Dwight Macdonald's trenchant essay “Masscult and Midcult” (1960) is the most sweeping—and the most famous—formulation by an American of the postwar animus against middlebrow culture. Yet “Masscult and Midcult” was not the opening shot in Macdonald's war against the pernicious products of the entertainment and publishing industries but, rather, the culminating episode in a campaign the writer had been waging for some time. By the early 1950s, Macdonald was already condemning particular works that, in his view, represented philistine assaults on art and language: Great Books of the Western World, the Revised Standard version of the Bible, Colin Wilson's British best seller The Outsider. In 1958, he issued his most inflammatory such piece, a review in Commentary excoriating James Gould Cozzens's widely praised novel By Love Possessed.Footnote ¹

More pointed and (hard as it may be to believe) more vitriolic than “Masscult and Midcult,” Macdonald's review, which he titled “By Cozzens Possessed,” is also possibly more interesting than the later essay because it provoked an equally vehement (although largely private) response from Cozzens. An inquiry into the assumptions of both parties to the discussion is especially useful in connecting the mid-century attack on middlebrow culture to the ongoing tensions surrounding the relationships among authors, readers, and critics in modern America. If blogs and Amazon.com have empowered ordinary readers in the digital age, the Macdonald–Cozzens affair suggests that, along with other literary tempests in the immediate postwar period, the episode helped prepare the way for the challenges to professional criticism that technology accelerated. A look at the circumstances that shaped the novel's popularity and at the values and reading practices that Cozzens and his public exemplified demonstrates as well how designating an author and his audience as “middlebrow” had as much to do with literary politics and institutions as with standards of taste. More generally, Cozzens's and Macdonald's shared tendency to misgauge the power of the opposition is an instructive reminder that cultural authority, while it may appear entrenched, is often precarious and always open to renegotiation on the basis of the anxieties in play at a given historical moment.Footnote ²

***

Given American academics’ penchant for enshrining alienated intellectuals, Macdonald's is a far more familiar name than his adversary's. Born in 1903, James Gould Cozzens was a graduate of the Kent School and completed two years at Harvard before taking what turned out to be a permanent leave of absence in 1924 in order to write fiction. By the early 1930s, Cozzens had discovered the subject that became his signature: the lives of white, middle-class men who grapple with issues of duty to others. The Last Adam (1933) portrayed a renegade doctor, Men and Brethren (1936) a priest in the Episcopal Church (of which Cozzens was himself a member). In The Just and the Unjust (1942) he turned to the legal profession, a source of special fascination for him. These vocational novels—especially the lawyer tales—link him to his popular contemporaries John Marquand and Louis Auchincloss.Footnote ³

Cozzens's next book, Guard of Honor, was a story of military discipline and race relations set on an air force base in Florida that resembled Cozzens's own posting during World War II. Drawing on the 1945 Freeman Field mutiny by African American airmen, the novel carried forward Cozzens's preoccupation with middle-class professionals by assigning Colonel Norman Ross, a judge in peacetime, the role of wise negotiator between principle and expediency. As Alfred Kazin noted, Guard of Honor evinced Cozzens's ability to master an immense amount of technical detail, to render clearly a dizzying array of characters, and to achieve a level of control over structure and language that paralleled the maintenance of moral order on which the plot turned. Guard of Honor won its author the Pulitzer Prize for 1949; Malcolm Cowley and others have called it the best novel of the war.Footnote ⁴

The accolades the book received heightened the expectations of both the publishing business and the reading public when, after a nine-year hiatus, Cozzens produced his twelfth novel, By Love Possessed, which appeared in September 1957. Its middle-aged hero, Arthur Winner, is an attorney in a small city between New York and Washington. Following law school, Winner had joined the firm his father and Noah Tuttle had founded; years later, after Arthur Winner Sr's death, his son has come to regard him as the exemplary “Man of Reason.” But the son's professional and personal life has repeatedly drawn him into the realm of passion, where impulse, rather than law, holds sway. In the course of the novel, which takes place over a two-day period, Winner must assist his prim, conscientious secretary Helen Detweiler by stepping in as counsel when her brother Ralph is charged with rape. Ralph flees without knowing that he is about to be exonerated; Helen, awash in shame, commits suicide. Simultaneously, Winner learns that Tuttle, possessed not by sexual love but by prideful self-protection, has embezzled money from trust funds in order to compensate investors for their losses following the bankruptcy of a trolley line he had backed. Winner's own defections from reason have involved him in an affair with the wife of another partner in the firm, Julius Penrose. (The wife's attraction to Catholicism serves as an additional example of unreason, which prompted numerous complaints from readers, as did Cozzens's patronizing portrayal of a Jew-turned-Episcopalian.) At the end of the book, Cozzens positions Winner as a man caught (like Colonel Ross) between his allegiance to principle and his appreciation for practical realities: Penrose, who has long known about the affair and the embezzlement, points out that fingering Tuttle would ruin everyone involved. Aware that allowing Tuttle's illegal practices to continue in order to square the accounts would involve him in “a whole life of lies,”Footnote ⁵ Winner nevertheless apparently chooses to countenance wrongdoing for the greater good, a moral compromise he has always abhorred.

The initial reviews of By Love Possessed were uniformly positive, albeit with some demurrals regarding Cozzens's prose style. (None of the major reviewers raised concerns about the Cozzens's religious prejudices.) In the New Yorker, Brendan Gill called the book a “masterpiece” and “an immense achievement.” Cowley, in the New York Times, termed Cozzens an astute observer of “human nature and human institutions” whose work deserved wider exposure. Edward Weeks of the Atlantic Monthly and John Fischer of Harper's voiced similar views. Reviewers in the liberal journals of opinion—Richard Ellman, Howard Nemerov, and Granville Hicks, writing in the Reporter, the Nation, and the New Leader, respectively—all weighed in with at least qualified praise of By Love Possessed. The book sold 170,000 copies in the first six weeks after publication. It was first on the New York Times best-seller list from late September 1957 to early March 1958, staying on the list for a total of thirty-four weeks. Hardcover sales (including Book-of-the-Month Club distribution) reached 500,000 copies before the novel brought a record price for paperback rights. A 240-page Reader's Digest Condensed edition sold more than three million copies. The New Yorker captured the instant cachet the novel acquired in a cartoon depicting one older woman remarking to another, “I was looking forward to a few weeks of just doing nothing after Labor Day when along came James Gould Cozzens.”Footnote ⁶

***

Macdonald's review in Commentary for January 1958 burst this bubble of enthusiasm. Macdonald had recently made the transition from his earlier career as political radical to a role as freelance critic, and brought to the table, so to speak, the personal anxieties attending that transition. Born in 1906, Macdonald shared Cozzens's prep school, Ivy League education and familiarity with Arthur Winner's milieu; in fact his father was a lawyer. Those commonalities make the Cozzens–Macdonald episode not a story of how class interests shape cultural hierarchy (the approach many literary scholars and historians have favoredFootnote ⁷) but, rather, one of competition within a fractured elite. Well before graduating from Yale in 1928, however, Macdonald had developed what his biographer, Michael Wreszin, has called his “lifelong suspicion of wealth.” In the mid-1930s, Macdonald had channeled his critique of capitalism into support for the Communist Party; later, affiliated with Partisan Review, he had shifted to the Trotskyist, noncommunist left. For a time, he succeeded in “having Marxism and modernism march together as political and aesthetic comrades-in-arms.” Although Macdonald broke with his PR colleagues in 1944 and remained committed to revolutionary socialism longer than they did, in the immediate postwar period he believed, with other New York Intellectuals, that, as George Cotkin has noted, “they had finally achieved hegemony as critics.” But the moment of triumph was short-lived. By 1945 Macdonald, as editor of Politics, was increasingly dismissive of Marxism. The arrival of the Cold War further diminished Macdonald's prospects for effecting social change. In those circumstances, Macdonald decided to cast aside political radicalism and to concentrate on cultural matters.Footnote ⁸

Macdonald's long history of insecurity influenced how he managed the shift. Wracked with uncertainty about his intellectual abilities, he also increasingly exhibited what Wreszin termed his “closet absorption in the very mass culture he condemned,” as well as dependence on middlebrow outlets such as the New Yorker. Defensively, he imported into the cultural arena the role of gadfly he had played on the left, and made crankiness the defining feature of his style. His need for distinctiveness and legitimacy accounts, more than anything, for the tone he brought to the Cozzens review. To what degree his vehemence toward Cozzens's characters sprang from ambivalence about his own background is also a tantalizing question.Footnote ⁹

Yet, as formerly alienated intellectuals took up academic posts to teach the expanding university population of the 1950s, doubts about the “hegemony” of the oppositional critic added a more general urgency to literary discussion. The same winter that Macdonald's piece appeared, Geoffrey Wagner published an essay in the American Scholar decrying “The Decline of Book Reviewing.” Large-circulation newspaper book-review supplements were especially guilty of rejecting conscientious criticism in favor of less rigorous reviewing; as proof, Wagner offered the example of Maxwell Geismar's warm reception of Marjorie Morningstar on the first page of the New York Times Book Review and his chillier remarks in the Nation. Accusing the media of failing to differentiate “serious fiction” from “trash” and of pandering to popular appeal, Wagner anticipated the position that Elizabeth Hardwick, writing in Harper's two years later, would take in her own article entitled “The Decline of Book Reviewing.”Footnote ¹⁰

In “By Cozzens Possessed,” Macdonald joined that jeremiad tradition, which he inflected with his newly reconstituted hostility (“such reviews, such enthusiasm, such unanimity, such nonsense!”). He began by lambasting, one by one, the reviewers who had praised the novel. Then he mounted his own double-barreled critique. First, he accused Cozzens of creating characters who speak and behave artificially. Far from exemplifying the power of passion, Macdonald claimed, Arthur Winner came off as full of rectitude and self-satisfaction: a result all the more disturbing because Cozzens was unaware of it. In a letter to Commentary subsequent to the review's publication, Macdonald went further, linking Winner's deplorable caution to his social status as “an Episcopalian zombie.” Finding incredulous the idea that such a “decent” man would have an affair with a partner's wife, Macdonald singled out the sex scenes in By Love Possessed as especially formulaic and false; they proceeded not from Cozzens's artistry but merely from his desire to sell books.Footnote ¹¹

The second aspect of Macdonald's attack revolved around Cozzens's deficiencies as a stylist. By Love Possessed contained passages that were, in Macdonald's view, “as bad as prose can get.” Cozzens relished classical and Shakespearean allusions; inverted sentence structure, which Macdonald dubbed “pointless,” was one of his specialties. Even more pervasive was Cozzens's fondness for arcane, latinate language—a level of diction that challenged the most erudite readers. “Toujours le Mot Injuste,” Macdonald railed. “If there's an inexpressive word, Cozzens will find it.” The result was a distance from ordinary speech that Macdonald likened to the worst excesses of nineteenth-century British fiction. The novelist's preoccupation with the formal language of the law, which dominated long courtroom scenes and exchanges between Winner and his fellow attorneys, compounded his allegedly “turgid” style. Macdonald traced the sources of Cozzens's tin ear to his isolation from a cosmopolitan literary tradition, as well as from a vibrant intellectual community. Those long-standing problems of American writers, exacerbated by the author's reclusiveness (Cozzens lived in rural New Jersey and rarely socialized with anyone other than his wife), explained but did not excuse Cozzens's “grotesque” effort to produce “Literature.”Footnote ¹²

These defects were less troubling to Macdonald, however, than the critical acclaim and large audience the book achieved, because both developments reflected the sorry state of American culture. The reception of Cozzens's novel, Macdonald declared in the final section of the review, was an “episode” in what he called “The Middlebrow Counter-Revolution.” Spurred by writings in the early 1940s of Archibald MacLeish and Van Wyck Brooks, the critics who embraced Cozzens did so, Macdonald thought, in order to strike a blow against the “fashionable” assumption that great literature could emanate only from a modernist avant-garde. Cozzens symbolized for his advocates a rejection of the pretensions, the arrogance, and the “negativism” that animated the producers of high culture. Quoting reviewers whom he saw as bent on giving Cozzens his due despite his exclusion from the community of the alienated, Macdonald sarcastically detected “a highbrow conspiracy of paranoic dimensions.” In reality, he argued, power lay not in the hands of the disaffected artist, whose skeptical stance was a “luxury” the Cold War could not afford, but, rather, in the producers and consumers of middlebrow culture to whom the reviewers of By Love Possessed were shamelessly pandering. For Macdonald's money, the critics who proclaimed themselves Cozzens's admirers were as guilty as Cozzens of lowering aesthetic standards and eroding the quality of American literature.Footnote ¹³

***

It may be helpful to stipulate at this point that Macdonald was right about Cozzens in several respects. First, although Cozzens never employed the word “middlebrow” himself, and while part of the purpose of this essay is to emphasize the instability of the category, Cozzens can justifiably be called a middlebrow writer because of the wide distribution of his novels to what the Book-of-the-Month Club called “average intelligent readers.” And, yes, the prose seems overwritten, as Cozzens later partially admitted. Moreover, Cozzens's religious prejudices cannot be denied. Yet Macdonald's explanation of the initial response to By Love Possessed in terms of the influence of Brooks and MacLeish on reviewers’ “counter-revolutionary” decision to redress the snobbery of the avant-garde misses a host of other factors that contributed to the book's success.

First, Cozzens contributed to and profited from the postwar vogue of the novel as magnum opus. The hefty hardcover edition ran close to six hundred pages. As such, it joined other lengthy best sellers of the 1950s—James Jones's From Here to Eternity (1951), Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny (1951), MacKinlay Kantor's Andersonville (1955)—that announced the end of wartime paper shortages and, perhaps, the reading public's attention span before television became ubiquitous. The sheer bulk of the text suggests publishers’ eagerness to capitalize on their perception that audiences equated a book's significance (or at least value received) with its size.Footnote ¹⁴ (From the publishers’ perspective, long works were also cost-effective, because the expenses of production did not rise in proportion to increases in length.) This was not a new phenomenon: during the Great Depression, Hervey Allen's 1,200-page Anthony Adverse was a best seller. But in the postwar years, the popularity of the long novel may have reflected readers’ aspirations to certify themselves as beneficiaries of the ample leisure and educational advantages that middle-class affluence made possible. For authors whose view of their craft coincided with prevailing taste and economics, the form offered built-in benefits. If Hemingway's fiction had exemplified the possibility that the “great American novel” could take shape in relatively few spare sentences, Cozzens's alternative (and, from a modernist perspective, reactionary) choice overtly declared an author's ambition to create a monumental literary work; By Love Possessed's length alone invited judgments of greatness before readers even cracked the book's spine.

Along with his attunement to the market, Cozzens's location in the New York literary world also conditioned the reception of By Love Possessed. His marriage to the agent Sylvia Bernice Baumgarten gave him both access to and protection from the power of publishers and other mediators to make or break a book. Even before meeting Baumgarten, Cozzens was well placed to become a prominent writer by virtue of his Harvard connections, which led him first to the entrepreneurial Boston editor William Stanley Braithwaite and then to the New York literary agent Carl Brandt. But the latter connection proved crucial for Cozzens's personal and professional fortunes: Brandt was a key player in the literary marketplace, and Baumgarten, initially a secretary, was on her way to becoming his firm's most respected representative.

Baumgarten was determined that Cozzens, whom she married in 1927, become a “major writer,” and used her knowledge of taste hierarchies within the publishing industry to realize that goal. The fact that she was Jewish is not incidental to the story: the 1920s was precisely the period when new Jewish publishers unafraid of treating books as business propositions emerged to compete with older, genteel houses, and Baumgarten seemed to move easily between both milieus. (In addition, she was a ready-made rebuttal to accusations about Cozzens's anti-Semitism.) In the first three years of their acquaintance, Baumgarten extricated Cozzens from two contracts and moved him first to the Boni brothers’ firm (a house with high-culture aspirations) and then to William Morrow. Although Baumgarten initially urged Cozzens to master the conventions of slick magazine stories, she understood that commercial fiction was not the most advantageous niche for his work. In 1930, after Morrow pressured Cozzens to “write in a more popular vein,” Baumgarten placed her husband's work-in-progress, S.S. San Pedro, with Harcourt, Brace, thereby enhancing his status as a literary writer. S.S. San Pedro became the first of Cozzens's works to be named a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. By the same token, Baumgarten had to take Castaway (1933), an allegorical experiment too murky for the Harcourt audience, to several other publishers before placing it with Random House, where editor Bennett Cerf owed her a favor.Footnote ¹⁵

For the rest of his career, Cozzens remained a Harcourt author—managed by Baumgarten. Her influence on the reception of By Love Possessed resulted not only from the cumulative effect of her efforts to position Cozzens as a “major writer,” but also from her direct intervention in the distribution of the novel. Because the Book-of-the-Month Club's failure to choose Guard of Honor as a “main selection” had so distressed Cozzens, when his next manuscript was ready for Club evaluation Baumgarten traded on her Brandt & Brandt connections to smooth the way: through Carol Brandt, she asked Club judge John Marquand (Brandt's lover) to identify in advance passages that might have to be altered to make the work acceptable to the entire Club board. Marquand found no such obstacles, and, with Cozzens's ego intact, By Love Possessed became the “book of the month” for September 1957. By 1959, the club had mailed out 270,000 copies. At the same time, Baumgarten apparently did not hesitate to let Cozzens take advantage of other distribution opportunities that, while they risked marking him as popular, as opposed to middlebrow, offered financial benefits too lucrative to pass up. Presumably she was involved in Harcourt's $100,000 sale of By Love Possessed to Reader's Digest Condensed Books. In 1958, Leona Nevler, a Fawcett/Crest editor keen to exploit the potential of the burgeoning paperback industry, fresh from her discovery of Peyton Place, bought the book as a mass-market—rather than a trade—title for the record price of $101,505.Footnote ¹⁶

For all of his reclusive tendencies, Cozzens's appreciation for—or at least his acquiescence in—the mechanisms of publicity likewise operated to shape critics’ and readers’ reactions. The week the novel was published, Time carried a cover story about Cozzens. He had agreed to the article out of a sense of obligation to Time publisher Henry Luce, for whom he had worked briefly, and because he wanted the exposure he knew the periodical would provide. He also had a prior acquaintance with Serrell Hillman, the researcher assigned to interview him. The story depicted Cozzens as “classical, dry, cerebral” and deeply inimical to sentimentality, concluding, “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.” That judgment, with its implicit pitch to readers who thought of themselves as superior to consumers of best sellers, arguably offset the liability to Cozzen's reputation for seriousness that appearing on the cover of a mass-market magazine could pose. Cozzens and Baumgarten nevertheless considered the article a disaster, although for a different reason: that Hillman had betrayed his subject by giving the writer of the piece his notes of Cozzens's ironic “jokes” about women, Jews, and blacks—remarks the writer then quoted. Yet the celebrity Time conferred accounted for the sale of “thousands of copies” of By Love Possessed and contributed to the need for three reprintings, at fifty thousand books apiece, during September 1957.Footnote ¹⁷

The other source of publicity for the novel was the almost unprecedented advertising campaign Harcourt, Brace mounted in collaboration with the firm of Franklin Spier. The “heavy advertising program” for By Love Possessed consisted, first, of unusually extensive prepublication activity. Harcourt's publicity department coordinated a carefully planned strategy to build enthusiasm for the novel among booksellers and reviewers, beginning three months before publication with announcements in the trade media intimating that Harcourt had its hands on “one of the most important books of our time.” Subsequently, the publisher distributed advance copies and large posters to the booksellers. The company also sent out four hundred review copies two months (rather than the customary one month) ahead of the publication date in order to give reviewers a chance to read the book on vacation. “Upon publication,” Harcourt's director of publicity, Julian Muller, reported, “the book commanded the top review spot in practically every important publication in the nation.” What is more, Harcourt anticipated the success of the campaign by printing enough copies to satisfy the initial demand. The second part of the campaign involved a barrage of both large- and small-space insertions in newspapers. As a centerfold in the New York Times Book Review the Sunday following publication, Harcourt ran one of the largest advertisements for a single volume of fiction to appear in the paper up to that time. A second spread in the Times four days later, cosponsored by Doubleday Book Shops, reminded readers of Cozzens's Pulitzer Prize. As By Love Possessed climbed to the top of the best-seller list, the publisher placed ads in newspapers throughout the country calling attention to the novel's popularity. The campaign—in the press and through mail to booksellers—continued until the end of the year.Footnote ¹⁸

Cozzens's sensitivity to the implications of formal choices, his network of personal connections, Baumgarten's astute negotiation of the basis on which readers encountered him, and the access to publicity such negotiation facilitated all operated to create the positive reception of By Love Possessed. But Baumgarten's role also enabled Cozzens to stake out a position above the market that, paradoxically, contributed as well to his commercial success. His self-conception depended on distancing himself from the institutions of American literary culture that conferred authorial stature, notably awards, professorships, and speaking engagements. Upon winning the Pulitzer Prize for Guard of Honor, Cozzens wrote to his mother that he “certainly had it fixed in my mind that the fiction award was contemptible,” because it typically went to “pseudo-serious tripe”; his consolation came in Baumgarten's observation (as Cozzens put it) that the selection committee “gave me free in the boob market perhaps half a million dollars worth of advertising.” In 1960, Malcolm Cowley accepted the Howells Medal (which honored By Love Possessed as the best work in American fiction published during the previous five years) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters on the author's behalf, Cozzens having decided not to attend the ceremony. He also refused to serve on juries for the National Book Award and the Harper Prize Novel Contest. His official reason for declining, which he offered in turning down invitations to teach and lecture as well, was that he was out of step with prevailing critical standards. Moreover, Bruccoli has explained, Cozzens was “utterly contemptuous of the literary life of self-promotion and reciprocal back-scratching.” Yet Cozzens coupled those aesthetic and moral objections with a pervasive desire to achieve the distinction of unpopularity. “I confess I've always held a snide view of prizes and medals as mostly meaningless and often insulting,” he wrote to John Fischer of Harper's in the wake of the Howells Medal. The insult, as his response to receiving an honorary degree from Harvard in 1952 makes clear, consisted of becoming associated with popular taste: Cozzens's adulation of Harvard propelled him to appear at the commencement ceremony, but he was “bitterly chagrined” that he occupied the platform with the best-selling novelist Walter Edmonds, whose Drums along the Mohawk Cozzens thought far beneath his own work. In that respect, Cozzens conforms perfectly to the figures James English has discussed in The Economy of Prestige who, “linking autonomy with truth,” enhance their status within high culture by disdaining precisely the tokens of literary achievement devised to signify that location.Footnote ¹⁹

Along with the “boobs’ edition,” which Cozzens used to describe the Reader's Digest Condensed version of By Love Possessed, the phrase “boob market” suggests as well Cozzens's fraught relationship with the readers who made him a best-selling author. His insistence on elevating himself above popular preferences, which the Time article had highlighted, acquired strategic value as a way to deflect the criticisms that By Love Possessed incurred from those members of the reading public who regarded the novel as opaque, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, or immoral. As Cozzens told several correspondents, the sales of the book had gotten “out of hand” by late 1957, motivating perhaps “tens of thousands” of “people who would never normally think of trying to read a book of mine” to buy it. While some told him that they appreciated his achievement, “far more,” he wrote, “found it baffling or even infuriating—illiberal, antireligious, pornographic—and I've had all their generally illiterate letters too.” Although on some occasions Cozzens refuted directly the charges of obscurity, intolerance, and obscenity that By Love Possessed provoked, the idea that he had only written the book for the limited number of readers who could understand him became his stock reply to much of the fan mail he received—flattering the intelligence and bolstering the support of his admirers in the process.Footnote ²⁰

Finally, Cozzens embraced high culture in his own aesthetic standards. His notebooks are replete with comments chastising writers for “shoddiness,” falsity, and failure to respect the nuances of language. His list of offenders included Steinbeck, Hemingway, Mailer, Elizabeth Bowen, and most other contemporary authors. “There's an apparent feeling,” he complained in 1963 about a new novel by Hortense Calisher, “that exactness is narrow and confining and truth and life can't be fitted into it. There is a resulting resort to similie [sic] and generalization. Naturally, I think they [Calisher and likeminded writers] couldn't be more mistaken.” About Faulkner, Cozzens expressed mixed feelings, commending his “distillation of truth, even if obvious truth, of the kind that makes writing worth reading,” while indicting him for “the imprecision that makes you tired.” Cozzens's devotion to clarity and precision extended to nonfiction: recording his opinion of Frank Harris's memoir, he averred, “There's a false-sounding turn of phrase here, an unconvincing detail there”; Gene Smith, the author of a history of Woodrow Wilson, “keeps letting you see he's constantly missing the significance of what he's telling you.” Cozzens's small pantheon of figures to emulate consisted of Somerset Maugham, John O'Hara (in terms of his ability to transmit the “real”), and certain inspirations from the past: Milton, Pope, Shakespeare, Thoreau.Footnote ²¹

It is easy to recognize in Cozzens's judgments the same criteria that Macdonald invoked in assailing By Love Possessed. To be sure, Macdonald championed avant-garde experimentation while Cozzens repudiated it; his designation of Joyce as a “hero” in Against the American Grain (1962), for example, contrasts sharply with Cozzens's disdain for the modernist devices he dubbed Joycean “word games.” Yet Cozzens's pronouncements mirrored those of his adversary in their modernist allegiance to the quest for a language adequate to represent reality, their rejection of what (as the Time article had noted) Cozzens identified as “sentimentality,” and their presumption that great literature entailed difficulty. In both its slightly mocking tone and its content, Cozzens's missive to the head of the Guggenheim Foundation in 1950 could be mistaken for a pronouncement by Macdonald: “I think our writing age—that is, our so-called Serious Writing and nearly all our more talented writers—is infected beyond precedent with a poison of sentimentality; with . . . childish thinking and cheap feeling; with a miserable tolerance of careless and incompetent writing if it is solemnly presented or comes in a fancy form.” Similarly, Cozzens declared in 1962, “It seems impossible to write a book so bad that quite a few reviewers won't say it's good”—a sentence Macdonald might have penned four years earlier.Footnote ²²

In light of that shared sensibility, Macdonald's famous epithet in “Masscult and Midcult” that middlebrow culture “pretends to respect the values of High Culture while it waters them down and vulgarizes them”—a statement which itself reflects a preoccupation with falsity—seems off the mark, if the measure is authorial intention. While Cozzens's appeals to a status-hungry public align him with Macdonald's portrait of the middlebrow as a bogus highbrow, as a writer and reader Cozzens's high-culture commitments were genuine. Instead, Cozzens may be said to have mastered the institutions of middlebrow culture while dissociating himself from some of their consequences. This adroit balance—reminiscent of the combination of consumerism and gentility characterizing American middlebrow artifacts of the interwar period—explains more fully than marketing savvy alone reviewers’ receptivity to By Love Possessed.Footnote ²³ Yet Cozzens's effort to achieve distance from the “boob market” by affirming his investment in textual difficulty and the representation of reality must have made the sting of Macdonald's attack all the more painful. By the same token, for Macdonald the fact that his and Cozzens's aesthetic criteria might be confused with one another (although he regarded Cozzens as “pretending”) was among the most galling aspects of the novel's success.

Cozzens retaliated against Macdonald's Commentary review in terms that reveal additional common ground between the two antagonists, while illuminating some of the larger social tensions that attended his “middle” location. The most troubling form of Cozzens's response (although it has its ridiculous side) is his depiction of himself as the victim of Jews. In journal entries from the 1960s, he repeatedly mustered that image, referring to “that spew-out of Jewish fury that By Love Possessed provoked,” the “venomous hatchet jobs the Jewish critics gave me,” the “Jew-boy line about me,” “my poor Jew-Boys[,] and even perhaps that poorest of those poor . . ., Dwight Macdonald.” In Cozzens's view, the affiliation of Commentary with the American Jewish Committee made Macdonald's review a Jewish attack. Jews were reprehensible, he indicated, because of their ideas: they were “liberals” given to sentimentality in art and politics. But they were also pernicious because they enjoyed control over the “little magazine” and the New York literary scene.Footnote ²⁴

Undergirding Cozzens's animosity was the age-old prejudice that Jews were clannish, that their allegiance was to one another, to the detriment of non-Jews. In 1960, after observing that James Baldwin, Jason Epstein, Lillian Hellman, Robert Lowell, Lionel Trilling, and other writers had sprung to the defense of Norman Mailer (who had stabbed his wife), Cozzens asserted, “This seems interesting as an indication of just who in ‘Literary Circles’ determines that shallow, slovenly and phoney writing is to be treated as Significant and Brilliant—or is there after all some fervid Jewish literary bond?” Later, Cozzens summarized his perception of tribal loyalty in the term “Mac-cult,” a play on “mass-cult” and “mid-cult” that implied mindless veneration of Macdonald.Footnote ²⁵

To be fair, Cozzens followed his query about a Jewish “bond” with the speculation that perhaps the rallying on Mailer's behalf was “non-sectarian.” Moreover, Cozzens's “spew-out” of anti-Jewish “fury” was not entirely paranoid: most New York intellectuals were Jews, and had promoted socialism and modernism in the pages of the influential Partisan Review; by the 1950s, Jewish intellectuals were enjoying an increasingly central role at magazines such as the New Yorker. Yet calling Macdonald and his other opponents Jews was ironic on several levels. First, of course, Macdonald was not only not Jewish but, especially early in his life, was given to anti-Semitic remarks of his own. As a student, he had explained to a young woman involved with a friend of his why he had behaved hostilely toward her: “And then there is the fact that you are a Jewess, and are rather obviously one, to make me react unfavorably. For I dislike rather violently the Jews as a race.” More self-critical than Cozzens, Macdonald outgrew most of that hostility, although vestiges of it broke through on several drunken occasions later on. While his views were arguably more defensible than Cozzens's, he also alienated a number of his Jewish friends in the late 1940s by supporting the award of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry to Ezra Pound, by opposing Zionism, and by deploring an interest in Jewish culture at the expense of cosmopolitanism. More important, as a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, Cozzens was a member of what was, at mid-century, still the most powerful social group in the United States, and had gained access to authorship in part because of the opportunities thus afforded him. Yet (for all his self-imposed isolation) he experienced the blow to his literary reputation as a form of social exclusion. Cozzens's response reversed the traditional motif of the Jew as outsider, underscoring his felt status as unwilling exile. But, paradoxically, from Cozzens's standpoint, reducing his critics to “Jews” also accomplished a number of retaliatory moves: the label marked Macdonald and his ilk as his social inferiors, as arrivistes, as individuals who held erroneous beliefs, and as figures whose judgments, rooted as they were in ethnic bonds, need not be taken seriously as literary commentary.Footnote ²⁶

It should be noted that “Jew” was not the only reference to presumptive inferiors with which Cozzens tagged his detractors, and that Macdonald joined him in additional variants of this unsavory strategy. Like other writers of the period, including John Ciardi and Bernard DeVoto, Cozzens employed a variety of misogynistic tough talk that certified him as masculine. For example, when Serrell Hillman reported to him that a woman interviewed for the Time article had said Cozzens “used to look like an Aubrey Beardsley drawing,” Cozzens replied that she “used to look like a cow in skirts.” Truculence was one of his trademarks: after recording in his journal that the novelist Terry Southern had called Arthur Winner a “copy” rather than an “original” character, Cozzens spouted, “Look, Stupid. It's a copy, all right . . . The copy is from life.” That stance—the novelist as streetfighter—bespeaks the struggle of mid-twentieth-century American men to differentiate themselves from what they understood as the feminizing consequences of both mass and elite culture. On the one hand, suburbanization and consumerism threatened masculinity because they eroded independence and created “organization men.” To the extent that Cozzens sought to invest his male heroes such as Winner with the virtues of individualism and unbridled integrity (and to portray women like Marjorie Penrose as irrationally dependent), he evinced the postwar anxiety surrounding the survival of those ideals in mass society. Yet, on the other hand, in the character of Julius Penrose, Cozzens (with his other prejudices in evidence) gave voice to the Cold War indictment—clearest in the innuendo surrounding Adlai Stevenson's 1952 candidacy for the presidency—of the educated liberal as effeminate:

In the aftermath of By Love Possessed, Cozzens was quick to adopt the specifically literary version of that attack. As James Gilbert has written, “elite writers had to face the disturbing accusation that their isolation from mainstream American culture, their European orientation, their occasional radical politics, and their sometimes complex artistic creations raised serious questions about their gender identity.” Cozzens typified the accusers: he repeatedly called Macdonald and his circle “critical queers” or “literary queers, the critical odd-balls, the pretentious pseudointellectuals and cockeyed communists.” In so doing, he buttressed his own status as a real man.Footnote ²⁷

But gender categories furnished ammunition to Macdonald as well. In his Commentary review, after referring to the New Yorker cartoon, he wrote with characteristic acerbity, “How do those matrons cope with it, I wonder. Perhaps their very innocence in literary matters is a help—an Australian aboriginal would probably finder Riders of the Purple Sage as hard to read as The Golden Bowl.” That comment, which implicated Macdonald as much as Cozzens in misogyny, cast aspersions on Cozzens's masculinity by imagining the consumers of middlebrow culture as an audience of ignorant, unsophisticated women. (In the same paragraph, Macdonald patronizingly referred as well to the author of Forever Amber as “another notably untalented lady.”) Furthermore, Macdonald's determination to set himself up as a no-holds-barred cultural critic (a “world-class demolition expert”) has a masculinist flavor; truculence defined his tone as much as it did Cozzens's. The biggest tip-off to Macdonald's equation of Cozzens's deficiencies with failures of manhood, however, is his insistence on calling Winner both a “prig” and a “brute”—the latter quality epitomized in Cozzens's misguided “idea of manly straight-from-the-shoulder talk.” Macdonald deserves some credit for his observation that Cozzens created male characters who treat women badly, yet his intimation that Cozzens misunderstood true masculine behavior—that he, on the other hand, has gotten masculinity right—implicates Macdonald in the same anxiety about encroaching emasculation that Cozzens displayed.Footnote ²⁸

Cozzens's and Macdonald's reduction of each other to a subordinate social category—Jew, queer, feminized “middlebrow”—exposes the struggle for power at the core of their dispute. That point is even clearer with respect to an additional marker of inferiority both writers invoked—the designation “child”—because the postwar discourse about the nature of adulthood allowed for consolidating power over readers as well as critics.

One locus of this discourse is H. A. Overstreet's The Mature Mind (1949), which summarized the emphasis of contemporary social scientists on the importance of achieving genuine mental and emotional maturity. True (one might say real) adults, Overstreet explained, readily assumed responsibility for their actions, accepted the necessity of work, exhibited self-discipline, engaged in a long-term heterosexual relationship, and exhibited a capacity for empathy. Behavior that ill-served either the individual or society was not so much “bad” or “ignorant” as “immature.” Why this outlook (and a related preoccupation with innocence) assumed such significance in the postwar era is a matter for speculation. Part of the answer may be that these rubrics provided a way to address the moral questions of personal versus collective responsibility occasioned by the Holocaust and Hiroshima, a theme perhaps best represented in Arthur Miller's All My Sons (1947). Another part of the answer is that “maturity” assuaged Cold War anxieties: the Soviet Union, Overstreet argued, infantilized its citizens by curtailing the right to think for oneself—although Overstreet believed that an immature individualism was equally perilous and proposed a mature approach to creating “one world.” The discourse of adulthood may also have gained momentum from the challenges facing demobilized soldiers adjusting to civilian life and the temptations of affluence. In any event, as Americans in the 1950s confronted youthful rebellion, whether in the form of juvenile delinquency or Beat poetry, and at roughly the same moment writers such as Paul Goodman were pointing out the injuries that growing up entailed, insisting that people act like adults became a stock prescription for maintaining social order.Footnote ²⁹

Both Macdonald and Cozzens were caught up in those concerns. Macdonald had wrestled with questions of personal and collective obligation during World War II, but in 1953, reworking his “Theory of Popular Culture,” he applied the vocabulary of maturity to cultural critique. One result of kitsch, he argued (referring to both mass and middlebrow culture), was that it created “adultised children and infantile adults”—the latter “unable to cope with the strains and complexities of modern life,” and therefore susceptible to even more kitsch. At the conclusion of his By Love Possessed review, Macdonald faulted Cozzens for contributing to that problem not by blurring “age lines” in the manner of comic books but, rather, by conflating adulthood with the “wholesale acceptance” of the status quo. Winner's willingness to support “the System,” he proclaimed, rested on Cozzens's presumption that “it is childish if not worse to insist on something better.” In fact, Macdonald argued, that position was just an instance of the American propensity to think in extremes—“either juvenile revolt or the immature acceptance of everything”—and no closer to the adult thinking that only high culture fostered.Footnote ³⁰

Macdonald's reliance on the discourse of maturity to deprecate By Love Possessed anticipated Cozzens's rejoinder in the same terms. The opposition between childish and adult qualities had been part of Cozzens's aesthetic for a long time (“childish sentimentality”). More to the point, both Guard of Honor and By Love Possessed offered lessons in mature conduct: their heroes (not just Ross and Winner but also Penrose and Tuttle) strike painful moral balances for the good of others. The imperative to weigh passion against reason can be read as an alternate formulation of the responsibility to delay gratification. In that respect, adulthood was what By Love Possessed was about.

Furthermore, the contributors to the book's marketing campaign seemed to recognize the sales potential of that theme. The headline for Clifton Fadiman's report in the Book-of-the-Month Club News declared, “The maturest and most readable piece of American fiction we have been privileged to offer our membership for many years.” Harcourt's two-page advertising spread quoted Fadiman's text: “A grown-up novel by a grown-up man for a grown-up audience.” In part, that strategy was a way to signal, and to legitimate, the steamy sex in the book. But it also embellished Cozzens's persona as a serious writer, while potentially wooing readers eager to allay their fears about whether they were adult enough to cope with ethical dilemmas in their own lives. Fadiman sounded both appeals at the end of his review: “[Cozzens] does ask that you give this story the benefit of your most mature understanding . . . It makes most current American novels seem like the work of excited children.”Footnote ³¹

Thus, for Cozzens, the vocabulary of adulthood was readily at hand in the aftermath of the Commentary article. In the only direct reply Cozzens made to Macdonald, a letter of 5 March 1958, he exclaimed that

Cozzens sustained that view as late as 1963, when he wrote to an admiring newspaperman that Macdonald's “Mass Cult and Mid Cult pronouncements don't seem likely to interest intelligent adults but they're evident naturals for what can be called the sophomore mind.”Footnote ³²

But the greater utility of the adulthood defense was in structuring Cozzens's view of his audience. As if fulfilling the conceit of the Book-of-the-Month Club blurb (which perhaps Cozzens had helped compose in the first place), he explained to a Berkeley student,

Adult readers, as Cozzens envisioned them, could handle the novel's sexual explicitness and occasional swear word; to a Massachusetts woman who found those features of the book offensive, he replied, “That I write strictly for grown-ups is fairly well known.” If they encountered a word they did not understand, they had the patience and the initiative to look it up in the dictionary, thereby negating Macdonald's complaint about Cozzens's esoteric language. Most important, they possessed the competences (to use Richard Brodhead's term) to comprehend works of fiction without depending on the interventions of critics. Like the “autonomous” readers Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin summoned up in 1972 as part of his own critique of mass entertainment, Cozzens's mature public (as distinct from the tagalong crowd popularity generated) required neither guidance nor instruction.

Cozzens linked that construct to his rejection of certain elements of modernism: in the absence of what he called “the literary rubbish of symbolism, of ‘levels of meaning,’” interpretation became superfluous. Somerset Maugham provided a case in point: “The thing most held against Maugham,” Cozzens insisted, “is obviously that he made critics and criticism unnecessary. He never wrote a line that needed to be explained (or explained away) . . . Any adult reader takes his meanings at a glance: he writes to be instantly understood.” But Cozzens's champion Bernard DeVoto had applied the same observation to Cozzens himself in his Harper's “Easy Chair” column for February 1949. Critics “avoid Cozzens,” DeVoto averred, “because his novels are so carefully written “that they leave criticism practically nothing to do.’” Stripping critics of their function as mediators concentrated power in authors, who need not fear that a third party would remove readers from their influence—or, for that matter, make the “boob market” line up at their doors—by distorting or misrepresenting their work. In this literary utopia, recognizing that it could grasp the message and artistry of a text unaided led the audience, which was smarter than the critical establishment, toward a heightened appreciation of the author's command over simple truth. At the same time, Cozzens made personal responsibility and self-discipline as germane to the act of reading as they were to love and work.Footnote ³³

While it is possible—even likely—that the correspondents who wrote to Cozzens to praise By Love Possessed chose the book on the basis of reviews, as readers some of them comported with Cozzens's fantasy. The most striking feature of their encounters with the novel is the extent of rereading (of both particular passages and of the text as a whole) in which they engaged. “I had to read it slowly and reread parts to grasp it,” a Brooklyn woman remarked, “and it truly was an experience I wouldn't have wanted to miss.” Another woman, who described herself as not a college graduate, reported, “Finished your latest last week and am rereading it—I find the second reading even more wonderful than the first.” In a subsequent letter she explained, “I got up at four—the moon was so bright and I had slept my six hours—When I finished your book I kept going back to the beginning to read this or that and I found myself reading the book over again.” An acquaintance from New Jersey noted that she and her husband were “reading out bits” to each other, adding, “So you see it took time, and we know we will appreciate it even more the second time.” A sixty-four-year-old Pennsylvania woman wrote in 1959 to tell Cozzens she had read part of the book four times. Those individuals made clear that rereading furnished pleasure, but they also willingly shouldered the obligation to read closely, with an eye to literary craft, in order to discern the author's meaning. “Then, following my SOP,” a Maryland man noted, “came a second reading to garner any subtlety or nuance missed the first time through.”Footnote ³⁴

Furthermore, like Cozzens himself, his correspondents repeatedly invoked lack of “falsity” as a key aesthetic standard: “One can envy not only your mastery of the language and the extent of your erudition, but also the skillful, penetrating delineation of characters and philosophies, so that, although . . . one is more or less continually conscious of the fact that he is reading a novel put together by a master craftsman, the printed people none-the-less [sic] come vividly and stingingly alive.” A Minnesota woman who read By Love Possessed in the condensed format wrote, “I was deeply touched with respect for an author who seemed to have such an understanding of people. All of the characters were so REAL—so genuine I felt I knew them.” Such individuals were also actively engaged in reshaping the text: as a Colorado man put it, “You have given us another 500-odd pages to be written in our own minds, out of our own experiences, and that's another mark of greatness.”Footnote ³⁵

These disciplined, patient, standard-conscious, active readers, while only a segment of Cozzens's audience, may be considered middlebrow (“I am not a scholar,” the Minnesota woman stated). The individuals who chose the condensed format, one might argue, exhibited a lack of seriousness or respect for the author, although some told Cozzens that the abridgment made them want to read the original version. Yet, in any case, in terms of their approach to the page, Cozzens's “plodding” readers (as the Minnesotan described herself) read in a high-culture way: or, rather, there was no distinction between the way they read and what the proponents of high culture valued. As Cozzens rightly intuited, their autonomy, coupled with the homage their letters paid to authorial skill, were a central aspect of the threat the “Middlebrow Counter-Revolution” posed for Macdonald. To be sure, Macdonald's imagined middlebrow reader was sometimes a passive figure; what made the reviewers and advertisers who had commended Cozzens so dangerous was that the “matrons” were all too ready to follow their advice. There were as well among Cozzens's displeased readers those whose dependence took the form of subordinating their judgment to Macdonald's. One man wrote to the editors of Commentary that “By Cozzens Possessed” had “somewhat restored what little confidence I had in my own critical perceptions”; another confessed that until he read Macdonald's review “I had the feeling that I no longer had any critical sense in literature.” These comments must have gratified Macdonald. Yet he was equally worried about readers who exercised their own power rather than deferring to critical expertise. In “Masscult and Midcult,” he asserted that “the demands of the audience, which has changed from a small body of connoisseurs into a large body of ignoramuses, have become the chief criteria of success.” In the Cozzens review, the spectre of autonomous reading took the form of By Love Possessed on the “living-room table,” a “symbol” of the fact that “one of the consumer goods to which every American feels he has a right in this age of plenty is Culture.”Footnote ³⁶

Macdonald's position was inherently contradictory: he claimed, at the end of “Masscult and Midcult,” to want “an audience that can appreciate and discriminate on its own,” but only if it were “sophisticated” enough to listen to him; his famous prescription “So let the masses have their Masscult, let the few who care about good writing . . . have their High culture, and don't fuzz up the distinction with Midcult” represented a denial that the critic had a responsibility to “raise the level of our culture in general.” Be that as it may, the shared competition for readers animating the reception of By Love Possessed suggests that, for Macdonald, “the scandal of the middlebrow” was the diametric opposite of the phenomenon Janice Radway identified in characterizing the controversy surrounding the Book-of-the-Month Club in the late 1920s. The observers who impugned the Club, Radway showed, did so because the reliance of subscribers on a Board of Judges who picked the “best” books destroyed the myth that great literature emerged in the unmediated exercise of taste. Here the “scandal” was the prospect that the autonomous middlebrow public, grown confident as the postwar expansion of higher education proceeded apace, would make an alliance with the author alone, bypassing the critic entirely. And here, again, was irony: Cozzens, the denouncer of liberalism, articulated a populist vision of the reader–author relationship rooted in a democratic “right” to “Culture,” while Macdonald, the old socialist, reaffirmed cultural hierarchy.Footnote ³⁷

***

Yet there is the final commonality that both Macdonald and Cozzens tended to project onto the other greater power than their antagonist actually experienced, and that, conversely, “By Cozzens Possessed” and the novel that prompted it are elegies for eras that each writer sensed was passing. Macdonald was transparent in this regard. In his “Theory of Mass Culture” (1953), Macdonald had declared “the Avantgarde is now dying”; in the Cozzens piece, he repeated the point and implicated middlebrow critics in its demise. By the 1960s, the context for Macdonald's vigil at the bedside of high culture included not only lamentations about the “decline of book reviewing” but also increasingly frequent pronouncements about the “death of the novel.” At the same time, Macdonald was himself bridging high and popular culture by writing film criticism for Esquire. Thus, for all the energy he put into classification, when Macdonald finally refined his analyses of the 1950s in “Masscult and Midcult” his intervention was not so much about establishing cultural hierarchies as about memorializing them.Footnote ³⁸

As for Cozzens, nostalgia does not quite describe his attitude: the famously graphic bedroom scene between Winner and his wife Clarissa, for example, is a thoroughly modern, post-Kinsey Report tribute to female sexuality and mutual desire. Yet Cozzens's protagonist would prefer to stop time (the cover of the book, and its first paragraph, feature an antique French clock), so that he and his colleagues could go through their routines—days in office and courtroom, evenings at their lakeside summer homes—in charge of their environments, buoyed by the prestige and assurance to which their social class ostensibly entitles them. Tellingly, in Winner's surroundings, American mass culture never intrudes, apart from a few oblique references to the music and dancing at working-class bars and at a gay party Winner's renegade son attends.

But change is on the way, and Winner knows it. Rodney Revere, the son of the deferential African American steward at the Union League Club, is in dental school, willing to “help” the whites in Brocton over the summer “less for money than for old times’ sake”; soon he will be “a professional man.” The Club itself can no longer afford to stay open. “It must go the way of the Ponemah Association,” old Judge Lowe says, referring to the owners of the lakeside cottages, the way of “the summer night singing around the fire; of the buckboards and the horses that drew them up the old valley road . . . and the way of so many, many friends, now among the dead. For a new scene: Time: Today, the stage had to be cleared.” The revelation of Noah Tuttle's embezzlement is, for Winner, merely the most tangible evidence that the ground is shifting underfoot. As Brendan Gill explained in his New Yorker review, “The words he [Winner] has lived by, if never uttered—truth, honor, probity—are suddenly found to be worse than nonsense; they are beside the point.” In this context, Cozzens's attraction to the law (which virtually functions as a character in the novel) becomes clear: it offers “repose” and the illusion of permanence. At the end, however, all that Winner can do is to carry on as an adult, to assume the burden of painful knowledge that he must shoulder indefinitely. For this reason, Macdonald disapprovingly called By Love Possessed a “Novel of Resignation,” although with fewer preconceptions he might have regarded Winner's predicament as a species of existential tragedy.Footnote ³⁹

Furthermore, after the imbroglio with Macdonald, Cozzens experienced a marked plunge in reputation, despite the award of the Howells Medal in 1960. In 1963, when Esquire's cheeky “Structure of the American Literary Establishment, with Shaded Heraldic Tree,” placed him well outside the “red hot center,” Cozzens protested to the chart's author, L. Rust Hills, “Granted I'm not really out; but still this is outrageous.” Yet Cozzens's complaint amounted to wishful thinking. His diminished position cannot be attributed to Macdonald's attack alone. Cozzens himself thought the Time portrait more damaging to public sympathy. Probable alcoholism, depression, and a serious car accident in 1971 also contributed to Cozzens's decline, while his increasing identification with literary and political conservatives as the 1960s wore on made him decidedly unfashionable. Yet Macdonald's critique did irrevocable damage to Cozzens's stature (as he and others perceived it) because Macdonald so effectively used Cozzens's own values against him, while striking a tone and pose that masked the two antagonists’ shared convictions. Within a few years of By Love Possessed he had become what Bruccoli called “America's best unread novelist.” He died, bitter and obscure, in 1978.Footnote ⁴⁰

***

Few American readers today will shed tears over that development, or over the social predicament of Winner and his creator: their roles as white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men who, poised on the brink of the civil rights and women's movements that will sweep away much of their class and gender privilege, recognize that they will have to cope with a society vastly different from the one to which they feel their background entitles them. Yet, despite its disturbing qualities, Cozzens's elegy evokes poignancy because of Winner's human predicament, his inability to control the vicissitudes of life (just as Cozzens could not escape the brunt of Macdonald's attack). Cozzens's only recourse, as Alfred Kazin pointed out, is to blame “emotions” for what Kazin regarded as Cozzens's, as well as Winner's, “disarray” in the face of “truth” about his own class—truth “wrung out of him in pain.” The discomfiting acknowledgment of the hypocrisy By Love Possessed exposed, Kazin argued, accounts for the deficiencies of Cozzens's prose, so different from the writing in Guard of Honor: “Now the style broke down, tried to conceal Cozzens's conflict by unnatural fussiness . . . The ‘well-made’ novel has not survived the shapely class distinctions on which it modeled itself.”Footnote ⁴¹

Still, there is something admirable, and more than elegiac, in Cozzens's reaffirmation of personal responsibility. By Love Possessed may be a novel of resignation, but it is also a novel of moral fortitude, of principled compromise. In 1957, American readers were three years away from encountering a work in which the commitment to honor one's obligations to others is no longer a desirable, or even viable, option: John Updike's Rabbit, Run. Rabbit Angstrom lives in a small Pennsylvania city, Mt Judge, which (perhaps not coincidentally) resembles Cozzens's Brocton in size and location. But the changes that Winner knows are coming have already occurred. The Episcopalian rector in Cozzens's story, Doctor Trowbridge, behaves decorously and consistently exhibits “the good shepherd's confident fatherly manner”; although Cozzens gently satirizes his youthful enthusiasm and innocence, he approves of the constancy of the “Man of Faith” to the theological doctrines that supply “comfort or calm.” Jack Eccles, Updike's Episcopalian minister, smokes, plays golf, and exudes the friendliness that he believes will enable him to reach his parishioners, but his modernized Protestantism (as opposed to that of his “rigid” Lutheran colleague) leaves him as bedeviled as Angstrom by a quest for “this thing that wasn't there.” Unlike Brocton, the world of Mt Judge and its suburbs is suffused by mass entertainment and consumption: Angstrom hawks a kitchen gadget, his wife watches dancing Tootsie Rolls and Mouseketeers on television, Some Like It Hot is playing at the movies. The possibility of preserving some distance between upper-class values and the rest of America has evaporated. If the subject matter of both novels is the burden of adulthood, the contrast between the conclusions of the books could not be starker. Winner, mustering “the strength, the strength to, to—to endure more miseries,” hears his aunt call “Arthur? Are you there?”; the last line of the text reads “He said: ‘I'm here.’” Angstrom glances up at an unlit church window, “feels his inside” as “a pure blank space in the middle of a dense net,” and, in Updike's brilliant ending, “he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.”Footnote ⁴²

Rabbit, Run thus epitomizes not only the moral universe that Cozzens had rejected but also the passing of the mid-century moment when well-established patterns of deference to critical expertise, while under pressure (even from Cozzens himself), had not yet collapsed. As several observers have pointed out, since the 1960s the real threat to high art has come not from a “Middlebrow Counter-Revolution” but, rather, from mass culture and postmodern relativism. (“Masscult, midcult—who cares anymore?,” James Wolcott wrote in a recent essay on Macdonald, who died in 1988. “It's all one big postmodern mishmash.”) If a long novel like By Love Possessed became a best seller in part because of the promotional techniques the marketplace rewarded, at least it found a large audience, whereas today the National Endowment for the Arts has issued convincing studies that most Americans are reading fewer books of any size—let alone rereading them. But mass culture has cut both ways, creating new opportunities for the remaining middlebrow public to achieve the autonomy Cozzens's democratic fantasy sanctioned. As Rachel Donadio concluded a recent essay on 1958 that discussed the By Love Possessed episode, “In today's blog-crazy culture, everyone's a critic. What would Dwight Macdonald say?”

Yet one need not fall completely into Cozzens's and Macdonald's elegiac pose. The investigations of canon formation over the last several decades, although sometimes misguided in positing a unitary taste-making “elite,” have thoroughly undermined the fixity of what counts as high culture. The task is now to bring an awareness of the provisional nature of cultural authority, the impact of material conditions, the mediations of institutions and individuals, and the responses of readers to the entire range of literary production, including the postwar American middlebrow, so that the historical factors that gave works such as By Love Possessed their status and significance come fully into view.Footnote ⁴³