BOOKS Ministers of Fate

By DAVIIA, REES

FOR some years before the publication of By Love Possessed in 1957, James Gould Cozzens had enjoyed a respectable, if obscure, reputation. That novel soon became a best- seller, was probably over-praised by some critics who hastened to compensate for their previous neglect of Cozzens, and soon a critical reaction set in. One remembers in particular Mr. Dwight Macdonald's parody of the richly involutional style of By Love Possessed in Commentary, ,but the attempted deflation of Cozzens through stylistic grounds was only part of the story. Perhaps of all important contemporary American writers, Cozzens is the least typically American. The literary interpretation of `experience' in twentieth-century America is very often a roman- tic one, with the emphasis on youth, self- expression and, above all, self-realisation. From Jay Gatsby's unfulfilled dream of the 'orgiastic future' to Moses Herzog's vision of a universal change of heart, there is a strongly held belief that in spite of the worst our age can do, there are good grounds for assuming that man may still triumph over society.

Cozzens, on the contrary, is an anti-romantic pessimist who possesses not a youth complex but an age complex, who deplores change, and who sees his characters not in conflict with society, but as people who have little meaning apart from their place in society. For Cozzens, the romantic individualist is a menace. He has often been described as a conservative, not so much in the political sense, but, more important, in the artistic sense, in that the attitudes we find in his novels may preclude the exercise of the creative imagination. It is a contractive, not an expansive document,' wrote Mr. Maxwell Geismar of By Love Possessed in a symposium a few years ago on Cozzens in Critique magazine, 'and one almost suspects that beneath its measured harmony lies an anguished, perhaps a morbid fear of life . One can see why this view of Cozzens's work exists, although one disagrees with it. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Cozzens is not concerned with the potentialities of man; he is concerned with his limitations. It seems extremely doubtful if this can ever be a popular viewpoint.

Yet the publication of a new collected volume of Cozzens's stories, Children and Others,* helps us to take a new look at this most dispassionate of novelists. Most of these seventeen stories, origin- ally published in the 1930s, are either about childhood or schooldays with an American middle-class background; the rest of the collec- tion includes two historical sketches on the Civil War, some studies of broken marriages and sexual failure with a Cuban background, and a long, possibly autobiographical story, 'Eyes to See,' about a fifteen-year-old's recollection of the tribal rituals at his mother's funeral. Unlike Cozzens's novels with their sprawling tapestry of major and minor characters, the emphasis in these stories is on recollection rather than creation. The stories of schooldays are amusing, those of childhood precise, and always the treatment avoids that sentimentality that one finds too often in English writers on these themes.

CHILDREN AND OTHERS.. By J. G. COZZCRS. (Longman's, 21s.)

In the long story 'Eyes to See,' for example, the young narrator, in the traumatic turmoil of family obsequies, reflects that `My occasion of disquiet was that, even in these moments, an uneasy awareness was growing that if I didn't concentrate on feeling sorrow, I might, in appalling fact, forget to feel it.'

In this detached assessment of grief, there is a strong sense of unbreakable family ties. The claims of the group are all-compelling. At the end of 'Some Day You'll be Sorry,' the grown-up Smith HI returns to his old prep school deter mined to attack its entire ethos. But the opposite happens; and Smith delivers a passionate defence of Durham School:

Grant Lindsay found him afterwards, as the meeting was breaking up.

'Listen, Benson, you missed your calling. I'll bet you netted [the headmaster] an extra thousand.'

`That's funny, isn't it,' Bcnson Smith said, 'I'd come here to pan the whole outfit.'

Grant Lindsay looked at him. . . . 'Yes,' he said, 'the old place has sort of a hold on one, hasn't it?'

What we see in these stories is a display of Cozzens's analytic talents without the detail and the complexity of the situations he had made his own—the predicament of the professional man when he comes into conflict with his chosen en- vironment, always posing the question: what are the limits of the possible in human behaviour? Where do the demands of conscience end and the claims of society begin?

In Children and Others we can see the early Cozzens partly working out these problems against the background of an eastern prep school, and, indeed, his work has shown a de- veloping preoccupation with professional life: the merchant-marine (S.S. San Pedro, 1931), medicine (The Last Adam, 1933), the clergy (Men and Brethren, 1936), politics and the law (The lust and the Unjust, 1942), the services (Guard of Honour, 1948), law and marriage (By Love Possessed, 1957). In these novels, the underlying themes of man in society, the limits of action, and the curious, often .irrational way in which insti- tutional decisions evolve are controlled by two technical devices which remain broadly unaltered; the unities are usually preserved and, secondly, Cozzens's extremely detailed, allusive descrip- tive style means that we see his characters, and not only his leading characters, in almost Joycean depth. The extremely complex action

of Guard of Honour, for example, takes but three days, and is concentrated on one airbase, both The Just and the Unjust and By Love Possessed are set in small-town, while 'the action of Men and Brethren rarely moves outside a fashionable New York vicarage.

Yet the novels differ widely in their treatment of common themes. In The Last Adam, known as A Cure of Flesh in Britain, we see a typhoid epidemic rampaging through a New England town, partly as a result of dereliction by an egocentric, all-defying GP, Dr. Bull eventually bawls out a critical town meeting, aided by an unsavoury parish-pump politician, but the point that the writer makes in his characteristically subtle way is that however desirable, the doctor's removal may be on utopian grounds, such an action in a small community would be worse than his retention. In much the same way, in Men and Brethren, an Episcopal vicar has to repudiate a disgraced colleague; his superior reminds him that his duty is to the Church, not to individuals, and Cozzens leaves us wondering whether the claims of charity or the Church as an institution have greater validity. Again, in The Just and the Unjust, he shows how different are the forms of law and politics, but how close are their ways of operating as human institutions. In the setting of a murder trial, we see not only how the jury acts as an arbiter between an often irrational public and an often impossibly abstract legal code, but that politicians, no matter how opportunist their bar- gaining, are indispensable in reconciling theory and practice in an imperfect society. There is no human activity, reflects one character, `in which practice is the same as theory.' Both lawyers and politicians are brokers of humanity's invincible frailty, and both know that the only possible attitude towards large schemes of human enterprise is one of profound scepticism.

All these themes are gathered up and pre- sented in a masterly way in Guard of Honour, Cozzens's best novel. Set at Ocanara airbase and its environs in Florida during 1943, Cozzens here deploys scores of characters, turning this com- plex society into an allegory of America at total war. Two crucial examples of the disparity be- tween the theoretical and the practical dominate the action, the first the difficulty of integrating the coloured officers at Ocanara, a problem impos- sible to solve as the irremovable prejudice of the Southerners in and around the base must wring a tortuous compromise from service authorities officially dedicated to equality. But the theoretical must also yield to the practical on the very highest levels of the war, as General `Jo-Jo' Nichols, urbane emissary from.the Penta- gon, reminds Colonel Ross, air inspector at Ocanara, former judge, and the most memorable custodian of Cozzens's outlook in his entire work. Nichols has just seen the Allied leaders grappling with the discrepancies between the desirable and the practical at the Quebec conference:

Yes . . . the possible! That engaged them a lot. The problem as always, as I see it, is to find out what that is; because that's all. You have to work inside that. The top echelon rides the whirlwind, all right; but sometimes the storm seems to do the directing. That limits your choice, your freedom. Certain things that it might be wise to do can't be done. . . .

Man's actions are so circumscribed that freedom is often a delusion; the epigraph of Guard of Honour invites comparison of thd 'whirlwind' with Ariel: • . . I and my fellows Arc ministers of fate; the elements, Of whom your swords are temper'd, may as well Wound the loud winds, or with bemock'd-at stabs Kill the still-closing waters, as diminish

One dowle that's in my plume: my fellow ministers Arc like invulnerable. . .

In the face of this deeply realistic assessment

of existence, of the uncontrollable forces that dominate our lives, what can a man do? For as Colonel Ross reflects, 'There could never be a man so brave that he would not sometime, in the end, turn part or all coward; or so wise that he was not, from beginning to end, part ass if you knew where to look; or so good that nothing

at all about him was despicable . . Carrying on with this stoical assessment, Ross bravely decides that `Downheartedness was no man's part. A man must stand up and do the best he can with what there is. . . . If mind failed you, seeing no pattern; and heart failed' you, seeing no point, the stout stubborn will must be up and doing . . .' The lesson is that meaning can only be given to a bleak existence by formalised codes of behaviour to make men tolerable to their fellow creatures—devices such as a guard of honour, 'a suitable mark of our regret for mortality,' as Ross remarks in a charac- teristic throw-away line that explains the title of the novel.

Many of the attitudes of Guard of Honour are found in By Love Possessed, which is, if anything, even more structurally complex than Guard of Honour as it deals with most of the permutations of love through its clinical ex- amination of the life of a Pennsylvania small- town lawyer, Arthur Winner. The mocking de- scriptions of Winner's affair with the wife of his law partner, lying at the heart of the book, have sometimes been taken as illustrating Cozzens's belief that the sexual drives can only be decently satisfied within marriage. Yet this is surely mis- interpreting a scene which has great comic potential as the 'crisis of connection' of the clandestine lovers takes place with . . . some impassioned moments of the now en- gendered beast of two backs, of that acting androgyne whose he-half was excitedly prodding and probing, whose she-half was excitedly prodded and probed. The little life-span of the beast soon sped, its death was died. As the she- hairs flings about in her extremity, the he-half's spoonful of phrenetic sensation was tweaked to spend itself—and there! There was the buy, the bargain, the prize, the pearl of price! All pos- sible gain now realised. . . .

The prize, the pearl . . . what Cozzens is saying here is that all experience is indi- visible. That apostle of reason and rectitude, Arthur Winner, not only couples with Marjorie Penrose, but at the end of By Love Possessed dis- covers that his entire career is built on the defalcations of his senior partner, and that his affair has been known all along to Julian Pen- rose. In fact, with his pessimistic stoicism, his belief in the limits of human freedom, the still necessary claims of conscience, and the univer- sality of experience, no matter what the insti- tution or the situation, Cozzens reaches back to a pre-romantjc tradition. Was it not John Adams, in the earliest years of the Republic, who be- lieved that 'human passions are insatiable' and that 'self-interest, private avidity, ambition and avarice will exist in every state of society and under every form of government'? It is these Passions and the way in which men have tried to control them that Cozzens has made his subject : the attitude that informs his work is not the conservative, but the classical.