Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [76]
It is as if Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich ended with the hero, after his atrocious sufferings, concluding that, as a high official of the Court of Justice, it was in the nature of things that he should die horribly of cancer, and that he must therefore bear his torment like a man for the good of the service. In the actual story, however, he is driven by his “extreme situation” to reject his whole past way of life. Only when he is finally able to give up “the claim that his life had been good” can he experience anything significant: love—the young servant’s gentle care of him—and then death.
The ending of By Loved Possessed strikes rather a different note. From Winner’s climactic six-page interior monologue that ends the book we can take three formulations that sum it up: (1) “Freedom is the knowledge of necessity.” (2) “We are not children. In this life we cannot have everything for ourselves we might like to have.” (3) “Victory is not in reaching certainties or solving mysteries; victory is in making do with uncertainties, in supporting mysteries.”
What is the reality behind these unexceptionable bits of philosophy? It is that Winner, for complicated pragmatic-sentimental reasons, decides to cover up an embezzlement he has just discovered, an embezzlement of trust funds by his venerable law partner, Noah Tuttle, and that he has been eased of his guilt toward his other partner, Julius Penrose, about his old affair with Marjorie, Penrose’s wife. In both cases, it is Penrose who gives him the line: exposing Tuttle would not only ruin Winner—who would be equally responsible for his partner’s defalcations—but would also mean the disgrace of Tuttle, who is after all paying the money back slowly. As for Winner’s liaison with Marjorie, Penrose has known about it all along and has never blamed Winner, considering that “indefeasible urge of the flesh.” In fact, Penrose is actually obliged to Winner for not telling him: “ ‘I’ve always thanked you for... trying in every way to keep it from me.’”
In short, Ivan Ilyich feels free because he is compelled to reject his past as “not the right thing,” Arthur Winner because he is allowed to accept his past, is even thanked by his best friend for having concealed from him that fact that he had cuckolded him. The last words of the book are Winner’s, as he returns home: “I’m here.” It’s all right, nothing has to be changed: “I have the strength, the strength to, to—to endure more miseries,” thinks Winner, gratefully.
[1]Actually, even according to Mr. Fischer’s absurd standards, Cozzens doesn’t deserve this eminence. He is not “a classic mind operating in a romantic period” nor does his novel run counter to “the Gothic extravagance of current fiction”; as I shall show, his mind lacks clarity, control, and form and his prose is as Gothic as Harkness Memorial Quadrangle (also as unaesthetic). As for the alleged normality of his characters—“ordinary people, living ordinary lives, in ordinary circumstances” with whom the reader “can identify himself as he never can with the characters of an Algren or a Mailer”—they are normal only on the surface; once this is broken through, they are as neurotic and fantastic in their behavior as other