Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [66]
There seems little doubt that By Love Possessed has been selling on the strength of the reviews. (Word-of-mouth comment has probably worked the other way: I’ve found only two people who liked it, and the most common reply is: “I couldn’t read it.”) All the commercially important journals reviewed it prominently and enthusiastically. The Sunday Times and Herald Tribune book sections gave it front-page reviews, by Malcolm Cowley (“one of the country’s truly distinguished novelists”) and Jessamyn West (“Rich, Wise, Major Novel of Love”). Time put Cozzens on the cover—Herman Wouk was there a year or two ago—and pronounced By Love Possessed “the best American novel in years.” Orville Prescott in the Times thought it “magnificent,” Edwards Weeks in The Atlantic found it “wise and compassionate,” and Whitney Balliet in the Saturday Review divined in it “the delicate and subtle tension between action and thought that is the essence of balanced fiction.”
The most extraordinary performances were those of Brendan Gill in The New Yorker and John Fischer in Harper’s. The former praised it in terms that might have been thought a trifle excessive if he had been writing about War and Peace: “a masterpiece...the author’s masterpiece...almost anybody’s masterpiece...supremely satisfying...an immense achievement...spellbinding...masterpiece.” The mood is lyrical, stammering with heartfelt emotion and bad grammar: “No American novelist of the twentieth century has attempted more than Mr. Cozzens attempts in the course of this long and bold and delicate book, which, despite its length, one reads through at headlong speed and is then angry with oneself for having reached the end so precipitately.”
Mr. Fischer was more coherent but equally emphatic. Speaking from “the Editor’s Easy Chair,” as Harper’s quaintly styles it, he headed his piece: “NOMINATION FOR A NOBEL PRIZE,” and he meant it. For one slip or another—sentimentality, neuroticism, subjectivism, sloppy plot construction, or habitual use of “characters who are in one way or another in revolt against society”—he faults all the other competitors (the habitual-use-of-deleterious-characters rap alone disposes of Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Algren, Mailer, Capote, Bellow, Jones, Paul Bowles, and Tennessee Williams) until finally James Gould Cozzens stands out in superb isolation, a monument of normality, decency, and craftsmanship.[1]
The provincial reviewers followed their leaders: “COZZENS PENS ENDURING TALE” (Cleveland News), “ONE OF THE GREAT NOVELS OF THE PRESENT CENTURY” (San Francisco Call-Bulletin), “finest American novel I have read in many a year” (Bernardine Kielty in the Ladies’ Home Journal), “COZZENS WRITES ABSORBING STORY IN EXCELLENT AND PROFOUND NOVEL” (Alice Dixon Bond in the Boston Herald; her column is called “The Case for Books”—is there an adjacent feature, “The Case Against Books”?). Leslie Hanscom in the New York World-Telegram—there are provincials in big cities, too—was impressed by Cozzens’s “awesome scrupulosity as an artist.” Mr. Hanscom’s scrupulosity as a critic inspired little awe; “Hemingway and Faulkner, move over!” he summed up. The frankest of the provincials was Carl Victor Little in the Houston Press: “The N.Y. Times, Saturday Review and other publications have taken out of the ivory tower the most accomplished critics available to join in the hallelujahs. So about all I can do is ditto the dithyrambs.”
The literary quarterlies have not yet been heard from, but the liberal weeklies have. They didn’t exactly ditto the dithyrambs, except for Granville Hicks in The New Leader: “...a novel to which talk of greatness is not irrelevant.” But they didn’t exactly veto them, either. Howard