29 NOVEMBER 1935, Page 32

EXILE'S .RETURN

By Malcolm Cowley •

There is no reason for. Mr. Cowley's calling his book (Jonathan Cape, 10s. 6d.) " a narrative of ideas." It is the story—told in the manner and with the detail characteristic of the American reporter-author—of certain young American writers and artists, most of whom were leaving school or college as the United States entered the War. Mr. Cowley, who is now an associate editor of the New Republic, was in the ambulance service in 1917. He returned to New York after the peace, and then became a member of the distressful band of American expatriates who were scattered over France and the Mediterranean until the financial. crash of 1929. He tells us that all these young men had suffered the same emotional collapse, being " uprooted, schooled away from any religion or tradition." He makes the curious assumption that they were a generation, and he writes as though during their years of exile they were performing some valuable service in settling the relations between Art and Life, between the creative person and a mechanistic civilisation. Ile describes their pathetic attempts to realise the Bohemia of French legend, their, wretched housekeeping, their riotous parties, nocturnal wanderings and babyish efforts to bring something off by bashing a policeman or caf6 proprietor in the jaw and getting locked • lip. • Amid these pleasing pm:suits they were reading the Frenclit its cuts and quarrelling over cliches of art and style. That Mr, »viey can do a com- petent reporter's job is shown by his pici u re of the Dadaists in their last absurd stage, and the book has other. chapters • that have an interest as fraginents of recent Social history.

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