Critics can be creative – look at Malcolm Cowley

Even Spectator book reviewers have to concede that their craft is inferior to the creative travail of authors. Henry James railed against the practitioners of literary criticism long ago:

So much preaching, advising, rebuking & reviling, & so little doing: so many gentlemen sitting down to dispose in half an hour of what a few have spent months & years in producing. A single positive attempt, even with great faults, is worth generally most of the comments and amendments on it.

The American critic Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) escapes these anathemas because early in his long life he was a poet of some distinction. For nearly 70 years, too, he produced essays and books which together constituted a literary history of the United States. He was at the topmost notch of second-rate minds, or (as his dedicated editor Hans Bak might claim) on the lowest rung of the first-rate. Moreover, as Bak’s selection of Cowley’s correspondence shows, he preferred to advise and improve other people’s draft work, or to explain and praise published work, rather than to rebuke or revile. He rehabilitated reputations, promoted new talents, encouraged flagging spirits.

Cowley volunteered in 1917 as a camion driver with the American Field Service, transporting ammunition, barbed wire and trench flooring in France, and wrote austere war poetry that has not lost its power. After the war he shrank from becoming an office-worker or subway commuter: he apostrophised

tin alarm clocks exploding simultaneously in hall bedrooms from the Battery to Yonkers … O explosive clocks you are very evidently the symbol of something.

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He studied at Montpelier university as well as Harvard; then hung out in Paris with the Dadaists, befriended Louis Aragon, grew ‘very fond’ of Tristan Tzara, and knocked around with hard-drinking American expatriates including Hemingway and Fitzgerald.