[In the following review of Just Representations, Epperson examines Cozzens's career, his fall from critical esteem, and argues that his work has significant literary merit.]

Only twenty years ago, any list of our top-ranking novelists would surely have included the name of James Gould Cozzens. His short stories and novels had won prizes and critical attention. Six of his books had been selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club. By Love Possessed (1957) received all the acclaim a writer could hope for: commercial success as a best-seller, condensation in the Reader's Digest, a cover story in Time, $250,000 for the movie rights, and, in 1960, the prestigious Howells Medal for fiction, awarded every five years by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. One respected critic went so far as to suggest Cozzens as a nominee for the Nobel Prize. And such a suggestion seemed, at the time, perfectly apt. Cozzens had written a number of distinguished novels fully in the tradition of Hawthorne, Edith Wharton, and Henry James. One of them, Guard of Honor (1948), a fine novel by any standard and in any time, received the Pulitzer Prize and was called "the best American novel of World War II."

Such honors and distinction, one thought in 1957, would assure Cozzens of an enduring literary reputation. Yet now who reads his novels? Who not yet in middle age has even heard his name? He is certainly not read in college courses devoted to modern American fiction, where one naturally finds such contemporaries of Cozzens as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner—but also Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, and William Burroughs, writers of little or no reputation in the late Fifties.

After about 1960, while other and perhaps less significant novelists rose to popularity, Cozzens virtually disappeared from our collective literary consciousness. His last book, Morning, Noon, and Night, received scattered and generally hostile notices when it was published in 1968, a bad year for books as for many other manifestations of American culture.

Perhaps now that the turmoil of the Sixties is fading, Cozzens' work may emerge from the curious limbo to which it has been assigned. The volume under review [Just Representations: A James Gould Cozzens Reader] is an attempt to help it do just that, to provide an introductory and comprehensive review of Cozzens' fiction in an omnibus that includes one complete novel (Ask Me Tomorrow), generous and relatively self-contained excerpts from six of his major books, and some stories, essays, letters, and reviews. Sandwiched between these chunks of Cozzens are appreciative essays by distinguished critics and men of letters. Professor Matthew J. Bruccoli, who edited the volume, has also contributed a perceptive biographical essay. In addition to the reprinted pieces by Jerome Weidman and Brendan Gill, there are four critical essays by academic writers, all of whom write appreciatively of Cozzens' art; in particular, Noel Perrin, Frederick Bracher, and Richard Ludwig offer analytical commentary in support of their enthusiasm.

All the critics included in this volume are puzzled and rather aggressive about what they rightly see as the unjustified, almost conspiratorial, neglect of Cozzens by the critical establishment—that is by the majority of academic and "New York" literary critics. Explaining this neglect and overcoming it is largely the task of these critics and is, one assumes, the purpose of the anthology itself.

Several reasons are given for the sudden eclipse of Cozzens' once brilliant reputation, none of which seems convincing. Some point to Cozzens' obdurate refusal to grant interviews, to appear on talk shows, to become a celebrity. Such reticence, however, has not injured the esteem granted to Thomas Pynchon or (still) to J. D. Salinger, both of whom remain firmly and obsessively private. Others argue that Cozzens' style is too cerebral, too allusive, too controlled. Yet no one would deny cerebration, allusive reference, learning, or architectonic control in the writers named above, not to mention Mailer, Nabokov, Joyce Carol Oates, Bellow, John Hawkes, or Donald Barthelme—all writers whose works are regularly explicated in university lecture halls. The causes for this neglect of Cozzens must be found elsewhere, in the mysterious turns of literary fashion, and in the tremendous cultural upheavals of the last two decades, which fractured and then fragmented our literary ideologies.

We find a clue to these changes in the year 1957, the year of Cozzens' most successful novel, By Love Possessed—and also the year in which Norman Mailer turned in a new and astonishingly fruitful direction with the publication of his essay "The White Negro." At the same time, Kerouac published On the Road, a book that was to have an immense influence on the thoughts and deeds and writings popular in the Sixties. Both of these authors consciously rejected the novelistic form that they and Cozzens had inherited from a long American tradition, a form that Cozzens sharpened and refined in over three decades as a writer. His novels attempted to be "just representations" of men and manners in the twentieth century, judicious, realistic, objective, and accurate imitations of tone and detail. In contrast, the novel of the Sixties and Seventies was to be fact-and-fiction, reportage, polemics, or propaganda; it was to be autobiographical, plotless, solipsistic, or narrowly topical, and to range from the impressionistic to the surrealistic and absurd. Cozzens rigorously rejected these fashionable positions.

In addition, our most recent novels have played on (and perhaps played out) themes of anxiety, despair, violence, moral and spiritual relativism, and the blind aggressions of military, sexual, or social conflict. Cozzens' novels do not ignore these themes; to do so would have indicated a willful disregard of the stresses of our century. Nor does reconcile the problems these themes raise with sentimental or contrived solutions. Cozzens can be as bleak as Pynchon, as realistic as Mailer, and as ironically searching as Bellow.

Where Cozzens parts company with his contemporaries is in his ideological stoicism, his refusal to yield to despair or trendy nihilism, his steady belief that intelligence can impose form on experience, that excellence is necessary and possible, and that the abiding virtues in what we now pejoratively call the Puritan Ethic are indeed virtues. In other words, his novels celebrate and define the limits of honor, faith, education, hard work, dignity, loyalty, restraint, and the responsibility incumbent on those who possess (accidentally perhaps) social rank and material wealth.

Cozzens, then, pursued subjects that might well be called old-fashioned and conservative—or, put another way, subjects that are worth conserving. His preoccupations naturally affected the way he wrote and the world he wrote about. He was a traditionalist who subordinated his ego, intelligence, and considerable skill to the demands of narrative and character. Honoring hard work, he worked hard and long at his craft, with a faith and diligence we cannot help but admire. His subjects came from that segment of American society, the privileged and educated elite, of which he unapologetically felt himself a part. (His essays on the Kent School and Harvard place him squarely and cheerfully among the Eastern gentry.)

His best books are about that class of Americans, professional people, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, going about their responsible and complicated lives with a sense of duty and compassion, sure of their abstract convictions but uncertain—as we all are—when the abstract collides with the concrete instance. It is this collision and the resulting incongruity that form the central interest of Cozzens' best novels. Lawyers discover that legalistic concepts of justice are inapplicable to matters of the human heart. Doctors, clergymen, and generals learn that the honorable and necessary principles of their professions, principles that have shaped their thoughts and actions, are inadequate to explain or control the complexities of experience. Despite these inadequacies, these limits (and Cozzens is a writer who explores our limitations), Cozzens' heroes retain their virtue and dignity even as they are disillusioned by experience. Perhaps this hard, classically stoic, even illiberal recognition of our limitations and helplessness accounts for Cozzens' unpopularity with the literary-critical establishment.

Or it may be, as Bruccoli argues, that Cozzens is in disfavor because he writes about those who are generally regarded as successful—the educated, intelligent, socially prominent, well-to-do. The liberal cliche, of course, has it (to quote Bruccoli) that "success is a sign of corruption…. Cozzens alarms proponents of the higher failure." There may be truth in this comment. Only one other author of stature, Louis Auchincloss, has written with intelligence and knowledge of the nation's managerial and professional classes, a segment of our society by no means inconsequential or uncharacteristic. Yet Auchincloss, like Cozzens, gets short critical shrift in the pages of the literary quarterlies.

It is too soon to predict the reemergence of Cozzens as a major figure of American fiction. He died on August 9, ten days before his 75th birthday, the date on which this anthology was released. Like a character from one of his own novels, he must surely have been aware of the irony of this book's genesis and appearance, a project conceived and executed by academics who hoped to rescue him from oblivion. Personal oblivion came to him before he could know of the success or failure of this belated rescue operation. One likes to think that he did not much care, that a lifetime devoted to the writing of books in the best way he knew how was satisfaction enough. Whatever the case, his books will last because they are true, faithful, and intelligent. Those who know his novels will honor his memory. For those who have not yet read Cozzens' work, the omnibus serves as a fine introduction.