'In a More Just World'

Our youngest son’s bedroom has lately turned into an overstuffed warehouse. Last year, as a junior at Rice, he lived off-campus in an apartment. This year he’s back in a dormitory so most of his “housewares” – clothing, dishes and utensils, tchotchkes – have been heaped in his room. Books were stacked on every horizontal surface. My job on Sunday was to organize them on the shelves. They reflected every era of David’s twenty-one years, from R.L. Stine to A Presocratics Reader. 

One book surprised me: a first edition, without a dustjacket, of The Just and the Unjust, James Gould Cozzens’ 1942 novel about a murder trial. David is in prelaw so finding the book among all the others makes sense. I rank it as Cozzens’ second-best novel after Guard of Honor (1948), though I haven't read Cozzens in years. Once a bestseller, his reputation has evaporated among critics and general readers. I won’t even try to rally the troops. Cozzens might as well have written in Linear B.  

 

Cozzens (1903-78) dedicated the novel to Edward G. Biester. Poking around online, I see that Biester was a lawyer who served as prosecutor and judge in Pennsylvania. He and Cozzens met during a trial in 1939 and became friends. Cozzens relied on him for legal accuracy. In his defense of Cozzens’ work, Joseph Epstein writes of The Just and the Unjust: “A very strong sense emerges of how the law in its daily operations works which I, for one, find fascinating.” The novel, as I recall it, has a documentary flavor without losing its narrative momentum.

 

Beneath the dedication, Cozzens adds a Latin tag, “Cuilibet in arte sua perito est credendum,” which he attributes to “Coke on Littleton, 125.” A rough translation: “Everyone must be trusted as an expert in their craft.” Coke I recognized as Sir Edward Coke (1551-1634), the English barrister, judge and legal scholar. The volume referred to is The Institutes of the Lawes of England (1628-44), one of the basic texts of common law.

 

Biester was likely “an expert in [his] craft,” as was Cozzens. As Epstein puts it: “In a more just world, James Gould Cozzens would be accorded a volume in the Library of America . . .”