Peggy Cowley

Marguerite Frances Cowley (née Baird; 1890 – September 23, 1970), known as Peggy Cowley and also as Peggy Baird and by her first married name Peggy Johns, was an American landscape painter. She was married to poet-playwright Orrick Johns and writer Malcolm Cowley and was the lover of playwright Eugene O'Neill and poet Hart Crane.[1][2][3]

Peggy Cowley
Born
Marguerite Frances Baird

1890
DiedSeptember 23, 1970(1970-09-23) (aged 79–80)
Tivoli, New York
Spouse(s)
​
​
(div. 1919)​

​
​
(m. 1919; div. 1931)​

Activism

Baird was a member of the women's suffrage movement. In 1917, she invited Dorothy Day to join the National Woman's Party.[4] They were jailed for 60 days for their protests but were released after 16 days and pardoned by President Woodrow Wilson.

Personal life

After divorcing her first husband, Johns, she married Malcolm Cowley in 1919.[5][6] In 1931 she moved to Mexico to obtain a divorce. While there her long friendship with poet Hart Crane turned into Crane's first and only documented heterosexual affair.[7][8][9] As Crane wrote to a friend about his romance with Peggy Cowley, "Rather amazing things have happened to me since Xmas. Peggy Cowley ... is mainly responsible".[10] This affair has since become a major point of interest for Crane scholars—particularly for those reading him with an eye toward his sexuality—as his engagement with heterosexual life is a determining theme in his last major poem, "The Broken Tower". Appearing at moments to be a highly symbolic affirmation of their relationship, as well as a denial of his homosexual past (the 'broken tower' can be read as a defeated phallus), the poem was written just months before Crane committed suicide by jumping off of a passenger ship in 1932, following a trip to Mexico.[11][12]

Though their relationship had begun to deteriorate by that time (Crane said he had "misunderstood and misinterpreted Peggy's character quite badly"), Cowley was with Crane on the boat, and she figures briefly, but poignantly, in the events leading up to his death.[13]Hart Crane and family papers Almost thirty years later, she wrote about this period in an article for Venture, "The Last Days of Hart Crane."[14]

After Crane's death, Cowley married twice more and converted to Catholicism at the age of 60.[15] Cowley died of cancer at Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker Farm in Tivoli, New York, where Cowley had resided for ten years.[16]

References
  1. Johns, Orrick (1937). Time of Our Lives. New York: Stackpole.
  2. Black, Stephen A. (2002). Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy. Yale University press. p. 201. ISBN 0-300-09399-3.
  3. Hart Crane, The Letters of Hart Crane, 1916-1932 (Hermitage House, 1952), page 403
  4. Klejment, Anne; Roberts, Nancy L. (1996). American Catholic Pacifism. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 21–22. ISBN 0-275-94784-X.
  5. Cheever, John (28 August 1983). "My Friend, Malcolm Cowley". The New York Times. Retrieved 21 October 2019.
  6. Krebs, Albin (29 March 1989). "Malcolm Cowley, Writer, Is Dead at 90". The New York Times. Retrieved 21 October 2019.
  7. Newman, Karen; Clayton, Jay; Hirsch, Marianne (2002). Time and the Literary. Routledge. p. 241. ISBN 0-415-93960-7.
  8. Mariani, Paul. The Broken Tower. p. 377.
  9. Murphy, Brenda; Monteiro, George (2016). Eugene O'Neill Remembered. University of Alabama Press. p. 333. ISBN 9780817319311. Retrieved 21 October 2019.
  10. Hart Crane, The Letters of Hart Crane, 1916-1932 (Hermitage House, 1952), page 403
  11. See, for instance, Harold Bloom's introduction to Mark Simon's edition of Crane's poems, published by Liveright (2000), p. xxx.
  12. Wald, Alan M. (2012). American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War. UNC Press Books. p. 139. ISBN 9780807837344. Retrieved 21 October 2019.
  13. See the last chapter in Mariani, as well as articles on "The Broken Tower" and Hart Crane's sexuality.
  14. Vol 4., No. 1, 1961
  15. Matthew Marcovic, Peggy Baird Cowley: 'Late Have I Loved Thee': Her Wayward Journey from Greenwich Village to Rome (St. Matthew Books, 2010)
  16. Paul L. Mariani, Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane (W.W. Norton, 2000), page 427)
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