[Becker is an educator and author whose books include Paris and the Arts, 1851–1896 (1971) and Master European Realists of the Nineteenth Century (1982). In the following review of Guard of Honor, he contends that while the military detail is authentic, the plot is weak and lacks objectivity and balance in its view of military life.]

The slice of life or the cross-section has been used by novelists to give a balanced and objective view of a world too often subject to distortion because of faulty vision or special pleading. James Gould Cozzens, in his Pulitzer Prize novel, [Guard of Honor], uses the technique with skill and urbanity. Yet his very success brings the value of the device into question.

For millions of us, civilian as well as military combatants, the most abiding memory of the late war is of the gigantic and often apparently chaotic organizations of which we were a part. As sprawling army bases and posts rose in brick and concrete almost overnight, teapot tempests and departmental intrigues and jealousies loomed larger on the immediate horizon than the landing on Okinawa or the crossing of the Rhine. Conduct of the war, like that of any enterprise, depended on the nature and interplay of personalities. A fumbler in uniform was a fumbler still, raised even to a higher power.

What Mr. Cozzens gives us is the shock and pleasure of recognition. A score or more of representative people at a great army air base at Ocanara, Florida, live through forty-eight hours and 631 pages of a purely local crisis. For a time it is in question whether Major General Beal, commander of the base, will display the powers of judgment and stability to enable him in an administrative position to continue the rapid rise he has made as a "flying general." If it is less by intelligence than by his ability to inspire the intelligent devotion of others that he does come through, still there is the comforting assurance that the war is in good hands and men of good will do prosper.

It is both idle and ungrateful to ask that an author have written another novel than he did. Yet the careful lack of focus, the persistent effort to avoid an issue, the deliberate reaching out to obvious and trivial episodes in the lives of the characters, becomes here a fundamental flaw, negating the very literary skill that is everywhere apparent. This group of human beings is intrinsically no more interesting than any other similarly complex group, nor is the Ocanara air base shown to be any different in its essentials from a department store, or a labor union, or a metropolitan hospital, to choose at random from popular subjects of the cross-section technique. Indeed, except for the possible novelty of the military scene, there is nothing new here. On the evidence submitted by Mr. Cozzens, there is no reason to think that the war behind the lines is especially interesting or worth writing about.

Actually he starts a number of hares in the form of serious themes, any one of which would have provided an adequate focus for his book. In Benny Carricker and in General Beal, for example, we have tantalizing glimpses of the new man who has added the air to his dimensions. Benny, though not fully drawn, is convincing in his insouciant insubordination and pungent speech. Beal taking to the air while others resolve his problems for him is also memorable. He raises also the question of what kind of leadership a war demands, but though we are told at the end that Beal's qualities are more indispensable than those of Jo-Jo Nichols, the Jove-like Deputy Chief of Air Staff, we never get at his essence.

The crisis in Cozzens' book deals with Jim Crowism at the base and in the community at large. Several characters exist only to exacerbate the tension by trying to see that justice is done. A nice sense of irony is displayed in some of the central scenes. But then, as personal crises are resolved, the social problem recedes, and it becomes clear that it is only a piquant element, not the real focus of Cozzens' concern.

Thus there is both too much and too little. There is a wealth of authentic detail, but the whole is a blur, a huge Delacroix canvas that becomes a little tiresome, no matter how engaging the parts. In short, the cross-section seems played out in serious writing except as an elementary device for readers who cannot keep their eyes on a complex object. What is needed is a more intensive application of the qualities of objectivity and balanced selection to a smaller segment of experience. Where an author has found value and meaning he should make it possible for the reader to disengage them. And where they do not exist, that itself is a meaning which needs to be brought into focus.