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By Root 1075 0

like the weather. The provincials, for some reason, get the point here much better than their urban leaders did. The Chattanooga Times wonderfully summed up the theme as “the situation of rational man beset by passion,” adding: “Cozzens regards each form of love as a threat to Arthur Winner’s power to reason, to his ability to live life with meaning.” It’s too bad this acuteness in diagnosis was not accompanied by equal skill in evaluation; Cozzens’s notion of love was accepted as valid; but it isn’t, since love, even passion, is not an extraneous monkey wrench thrown into the machinery of life, but rather a prime mover which may burst everything apart but which must function if there is to be any motion at all. This is, at any rate, how the makers of our literature, from Homer to Tolstoy, Proust, and James, have treated the theme; Cozzens’s efficiency-expert approach (Gumming Up the Works) is echt-American but creatively impoverishing.

“The readers didn’t go much for Cozzens,” observed The Detroit Times, “until he wrote something with some sex in it.” This cynicism is not wholly justified. The literary prestige conferred by the reviewers was, I think, the chief factor. One of the consumer’s goods to which every American feels he has a right in this age of plenty is Culture, and By Love Possessed on the living-room table is a symbol of the owner’s exercise of this right. Granted that the reviews may have led many proprietors of living-room tables to think they could combine business with pleasure, so to speak, word must have gotten around fairly soon that the sexual passages were unrewarding.

For even the sex is meager—perhaps the real title should be By Reason Possessed. I have the impression that Cozzens is as suspicious of sex as of love. Most of the sexual encounters he conscientiously describes are either fatuous (Winner and his first bride), sordid (Ralph and Veronica), or disgusting (Winner and Marjorie). Far worse—from a sales viewpoint—they are written in his customary turgid and inexpressive style. Take for example the two pages on Winner’s love-making with his second wife, the most concrete description of the sexual act in the book and also the only place where sex is presented as one might say positively. This passage sounds partly like a tongue-tied Dr. Johnson: “the disposings of accustomed practice, the preparations of purpose and consent; the familiar mute motions of furtherance.” But mostly like a Fortune description of an industrial process: “thrilling thuds of the heart...moist manipulative reception...the mutual heat of pumped bloods...the thoroughgoing, deepening, widening work of their connection; and his then no less than hers, the tempo slowed in concert to engineer a tremulous joint containment and continuance...the deep muscle groups, come to their vertex, were in a flash convulsed.”[2]

The reviewers think of Cozzens, as he does himself, as a cool, logical, unsentimental, and implacably deep thinker. “Every character and event is bathed in the glow of a reflective intelligence,” puffs Time, while Brendan Gill huffs: “The Cozzens intellect, which is of exceptional breadth and toughness, coolly directs the Cozzens heart.” In reality, Cozzens is not so much cool as inhibited, not so much unsentimental as frightened by feeling; he is not logical at all, and his mind is shallow and muddy rather than clear and deep. I think Julius Penrose may fairly be taken as Cozzens’s beau ideal of an intellectual, as Winner is his notion of a good man. If Penrose is meant to be taken ironically, if his pompous philosophizings are supposed to be burlesques, then the novel collapses at its center—leaving aside the fact they would be tedious as parodies—since it is Penrose who throughout the book guides Winner toward the solution of his problems. There’s a Penrose in Homer, but he’s not confused with Ulysses. His name is Nestor.

The reviewers, of course, were impressed by this club bore: “a dark, supernal intelligence” (Balliett), “one of the most compelling [what does that critical standby mean, I wonder] and memorable