The Dream of the Golden Mountains by Malcolm Cowley

First published: 1980

Type of work: Memoir

Time of work: 1929 to 1938

Locale: The United States

Principal Personages:

• Malcolm Cowley, an American literary critic
• Peggy Baird Johns Cowley, his first wife
• Muriel Maurer Cowley, his second wife
• Robert Cantwell, a proletarian novelist and short-story writer
• Hart Crane, a poet
• John Dos Passos, a novelist
• Theodore Dreiser, a novelist
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, a novelist
• Waldo Frank, a novelist and critic
• Clifford Odets, a playwright
• Edmund Wilson, a novelist, critic, and sociopolitical essayist

Form and Content

When Malcolm Cowley’s study of expatriate American writers of the 1920’s, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920’s, was published in 1934, it was attacked by established reviewers not only because of its contention that the so-called lost generation was worthy of serious critical attention but also because Cowley at that time was identified with the American Communist movement, although he never actually joined the Communist Party. Cowley sees 1930—the year that concludes Exile’s Return—as “a watershed between two ages,” and in The Dream of the Golden Mountains he writes of his activities in the 1930’s, when economic chaos in the United States and the rise of Fascism in Europe led Cowley and other writers to believe that “great changes would surely take place; they must take place, and . . . it was our duty as writers to take part in them.” Because this book was not completed until 1979, it both reflects the attitudes of the 1930’s and places them in a wider historical context. Cowley recognizes that many who joined the Communist movement in the 1930’s have explained their disillusionment with it, but very few have explained why they joined the movement in the first place and what they hoped to accomplish. This book is Cowley’s explanation. In it, although he acknowledges that he had doubts and reservations even as he was part of the movement, he evokes above all the genuine desire to effect radical change that motivated him and his comrades.

The twenty-six chapters, arranged in chronological order beginning in 1929 (when Cowley went to work for The New Republic) and ending in 1937 (when the stock market crashed again, the Spanish Civil War was beginning, and news of the purges in the Soviet Union was reaching the West), trace literary, political, and personal events. The first eight chapters describe Cowley’s growing sympathy with the suffering and bewilderment of Americans during the first two years of the Depression. At the same time, an era in his personal life drew to a close with his divorce from his first wife, Peggy Baird Johns, and the suicide of his close friend Hart Crane, the American poet who wrote The Bridge (1930). Cowley observes that he, like many others at the time, wanted both an intellectual and an emotional means of understanding the apparent collapse of the American economy and of doing something about it. Marxism seemed to provide an intellectual analysis, showing that the breakdown of the capitalist system was an inevitable part of a large historical process and not a random disaster. Leninism provided a complementary emotional direction, leading to the “essentially . . . religious experience” of subordinating petty selfish concerns and ambitions to the great cause of bringing about an economic, political, and cultural revolution that would culminate in rule by the workers.

In the second section (chapters 9 through 16) Cowley shows how the painful, violent experiences of Americans in the Depression years before the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt affected him and other intellectuals of the American Left. He witnessed the despair of veterans who had participated in the “Bonus Army” encampments in Washington, D.C., as they passed through Johnstown, Pennsylvania, having been driven out of Washington by tear gas and fire wielded by the troops of General Douglas MacArthur, under orders from President Herbert Hoover. He attended the National Hunger March on Washington in December, 1932, and observed how the bank failures throughout the winter of 1932-1933 deepened the despair of not only workers but also farmers and middle-class citizens. All these events, and many others like them, seemed evidence that the American system could not survive. A Fascist takeover seemed a real possibility—Adolf Hitler was on the rise in Germany—and intellectuals on the Left, regarding revolution as inevitable, feared that “Germany, not Russia, has traced the path which we seem destined to follow if the crisis continues or recurs.” The choice seemed to be between socialism and Fascism; even Roosevelt seemed to be merely perpetuating the old order, and thus few New York writers of the Left participated in the shaping of the New Deal. Ideological purity forbade any compromise with movements that were less than radical.

While the Depression was at its worst, however, young writers and artists were joining John Reed clubs throughout the country, dedicating themselves to creating art that would spread revolutionary ideals. Such plays as Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty (1935), such magazines as Partisan Review and Dynamo, and many poster campaigns, poems, and pamphlets on proletarian and revolutionary themes were part of “an amazing burst of cultural activity” with which Cowley sympathized but which he also saw as aesthetically limited by ideological commitments.

After marching with the John Reed Club in the 1933 May Day parade, Cowley spent the summer in Tennessee, working on Exile’s Return and hearing the arguments of the Southern Agrarians, among them critic and poet Allen Tate (who had arranged for Cowley’s retreat), as well as the poets John Crowe Ransom, John Gould Fletcher, and Robert Penn Warren. Although their vision of an ideal agricultural society attracted Cowley, he could not reconcile that vision with the realities of slavery, sharecropping, and limited scope for intellectual talents on the land.

Cowley returns to his main themes in the last nine chapters, which show how the efforts of the Communist movement to embrace rather than exclude other liberal and socialist groups in a common “People’s Front” to oppose Fascism brought about a “brief era of good feeling” during which revolutionary communism was deemphasized. Within this political context, Cowley, always the sympathetic but somewhat detached observer, supported the fresh critical insights of those who applied Marxism to literature but believed that “proletarian literature” was more often stultifying than liberating, showing too great a willingness to “renounce the art of making patterns out of words for the easier task of writing cautionary tales and artless sermons.” The realities of Joseph Stalin’s purges in the Soviet Union and the growing certainty that the United States would go to war against Germany, along with the New Deal’s success in dampening revolutionary fervor in the United States, caused bickering and stresses within the American Communist movement that marked the end of the confident comradeship Cowley had found in it.

Critical Context

Ever since the Red scares of the 1950’s ruined so many artists’ lives, members of the literary and intellectual Left in the United States have been understandably wary of acknowledging or discussing their support of the Communist movement. Those who have written about their participation have generally emphasized how and why they came to reject and abhor communism (as in, for example, The God That Failed: Six Studies in Communism, 1950) and have taken pains to insist that they were ignorant of the true nature of the Communist movement until some moment of insight brought about their deconversion. Cowley separates himself from that apostate tradition, while at the same time remaining as skeptical of the narrowness of party dogma as he was in the 1930’s. Thus, his work represents an effort to move beyond the passions of the moment and to explain without either apologizing or condemning.

In his major studies of American literature, such as Exile’s Return and A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation (1973), Cowley explores the characteristics of literary movements or generations, seeking to trace the ways writers change and are changed by the literary and cultural circumstances in which they work. In The Dream of the Golden Mountains, Cowley extends the range of his interests beyond the purely literary to include the political, economic, and social conditions under which he and his compatriots worked in the 1930’s. Thus, although all of his work is in some ways more than literary criticism, this book shows perhaps the greatest range and depth of any of Cowley’s writings. From his vantage point at the center of American literary life, he has both shaped and explained the leftist intellectual tradition in the United States.

Bibliography

Alter, Robert. “The Travels of Malcolm Cowley,” in Commentary. LXX (August, 1980), pp. 33-40.

Brown, Maxine. “The Thirties Revisited,” in The Virginia Quarterly Review. LVII (Winter, 1981), pp. 168-175.

Hook, Sidney. “Disremembering the Thirties,” in The American Scholar. XLIX (Fall, 1980), pp. 556-560.

Kazin, Alfred. “Writers in the Radical Years,” in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXV (March 23, 1980), p. 7.

Lasch, Christopher. “Alienation a la Mode,” in The Nation. CCXXXI (July 5, 1980), pp. 21-22.

Lewis, R. W. B. Review in The New Republic. CLXXXII (March 15, 1980), pp. 28-30.

Simpson, Lewis P. “Cowley’s Odyssey: Literature and Faith in the Thirties,” in The Sewanee Review. LXXXIX (Fall, 1981), pp. 520-539.