Mr. Cowley Views Today's Writers:

...Life was never safe, morality never secure...

...they have become as respectable as universities, and administrators and editors may base their decisions about a raise or an advance upon what the Sewanee-Kenyon-Hudson-Partisan reviewer says in praise or blame...

...Without having been a soldier, a Greenwich Villager, an expatriate, the literary editor of the New Republic...

...And I wish he would publish more poems and collect the essays that have not been put in book form...

...Cowley writes his overview of what is happening to literature and everything that concerns and affects it "in the spirit of Margaret Mead when she described various tribes of New-Guinea or in the not dissimilar spirit of Robert S. and Helen Merrill Lynd...

...This is my inference rather than Mr...

...Cowley does not consider even these novels as good as those which Faulkner, Warren, Dos Passos, Steinbeck and Hemingway produced in a healthier literary situation...

...Whether one agrees with Mr...

...The way out of the mediocre goodness of talented writing today, Mr...

...Then the new literature might not only be concerned with personal feelings at their deepest or lowest depths or with societal literature on the most superficial level...

...Cowley hastens to add...

...Sometimes, as in the novels of Jean Stafford and Carson McCullers, discernment and talent overcome fashionable preoccupations, but more frequently the result is a book with few friends or enemies...

...Cowley suggests in his closing pages, there are all sorts of truly new possibilities if writers become men who stand up in spite of everything...

...Cowley so accurately defines is affected by the culture as a whole as well as by his parents, childhood, college, and economic background...

...But one gets the impression that Mr...

...Professor of English at Louisville University SOME thirty years ago, after the brief flirtation with dadaism which he described in Exile's Return, Malcolm Cowley decided on the beliefs that have guided him during his distinguished career as a man of letters...

...Such a collection would form quite as interesting a running commentary on literature in our times as Edmund Wilson's Classics and Commercials and The Shores of Light...

...But they are "normal" in most of their habits and a good deal more sensitive and dedicated to the good life than any other cultural group...

...It also means that he is affected by the increasing difficulty of getting printed unless he hacks away for those pocket-book publishers who want books that fall, like soapflakes, into the categories of past successes: "Tobacco Road...

...Their incomes are low, their ideals high, their curiosity about people and society insatiable...

...Vocationally, they are people for whom "writing is the central activity," even if they are teachers or an insurance company's vice-president like Wallace Stevens...

...Perhaps...

...He is concerned, in other words, with the total environment that makes writers write, with how their books are distributed and how widely, with the quality of the work they do, and the external and internal forces that make it precious, terrible, mediocre or excellent...

...is the aim of literature...

...Functionally, they are craftsmen "whose medium is the written language...

...These quarterlies today resemble only faintly the daring and sometimes disorderly little magazines of the Twenties...

...Perhaps, Mr...

...It is not a book written by a critic for critics and maybe a few other writers...

...The economic insecurity that drives most writers to either editorial work or college teaching is compounded by a fear of what the very critical quarterlies will say about their writing...

...Though the general level may even surpass that of the novels that followed World War I, too many of them seem based on Dos Passos for structure, Fitzgerald for mood, Steinbeck for humor, and Hemingway for action and dialogue??and this despite the fact that most of the war writers are as ignorant of the new criticism as the new critics are of what they have written...

...The consequences of this situation that has raised critics above creative writers have been unfortunate, Mr...

...Although, for some reason I cannot account for, Mr...

...without being a publisher's editor with a singular capacity to make and keep friends and a man who does not hesitate to take his stand on controversial public issues, he could not have written his "informal history of our liberary times" so well...

...Cowley's statement...

...Undoubtedly, The Literary Situation is the best book of its kind to be written by an American...

...No war books as original as Three Soldiers, Farewell to Arms or The Enormous Room have yet appeared...

...but he was also right...

...I was grandiloquent in those days," Mr...

...Of course, the writer whom Mr...

...Cowley's provocative and sometimes provoking generalizations or not, there can be no doubt that The Literary Situation surveys the contemporary literary scene in "breadth" as he intended and in depth as he hoped...

...Cowley thinks...

...He would not have written his very good and too little-known poems, his discerning critical essays on writers as diverse as Lillian Smith, Faulkner, Hemingway and Auden, his excellent Exile's Return, and his recently published The Literary Situation if he had had lower ideals...

...Proletarian Sex.Gangster and Waterfront...

...Cowley places his "Natural History of the American Writer" toward the end rather than the beginning, it is here that his explanation really begins...

...Today, that means that he is anxious about the future (McCarthyism, Communism, when will the atom bomb drop...

...Since the self-respecting writer is pretty sure to prefer ditch-digging to concocting such stereotypes, he has to hope for hardback success (with maybe later publication by the more reputable paperback publishers...

...it might become an expression of "interpersonal relations...

...Perhaps they drink a little more than most other groups in America and die earlier than those who do not have to contend with the insecurities which getting books published and sold generally involves...

...Affected by the best "new" critics (Ransom, Tate and Blackmur) but never infected by them, affected also by an immense curiosity about all kinds of ideas, emotions, societies and men, Malcolm Cowley, a conscientious and gifted writer, stands with Edmund Wilson, Granville Hicks, Van Wyck Brooks, Newton Arvin and Lionel Trilling as one of the few who can make whoever reads feel his mind expand "to its extremest limits of thought and feeling" instead of contracting...

...Cowley thinks, lies in a greater sense of adventurousness in the choice of both technique and subject...

...Nelson Algren's The Man With the Golden Arm, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man Mr...

...Cowley's dislikes (Robey Macaulay) and wish he had had something to say about such excellent writers as Gerald Sykes, James Baldwin and Wright Morris...

...it is a book with important things to say to anyone who is interested in our culture as a whole and who realizes that literature and trash both reflect a culture and influence it...

...It is foolish for the writer to demand security in the moral and economic world, though this is a natural trend in modern America and perhaps a necessity in Russia today...

...The new writers might abandon the too-exclusive study of techniques and relearn (underivatively) the lesson of Hemingway, who told "what really happened, and to whom, and how they truly felt about it, not how they had been taught to feel or were expected to feel...

...And about poetry and the short story, both of which are more flourishing than he implies by his almost total neglect of them...

...Cowboy ...Mystery, Science Fiction...

...Bergler describes in his unperceptive book, The Writer and Psychoanalysis...

...Psychologically, they are people who keep "trying to find the exact and meaningful words for any situation...

...too uniformly, the characters are "students of both sexes, young artists and writers, gentlemen on their travels, divorced or widowed mothers, gay boys, neurotic bitches, virtuous grandfathers, old women on their deathbeds, and preternaturally wise little girls...

...and, always...Historical Sex with bitchy heroines...

...Since few novels and no books of poetry except those of Ogden Nash and Robert Frost sell as many as 12,000 hardback copies and most books of any kind sell less than 5,000, the writer has to expect to live on next to nothing or on an outside job...

...The "new" fiction, which sometimes implies that "authors, readers and critics all exist on the island of Laputa, which floated in the sky," too frequently suggests a "tidy room in Bedlam...

...Off-Beat Sex...

...For the "new" naturalism, which Malcolm Cowley calls personalism, he has higher praise, although he decries conventional naturalism's disregard of form...

...It would have been particularly difficult for him to write The Literary Situation if he had contracted the circle of his interests...

...Cowley considers very good books, although he is not uncritical about them...

...I agree, though I disagree with some of Mr...

...Despite the fact that they are often "hurt into poetry" and the more usual fact that they have almost always suffered unusually intense loneliness at some time in their lives, writers are not the "orally regressed psychic masochists" whom Dr...

...Too often, form is the main preoccupation...

...Joyce, Eliot, Proust and the other over-cited greats haven't exhausted the possibilities of original ways of looking at life or of individual ways of expressing it...

...Then the form of their writing would be determined by the subject-matter and it might??in one case out of ten or a thousand??be as new as the sense of life it was intended to express...

...He believed that the man of letters should devote "himself to literature as one might devote a life to God or the Poor," that he "should concern himself with every department of human activity, including science, sociology and revolution," that he should not be like those writers "who deliberately contract the circle of their interests who confine themselves to literary matters??in the end, to literary gossip," neglecting "the work of expanding the human mind to its extremest limits of thought and feeling ??which...

...Such novels are neither amorphous masses nor neatly tied trivia, and they assert the dignity of the defeated in a way that is unusual in the naturalistic novel...