A Year in Reading: Richard Brody

In the past few decades, my years in reading have been nearly coextensive with my years in riding: most of my pleasure-reading has been done on the subway, commuting to and from work—and when there’s reading I want (or need) to do on weekends, I’ve often done it on the subway to nowhere, arbitrary destinations where I’ll walk around a little before getting back on and reading my way home. The pandemic put an ongoing pause to optional subway trips (unavoidable necessities only) and, because I’ve been working from home since it started—at first, all the time, and, now, most of the time—I get less time to read.

For me, the best reading isn’t quiet time, it’s the virtual sound of voices, and that’s why I like to read in busy places, not necessarily noisy ones but definitely not quiet ones. Voices, in quiet places, take on the formal solemnity of the lecture hall or the velvet-muffled house of worship (that’s why I’ve never liked reading—or writing—in libraries; even in middle school, I had a long walk home along a fairly busy road and used to read while walking) but, in public places and spaces, they join the clamor conversationally, in regular speaking tones. (That’s the big difference between theatre and movies—the theatre is the sacred space for the declamatory, the movies are the mundane settings for magnified murmurs, and that’s why the two art forms, despite their practical overlaps, are mutual enemies. Don’t @ me.)

This year, I’ve read plenty nonetheless, much of it in the biographical category, much of it for work, on subjects of interest—notably, Charles Elton’s biography of Michael Cimino, which reads like a detective story, and Mark Alice Durant’s fanatically researched biography of Maya Deren, along with Richard Koloda’s Holy Ghost, a meticulous and passionate critical biography of Albert Ayler. There was also a slightly heightened dose of cine-Francophilia, including the translation of Serge Daney’s The Cinema House and the World, two untranslated volumes of Daney’s newspaper pieces called Ciné journal and a memorial volume for Daney published by Cahiers du Cinéma, and also a new French collection of François Truffaut‘s correspondence with writers.

But the book I read with the greatest astonishment this year is from 1966: a slender volume called The Faulkner-Cowley File: Letters and Memories, 1944-1962, by Malcolm Cowley, which is titled as modestly as it is audacious in its substance and its form—it’s the literary equivalent of expanded nonfiction or personal metadocumentary. It’s a story of the depressing vagaries of the publishing industry and the crabbed taste of even ostensibly sophisticated readers—professors and critics being equally to blame—and how they benightedly united to submerge great works in obscurity. It’s a tale of the historic role of a devoted and passionate critic in rehabilitating such works and resetting both the academic and critics view of them—and, as such, it’s an inspirational, hortatory, and cautionary book for current-day critics in any medium. But, most simply, it’s Cowley’s first-person narrative—complete with supporting documents—of how he, a connoisseur of William Faulkner’s writing, came to edit the 1946 The Portable Faulkner, and why it mattered.

The story that Cowley tells has the excitement and the drive of a literary thriller—a thriller about literature. Cowley, born in 1898 (he was nearly a year younger than Faulkner) was then a critic and editor who, while assembling an anthology for Viking Press called The Portable Hemingway, wanted to follow it up with a Faulkner collection, which proved a far tougher sell to the publisher—because Faulkner, hard though it may be to believe, was largely forgotten (all seventeen of his books were, Cowley writes, “effectively out of print”; even the New York Public Library had only two) except insofar as, among academics and critics alike, he was disdained. (At least in the United States—Faulkner was already esteemed in France.) At the time, Faulkner was working half the year in Hollywood on screenplays, unhappily, merely to make a living (since his literary writing was hardly remunerative) before returning to his Mississippi farm for the other six months, which, he told Cowley, he further divided between farming and writing. Cowley intended to write a long essay about Faulkner—but couldn’t find any editor who’s take it, so, he says, he “beefed” it, cutting off pieces and publishing them in a wide range of journals (including the New York Times Book Review); this spate of Cowley essays led editors to believe that Faulkner was suddenly being talked about (even if only by Cowley) and, as a result, in 1945, the Portable was commissioned.

Cowley, however, planned The Portable Faulkner as no mere anthology—he considered Faulkner’s novels and stories to be fragmentary manifestations of the grand design of Faulkner’s fictitious Yoknapatawpha County, and he proposed to map the works’ history, geography, and characters through his editorial choices. His idea was to affirm the vastness of Faulkner’s imaginative world, the virtually Balzacian scope and depth of Faulkner’s life’s work, over and above the specific achievement of any one book. Editing the “Portable” took lots of back-and-forth between Faulkner (who appreciated Cowley’s critical assessments of his work) and Cowley (who would proceed only with Faulkner’s coöperation and approval). Much of the “File” involves the two men’s correspondence as the Portable takes shape, and reveals that the principal sticking point was the introduction, for which Cowley wanted to include a biographical sketch of Faulkner—whose resistance to any aspect of the personal was unyielding. (In a letter to Cowley, Faulkner expressed the desire to vanish behind his work, not even to sign it, and proposed an epitaph for himself: “He made the books and he died.”)

When The Portable Faulkner came out, in April 1946 (with a bare minimum of biography in Cowley’s introduction), it was promptly and widely and enthusiastically reviewed. It instantly propelled Faulkner into the pantheon of American authors, it spurred publishers to reissue some of his earlier books and to sign up new ones,  it made him a celebrity—and it smoked out of the woodwork long-indifferent magazine editors (at Life and Vogue) who wanted profiles of Faulkner, including by Cowley. (Faulkner wanted none of it; Cowley demurred, others wrote profiles nonetheless, and Cowley’s book includes a draft of a diatribe by Faulkner inveighing against the invasion of privacy by journalists presuming to write about his, or anyone’s, personal life—as well as a dramatic scene of Faulkner’s encounter with one such intrepid, intrusive profiler.)

The portraiture of Faulkner in The Faulkner-Cowley File is graceful, loving, discerning, and touching. The two men’s growing friendship is marked by scenes of Faulkner travelling to rural Connecticut and visiting Cowley and his wife, Muriel, there, in 1948—and by the two men’s reports of their successes and failures in hunting. Cowley’s vision of the great writer’s personal bearing and idiosyncrasies, and his view of Faulkner’s belated wrangle with fame, is undergirded by his own justifiable, albeit understated, pride in helping to establish Faulkner in his due, exalted place among critics, scholars, publishers, and readers. That pride is crowned with a literary moment that has the earth-shaking simplicity of a cinematic shock cut: following a word about Faulkner’s progress on the novel A Fable, Cowley adds, “In November 1950 I wrote to congratulate him on the Nobel Prize.”

There’s much more to this spectacularly vivid and trenchant yet slender book, involving Faulkner’s later years and Cowley’s overview of the literary generation to which both of them belonged. But what most fundamentally moves me about the book, over and above its astonishing particulars, is its confirmation of my view (and practice) of criticism as more than an effort at comprehension and elucidation—as, essentially, a matter of advocacy, of polemics, of taking sides and aiming at real-world results. The proper subject of criticism is the future—envisioning the future of the arts and helping to realize it. In The Faulkner-Cowley File, Cowley hardly broaches political subjects (though he makes one precious mention, in a letter to Faulkner, of the 1948 Presidential election returns)—yet a glance at Cowley’s Wikipedia page reveals that, in the late 1920s through the nineteen-thirties, he was intensely, relentlessly politically engaged (and had the trouble and the distinction of being denounced by the House Un-American Activities Committee as early as 1942). By the time of the events that he documents in the “File,” Cowley had sworn off politics—but it’s hard to imagine that, had he not first been such a committed and effective activist, he’d have been up to the strategic challenge of fighting the Faulkner battle, and winning it.