BOOKS
The Limits of Conscience
By D. W. HARDING
THE clamour of praise in America on the appearance of By LoVe Possessed* might suggest the emergence of a remarkable new novelist. In reality James Gould Cozzens has been a major figure among serious novelists for many Years. That he is comparatively little known, ,at fifty-four and after publishing twelve novels, is a comment on criticism. He waved none of the right 'flags for getting attention in the Thirties and early Forties. He is not convinced that being PPpressed ensures true worth, he cannot have needed to explain that he was never a Communist, knows that brutality and cruelty are not the expression of toughness, doesn't take copulation to be a touchstone of value, doesn't believe that `reality is to be found exclusively in wretched- ness. In fact, he is not a sophisticated senti- mentalist and indulges neither himself nor his readers in projected self-pity. On the contrary, individual responsibility has been a recurrent theme of his previous novels, and problems of conscience and of judging others Play a big part in the new one. Arthur Winner, through whose experience the story is presented, remembers how his father, like himself a genuinely scrupulous lawyer in a civilised small town, had in his last illness attributed his lifelong good conscience to extraordinary luck and the indul- gence of circumstance. Winner had not then understood what he meant, but the novel ends with a scene in which he walks distraught and appalled through the town, in the morning-coat of an usher in his prosperous Episcopalian church, saluted by the police, on his way to the first prac- tical step in his new programme of abetting an embezzlement by the senior partner of his firm. tie is left entering on a desperate gamble, his chances in which the reader must guess for him- self in an ending of remarkably effective tension. The situation is devised to show the necessity ' that may somewhere be lurking for a really decent man to sacrifice the conventionally clear con- . science that has formed the mainstay of his life in the community. The crime Winner must abet is the outcome of the partner's deep concern for the °Pie he serves (and whom he once let doWn through an error of financial judgment), and it is, ,therefore one expression of the theme indicated by the title; 'possessed' conveying the disturbance of all rational codes and calculations by the in- fluence of one or other of the sta1tes of mind labelled 'love.' Winner, too, is a man of feeling, and his attachment to other people means that he !lust sacrifice everything that the simpler codes of reason and law would require; by love possessed, he finds the cost of a clear conscience too high. The problem for the unity of the book is whether this sort of love can be convincingly related to the other sorts Cozzens writes about; i,c1 Helen Detweiler's hopeless love for the hope- lss brother, yes, and to the doctor's incipient , BY Lovi POSSESSED. By iaiiics Gould Cozens. tiongmans. I8s.)
crack-up because feeling has broken through professional defences in face of suffering. These are varieties of affection. But Cozzens has also to deal with sexual appetite, equally disturbing to the simpler rationalities; and the sexual episodes, though closely linked by plot to the theme of non-sexual feeling for others, seem a little to stand apart. The short, but perhaps not quite sufficient, answer is that in ordinary speech, too, 'love' covers both social attachments and sexual appetite, and that the contrast between them creates in itself relation enough for the purpose of the novel.
The problem appears in another form as the relation in individual experience between sexual appetite and affection for the sexual partner. Sexual behaviour is examined at several levels. The real squalor of clumsy adolescence in the back seat of the parked car is given appropriately emetic treatment through the precise and un- sparing account elicited by Winner as defence counsel when a trumped-up charge of rape threatens one of the boys Of the community. His avid partner's use of 'lover' and 'loving' underlines what their relation lacks. But an adult episode of simply physical enjoyment dissociated from the slight contempt he felt for the woman lurks in one of the recesses of Winner's own past, and in its turn comments by contrast on what he had lost through the passivity of his first wife. Finally, the equal and happy intercourse between him and his second wife is presented in a very evidently organised and worked, but still effective, passage of rhythmical prose. But the doubt persists whether Cozzens has, with this, covered the whole range. In earlier novels, too, he ignored the pos- sibility of a subtler intimacy between man and woman achieved by way of sexuality. The Just and taw Unjust (1942) and Guard of Honor (1948) give a sensitive account of the easy and affec- tionate relations that may exist among men, especially in the framework of professional life, but the contacts of man and woman seem to be subordinate, interrupting the real job.
In Ask Me 7'oniorrmv (1940) he writes of his very young man, desperately in love :
He wanted her; and not merely in terms of coverture and access. He wanted all that, and he looked at her body, distracted because he could not even touch it; but in his mind he saw the sexual connection as a step, means to a vital emotional end . . . the something more, he did not know what, that, over and above her body, have from her.he must.
But nothing comes of it, and in the later books this possibility—or impossible fantasy?—is left unexplored; sexual attraction, when not a dis- turbance, is an added pleasure to a form of com- panionship that seems not very different from what men find with each other, though founded on a more limited occupational partnership.
The non-rationalities of 'love' are displayed throughout By Love Possessed against the intense, sustained discipline of rationality undertaken in the legal profession The spirit and technical detail
of the law are exhibited with impressive resources of skill and information. CoZzens's thoroughness in creating the full setting of his characters' lives is a part of his 'self-chosen discipline that con- tributes to the strength of his work and also at times, in the preceding two novels, to a certain slowness and heaViness. He has no use for the rapid, selective sketch; in his richly worked back- ground this or that detail emerges into greater importance as a result of the unfolding pattern, not through being labelled with its salience from the start.
The texture of the writing accords with the straightforward, packed narrative. Its only de- parture from traditional structure is the occasional use of long parentheses that separate the beginning of a sentence from the end in a way that departs drastically from spoken language and suggests something of the rapid tangential surveys that may occur in a thought s2quence without disrupt- ing it. The device disturbs ordinary reading, with its associated images of speech, but it emphasises that what is being interrupted is a representation of thought and reflection. The lavish use of quota- tion and allusion, a feature of this last novel, con- tributes towards defining the position, civilised, well-read, ironic, from which the story is told.
In spite of the direct narrative and natural dialogue By Love Possessed is far from an exer- cise in realism. Winner is used as a percipient of almost Jamcsian subtlety; what he reads into simple remarks and slight clues—the stance of a young lawyer at a door, for instance—allows of the extensive retrospection and comment that form part of Cozzens's method. The distance from realism is still more evident in the selective report- ing of events that would in reality have come crowding together in Winner's memory. A specially successful instance is the postponement in the revelation of his affair with his one-time mistress: when her confidante tells Winner zest- fully that she knows all, and we hear of the woman's unsuccessful attempt' to seduce him immediately after his first wife's death, we imagine we know his state of mind as he parries the confidante; how successfully she seduced him in the end we don't learn till later. The seeming memories come up only in the sequence demanded by Cozzens's design. One result is that a re- reading of the book is immensely enriched with ironies, and a yet more intricate pattern of parallels, echoes and mutually illuminating variants is revealed.
The intricacy of pattern results in part from the second discipline Cozzens commonly adopts —that of a short time-span, in this book forty- nine
hours, within which he ties together his component stories and brings them to a climax. That design suits his .purpose, which is less to show a development of personality than to manipulate situations and show their develop- ment when the characters respond to them in the way that, being theMselves,. they must respond. How they came to be what they are interests him a little more in this than in earlier novels, but it is not a focus of interest or a main source .of strength. The analysis of .Helen Detweiler's reac- tion to her parents' death smells a little of un- assimilated psychology. But the development of her brother, of Winner's sons and of an honest young lawyer is. examined with particular and puzzled attention to the limits of what upbringing can do with the raw material of a child. That question forms part of the serious concern with responsibility and choice that gives such maturity to Cozzens's examination of crime and moral debility, and not less because he remains acutely aware of the complexities that make moral codes so inadeanate as guides to moral action.
Previous page
