A Second Flowering
Kenner, Hugh
Nevertheless, the conclusion remains inescapable that the dangers inherent in the Nixon China policy are limited when compared with those created by Administration assumptions about the...
...It is more than enough for the honor of twentieth-century America that two Americans helped shape the great age in which Mr...
...Cowley's generation were the first-rank minor talents...
...So Pater wrote in 1868...
...then Hart Crane and Hemingway (1899), Wilder and Faulkner (1897), Fitzgerald and Dos Passos (1896), e.e...
...President Nixon had been alarmed by this unprecedented violence and asked J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Helms, Admiral Noel Gyler, and General Richard Bennett to prepare a report on national security and 18 The Alternative February 1974...
...He's the youngest man to whom Cowley pays any heed...
...Tie smashed Montgomery Schuyler's collection of records and tried to throw the phonograph out of a second-story window...
...The committee has given no indication that it will ever give Huston his day in court...
...then Cowley's classic essay (reprinted and expanded here) demonstrated how by Malcolm Cowley Viking $7.95 the books all hung together, a home-made Comedie Humaine, and opinion suddenly pulled itself together...
...Waiter Pater too thought that the moment remained...
...It's hard to repress the suspicion that Faulkner, just one year Cowley's senior, came in for this devoted act of salvage in part by belonging to the right age-group...
...Having Joyce, Pound, and Eliot for mentors and the war for a public crucible serves to disgxtise this inheritance without reducing its latent power...
...This is a grave misrepresentation, and despite the Ervin Committee's reluctance to do so, some things need to be set straight...
...Faulkner's first writings were hand-medown ~nineties" poems, cummings and Dos Passes belonged to a Harvard group that called itself the Aesthetes and, Cowley tells us, tried %0 create in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an after-image of Oxford in the 1890s...
...That was the year in which James Joyce turned 23, Ezra Pound 20, T.S...
...Then he shouted to Monte, 'My father is a millionaire...
...Psychic paternity works by a different law, in this case also negative...
...The leaves, his narrator recalls, "fell early that year," and the soldiers marched by leaving "the road bare and white except for the leaves...
...That was their real peculiarity, that they were a "generation...
...Move back in time a little from 1905, move closer, closer to the great generation, and you get a picture...
...That was certainly how Hemingway and Fitzgerald felt about fiction, if not about the century...
...systematic derangement of the senses--suggest a midwesterner's rowdy imitation of long-ago Chelsea decadence...
...Eliot 17, which makes Eliot just conceivably old enough to have been Dalton Trumbo's father, an indiscretion he happily didn't commit...
...What can be claimed for them is that they availed themselves of a certain transatlantic detachment to transcend the premises of decadence as much as they did: that they made a substantial native literature out of wrecking their lives, in several instances, as thoroughly as many English lives had been wrecked in the decade of their birth, on principle but to no avail whatsoever...
...Ellery Queen" were born (there were two of him, cousins) in 1905...
...You encounter, working backward, Thomas Wolfe (1900...
...No, he is a specialist, his practice limited to writers born within a six-year span, 1894-1900, which would be as comic_a] as specializing in the left feet of Ashtabula topologists were it not for the special nature of the case: had he not known so many of these writers personally, known their world so intimately, and had theirs and his not been the most exactly defined generation in American literary history...
...For them the "pro-war" was just childhood...
...The unchecked bnild-up of Soviet strategic and conventional military power, the continued attempts by the SOviets to project political influence in the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America, the uncompromising position the USSR has assumed in the various East-West negotiations now in progress all constitute challenges to Administration logic as yet unanswered...
...Is it too cynical to suggest that this may have been among the purposes of the China gambit from the outset...
...His whole Crane chapter, an evocation sustained for twenty-five pages, calls up a temps perdu suffused with affection...
...it can be questioned in the light of after-events, but the moment remains...
...His Senate investigation may have accomplished many great and noble things...
...Cowley, himself born in 1898, has been writing about his contemporaries for fifty years, and has to his credit one especially shining effort, the nearly single-handed rescue of Faulkner from what he rightly calls ~'scandalous neglect...
...That needn't be claimed...
...Minnesota and Michigan fueled the gem-like flames that crafted those books...
...Malcolm Cowley showed no visible concern for the comparably scandalous neglect of William Carlos Williams (1884), who was equally unknown at about that time...
...The question he raises in putting these chapters together with others less distinguished though necessary to his pattern is the question of the meaning of the pattern: what exactly that generation of his signifled...
...John The Alternative February 1974 17 W. Aid.ridge, discussing Cowley's book in ti~e November 1973 Commentary, pronounces that the Cowley writers ~had one ~biding interest, themselves when young," and that along with their creations they ,-~ti]l project "the clarity of outline, the individualiW, and the eternal openness which, as a rule, only young people of college age seem to possess...
...A Second Flowering, he suggests at the end, to match the first flowering, in New England eighty years before...
...At the end of his best novel, Jay Gatsby floats dead in a leaf-strewn swimming pool as a direct consequence of refusing to believe that you can't bring back the past ('WVhy, of course you can...
...Yes...
...If he did not manage this, part of the difficulty, as we may learn from casting a cold eye on Sheila Graham's embarrassing memoir, College of One, was that apart from his astonishing feel for his craft he was virtually illiterate...
...when Q, R, S, T et al...
...Compare the merely very skillful Wolfe chapter, where we always sense that the colorful anecdotage is coming at secondhand...
...likewise Dalton Trumbo and Ayn Rand, John O~-Iara, Edgar Snow and Robert Penn Warren and Lionel Trilling...
...In 1945 every on of Faulkner's seventeen books was out of print...
...His doctrine was powerful medicine in England in the nineties...
...They did more than that, but that describes them partly...
...He was the seismograph of microchanges, and could tell 1926 from 1927 by a hundred indices, as surely as we can tell the twenties from the thirties...
...Perhaps...
...It would not be the least of the ironies associated with this Administration if the attention lavished on the Peking initiative caused the nation to misperceive the ultimate purposes and attendant dangers of the NixonKissinger global strategy generally...
...he was only 14 when it broke out...
...Viewed from 1905, the innovating masters fell in between...
...Although the memorandum suggested no intrusion into domestic politics or Watergate-type activities, and even though Huston had left the White House in the spring of 1971, a full year before the Wateergate break-in, Ervin and his colleagues apparently decided that the fact that Huston had once worked for the White House was pr/ma fac/e evidence of his complicity in some comprehensive plot to turn America into Chile...
...Lionel Johnson would have nnder,~tood...
...Wolfe was the most Joyce-obsessed of the lot, and the least war-conscious...
...As a result, Huston fell victim to the Senate Watergate Committee's nationally-televised ax, and his reputation has been eternally stained...
...In 1970 Huston, who was then the President's liaison man with American intelligence agencies, received the order to submit a proposal for keeping the Executive well-informed on the radical I~ft, which then seemed to be threatening the very workings of the government and had stopped the day-to-day operation of hundreds of colleges and universities...
...Later the very army disintegrates, Frederic Henry is a different man forever, and Catherine Barkley dies of multiple hemorrhages...
...Fitzgerald in particular was to spend nine years trying to achieve, he said, "something really NEW in form, idea, and structure--the model for the age that Joyce and Stein are searching for, that Conrad didn't find...
...Poor old Sam, for years he has defended the rights of individuals before the law, but inject a little moral zeal into him and before long he is afflicting his fellow citizens with the same kind of abuse that he once chastized Senator McCarthy for practicing...
...What is far more important, I believe that it has advanced still further the capability of government to intimidate, harass, and slander free and innocent men, the Bill of Rights notwithstanding...
...Nevertheless, the conclusion remains inescapable that the dangers inherent in the Nixon China policy are limited when compared with those created by Administration assumptions about the possibilities for a ddtente with the USSR...
...Most of them missed the point of the twentieth century...
...He made fiction out of vanishing moments, and extracted the last pathos from the likes of his Tom Buchanan, who after the passing of the golden moment would '~drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game...
...In the first place the so-called Huston Plan was not a Watergate blueprint...
...cummings (1894): the personnel of Malcolm Cowley's A Second Flowering...
...Boxed between the great innovators and the war, defined by being just old enough to respond as younger contemporaries to the former and not too old to have escaped being romantic about the latter CYou went to the war and it was like going to a theater that advertised the greatest spectacle in history"), the men of 1894-1900 combined a superficial experimentalism (leaving out capitals, putting whole paragraphs in italics) with the vulgar hopefulness that accompanied the dawn of the new century...
...Through it time pours, an tmstanchable wound, and what memory and prose have fixed, as the nine~ies prescribed, is the brief being of what never again will be...
...Of what else should anyone die, in such a book...
...Maria," could elsewhere be as eloquent as Walter Pater about what vanishes forever, telling us on the opening page of A Farewell to Arms how the water moved past the pebbles and the troops past the house, "and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees...
...In the recent hearings, Senator Ervin, long a proud spokesman for civil liberties and due process, has personally dragged through the dirt the names of many innocent men without even allowing them the opportunity to defend those actions which he in his zeal has condemned...
...Any given moment," he wrote, "has its value...
...it was like a business in financial straits that could be rescued by a timely change in management...
...There is no English Gatsby, no English In Our Time...
...The surprising reason for this quality of theirs is that they were all, by election as well as by birth, men of the nineties, the true successors (transatlantic branch) of Walter Pater's di~iples, of Dowson and Symons, Wilde and Lionel Johnson, the men of W.B...
...Yes...
...But the moment remains...
...Has that a familiar ring...
...When Cowley is reliving his book is alive...
...It has...
...it had nothing to do with party politics...
...rather, it has dragged his name into the Watergate mess as if he is indistinguishable from the average John Dean...
...They move as the stream moves, to fall as the leaves fall...
...men, moreover, old enough by 1914 to have acquired some sense of what suddenly began to be swept away that August...
...Indeed, the argument that Soviet foreign policy objectives in their broadest definition have decisively changed is only slightly more compelling now than when it was first raised not long after the Revolution of 1917...
...Such moments were to be preserved "simply for those moments' sake...
...Cowley writes as though he'd never heard of Marianne Moore, he is exceedingly vague about whatever it was Pound may have accomplished (except coin the phrase "news that stays news" and teach Hemingway the doctrine of the Image), he is as blank about Stevens as about Williams, and is so little driven by impersonal rage at neglect that a truly scandalous neglect, that of I~uis Zukofsky (born 1904) has wrung from him over the years, to the best of my knowledge, not so much as a mention of Zukofsky's name...
...Hart Crane's visible career--dixmkenness, bisexuality, suicide---and also his poetic procedure---magpie connoisseurship of exotic words...
...Also they were born a little too late to have collected their wits before the 1914 war...
...Maria...
...So the 1905 bunch lived on a fringe, just old enough not to have been much affected by the great "modernist" generation of the 1880s----Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Williams, Stravinsky, Picasso...
...It must have been at a meeting of our local chapter of Common Cause where I first heard my high-minded colleague, Tyrrell, asseverate his famous maxim that "for American politicians moral zeal seems to have the properties of a hallucinatory drug or of Unitarianism, for whenever one is bitten by the stuff he generally becomes obsessively idiotic...
...To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down...
...Williams is nowhere mentioned in A Second Flowering, not even as part of the elder ambience, and is mentioned just once in an earlier Cowley book, The Literary Situation, where we are told only that he spent most of his time practicing medicine...
...Joyce, Pound, and Eliot weren't too young but just a little too old to serve as intellectt~l examples to Queen, Rand, Snow, Trumbo et al...
...It may be the prodigy of the age, but I seriously doubt that it has done much to clarify the issues at stake in the Watergate spectacle...
...Who is your father?'") Malcolm Cowley too is bent on recovering moments...
...A memorable example of Ervin's dishonorable behavior is the case of Tom Charles Huston, a young White House functionary who in 1970 put together a memorandum on a plan of government surveillance of foreign and domestic groups then threatening the country's security...
...But we are in a realm of fine-tuning, not channel-changing...
...Not only his eight writers, recalls Cowley, but all their coevals--'~those who were lucky enough to be bern a little before the end of the last century"--spent much of their lives "feeliug that the new century was about to be placed in their charge...
...He lacked the style for it...
...The book's longest views m'e taken at the beginning, in the chapters on Fitzgerald and Hemingway, where we learn on firsthand authority how it was in Pro'is, how the war ~_~eemed to Young Americans, how the peace seemed, what the act of writing seemed to imply...
...Hemingway, though he could reduce a magic moment to "Maria...
...Yeats ~ ~Tragic Generation...
...At the time I first heard it I was struck by the collossal idealism of the remark, and now after months of witnessing the Senate's foremost civil libertarian in action I am convinced of our gentle editor's timeless wisdom...
...An intellectual mentor needs to be either young enough to be the client's big brother or old enough to be his grandfather...
...You commence to encounter men who could feel that Joyce, say, was an elder contemporary, to learn from...
...but at the very least it is probable that the Administration would regard this as a not-unwelcome consequence...
...should eventually have come to need mentors...
...Appropriately, though, his feel for his craft included a feel for his time---Cowley calls it "a quality that very few writers are able to acquire: a sense of living in history...
...To that end, they ritually "discussed the music of Pater, the rhythms of Aubrey Beardsley, and, growing louder, the voluptuousness of the Roman Church and the essential sanctity of prostitutes...
Vol. 7 • February 1974 • No. 5
