Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [71]
There is some evidence, if one reads closely and also between the lines, that some of the reviewers had their doubts. But they adopted various strategies for muffling them. Messrs. Gill, Fischer, and Balliett, while applauding the style in general, refrained from quoting anything. The last-named, after praising the “compact, baked, fastidious sentences,” went into a long, worried paragraph which implied the opposite. “The unbending intricacies of thought... seem to send his sentences into impossible log-jams,” he wrote, which is like saying of a girl, “She doesn’t seem pretty.” Jessamyn West warned, “You may come away with a certain feeling of tiredness,” and left it at that. Malcolm Cowley managed to imply the book is a masterpiece without actually saying so—the publishers couldn’t extract a single quote. With that cooniness he used to deploy in the ’thirties when he was confronted with an important work that was on the right (that is, the “left”) side but was pretty terrible, Cowley, here also confronted with a conflict between his taste and his sense of the Zeitgeist, managed to praise with faint damns. One magisterial sentence, in particular, may be recommended to all ambitious young book reviewers: “His style used to be as clear as a mountain brook; now it has become a little weed-grown and murky, like the brook when it wanders through a meadow.” A meadowy brook is pretty too—it shows the mature Cozzens now feels, in Cowley’s words, that “life is more complicated than he once believed.”
A favorite reviewer’s gambit was that Cozzens’s prose may be involved but so is James’s. “One drawback is the style,” Time admitted, “which is frosted with parenthetical clauses, humpbacked syntax, Jamesian involutions, Faulknerian meanderings.” I am myself no foe of the parenthesis, nor do I mind a little syntactical humping at times, but I feel this comparison is absurd. James’s involutions are (a) necessary to precisely discriminate his meaning; (b) solid parts of the architecture of the sentence; and (c) controlled by a fine ear for euphony. Faulkner does meander, but there is emotional force, descriptive richness behind his wanderings. They both use words that are not only in the dictionary but also in the living language, and use them in conversational rhythms. Their style is complex because they are saying something complicated, not, as with Cozzens, because they cannot make words do what they want them to do.
But the main burden of the reviewers was not doubt but affirmation. In reading their praise of Cozzens’s prose, I had an uneasy feeling that perhaps we were working with different texts.
“Every sentence has been hammered, filed and tested until it bears precisely the weight it was designed to carry, and does it with clarity and grace,” wrote John Fischer. The sentences have been hammered all right:
Recollected with detachment, these self-contrived quandaries, these piffling dilemmas that young love could invent for itself were comic—too much ado about nothing much! Arthur Winner Junior was entangled laughably in his still-juvenile illogicalities and inconsistencies. Absurdly set on working contradictories and incompatibles, he showed how the world was indeed a comedy for those who think. By his unripe, all-or-nothing-at-all views, he was bound to be self-confounded. By the ridiculous impracticalness of his aspirations, he was inescapably that figure of fun whose lofty professions go with quite other performances.