[Stern is an educator, critic, novelist, and short story writer whose books include Golk (1960) and Collected Stories (1988). In the following unfavorable review of By Love Possessed, Stern faults the novel's structure, literary style, and character development.]

The form of James Cozzens' latest novel is that of The Ambassadors: the book is organized around a central consciousness, an intelligent, middle-aged man who participates more or less directly in actions the evaluation of which leads to revaluation of his own experience and principles. A fine pattern for a novel, and one which Cozzens has successfully followed—though not so strictly—in Men and Brethren (1936), Ask Me Tomorrow (1940), and The Just and the Unjust (1942). Unfortunately, the structural principle of By Love Possessed is seriously flawed, and its materials are shoddy. The central intelligence, Arthur Winner Jr., the well-to-do lawyer who appraised the events and characters of the Delaware Valley town, Brocton, is sniped at throughout the book, but so inconsistently and arbitrarily that the values which are to be reappraised at the end have never been given a sensible presentation.

Arthur Winner Junior—confusion in the moonlight; dismay among the roses!—was obliged to conceal as well as he could a crisis about which his single shamed consolation was that Hope [his first wife], anything but knowing, would never know what happened.

The interpolated mockery is so isolated in context that it seems as much mistaken intrusion as genuine qualifier. The real qualifying is done by the opposition of the two final clauses, and these, in all their contrived complexity, are the thoughts of Winner himself. Such thoughts seem to constitute what makes for right reason in this novel because nothing better is ever supplied.

Except at the very end. There, Winner's law partner, Julius Penrose, displaces him as the central intelligence, sits him down and teaches him what life is really about, what the true significance of the discoveries he has been making is, and what he should do about them. The structure of the book topples. As Winner staggers home through the streets of "Brocton, my Brocton!" the bitter sophistication ringing in his ears, the reader too is staggering in the realization that he has been led astray, and for over five hundred pages. The analyses of the events and characters Winner has supplied are all suspect. The effect of this conclusion may be gauged if we venture to substitute a similar deus ex machina for Maria Gostrey during the last scene of The Ambassador. Thus: Strether enters, full of the slowly-accumulated wisdom whose acquisition the book has charted, opens his mouth to speak, is sat down by the god and told, "Strether, dear boy, you have been beautifully, sublimely wrong from first to last. Let me sketch in the fine view for you." Such an ending reduces Winner's education to the level of a sweepstakes' winning, a sudden triumph which blots out the past. The Jamesian structure has been used—I think consciously—as a trick, a pointless trick, the result of which is a deformity of the sort that the author of the treatise On the Sublime says is due to "a single cause, that pursuit of novelty in the expression of ideas which may be regarded as the fashionable craze of the day."

Works of art frequently survive even serious structural flaws. By Love Possessed would not survive even if its overall make-up were as perfect as that of its model. And this is surprising, for Cozzens here attempts what he has done with great success ever since the two Cuban novels which he excludes from his canon, the panoramic presentation. Nearly a quarter of a century ago, in The Last Adam, Cozzens had learned how to exhibit a town's crisis through a number of individual ones. Meanwhile, he had made a far more complex presentation in Guard of Honor (1948): there, two leading story lines, that of Ross and Beal, and that of Hicks, cut a swathe through a large number of individual careers and a number of important general crises in a manner reminiscent of Tolstoi. Although the burden of coincidence was a bit heavy, the total effect was one of spareness, the brilliant administration of a complex action. The panorama was incidental to the action, not close to its heart as is the case in By Love Possessed, where the urge to exhibit the scene seems to be nearly as strong as the urge to exhibit Winner's appraisal of it. Consequently, the expository devices are embarrassingly awkward and obtrusive; the list Winner's mother makes out at the beginning of the book which includes the names of many of the characters as in a dramatis personae, and which is gone over in detail by Winner; the frequent flashbacks which spring up at the sight of a plaque or a character and often go on for pages irrelevant to an action but not to sheer panorama, or to a Sherwood Anderson-like desire to write up the careers of all the characters as if this were what the novel were about. The clumsiness extends to the use of information one character gives another who must certainly have known it already: so Winner's second wife informs him that she used to run a girl's camp. (He has known her all her life and been married to her for some years. And there is no point in his not having known this fact. In novels, a wife, or husband, exists in no small part as a repository of all but the "to-be-treated" parts of the partner's past.) The story lines of this novel are largely replaced by the panoramic fill-in, elaborate detail, and by that most notorious feature of pretentious fictions, talk.

Cozzens has always had an eye peeled for the philosophic wiseacre, and he has usually been careful to separate his own reflective heroes from their burlesque counterparts by having the former denounce or make fun of the latter. So Ellery ridicules McKellar in Ask Me Tomorrow, Coates turns on Harry Wurts in The Just and the Unjust, and even Colonel Ross remembers Judge Schlicter's lapses into "discourse—no homelier word described it." Now, however, although the burlesque counterpart is present in the Roman Catholic proselytizer, Mrs. Pratt—"Ecstatic, she twittered: yes-yes; and mountains prepared themselves to be moved"—, her style is almost indistinguishable from that of Winner, Penrose, or the author himself. This book is swollen with tortuous lucubrations on every topic under the sun, honesty, tolerance, legality, sentimentality, old age, rationalism, and what have you. Almost everyone talks and talks and talks, in that style which will be memorable in the American novel as the most disserviceable, most inexcusably perverse of any but that of A Fable. Inversions—"With calm entire"; court-Latin syntax,

Pushing hard, he managed to push it to play. A jar of cogs, forced, creaking and dubious, together, sounded;

Wardour Street diction—"the heart relucted"; cultural displays—

"the small dome—like the side porches, innocent of utility; like the columns' capitals, a pure aspiring to the solemn and to the noble, to putative glories of Greece, to supposed grandeurs of Rome";

tenth-rate philosophizing—

The nature of the intimation could be seen—a query directed at human struggle and human failure, and at the kinds of victory attainable in life. Might all of them be forms of defeat: givings-up; compromises; assents to the second-best; abandonments of hope in the face of the ascertained fact that what was to be, was to be?…

and digested portions of selected texts—

The heavy story needs no going over. To the height of this great argument, to justify to men these ways of nature, no tongue or pen ever successfully asserted anything—that was impossible.

This ambitious style, aiming perhaps at that of late James, succeeds in stifling what little life the book contains. No book could survive it.

All the critics of By Love Possessed whom I have read—Gill in The New Yorker, Cowley in the N.Y. Times Book Review, Ellmann in The Reporter and The Chicago SunTimes, the anonymous Time reviewer—follow the blurb in pointing to a novelistic structure based on the theme of love. The novel is said to be a display of the varieties of love, the love which possesses and so perverts the proper functioning of human beings who become sentimentalists in the form of either fools or knaves. A word had best be said about such an organization. Thematic structures are of great importance in the 20th Century novel. (They were discussed briefly in the Spring, 1956, issue of Western Review as a way of contrasting the picaresque of Mann with that of Defoe.) A novel organized as variations on a theme runs into the peril of uncontrolled exhibitionism; it needs the support of another narrative method, either picaresque (as in Felix Krull), the memoir (Proust, Dr. Faustus), or the parodic epic (Ulysses). If the formal implications of the secondary technique are observed, then the thematic material can be distinguished as the crucial, underlying form. When the secondary convention is not observed, then the narrative collapses, and the thematic material looks like notes for a novel. A theme can be found to cover almost any disorganized book, but then it will be seen as the artificial, imposed form Proust talked about in La Prisonnière. (This was discussed in the Summer, 1956, issue of the Kenyon Review.) This, it seems to me, is the case of By Love Possessed. The novel stands at best as an immense prologue to a novel: all the vital relationships will appear in that alteration of the old relationships which Winner's discoveries entail. If the novel had begun shortly after the discoveries, gone back for the essential past, and then come up to deal with the difficult consequences, one could suppose an exciting novel as the result. Not, of course, the one here written.

A bad book, a labored book, and—God knows why—a popular book. For years Cozzens has been writing fine novels. He has won prizes, a Scribner contest in 1931, the Pulitzer Prize in 1948, been praised by influential critics (De Voto, Fadiman), and had the Book of the Month Club's support four times, yet till now, his books have not sold well, and he has been almost entirely ignored by serious critics. One hopes that this most ornery of his books will not deflect serious readers from the fine ones, particularly from Men and Brethren, Ask Me Tomorrow, and Guard of Honor. It almost looks as if such fictional perversity as By Love Possessed exhibits was nurtured in that isolation which lack of serious criticism inflicts on serious writers.