'A First-Rate Mind Laboring at Full-Tilt'

Perhaps the most effectively lasting vanishing act in American literature is the disappearance of James Gould Cozzens (1903-78) from bookstores, libraries, syllabi and reader consciousness. I’ve read with pleasure three of Cozzens’ thirteen novels – Castaway (1934), The Just and the Unjust (1942) and Guard of Honor (1948). That third title, which copped the Pulitzer Prize in 1949 (for once, they got it right), I’m reading for the third time.

Cozzens’ removal can be attributed, in part, to the changing tastes of the reading public, though such monumental shifts are difficult to document. One suspects “dumbing down” has something to do with it. Easier to identify is the odious Dwight McDonald’s review of By Love Possessed published in Commentary in 1958. Ten years ago in the same journal, my late friend David Myers launched another salvage effort, calling Cozzens “America’s best forgotten novelist” and describing McDonald’s review as “the deadliest critical hit job in history.” McDonald was a fashion-minded snob who sniffed at so-called “middlebrow” culture.

Another Cozzens reclamation project was undertaken by Joseph Epstein in 1983, also in Commentary. Of McDonald’s review he writes: “It was a toasting, a roasting, a pasting, a lambasting, a drawing and quartering—well, you have to imagine a death by broad-ax and tweezers. Not since the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre has there been so efficient a piece of work. I for one was put off by it from reading Cozzens for a full quarter of a century.”

In contrast to McDonald’s snotty hatchet job, Whitney Balliett celebrated Cozzens and By Love Possessed in his 1957 review in The Saturday Review. The novel’s publication, he writes, “is brilliant, if rather staggering, proof—its nearly six hundred pages, about eight years in the writing, reveal a first-rate mind laboring at full-tilt—that its author has become the most mature, honest, painstaking, and technically accomplished American novelist alive.”

Balliett is best known as the longtime jazz writer for The New Yorker. No one wrote better about that indigenous American art form. Some enterprising publisher ought to collect his non-jazz writing and combine it with the best of his music profiles and reviews in a thoughtfully edited selected volume. Library of America, are you listening? More than twenty years ago, in his immediate post-New Yorker era, I remember several of his reviews in The New York Review of Books – of God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church by Caroline Fraser and, especially, Guard of Honor when it was reissued by Modern Library.

I love reading Borges and Nabokov, but consistency is overrated when it comes to literature (and much else). I also love reading Cozzens, which brings up another reputation in need of reclamation, John O’Hara, especially his short stories. The Library of America has published two volumes of O’Hara’s work. Why not Cozzens?