Book Review : Correspondence of Two Men of Letters

The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1981, edited by Paul Jay (Viking: $29.95, 448 pages)

As a young man in my college years, I engaged in three furious and passionate exchanges of letters--the love letters by which I courted my wife, the letters that my brother and I wrote to each other when he was in Paris and safely out of reach of the draft during the Vietnam War, and the letters in which I confided my literary ambitions to a friend from high school who had sought his own fortunes on a commune in Mendocino. I poured my heart and soul into those letters, sometimes writing two or three times a day. By the age of 21, however, I found that I had spent my passion for letter-writing, and I turned to other literary endeavors.

What we discover in “The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley” is, among many other things, that the passionate letter-writing of one’s adolescence and young adulthood can be sustained over a lifetime. Indeed, “The Selected Correspondence” is quite literally the life’s work of two enduring figures of American literature.

Cowley, the distinguished critic and literary historian (“Exile’s Return”), studied at Harvard, volunteered as an ambulance driver in World War I, and spent his expatriate years in Paris. Kenneth Burke--who has also distinguished himself as a critic (“A Grammar of Motives” and “A Rhetoric of Motives”) as well as a poet-- studied at Ohio State University and Columbia, then dropped out to become “a Flaubert” in New York. Each man went on to invent himself as a force in the noisy literary battles of the 20th Century. Now we learn that their most impressive literary achievement may have been the letters that they have exchanged throughout their lives.

Burke and Cowley, who befriended each other as high school students in Pittsburgh in the early years of the century, began an exchange of correspondence that has lasted more than 70 years.

“The Selected Letters” is a sweeping intellectual history of the 20th Century, an intimate chronicle of the ideas and personalities and events that have informed and inspired the last four or five generations of American men and women of letters. At the same time, the book can be approached as a kind of two-headed autobiographical novel embodied in the letters exchanged by two bright, ambitious and accomplished men who find in each other a kindred spirit, a confessor, a goad, a fellow soldier in the literary campaigns, a comforter in old age.

We first meet Burke and Cowley as brash and callow young men: “Last night I had the fullest hours of my life; I was at Theodore Dreiser’s,” Burke writes in 1915. “I managed to worm myself shyly into conversation with Dreiser, but not until I had suffered the painful humiliation of finding myself addressing the air.”

We see them, too, as men grappling with the vagaries and frustrations of life, struggling to build careers and relationships and reputations: “I feel hollow as a sucked egg,” Cowley complains in a letter from 1931, when he was working as literary editor of the New Republic. “If I could drop everything, go to Europe, write an ambitious book, I’d be cured quickly; but I don’t want to drop the New Republic. . . . What’s the answer?”

And we see them in old age, mellow and reflective, enduring the losses of colleagues and loved ones, and struggling against new infirmities: “For both of us a mild consolation is that we’re not just stumbling into the shadows,” Cowley writes in 1980. “Both of us are better known in our 80s than we were in our 60s.”

The correspondence is filled with preening and posturing, carping and kvetching, and--not infrequently--the flatulence of inflated egos. (“I don’t want to be a virtuoso,” Burke writes in 1918. “I want to be a--a--oh hell, why not? I want to be a--yes--a genius.”) Early on, we suspect that Burke and Cowley are writing for readers other than each other--indeed, they were writing for the ages. By 1982, Cowley is ready to go public with the letters:

“I made a review of my literary remains or disiecta membra and decided that they included material for nine, count them, nine books,” Cowley wrote. “One project we ought to think about is the Burke-Cowley correspondence. By this time there’s nothing like it in the American 20th Century.”