The Dream of the Golden Mountains
Rodgers, Daniel T.
of the early 1930s out of which those political passions erupted. The Cowley who began the decade, as he described himself in his much earlier and brilliant memoir of the twenties, Exile's Return,...
...The bullet had entered his body just above the heart...
...Cowley himself never saw it closer at hand than Soviet propaganda films but he felt its presence vividly and his convictions may have lasted the longer as a result...
...Like most writers drawn to Communism in the 1930s, Cowley traveled with, not in, the party...
...Above all, there was the phenomenon of conversion, the exhilarating plunge that Communism offered into faith and com- radely communion...
...Cowley's generation was that of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Dos Pas- sos, all of whom, for all their doubts and waverings, rode through the 1930s essen- tially on the ideas they had hammered in place before the crash...
...Cowley's reticence here and elsewhere will disappoint, but it is fit- ting...
...It made a temporary allegiance to the party about as foolish, understandable, and thoroughly American as a fit in a Methodist camp meeting...
...Maxwell's near perfect memoir Ancestors...
...JOrlN JUDlS is associate editor of In These Times, the Socialist weekly newspaper pub- lished in Chicago...
...Whether the disillusionment came with the Moscow trials, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, or the dis- memberment of Poland, the Russian dream sooner or later turned to ashes, the long view failed, and the result was a feeling of emptiness and a raft of quiet resignations...
...He is .also contributing editor to The Progressive...
...By suppressing an unneces-sary element of suspense, he can explore the nature of death, the confusions of childhood, the quality--the very texture-- of desire...
...Ultimately the long view foundered on those same distant events...
...Cowley is too serious about the ques- tion of political commitment, however, not to offer explanations, all of them now worn by use to something of the bright- ness of historical cliches...
...More horrifying still, "the mur-derer had cut off the dead man's ear with a razor and carried it away with him...
...Cowley him- self was no stranger to the "desperate feeling of solitude," the sense of en-trapment in an inner monologue, that he ascribed to the writers he knew best in the 1920s...
...John Dos Passos talked of finding an ad man to put Marx across in genuinely American language...
...But if in the thirties he sang "The Internationale," at times with head thrown back and tears in his eyes, Cow- ley never felt the urgent need to leave his own self and class behind, not by "pieces or parts," as the younger writer Meridel Le Sueur described it, but by a willing- ness "to go all the way, with full belief, Commonweal: 282 into that darkness" of rebirth and belong- ing...
...and they are joined by as many that are new...
...We are given the particulars in the opening pages• The style is unadorned, reportorial...
...He is found "sitting on a stool, his eyes open...
...But few '~A splendid literary memoir:'* THE DREAM_OF THE GOLDEN MOUNTAINS igEMI::MBEI¢I~ i THE 1930s MALCOLM COWLEY Malcolm Cowley's chrono- logical sequel to Exile's Return is a "superb re-creation of the turmoil and politics of the...
...This is the small town Middle West of They Came Like Swallows, the world which haunted the urban setting of The Folded Leaf and dominated Mr...
...Washington, D.C., bristling with sabers and machine guns, and haggard Army veterans talking of revolution...
...early 1930's:' --*Publishers Weekly "Charming, rueful, extremely weU written:' --The New York Times Book Revzew $14.95 l WmNG fellow travelers were more ardent or eloquent, more stubborn in their commitment, or, in his post in the back pages of The New Republic, more prominently placed than he...
...There was the classic generational, revolt of young writers against the world their fathers had made...
...If Mr...
...Once the details of the crime are presented, the narrator tells us about his childhood, of his mother's death in the influenza epidemic of 1918...
...That Communism served those who fell into its embrace as a surrogate church--militant, emotional, and apocalyptic--is the most brightly polished of all the explanations of its appeal...
...Not that Cowley has lost any of his consummate literary craftmanship...
...The argument was born with the first recantations and codified in the col- lected confessions of 1949, The God That Failed...
...DANIEL T. ROttERS is associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin...
...But though he writes well and powerfully of the crime, he does not want it to dominate his other II concerns...
...Nor were most of the prominent writers drawn into the Communist orbit...
...Certainly there was Russia, untouched by the global economic collapse of the thirties--the "moral top of the world," as Edmund Wilson described it in 1936, "where the light never really goes out...
...If to liken Communism to a kind of primitive church catches a part of its appeal, it badly understates how strongly the party appealed to the intellect and, still more, how desperately much there was to explain in the bewil- dering events of the 1930s...
...What he has given us are the shat- tered pieces of experience that drove him toward the long view and that in the angry and puzzled thirties had, some-how, to be comprehended: the grim, midnight ride across the Kentucky state line...
...Maxwell's story were about no- thing more than the murder, his presenta- tion of this information so early on might have proved ruinous...
...Why had they all dreamed so fervently of those golden mountains, of that class- less soviet future shimmering in the dis- tance beyond the bleached bones of capitalism...
...Maxwell's earlier works, this is familiar material...
...The'story is told by a narrator looking back on events that occurred fifty years earlier...
...The experience pushed Cowley into a whirl of angry speeches and manifestoes, revolutionary dreams, and Communist alliances...
...Communism offered, as no rival political movement did, a "long view" of history, in which the death rattles of capitalism and ac-celerating international crises fell into a sweeping historical pattern...
...That was the authentic voice of con- version, and by those standards Cowley was hardly a convert at all...
...The Dream of the Golden Mountains is full of vividly realized descriptions of the de- cade...
...It was no accident that the analogy helped to domesticate and de- flate participation in Communism...
...ROBERT LE/TER has contributed to The Na- tion, Commentary, and Film Heritage, among other journals...
...He could not resist chiding Granville Hicks, a far more orthodox Marxian critic than he in the thirties, for behaving like a football coach at a pep- rally, hoarsely insisting that "we simply can't lose...
...Many of the familiar stories are here: the rout of the Bonus Marchers, the brief and flamboyant Blue Eagle cam- paign, the skirmishes over proletarian literature...
...Early one morning while milking his cow, Lloyd Wilson is shot...
...The "long view" was too EuropeanREVIEWERS FATHER PETER CHIRICO, S.S., author of Infal-libility: the Crossroads of Doctrine, is cur- rently theologian-in-residence for the Archdiocese of Seattle...
...But the man at the center of it all, who marched in May Day parades and dreamed revolutionary visions, is a much less vivid presence than the events that boomed and crashed around him...
...There was the example of Russia...
...He is silent here about those last bitter years of broken friendships and angry recriminations at the end of the Simple terms, burning words thirties...
...Certainly some of those drawn to Communism in the 1930s were pulled by the guilt and emotional hunger that form the classic preconditions of the conver- sion experience, and felt something akin to its emotional catharsis...
...He had left Harvard, convinced that nothing his elders had taught him there was true, to join the flight of young writers to Greenwich Village and Paris, flirted with Dada, published a volume of poetry, and drank deeply of the creed to art for art's sake...
...It seems the author has needlessly delayed the telling of his story...
...But Cowley was no stripling writer in 1929: He was a good deal older than the apprentice au- thors like Richard Wright, huddled around the coffee urns in the John Reed Clubs...
...and Cowley, too, was an outsider almost by reflex...
...The Cowley who began the decade, as he described himself in his much earlier and brilliant memoir of the twenties, Exile's Return, was a literary rebel but a political indif- ferent...
...The Dream of the Golden Moun- tains concludes in 1936, in what Cowley calls "High Thirties," the euphoric time of the Popular Front, when "the price of groceries, a small merchant bankrupt in the next block, a love affair broken off, •. [the] revolts in Spain, a new factory in the Urals, [and ] an obscure battle in the interior of China" seemed to hold to- gether in a single historical pattern...
...What mattered to the Cowleys and the Wilsons far more than catharsis was comprehension...
...and when one came upon it, Cowley remembers, its explanatory effect was "overwhelm- ing...
...He was finally wrenched out of that exclusive passion for form early in 1932 when he joined a writers' fact-finding mission to the seething, strike-bound Kentucky coal fields and found himself routed out of his hotel bed and run out of town, to watch as Waldo Frank was bludgeoned by coal operators' goons...
...In the present volume Cowley looks across a much greater expanse of time, and the thirties critic is, even to himself, a much more distant figure, moving indistinctly through fragmentary memories of rented halls, speakers' ta- bles, folding chairs, and political wrang- lings...
...The narrator, now without a mother, is a lonely child, and a woman in the corn9 May 1980:283...
...Was it then a matter of conversion...
...Cowley's New Republic columns in the early thirties were, in con- trast, full of premonitions of short-run disaster, and he quietly passed on the proletarian novels to someone fuller of the faith than he to review...
...The long view heightened the gaudy, sideshow aspects of the New Deal, particularly when measured against the real drama, somber and foreboding, being played out in Ger- many, Spain, and Russia...
...centered to hold much place for the New Deal or offer much hope that anything would come of its frenetic motions...
...Maxwell has his reasons...
...Edmund Wilson dreamed of "taking Communism away from the Communists...
...Cowley held on through the end of the decade, much longer than most...
...Exile's Return, when it appeared in 1934, was an au- tobiography written virtually in the pre- sent tense, a dazzling collision of the still vividly remembered, and repudiated, aesthetic creed of the 1920s with the political passions set loose by the De- pression...
...the panacea salesmen clustered at The New Republic' s door;, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hart Crane edging toward self-destruction...
...I SO 10Ng, SEE YOU TONORR0W William Maxwefl Knoll, $7.95, 135 pp Robert A. Leiter ~ 1 HE CENTRAL EVENT in William Maxwell's new work is a violent murder...
...These are superbly, told stories...
...They are not an inner view of political commitment, but, in the end, they are the heart of the matter...
...But Mr...
...That question is at the center of Cowley's memoir, and to a great ex- tent, it must be said, he himself is not quite sure of the answer...
...Ed- mund Wilson, sent to report Franklin Roosevelt's installation into the presi- dency, could not dispel from the front of his mind the zanily dressed lodge mem- bers, in purple fezzes and golden cloaks, who made up the tag end of the inaugural parade...
...There was, too, a sense of relief, and at times of secret triumph, in watching the world that one's fathers and teachers had built with such self-importance crUmble so swiftly to the ground...
...At fLrSt this shift in the narrative is a bit disconcerting...
...For those who have read Mr...
Vol. 107 • May 1980 • No. 9
