At Harvard he edited the
Advocate and, while an undergraduate, began to publish reviews in the
Dial and the
New Republic. He left the university during his sophomore year in 1917, intending to serve with other young writers in an American ambulance unit in France, but soon found himself driving munitions trucks for the French military transport. Cowley said later in
Exile's Return that being a volunteer was in many ways "ideal"--"good food, a congenial occupation, furloughs to Paris"--and it provided a means of observing "the once-in-a-lifetime spectacle of the Western Front," seeing firsthand, gaining valuable experience. Cowley compares the activity to a college-extension course:
A few miles north of us the guns were booming. Here was death among the flowers, danger in spring, the sweet wine of sentiment neither spiced with paradox nor yet insipid, the death being real, the danger near at hand.
Besides nurturing "a spectatorial attitude," the war enormously benefitted future writers, for it "revivified the subjects that had seemed forbidden because they were soiled by many hands and robbed of meaning; danger made it possible to write once more about love, adventure, death." But foreign soil and the war experience exacted an expense of spirit from the expatriate: after the armistice he discovered that "the country of his boyhood was gone and he was attached to no other." On the other hand, Cowley had developed the beginnings of his intense interest in French literature and civilization.
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