Resurrecting a Writer
WIEGAND, WILLIAM
Resurrecting a Writer James Gould Cozzens: A Life Apart By Matthew J. Bruccoli Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 343 pp. $15.95. Reviewed by William Wiegand, Author, "The Chester A. Arthur...
...he was a Puritan who made a vow when young to be an author and positively needed permission for even short-term release from it...
...In character to the end, he also declined any meetings with Bruccoli, a veteran biographer of American writers...
...his praise for her contributions seems always to have been whole-hearted...
...Baumgarten's sister, one of the few outsiders who saw the novelist more than occasionally, observed after a while that he was getting "bored with himself...
...She commuted from their home in Lambertville, New Jersey, and he stayed in the house and wrote...
...We learn from Bruccoli of Cozzens' unconscious complicity in this portrait, for he declined an offer to read the piece prior to publication...
...Reviewed by William Wiegand, Author, "The Chester A. Arthur Conspiracy" For 43 years beginning at age 25, James Gould Cozzens, the author of some uncommonly good novels during the height of his career, did little except write...
...Bruccoli has made no real attempt to penetrate the relationship...
...One wonders if it was Baumgarten who succeeded in getting Cozzens to make a few tense and reluctant late forays into public service, usually connected with Harvard, the alma mater, or Princeton, where he used the library, or Kent, his prep school...
...Few of the sources knew the novelist intimately, but that was the way he wanted it...
...The author was not surprised by old age, but he was deeply resentful of it...
...Subsequently he regretted not having taken the opportunity to correct misquotations...
...Nonetheless, his work was superior during this period...
...that if you need help, most people will, if they possibly can, try to help you...
...Cozzens' respect for W. Somerset Maugham, a writer then as now out of fashion, appears to have fortified his attitude toward his own work...
...Other critics joined the cry...
...a bit of proper romancing with various young ladies before marriage...
...He worked conscientiously, too, flying from base to base to do his research in proper fashion...
...No battlefields, gold rushes, bullfights, or French cafes here...
...Cozzens in turn often assisted his wife by evaluating manuscripts she brought home from the office...
...certainly no running to Hollywood to find solace with a gossip columnist or a script girl...
...that if you're civil and honest in your dealings with him, he'11 be the same...
...He talked to fliers about equipment...
...people eventually were ready to like Ike again, but not to like all those mordant novels about professional men...
...Although he wrote them because money was needed in the house, they do not feel pre-shrunk for the consumer...
...drinking and gardening became practically his only diversions from writing...
...Readers who know Cozzens through his only books that still seem to sell a little-the brief and elliptical early novellas, 5.5...
...He clearly enjoyed the drinking and playing that went along with the uniform...
...Ever the Puritan, he quit cold...
...And in the manner of Arthur Winner, he deliberated over his judgments...
...Despite escaping unhurt, he decided that he and Baumgarten should leave Massachusetts, where they had been living for most of the years since her retirement...
...Even his slick magazine stories were comically, implacably his own...
...No one could have had less personal stake in the social pecking order...
...In essence, the records confirm that he fathered no children, sought no friendships, pursued no feuds, supported no causes, and welcomed no literary awards...
...Ten days afterward, he blacked out while driving alone and demolished his car...
...In short, I don't remember ever in my life meeting personally a character of O'Hara's...
...Most of all, one is tempted to admire the marriage of over half a century to the point of sentimentalizing it...
...Bruccoli's study provides the counterpoint of the life that made them possible...
...The unflattering aspects of the Time profile notwithstanding, they pegged Cozzens as a prototypical Luce celebrity of the Eisenhower years...
...a job or two tutoring...
...He who had "lived to write" drank no more and wrote no more, although he did help Bruccoli (by mail and phone) prepare the Cozzens anthology, Just Representations...
...He had to know the names of things...
...San Pedro and Castaway-might look at the parachute drop sequence of Guard of Honor for its lucid perfection of tone and its range of focus and implication...
...The two did correspond a bit, though, and before his death in 1978 Cozzens put aside documents he thought might be useful...
...Bernice Baumgarten died in January 1978, and Cozzens a few months later of pneumonia while receiving cobalt treatment for spine cancer...
...In 1927, when Cozzens was 24 years old and already the author of two published novels, he chose for his wife Ber-nice Baumgarten, a prominent New York literary agent until her retirement in the late '50s...
...Perhaps it was the one time in his life when he contributed in a conventional way to a group endeavor...
...Later, the War allowed him three full years of knockabout human contact that it is hard to see how he could have done without...
...In his private assessments, Cozzens was as a rule even-handed...
...Of course, he was lucky in his assignment: Baumgarten was frequently able to take leave from the Brandt & Brandt agency and set up households for them at his various stations...
...Or they might examine the often parodied opening meditation of Arthur Winner in By Love Possessed for density of effect and lyric power, however "mannered" the style...
...No tide of new interest in Cozzens ever rolled in...
...this one suddenly became a huge best seller...
...Without question, the largest amount of public attention was paid to him in 1957 upon the appearance of By Love Possessed, a study of a smalltown lawyer named Arthur Winner...
...Guard of Honor was published in 1948 and By Love Possessed nine years later...
...After 10 months he felt the purpose was served and left...
...a cool relationship with his father, who died young...
...Now Matthew J. Bruccoli attempts to give definition to that "life apart" by means of the journals and letters Cozzens left behind, as well as through interviews with people who were acquainted with him...
...Bruccoli's biography shows that there are things to like about the novelist as well-the dignity of the man, the perseverance, the working intelligence, the awareness of his own faults, the helpless integrity...
...a trip to the Caribbean, and another to Europe...
...Still, we do learn that Baumgarten marketed Cozzens' work and gave him editorial advice he valued...
...This fairness was an important source of his strength as a writer...
...Consider the following benign paragraph about John O'Hara's work: "O'Hara's procession, literally unbroken, of mean and cheap bastards, all quite convincing and also all wonderfully varied in situation and character, is hard for me (for my experience) toaccept and credit...
...To celebrate the occasion, Time ran a cover story on "the hermit of Lambertville," presenting him as a snobbish curmudgeon who was possibly a racist to boot...
...James-Gould Cozzens' view of the world was essentially tragic...
...He would in time say that he should have died in the accident...
...None of this might have mattered in the long run if Cozzens had one more big book inhim.Hedidn't...
...Most of his 11 previous novels had been respected, and several of them honored...
...As did Henry James, he gave others their due...
...It seems apparent that he did not-as has frequently been charged-choose men in law, medicine, the clergy, and the military for his subjects because he was impressed with their conservative ideas or their social status...
...Rather, he shared their senseof work as a calling...
...They moved to Florida...
...The rare disruptions of Cozzens' privacy provide the high points of the biography...
...For the rest, there is some, not too much, expensive education...
...In the late '30s, Baumgarten, who for the most part shared her husband's view that a writer should be at home writing, suggested his work was becoming too "literary...
...Commentators such as Dwight Mac-Donald and Irving Howe quickly landed on "the hermit" and his book...
...When Fortune offered him a full-time job, Cozzens at first balked, then accepted, hoping it would give him "material...
...Ultimately the drinking, begun in earnest when Cozzens was in uniform?and which he said made "all look well in some indeterminate, yet completely reassuring and confidence-inspiring way"-became deleterious enough for his doctor to advise in 1971 that it stop...
...They are keenly felt, finely made, and deserve to last...
...Cozzens was never simply an introvert...
...Service in the Air Force -where his duties included preparing combat flight manuals and writing speeches for the top brass-not only gave him the subject matter for his best novel, Guard of Honor, but seemed generally to revive his responsiveness to people and their personalities...
...a warmer one with his mother...
...It's my experience, so constant that occasional exceptions almost shock me, that if you're honest with a person, he'll be honest right back...
...Morning Noon and Night, his next and last novel, was destined to lie dead in the water, leaving the logjam from the By Love Possessed controversy uncleared...
...His recurrent theme was regret at human carelessness, most fully explored in his two best books...
...A single sentence suffices to record a minor indiscretion at Harvard, plus one more to note, a peccadillo committed in World War II...
...Cozzens' monastic side took over again upon his return to civilian life...
...Bruccoli's excerpts from his subject's journals reveal a temperament less grouchy than we might expect...
Vol. 66 • October 1983 • No. 18
