Reading Journal

Those interested in literature and journalism might enjoy the classic book, The Flower and the Leaf by Malcolm Cowley. After having lost my original copy,   I chanced across it in a used bookstore. There are a number of essays regarding literature and the intellectual climate from WWII to about the eighties.

Some describe Cowley's life of letters. In one essay Cowley  discusses teaching writing students at the cusp of the war, describing them as somewhat self-involved and without political impetus. Another  essay describes small town life during the second world war, and the changes, privations, and experiences of the townsfolk as they experience rationing, changes in the economy, instructions from Washington on civic projects to promote the war effort, and news from oversees. I was surprised at the lackadaisical mood of the townsfolk as the war progressed, with local news competing with events from the Soloman's. Cowley also, in this book, includes an essay of how French literature helped shape the resistance. France, at that time, sounds like America today, riven by infighting and internal selfishness.

Cowley also has a good essay on writer Theodore Dreiser, and the unschooled nature of that genius--a brilliant and compelling world view but with a lack of  literary ability or style. Cowley also discusses some later published manuscripts about the French Quarter written during the twenties, and some of the lesser known writers during that time--writers with talent and energy and vision but without much ability to profit from instruction, unaccomplished writing styles despite great vigor and talent, or unpalatable personality traits that interfered with publication and acceptance.

An essay on Gertrude Stein on her experience in France during the war interested me. Generally, Cowley is dismissive of Stein as a writer, regarding her as inchoherant, inconsequential, without much intellectual center, but notes that her day to day interactions during the occupation with the townspeople give a vivid experience of that time--for him her greatest work by far.

His most famous essay, one which I have been trying to find for years after losing my original copy of the book, is called The Middle American Prose Style. He analyzes that flat middle western prose style that characterized Hemingway,  Stein, Lardner, and others, how it was formed and the variety of affects that make a paragraph of this style of writing discernibly different from a similar paragraph written by an English writer or American writer of another era.

Cowley also writes of his own literary experiences, and observations of communism as a form of religion, and the reactions of his contemporaries to such dispiriting events as the non-aggression pact between Germany and Russia. A critique of Leslie Fiedler, a psychoanalytically oriented, but somewhat dogmatic critic, is deft and convincing and there is a delightful  essay on philosopher Kenneth Burke, the iconoclastic,  original thinker. And finally a wonderful essay about the difficulties of  European intellectuals in the thirties and forties--dispossessed, sometimes exiled if not jailed, rent of their political convictions and betrayed by the Russian German pact, often coming to the US but too exhausted to make a second life here.

Cowley's observations are shoc

king,  sweeping, refreshing and encouraging and remind one of the possibilities of thought and circumspection in a world that, today, seems imbued with shallowness and illiteracy.  Cowley was editor of New Republic and President of the American Academy of Arts and Lettres.