Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [73]
(a) Multisonous, incommutable, phantasmogenesis (having to do with the origin of dreams), stupefacients (narcotics), encasement (“snug encasement of his neck” for “tight collar”), explicative (“one of his characteristically explicative observations”), solemnization (“wedding” becomes “the solemnization’s scene”), eventuated (“acts of eventuated guilt,” a phrase undecipherable even with the Unabridged), and condign (“condign punishment”—means “deserved p.”).
(b) I must admit that reading Cozzens has enriched my vocabulary, or, more accurately, added to it. My favorite, on the whole, is “presbyopic,” which of course means “long-sighted because of old age.” I also like the sound of “viridity” and “mucid,” though it’s disappointing to learn they mean simply “greenness” and “slimy.” But I see no reason for such grotesques as qualmish, scrutinous, vulnerary (“wound-healing”), pudency, revulsively, and vellications, which is Latin for twitchings.
Cozzens’s style is a throwback to the palmiest days of nineteenth-century rhetoric, when a big Latin-root was considered more elegant than a small Anglo-Saxon word. The long, patient struggle of the last fifty years to bring the diction and rhythms of prose closer to those of the spoken language might never have existed so far as Cozzens is concerned. He doesn’t even revert to the central tradition (Scott, Cooper, Bulwer-Lytton) but rather to the eccentric mode of the half-rebels against it (Carlyle, Meredith), who broke up the orderly platoons of gold-laced Latinisms into whimsically arranged awkward squads, uniformed with equal artificiality but marching every which way as the author’s wayward spirit moved them. Carlyle and Meredith are even less readable today than Scott and Cooper, whose prose at least inherited from the eighteenth century some structural backbone.
That a contemporary writer should spend eight years fabricating a pastiche in the manner of George Meredith could only happen in America, where isolation produces oddity. The American novelist is sustained and disciplined by neither a literary tradition nor an intellectual community. He doesn’t see other writers much; he probably doesn’t live in New York, which like Paris and London unfortunately has almost a monopoly of the national cultural life, because the pace is too fast, the daily life too ugly, the interruptions too great; and even if he does, there are no cafés or pubs where he can foregather with his colleagues; he doesn’t read the literary press, which anyway is much less developed than in London or Paris; he normally thinks of himself as a nonintellectual, even an anti-intellectual (Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Lewis, Anderson). It is a pattern of cultural isolation that brings out a writer’s eccentric, even his grotesque side.
In the case of Cozzens, things have gone about as far as they can. At his country place in Lambertville, New Jersey, he leads a life compared to which Thoreau’s on Walden Pond was gregarious. “I am a hermit and I have no friends,” he understates. According to Time, “Years elapse between dinner guests” and he hasn’t been to a play, a concert, or an art gallery in twenty years. (He did go to a movie in 1940). To those who wonder how he can write novels when he has so little contact with people, he says: “The thing you have to know about is yourself; you are people.” But he seems signally lacking in self-knowledge. He fancies himself as a stylist, for instance. “My own literary preferences are for writers who write well,” he says, pleasantly adding: “This necessarily excludes most of my contemporaries.” The level of his taste may be inferred from the fact that he sneers at Faulkner (“falsifies life for dramatic effect”), Hemingway (“under the rough exterior, he’s just a great big bleeding heart”), and Lewis (“a crypto-sentimentalist”), but admires—W. Somerset Maugham.
He is similarly