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Home , James Gould Cozzens, John Hersey, The Grapes of Wrath

BY COZZENS POSSESSED

A Review of Reviews

DWIGHT MACDONALD

T HE most alarming literary news in beck. He is a "serious" writer, and never years is the enormous success of more serious than in this book. That so un- ' By Love Pos- compromising a work, written in prose of sessed.* It sold 170,000 copies in the first an artificiality and complexity that ap- six weeks of publication-more than all proaches the impenetrable-indeed often eleven of the author's previous novels put achieves it-that this should have become together. At this writing, it has been at the what the publishers gloatingly call "a run- top of the best-seller lists for two months. away best-seller" is something new. How do Hollywood and the Reader's Digest have those matrons cope with it, I wonder. Per- paid $100,000 apiece for the privilege of haps their very innocence in literary matters wreaking their wills upon it. And the New is a help-an Australian aboriginal would Yorker published a cartoon-one matron to probably find Riders of the Purple Sage as another: "I was looking forward to a few hard to read as The Golden Bowl. weeks of just doing nothing after Labor The requirements of the mass market ex- Day when along came James Gould plain a good deal of bad writing today. But Cozzens." Cozzens here isn't writing down, he is ob- There's nothing new in all this-after all, viously giving it the works: By Love Pos- something has to be the No. 1 Best-Seller sessed is his bid for immortality. It is Litera- at any given moment. What is new appears ture or it is nothing. Unfortunately none of if one considers Grace Metalious' Peyton the reviewers has seriously considered the Place, which was at the top for a full year, second alternative. The book is not only a before By Love Possessed displaced it. Pey- best-seller, it is a succes d'estime. Such re- ton Place is a familiar kind of best-seller, a views, such enthusiasm, such unanimity, pedestrian job, an artifact rather than a such nonsense! The only really hostile re- work of art (putting it mildly) that owes its view I have been able to find was by William popularity to nothing more subtle than a Buckley, Jr., of all people, in his National remarkably heavy charge of Sex; perhaps its Review. Granted that he was somewhat moti- best-known predecessor is Forever Amber, vated by a non-literary consideration-the fabricated a decade ago by another notably book is lengthily anti-Catholic-still I untalented lady. But Cozzens is not of the thought his deflation skillful and just. company of Kathleen Winsor, , Looking through Alice Payne Hackett's Daphne Du Maurier, Llovd C. Douglas, Sixty Years of Best Sellers, I find among and other such humble, though well-paid, the top ten novels between 1935 and 1955 artisans. Nor can he be "placed" at the mid- just seven that I would call in any way dle level of best-sellerdom, that of writers "serious," namely: Wolfe's Of Time and the like , , and Irwin River (1935), Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza Shaw, nor even (perhaps) on the empyrean (1936), Virginia Woolf's The Years (1937), heights occupied by Marquand and Stein- Steinbeck's (1939), Hemingway's (1941), 's The Naked and ACCORDING to , the phe- nomenal success of James Gould Gozzens' By the Dead (1948), and James Jones's From Love Possessed indicates a new trend in Amer- Here to Eternity (1951). About one every ican middlebrow culture. Mr. Macdonald is a three years, with a significant falling off in New Yorker staff writer. His latest book, the last decade. It is a slim harvest, in both Memoirs of a Revolutionist, was reviewed in the November COMMENTARY. *, Brace, 570 pp., $5.00. 36 BY COZZENS POSSESSED 37 quantity and quality, but the difference be- long and bold and delicate book, which, tween the least of these and By Love Pos- despite its length, one reads through at head- sessed is the difference between a work of long speed and is then angry with oneself art on some level and to some extent for having reached the end so precipitately." achieved, and one that falls below any rea- Mr. Fischer was more coherent but sonable literary criterion. Yet the reviewers equally emphatic. Speaking from "the Edi- almost to a man behaved as if they were tor's Easy Chair," as Harper's quaintly styles possessed. This sincere enthusiasm for a it, he headed his piece: "NOMINATION mediocre work is more damaging to literary FOR A ," and he meant it. standards than any amount of cynical bally- For one slip or another-sentimentality, neu- hoo. One can guard against the Philistines roticism, subjectivism, sloppy plot construc- outside the gates. It is when they get into tion, or habitual use of "characters who are the Ivory Tower that they are dangerous.* in one way or another in revolt against so- ciety"-he faults all the other competitors THERE seems little doubt that By Love (the habitual-use-of- deleterious- characters Possessed has been selling on the strength rap alone disposes of Faulkner, Hemingway, of the reviews. (Word-of-mouth comment Steinbeck, Algren, Mailer, Capote, Bellow, has probably worked the other way; I've Jones, Paul Bowles, and Tennessee Wil- found only two people who liked it, and liams) until finally James Gould Cozzens the most common reply is: "I couldn't read stands out in superb isolation, a monument it.") All the commercially important jour- of normality, decency, and craftsmanship.t nals reviewed it prominently and enthusi- The provincial reviewers followed their astically. The Sunday Times and Herald leaders: "COZZENS PENS ENDURING Tribune book sections gave it front-page re- TALE" (Cleveland News), "ONE OF THE views, by Malcolm Cowley ("one of the GREAT NOVELS OF THE PRESENT country's truly distinguished novelists") and CENTURY" (San Francisco Call-Bulletin), Jessamyn West ("Rich, Wise, Major Novel "finest American novel I have read in many of Love"). Time put Cozzens on the cover a year" (Bernardine Kielty in the Ladies' -Herman Wouk was there a year or two Home Journal), "COZZENS WRITES ago-and pronounced By Love Possessed "the ABSORBING STORY IN EXCELLENT best American novel in years." Orville Pres- AND PROFOUND NOVEL" (Alice cott in the Times thought it "magnificent," Dixon Bond in the Boston Herald; her col- Edward Weeks in the Atlantic found it umn is called "The Case for Books"-is there "wise and compassionate," and Whitney an adjacent feature, 'The Case Against Balliett in the Saturday Review divined in it Books"?). Leslie Hanscom in the New York "the delicate and subtle tension between World-Telegram-there are provincials in action and thought that is the essence of big cities, too-was impressed by Cozzens' balanced fiction." "awesome scrupulosity as an artist." Mr. The most extraordinary performances Hanscom's scrupulosity as a critic inspires were those of in and John Fischer in Harper's. The {Actually, even according to Mr. Fischer's former praised it in terms that might have absurd standards, Cozzens doesn't deserve this been thought a trifle excessive if he had eminence. He is not "a classic mind operating been writing about War and Peace: "a mas- in a romantic period" nor does his novel run counter to "the Gothic extravagance of current terpiece . . . the author's masterpiece . . . fiction"; as I shall show, his mind lacks clarity, almost anybody's masterpiece . . . supremely control, and form-the typical classic virtues- satisfying . . . an immense achievement and his prose is as Gothic as Harkness Memorial . . . spellbinding . . . masterpiece." The Quadrangle (also as unaesthetic). As for the alleged normality of his characters-"ordinary mood is lyrical, stammering with heartfelt people, living ordinary lives, in ordinary circum- emotion: "No American novelist of the stances" with whom the reader "can identify twentieth century has attempted more than himself as he never can with the characters of Mr. Cozzens attempts in the course of this an Algren or a Mailer"-they are normal only on the surface; once this is broken through, they are *A similar case of demoniacal possession took as neurotic and fantastic in their behavior as place in London in 1956 apropos of Colin Wil- other current fictional people. The chief differ- son's le Outsider. ence is that their creator often doesn't realize it. 38 COMMENTARY little awe; "Hemingway and Faulkner, move . . . the quintessence of our best qualities" over!" he summed up. The frankest of the (Gill). I'm unwilling to go farther than provincials was Carl Victor Little in the the Kansas City Star: "thoroughly honest, Houston Press: "The N.Y. Times, Saturday genteel, devoted to his work, and conscien- Review and other publications have taken tious." Passion seems to me just what is out of the ivory tower the most accom- most obviously missing in Arthur Winner; plished critics available to join in the halle- he's about as passionate as a bowl of oatmeal. lujahs. So about all I can do is ditto the He is, in fact, a prig. His responses to the dithyrambs." many appeals made to him in the course of The literary quarterlies have not yet been the story-he's always on top, handing down heard from, but the liberal weeklies have. advice and help, a great temptation to prig- They didn't exactly ditto the dithyrambs, ex- gishness-while decent enough in form cept for Granville Hicks in the New Leader: ("genteel") are in reality ungenerous and . . . a novel to which talk of greatness is self-protective. To a Catholic lady who tries not irrelevant." But they didn't exactly veto to justify her faith: "Where there are dif- them, either. Howard Nemerov in the Na- ferences in religion, I think it generally tion, Sarel Eimerl in the New Republic, wiser not to discuss them." To a seduced and Richard Ellmann in the Reporter were girl's father, who has flourished a gun: "Be all critical but respectful. very careful! Return the gun; and mean- Mr. Nemerov's review I thought especial- while, show it to no one else. Don't take it ly interesting. He was much alive to the use out of your pocket; and don't consider point- of the novel by the middlebrow reviewers ing it. Pointing a weapon is a separate in- as a stick to beat the highbrows, but, like dictable offense, and would get you an Ellmann and Eimerl, not at all alive to what additional fine, and an additional jail term." seems to me the chief defect of a very de- To his teen-age daughter, who wants to go fective novel: the atrocious style. My first dancing: "A real gone band? I believe I thought was that this is odd because Nem- grasp your meaning. Clearly a good place to erov is a poet. My second was that perhaps know. Where is it?" "Oh, it's called the Old that's the trouble. Our taste may have been Timbers Tavern. It's down toward Mechan- corrupted not only by mass culture but also icsville, not far." "Yes; I've heard of it. And by its opposite-as we learned in old Doctor I'm afraid, whatever the reputed quality of Engels' dialectical kindergarten, opposites the band, I must ask you not to go there." are first cousins-the anything-goes subjec- "Oh, Father!" That he is right in each case, tive style which some of our painters and that the Catholic lady is addlewitted, that poets have evolved as a protest against, and the father is a fool and a braggart, that the an escape from, mass culture. After all, By Old Timbers Tavern is in fact no place for Love Possessed is not much harder to read a young girl to go-all this is beside the than most contemporary poetry. point. A prig is one who delights in demon- strating his superiority on small occasions, )ERIAPS we should now take a look at and it is precisely when he has a good case what Cozzens has to say in By Love Pos- that he rises to the depths of prigocity. sessed, and how he says it. The normative Although Winner behaves like a prig, hero is Arthur Winner, a reputable, middle- he is not meant to be one, if only because aged lawyer and family man who is exposed, the main theme of the novel, the moral test- during the two days and nights covered by ing and education of a good man, would the action, to a variety of unsettling experi- then collapse, and the philosophical tragedy ences, which stimulate in him some even that Cozzens has tried to write would have more unnerving memories. Winner is pre- to be recast in a satiric if not a downright sented as a good man-kind, reasonable, farcical mode. Here as elsewhere, the au- sensitive, decent-and so he is taken by the thor is guilty of the unforgivable novelistic reviewers: "The grandest moral vision in sin: he is unaware of the real nature of his all Cozzens' work-a passionately good, pas- characters, that is, the words and actions sionately religious, yet wholly secular man, he gives them lead the reader to other con- whose very failures are only bad dreams" clusions than those intended by the author. (Balliett), "intelligent, successful, tolerant His characters often speak brutally, for BY COZZENS POSSESSED 39 example, not because they are supposed to piss?" Methinks the gentleman doth protest be brutes, but because their creator appar- too much, and methinks that Swift's allusion ently thinks this is the way men talk. An to Celia's necessity was positively healthy elderly lawyer, civilly asked by a client to compared to Cozzens-Winner's resort to make some changes in the investing of her scatology to win an argument. trust fund, replies: "You're getting senile, Maud. Try not to be more of a fool than TiIS leads us, in a way, to sex. The crucial you can help." A doctor, presented as a episode, the one that more than any gentleman, meets the wife of a friend at a other shakes Winner's faith in himself and party, and, no dialogue or motivation given in the uprightness of his life, is something before, opens up: "What's your trouble, that happened years before the action be- baby? Or can I guess? . . . Tell Pappy how gins and that keeps coming back into his many periods you've missed.... You know mind: his affair with Marjorie, the wife of as well as I do you're one of those girls who his close friend and law partner, Julius Pen- only has to look at him to get herself knocked rose. On the day after his first wife's death, up." She leaves the room "indignantly" (the Marjorie-another silly, hysterical woman- adverb implies she's a mite touchy) and he comes to the house and in a rush of emotion turns to Clarissa, Winner's wife: offers herself to him. He is about to take "I knew it as soon as I looked at her. Sure. One her, on his wife's bed, when the phone rings. night she thinks: Too much trouble to get up; That time he is literally saved by the bell, the hell with it! You two ought to trade appa- but later, one summer when Penrose is away, ratus. Then everybody'd be happy." they do have a frantic affair. At no time is Clarissa said: "Reg, you're not being very love or even lust involved: "Far from covet- funny-" ing his neighbor's wife, he rather disliked "That's right. I don't feel very funny. Some- her, found her more unattractive than not." times you get your bellyful of women-their The only reason given for Winner's reaction goddam notions; their goddam talk-talk-talk; to Marjorie is that she was there. Like that their goddam sacks of tripes!" mountain climber. Or as Marjorie's remorse- No reason is given for any of these on- lessly philosophical husband puts it in his slaughts, aside from the fact that all three pidgin (or shall we say turkey) English: recipients are women; this seems to be Coz- 'I venture to assert that when the gadfly's zens' idea of manly straight-from-the-shoul- sting is fairly driven in, when this inde- der talk. Curious. Curious, too, Winner's feasible urge of the flesh presses them, few pooh-poohing attitude when he is appealed men of normal potency prove able to refrain to by the feminine victims. their feet from that path." But then (a) why For Winner, too, is something of a brute, hasn't Winner had dozens of such affairs in- without his creator suspecting it. There is, stead of only this one-and for that matter, for example, that odd business on page 428 why was Marjorie able to seduce him only when Mrs. Pratt, after her silly, hysterical that one summer?; and (b) granted that religiosity has beaten vainly for some thirty some men do indeed so behave, why Win- pages against the rock of Winner's Episco- ner? Does an Episcopalian lawyer, a rational, palian rectitude (Mrs. Pratt is a Roman decent family man with no more and no Catholic), is finally checkmated. She has different sexual urges than the normal ones, to go to the bathroom. For reasons obscure act like a dead-end kid? Cozzens insists that to me, this is presented as the decisive proof the best of us do so behave, but if we do, of hypocrisy: "At fact's surely unkindest then we aren't the best. There might be some prank of all, Arthur Winner must protest, individual quirk in Winner to explain it, generously indignant." ("Meanly delighted" but it is not given; on the contrary, Cozzens' would be more accurate.) For a page, Win- point is precisely Winner's lack of such rer ruminates on his antagonist's discomfi- quirks-"few men of normal potency prove ture, concluding: "But how in the world able to refrain their feet from that path.' of fancy did you put delightfully the human This is neither realistic nor imaginative. It circumstance whose undressed substance is the shocked revulsion of the adolescent was that Celia, Celia, Celia shits-or even who discovers that papa and mama do it. that Mrs. Pratt most urgently requires to The formula for a best-seller now includes 40 COMMENTARY a minimum of "outspoken" descriptions of (Winner and Marjorie). Far worse-from a sexual activities, and By Love Possessed sales viewpoint-they are written in his cus- doesn't skimp here. Its inventory includes tomary turgid and inexpressive style. Take rape, seduction, marital and extra-marital for example the two pages (264-65) on Win- intercourse, with touches of sadism, lesbian- ner's love-making with his second wife, the ism, onanism, and homosexuality. By Sex most concrete description of the sexual act Possessed would be a more accurate title. in the book and also the only place where There is very little love, which the author sex is presented as one might say positively. presents as at best a confusing and chancey This passage sounds partly like a tongue-tied business, to be patiently endured, like the Dr. Johnson: "the disposings of accustomed weather. The provincials, for some reason, practice, the preparations of purpose and get the point here much better than their consent, the familiar mute motions of fur- urban leaders did. The Chattanooga Times therance." But mostly like a Fortune descrip- wonderfully summed up the theme as "the tion of an industrial process: "thrilling thuds situation of rational man beset by passion," of his heart . . . moist manipulative recep- adding: "Cozzens regards each form of love tion ... the mutual heat of pumped bloods as a threat to Arthur Winner's power to rea- ..the thoroughgoing, deepening, widen- son, to his ability to live life with meaning." ing work of their connection; and his then It's too bad this acuteness in diagnosis was no than hers, the tempo slowed in con- not accompanied by equal skill in evalu- cert to engineer a tremulous joint contain- ation; Cozzens' notion of love was accepted ment and continuance . . the deep muscle as valid; but it isn't, since love, even passion, groups, come to their vertex, were in a flash is not an extraneous monkey wrench thrown convulsed."* into the machinery of life, but rather a prime mover which may burst everything apart but T Ereviewers think of Cozzens, as he does which must function if there is to be any himself, as a cool, logical, unsentimental, motion at all. This is, at any rate, how the and implacably deep thinker. "Every charac- makers of our literature, from Homer to Tol- ter and event is bathed in the glow of a stoy, Proust, and James, have treated the reflective intelligence," puffs Time, while theme; Cozzens' efficiency-expert approach Brendan Gill huffs: "The Cozzens intellect, (Gumming Up the Works) is echt-Amer- which is of exceptional breadth and tough- ican but creatively impoverishing. ness, coolly directs the Cozzens heart." In "The readers didn't go much for Coz- reality, Cozzens is not so much cool as in- zens," observed the Detroit Times, "until hibited, not so much unsentimental as fright- he wrote something with some sex in it." ened by feeling; he is not logical at all, and This cynicism is not wholly justified. The his mind is shallow and muddy rather than literary prestige conferred by the reviewers clear and deep. I think Julius Penrose may was, I think, the chief factor. One of the fairly be taken as Cozzens' beau ideal of an consumer's goods to which every American intellectual, as Winner is his notion of a feels he has a right in this age of plenty is good man. If Penrose is meant to be taken Culture, and By Love Possessed on the liv- ironically, if his pompous philosophizings ing-room table is a symbol of the owner's are supposed to be burlesques, then the exercise of this right. Granted that the re- novel collapses at its center-leaving aside views may have led many proprietors of the fact they would be tedious as parodies living-room tables to think they could com- -since it is Penrose who throughout the bine business with pleasure, so to speak, word book guides Winner toward the solution of must have gotten around fairly soon that his problems. There's a Penrose in Homer, the sexual passages were unrewarding. but he's not confused with Ulysses. His For even the sex is meager-perhaps the name is Nestor. real title should be By Reason Possessed. I The reviewers, of course, were impressed have the impression that Cozzens is as sus- by this club bore: "a dark, supernal intelli- picious of sex as of love. Most of the sexual encounters he conscientiously describes are *"The passages having to do with physical love either fatuous (Winner and his first bride), have a surprising lyric power.'-Jessamyn West sordid (Ralph and Veronica), or disgusting in the N.Y. Herald Tribune. BY COZZENS POSSESSED 41 gence" (Balliett), "one of the most com- precise formulae have the external qualities pelling [what does that critical standby of theoretical thinking, lacking only the mean, I wonder] and memorable figures in most essential one-they don't illuminate recent writing" (Jessamyn West), "the reality, since what is "given" is not the con- scalded mind of the archskeptic . . . a cor- ditions of life but merely a narrow conven- rosive nonstop monologuist with a tongue tion. Dickens, Tolstoy, and other novelists like a poisoned dart" (Time). The intellec- have written law-court scenes showing that tual climax-more accurately, anti-climax- truth is too small a fish to be caught in the of the book is a thirty-page conversation be- law's coarse meshes. But to Cozzens a trial tween Penrose and Winner-at their club, is reality while emotional, disorderly life is appropriately enough-about life and love. the illusion. He delights in the tedious com- It reminds me of two grunt-and-groan plications of lawyer's talk, the sort of thing wrestlers heaving their ponderous bulks one skips in reading the court record of even around without ever getting a grip on each the most sensational trials. On page 344 a other. "How could she like these things clergyman incautiously asks Winner about [sadistic acts by her first husband]?" Pen- the property rights of churches in Pennsyl- rose rhetorically asks at one point, immedi- vania. "The difference is technical," Winner ately continuing in the strange patois of begins with gusto, and three pages later is Cozzensville: "My considered answer: still expatiating. Marjorie, though all unknowing, could! She This fascination with the law is perhaps could see such a punishment as condign. a clue to Cozzens' defects as a novelist. It She had to submit, because in an anguished explains the peculiar aridity of his prose, its way, she craved to have done to her what needless qualifications, its clumsiness, its de- she was persuaded she deserved to have done fensive qualifications (a lawyer qualifies to her." Having got off this bit of kinder- negatively-so he can't be caught out later; garten Freudianism: "He gazed an instant but a novelist qualifies positively-to make at Arthur Winner. 'You find this far- his meaning not safer but clearer). And his fetched?' he said. 'Yes, we who are so normal sensibility is lawyer-like in its lack of both are reluctant to entertain such ideas.'" Ideas form and feeling, its peculiar combination of are always entertained in Cozzensville, a brutal domineering pragmatism ("Just though they are not always entertaining. stick to the facts, please!") with abstract After fifteen more lines of elaboration, Pen- fancywork, a kind of Victorian jigsaw deco- rose again fears he has outstripped his audi- ration that hides more than it reveals. I, too, ence: "You consider this too complicated?" think the law is interesting, but as an intel- To which Winner, manfully: "Perhaps not. lectual discipline, like mathematics or cross- But I've often wondered how far anyone can word puzzles. I feel Cozzens uses it as a see into what goes on in someone else. I've defense against emotion ("sentimentality"). read somewhere that it would pose the Confusing it with philosophy, he makes it acutest head to draw forth and discover bear too heavy a load, so that reality is dis- what is lodged in the heart." Now where torted and even the law's own qualities are could he have read that? destroyed, its logic and precision blurred, It is interesting to note that Penrose and its technical elegance coarsened. There's too Winner, the two "point-of-view" characters, much emotion in his law and too much law are lawyers, and that the processes of the in his emotion. law occupy a considerable amount of the book. The reviewers marvel that Cozzens THE three earlier Cozzens novels I've read, has been able to master so much legal know- The Last Adam, The Just and the Un- how, but I think there is more to it than just, and , were written in that. We Americans have always had a a straightforward if commonplace style. But weakness for the law. Its objectivity re- here Cozzens has tried to write Literature, assures our skittish dread of emotion and its to develop a complicated individual style, to emphasis on The Facts suits our pragmatic convey deeper meanings than he has up to temper. But above all the law is our substi- now attempted. Slimly endowed as either tute for philosophy, which makes us almost thinker or stylist, he has succeeded only in as nervous as emotion does. Its complicated, fuzzing it up, inverting the syntax, dragging 42 COMMENTARY in Latin-root polysyllables. Stylistically, By but I feel this comparison is absurd. James's Love Possessed is a neo-Victorian cakewalk.+ involutions are (a) necessary to precisely A cakewalk by a singularly awkward con- discriminate his meaning; (b) solid parts testant. Confusing laboriousness with pro- of the architecture of the sentence; and (c) fundity, the reviewers have for the most controlled by a fine ear for euphony. Faulk- part not detected the imposture. ner does meander, but there is emotional There is some evidence, if one reads close- force, descriptive richness behind his wander- ly and also between the lines, that some of ings. They both use words that are not only the reviewers had their doubts. But they in the dictionary but also in the living lan- adopted various strategies for muffling them. guage, and use them in conversational Messrs. Gill, Fischer, and Balliett, while rhythms. Their style is complex because applauding the style in general, refrained they are saying something complicated, not, from quoting anything. The last-named, as with Cozzens, because they cannot make after praising the "compact, baked, fastidious words do what they want them to do. sentences" went into a long, worried para- graph which inferred the opposite. "The un- nuT the main burden of the reviewers bending intricacies of thought . . . seem to was not doubt but affirmation. In read- send his sentences into impossible log-jams," ing their praise of Cozzens' prose, I had an he wrote, which is like saying of a girl, uneasy feeling that perhaps we were work- "She doesn't seem pretty." Jessamyn West ing with different texts. warned, "You may come away with a certain "Every sentence has been hammered, filed feeling of tiredness," and left it at that. and tested until it bears precisely the weight Malcolm Cowley managed to imply the it was designed to carry, and does it with book is a masterpiece without actually say- clarity and grace," wrote John Fischer. The ing so-the publishers couldn't extract a sentences have been hammered all right: single quote. With that cooniness he used Recollected with detachment, these self-con- to deploy in the 30's when he was confronted trived quandaries, these piffling dilemmas that with an important work that was on the young love could invent for itself were comic right (that is, the "left") side but was pretty -too much ado about nothing much! Arthur terrible, Cowley, here also confronted with Winner Junior was entangled laughably in his a conflict between his taste and his sense of still-juvenile illogicalities and inconsistencies. the Zeitgeist, managed to praise with faint Absurdly set on working contradictories and damns. One magisterial sentence, in par- incompatibles, he showed how the world was ticular, may be recommended to all ambi- indeed a comedy for those who think. By his tious young book reviewers: "His style used unripe, all-or-nothing-at-all views, he was By the ridicu- to be as clear as a mountain brook; now it bound to be self-confounded. lous impracticalness of his aspirations, he was and murky, has become a little weed-grown inescapably that figure of fun whose lofty like the brook when it wanders through a professions go with quite other performances. meadow." A meadowy brook is pretty too The high endeavor's very moments of true pre- -it shows the mature Cozzens now feels, in dominance guaranteed the little joke-on-them Cowley's words, that "life is more compli- to follow. cated than he once believed." This is not a Horrible Example-we shall A favorite reviewer's gambit was that have some later-but a typical, run-of-the-mill Cozzens' prose may be involved but so is Cozzens paragraph, chosen at random. It James's. "One drawback is the style," Time seems to me about as bad as prose can get admitted, "which is frosted with parenthet- sensitive or even merely competent ical clauses, humpbacked syntax, Jamesian -what novelist would write a phrase like "the involutions, Faulknerian meanderings." I ridiculous impracticalness of his aspirations"? am myself no foe of the parenthesis, nor do "Mr. Cozzens is a master of dialogue," I mind a little syntactical humping at times, wrote Orville Prescott. On the contrary, he has no ear for speech at all. "You answer *"CAKEWALK-a form of entertainment one matron. "But, to my among American Negroes in which a prize of a well, Arthur!" says cake was given for the most accomplished steps very point!" And another: "They're all, or and figures."-WEBSTER. almost all, down at the boathouse, swim- BY COZZENS POSSESSED 43 ming, Arthur." A practicing lawyer, not "Its author has become the most tech- supposed to be either pompous or balmy, nically accomplished American novelist uses the following expressions during a chat: alive," wrote Whitney Balliett. Let us say "I merit the reproof no doubt.... My un- rather: the least technically accomplished. becoming boasting you must lay to my sad To list a few defects of style: disability.... I'm now in a fettle fine.... (1) Melodramatics. "Deaf as yesterday to Our colloquy was brief." In short, Cozzens' all representations of right, he purposed fur- people tend to talk like Cozzens. They're ther perfidy, once more pawning his honor out for that cake, too. to obtain his lust. Deaf as yesterday to all "Ile has always written with complete remonstrances of reason, he purposed to clarity," wrote Granville Hicks, "but here, sell himself over again to buy venery's dis- without forsaking clarity and correctness, he appearing dross." (Haven't seen "dross" in achieves great eloquence and even poetic print since East Lynne.) power." On the contrary, malphony exfoli- (2) Confucius Say. A queer strangled ates, as our author might put it. As: sententiousness often seizes upon our au- thor. "In real life, effects of such disappoint- The succussive, earthquake-like throwing-over of a counted-on years-old stable state of things ment are observed to be unenduring." "The had opened fissures. Through one of them, resolve to rise permitted no intermissions; Arthur Winner stared a giddying, horrifying ambition was never sated." Like shot in moment down unplumbed, nameless abysses game or sand in clams, such gritty nuggets in himself. He might later deny the cognition, are strewn through the book to set on edge put thoughts of the undiscovered country away, the teeth of the reader-though not, ap- seek to lose the memory; yet the heart's mute parently, of the reviewer. halt at every occasional, accidental recollection (3) Pointless Inversion. As Wolcott Gibbs of those gulfs admitted their existence, con- once wrote of Time: "Backward ran fessed his fearful close shave. sentences till reeled the mind." Examples: "Succussive" is cake-walking, since it "Unintelligible to them would be the law." means "violently shaking ... as of earth- "Owned and operated by Noah's father was quakes" and so merely duplicates the next a busy grist mill." "Behind these slowminded word; a good writer wouldn't use four peerings of sullen anxiety did dumb un- hyphenated expressions in a row; he reasonable surges of love swell." "For that would also avoid the "occasional, accidental" night, untied Hope still her virgin knot will rhyme, and the reference to unplumbed keep." The last is interesting. He must mean abysses; he would ask himself what a mute "tied," since the "still" implies a possible halt is (as versus a noisy halt?); and he later change, and a virgin knot, once untied, would sense that "close shave" is stylistically must ever remain so. I think the "un-" was an anticlimax to so solemnly elevated a pas- added automatically, because Cozzens makes sage. It's all very puzzling. Here's Richard a dead style even deader by an obsessive Ellmann of Northwestern University, who use of negative constructions, often doubled, has been perceptive about Joyce's prose, find- as: "unkilled," "unhasty," "not-unhelped," inig By Love Possessed "so pleasant to read," "not-uneducated," "not-unmoving," "a not- while I find almost every sentence grates.* unsturdy frame," "a not-unhandsome pro- file." May we take it the profile is handsome, *As: "Thinking last night of Ralph's 'Joanie,' those Moores, all unsuspecting; whose 'shame' or the frame sturdy, or do they exist in some 'disgrace' of the same kind (if more decent in limbo betwixt and between? degree) stood accomplished, waiting merely to (4) Toujours le Mot Injuste. If there's be discovered to them, Arthur Winner had felt an inexpressive word, Cozzens will find it. able to pre-figure, following the first horrified anger, the distraught recriminations, the general He specially favors: (a) five-dollar words fury of family woe, a bitter necessary accept- where five-centers would do; (b) pedantic ance." I find such prose almost impossible to Latinisms, strange beasts that are usually read, partly because of an inexpressive, clumsy kept behind the zoo bars of Webster's Un- use of words, partly because the thought is both abstract and unclear, but chiefly because the abridged. rhythms are all wrong. Instead of carrying one forward, they drop one flat, and one must begin bit added to bit; each addition of Cozzens de- anew with each phrase. An artist creates a world, stroys what has gone before. 44 COMMENTARY (a) Multisonous, incommutable, phantas- so far as Cozzens is concerned. He doesn't mogenesis (having to do with the origin of even revert to the central tradition (Scott, dreams), stupefacients (narcotics), encase- Cooper, Bulwer-Lytton) but rather to the ment ("snug encasement of his neck" for eccentric mode of the half-rebels against it "tight collar"), explicative ("one of his char- (Carlyle, Meredith), who broke up the acteristically explicative observations"), orderly platoons of gold-laced Latinisms in- solemnization ("wedding" becomes "the to whimsically arranged squads, uniformed solemnization's scene"), eventuated ("acts with equal artificiality but marching every of eventuated guilt," a phrase undecipher- which way as the author's wayward spirit able even with the Unabridged), and con- moved them. Carlyle and Meredith are dign ("condign punishment"-means "de- even less readable today than Scott and served p."). Cooper, whose prose at least inherited from (b) I must admit that reading Cozzens the 18th century some structural backbone. has enriched my vocabulary, or, more accu- That a contemporary writer should spend rately, added to it. My favorite, on the eight years fabricating a pastiche in the whole, is "presbyopic," which of course manner of George Meredith could only hap- means "long-sighted because of old age." I pen in America, where isolation produces also like the sound of "viridity" and "mucid," oddity. The American novelist is sustained though it's disappointing to learn they mean and disciplined by neither a literary tradi- simply "greenness" and "slimy." But I see tion nor an intellectual community. He no reason for such grotesques as qualmish, doesn't see other writers much; he probably scrutinous, vulnerary ("wound-healing"), doesn't live in New York, which like Paris pudency, revulsively, and vellications, which and London unfortunately has almost a is Latin for twitchings. monopoly of the national cultural life, be- Perhaps the supreme triumph of Late cause the pace is too fast, the daily life Cozzenesque occurs on page 128, where, too ugly, the interruptions too great; and agonizedly entoiled in the entracement of even if he does, there are no cafes or pubs a bridegroom's mazed tergiversations, as our where he can foregather with his col- author might put it, he manages twice to leagues; he doesn't read the literary press, use the phrase "piacular pollution." The which anyway is much less developed than second time is specially impressive: "That in London or Paris; he normally thinks of concept of piacular pollution, much dimin- himself as a non-intellectual, even an anti- ished as the idea of undressing Hope was intellectual (Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzger- entertained, received, with the autoptic fact ald, Lewis, Anderson). It is a pattern of of the undressed Hope, its coup de grace." cultural isolation that brings out a writer's "Autoptic" is simple-an adjective made eccentric, even his grotesque side. from "autopsy" or "personal inspection." "Piacular" is more complicated. It means IN THE case of Cozzens, things have gone either (a) "of the nature of an expiation; about as far as they can. At his country expiatory," or (b) "requiring expiation." place in Lambertville, New Jersey, he leads If it's (a), then the pollution is an expia- a life compared to which Thoreau's on tion, an atonement for some sin, which is Walden Pond was gregarious. "I am a absurd since the pollution itself is a sin; hermit and I have no friends," he under- but if it's (b), we are presented, by in- states. According to Time, "Years elapse ference, with the interesting notion of a between dinner guests" and he hasn't been pollution that does not require expiation, to a play, a concert, or an art gallery in that is, a so-to-speak pure pollution. twenty years. (He did go to a movie in Cozzens' style is a throwback to the 1940). To those who wonder how he can palmiest days of 19th-century rhetoric, write novels when he has so little contact when a big Latin-root word was considered with people, he says: 'The thing you have more elegant than a small Anglo-Saxon to know about is yourself; you are people." word. The long, patient uphill struggle of But he seems signally lacking in self-knowl- the last fifty years to bring the diction and edge. He fancies himself as a stylist, for rhythms of prose closer to those of the instance. "My own literary preferences are spoken language might never have existed for writers who write well," he says, pleas- BY COZZENS POSSESSED 45 antly adding: "This necessarily excludes "It could have been a humiliating situa- most of my contemporaries." The level of his tion, but I guess I had a certain native con- taste may be inferred from the fact that he ceit [those Tory ancestors] and felt that sneers at Faulkner ("falsifies life for dramat- her time was well spent," he says with his ic effect"), Hemingway ("under the rough usual delicacy. Perhaps Cozzens is as inept exterior, he's just a great big bleeding with the spoken as with the written word. heart"), and Lewis ("a crypto-sentimental- Probably he didn't mean to define quite so ist"), but admires-W. Somerset Maugham. narrowly and explicitly his wife's role in his He is similarly deceived about himself. life, just as probably the slick, pushing, He thinks he is a true-blue conservative of crafty Jewish lawyer, Mr. Woolf-he has the old school: "I am more or less illiberal even had the nerve to turn Episcopalian, to and strongly antipathetic to all political and Winner's contemptuous amusement-is not social movements. I was brought up an meant to stand for Jews in general, any Episcopalian, and where I live, the landed more than the odious Mrs. Pratt is meant gentry are Republican." He is proud of his to stand for all Catholics. One only wishes Tory ancestors, who had to flee to Canada that Cozzens' mouthpiece weren't quite so during the Revolution: "To tell the truth, explicit: "Glimpsing Mr. Woolf's face in the I feel I'm better than other people." But this mirror again, Arthur Winner could see his statement itself seems to me not that of an lips form a smile, deprecatory, intentionally aristocrat, who would take it for granted, ingratiating. Was something there of the but rather of an uneasy arriviste. Nor does patient shrug, something of the bated illiberalism make a conservative, as we breath and whispering humbleness? . . . learned in the days of McCarthy. Cozzens, Did you forget at your peril the ancient like some of his sympathetically intended grudge that might be fed if Mr. Woolf heroes-Dr. Bull in The Last Adam is an could catch you once upon the hip?" example-goes in for Plain Speaking, but it comes out somehow a little bumptious and How did it happen? Why did such a unpleasant: "I like anybody if he's a nice book impress the reviewers? We know guy, but I've never met many Negroes whodunit, but what was the motive? Like who were nice guys." His notion of a nice- other crimes, this one was a product of guy Negro is Alfred Revere in By Love Conditions. The failure of literary judg- Possessed, the colored verger of the local ment and of simple common sense shown Episcopalian church, which is otherwise in l'affaire Cozzens indicates a general Whites Only. Tactfully, Mr. Revere always lowering of standards. If this were all, if takes Communion last: "The good, the just our reviewers just didn't know any better, man had consideration for others. By delay- then one would have to conclude we had ing he took care that members of the con- quite lost our bearings. Luckily, there were gregation need never hesitate to receive the other factors. It is disturbing it could have blood of our Lord Jesus Christ because a happened at all: By Love Possessed is the cup from which a Negro had drunk con- Sputnik-Vanguard of the literary world. But tained it." This is not ironical, it is per- there were also specific reasons for the re- fectly serious, and is followed by a page of viewers' misjudgment, some of them also contorted dialectic about God's love. rather disturbing but at least limited in Years ago Cozzens married Bernice their implications. Baumgarten, a well-known literary agent. The two most important, I think, were Although apparently it is a successful mar- related: a general feeling that Cozzens had riage, his remarks to the press about it have hitherto been neglected and that he "had been rather boorish, even for him: "I sup- it coming to him." And consequently a pose sex entered into it. After all, what's willingness, indeed an eagerness to take at a woman for? ... Mother almost died when face value his novel's pretensions. It is dif- I married a Jew, but later when she saw I ficult for American reviewers to resist a was being decently cared for, she realized long, ambitious novel; they are betrayed by that it was the best thing that could have the American admiration of size and scope, happened to me." Up to By Love Possessed, also by the American sense of good fellow- Cozzens was largely supported by his wife. ship; they find it hard to say to the author, 46 COMMENTARY after all his work: "Sorry, but it's terrible." is a writer," he observed, a little obscurely In Cozzens' case, it would have been espe- but I see what he means. "There are a cially hard because he had been writing handful like him in every age. Later on it serious novels for thirty years without ever turns out they were the ones who wrote having had a major success, either popular that age's literature." The wheel has or d'estime. It was now or never. The sec- comically come full circle: it used to be ond alternative would have meant that a those odd, isolated, brilliant writers who lifetime of hard work in a good cause had were in advance of their times-the Stend- ended in failure, which would have been hals, the Melvilles, the Joyces, and Rim- un-American. So it had to be now. bauds-who later on were discovered to be The other factor in the book's success is "the ones who wrote that age's literature"; historical. It is the latest episode in The but now it is the sober, conscientious plod- Middlebrow Counter-Revolution. In the ders, who have a hard time just keeping up 2 0's and 30's, the avant-garde intellectuals with the procession, whose true worth is had it pretty much their way. In 1940, the temporarily obscured by their modish counter-revolution was launched with avant-garde competitors. This note is struck Archibald MacLeish's essay, "The Irrespon- by the reviewers of By Love Possessed. sibles," and Van Wyck Brooks's Hunter "Critics and the kind of readers who start College talk, "On Literature Today," fol- fashionable cults have been markedly cool lowed a year later by his "Primary Litera- toward him," writes Gill, while John Fisch- ture and Coterie Literature." The Brooks- er complains that Cozzens, unlike "some MacLeish thesis was that the avant-garde other novelists of stature," has hitherto had lost contact with the normal life of been denied "the reverence-indeed the humanity and had become frozen in an at- adulation-of the magisterial critics whose titude of destructive superiority; the moral encyclicals appear in the literary quarterlies consequences were perversity and snobbish- and academic journals. Aside from a Pulit- ness, the cultural consequences were negati- zer Prize in 1949, no such laurels have vism, eccentricity, and solipsism.* The lighted on Cozzens' head, and the fashion- thesis was launched at the right moment. able critics have passed him by in con- By 1940 the avant-garde had run out of gas temptuous silence." -unfortunately no rear-guard filling sta- A highbrow conspiracy of paranoiac tions have been opened up, either-while dimensions, it seems, is behind it all. Coz- the country had become engaged in a world zens just won't play our game. "It may be struggle for survival that made any radical- that his refusal to become a public figure- ly dissident, skeptical attitude a luxury. Both no TV or P.E.N. appearances, no com- conditions still persist, and so the counter- mencement addresses at Sarah Lawrence, revolution has been on ever since. no night-club pronouncements recorded by Perhaps the first to see Cozzens as a Leonard Lyons-has put them [us] off. By rallying point was the late Bernard De devoting himself to writing, he has made Voto, who had a wonderfully acute instinct himself invisible to the world of letters." in these matters. De Voto was Cozzens' So, Mr. Gill. Ezra Pound. "He is not a literary man, he And Mr. Fischer: "Even his private life *Brooks and MacLeish assumed it was good is, for a writer, unconventional. He attends for writers to identify themselves with their so- no cocktail parties, makes no speeches, ciety, which in turn assumed the society was signs no manifestoes, writes no reviews, good. If it wasn't, then the avant-garde was appears on no television shows, scratches no justified in isolating itself. Empirically, this would backs, shuns women's clubs .... Few people seem to be the case-at least most of the mem- orable art in every field produced between about in the so-called literary world have ever set 1890 and 1930 was done by artists like Joyce, eyes on him." But doesn't all this precisely Eliot, Picasso, Stravinsky, and others who had describe Faulkner and Hemingway when rejected bourgeois society. But there's no space they were making their reputations? Is the to argue the question here. Those interested might look at my "Kulturbolshewismus-the P.E.N. Club-have I ever met a member? Brooks-MacLeish Thesis" in Partisan Review, -so powerful? Did Fitzgerald sign any November-December 1941, reprinted in Memoirs manifestoes? Are we highbrows really so of a Revolutiont (1957). impressed by TV appearances, talks be- BY COZZENS POSSESSEl) 47 fore women's clubs, mention in gossip therefore bear his torment like a man for columns? Could it be simply that Cozzens the good of the service. On the contrary, really isn't very good? he is driven by his "extreme situation" to Another hypothesis was advanced by reject his whole past way of life. Only when Time: "The interior decorators of U.S he is finally able to give up "the claim that letters-the little-magazine critics whose his life had been good" can he experience favorite furniture is the pigeonhole-find anything significant: love-the young that Cozzens fits no recent fictional com- servant's gentle care of him-and then death. partments, and usually pretend that he does The ending of By Love Possessed strikes not exist." But there is, in fact, a recent rather a different note. From Winner's cli- pigeonhole for Cozzens: the Novel of Res- mactic six-page interior monologue that ignation. By Love Possessed is, philosophi- ends the book we can take three formula- cally, an inversion, almost a parody of a tions that sum it up: (1) "Freedom is the kind of story Tolstoy and other 19th-cen- knowledge of necessity." (2) "We are not tury Russian novelists used to tell: of a children. In this life we cannot have every- successful, self-satisfied hero who is led by thing for ourselves we might like to have." experiences in "extreme situations" to see (3) "Victory is not in reaching certainties how artificial his life has been and who or solving mysteries; victory is in making then rejects the conventional world and do with uncertainties, in supporting myster- either dies or begins a new, more meaning- ies." ful life. In the Novel of Resignation, the But what is the reality behind these un- highest reach of enlightenment is to realize exceptionable bits of philosophy? It is that how awful the System is and yet to accept Winner, for complicated pragmatic-sen- it on its own terms. Because otherwise timental reasons, decides to cover up an there wouldn't be any System. Marquand embezzlement he has just discovered, an invented the genre, Sloan Wilson carried embezzlement of trust funds by his vener- it on in The Man in the Grey Flannel able law partner, Noah Tuttle, and that he Suit, and Herman Wouk formulated it has been eased of his guilt toward his other most unmistakably in . partner, Julius Penrose, about his old affair Wouk's moral is that it is better to obey with Marjorie, Penrose's wife. In both a lunatic, cowardly Captain Queeg, even if cases, it is Penrose who gives him the line: the result is disaster, than to follow the exposing Tuttle would not only ruin Win- sensible advice of an officer of lower grade ner-who would be equally responsible for (who is pictured as a smooth-talking, his partner's defalcations-but would also destructive, cynical, irresponsible conniver mean the disgrace of Tuttle, who is after -in short, an intellectual) and save the ship. all paying the money back slowly. As for Because otherwise there wouldn't be any Winner's liaison with Marjorie, Penrose U.S. navy. In short, the conventional has known about it all along and has never world, the System, is confused with Life. blamed Winner, considering that "in- And since Life is Like That, it is childish defeasible urge of the flesh." In fact, Pen- if not worse to insist on something better. rose is actually obliged to Winner for not This is typically American: either juvenile telling him: "I've always thanked you for ... revolt or the immature acceptance of every- trying in every way to keep it from me." thing; there is no modulation, no develop- In short, Ivan Ilyitch feels free because he ment, merely the blank confrontation of un- is compelled to reject his past as "not the tenable extremes; "maturity" means simply right thing," Arthur Winner because he to replace wholesale revolt with wholesale is allowed to accept his past, is even thanked acceptance. by his best friend for having concealed from him the fact that he had cuckolded IT IS as if Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan him. The last words of the book are Win- Ilyitch ended with the hero, after his ner's, as he returns home: "I'm here." It's atrocious sufferings, concluding that, as all right, nothing has to be changed: "I a high official of the Court of Justice, it have the strength, the strength to, to-to was in the nature of things that he should endure more miseries," thinks Winner, die horribly of cancer, and that he must gratefully.