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By Root 1097 0

figures in recent writing” (Jessamyn West), “the scalded mind of the archskeptic...a corrosive nonstop monologuist with a tongue like a poisoned dart” (Time). The intellectual climax—more accurately, anticlimax—of the book is a thirty-page conversation between Penrose and Winner—at their club, appropriately enough—about life and love. It reminds me of two grunt-and-groan wrestlers heaving their ponderous bulks around without ever getting a grip on each other. “How could she like these things [sadistic acts by her first husband]?” Penrose rhetorically asks at one point, immediately continuing in the strange patois of Cozzensville: “My considered answer: Marjorie, though all unknowing, could! She could see such a punishment as condign. She had to submit, because in an anguished way, she craved to have done to her what she was persuaded she deserved to have done to her.” Having got off this bit of kindergarten Freudianism: “He gazed an instant at Arthur Winner. ‘You find this far-fetched?’ he said. ‘Yes; we who are so normal are reluctant to entertain such ideas.’” Ideas are always entertained in Cozzensville, though they are not always entertaining. After fifteen more lines of elaboration, Penrose again fears he has outstripped his audience: “You consider this too complicated?” To which Winner, manfully: “Perhaps not. But I’ve often wondered how far anyone can see into what goes on in someone else. I’ve read somewhere that it would pose the acutest head to draw forth and discover what is lodged in the heart.” Now where could he have read that?

It is interesting to note that Penrose and Winner, the two “point-of-view” characters, are lawyers, and that the processes of the law occupy a considerable amount of the book. The reviewers marvel that Cozzens has been able to master so much legal knowhow, but I think there is more to it than that. We Americans have always had a weakness for the law. Its objectivity reassures our skittish dread of emotion and its emphasis on The Facts suits our pragmatic temper. But above all the law is our substitute for philosophy, which makes us almost as nervous as emotion does. Its complicated, precise formulae have the external qualities of theoretical thinking, lacking only the most essential one—they don’t illuminate reality, since what is “given” is not the conditions of life but merely a narrow convention. Dickens, Tolstoy, and other novelists have written law-court scenes showing that truth is too small a fish to be caught in the law’s coarse meshes. But to Cozzens a trial is reality while emotional, disorderly life is the illusion. He delights in the tedious complications of lawyer’s talk, the sort of thing one skips in reading the court record of even the most sensational trials. On page 344 a clergyman incautiously asks Winner about the property rights of churches in Pennsylvania. “The difference is technical,” Winner begins with gusto, and three pages later is still expatiating.

This fascination with the law is perhaps a clue to Cozzens’s defects as a novelist. It explains the peculiar aridity of his prose, its needless qualifications, its clumsiness, its defensive qualifications (a lawyer qualifies negatively—so he can’t be caught out later; but a novelist qualifies positively—to make his meaning not safer but clearer). And his sensibility is lawyer-like in its lack of both form and feeling, its peculiar combination of a brutal domineering pragmatism (“Just stick to the facts, please!”) with abstract fancywork, a kind of Victorian jigsaw decoration that hides more than it reveals. I, too, think the law is interesting, but as an intellectual discipline, like mathematics or crossword puzzles. I feel Cozzens uses it as a defense against emotion (“sentimentality”). Confusing it with philosophy, he makes it bear too heavy a load, so that reality is distorted and even the law’s own qualities are destroyed, its logic and precision blurred, its technical elegance coarsened. There’s too much emotion in his law and too much law in his emotion.

The three earlier Cozzens novels I’ve read, The