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By Root 1061 0

deceived about himself. He thinks he is a true-blue conservative of the old school: “I am more or less illiberal and strongly antipathetic to all political and social movements. I was brought up an Episcopalian, and where I live, the landed gentry are Republicans.” He is proud of his Tory ancestors, who had to flee to Canada during the Revolution: “To tell the truth, I feel I’m better than other people.” But this statement itself seems to me not that of an aristocrat, who would take it for granted, but rather of an uneasy arriviste. Nor does illiberalism make a conservative, as we learned in the days of McCarthy. Cozzens, like some of his sympathetically intended heroes—Dr. Bull in The Last Adam is an example—goes in for Plain Speaking, but it comes out somehow a little bumptious and unpleasant: “I like anybody if he’s a nice guy, but I’ve never met many Negroes who were nice guys.” His notion of a nice-guy Negro is Alfred Revere in By Love Possessed, the colored verger of the local Episcopalian church, which is otherwise Whites Only. Tactfully, Mr. Revere always takes Communion last: “The good, the just man had consideration for others. By delaying he took care that members of the congregation need never hesitate to receive the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ because a cup from which a Negro had drunk contained it.” This is not ironical, it is perfectly serious, and is followed by a page of contorted dialectic about God’s love.

Perhaps the slick, pushing, crafty Jewish lawyer, Mr. Woolf—he has even had the nerve to turn Episcopalian, to Winner’s contemptuous amusement—is not meant to stand for Jews in general, any more than the odious Mrs. Pratt is meant to stand for all Catholics. One only wishes that Cozzens’s mouthpiece weren’t quite so explicit: “Glimpsing Mr. Woolf’s face in the mirror again, Arthur Winner could see his lips form a smile, deprecatory, intentionally ingratiating. Was something there of the patient shrug, something of the bated breath and whispering humbleness?... Did you forget at your peril the ancient grudge that might be fed if Mr. Woolf could catch you once upon the hip?”

How did it happen? Why did such a book impress the reviewers? We know whodunit, but what was the motive? Like other crimes, this one was a product of Conditions. The failure of literary judgment and of simple common sense shown in l’affaire Cozzens indicates a general lowering of standards. If this were all, if our reviewers just didn’t know any better, then one would have to conclude we had quite lost our bearings. But there were other factors.

The two most important, I think, were related: a general feeling that Cozzens had hitherto been neglected and that he “had it coming to him.” And consequently a willingness, indeed an eagerness to take at face value his novel’s pretensions. It is difficult for American reviewers to resist a long, ambitious novel; they are betrayed by the American admiration of size and scope, also by the American sense of good fellowship; they find it hard to say to the author, after all his work: “Sorry, but it’s terrible.” In Cozzens’s case, it would have been especially hard because he had been writing serious novels for thirty years without ever having had a major success, either popular or d’estime. It was now or never. The second alternative would have meant that a lifetime of hard work in a good cause had ended in failure, which would have been un-American. So it had to be now.

The other factor in the book’s success is historical. It is the latest episode in The Middlebrow Counter-Revolution. In the ’twenties and ’thirties the avant-garde intellectuals had it pretty much their way. In 1940, the counter-revolution was launched with Archibald MacLeish’s essay, “The Irresponsibles,” and Van Wyck Brooks’s Hunter College talk, “On Literature Today,” followed a year later by his “Primary Literature and Coterie Literature.” The Brooks-MacLeish thesis was that the avant-garde had lost contact with the normal life of humanity and had become frozen in an attitude of destructive superiority; the moral consequences