Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [65]
[4] Nothing, absolutely nothing.—D.M.
By Cozzens Possessed
The most alarming literary news in years is the enormous success of James Gould Cozzens’s By Love Possessed. It sold 170,000 copies in the first six weeks of publication—more than all eleven of the author’s previous novels put together. At this writing [December, 1957] it has been at the top of the best-seller lists for two months. Hollywood and the Reader’s Digest have paid $100,000 apiece for the privilege of wreaking their wills upon it. And The New Yorker published a cartoon—one matron to another: “I was looking forward to a few weeks of just doing nothing after Labor Day when along came James Gould Cozzens.”
There’s nothing new in all this—after all, something has to be the No. 1 Best Seller at any given moment. What is new appears if one considers Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place, which was at the top for a full year, before By Love Possessed displaced it. Peyton Place is a familiar kind of best seller, a pedestrian job, an artifact rather than a work of art (putting it mildly) that owes its popularity to nothing more subtle than a remarkably heavy charge of Sex. Perhaps its best-known predecessor is Forever Amber, fabricated a decade ago by another notably untalented lady. But Cozzens is not of the company of Kathleen Winsor, Edna Ferber, Daphne Du Maurier, Lloyd C. Douglas, and other such humble, though well-paid, artisans. Nor can he be “placed” at the middle level of best-sellerdom, that of writers like Herman Wouk, John Hersey, and Irwin Shaw, nor even (perhaps) on the empyrean heights occupied by Marquand and Steinbeck. He is a “serious” writer, and never more serious than in this book. That so uncompromising a work, written in prose of an artificiality and complexity that approaches the impenetrable—indeed often achieves it—that this should have become what the publishers gloatingly call “a run-away best seller” is something new. How do those matrons cope with it, I wonder. Perhaps their very innocence in literary matters is a help—an Australian aboriginal would probably find Riders of the Purple Sage and The Golden Bowl equally hard to read.
The requirements of the mass market explain a good deal of bad writing today. But Cozzens here isn’t writing down, he is obviously giving it the works: By Love Possessed is his bid for immortality. It is Literature or it is nothing. Unfortunately none of the reviewers has seriously considered the second alternative. The book is not only a best seller, it is a succès d’estime. Such reviews, such enthusiasm, such unanimity, such nonsense! The only really hostile review I have been able to find was by William Buckley, Jr., of all people, in his National Review. Granted that he was somewhat motivated by a nonliterary consideration—the book is lengthily anti-Catholic—still I thought his deflation skillful and just.
Looking through Alice Payne Hackett’s Sixty Years of Best Sellers, I find among the top ten novels between 1935 and 1955 just seven that I would call in any way “serious,” namely: Wolfe’s Of Time and the River (1935), Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza (1936), Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937), Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1941), Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), and James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951). About one every three years, with a significant falling off in the last decade. It is a slim harvest, in both quantity and quality, but the difference between the least of these and By Love Possessed is the difference between a work of art on some level and to some extent achieved,