University of New Orleans ScholarWorks@UNO English Faculty Publications Department of English and Foreign Languages Spring 1983 Conversion, Revisionism, and Revision in Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return John D. Hazlett University of New Orleans, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uno.edu/engl_facpubs Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Hazlett, John D. “Conversion, Revisionism, and Revision in Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return.” South Atlantic Quarterly 82 (2) (Spring 1983): 179-188. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English and Foreign Languages at ScholarWorks@UNO. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UNO. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Conversion, Revisionism, and Revision in Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return }ohnD. Hazlett Most readers of American literature think of Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s' as the standard insider's literary history of that small group of expatriates who left the American "waste- land" to live in Paris in the 19205. Fewer readers, however, are aware that the first edition, entitled Exile's Return: A Narrative of Ideas', was a good deal more than this; it was also an excellent autobiographical narrative that followed Cowley and his friends on their ideological odyssey from bohemianism to Marxism. Cowley himself is largely responsible for our current neglect of the first edition. In the Prologue to the revised book, he explained that the political opinions he held in 1934 had no place in "a narrative that dealt with the 1920s" (p. 12). But he went on, rather disingenuously, to point out that "while adding new episodes here and there, I have left most of the narrative untouched, out of a feeling that myself in 1934 had as good a right to be heard as myself today; when he went wrong I would rather have others correct him" (p. 12). The revised Prologue leaves the false impression that Cowley merely did away with a few rash political remarks ("There were not many in the book I wrote in 1934"-p. 12), and that the new episodes only expanded upon his original intentions. In fact, the ideological pilgrim- age of the younger Cowley was almost wholly effaced from the 1951 text. In retrospect, one can only assume that Cowley, like many other writers of his generation,' was embarrassed by his decade of Marxist enthusiasm, A candidatefor the degree of doctor of philosophy a1 the University of Iowa. J~HN ~. HAZLETT is presently editor of scientific manuscripts at the University of California, Berkeley.He would like to thank Suzanne Quallsfor her criticalreading of the manz:scr'l?f. The South Atlantic Quanerty, 82:2, Spring. 1983. Copyright © 1983 by Duke University Press. All I. Malcolm Cowley, Exiles Rerum: ~ Liter~r.l'C!dy.ueyof/he 1920s (~ew York, 1951). subsequent references to this book WIll be given In the body of the article by page. 2. Malcolm COWley, Exile's Return: A Narrative of Ideas (New York, 1934). All sub- sequent references to this book will be given in the body of the artic~e by ~age. 3. The other notable example is Edmund Wilson, whose American Jitters (1932) was an attempt to combine contemporary national history and personal witness. Wilson's book, - 180 The South Atlantic Quarterlv and that this embarrassment, coupled with a national mood increasingly hostile to communism, had led him to perceive the view of history in Exile's Return as a literary flaw. His fellow-travelling days had already begun to be a Source of irritation in the late thirties when he first considered discarding his Marxist "illusions" (as he reluctantly called them in a letter to Edmund Wilson). In spite of his increasing skepticism, Cowley had defended Russia and Stalin in the pages of the New Republic throughout the thirties, accepting, for example, the Party's explanation of the Moscow Trials and the Spanish Civil War. But he finally broke with the Commu- nists, like many other fellow travellers, shortly after the signing of the Russo-German Pact in 1939. Disillusioned with the Soviet Union and harassed by the House Un- American Activities Committee over a government appointment in 1941, Cowley suffered from a pervasive sense of guilt and resolved to have nothing further to do with anything political. He recalled his mood after leaving Washington: "I felt politically amputated, emasculated, but then I had never been happy among politicians. Now, with a sense of release and opportunity, I could get back to my proper field of interest."?' That resolu- tion appears to have had much to do with the spirit in which he rewrote Exiles Return ten years later. The rationale offered by Cowley for his revisions reveals how political guilt led him to misperceive the real worth of his work. The 1934 edition was not solely about the twenties, as he claimed; it was also about the process by which the ideas and assumptions of the 1930s evolved out of the 1920s. By suppressing the self that had undergone that process and had emerged with a Marxist vision, Cowley seriously marred the coherence of the book. It was possible, of Course, to omit the overtly political conclu- sions to which the narrative led, and so to reduce his "narrative of ideas" to a "literary odyssey." But such editorial surgery, however acceptable it may have made the text for readers in 1951, ignored the very assumptions upon which the story's coherence depended. Moreover, in effacing his earlier political perspective, Cowley took from future readers the oppor- tunity to see how writers during the thirties thought about themselves and their immediate past. When he wrote the first edition, Cowley saw his conversion to Marxism as a representative act. "One man is always representative," Cowley has said. "when he gives honest testimony about what he has felt and observed.'" which was also reissued i.n the .1950s,is drastically altered in the updated The American Earlhquake (1957). and his earlier fellow~travellingself, like Cowley's. is silenced. 4. Malcolm Cowley.-And 1 Worked the Writer's Trade: Chapters of Literary His/o.r):. 1918-1978 (New York, 1978). p. 158. See also the chapters entitled "The Sense of Guilt (pp. 133-52) and "A Personal Record" (pp. 153-60). (New5.York.Malcolm1980).Cowley.p. xi. The Dream of the Colden Mountains: Remembering the 1930s Malcolm Cowlev's Exile's Return 181 Asa result, he created what might be termed a "collective autobiography," one in which the conventional "I" narrator is subordinated as much as possible to a collective "we." In the first edition, this collective narrator is, in fact, used ambiguously. At times, the "we" represented the generation of writers who came of age with Cowley during the twenties, and the story was the narrative of their "odyssey" through that decade; at other times, the "we" is used in a Marxist sense, as when Cowley says that his was the story of "a whole social class" (p. 13). During the twenties and thirties, many memoirists used one or the other of these notions of collective identity-the "generation" and the Marxist "class"<-to reconstruct their historical selves. One may speculate, as in fact most of these writers did themselves, why the collective self had such an appeal. In part, it seemed to express a rebellion against the previous generation's romanticization of the individual ego. It also provided an explanation of the effects of new technologies which were destroying regional identities and creating what historical philosophers such as Jose Ortega y Gasset called the "masses." Cowley himself suggested a number of reasons why members of his generation thought of themselves as a group with a distinct identity, foremost of which was their common dis- illusionment with their elders' rhetoric during the First World War. In Exile's Return, Cowley attempted to combine generationalist and Marxist ideas of identity to reconstruct the story of his representative "we" in spite of the fact that the assumptions of the former, as they were developed by European historians,' were largely incompatible with those of the latter. European generationalists, on the one hand, explained histori- cal change as the result of overlapping cohort groups, whose respective periods of dominance, which were calculated according to the biological rhythms of human reproduction and the stages of the life cycle, were relatively short. Marxists, on the other hand, regarded much longer periods of time, based on the rise and fall of economic systems, as the most important temporal units, and classes as the most crucial social groups. So, in fact, Cowley's ambiguous use of the collective "we" also included an ambiguous temporal framework within which that "we" developed. On the one hand, the narrative covered the fifteen-year period from 1915 to 1930when Cowley's generation came of age. On the other hand, when he stated that his was a story of "a whole social class, how it became aware of Itselfand how it went marching toward the end of an era" (p. 13)7,he was 6. For an overview. see Julian Marias. Generations: A Historical Me/hod, trans. by Harold C. Riley (University. Ala .. 1970). 7. In the revised version this has been changed to read: "the story of the American educated classes, what some of them thought about in the boom days and how they reached the end of an era" (10). The effect is of a general diminution of scope. The "whole social class" no longer achieves an awareness of itself.