Reviews for A second flowering

The average rating for A second flowering based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-08-12 00:00:00 Steve Wiley To paraphrase Walt Whitman, who better to "understand the large hearts of heroes" than someone who can truly say "I am the man, I suffered, I was there."? In A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation, Malcolm Cowley strives to help us understand the "large hearts" of close to a dozen post-World War I literary heroes, whose hearts' expanse contained perplexing darkness and obsessive energy as well as generous talents to express a proposed generational outlook (then, though, as after and now, I suspect generational viewpoints were never as pervasively held by the entire generations as the writers and artists--or, perhaps more accurately, their publicists--would have us believe). And Malcolm Cowley was there. In World War I Cowley was a reporter from the front for The Pittsburgh Gazette and an American Field Service ambulance driver along with Hemingway, Cummings and so many other "lost generation" writers. After the war, he rubbed shoulders among the American literary artist expatriates in 1920's Paris. His first wife, Peggy, apparently was the other half of the only heterosexual relationship of substance (or at all) had by poet Hart Crane, who was a friend of Malcolm and Peggy Cowley and in and of their social circle during the '20s and into the next decade (Hart suicided in '32). Maybe further reading by and about Cowley will help me eventually take a side on the debate that possibly exists beyond my own mind as to whether his relationships in the "Lost Generation" literary scene were as a true and vital participant or as a hanger-on poseur who later made more hay as a publisher and editor than as a writer. Hemingway put Cowley down in a brief passage in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, but I tentatively suspect Hemingway of using cutting put downs more for stylistic effect than as a reflection of something approaching historical truth (the parenthetical voice in my head that is never silent, and that Hemingway would have hated, interjects at this point that for Hemingway style was truth. He was a painter, not a philosopher). These suspicions, and a better understanding of Hemingway's anti-intellectualism, are also notions I'll reserve bringing into a full flourishing opinion until after I complete further reading. Always further reading. The book consists of eleven chapters: two bookend chapters set up and sum up this generational literary era (I.The Other War as the alpha and XI.Taps for the Lost Generation as the omega), seven chapters each are devoted to well-known writers (be they mainly poets such as Cummings or Crane or chiefly novelists such as Faulkner and Fitzgerald) and good ol' Hemingway, despite his taking a Kilimanjaro cheap shot at the author, receives two chapters--one focusing on the young writer of the Paris years and the penultimate chapter extolling the virtues of X.The Old Lion during a period of his career where it is fashionable to bash Poppa as having lost his talent. Besides being an enjoyable and informative read, here's one thing this book did for me: it made me realize how little of this stuff I've read as the older man I am now, as opposed to the couldn't-care-less person I was in high school and college when this stuff was being shoved down my throat in the form of assignments made by English teachers and American Lit professors who I believe fell short in making this writing come as alive as Cowley has convinced me it is, or at least inspired me to believe it now waits to be. And so the book gave me resolve to plunge into reading (in some cases, rereading with older and now new eyes) the works of many of these authors. I doubt many of you managed to make it through high school, let alone American Lit in college, without being assigned Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby? Although, like some of my contemporaries, many of you might have opted to instead watch the movie, read the Cliff Notes or just said "fuck it" and took the failing grade. Similar might be said of Hemingway and, though assigned to a lesser extent in my experience, Faulkner. And these writers whom I was introduced to yet not sufficiently inspired, it seems, to enjoy during my formal academic years are merely the beginning. I wasn't even finished with Cowley's book when I started in on a copy of U.S.A by John Dos Passos (subject of IV.The Learned Poggius) that I long ago picked up in one of my second-hand book buying frenzies. And I realized that as much as I've heard about Thornton Wilder's play Our Town, I've never seen nor read the goddamned thing (Wilder's work, of which the famous play is but a small slice, is covered in IV.Time Abolished). Although Cowley's chapter on Thomas Wolfe (VIII.Homo Scribens) didn't make me eager to read any of Wolfe's work (other than to surely, I tell myself, someday get back to Look Homeward, Angel) I was fascinated by the portrait of a literary artist as a young man so unquestioning and obsessive as to be pitifully twisted and life a live that is more a cautionary tale for future writers than a story of an author leaving behind timeless works. Wolfe, like Crane, died in his early thirties and while his death was not a suicide, after reading his chapter I felt as though he might have somehow written himself to death. For obvious and aforementioned reasons, in the chapter on Crane (IX.A Memoir) Cowley is at his most personal and poignant. And, a slight warning, I felt the chapter on Faulkner (VII.The Yoknapatawpha Story) serves almost as much a spoiler, particularly if you're planning to read Absalom, Absalom! any time soon, as an enticement to discover or rediscover him. Here are some of the larger things this book did for me: it made me realize how much I lack (or am currently unaware of) heroes of the pen that come from my generation. Cue the end of the The Fall's song Repetition, ("My Generation! ... Same old ... My Generation! ... Groovy ... My Generation!") to signify that there may not be a stronger argument for cohesiveness of a generational view or mood since the one Cowley writes about in this book (which might have been a point he himself made either explicitly or between the lines. I can't quite remember and I'm too lazy to research it with a skimming reread). I know I set myself up for an accusation of romanticism when I say that most of the heroes of the pen that I do have are of an entirely different time and breed, even their cynicism seems purer to me for somehow being more fairly earned. It could be I simply need to read more ... further reading. Always further reading. And, to borrow--if memory serves--a phrase from Charles Bukowski, I am a bit disgusted that I have "no grounding in the classics," any classics. To think that most of these writers began as young Turks who were, if not rebelling against their classics, at least rebelling against their fathers' generation who revered those classics as a matter of good form and rote rather than true emotional connection ... to think that I don't have even a solid grounding in their work. To think that their foundational experiences in storytelling were the likes of Milton or Shakespeare or Balzac while mine were Saturday morning cartoons and comic books before finally graduating on to science fiction short stories. To realize that they were raised on the sweet milk of noble poetry and the good clean air of a far less crappy world while I sat back and sucked up Looney Tunes and potato chips as if there wasn't a difference between the two. This I can't change, but it's not too late to recognize the big difference between "the large hearts of heroes" and whatever tinker toy noisemakers beat beneath the breasts of more docile and rehabbed MFAs such as, say, Rick Moody. If there's one thing possibly worse than being born too late, it's failing to recognize the power of what once was and, within that recognition, still is. Oh, I'm sorry. I seem to have gotten carried away. ***** ***** crap I wrote earlier Started Sunday morning 12 August 2012 and finished Sunday morning 16 September 2012. Something I wrote early on in my progress through the book (I believe because goodreads invited me to do so and interweb head that I am, I could not resist the siren call of their UI: Excellent first chapter. Although I find it mildly annoying (possibly because it underscores my lack of worldliness) when French phrases are left to stand on their own without being translated into English (y'know, for us hicks) and I'm sent once again to the great Google. "Apres la guerre finit!" "Que je m'ennuie pour la Ville Immense, la Femme superbe et subtile qui s'appelle--tu le sais--Paris." Cummings in a letter to Dos Passos. Could this possibly mean the following? Bored with the Big City where the babes are as hot as they are crafty and its name is--as you know--Paris. Ah, that crazy ass Lost Generation crew! Not like the Beats had all the fun. I am done with this. Review to follow.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-06-29 00:00:00 John Neumann Interesting to read in its time. A lot has changed in scholarship around the Lost Generation.