Living with Books

...Even in the texture of the writing, Cozzens's virtues are more highly developed than ever before...

...Ernest Cudlipp in I/en and Brethren—like almost all Cozzens's heroes e\cept Dr...

...But I could discover in his books little evidence of the kind of inner pressure that is essential to greatness...

...A richness of literary allusion widens the implications of the writing, and an unobtrusive, uninsistent use of symbols points to deeper meanings...

...the religiosity of the friend of a friend and the mindlessness of a juvenile delinquent are juxtaposed...

...the narrator is an old man looking back on his youth...

...Now we have Brace's The World of Carrick's Cove (Norton, $3.95) to demonstrate how good the traditional novel can be, while By Love Possessed (Harcourt, Brace, $5.00) raises the question whether Cozzens hasn't transcended the limits of tradition, whether he hasn't achieved a fresh creation while adhering to the forms of conventional fiction...

...Marjorie Penrose, wife of Arthur's crippled partner, plays with the idea of conversion, and Julius, her husband, ruthlessly analyzes her motives in talk with Arthur...

...At 16 Ben decides to finish the sloop begun many years earlier by his grandfather, and he does it, too, in a way that Brace describes with loving but never tiresome detail...

...he has not surrendered his reason...

...The word "love," which has such favorable connotations in most contemporary writing, is employed more skeptically by Mr...

...Miner ("nates in The Just and the Unjust...

...Craftsmanship is operating against pressure, and the result is a novel to which talk of greatness is not irrelevant...

...That the experimentalists should be praised and encouraged is right, but this is no reason for underrating traditional novelists of ability...

...Suddenly orphaned, Helen has devoted her life to young Ralph while being employed as Noah Tuttle's secretary...

...In the meantime we have learned a good deal about Arthur and his friends in Brocton...

...We see Ben growing up on Weymouth Island with his strangely irresponsible and incompetent father, his understandably unhappy mother, and a younger brother and sister...

...At the end, when Julius Penrose speaks of Helen Detweiler as "possessed by love," we are not to forget that her love for her brother Ralph harmed him and destroyed her...

...Pratt, Marjorie's proselytizing friend, and this is startling, for Arthur is clerk of the vestry of the Episcopal Church and the new rector's candidate for senior warden...

...Most of the incidents are of a simple sort, as befits such a story...

...The defense of reason is central in the book, being most dramatically manifested in a surprising attack on Catholicism...

...We have met his partners—the aged but still active Noah Tuttle, father of Arthur's deceased wife, and Julius Penrose, who has been crippled by polio—and we have seen him with his intimates, most of whom belong, as he does, to the old Brocton families...

...Winner proves that he has achieved it, and then is confronted with a situation that seems to leave reason helpless...

...The pleasure such a novel can give ought not to be underestimated...

...Have I a complaint...

...In most of Cozzens's novels the action takes place in a day or two, and no one is more adept at employing the devices required by this kind of compression...

...Part I ends some nine hours and 265 pages later, when his 15-year-old daughter by his first wife comes upon him as he has all too obviously been making love to his second wife...

...That earlier judgment is now called in question, in my own mind, by the new novel...

...Rut then there are troubles, as with such a father there are bound to be, and Ben waits a long time for his Cora...

...Reasonable in all things, Arthur is reasonable enough to recognize the limits of reason...

...He knows that he has failed in his relations with both his sons...

...Yet Brace has been writing novels for more than 20 years and Cozzens for more than 30, and, unlike some of their experimental contemporaries, both have grown in stature...

...Winner's own sexual activities, for example, are compared and contrasted with Ralph Detweiler's unfortunate experiments...

...the reflections of an aging Negro with a heart condition illuminate for Winner experiences of his own and of his friends...

...When Guard of Honor was published—nine years ago now!—the late Bernard De Voto wrote something to the effect that Cozzens was the greatest living American novelist...

...We note that Arthur Winner, confronted with what is unreasonable, finds reason his ultimate reliance...

...We are to assume that Arthur, like his father, who was senior warden in his time, practices "practical churchmanship...

...the time is 60-odd years ago...

...Everything is made to count for as much as possible...

...James Gould Cozzens, for example, although he has had honors enough of a sort, is rarely mentioned in the writings of the more serious critics of contemporary literature, and Gerald Warner Brace, who is comparable to Cozzens though not his equal, is never mentioned at all...

...By Love Possessed, on the other hand, strikes me as being an event of considerable importance for American literature...

...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Traditional Novels by Gerald Warner Brace and James Gould Cozzens Critical opinion today places a high value on the innovating novelists, those who try to find ways of making the novel do more than it has done before...

...At the outset, contemplating his father's gilt clock, with its motto, Omnia vincit amor, Arthur reflects that love does indeed conquer all, and smiles at this "triumph of unreason...

...Unlike its predecessors, The World of Carrick's Cove is a novel of pure nostalgia...

...The events of the crowded weekend show him that, because he followed the dictates of reason, he has some degree of responsibility for the tragedy of Helen Detweiler...

...Bull in The Last Adam—Winner is a dispassionate man...

...More than most men, he has lived his life by the light of reason, and at 54 he can legitimately take satisfaction in this accomplishment...

...After that he gets himself a girl...

...Irked by the books he reads about "the old ways," Ben Carrick decides to try "to tell the truth straight out," and it seems likely that the account Brace has put into Ben's mouth is as accurate as any modern account can be...

...He has endowed his principal characters with great articulate-ness and, though the dialogue is no more realistic than Henry James's, he persuades us to accept it...

...It is his most complex book—and he has chosen complex themes in all his more recent novels—and it is his densest...

...Cozzens makes clear that the life of reason, which he obviously admires, is not easily achieved...

...I will not argue that this is an important novel, but I like the book, and I respect its author...

...This, I felt at the time, much as I admired Guard of Honor, was not merely wrong but wrong-headed, for greatness was just what I couldn't find in Cozzens's work...

...Yes," he thinks...

...The point, then, is not that Cozzens has abandoned reason in favor of feeling, but that here, more than in anything he has written before, he has given feeling its due, so that a tension is set up that makes the whole richly conceived, finely constructed novel vibrate with life...

...Cozzens is saying not that reason is wrong but that its way is difficult—and sometimes impossible—in this world...

...The adroitness and plausibility with which Brace lets Ben tell his own story, the choice of details by which he gives verisimilitude to his account of "the old ways," the evocation of a place and a time and the mood of youth—these are admirable...

...He was good, tremendously good, a fine craftsman, conscientious, honest, shrewd, even wise...

...And the crushing discovery that he makes in the book's last, its forty-ninth, hour is a humbling reminder that obedience to reason and conscience is possible only for the man who is lucky...

...He has always written with complete clarity and with none of the sloppi-ness so often associated with what is called "the common style...

...Brace has made himself the novelist of New England, and what he usually does—as in his best and best-known novel, The Garretson Chronicle, and in the more recent Bell's Landing—is to examine the values of the New England past as they have lived into the present...

...The novel begins at 3 o'clock on a Friday afternoon, with Arthur Winner talking with his widowed mother...

...We follow him for a period of 48 hours, during which he is confronted with what must be even for him an unusual number of difficult problems, and we can only respect his self-discipline, integrity, generosity of spirit, and wisdom...

...By Love Possessed is the story of Arthur Winner, a successful, much respected lawyer in Brocton...

...Here, without forsaking clarity and correctness, he achieves great eloquence and even poetic power...

...Cozzens is committed here, and he writes with intensity, so that in the end the book moves me as I have been moved by no other book of his...

...Arthur himself takes up the attack in conversation with Mrs...

...He has dealt with some persisting problems during this period, his own and other people's, and has been exposed to some new ones, chiefly the problem of Helen Detweiler and her brother Ralph...

...Like Colonel Ross in Guard of Honor...

...As always, he is in control of his materials, but here a new tension is created, for one can feel the struggle that control demands...

...Its scene is the Maine coast, a region Brace has come to know well in summer after summer...

...He was too detached, I felt, too uncommitted, to be a great creative artist...

...There is great warmth in the book but not sentimentality...

...a city of six or seven thousand, presumably located in Pennsylvania...

...Now Ralph is in trouble with a girl—with two girls, in fact— and Helen's problem becomes Arthur Winner's...

...The general point of view, as always in Cozzens, seems to be that of conservatism, but we must note that Arthur Winner is a rational rather than a traditional conservative...

...He cannot forget that, after the death of his first wife, he was involved in an affair with Marjorie Penrose, an affair that reason must have condemned on a hundred grounds...

...life which has so unfairly served so many others at last unfairly serves me —really, at long last...

...And there is much skill in the characterization, especially in the portrayal of Ben's father, who is, to paraphrase Conrad, unfortunate and undeserving...

...The story he tells in By Love Possessed may be no more complicated than that set forth in Guard of Honor, but in the new novel he has succeeded in playing one theme against another in the most elaborate and effective kind of counterpoint...