Worshiping a Cruel God

...But Cowley tells me that he wants to write more about the late 1930s...

...Recalling the doubts and successes of his early public speaking he is disarmingly humorous...

...I claimed that it could vastly strengthen his work," he says, and then, reverting to one of those pronouns he admits are "treacherous," concludes: "Gradually we should find that the movement might diminish a writer by giving him what seemed to be noble motives for concealing part of the truth...

...But at once it became clear that he was revolted by the disgusting deeds of the accused, not the nasty concoctions of the accusers...

...John Dewey, against whom Cowley led a strong and prolonged attack in an attempt to destroy the committee the philosopher had organized to investigate the truth of the Soviet accusations of Trotsky, receives three mentions...

...Yet Macdonald does not merit a single entry in the index...

...So many were out of work that thoughtful people looked with wonder toward the Soviet Union, where there was no unemployment...

...The scathing criticism that greeted the first publication of Exile's Return in 1934, with its fiery revolutionary epilogue, made him "feel like a timid nocturnal animal suddenly exposed to blinding sunlight, while shapes loomed over me and voices argued about whether to cage me and put me on display or let me scuttle back under the weeds...

...Actually almost all the writers were against capitalism's injustice and waste...

...The fact is that Cowley did his best to create unanimity...

...At one of the congresses of the League of American Writers, Cowley made a speech on "What the Revolutionary Movement Can Do for a Writer...

...After quoting a troubled letter from Newton Arvin to Granville Hicks, Cowley goes on: "History was a cruel God that the young instructor was learning to worship, and he was ready to accept the Communist leaders as His wrathful and lice-ridden prophets coming down from the mountains clad in goatskins...

...He had started working for the New Republic just before the stock market crash of 1929, and rose to editorial authority when Edmund Wilson left to tour the country and write The A merican Jitters...

...The battles were good fun, and I charged into most of them like a halfback into a scrimmage, but I began to note that real blows were being exchanged by others . . . the writers who quarreled were revealing themselves as the spokesmen for social interests in deadly combat...

...For fellow-travelers the doubts became acute at the time of the Moscow trials of the old Bolsheviks in 1936-37...

...The last stanza of "Mine #6" in Malcolm Cowley's collected verse, Blue Juniata, it suggests the tension between his two impossible dreams: to join the workers in a revolutionary brotherhood that would overthrow the system and "simply to write better than others...

...Some of them (usually shouted down, later to be discredited by systematic misrepresentation and slander) were "quarreling" over whether in the fight against the threat of fascism they should unquestioningly carry out tactics dictated by the Soviet-oriented Communist Party...

...Nevertheless, Cowley reports, slipping into the third person plural, "Those for whom the dream merely faded were likely to persist for some time in patterns of behavior that their faith had imposed upon them...

...At the beginning of the '30s the revolutionary dream did not look impossible, and Cowley was in a uniquely good position to help make it come true...

...He reports these sickening charges in horrified detail, taking them all as "evidence...

...One is in a neutral listing of Socialist Party supporters...

...Midwestern farmers, America's ultraconservative group, looted groceries and used pitchforks to stop foreclosures...

...New Russia's Primer, a Book-of-the-Month Club choice, became a best seller in 1931...

...He quotes a series of letters from Peggy Cowley, his first wife, who was in Mexico getting a divorce from him when she led Crane into an astonished and triumphant discovery of heterosexual love...

...They still went to meetings, they served on committees, and they signed open letters in spite of being dubious about what the letters said...

...Its assumed liberal integrity could be used to smother honest concern and restore the wavering support for the Socialist Fatherland...

...Details are given here of Crane's suicide that, until now, Cowley had found too painful to recreate...

...This must be an example of what Daniel Aaron means when, in his formidably documented chapter on Cowley in Writers on the Left, he demurs from the harsher verdicts of others and concedes that Cowley "devoted a good deal of time defending, sometimes ov-eringeniously," the Russian Revolution's "bloody aftermath, to his readers, to his friends, and, very probably to himself...

...Habits like that, drilled into reflexes, can be hard to break...

...Mary McCarthy rates only references, indulgently masculine, to her arrival from Vassar as part of "an army or a daisy chain with banners...

...Cowley's purpose in The Dream of the Golden Mountains is to explain a decade that for many who came after seems inexplicable...

...He even kept writing friendly warnings to Cowley, who in accepting party leadership had so strikingly rejected Wilson's famous urging of progressives to "take communism away from the Communists...

...The third describes Cowley, as a beginner on the magazine, trying to untangle Dewey's sentences and changing his words "to others that were closer to what I rather guessed he intended to say...

...To understand it fully one must have lived through the Depression...

...Totally granting the guilt of the condemned, he explains it at some length, putting together rumors and reports from scattered sources so as to suggest that there had been a widespread Rightist conspiracy attempting to overthrow the Soviet at a critical point in its "new revolution...

...The second tells of Dewey making a sweeping gesture that knocks glasses from the table at a drunken celebration of the New Republic's move uptown...

...He describes with delightful nostalgia his "big room under the roof" of one of the three brown-stone houses in New York's Chelsea area that the New Republic occupied...

...At home, too, Cowley says, "I was more comfortable . . . than I felt a man of my radical opinions had any right to be . . . . Our motherly Swedish maid did the shopping...

...There was always a five-gallon keg of applejack under the hinged lid of the window seat...

...There was never any unanimity about them," Cowley says, "except in respect to the general uneasiness ness they created among Left-wing intellectuals...

...Some phases of these and other relationships of the '30s may still seem too painful for full reconsideration...

...These are the words of a young man who in 1932 faced a menacing sheriff's posse to take food to the families of striking miners trying to organize a union in Harlan County, Kentucky...

...From then on, by his own writing and that of chosen contributors, he was able to push the magazine's small but bellwether circulation of liberal intellectuals steadily in the direction he had chosen for himself...

...to which Cowley refers his readers...

...Once Cowley had chosen his side, he gave it all he had, despite the doubts he describes...

...He makes comedy of the interminable wranglings over Leftist strategy and of one result, a disastrous dinner given with hypocritical opportunism in honor of wickedly uncooperative Sinclair Lewis...

...In the grim light of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 the golden dream "receded into the mist...

...In New York, the most generous city, whole families lucky enough to get it "received $2.39 a week for relief...

...Under these circumstances Cowley's $ 100 a week job seemed too cushy for his conscience, but he could not help reveling in it...

...But he himself is able to set his scene with a few sharply selected facts...

...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" Beauty, perfection, I have loved you fiercely —even in this windy slum, where fear drips from the eaves with April rain, and scarcely a leaf sprouts, and a wilderness in pain brings forth its monstrous children —even here . . . your long white cruel fingers at my brain...

...Because he could note and remember crucial details, he can share with us the atmosphere of both fear and adventure in Harlan County and on the Bonus March from Washington to Johnstown in 1932...

...Cowley's style, as in all his books beginning with Exile's Return, is quietly lucid, often gently ironic, and even when serious is never ponderous...

...He quotes Arvin's conclusion, which was also his own: "Let's salvage as much as we can . . . and do nothing, absolutely nothing, to impede the work of the men who are fighting what is really our battle for us...

...Cowley was not content, however, to stay on the sidelines...

...The grace of Cowley's language may be partly due to the strict training of the old-fashioned English teachers in his Pittsburgh high school—a training he chafed under, working up a mutual rebellion with his chum, Kenneth Burke, that would find its ultimate object when capitalism proved a cruel failure in the Depression...

...For this was one of those rare moments when an intellectual weekly had influence far beyond its normal circulation...

...This, as the '30s progressed—especially in the period of the Popular Front—coincided more and more closely with the Communist Party line...

...Looking up what he wrote then in a long two-issue review of the transcript of the 1937 trials, published in the New Republic in Mary 1938, I was relieved at first glance to see the world "revulsion" in the opening sentence...

...Those years have been described before, notably in The Crisis of the Old Order by Arthur Schlesinger Jr...

...Edmund Wilson, though effectively isolated, had the strength to hold out against political pressure...

...Cowley does not speak of his active and damaging hostility to James Farrell, or to Dos Passos, who in covering the Civil War in Spain had reported the execution of a close friend, a Loyalist colonel, by Stalinist agents...

...she liked to buy very thick steaks and insisted on polishing the furniture with olive oil...

...Dwight Mac-donald and Mary McCarthy were foes worthy of his steel when they protested the Communist leadership of the League of American Writers, to which Cowley as one of the founders devotes a good deal of space in Dream...

...that was for food, rent, clothing, everything...

...Some of Wilson's pleas are reprinted here, but at the time his counsel of caution could not stand up against the opposing challenge, irresistible to so many of us...

...we used to siphon off a pitcherful when guests dropped in for Ping-Pong...

...His portraits of friends like Burke, John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson and—most important to him personally—Hart Crane, are vivid and appealing...

...Many of us showed this same amazing ability to blind ourselves to what should have been obvious, and in Cowley's position would have taken full advantage of the power he had...

...The Civil War in Spain, which had made it possible for the Communists to unite most of the Left in a Popular Front, ended disillu-sioningly with Franco's victory...

...Now in his magisterial 80s, standing almost alone among the literary men of stature from his period, he can give us history of immeasurable value if he tells what only he can know, the rest of the truth...

...There was a live-in cook and butler who served the staff and distinguished visitors fine French meals each day...