Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [75]
Perhaps the first to see Cozzens as a rallying point was the late Bernard DeVoto, who had a wonderfully acute instinct in these matters. DeVoto was Cozzens’s Ezra Pound. “He is not a literary man, he is a writer,” he observed, a little obscurely but I see what he means. “There are a handful like him in every age. Later on it turns out they were the ones who wrote that age’s literature.” The wheel has comically come full circle: it used to be those odd, isolated, brilliant writers who were in advance of their times—the Stendhals, the Melvilles, the Joyces, and Rimbauds—who later on were discovered to be “the ones who wrote that age’s literature”; but now it is the sober, conscientious plodders, who have a hard time just keeping up with the procession, whose true worth is temporarily obscured by their modish avant-garde competitors. This note is struck by the reviewers of By Love Possessed. “Critics and the kind of readers who start fashionable cults have been markedly cool toward him,” writes Gill, while John Fischer complains that Cozzens, unlike “some other novelists of stature,” has hitherto been denied “the reverence—indeed the adulation—of the magisterial critics whose encyclicals appear in the literary quarterlies and academic journals. Aside from a Pulitzer Prize in 1949, no such laurels have lighted on Cozzens’s head, and the fashionable critics have passed him by in contemptuous silence.”
A highbrow conspiracy of paranoiac dimensions, it seems, is behind it all. Cozzens just won’t play our game. “It may be that his refusal to become a public figure—no TV or P.E.N. appearances, no commencement addresses at Sarah Lawrence, no night-club pronouncements recorded by Leonard Lyons—has put them [us] off. By devoting himself to writing, he has made himself invisible to the world of letters.” So, Mr. Gill.
And Mr. Fischer: “Even his private life is, for a writer, unconventional. He attends no cocktail parties, makes no speeches, signs no manifestoes, writes no reviews, appears on no television shows, scratches no backs, shuns women’s clubs....Few people in the so-called literary world have ever set eyes on him.” But doesn’t all this precisely describe Faulkner and Hemingway when they were making their reputations? Is the P.E.N. Club—have I ever met a member?—so powerful? Did Fitzgerald sign any manifestoes? Are we highbrows really so impressed by TV appearances, talks before women’s clubs, mention in gossip columns? Could it be simply that Cozzens really isn’t very good?
Another hypothesis was advanced by Time: “The interior decorators of U.S. letters—the little-magazine critics whose favorite furniture is the pigeonhole—find that Cozzens fits no recent fictional compartments, and usually pretends that he does not exist.” But there is, in fact, a recent pigeonhole for Cozzens: the Novel of Resignation. By Love Possessed is, philosophically, an inversion, almost a parody of a kind of story Tolstoy and other nineteenth-century Russian novelists used to tell: of a successful, self-satisfied hero who is led by experiences in “extreme situations” to see how artificial his life has been and who then rejects the conventional world and either dies or begins a new, more meaningful life. In the Novel of Resignation, the highest reach of enlightenment is to realize how awful the System is and yet to accept it on its own terms. Because otherwise there wouldn’t be any System. Marquand invented the genre, Sloan Wilson carried it on in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and Herman Wouk formulated it most unmistakably in The Caine Mutiny. Wouk’s moral is that