Appreciation: Malcolm Cowley on Paris

“This book is the story to 1930 of what used to be called the lost generation of American writers.” So begins the prologue to Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920’s, by Malcolm Cowley. On the cover of the Penguin Paperback edition, you find a picture of the Pont Marie bridging the Île Saint-Louis to the Marais in Paris.

From this sort of evidence, you might infer that the book is about “the Lost Generation”—about Gertrude and Alice, and Hem and Ezra, and Sylvia Beach and Kay Boyle and all those Americans who fled from their American homes to hang out after World War I in Gay Paree.

You’d be disappointed. Granted that Paris and the losties do play a role in this memoir, still that role is a lot smaller than you might expect. What you have instead is an autobiographical account, necessarily idiosyncratic, of one person’s sojourn from Western Pennsylvania to Paris—and then back again to New York and Connecticut, during which time he read a lot, hung out with some famous and not-so-famous writers, and generally tried to make sense of his life.

What saves the book is Cowley’s extraordinary shrewd capacity as in observer—so remarkable you can only wish he offered more. He’s got about the best two-or-three page summaries showing why Joyce and Pound are important—and why Pound is not—as you’re likely to find. He offers equally wise and often funny insights into his friends and other strugglers trying to figure out a way to make a living while making a life. And he has some instructive thoughts on Paris itself: unlike so many who have written about Paris in the 20s, he seems to have a sense of history, and a capacity to put he 20s in context as an episode in a long tradition. He speaks, for example, of

…the Paris of the international revelers and refugees. … the crazy Paris which, to its own people, seemed the innermost city; in truth it was the outmost and the youngest. It was not the Paris of Villon or Cyrano or Rameau’s famous nephew, who were wastrels too, but in a different fashion. It was a Paris that began to flourish under the Second Empire, when the landlords and suddenly enriched speculators of all Europe came flocking toward a world capital where they could spend their profits and be ostentatious in their vice. From year to year this Paris became more feverish and gilded—but there was a time after Louis Napoleon fell when it suddenly ceased to exist. “Wonderful indeed,” wrote Karl Marx in 1871, “was the change the Commune had wrought!” …

But this was only an interlude. Soon the police and its Conservative friends reoccupied Paris, after executing thirty thousand of its inhabitants. Son the burglaries began again; soon the wealthy exiles reappeared on the boulevards; and for half a century their special city continued to grow.

Its population, however, had changed since the World War. The Russians still formed part of it, but they no longer had any ex-serfs to provide them with incomes—the Irish absentees had disappeared, after losing most of their estates—the British landlords, with heavier taxes to pay, were living at home—the Southern ex-slaveholders were dead and their descendants had joined the middle classes. Their places in the international set had been taken by the sons and daughters of Northern bankers, by Swedish match kings, by Spanish grandees—and also by strange new people, Chinese mandarins and war lords, Egyptian cotton growers, Indian maharanees, even a sprinkling of Negro kings from Senegal Their places were also taken by a few French nobles … [A]ll these people had this in common, that they lived at a great distance from their sources of revenue; that their money came to them, not smelling of blood, sweat and the soil, but in the shape of clean paper readily transformable into champagne and love. They were spending it faster and faster, but also more aimlessly. In everything they did there was now an air of uncertainty and strain. Something, the war, the Russian Revolution, had given them a sense that their order was crumbling and that they belonged to a dying world.

—Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return 262-5 (Penguin ed. 1994)