SOURCE: "Style and Structure," in The Novels of James Gould Cozzens, Harcourt, 1959, pp. 49-76.

[In the following excerpt, Bracher explores Cozzens's use of description, alliteration, poetry quotes, and characters.]

Until 1957, reviewers and the few critics who wrote of him at all were almost unanimous in praise of the lucid precision of Cozzens' style, and Bernard De Voto after the publication of Guard of Honor concluded that the author's reputation would rest largely on his technical achievements as a writer. This prediction seemed reasonably safe until the appearance of By Love Possessed, in which the occasional idiosyncrasies of Cozzens' basically classical style were at times exaggerated into the convolutions of the baroque, if not the eccentricities of the rococo. Malcolm Cowley, in a discerning review of the novel [in The New York Times Book Review, 25 August 1957], took gentle note of the change: "His style used to be as clear as a mountain brook; now it has become a little weed-grown and murky, like the brook when it wanders through a meadow."

Other critics were more harsh. Deploring "prose of an artificiality and complexity that approaches the impenetrable—indeed often achieves it," Dwight Macdonald [in Commentary, January, 1958] quoted excerpts to illustrate a whole gallery of supposed faults. The device is not very impressive to a reader who knows how easily stylistic effects can be distorted when sentences are removed from the field of force generated by their context; and Macdonald's bald lists of examples are certainly unfair. In an attempt to discredit Cozzens without damaging other writers notable for their complex meanderings, he adds,

James's involutions are (a) necessary to precisely discriminate his meaning; (b) solid parts of the architecture of the sentence; and (c) controlled by a fine ear for euphony. Faulkner does meander, but there is emotional force, descriptive richness behind his wanderings…. Their style is complex because they are saying something complicated….

Confronted with such arbitrary condemnation one can only try to make some further distinctions, not so much in the expectation of making converts among those who find Cozzens' latest style antipathetic as with the hope that his style may be seen for what it is, whether anyone likes it or not. The following is the kind of sentence hostile critics like to pin up on the wall as a horrible example:

Here was Elmer Abbott, an Orcutt, a well-off man (with all that meant in the way of perfect freedom to quit himself like a man) so tame, so pridelessly relieved at the withdrawal of a false charge, at the permission to continue his namby-pamby round, keep his piffling post, his unpaid job's clung-to prerogative of inflicting on a captive audience his mediocre music, that he cried! [By Love Possessed]

This is knotty and mannered, and the alliteration is perhaps excessive. But in context this summarizing sentence is a deliberately rhetorical conclusion to a long passage (six pages) of meditation by Arthur Winner on Elmer Abbott's past. In the passage, Cozzens makes fully articulate the flashes of remembrance or intuition that occur in the mind of a principal character during the course of action or talk. The device is used constantly throughout the novels (it is especially effective in the brilliant scene with Mrs. Pratt in the garden); and if it is unrealistic in the strict sense that thought so fully explicated would take up much more time than a momentary pause in a conversation, the device is obviously intended to be taken with that willing suspension of disbelief which any convention, on the stage or in a novel, requires. Moreover, such meditative interpolations do not lack psychological realism. Cozzens is only articulating in precise detail a pattern of thought which perceptive minds might hit upon in flashes of intuition. The convention that readers are asked to accept is no more than the exposition of the full, coherent content of such intuitions. If the passages are neither euphonious nor simple, it is because they clearly were not meant to be; they are intended to arrest and challenge. In its context the sentence about Elmer Abbott is appropriate and functional in providing a deliberately rhetorical conclusion to the long interpolated meditation.

It should also be noted that the baroque style of By Love Possessed is neither completely representative nor entirely new. The eccentricities are exaggerated, to be sure, but they are exaggerations of tendencies already present, though kept under stricter control, in Cozzens' earlier novels. So far as sentence structure is concerned, Cozzens has two characteristic traits: a fondness for elaborate subordination which results in nests of parenthetical comments within subordinate elements, and a habit of appositival coordination in which one expression (noun, verb, modifier) is followed by others that explain and bear the same grammatical construction as the first. These traits, infrequent in dialogue, are common in meditative or descriptive passages.

Though the waking mind clutched at its relief of recognizing the dream as such—not really real, not really happening, not really requiring such an anguished effort to grasp and to explain—the dreaming mind with desperate hypnagogic attachment would not let go, leave off. A running engine of phantasmogenesis, powerfully engaged again, pressed him to dream on; and, little as life, Dunky (could that man be still alive?) angrily, excitedly, confronted him. [By Love Possessed]

The two devices just illustrated are common as early as Men and Brethren (1936).

The words returned, of themselves, with unforced deliberation, over and over. Soon he was aware, without the distraction or the interruption of taking an interest in it, of the automatically increasing depth of his breathing, the modulation of his heart beat. Set, by the familiar practice of his will, on the deceptive threshold over which some people stepped to a supposed spiritual apprehension—where the senses, starved of nervous energy, were narcotized, kept no more check on actuality; where reason, deprived of ideas to work with abdicated, impotent; where Grace might very well appear, as Calvin supposed, irresistible—Ernest released himself.

Compare a typical passage from Faulkner which uses the same devices, especially the piling up of appositival absolute constructions.

In the surrey with his cousin and Major de Spain and General Compson he saw the wilderness through a slow drizzle of November rain just above the ice point as it seemed to him later he always saw it or at least always remembered it—the tall and endless wall of dense November woods under the dissolving afternoon and the year's death, sombre, impenetrable (he could not even discern yet how, at what point they could possibly hope to enter it even though he knew that Sam Fathers was waiting there with the wagon), the surrey moving through the skeleton stalks of cotton and corn in the last of open country, the last trace of man's puny gnawing at the immemorial flank, until, dwarfed by that perspective into an almost ridiculous diminishment, the surrey itself seemed to have ceased to move (this too to be completed later, years later, after he had grown to a man and had seen the sea) as a solitary small boat hangs in lonely immobility, merely tossing up and down, in the infinite waste of the ocean while the water and then the apparently impenetrable land which it nears without appreciable progress, swings, slowly and opens the widening inlet which is the anchorage. [William Faulkner, Go Down Moses, 1942]

Cozzens' style is perspicuous, even when twisted and baroque, in the sense that its ornate complications serve to qualify, sharpen, and enrich an approximately specific meaning already established by the basic structure. In Faulkner the interminable increment of absolute phrases is cumulative: the meaning is not defined by an articulated structure but emerges as a kind of essence of the tangle of sentence elements, heaped up like branches on a bonfire—a glow that appears now and then dimly through the smoke and occasionally bursts free in bright flame. Though Cozzens' later style is, in rare instances, smokily obscured, it characteristically gives off a steady, dry light.

This is to say that Cozzens' style, although sensitive and ornate, is not poetic. The surface is dense and in the later novels often forbidding, but it is clear in the sense that the poetry of Pope is clear—the meaning not always easy to grasp on a first reading, but fully articulated and expressed if a reader makes the effort required by the compression and complication of the structure. The prose of Faulkner, on the contrary, even when the structure is relatively simple, is suggestive rather than explicit; and it is ambiguous in the sense that, like poetry, it sometimes manages to express what cannot really be said. The one Cozzens novel that might be called poetic—both in its primary use of image and symbol and in the feeling it gives of being autogenetic, of having been discovered as an organic whole by the writer instead of being deliberately constructed—is Castaway. But even here the writing is sharp and precise. Cozzens seems to know, and to be able to say, exactly what he wants to express; as to ornament he would probably agree with Aristotle that "the perfection of style is to be clear without being mean." It is true that Cozzens' later style makes heavy demands on the reader, but it richly rewards those who still cultivate the art of full reading.

In addition to being complex and ornate in its structure, Cozzens' style is "literary" in the sense that the reflective and descriptive passages use a good many uncommon words, similar to the inkhorn terms of Elizabethan writers, and a wealth of half-quotations and allusions. Again, it is ridiculously easy to make fun of this vocabulary by compiling lists of outlandish terms from Cozzens' novels. Out of context they give a false impression of their frequency of appearance and a smack of the pedantic Latinism of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary. Actually, since such words are not common in the dialogue that makes up a large part of the novels, their frequency can easily be, and has been, exaggerated. They do not occur on every page but tend to cluster in occasional set pieces of rhetorical fireworks. While some of them—anfractuosities, furibund, or succussive—make no obvious addition to the meaning, many of them (including most of those listed by Dwight Macdonald) make the precise discriminations appropriate to the literate sensibilities of the characters through whom comment on the action is made. Colonel Ross, who constantly quotes Milton and Pope, may be allowed an occasional word like chicanery, senescence, or irruptive, especially when, as in the last example, the word is so effectively used: "that horrid irruptive roar" of airplanes passing close overhead.

Apart from their preciseness of connotation, Cozzens seems often to use exotic words out of an almost Elizabethan exuberance, a simple delight in rich materials. Reminded of the phrase "an old style Princeton Seminary supralapsarian," Ernest Cudlipp interjects "What a marvelous word, by the way!" and rolls on his tongue its opposite, "infralapsarian," which he equates with "a dreary Arminianism, a mess of Methodist pottage." The orotund terms and the veiled allusion, are sharpened by contrast with the Anglo-Saxon earthiness of "Calvin would spit on them!" The rhetorical effect—colloquialism pointing up rhetorical opulence, and vice versa—is a marked characteristic of Cozzens' style, and it can be extraordinarily effective in puncturing a balloon, as in the following passage describing the Catholic Church's facility in dealing with the weakness of the flesh:

But among the forewarned, forearmed faithful, such escapes were no occasion for panic, nor even for agitation. The strays were the devil's—bad; they worked evil; they spread confusion among pious or sacred thoughts and intentions; but what would you? Evil's energies must flag, too; and when they flagged, means to recapture and recommit the unclean spirits had been appointed. Grace, failing to confine, still enabled contribution; mercy saved the contrite—just keep your shirt on! Meanwhile, nature must take nature's course. [By Love Possessed]

Similarly the studied, self-mocking, defensive artificiality of Julius Penrose's speech achieves an additional incongruity when used to describe some bald fact and gives a mild relish of irony to the style. Cozzens writes for an audience literate enough to enjoy deliberate virtuosity and able to look at the literary equivalent of late Victorian gingerbread architecture, not with Puritan outrage, but with amusement and affection.

These devices—the ornate complexity of sentence structure, the use of literary words, the excess of alliteration—give to parts of Cozzens' later novels their stylistic effect of slightly old-fashioned magniloquence. Cozzens is said to admire Macaulay, and he justifies his own style, by implication at least, when Arthur Winner contemplates the florid Victorian inscription in the lobby of the Union League Club:

That epigraph embodied a seriousness of purpose still respectable. Were people really the better for not talking like that any more? Was there any actual advantage of honesty when high-sounding terms went out? Had facts of life as life is lived been given any more practical recognition? [By Love Possessed]

The bare, plain style recommended by Bishop Sprat for use by the Royal Society in the late seventeenth century is not the only possible style, and those who insist on its use in the novel seem to fall into the Puritan fallacy of assuming that all ornament is bad. Even at its most rhetorical, Cozzens' style in By Love Possessed is rich, sonorous, and masculine. The sentences are architectural in their feeling for rich materials and their concern for an explicitness of structure which baroque embellishment may cover but does not conceal. If the decoration is occasionally so literary as to approach the grotesque, at least it is determinate and perspicuous, sharp in the sunlight with no blurred, fuzzy edges. Its rhetorical opulence is a pleasant surprise in a day when the concept of unembellished functionalism has been so widely and unconsciously accepted that Renaissance splendor (as revealed, say, in a film like The Titan) comes as a shock to the average American.

Cozzens' magniloquence is not motivated by the pious reverence of the antiquarian; he uses Victorian mannerisms with a full, ironic awareness of their incongruity in an age which, as Julius Penrose notes, is cheap and maudlin. The ironically artificial speech of some of the characters provides them with a kind of defense against falsity, against too open a revelation of deep feeling. Lieutenant Amanda Turck's "wry phrasing" and intricately formed sentences [in Guard of Honor]—"I will stop drinking your valuable whisky, clean up these things, and with heartfelt thanks for your kindness and your cash outlay, make myself, as we said when I was young, scarce"—are not in the normal spoken style of even educated Americans. They are, as Nathaniel Hicks recognizes, defensive; and he is touched by "this controlled and composed, yet ceaseless struggle … against that obsessive self-consciousness." He remembers her "in the terrible heat of yesterday's high afternoon pronouncing a little stiltedly: 'The Lybian air adust—' it was defensive, he could see now. It intended the irony, for what that was worth, both ways. Though she reeked, she thought, of sweat, she quoted Milton; and though she quoted Milton, she reeked, she thought, of sweat." Her wry raillery is "aimed at herself; her defense against everything."

The affected speech of Julius Penrose [in By Love Possessed]—"the finished phrases, in their level precision almost rehearsed-sounding, the familiar deliberately mincing tones that mocked themselves with their own affectation"—is likewise a defense against hurts to one's vanity. Though not in the ordinary sense realistic, they are realistically appropriate to the hypersensitivity of a proud, crippled man. Julius' habit of speech, ironic at his own expense, serves to hold strangers at arm's length while partially sharing, with old friends, "the privacy, or even secrecy, which alone, at some points, dignifies a man."

Cozzens' own sensibility may well be similar to that of Julius Penrose or Amanda Turck. In a letter written in 1955 he admits that the account of the young writer in Ask Me Tomorrow is to some extent autobiographical; and the theme of the novel is pride. Francis Ellery, over-sensitive and proud, interposes a series of masks between himself and the world, and Cozzens' use of a central consciousness in the later novels serves as a similar protective device. The point of view shifts in the early novels, but after 1933 it is only in Castaway that the author consistently speaks out in his own person. The entire action of Men and Brethren is seen through the sensibility of the Reverend Ernest Cudlipp; Abner Coates is unvaryingly the central consciousness of The Just and the Unjust; the melodramatic events of By Love Possessed are given us only as seen through the normally dispassionate eyes of Arthur Winner. In Guard of Honor a few incidents—General Beal on the target range, Sergeant Pellerino at the Knock and Wait Club, the WAC officers at breakfast—are narrated directly, but most of the action of the book is seen through the eyes of the youthful Nathaniel Hicks or the aging Colonel Ross. The device enables Cozzens not only to develop the theme of Hicks' moral education, but to attribute to the colonel a ripened wisdom which a sensitive author might hesitate to offer in his own right.

Another device that serves to establish an exact degree of separation between the author and his characters is the use of full names to designate the principal characters in By Love Possessed. A good many readers, including the parodists, have noted, sometimes with annoyance, the frequent repetition of the full name "Arthur Winner." The device may sound mannered, but it serves to establish the slightly formal tone that Cozzens seems to intend. Outside the Society of Friends no one in real life calls another person by his full name; normal idiom would require "Arthur," or "Art," or "Mr. Winner," depending on the degree of intimacy. These names are all used by characters in the novel, but none is really appropriate for the author's use. Garret Hughes, Julius Penrose, Noah Tuttle, and Helen Detweiler are dramatis personae, not personal friends, and in By Love Possessed (as in Guard of Honor, where military titles are used) the slightly formal note struck by the repetition of the full names helps to detach the characters from the author and to stress the fact that, like actors in a play, their opinions are not necessarily those of their creator.

Cozzens' particular temperament may also be indicated in the frequency with which certain words are used. "Compunction" occurs over and over again throughout the novels, and its connotation—a faint suggestion of arrogance and guilt mingled with pity or sympathy—seems to define the author's contradictory combination of habitual feelings: protectively detached, oversensitive almost to the point of being finicky, yet worried and involved. The impression is reinforced, especially in Ask Me Tomorrow, by an excessive use of other words suggesting a kind of partial disengagement, or shrinking involvement: mortifying, harassed, crest-fallen; qualms, chagrin, wounded feelings; quailed, shrank, recoiled. Like his sentence structure, Cozzens' diction reflects his basically Pyrrhonistic temperament, his apoetic intelligence, and his troubled aloofness.

The intricately qualified observations and judgments of the Cozzens heroes are matched by the complexity and magniloquence of the style in which they think and speak, and a very conspicuous trait of this style is its frequent incorporation of quotations, half-quotations, and allusions. It is probably true, as suggested in Ask Me Tomorrow, that Cozzens no longer finds satisfaction in writing poetry, but the quotations indicate that he still finds poetry rewarding to read. The English poets of every age since the Renaissance are represented, and references to Shakespeare and the Bible are particularly frequent. Sometimes the quotations are unmistakably indicated by italics or quotation marks, as when Arthur Winner quotes from one of Hotspur's speeches or Julius Penrose recites a stanza from In Memoriam. More frequently they are worked unobtrusively into the structure of Cozzens' own sentences. On two of the pages describing the death of Warren Winner there are unacknowledged fragments of Julius Caesar, Keats, and Tennyson. An account of the orgies at the Osborne farm, known to the natives as Alcoholic Hill, concludes: "At any rate, the revels, silly or scandalous, now were ended." Mrs. Pratt makes a "fresh deviation into sense"; Arthur Winner thinks of the dimming "image of his late-espoused saint." The appropriateness of such fragments varies. Lieutenant Winner and Tennyson's eagle have obviously a good deal in common, and other fragments are more or less ironic. But some of the allusions are so recondite as to be easily missed by the average reader, who could hardly be expected to think of Sir Christopher Wren when Arthur Winner speaks of his father's monument. Many quotations have no apparent function beyond embellishment. Presumably they just occurred to Cozzens, as fragments from "Abide with Me," echoing the hymn tune played on the carillon, occur to Arthur Winner while he contemplates Colonel Minton's ruin.

The constant casual use of quotations in the novels has something of the effect of a genre of poetry popular in the eighteenth century—the "imitation." Like Pope's imitations of Horace, Dr. Johnson's "London" is neither a translation nor a new poem. The trick of writing an Imitation was to follow the content and plan of the original poem but to supply new, contemporary names and events and if possible to demonstrate a contemporary relevance in the thought of the "Ancients." The relevance might be ironic, as when Pope directed his Imitation of the first epistle of the second book of Horace not to that famous patron of poetry, the emperor Augustus Caesar, but to George II of England, notorious for his philistine scorn of literature and the arts. The effectiveness of a successful Imitation consisted partly in its demonstration of the idea, popular among neoclassic writers, that human nature did not change, that what oft was said could still be relevantly expressed. Partly, too, an Imitation was effective because it flattered the reader. Written for a small group of educated gentlemen, who could be counted on to be conversant with the Latin classics, an Imitation afforded the pleasure of a familiar Latin phrase turned to a new use. Whether the use was exactly apposite was not crucial; the pleasure of recognition was considerable, and it was increased by a flattering sense of belonging to a small, exclusive, superior group. The reader of Cozzens is likewise complimented by an implied offer of admission to the circle of educated professional people in whose mouths and minds the quotations appear.

Similar in use and effect to the quotations in the text are the epigraphs to the novels or to parts of novels. Some are ironic—for example, the text that introduces The Just and the Unjust: "Certainty is the Mother of Repose; therefore the Law aims at Certainty." Some are structural in the sense that they announce a theme. The quotation from Acts 2:37, "Men and brethren, what shall we do?" relates the title of the book to the central question answered in the novel. The epigraph to Castaway directs the reader to the parallel with Robinson Crusoe; the quotation from Troilus and Cressida at the beginning of Ask Me Tomorrow introduces the theme of frustrated youthful pride. But frequently the epigraphs have no clear, unmistakable relevance. Their significance must be seen, if at all, by peripheral vision, out of the corner of the eye rather than by direct examination. Ariel's speech to the earthbound Caliban beginning "I and my fellows/Are ministers of fate" and stressing his invulnerability to earthly weapons may strike the strictly logical mind as a baffling epigraph for Guard of Honor. But it has a kind of glancing relevance in its stress on the intractability of those inexorable forces which, despite our wishes and best efforts, determine a considerable part of what happens to us.

Similarly, the epigraph to By Love Possessed may have an indirect significance in addition to its explicit stress on the passage of time. It is taken from a speech by the weak and unhappy King Henry VI, who in the midst of battle wishes that he were a simple swain tracing the uneventful hours of a life that will in due time "bring white hairs unto a quiet grave"; instead of a king who, despite his rich surroundings, is waited on by "care, mistrust, and treason." Arthur Winner, too, had hoped for an ordered, blameless life but is forced to endure an increasingly heavy burden of dangerous responsibility. The epigraphs to the three main subdivisions of the novel are all stage directions, the first two only indirectly relevant. "Drums afar off" probably refers to Coriolanus, where the drums are a call to battle. "A noise of hunters heard" is from The Tempest and seems to be related to the metaphorical sounds—"Were they of hunting, of pursuers?"—which Arthur Winner takes as premonitory intimations of disaster. Both have a faintly ominous note and thus lead up appropriately to the short, climactic section headed "Within the tent of Brutus."

The parallel between the last section of By Love Possessed and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is too striking to be missed, yet not easily generalized or defined. Helen Detweiler, like Portia too easily despairing, "fell distract,/And, her attendants absent, swallow'd fire." Julius Penrose, who like Cassius "smiles in such a sort/As if he mocked himself," gives Arthur (Brutus) wine to restore his spirits. Brutus, "arm'd so strong in honesty," accuses Cassius of condoning bribery.

                Shall we now
       Contaminate our fingers with base bribes,
       And sell the mighty space of our large honours
       For so much trash as may be graspéd thus?

Cassius' justification of himself is essentially Julius Penrose's insistence that in view of the factual situation principle must sometimes be shelved. Finally, paralleling Cassius' statement that "a friend should bear his friend's infirmities," Julius indicates that he knows, and is able to accept, still loving, the weakness that had led Arthur Winner into adultery with Marjorie Penrose. Those readers who, like most of Cozzens' generation, have studied Julius Caesar in school will find a reading of the last section of By Love Possessed enriched by half-recognized echoes from Shakespeare's play; just as the scene with Mrs. Pratt in the garden produces a faint resonance—inexplicable on logical grounds since the details are changed with the casual inconsistency of a dream—set up by parallels with Milton's account of the fall of man.

If Cozzens' style, with its usual lucid precision, its occasional deliberate flights of rhetoric, and its fondness for quoting from the "Ancients," might be described as classical, the same term could be used for another characteristic of his novels: a tight structure, based on the classical unities. The typical Cozzens novel is primarily dramatic; its purpose is the immediate presentation of significant character in action; and an important part of the action is what the characters think. In resolving the dilemma of what Joseph Warren Beach [in The Twentieth Century Novel, 1932] calls "subjective drama in the novel"—if it is to be drama, it must be presented rather than recounted or explained; if it is subjective, it must be told about since it cannot be presented through overt action—Cozzens follows the practice of Henry James. The description of internal, psychological experience is given as it occurs in the consciousness of characters in the novel, rather than by the author in his own person. In Ask Me Tomorrow Cozzens deliberately eliminated first-person observations from his original manuscript and lets his main character think about and comment on what happens. It is not necessary for him to "go behind" the consciousness of his characters, since those whose points of view he uses are apt to be, like Colonel Ross or Arthur Winner, almost preternatural in the sharpness of their perceptions, the breadth and depth of their understanding, and the articulate clarity of their thought and speech.

Cozzens does not trace the slow development of character molded by environment and experience over a long period of years. Instead, he confronts us at once with fully formed characters involved in some complication of critical action. The time covered by the novel is characteristically brief—several weeks in The Last Adam (the time required for the spread and crisis of a typhoid epidemic); three days in The Just and the Unjust; two days in S.S. San Pedro, Guard of Honor, and By Love Possessed; a day and a night in Men and Brethren. (Ask Me Tomorrow is an exception, both in the looseness of its structure and in the length of time covered.) Into these short periods Cozzens crowds relatively large casts of characters, a variety of crucial incidents, expository flashbacks sufficient to identify and explain both the persons and their actions, and a good deal of comment and speculation.

To present coherently and perspicuously this packed complexity of diverse material is a difficult technical problem even in a short novel like Men and Brethren. For the longer novels—Guard of Honor or By Love Possessed—the problem is fairly staggering. The author's awareness of the difficulty is made clear in a letter to his English publisher:

What I wanted to write about here [Guard of Honor], the essence of the thing to be said, the point of it all, what I felt to be the important meaning of this particular human experience, was its immensity and its immense complexity…. I could see I faced a tough technical problem. I wanted to show … the peculiar effects of the inter-action of innumerable individuals functioning in ways at once determined by and determining the functioning of innumerable others—all in the common and in every case nearly helpless involvement in what had ceased to be just an "organization" … and become if not an organism with life and purposes of its own, at least an entity, like a crowd…. I would just have to write off as readers everyone who could not or would not meet heavy demands on his attention and intelligence, the imagination to grasp a large pattern and the wit to see the relation which I could not stop to spell out between this & that.

The first step in dealing with such a mass of material is a thorough job of organization, and this requires an intellectual effort which many novelists seem unwilling to make. Captain Hicks, in civilian life editor of a popular magazine, comments irritably, in a tone that suggests Cozzens is expressing his own feeling, on the irresponsibility of some modern writers of serious fiction. "One of you prose artists can screw up a simple, factual story until hell won't have it. You never know anything about organization of the material, and most of you won't learn; you think you know it all" [Guard of Honor].

In another connection Hicks speaks of the "austere beauty of order," and the phrase is an apt description of the effect of the Cozzens novels. Order is produced by "the important arts of selection and elimination" and a careful organization of the remaining details. The novels are as scrupulously organized as they are fully researched and documented, but despite the complicated ordering of events and the heavy load of accurate, detailed information carried, they never seem schematized or mechanical. Even so unsympathetic a critic as Irving Howe [in The New Republic, 20 January 1958] admits Cozzens' success in creating "the illusion of verisimilitude." The structure of the novels, though tight, appears organic.

Guard of Honor is perhaps the best work to illustrate the point, since it incorporates an especially wide variety of material and the plan is simple enough to permit the bare bones of structure to be easily discerned. The novel opens with a superb account of an army airplane flying back in the late afternoon to Ocanara Air Base in Florida. The military personnel aboard are disposed in a stylized order based on rank. At the controls is General Beal, the commanding officer of AFORAD. Next to him, necessarily but significantly out of rank order, is his copilot, Lieutenant Colonel Carricker. At the foremost of the three navigators' desks is Colonel Ross, the Air Inspector. The other two desks are occupied by Captain Hicks and Lieutenant Amanda Turck, WAC. Behind them, on the pull-down seat by the door, is Sergeant Pellerino, the general's crew chief; and in the tail of the airplane, perched on the seat of a chemical toilet, is T/5 Mortimer McIntyre, Junior, a Negro from the Base Services Unit.

The arrangement reflects the chain of command, which in the Army determines the possession and flow of power, a main theme of the novel. The personnel aboard are key figures in the tense, two-day drama about to be enacted, and they represent the various lines of action that are brought to a practical, if not indubitably moral, solution by Saturday night. General Beal is the dramatic center of the network of events to come; his freezing on the controls when a collision seems imminent typifies the temporary loss of command around which so much later action centers. Carricker, the hot pilot, precipitates by his anarchic defiance of proper military procedure the racial conflict which is another main thread of action. Colonel Ross, the imperturbable man of responsibility, shows even in this introductory scene the qualities of rational, controlled efficiency which make him, in Mark Schorer's words [in New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 10 October 1948], the "thematic center" of the novel: he is the man who takes over and straightens out the messes produced by the impulsive or emotional behavior of others. Captain Hicks and Lieutenant Amanda Turck are the fated but as yet barely acquainted lovers; and the flight into Ocanara, with Hicks a hapless passenger, parallels his flight out of Ocanara at the end of the book, morally shaken and confused by the disruptive events of the past two days. Sergeant Pellerino represents the group of essential career technicians who really keep the air base operative and whose disciplined competence and assurance are contrasted with the bewilderment of the reserve officers, forced to fit themselves somehow into the immense, ordered confusion of the wartime Air Force. T/5 McIntyre, almost AWOL through ignorance and negligence, has gained the grudging assistance of Captain Hicks in getting back to the base, and his place in the airplane suggests the racial injustice with which much of the subsequent action is concerned.

The flight to Ocanara serves as a kind of overture, sounding all the principal themes to be developed later in the novel. It begins as a routine operation, and in the early hours of the flight Cozzens sketches in, by means of very skillful flashbacks, the immediate background and present situation of each character. General Beal is being watched by the Air Force high command, who hope to give him, if he measures up to his present responsibilities, a major role in the later stages of the war. The account of Carricker's earlier heroism in combat reveals, along with the fact of his skill and physical courage, signs of his lawless, destructive individualism. The frustrating efforts of Judge Ross to get an assignment in the early days of the war, Captain Hicks' daily round of futile hack work, Amanda Turck's gallant efforts to overcome an ingrained maladjustment to life, all are interpolated into the account of the flight.

Thirty minutes from Ocanara, the persistent head-winds turn into a storm, and as the General attempts a landing in a thunder shower he narrowly misses a B-26 that slides into the runway ahead of him bearing one crew of the Negro medium bomb group who are to be tested and trained at AFORAD. The jolting disorder of the landing, with Lieutenant Turck sick and Sergeant Pellerino cut and bruised on the floor of the airplane, anticipates the only other violence directly presented in the book: the injury and drowning of the paratroopers at the review in honor of General Beal's forty-first birthday—the day on which he recovers the authority of command and qualifies as a full adult. Just as the flight to Ocanara serves as an overture to the grand opera that follows, so the whole novel serves as a kind of overture to the impending Götterdämmerung of the final assault on Japan. The first section ends with a superb curtain scene: in the glare of lightning flashes the whole party, from general to T/5, run just ahead of the thunder-shower for the Operations Building, Colonel Ross (the Prospero of this tempest) pausing characteristically to shepherd the new arrivals to shelter.

The multifarious activities of the Air Base—from high policy discussions among the generals to the routine problems of the WAC detachment and the Negro service units—are presented in a series of close-up shots, all organized around a carefully marked time scheme. The novel is divided into three main parts, entitled Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Each of these parts is subdivided into numbered sections which cover shorter periods of time, usually about an hour. These sections often consist of several scenes in different places, the camera eye moving from one area of the base to another.

Section VII of Saturday covers the period just before lunch. The scene is the Base Hospital, and it involves Captain Hicks, Colonel Ross, General Nichols, Lieutenant Stanley Willis (the battered Negro pilot), and his father. That they are all present at the same time is due to a complex of earlier, apparently unrelated—but, as it turns out, providential—incidents. Section VIII includes a number of scenes, and all occur during and just after lunch. The first is at the Chechoter target range, where General Beal relieves his feelings by blasting targets with his 50-caliber machine guns and, as it turns out, solves his personal problems in his own unorthodox way. The second scene shows Sergeant Pellerino and the other master sergeants enjoying an after-lunch game of dominoes at the Knock and Wait Club. In the third scene Colonel and Mrs. Ross, discussing the Negro problem during a belated lunch at home, are interrupted by Mrs. Beal, who has tried to drown her worry about the general by drinking most of a bottle of Scotch and has come to the Rosses' house, drunk and sick.

Though they seem on the surface made up of random incidents, Sections VII and VIII are actually the turning point of the novel since they embody solutions to the two chief problems confronting General Beal. Both have been introduced in the Thursday overture. The first is the social and military problem of racial antagonism, which has become acute when Carricker smashes the nose of Lieutenant Willis, the Negro pilot of the errant B-26. The problem has been latent for some time: Army regulations permit no discrimination on account of race, but the Air Base is located in central Florida. In an attempt at compromise the local military authorities have established separate Officers Clubs, but the punching of the Negro pilot, magnified by rumor, leads the other Negro officers to organize a demonstration. They force their way into the main Officers Club and are arrested; the news leaks out to the papers, and General Beal gets a direct order from Washington: straighten out this mess without apparently backing down, without antagonizing the Negroes, and without obviously violating Army regulations against segregation.

The second major problem is personal and psychological. General Beal, accustomed to an active life as commander of fighter pilots, whom he likes and understands, has been going to pieces under the unfamiliar strain of sedentary, large-scale administrative command. He becomes acutely aware of his loss of assurance and authority when he freezes on the controls Thursday night and almost wrecks the plane. His abdication of authority is confirmed by his flighty behavior on Friday, and his lowest point comes on Saturday morning at the Base Hospital, where his arrogant demand for a sedative conflicts with the professional ethics of a disgruntled young doctor in uniform. One of Colonel Ross's many jobs is to keep the visiting general, who represents the Chief of Air Staff, from knowing that Beal has lost his grip.

Section VII shows Colonel Ross, by a masterly exploitation of accident and coincidence, settling, at least temporarily, the Negro problem. The father of the injured Negro pilot is flattered into accepting an artfully slanted but accurate version of the affair: Stanley Willis was not "beaten up"; he merely got into a squabble—"it had to do with flying"—with "another officer," and got punched in the nose. At the same time a reward is tacitly offered. If Stanley shows the ability to command (i.e., if he is able to calm down the rebellious members of the Negro experimental bomb group), he will be made its commanding officer. After Colonel Ross has read the citation, General Nichols presents Lieutenant Willis with the Distinguished Flying Cross—which, like the Negro father, has providentially arrived from Washington; and it is soon reported that Lieutenant Willis, having made a speech to the rebels, "does not think they will do it again."

General Beal's personal problem is solved over the target range, though the details are not reported until later. In a fantastic game of "chicken" played with fighter planes high in the air, he makes Carricker flinch.

"Benny's had it close before; but I bet he never had it closer…. I moved in on him a little; and he hauled off fast, yelling: 'Stay away, damn it, keep away!'"

Having demonstrated, on Carricker's own primitive terms, that he is still as good a man as Benny, General Beal is restored; and he returns with vigor and assurance to the responsibilities that Colonel Ross has been bearing for him in the interim. The final episode—the accidental drowning of the paratroopers—serves to demonstrate, to the satisfaction of even the "hatchet man" from Washington, General Beal's complete recovery. In a burst of self-assurance, he contradicts his infallible, indispensable mentor, the Air Inspector.

"This way isn't going to work," Colonel Ross said. "But you're the general."

"You're damn right I am," General Beal said.

"They have to prove to me they can't do it, not just say so."

At the very end of the novel, General Beal puts General Jo-Jo Nichols and by implication Colonel Ross in their proper places.

He put his hand suddenly on Colonel Ross's shoulder. "Even Jo-Jo knows they could do without him before they could do without me…. Jo-Jo can talk to Mr. Churchill; but the war, that's for us. Without me—without us, he wouldn't have a whole hell of a lot to talk about, would he?"

Colonel Ross, "feeling the thin strong fingers, nervous but steadily controlled, pressing the cloth of his shirt," recognizes the gesture—the kindly hand of youth humoring yet firmly directing an aging subordinate. He accepts his position in the spirit of the lines from Samson Agonistes which have been running through his mind on the reviewing stand: with new acquist of true experience from this great event, and calm of mind, all passion spent. The final sentences of the book, while they imply another beginning in the interminable cycles of the war, round off this ordered cycle of minor tempest by introducing a different scale of proportion.

The position lights of the northbound plane could still be made out by their steady movement if you knew where to look. The sound of engines faded on the higher air, merging peacefully in silence. Now in the calm night and the vast sky, the lights lost themselves, no more than stars among the innumerable stars.