Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [68]
Clarissa said: “Reg, you’re not being very funny—”
“That’s right. I don’t feel very funny...Sometimes you get your bellyful of women—their goddam notions; their goddam talk-talk-talk; their goddam sacks of tripes!”
No reason is given for any of these onslaughts, aside from the fact that all three recipients are women; this seems to be Cozzens’s idea of manly straight-from-the-shoulder talk. Curious. Curious, too, Winner’s pooh-poohing attitude when he is appealed to by the feminine victims.
For Winner, too, is something of a brute, without his creator suspecting it. There is, for example, that odd business on page 428 when Mrs. Pratt, after her silly, hysterical religiosity has beaten vainly for some thirty pages against the rock of Winner’s Episcopalian rectitude (Mrs. Pratt is a Roman Catholic), is finally checkmated. She has to go to the bathroom. For reasons obscure to me, this is presented as the decisive proof of hypocrisy: “At fact’s surely unkindest prank of all, Arthur Winner must protest, generously indignant.” (“Meanly delighted” would be more accurate.) For a page, Winner ruminates on his antagonist’s discomfiture, concluding: “But how in the world of fancy did you put delightfully the human circumstance whose undressed substance was that Celia, Celia, Celia shits—or even that Mrs. Pratt most urgently requires to piss?” Me-thinks the gentleman doth protest too much, and methinks that Swift’s allusion to Celia’s necessity was positively healthy compared to Cozzens-Winner’s resort to scatology to win an argument.
This leads us, in a way, to sex. The crucial episode, the one that more than any other shakes Winner’s faith in himself and in the uprightness of his life, is something that happened years before the action begins and that keeps coming back into his mind: his affair with Marjorie, the wife of his close friend and law partner, Julius Penrose. On the day after his first wife’s death, Marjorie—another silly, hysterical woman—comes to the house and in a rush of emotion offers herself to him. He is about to take her, on his wife’s bed, when the phone rings. That time he is literally saved by the bell, but later, one summer when Penrose is away, they do have a frantic affair. At no time is love or even lust involved: “Far from coveting his neighbor’s wife, he rather disliked her, found her more unattractive than not.” The only reason given for Winner’s reaction to Marjorie is that she was there. Like that mountain climber. Or as Marjorie’s remorselessly philosophical husband puts it in his pidgin (or shall we say turkey) English: “I venture to assert that when the gadfly’s sting is fairly driven in, when this indefeasible urge of the flesh presses them, few men of normal potency prove able to refrain their foot from that path.” But then (a) why hasn’t Winner had dozens of such affairs instead of only this one—and for that matter, why was Marjorie able to seduce him only that one summer?; and (b) granted that some men do indeed so behave, why Winner? Does an Episcopalian lawyer, a rational, decent family man with no more and no different sexual urges than the normal ones, act like a dead-end kid? Cozzens insists that the best of us do so behave, but if we do, then we aren’t the best. There might be some individual quirk in Winner to explain it, but it is not given; on the contrary, Cozzens’s point is precisely Winner’s lack of such quirks—“few men of normal potency prove able to refrain their foot from that path.” This is neither realistic nor imaginative. It is the shocked revulsion of the adolescent who discovers that papa and mama do it.
The formula for a best seller now includes a minimum of “outspoken” descriptions of sexual activities, and By Love Possessed doesn’t skimp here. Its inventory includes rape, seduction, marital and extramarital intercourse, with touches of sadism, lesbianism, onanism, and homosexuality. By Sex Possessed would be a more accurate title. There is very little love, which the author presents as at best a confusing and chancey business, to be patiently endured,