An unfortunate danger of the journalistic mission to
make radical art accessible through simplification is the possible removal of what makes it radical. Malcolm Cowley probably did more for William Faulkner’s reputation (with The Portable Faulkner in 1946) than anyone else did, but the occasional distortions this entailed also had some lasting and lamentable effects.

I haven’t yet read Gerald Howard’s The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature, which just arrived in the mail, but I’m astonished to discover that the novel I regard as Faulkner’s greatest, Light in August (1932 ) — in

part because it has the most to say about Southern racism — doesn’t appear even once in The Insider’s index. Back in my graduate school days in the mid-1960s, I discovered that Cowley’s excerpting of the murder and castration of Joe Christmas in The Portable Faulkner entailed identifying Christmas as a “negro” [sic], which Faulkner never does, because a central aspect of Christmas’s tragedy is that neither he nor the reader could ever know his racial identity, even though his murder and castration is motivated by a supposition that Cowley opted to share for the sake of journalistic “clarity” (i.e. simplification). This is one among many changes and editorial decisions Cowley submitted for Faulkner’s approval in a single letter, and Faulkner’s tacit acceptance was clearly an oversight, as evidenced by his subsequent statements about Joe Christmas to college students in Virginia. Thus the radical step of withholding Christmas’s racial identity and challenging others (including Faulkner’s readers, e.g. us) with their own simplifying biases was removed by Cowley, thereby fostering subsequent misreadings of the novel.

Cowley also deradicalized Faulkner’s The Wild Palms (1939), a contrapuntal novel with two alternating stories, by including only one of these stories in The Portable Faulkner, deprived of its ironic and dialectical counterpoint as provided by the other story. (It hardly seems accidental or coincidental that Eisenstein is mentioned at one point in The Wild Palms.) To say that Faulkner also approved without proposing this dubious change is only to posit once again that his artistic gifts as a writer far exceeded Cowley’s gifts as a popularizing curator.