Books: The Hermit of Lambertville

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The greying, handsome man, a novelist by trade, sat in a New Jersey inn, talking amiably with two companions and sipping his favorite drink, an ice-cold, bone-dry martini with lemon peel. An animated party of four came in and sat down at the next table. The handsome man shifted uneasily. Beads of sweat pebbled his forehead as he stole a shy half-glance at the strangers. Abruptly, like a swimmer surfacing for a gasp of air, he got up, grabbed his drink and pivoted toward an untenanted dining area in the rear, taking his tablemates in tow with the muttered words: “Let’s eat in the back and get away from these people.”

James Gould Cozzens, 54, whose latest novel, By Love Possessed, is published this week, has spent much of his life getting away from people. He is the Garbo of U.S. letters. He devoutly wishes to be left alone, and critics and readers alike have obliged him to the point of neglect. After a writing span of more than three decades, during which he produced an even dozen novels, Cozzens is the least known and least discussed of major American novelists. Any two people, on discovering that they are both Cozzens fans, are apt to hail each other fervently, like members of a secret society.

Yet four of Cozzens’ books have carried at least one mark of popular recognition—selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club: S. S. San Pedro (1931), The Last Adam (1933), The Just and the Unjust (1942), and now By Love Possessed. Still another novel, Guard of Honor, won the Pulitzer Prize for 1948. Nevertheless, the hardcover sales of all Cozzens’ books combined (140,000) lag well behind that current dreary splash in a small-town sex sump, Peyton Place (250,000 copies). 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 pretend that he does not exist. This is particularly puzzling because no U.S. writer has rooted his novels more solidly in the American scene than Cozzens, or has more painstakingly portrayed the complex professional strongholds of a complex country—medicine, the clergy, the law, the military.

The Man in Gloves. Some of the neglect may be traced to the man himself. “I’m a hermit and I have no friends,” says Cozzens candidly. For almost a quarter-century, except for a three-year stint writing manuals and speeches in the

Army Air Corps during World War II, Cozzens has not stirred much beyond the neighborhood of his fieldstone house and 124-acre farm near Lambertville, N.J. (pop. 5,000). It is 17 years since he and his wife saw a movie, more than 20 since they went to the theater, to a concert or an art gallery. Years sometimes elapse between dinner guests.

Cozzens has lived by Joycean “silence, exile and cunning” without quitting U.S. shores. But since a writer’s secrets cannot be kept from his books and hence his readers, the popular mind has perhaps intuitively felt the “outsider” in its midst. For Cozzens is really alien grain in the American corn. Americans (particularly American writers) are apt to be romantics to the point of being moistly sentimental; Cozzens is classical, dry, cerebral. Americans have a youth complex; Cozzens has an age complex. Americans are optimistic; Cozzens is pessimistic (he would say realistic). Americans like change; Cozzens accepts but deplores it. Americans are temperamentally democratic; Cozzens is temperamentally aristocratic. Americans like to touch and handle life; Cozzens, a man who wears gloves winter and summer, prefers to contemplate it.

Can the twain ever meet? With his latest book, Americans and Novelist Cozzens stand their best chance of getting acquainted. An initial printing of 50,000 copies is off the presses. Reader’s Digest has paid $100,000 for the right to run a condensation in Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. The novel’s movie rights have been sold for $100,000. This time, apparently, Cozzens in going to reach beyond that loyal band of fans whom Critic John Mason Brown has dubbed “the many few, more than a coterie, less than a crowd.”

The Education of Arthur Winner. By Love Possessed (570 pp.; Harcourt. Brace; $5) is reared on a theme from the 17th century metaphysical poet Fulke Greville: “Passion and reason, selfe-division cause.” This theme is developed almost musically, but it is the austere music of a Bach fugue, architectonic, contrapuntal, slow, majestic, sometimes irritatingly tedious, always impressive if not steadily arresting. It is played in a minor key, for this is a bitter comedy sounding life’s black notes. The prevailing mood is irony, starting with the title itself. In Cozzens’ meaning, “possessed” stands for “seized” or ”made mad.” The more one loves, he is saying, the less one understands. Though characters crowd the novel’s pages, only one man is schooled fully by this theme, and if the book had a subtitle it would be “The Education of Arthur Winner.”

Seen superficially, Arthur Winner needs no more education. He is a successful lawyer in his 50s, a figure of Roman rectitude, a bald, grave patrician, sage and self-contained. In his middle-sized home town of Brocton (possibly located in Pennsylvania), he belongs to a comfortable upper class that has the attitudes if not the acreage of landed gentry. Within a 49-hour period, fissures of revelation about Winner’s closest friends—and about himself—rip open this safe and stolid world, and almost swallow him up.

To heighten the impact of these revelations, Cozzens feeds the reader key episodes from Arthur Winner’s past with flashbacks so deft as to be intravenous. There is Lawyer Arthur Winner Sr., a dispassionate Victorian man of reason, his son’s model and hero. An agnostic, he has been cut down in the fullness of life by cancer, and young Arthur learns his first sobering lesson—”How dies the wise man … as the fool.” With life’s occasional flair for overemphasis, the lesson is repeated when Arthur’s first wife, Hope, dies from the aftereffects of childbirth. Something else has died first—the youthful illusion that they had fallen in love with each other, when they had only fallen in love with love. In name Hope was a wife, in reality she was a permanently affronted virgin. Reflecting on the ignorance of his early years, Arthur Winner learns another lesson: “Youth’s a kind of infirmity.”

Calm v. Passion. Arthur Winner marries again. Clarissa is tall, athletic and thirtyish, an avid latecomer to the art of love. The hour of that art which the couple share in Cozzens’ pages has not been paralleled for clinical candor in U.S. fiction since Edmund Wilson singed the censors with Memoirs of Hecate County. Yet Lawyer Winner has a more demanding love—the law. The law is his passion precisely because it rules out passion. He is comforted by its seductive repose, “that majestic calm of reason designed to curb all passions or enthusiasms of emotion.”

A squalid case of uncurbed passion soon claims Arthur Winner’s professional attention as he undertakes the defense of an alleged rapist, the weak-willed brother of a self-abnegating girl named Helen Detweiler who—this is her form of love —has sacrificed her youth to the brother’s upbringing.

Love and the law: those are the story’s opposed forces, and much of their contention centers around Brocton’s old courthouse, its pillared cupola flanked by great trees, its tolling tower bell pacing life in the town. In the gallery of lawyers serving beneath the bell, the outstanding figure is Noah Tuttle, Winner’s senior partner, a doughty old lion of the law in his white-maned 80s, crotchety, plainspoken, a portable archive of torts, statutes and the cumulative wisdom of old age.

If Noah is the man whom everyone trusts, Winner’s other partner, Julius Penrose, is the man who mistrusts everyone. His is the scalded mind of the archskeptic who has supped so full of human follies that the race of man almost makes him retch. Crippled by polio, he has become a corrosive, nonstop monologuist with a tongue like a poisoned dart. Some of his more sardonic thrusts are directed at the Roman Catholic faith, which his wife Marjorie, a guilt-ridden sensualist of masochistic tendencies, is about to embrace. The bitterness of his remarks, including his view of his wife’s imminent conversion as a “peace-at-any-price panic,” will doubtless help make By Love Possessed a “controversial” novel.

This controversy may be heightened by Cozzens’ feudally patronizing portrayal of the Negroes who serve Brocton’s first families and are treated by them as near equals precisely because they make no unseemly claims to equality, e.g., in Arthur Winner’s church, the Negro sexton deferentially takes communion last. Racially barbed is Cozzens’ depiction of Eliot Woolf, a razor-sharp New York lawyer and a Jew-turned-Episcopalian whose “astute smelling-out of every little advantage . . . outside due process” makes Arthur Winner slightly queasy.

Perfume of Sanctity. Least flattering of all is the portrait Cozzens draws of Marjorie Penrose’s proselytizing Roman Catholic friend, Mrs. Pratt. Mrs. Pratt has a sweet tooth for vicarious sins, and she loves the gooey drippings of intimate confidences from flesh-bedeviled souls like Marjorie. About her person she dabs the odor of sanctity as if it were the latest Parisian perfume. But as she prattles of sin and piety in the quiet of Arthur Winner’s garden, her innuendoes loose the first of the novel’s rockslides of revelation. On the very day of his first wife’s death, this pillar of respectability, this devotee of reason, Arthur Winner, had embarked on an adulterous affair with Marjorie Penrose, wife of his crippled friend. In flashback ignominy, Winner relives their mute animal couplings, the gross infidelity of “two cheap sneaks.” With this recollection the ordeal of Arthur Winner has begun.

Overwrought by her brother’s case,

Helen Detweiler commits suicide, possibly for lack of some assurance, which Winner could have given her, that her brother would escape prison. As Lawyer Winner digs up her will from the office vault, his eye falls on some of Noah’s papers. Tuttle, the rock of probity, turns out to be an embezzler who has been juggling his accounts for years. Confiding his numbing discovery to Julius Penrose, Arthur Winner is jolted yet again—Penrose has known and kept silent not only about Tuttle’s secret, but about Winner’s as well. Faced with the ineluctable ironies and tragedies of the human condition, Arthur Winner resolves to pick up the pieces and carry on, in the almost existentialist conviction that life may have no meaning but must be lived.

The Clouded Glass. Novelist Cozzens has a mind like a lamp, and every character and event in By Love Possessed is bathed in the glow of a reflective intelligence. Every motivation rings true; each episode is part of a seamless whole; the taste of reality is unmistakable. The audacious scope of the novel is nothing less than the anatomy of love—from filial to fraternal, from spiritual to concupiscent, from self-regarding to self-sacrificing. Its disenchantment is equally total—the possessors are methodically dispossessed, love conquers nothing, the lovers lose all.

All of this has been plotted with such skill that the tantalizing question arises why this good novel never becomes the great novel it intermittently promises to be. One drawback is the style. Cozzens has always favored a glass-pane purity that does not intrude between reader and story. This time the glass is frosted with parenthetical clauses, humpbacked syntax, Jamesian involutions. Faulknerian meanderings. Cozzens, the man in gloves who likes to put the distance that lends disenchantment between himself and his characters, is so coolly the observer here that he puts the reader at a double distance, watching Cozzens watch his characters. Pity, which is Cozzens’ mode of compassion, is too condescending a virtue to replace the needed fellow-suffering identification with the book’s creatures. Finally. people analyzed as relentlessly as Cozzens analyzes his tend to become transparent; the Ahabs and Karamazovs of fiction survive because they are strangely opaque.

None of these shortcomings will keep By Love Possessed from being the best American novel of the year, or alter the fact that it is well worth reading. It is an education to know Arthur Winner, an education into which Novelist Cozzens has poured everything that 54 years of life have taught and made of him.

Writing for Mother. The education of James Gould Cozzens began with a baptism of family pride so drenching as to turn Cozzens into a lifetime “natural-born snob.” Born in 1903 in a place he would not have chosen (“Whoever was born in Chicago? It used to embarrass me like hell at school”). Cozzens was an only child. Young Jim grew up in Staten Island at St. Austin’s Place, “which was quite nice then—woods and fields.” Before that, the Cozzens clan were New-porters. Cozzens’ great-grandfather was mayor of Newport and governor of Rhode Island during the Civil War. His mother’s ancestors were Connecticut Tories who fled to Nova Scotia during the American Revolution. Says Cozzens: “They felt they were high quality because they hadn’t given in. They inculcated this feeling in me, so, to tell the truth, I still feel I’m better than other people.”

Jimmy attended Staten Island Academy: “The public school was full of kids with dirty germs; naturally, Mother wouldn’t dream of having me go there.” A classmate remembers Jimmy as “a frail little boy in short pants and blue serge suits who was smart as a whip. He never played marbles or tops or touch football. He would stand and watch. At noon we would play softball in the alley, and when we went in after lunch, we would be sweaty and dirty and rumpled. But there was our Jimmy, all neat and clean and full of answers. He would gladden the heart of any mother.”

Mrs. Cozzens was something of a stage mother. Says Cozzens’ maternal uncle: “She started training him from the time he was old enough to think. I believe she would have liked to write herself, but didn’t feel she had the ability, and decided he was going to do it for her. Whenever they went anywhere, his mother would get him to write it down—sort of a little essay about whatever they did or saw. I don’t think he ever had anything on his mind except writing.”

Boy Atheist. Cozzens’ father, a business executive with a Brooklyn typesetting-equipment firm, had other ideas about how his son should be spending his time. Says Cozzens: “My father was a proficient tennis player and a good swimmer. He used to say to me, ‘You should be a man.’ He looked at me with a certain disgust, and Mother would say, ‘Oh, but think how intelligent he is!’ He was a practical man. and he was bitterly disappointed in me. and would be today. He was an austere Episcopalian who knew his duty and did it. He wouldn’t think writing was man’s work. I still think he was right, if the truth were told. If I could have been a really efficient athlete, I never would have written another line.”

At Kent, a high-Episcopal prep school in Connecticut, Cozzens found that if he could not command his schoolmates’ respect as an athlete, he could awe them in other ways: “I was the boy intellectual who didn’t believe in God, scorned healthy exercise, and subscribed to the New Republic. But Kent marked me for life. If there’s hard work to be done and I get out of it, I feel extremely guilty. That’s the attitude Father Sill inculcated in us.” The late Rev. Frederick Herbert Sill, founder and headmaster of Kent, was a thunderous personality whose bolts of reproof struck Jim regularly. Recalls his senior-year roommate: “Jim had read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and he decided Christianity was a lot of hooey. He thought he should enlighten Father Sill, and went over to see him in his study. I remember I was downstairs, and suddenly I heard Father Sill—we called him the Holy Terror—yell, ‘Get out of my study, you dirty, stinking little coward!’ Jim left, protesting all the while, ‘But sir, this is most unfair . . But sir . . .’ ”

Vine Leaves to Harvard Club. Young Cozzens may have been a showoff, but he never really was a rebel, then or later. Says a friend: “No vine leaves in his hair —the Greeks are not in him.’3-Even Cozzens’ career as a Harvard (’26) hell-raiser was brief. At Harvard he was part of a splinter intelligentsia—Poet-Instructor Robert Hillyer, Classicist Dudley Fitts et al.—and kept flailing away at a novel that appeared early in his sophomore year. Aptly titled Confusion, it concerned a shimmering young sylph named Cerise D’Atreé who was caught in the Fitzgerald undertow and dragged to an early Jazz Age death.

A 21-year-old reporter named Lucius Beebe from the now defunct Boston Telegram came to interview the 20-year-old author, and the two were soon painting the town mauve. “We lived on gin and Swinburne,” recalls Beebe. “Jim had delusions of grandeur when it came to money. When he called on a girl, he would put on a morning coat and striped pants, hire a car and get a million orchids — all of it charged and seldom paid for.”

Dunned by his creditors, on probation for cutting classes, living beyond his mother’s means (his father had died in 1920), Cozzens got a leave of absence at the end of his sophomore year, and never went back to Harvard’s vine leaves. The school rewarded its prodigal son with an honorary Litt. D. degree in 1952 (Cozzens says he accepted it only to please his mother, who died a few months later). Nowadays, on rare trips to New York, he likes to lunch at the Harvard Club, “where everybody acts morose and nobody looks at anybody.”

Bernice the Breadwinner. After Harvard, Cozzens hibernated in Canada for a while on a publisher’s handout of $15 a week, finished a mawkish Elizabethan historical romance (Michael Scarlett), taught some American sugar planters’ children English and math in Cuba, junketed around Europe as tutor to a 14-year-old polio victim. Later, he drew on his Cuban impressions to write two more apprentice novels, Cockpit and The Son of Perdition, unlikely tales of tropic adventure. In Ask Me Tomorrow, Cozzens used his European experiences for a crisply satiric self-portrait, complete with a characteristic blast at the American expatriates.

Emotionally, Cozzens drifted until he was himself possessed by love. He first met Sylvia Bernice Baumgarten in mid-1926 on business, when she was a fledgling literary agent for Brandt & Kirkpatrick (now Brandt & Brandt). Of his feelings at the time, he says laconically: “I suppose sex entered into it. After all, what’s a woman for?” But in dedicating Son of Perdition, Cozzens was more gallant. The flyleaf is inscribed to her with these lines from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: “Outliving her beauty’s outward, with a mind/ That doth renew swifter than blood decays.” Cozzens recalls: “Mother almost died when I married a Jew, but later when she saw I was being decently cared for, she realized that it was the best thing that could have happened to me.”

Bernice Cozzens is a slight, trim woman with azure blue eyes, brown hair drawn taut in a bun, and a little-girl air of gravity. A passionately liberal Democrat, she is known as one of the shrewdest, scrappiest literary agents (annual income: about $30,000) in Manhattan, handling a stable of topflight authors, including rock-solid Republican James Gould Cozzens. Their childless marriage has been a remarkable success. While he stuck to his writing and made little money from it, she was the real breadwinner. Says Cozzens: “It could have been a humiliating situation, but I guess I had a certain native conceit and felt that her time was well spent.”

“You Are People.” A typical day in the Cozzens’ Lambertville house (bought in 1933, but soon to be abandoned because Cozzens fears that impending power lines will spoil his valley view) unreels with near monastic austerity. Daily except Sunday Cozzens rises at 5:15 a.m., brews a pot of tea for himself and fixes coffee for Bernice, who gets up at 5:45. In his 1957 station wagon he drives Bernice to the Trenton station for an early train to Manhattan, then returns for a breakfast of scrambled eggs, orange juice and milk. He works from 8 to noon (he is a two-finger typist). Says Cozzens, who spent eight years on By Love Possessed: “For every three pages I write, I throw away two. On a good day, I get two pages done.”

After lunch (with two martinis) he naps for an hour, putters around in the flower garden (he tends the roses), and reads until he picks up Bernice at the station. After dinner Cozzens goes to his study, “where I meditate and put on a rubber tire with three bottles of beer.” Cozzens’ sole hobby is a pop record collection, vintage 1920 to 1927—Al Jolson, Paul Whiteman—which he plays by the hour on his hi-fi set. “Most of the time I just sit picking my nose and thinking.”

To the charge that this life is isolated for a man who needs people as raw material, Cozzens retorts: “The thing you have to know is yourself; you are people.”

What Fish Are About. The principle has worked remarkably well in Cozzens’ books. The Last Adam etched a memorable portrait of a crusty, lusty New England doctor who serves the Life Drive rather better than he does his patients. Men and Brethren features a tough-minded Episcopal rector who copes with the eternal muddle of sin without sentimentalizing the sinner. The Just and the Unjust, the best U.S. novel ever fashioned around the law, focuses on a small-town murder trial; it illuminates both the law’s technicalities and its larger meaning, its limitations and its glories (which are often the same thing). Guard of Honor, the best of U.S. World War II novels, revolves around a delicate problem in white-Negro race relations at a Florida air base; but poised on this axis is a massive, self-contained world of U.S. fighting men girding for war.

In all these books, Cozzens not only searched himself, but researched his subjects with immense care. For The Just and the Unjust he haunted the nearby Doylestown courthouse (it reappears in By Love Possessed), devoured legal tomes, listened to the shoptalk of the lawyers, finally became so adept that he was stumping” them on abstruse points of law. An Air Force general proofread Guard of Honor for boners, found not a single one.

Cozzens’ men swim in their professions as naturally as fish in water, but he never assumes that water is what a fish is about. He raises questions of appearance v. reality, theory v. practice, but his chief question is: How may half-baked youth be seasoned to maturity? The recipe culled from his books: 1) the skepticism of Montaigne, 2) the craft of Machiavelli, 3) the self-reliance of Emerson, 4) the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, and 5) the patience of Job. Cozzens’ heroes do not “have fun”; they cannot “not give a damn”; they are trying to be responsible grownups in a confusing and dangerous world.

Anti-Sentimentalist. Cozzens himself often talks as if he did not give a damn. As an acquaintance puts it: “He is a shy, sweet man who says impermissible things.” Cozzens will sneer of a friend: “Oh, he’s one of those fellows that want equality for Indians.” He will say on the race issue: “I like anybody if he’s a nice guy, but I’ve never met many Negroes who were nice guys.” He says what the public-relations-minded would never dare say—not only from self-confessed snobbery or in tribute to the Toryism of his maternal ancestry, but because he wants to remind himself and others that he is not a sentimentalist.

In Cozzens’ eyes, the great villain—”the underlying principle that has ruined American fiction”—is sentimentality.

One of the worst of sentimental notions is that “the artist and intellectual is alien in this country. That’s nonsense.

I’m considered a man of distinction because I write books. The truth is, we don’t deserve it.” Cozzens regards most of his fellow writers as softies. Says he: “The Old Man and the Sea could have run in Little Folks magazine. Under the rough exterior of Hemingway, he’s just a great big bleeding heart. Sinclair Lewis was a crypto-sentimentalist and a slovenly writer who managed a slight falsification of life in order to move the reader. Faulkner falsified life for dramatic effect. It’s sentimentality disguised by the corncob. I can’t read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up. I couldn’t read the proletarian crap that came out in the ’30s; again you had sentimentalism—the poor oppressed workers.”

Cozzens’ favorite writer is Swift. Among moderns, he prefers Maugham, Huxley and the early Waugh—all of which suggests that he is an ironist in default of being a satirist, possibly for lack of humor or savagery. Like any good storyteller, James Gould Cozzens peddles no “message.” Says he: “I have no thesis except that people get a very raw deal from life. To me, life is what life is.”

The Classical View. The typical Cozzens hero is devoid of heroics, bent not on expressing himself—like the protoplasmic Lennies, the torturedly egocentric Eugene Gants—but on knowing himself. Contrasting “romanticism” and “classicism,” the English critic T. E. Hulme once wrote: “To the one party, man’s nature is, like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.” Cozzens’ wise men try never to get too big for their buckets.

This theory of limits is part of the Christian residue in Cozzens’ thought, i.e., that man is flawed and imperfectible. But since Cozzens holds with Arthur Winner —and with the Nietzsche of his prep-school days—that the universe is a “dreadful eyeless face” indifferent and unmindful of man, he cannot resolve the problem of evil he has raised. He can only try to outface it. “I am a man alone,” says Arthur Winner, seemingly at the end of his tether but actually buckling on his armor of stoic pride. “I can endure more miseries and greater far, than my weak-hearted enemies dare offer!” Says Colonel Ross in Guard of Honor: “If mind failed you seeing no pattern and heart failed you seeing no point, the stout stubborn will must be up and doing … A man must stand up and do the best he can with what there is.” A Cozzens hero always gets up off the mat for the next round—or goes back into court to file another brief.

A Handful Only. If the philosophical tension of a Cozzens novel is always high, the emotional voltage is often low. To Cozzens, passion is always mess, never force. His heroes seem to suffer from what E. M. Forster calls “the underdeveloped heart”—not cold, just underdeveloped.

It is perhaps a small price to pay for Author Cozzens’ other gifts. Cozzens has never been decoyed from the novelist’s, chief task—to hold a mirror up to nature. He has never used the novel as a tract-basket for a cause or a tear duct for an autobiographical cry. He has created recognizable people with recognizable problems in a recognizable world. He resembles no one now writing, but his genre is that of George Eliot and Joseph Conrad —the novel of moral choice resolved by force of character. An unstinting professional, he has never written a shoddy line or truckled to popular fancies or cliquish fads. With each book he has grown in craft, in insight, in authority.

Under the aspect of posterity, time may well second the judgment of the late Bernard DeVoto, who once wrote of Cozzens: “He is not a literary man, he is a writer. There are a handful like him in every age. Later on it turns out that they were the ones who wrote that age’s literature.”