don't let Hemingway punch you

 

------------------ [excerpt from Exile's Return:  A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s] -------------------------------

Introduction

Among the chronicles, memoirs, and remembrances of the making of American literature in the 1920s, Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return stands alone.  Far from the "we put on boxing gloves and Ernest Hemingway broke my nose" recollections of that shaping period for a national literature, Cowley's work is "a narrative of ideas," as he subtitled the original edition of his book, published in 1934.  

Save for a handful of anecdotes, the book is not an accumulation of silvered memories, but a meditative exploration of the design and goals of literary culture.

     It is a book written by a young man about a young time, and its extolling of a young generation's ability to cast off the baggage of its forebears and forge its own identity has quickened the hearts of generations of readers who have found resonance in its story.  It continues to speak.  Indeed, Exile's Return is not so much about Paris in the 1920s as it is about the exemplary revolt of one generation against its predecessors in the effort to establish itself.

------------------------- [end, excerpt]

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If I were president, I would make it so that each household in America had a copy of Exile's Return, and alongside it, the DVD of Woody Allen's 2011 movie, Midnight In Paris -- some of the artists and writers spoken of in Cowley's book come to life on screen, hilariously, in Allen's film.  (Time-travel situation...)

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