Sensitive, well-reported, and probing ... Howard’s book is not a proper biography of Cowley. One of those already exists, though it’s still in progress ... Howard is more interested, profitably, in giving us set pieces and in tracing a series of ideas ... I wish The Insider were about a hundred pages shorter. It’s more than 500 pages and sometimes places the reader in the weeds without a scythe ... My cavils about Howard’s book are mild ones. He’s a sensitive discriminator; he takes a lot of old battles out of their archival plastic and makes them fresh again.
Details...events sternly but with evident reluctance. Mr. Howard’s argument, which I find persuasive, is that Cowley’s stint as an ideologue was a short-term folly that does not fundamentally implicate his literary endeavors ... Suggests that the work of culture is as reliant on good administration as on artistic talent. Cowley had taste and practical know-how. We could use bureaucrats like that today.
Howard does more than highlight the ways in which—through the recommendation of residency recipients, the publication of essays and books, the mentoring of students, or the revival of out-of-print works—Cowley shaped individual literary careers. Rather, as Howard, a former book editor himself, sees it, Cowley’s agitation for the cause of his country’s literature also helped to vault what was once seen as a minor, regional tradition into a world-historical one ... Across Howard’s biography, a routine plays itself out: Cowley decides that a figure, whether it is a forgotten writer or an unproven one, deserves more attention, and he mobilizes ... The impression produced by Howard’s biography is of Cowley as a Zelig-like character present at every important moment in American literary life.
Clear-eyed ... Was he a great American critic? Not as great, in Howard’s final judgment, as his friend Wilson, whose polyglot sense of literary history had a global range. But Cowley was American in a crucial way, wearing many hats in his long career, fascinated by the country’s parts, and always seeking to understand the forces that kept it whole and the writers who shared that curiosity.
The Insider is a pleasure to read, in part because many of the characters in it remain intellectually and historically exciting, encrusted as they are with remnants of legend and glamour that Cowley himself never quite attained ... If Howard makes a slight overreach here, it’s nonetheless a lovely one, and in all, it must be said that a good bit of The Insider is startling and beautiful, particularly the portions that cover the late Twenties ... Throughout Howard’s excellent book, the word “literature” keeps raising its elegant, harrowed face, and you feel it as a punch in the gut almost every time; the word becomes a night vision of your mother’s ghost in the hall. In the end, seeing twentieth-century American literature from above, getting the big view, as The Insider allows you to see it, is an experience like visiting New York Harbor off Red Hook, or the islands in Jamaica Bay, or the approachable stretches of the Hudson River along its banks in northern Manhattan—and you think, Oh, how very beautiful, how stunning and lovely that water must once have been. No one swims in it now.
Written with clarity and affection, Howard’s study balances personal detail with intellectual history while serving as both tribute and reevaluation, reaffirming Cowley’s enduring significance as American literature’s most savvy insider.
