Malcolm Cowley's Exiles Return

Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return uses an autobiographical frame as a means of discussing the author’s development as a subjective actor within a generational structure of similar thinkers, thereby contextualizing his opinions and individual experiences inside a canonical category. His tone alternates between narrative and analysis, allowing him to relate his experiences and opinions through a trackable process of “becoming” both personalized and generalized. These factors characterize his autobiography as a rational yet carefully historical document, one which uniforms his artistic generation by a lengthy exposition on “deracination” and then develops conclusions looking back on its parallels with those previous and its significant differences.

He combines all of the information about the noteworthy individuals of the time in order to emphasize the singularity of the literary movement, thus reducing his need to explain beyond his knowledge as his is the common knowledge; the shared experiences of these various authors give him the fiat to write as if he were speaking for all of them. Even the autobiographical sections are devoted mostly in part to describing those in Cowley’s presence, from Tristan Tzara to Hart Crane: they speak through Cowley as he compiles his memories. His personal experiences and struggles are those most often generalized as common experience, while his depictions of meetings of the minds are written directly from his perspective. However, with this alternation, the communality of the experience becomes more plausible, especially as his encounters with the same people often occur in various geographic locations. All these writers, then, build upon similar banks of experience, often directly coinciding with those of others and abstractly forming the generation that Cowley ultimately defines, retrospectively examining the moral and cultural codes which influenced their