drove them overseas, but their need for American money drew them back, back to an America that was changed, in their perceptions.
This is a narrative of ideas. It is literary criticism but also contains strong elements of aesthetics, philosophy, history, and especially, sociology. It is not an easy read because of the complexities of the isms involved: Bohemianism, Dadaism, Symbolism, etc. So many interweaving threads are hard to follow, but there are flashes of brilliant writing here.
The author was steeped in literature. He lived it, full-time. He knew the big names on both sides of the Atlantic. This book is very much an inside view of the mostly-American literary scene to 1930.
This is a narrative of ideas. It is literary criticism but also contains strong elements of aesthetics, philosophy, history, and especially, sociology. It is not an easy read because of the complexities of the isms involved: Bohemianism, Dadaism, Symbolism, etc. So many interweaving threads are hard to follow, but there are flashes of brilliant writing here.
The author was steeped in literature. He lived it, full-time. He knew the big names on both sides of the Atlantic. This book is very much an inside view of the mostly-American literary scene to 1930.
September 12, 2007
A celebration of the brilliant people the essayist knew in Greenwich Village and in France during and after the war. It's personal without being too anecdotal and does a good job of showing the appreciation for form during this period, which is still useful for anyone who really cares about what makes for good writing. However, I was disappointed, but not surprised, by the author's virtual indifference to black writers from the same period who were just as talented and productive as their white counterparts. A few are mentioned on a birth list in the appendices, and in one section white authors, decrying their educations and privileged upbringings wish they could return to a more "primitive" life "like the Negro," but, otherwise, black authors are completely disregarded, as are most women, aside from their roles as wives and suicide partners. The author accounts for his disregard of women, but not for that of the Harlem Renaissance figures.
Still, it is, again, a personal story about the people the writer directly knew and loved; it is about their shaping and disintegration, and, once one accepts it for what it is, it is an impressive account.
August 21, 2018
Book-length descriptions of a certain age, time, or zeitgeist can be tricky to write. Depending on its relative importance, the writer can find herself exhausting all the information there is to offer, or choosing the most compelling vignettes and personalities to write about. Worse than either of these is the highly subjective take in which the author makes large, unwieldy extrapolations based on personal relationships with the people to be found within the book’s pages. In his retelling of the experience of a handful of American artists living in France during the 1920s, Malcolm Lowly opts for the latter, langorous approach which can sometimes indulge in heady amounts of omphaloskepsis.
An expatrite himself, Cowley quickly befriended some of the most prominent literary names of the decade upon moving to Paris. He knew everyone from Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Stein to e. e. cummings, Edmund Wilson, and Erksine Caldwell. As a long-time admirer of Kenneth Burke and Edmund Wilson, I was especially interested in any tidbits of information I might run across along the lines of theory. Instead, I encountered little insight and a willingness to name-drop that reminds the reader of an over-eager schoolboy. When Cowley wrote may very well be an indication of his eagerness to share these experiences: he first published the “Exile’s Return” in 1934 – barely enough time for the waves of the Gulf of Mexico to carry Hart Crane off this mortal coil. He must have seen what alcohol, drugs, and the suicidal ideation of artists did to many of his friends, and consequently decided to exorcise the book from himself as quickly as possible.
The individual stories of the writers suffer for all being so forced under the label “expatriate,” which Cowley wants to push even further to mean spiritually and psychologically isolated, not simply separated from their own country. This is a bit of a stretch. Lumping them all together and claiming that World War I had disenfranchised all of them in the same way sets the reader exactly up for what she gets: a bland, vague portrayal of the sentiments of certain writers of the generation. Even more bewilderingly, one of the main figures of the book – Harry Crosby – has left so little impression upon the general impression of American interwar literature that one even wonders why he is so thoroughly discussed. I’m not sure I need crisp, witty Plutarch-like epigrams of each writer’s life and literary contributions, but something in the middle of that spectrum would have been preferable. The American literary scene – both in the United States and abroad on the Rive Gauche – has drawn no paucity of attention. This book doesn’t add much to either the picture or the reception of American writers working in the immediate aftermath of World War I.
The Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics version that I have is the 1951 reissue of the work published almost two decades before. I don’t know whether it was the fevered pitch with which Cowley originally recounted his thoughts upon first writing, or the too-pregnant period of time before he was asked to edit it, but there is something about the book’s tone that comes off as slightly mawkish, like it was written by a obsequious acolyte instead of a distance of a cool, disinterested observer.
An expatrite himself, Cowley quickly befriended some of the most prominent literary names of the decade upon moving to Paris. He knew everyone from Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Stein to e. e. cummings, Edmund Wilson, and Erksine Caldwell. As a long-time admirer of Kenneth Burke and Edmund Wilson, I was especially interested in any tidbits of information I might run across along the lines of theory. Instead, I encountered little insight and a willingness to name-drop that reminds the reader of an over-eager schoolboy. When Cowley wrote may very well be an indication of his eagerness to share these experiences: he first published the “Exile’s Return” in 1934 – barely enough time for the waves of the Gulf of Mexico to carry Hart Crane off this mortal coil. He must have seen what alcohol, drugs, and the suicidal ideation of artists did to many of his friends, and consequently decided to exorcise the book from himself as quickly as possible.
The individual stories of the writers suffer for all being so forced under the label “expatriate,” which Cowley wants to push even further to mean spiritually and psychologically isolated, not simply separated from their own country. This is a bit of a stretch. Lumping them all together and claiming that World War I had disenfranchised all of them in the same way sets the reader exactly up for what she gets: a bland, vague portrayal of the sentiments of certain writers of the generation. Even more bewilderingly, one of the main figures of the book – Harry Crosby – has left so little impression upon the general impression of American interwar literature that one even wonders why he is so thoroughly discussed. I’m not sure I need crisp, witty Plutarch-like epigrams of each writer’s life and literary contributions, but something in the middle of that spectrum would have been preferable. The American literary scene – both in the United States and abroad on the Rive Gauche – has drawn no paucity of attention. This book doesn’t add much to either the picture or the reception of American writers working in the immediate aftermath of World War I.
The Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics version that I have is the 1951 reissue of the work published almost two decades before. I don’t know whether it was the fevered pitch with which Cowley originally recounted his thoughts upon first writing, or the too-pregnant period of time before he was asked to edit it, but there is something about the book’s tone that comes off as slightly mawkish, like it was written by a obsequious acolyte instead of a distance of a cool, disinterested observer.
June 19, 2011
Very possibly the book that made the most impression on me during university, therefore fantastic. A glimpse into the lives of Fitzgerland, Hemingway, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and others. On my to-read shelf to revisit.
May 21, 2016
The casual cosmopolitanism, the rage against the bourgeoisie, the sense of infinite time for cafe life (backed by an American dollar as strong as the fiercest vinasse). Cowley chronicles bohemian times in Paris, the village, the dilapidated farmhouses where writer's solitude was sought then tossed aside as too bereft of stimulation. His analysis of the fury of DaDa and its close kinship to the religion of art that it seemingly rejected could be transposed to many a later alternative art scene. The funeral of DaDa, seemingly held at the same banquets that celebrated its birth, embodied that frenzied idealism laced with post-war cynicism that haunted the generation unmoored from Babbitry. Factional arguments blossomed in a rich harvest of little magazines, Transatlantic Review, Transition, Secession, Broom Gargoyle, Fire, The Masses and the Little Review. Cowley sees the war dividing the bohemians and the radicals, until by the 1920s everyone was a former: a former anarchist making munitions, a former Wobbly opening a speakeasy, former suffragists who had been arrested after picketing the White House, former conscientious objectors paroled from Leavenworth....The gangsters at the Hell Hole, Eugene O'Neill's 24 hour dive of choice felt sorry for the skinny, shabby playwright and said "You go to any department store, Gene and pick yourself an overcoat and tell me what size it is and I steal it for you." Cowley parodies the "uniform" of the liberated young women who drank at The Working Girls Home, down Sixth Ave a few paces from the Hell Hole. Hair cut in Dutch bob, smock of embroidered Russian linen, daringly short skirt, sandals planted firmly on the ground, no corset. He seems terrified of them.
February 18, 2017
"Exile's Return" documents the experience of Cowley and other members of the Lost Generation in the 1920s.
Originally writing in 1934 about the 1920s, then substantially revising the book in the 1950s, we are given several layers of Cowley commenting on his own experience and his thinking about it. In the manner of Patrick Leigh Fermor or Robert Byron, the "non-fiction" nature of the work is secondary to its literary impact. The anecdotal quality of some of the starting points (being introduced to Hemingway while stopping by e.e. cummings' for a visit, getting drunk with Hart Crane) gives way generally to very elegant and quotable brief literary biographies of dozens of important figures, all of whom he happened to know. There are informative segments on Dadaism and dips back into the story of prior writers-in-exile, including the Russians of the mid-19th century in Germany and the always entertaining antics of Dostoevsky in Baden-Baden.
The history of bohemian artistic movements and Greenwich Village in particular is colorful. His grand Dada-ist gesture of punching a fascist-sympathizing Parisian cafe owner in the nose yields several (retrospectively) amusing pages on interactions with the French police, somewhat reminiscent of James Baldwin's essay on his stolen bedsheet incident.
The closing chapter on Harry Crosby treats his suicide as the end of an era (the Wall Street crash had a little bit to do with it as well). He also includes an index of "books one ought to have read" - I can see this is going to be trouble!
Originally writing in 1934 about the 1920s, then substantially revising the book in the 1950s, we are given several layers of Cowley commenting on his own experience and his thinking about it. In the manner of Patrick Leigh Fermor or Robert Byron, the "non-fiction" nature of the work is secondary to its literary impact. The anecdotal quality of some of the starting points (being introduced to Hemingway while stopping by e.e. cummings' for a visit, getting drunk with Hart Crane) gives way generally to very elegant and quotable brief literary biographies of dozens of important figures, all of whom he happened to know. There are informative segments on Dadaism and dips back into the story of prior writers-in-exile, including the Russians of the mid-19th century in Germany and the always entertaining antics of Dostoevsky in Baden-Baden.
The history of bohemian artistic movements and Greenwich Village in particular is colorful. His grand Dada-ist gesture of punching a fascist-sympathizing Parisian cafe owner in the nose yields several (retrospectively) amusing pages on interactions with the French police, somewhat reminiscent of James Baldwin's essay on his stolen bedsheet incident.
The closing chapter on Harry Crosby treats his suicide as the end of an era (the Wall Street crash had a little bit to do with it as well). He also includes an index of "books one ought to have read" - I can see this is going to be trouble!
January 20, 2008
This text was like a secret glimpse inside the lives of 1920s authors. You get to learn about the bar fights, affairs, and other drunken acts that inspired the great books of this century. I found it rather surprising that one man was so well-connected to this scene, as Malcolm Cowley befriended almost every major author of the time (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and my favorite e.e. cummings). By reading this, you get to really understand why WW1, the economy, and social change created the "lost generation" and pushed writers to leave their home country. Fascinating stuff, at least I think so.
February 10, 2008
Excellent account of the "lost generation" told by someone who knew all the major players.
August 1, 2008
I loved this book. Little snippets about Eugene O'Neil interacting with mobsters in the speakeasies of Manhattan, and remarkable descriptions of Hemingway, Proust, Joyce, not to mention a wonderful slew of anecdotes from Cowley's own life, and interesting intellectual history, such as the history of bohemianism, the expat experience, and what happened to the lost generation. If you like any of the authors mentioned in here, you should read this book.
December 9, 2008
Wonderful stories that greatly humanizes a great many writers and personalities from the 1920s.
August 18, 2019
Crowley uses his life to narrate the lost generation. The best bits are the occasional flashes of historical analysis (eg. Bohemianism).
July 16, 2016
An invaluable chronicle of the 1920s literary expatriates, Cowley's book benefits from his first-hand perspectives and participation. He allows himself to "intrude" on his narrative just enough to keep the book authentic while staying broad enough to encapture the entire era and scene rather than serving as a straight memoir.
I had chosen to read it mostly to learn more about Harry Crosby but all major figures from the era receive appropriate love.
I had chosen to read it mostly to learn more about Harry Crosby but all major figures from the era receive appropriate love.
November 9, 2010
An in-depth and fascinating review of modernism in Paris. Written from an outside perspective it adds a certain authenticity to the plethora due to its stark honesty even though it is often looking at other real figures in he scene, however, without the veil of fiction that most other pieces from the period rely on.
August 3, 2011
An informative retelling of the Lost Generation. Well worth reading. Of particular interest to those interested in: Hart Crane, Harry Crosby, the Dada movement, or the boom of post WWI literary reviews devoted to modernism and its offshoots.
November 30, 2013
Pretty good, but Cowley's account would make it seem that women were more or less absent in a significant, contributing way from the literary and artistic developments that occurred during the 1920s (Gertrude Stein is mentioned dismissively; Katherine Anne Porter gets a shout-out in an appendix).
November 4, 2015
I utilized this book for a paper I'm writing on the Lost Generation using the works of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and thus was a great book to get not only an overview of the lost generation, but also a direct insight into their lives.
August 18, 2007
I loved this book. It has really influenced my ideas on art and its creation. Also, it's a timeless understanding of the artist living amongst capitalism.
August 22, 2008
Lost Generation. A masterpiece that coined the phrase.
December 29, 2012
I can never get enough of Lost Generation writing. I especially enjoyed the extended portrait of Harry Crosby.
July 22, 2011
The "non-fiction" corollary to A MOVABLE FEAST. Oddly relevent.
October 8, 2013
An interesting insight to the mindset of writers coming of age in the 1920s and the forces that shaped their outlook.
November 21, 2023
This book was an interesting read while the author was in Paris in the 1920’s. He was a contemporary of Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, etc. Though interesting at times, it was a slow read, and at times boring. It would have been better with more emphasis on his contemporaries, and less on himself.
September 7, 2018
Starts strong, but falls apart about half way through when he's back in the U.S.
Quotes/Notes:
Life in [the United States] is joyless and colorless, universally standardized, tawdry, uncreative, given over to the worship of wealth and machinery.
Cowley was, as he saw it, in the company of the high priests of art. Their ideas were as palpable as their presence in Parisian cafe society. Once could, as Cowley did, attend Gertrude Stein's salons, meet with Joyce in his apartment, talk of Shakespeare's historical sources with Pound in the Hotel Jacob, sit with Valery on the park benches of the Tuilleries to question his ideas, attend and take part in Dadaist "happenings," drink with Tzara or with fellow American exiles in Montparnasse cafes such as the Select, the Rotonde, or the Dome.
Every new generation has its own sentimentality, its symbols that move it to compassion or self-compassion. For early Romantics writers beginning with Byron, the favorite symbol was the Haunted Castle—inaccessible, lonely, dwelled in by a young aristocrat of fabulous lineage, a Manfred seeking absolution for an inner sense of guilt, but wholly contemptuous of humankind. For the socially minded writers who followed Ibsen, the stock situation was that of the misunderstood reformer, the Enemy of the People, who tries to help his neighbors, and is crucified for his good intentions. The situation of the artist frustrated by society has been popular with the late Romantics.
Society obeyed the impersonal law of progress.
Editors would be poisoned with printer's ink: they would die horribly, vomiting ink on white paper.
Grub Street is as old as the trade of letters—in Alexandria, in Rome, it was already a crowded quarter; bohemia is a revolt against certain features of industrial capitalism and can exist only in a capitalist society. Grub Street is a way of life unwillingly followed by the intellectual proletariat; bohemia attracts citizens from all economic classes: there are not a few bohemian millionaires, but they are expected to imitate the customs of penniless artists. Bohemia is Grub Street romanticized, doctrinalized, and rendered self-conscious; it is Grub Street on parade.
the bohemian cult
Freud made being repressed unfashionable.
Socialism, free love, anarchism, syndicalism, free verse—all these creeds were lumped together by the public, and all were physically dangerous to practice.
"They" tried to be individual, but there is a moment when individualism becomes a uniform in spite of itself.
Shall I mention the writers—but they are countless!—who have lapsed into silence, or have involved themselves in barren eccentricities, or have been turned into machines?
I have said that ours was a humble generation, but the truth is that all writers are ambitious: if they were really humble they would choose a craft that involved less risk of failure and milder penalties for the crime of being average.
The religion of art is an unstable religion which yearly makes over its calendar of saints. Changes come rapidly, convolutions are piled on convolutions; schools, leaders, manifestos, follow and cancel one another.
Joyce had pride, contempt, ambition—and those were the qualities that continued to stand forth clearly from Ulysses. Here was the author's contempt for the world and for his readers—like a host being deliberately rude to his guests, he made no concession to their capacity for attention or their power of understanding; and here was an ambition willing to measure itself, not against any novelist of its age, not against any writer belonging to a modern national literature, but with the father of all the Western literatures, the archpoet of the European race. ...He had achieved genius, I thought, but there was something about the genius as cold as the touch at the parting of his long, smooth, cold, wet-marble fingers.
The religion of art very quickly expressed itself as a way of life, and one that was essentially anti-human. ...Flaubert with several of his friends once visited a brothel in Rouen. On a bet, before them all, he made love to a prostitute without removing his hat or taking the cigar from his mouth. The gesture was something more than an ugly boast. It announced a furious contempt for everything held sacred by society—as if he had said to the burghers of his time, "You think that life has meaning, that the act of love is holy, yet all of you together, the whole pack of lifelings, couldn't write one passable poem or even recognize the beauty of a sentence patiently carved in marble." It is as if he proclaimed that nothing had value in itself, that everything outside the world of art should be violently rejected. "Art is vast enough," he wrote in one of his letters, "to occupy the whole man."
Once the artist come to be regarded as a being set apart from the world of ordinary men, it followed that his aloofness would be increasingly emphasized. The world would more and more diminish in the eyes of the artist, and the artist would be self-magnified at the expense of the world.
These tendencies in turn, implied still others. Art would come to be treated as a self-sustaining entity, an essence neither produced by the world nor reacting upon it: art would be purposeless. No longer having to communicate with a public, it would become more opaque, difficult, obscure. It would be freed from all elements extraneous to itself, and particularly from logic and meaning, statistics and exhoration: it would become pure poetry. The independence of the artist would be asserted in always more vehement language: he would be proud, disdainful toward family duties and the laws of the tribe; he would end by assuming one of God's attributes and becoming a creator.
Art is separate from life; the artist is independent of the world and superior to the lifelings. From this principle, the hostile schools were born, and the manifestos that canceled one another, and the wholly unintelligible poems they called forth. By this principle were guided the careers of great poets and novelists, and the ambitions toward which their careers were directed—Huysmans' attempt to build an artificial paradise, Mallarme's to invent an algebra of literature, Ezra Pound's frantic flight from his admirers, Joyce's ambition to create a work of genius, Proust's attempt to recapture his own past in the longest novel ever written—all these belonged to the religion of art; and even Valery's forsaking of art was a development out of that religion.
If carried beyond a certain point, the religion of art imperceptibly merges into the irreligion of art, into a state of mind in which the artist deliberately fritters away his talents through contempt for the idiot-public that can never understand.
The way of escape and the retreat into futility—existed side by side in the Dada movement.
The extreme of obscurity was a tendency that had been growing for half a century, and soon Joyce would carry it to the point at which the reader was expected master several languages, and the mythology of all races, and the geography of Dublin, in order to unravel his meaning. Gertrude Stein carried it still farther. She seemed, indeed, to be writing pure nonsense, and yet it was not quite pure: one felt uneasily that much of it could be deciphered if only one had the key. But in reading a Dada poem it was often useless to search for clues: even the poet himself might not possess them. The door of meaning was closed and double-locked; the key was thrown away.
This high disdain for the public and for popular writers had always been a tradition in the religion of art, but it had lately been emphasized by the revulsion that followed the war, and the Dadaists pushed it forward to extremes of anti-human feeling.
"The good life," if it was ever achieved, would be surprising, novel, picturesque, purposeless, abstract, incomprehensible to the public—it would merit all the adjectives that applied to a Dadaist masterpiece.
invent a new system of punctuation like ee cummings
One very talented poet wrote nothing
but postcards to his friends.
A dadist collected paper matches:
he had the largest collection in the world.
while waiting for the revolution, for any revolution,
it didn't matter, they spent their time in quarreling
with one another.
The religion of art is not at all a poor man's religion: a degree of economic freedom is essential to those embarking on a search for aesthetic absolutes. In the decade before 1930 more writers and painters than ever before, and especially more Americans, had leisure to mediate the problems of art and the self, to express themselves, to be creative. And the artists were now surrounded by a cultured mob of dilettantes, people w/o convictions of their own who fed upon them emotionally, adopted their beliefs and encouraged their vices. In a world where everybody felt lost and directionless, the artists were forced often in spite of themselves to become priests.
For all artists the religion of art was better than having no religion at all. Even if they were not gifted enough to become saints or prophets of the religion, it furnished them with ideals of workmanship that were, in effect, moral ideals and that gave them a steady purpose in the midst of their dissipations.
Quotes/Notes:
Life in [the United States] is joyless and colorless, universally standardized, tawdry, uncreative, given over to the worship of wealth and machinery.
Cowley was, as he saw it, in the company of the high priests of art. Their ideas were as palpable as their presence in Parisian cafe society. Once could, as Cowley did, attend Gertrude Stein's salons, meet with Joyce in his apartment, talk of Shakespeare's historical sources with Pound in the Hotel Jacob, sit with Valery on the park benches of the Tuilleries to question his ideas, attend and take part in Dadaist "happenings," drink with Tzara or with fellow American exiles in Montparnasse cafes such as the Select, the Rotonde, or the Dome.
Every new generation has its own sentimentality, its symbols that move it to compassion or self-compassion. For early Romantics writers beginning with Byron, the favorite symbol was the Haunted Castle—inaccessible, lonely, dwelled in by a young aristocrat of fabulous lineage, a Manfred seeking absolution for an inner sense of guilt, but wholly contemptuous of humankind. For the socially minded writers who followed Ibsen, the stock situation was that of the misunderstood reformer, the Enemy of the People, who tries to help his neighbors, and is crucified for his good intentions. The situation of the artist frustrated by society has been popular with the late Romantics.
Society obeyed the impersonal law of progress.
Editors would be poisoned with printer's ink: they would die horribly, vomiting ink on white paper.
Grub Street is as old as the trade of letters—in Alexandria, in Rome, it was already a crowded quarter; bohemia is a revolt against certain features of industrial capitalism and can exist only in a capitalist society. Grub Street is a way of life unwillingly followed by the intellectual proletariat; bohemia attracts citizens from all economic classes: there are not a few bohemian millionaires, but they are expected to imitate the customs of penniless artists. Bohemia is Grub Street romanticized, doctrinalized, and rendered self-conscious; it is Grub Street on parade.
the bohemian cult
Freud made being repressed unfashionable.
Socialism, free love, anarchism, syndicalism, free verse—all these creeds were lumped together by the public, and all were physically dangerous to practice.
"They" tried to be individual, but there is a moment when individualism becomes a uniform in spite of itself.
Shall I mention the writers—but they are countless!—who have lapsed into silence, or have involved themselves in barren eccentricities, or have been turned into machines?
I have said that ours was a humble generation, but the truth is that all writers are ambitious: if they were really humble they would choose a craft that involved less risk of failure and milder penalties for the crime of being average.
The religion of art is an unstable religion which yearly makes over its calendar of saints. Changes come rapidly, convolutions are piled on convolutions; schools, leaders, manifestos, follow and cancel one another.
Joyce had pride, contempt, ambition—and those were the qualities that continued to stand forth clearly from Ulysses. Here was the author's contempt for the world and for his readers—like a host being deliberately rude to his guests, he made no concession to their capacity for attention or their power of understanding; and here was an ambition willing to measure itself, not against any novelist of its age, not against any writer belonging to a modern national literature, but with the father of all the Western literatures, the archpoet of the European race. ...He had achieved genius, I thought, but there was something about the genius as cold as the touch at the parting of his long, smooth, cold, wet-marble fingers.
The religion of art very quickly expressed itself as a way of life, and one that was essentially anti-human. ...Flaubert with several of his friends once visited a brothel in Rouen. On a bet, before them all, he made love to a prostitute without removing his hat or taking the cigar from his mouth. The gesture was something more than an ugly boast. It announced a furious contempt for everything held sacred by society—as if he had said to the burghers of his time, "You think that life has meaning, that the act of love is holy, yet all of you together, the whole pack of lifelings, couldn't write one passable poem or even recognize the beauty of a sentence patiently carved in marble." It is as if he proclaimed that nothing had value in itself, that everything outside the world of art should be violently rejected. "Art is vast enough," he wrote in one of his letters, "to occupy the whole man."
Once the artist come to be regarded as a being set apart from the world of ordinary men, it followed that his aloofness would be increasingly emphasized. The world would more and more diminish in the eyes of the artist, and the artist would be self-magnified at the expense of the world.
These tendencies in turn, implied still others. Art would come to be treated as a self-sustaining entity, an essence neither produced by the world nor reacting upon it: art would be purposeless. No longer having to communicate with a public, it would become more opaque, difficult, obscure. It would be freed from all elements extraneous to itself, and particularly from logic and meaning, statistics and exhoration: it would become pure poetry. The independence of the artist would be asserted in always more vehement language: he would be proud, disdainful toward family duties and the laws of the tribe; he would end by assuming one of God's attributes and becoming a creator.
Art is separate from life; the artist is independent of the world and superior to the lifelings. From this principle, the hostile schools were born, and the manifestos that canceled one another, and the wholly unintelligible poems they called forth. By this principle were guided the careers of great poets and novelists, and the ambitions toward which their careers were directed—Huysmans' attempt to build an artificial paradise, Mallarme's to invent an algebra of literature, Ezra Pound's frantic flight from his admirers, Joyce's ambition to create a work of genius, Proust's attempt to recapture his own past in the longest novel ever written—all these belonged to the religion of art; and even Valery's forsaking of art was a development out of that religion.
If carried beyond a certain point, the religion of art imperceptibly merges into the irreligion of art, into a state of mind in which the artist deliberately fritters away his talents through contempt for the idiot-public that can never understand.
The way of escape and the retreat into futility—existed side by side in the Dada movement.
The extreme of obscurity was a tendency that had been growing for half a century, and soon Joyce would carry it to the point at which the reader was expected master several languages, and the mythology of all races, and the geography of Dublin, in order to unravel his meaning. Gertrude Stein carried it still farther. She seemed, indeed, to be writing pure nonsense, and yet it was not quite pure: one felt uneasily that much of it could be deciphered if only one had the key. But in reading a Dada poem it was often useless to search for clues: even the poet himself might not possess them. The door of meaning was closed and double-locked; the key was thrown away.
This high disdain for the public and for popular writers had always been a tradition in the religion of art, but it had lately been emphasized by the revulsion that followed the war, and the Dadaists pushed it forward to extremes of anti-human feeling.
"The good life," if it was ever achieved, would be surprising, novel, picturesque, purposeless, abstract, incomprehensible to the public—it would merit all the adjectives that applied to a Dadaist masterpiece.
invent a new system of punctuation like ee cummings
One very talented poet wrote nothing
but postcards to his friends.
A dadist collected paper matches:
he had the largest collection in the world.
while waiting for the revolution, for any revolution,
it didn't matter, they spent their time in quarreling
with one another.
The religion of art is not at all a poor man's religion: a degree of economic freedom is essential to those embarking on a search for aesthetic absolutes. In the decade before 1930 more writers and painters than ever before, and especially more Americans, had leisure to mediate the problems of art and the self, to express themselves, to be creative. And the artists were now surrounded by a cultured mob of dilettantes, people w/o convictions of their own who fed upon them emotionally, adopted their beliefs and encouraged their vices. In a world where everybody felt lost and directionless, the artists were forced often in spite of themselves to become priests.
For all artists the religion of art was better than having no religion at all. Even if they were not gifted enough to become saints or prophets of the religion, it furnished them with ideals of workmanship that were, in effect, moral ideals and that gave them a steady purpose in the midst of their dissipations.
March 30, 2019
Not what I was expecting but engaging.
May 17, 2018
One of the best memoirs of the 1920's written in terms of American significance.
I realized little over a year ago, while on my first travel abroad, how what I valued of literature primarily was American. The 1920's being my wheelhouse, it was only when I myself had achieved some small expatriation when I realized all my internal interpretations remained American; though I had fled (and continue to this day to do so) America because of my disagreements with the social public (neo-marxists, victimization, the like), I continued to view and ingest the foreign world with this solid intent to modify and argue American--- and even, in some cases, to defend it. This national-centrality caught me completely by surprise, and is something which still alarms me to this day.
Cowley's memoir essentially analyzes "American Inferiority" of the 1920's, and how the "newness" of American letters and the disatisfied (yet still patriotic) American writers of the 20's, all young, egotistic and furiously attentive to "some thing," were responsible not only for disarming the American nation at the time, but also coloring it. In Cowley and expatriates-alike, their disatisfaction of America ultimately came to configure the central "idea" of what it meant to be American at last (in some way, anyway).
It's a great book which is filled with excellent analysis', most notable on Dadaism and Henry Crosby's suicide. There is also a wonderful list at the end which includes the names of more than 100 expatriate writers born in the 1890's through 1905, or who were primarily writers of the 1920's as we conceive them. Price of the book is worth that list alone, if you ask me.
Truly excellent, and utterly insightful on so many ways. I'll update this review with a link to my comparable article of this book and present-day once published.
I realized little over a year ago, while on my first travel abroad, how what I valued of literature primarily was American. The 1920's being my wheelhouse, it was only when I myself had achieved some small expatriation when I realized all my internal interpretations remained American; though I had fled (and continue to this day to do so) America because of my disagreements with the social public (neo-marxists, victimization, the like), I continued to view and ingest the foreign world with this solid intent to modify and argue American--- and even, in some cases, to defend it. This national-centrality caught me completely by surprise, and is something which still alarms me to this day.
Cowley's memoir essentially analyzes "American Inferiority" of the 1920's, and how the "newness" of American letters and the disatisfied (yet still patriotic) American writers of the 20's, all young, egotistic and furiously attentive to "some thing," were responsible not only for disarming the American nation at the time, but also coloring it. In Cowley and expatriates-alike, their disatisfaction of America ultimately came to configure the central "idea" of what it meant to be American at last (in some way, anyway).
It's a great book which is filled with excellent analysis', most notable on Dadaism and Henry Crosby's suicide. There is also a wonderful list at the end which includes the names of more than 100 expatriate writers born in the 1890's through 1905, or who were primarily writers of the 1920's as we conceive them. Price of the book is worth that list alone, if you ask me.
Truly excellent, and utterly insightful on so many ways. I'll update this review with a link to my comparable article of this book and present-day once published.
June 30, 2016
Thoroughly entertaining, though I found myself more engrossed in the chapters about less familiar subjects. I've read better accounts of the 20s in Greenwich Village and Paris, but the late 20s, when a fair population of New York literati took to rural Connecticut was new to me. That chapter in particular felt like lost history. I also really enjoyed the final essay, about the life and death of Harry Crosby, the publisher of Black Sun Press, and I will be chasing down a copy of that latter day decadent's diary sometime soon. This edition includes both Cowley's revised epilogue from 1954 as well as his original from the 30s. I found the 1930s version far superior, with a clear statement of the place Cowley believed writers should stand in the social struggle of the time, as opposed to the rather bland, bemused take on his youth offered in the 50s. Hard not to see the substitution of one for the other too as an act of political cowardice in the McCarthy era when "standing with the workers" might have gotten a respectable critic and editor blacklisted.
September 8, 2014
This was assigned reading for a book group. Had it not been for the assignment, I would not have read it. It's a non-fiction book about expatriate writers in Paris during the 1920s, which also includes 1930. Their motivations and goals are explained in a way that I feel only a fellow writer could understand. It also covers how they returned to their mother countries, and at least for the Americans with a new appreciation for their country. The author lived among them and writes from first hand knowledge. It was interesting, but similar to reading a history or sociological treatise on a unique group in time.
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