Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [67]
Perhaps we should now take a look at what Cozzens has to say in By Love Possessed, and how he says it. The normative hero is Arthur Winner, a reputable, middle-aged lawyer and family man who is exposed, during the two days and nights covered by the action, to a variety of unsettling experiences, which stimulate in him some even more unnerving memories. Winner is presented as a good man—kind, reasonable, sensitive, decent—and so he is taken by the reviewers: “The grandest moral vision in all Cozzens’ work—a passionately good, passionately religious, yet wholly secular man, whose very failures are only bad dreams” (Balliett), “intelligent, successful, tolerant...the quintessence of our best qualities” (Gill). I’m unwilling to go farther than The Kansas City Star: “thoroughly honest, genteel, devoted to his work, and conscientious.” Passion seems to me just what is most obviously missing in Arthur Winner; he’s about as passionate as a bowl of oatmeal.
He is, in fact, a prig. His responses to the many appeals made to him in the course of the story—he’s always on top, handing down advice and help, a great temptation to priggishness—while decent enough in form (“genteel”) are in reality ungenerous and pompous and self-protective. To a Catholic lady who tries to justify her faith: “Where there are differences in religion...I think it generally wiser not to discuss them.” To a seduced girl’s father, who has flourished a gun: “Be very careful! Return the gun; and meanwhile, show it to no one else. Don’t take it out of your pocket; and don’t consider pointing it. Pointing a deadly weapon is a separate indictable offense, and would get you an additional fine, and an additional jail term.” To his teen-age daughter, who wants to go dancing: “‘A real gone band?...I believe I grasp your meaning. Clearly a good place to know. Where is it?’ ‘Oh, it’s called the Old Timbers Tavern. It’s down toward Mechanicsville—not far.’ ‘Yes; I’ve heard of it.... And I’m afraid, whatever the reputed quality of the band, I must ask you not to go there.’ ‘Oh, Father!’” That he is right in each case, that the Catholic lady is addle-witted, that the father is a fool and a braggart, that the Old Timbers Tavern is in fact no place for a young girl to go—all this is beside the point. A prig is one who delights in demonstrating his superiority on small occasions, and it is precisely when he has a good case that he rises to the depths of prigocity.
Although Winner behaves like a prig, he is not meant to be one, if only because the main theme of the novel, the moral testing and education of a good man, would then collapse, and the philosophical tragedy that Cozzens has tried to write would have to be recast in a satiric if not a downright farcical mode. Here as elsewhere, the author is guilty of the unforgivable novelistic sin: he is unaware of the real nature of his characters, that is, the words and actions he gives them lead the reader to other conclusions than those intended by the author.
His characters often speak brutally, for example, not because they are supposed to be brutes, but because their creator apparently thinks this is the way men talk. An elderly lawyer, civilly asked by a client to make some changes in the investing of her trust fund, replies: “You’re getting senile, Maud. Try not to be more of a fool than you can help.” A doctor, presented as a gentleman, meets the wife of a friend at a party, and, no dialogue or motivation given before, opens up: “What’s your trouble, baby? Or can I guess?...Tell Pappy how many periods you’ve missed....You know as well as I do you’re one of those girls who only has to look at him to get herself knocked up” She leaves the room “indignantly” (the adverb implies she’s a mite touchy) and he turns to Clarissa, Winner’s wife:
“I knew it as soon as I looked at her. Sure. One night she thinks: Too much trouble to get up; the hell with it! You two ought to trade apparatus. Then everybody