Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s

Malcolm Cowley’s memoir about his generation of literary artists who graduated from college between 1915 and 1922 is an insightful guide to the Lost Generation milieu in Paris and New York. In the second edition, published during the Cold War, Cowley adds an introduction and epilogue but leaves his 1934 voice intact. They were a generation who served in the First World War, often as ambulance drivers, or were just young enough to miss it. They felt “like strangers in their own land,” disconnected from their middle-class American culture, though many returned to it after a time in artist colonies in Paris and Greenwich Village. The Greenwich Village of 1920, Cowley says, attracted youth who wanted to escape what they felt was the show more mechanical standardization of their early education. They wanted to express themselves artistically, live for the moment, and shun their Puritan heritage. Living for the moment often meant buying a car and other products of twentieth-century capitalism on the installment plan. Village values swept the nation. They were often rebels but seldom revolutionaries. Some young rebels, like Cowley, moved to France looking for values in their exile. What they found instead was a romanticized image of America.

One would think that T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) would have been celebrated as an anthem of their generation. However, it created a dilemma for the Paris exiles, even though “it had all the qualities demanded in our slogans.” Cowley says, “We were prepared fervently to defend it against the attacks of the people who didn’t understand what Eliot was trying to do—but we made private reservations. The poem had forced us into a false position, . . . brought our consciously adopted principles into conflict with our instincts. At heart—not intellectually, but in a purely emotional fashion—we didn’t like it. We didn’t agree with what we regarded as the principal idea that the poem set forth.”

James Joyce was also a problematic figure for Cowley and his friends because they knew that he had written a great work, but they had doubts about his value as a model for their own work. Should they emulate his pride, ambition, and contempt for others? Maybe not. Ezra Pound was equally troublesome, even though they did not know he had a major hand in polishing up The Waste Land. They were more in tune with Paul Valery’s pronouncement that “literature was an exercise, a game worth playing for the same reasons that one plays tennis or bridge.” The game eventually led Cowley to the contrarian Dadaists, who thought that “all the writers of the past had been enslaved by reality.”

Later in the decade, Hemingway became a cult figure, and Nathanael West and F. Scott Fitzgerald chronicled the excesses and absurdities of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald’s work, Cowley says, is “in some ways the best record of this whole period. Cowley closes with the sad stories of Hart Crane and Harry Crosby. Crane, like Fitzgerald, seemed to have to drink to write, and Crosby, a lesser-known poet and traumatized veteran, committed suicide. show less

"The 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. An age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Sea or the West Indies, or better still for Paris."
What a joy this book was for me. Like sitting for a long chat with someone who 'was there' and able to tell you all about it in the most interesting and illuminating way.
Escape from machines, and assembly lines, and expected ways of living. The effects of war, bohemianism, individualism, and perceptions of art. Experiencing and realizing the world tilting on its axis. By accident I learned so much more about a time in world history that was missing from my body of knowledge. Might there be a Roaring Twenties 2.0 waiting in show more the wings? show less

This is the story of the so-called lost generation of American writers, their alienation from their American roots, their attempts to replace America's "mechanical" values with moral values, by escaping to Europe or into themselves. Of their struggle to reconcile their need for self-expression with their need to make a living. The crass money values of America drove them overseas, but their need for American money always drew them back, back to an America that was changed, in their perceptions.

This is not an easy read. It is literary criticism but also contains strong elements of aesthetics, philosophy, history, and especially, sociology. So many interweaving threads are hard to follow. The isms involved are complex: Bohemianism, show more Dadaism, Symbolism, etc. But there are flashes of brilliant writing here.

The author was steeped in literature, up to his neck. He lived it, full-time. He knew the big names on both sides of the Atlantic. This book is very much an inside view of the mostly-American literary scene to 1930. show less

3253. Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s, by Malcolm Cowley (read Oct 8, 1999) I've wanted to read this book for ages, and when I quite by accident came across it in the library of a local college, I had to read it. Most of it was good reading, tho some of the discussion of literary theory was over my head. But most of the book was of interest.

A classic but wrong in historical perspective.