SOURCE: "Moral Realism: The Development of an Attitude," in James Gould Cozzens: New Acquist of True Experience, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, Southern Illinois University Press, 1979, pp. 44-62.

[Scholes is an educator and author of several books on literature, including Elements of Fiction (1968) and Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (1985). In the following essay, he discusses the evolution of Cozzens's literary style and his rejection of romanticism in favor of moral realism.]

The following quotations may be read as a dialogue. The first speaker is a young man in a novel of 1929. The second is an old man in a novel of 1942.

That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

Don't be cynical…. A cynic is just a man who found out when he was about ten that there wasn't any Santa Claus, and he's still upset. Yet, there'll be more war; and soon, I don't doubt. There always has been. There'll be deaths and disappointments and failures. When they come, you meet them. Nobody promises you a good time or an easy time. I don't know who it was who said when we think of the past we regret and when we think of the future we fear. And with reason. But no bets are off. There is the present to think of, and as long as you live there always will be.

The young man who spoke first was Frederic Henry in Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms; the old man who answered was Judge Coates in James Gould Cozzens's The Just and the Unjust. I do not wish to suggest that Cozzens in this passage is consciously and specifically attempting to rebut Hemingway. Rather, my intention in juxtaposing the two is to locate the unknown by its relation to the known—to make Cozzens's view of life clear by its polar opposition to the more familiar vision of the cosmos characteristic of Hemingway.

His view of life is certainly the right place to begin a consideration of James Gould Cozzens as a writer of fiction. This is true for a number of reasons. First, he is much more than most American writers of his generation a novelist of ideas. Second, and possibly because of the first reason, his technical development as a literary artist has been intimately connected with the development of his thought. This is not to say that he uses fiction (like George Orwell, for example) as a vehicle for polemical thought, but that a particular and very carefully worked-out attitude toward life operates in his fiction to determine the essentials of plot, character, and setting.

The speech of old Judge Coates from the end of The Just and the Unjust is characteristic enough to stand as a fair statement of the attitude toward life that dominates Cozzens's later and best fiction. But it is only characteristic. It is not an ultimate formulation, a solution to the problems of living. It represents a significant phase in his thinking, which is associated with much of his best work, but it represents a phase only—not the whole process of thought. The process is the important thing—the continuing development that began with his earliest fiction and is still in progress.

The early novels are Confusion (1924), Michael Scarlett (1925), Cock Pit (1928), and The Son of Perdition (1929). Cozzens was an undergraduate at Harvard when his first book was published—an event he has since regretted;

It made me, in my own eyes, a real figure in literature, at once; an author of far too much promise to waste time any longer at schoolboy work. So I quite school and got at my career, started right in at what I thought was the top. In that way every natural fault was solidified, and it is taking all my effort now, in my mid-thirties, to wipe out those faults, to really learn to write. [Cozzens in an interview with Robert Van Gelder, "James Gould Cozzens at Work," New York Times Book Review, 23 June 1940]

This separation of the first four novels from the later works is not entirely a device of criticism on my part. Indeed, they were first dissociated by their author, who has failed to mention any of them in the lists of "Other Books by James Gould Cozzens" that appear opposite the title pages of his later works. That his repudiation of his earliest works is a result of their technical shortcomings can certainly be inferred from his statement just quoted, but there is yet another reason why at that time he found these early novels "much too painful to talk about."

When I was that age I admired a friend of mine who got drunk at 9 o'clock in the morning. That is too early in life to begin to think of yourself as a writer. Because you are very young when you think a fellow who comes to your rooms early in the morning, already drunk, and is heaving bottles against near-by walls at noon, is entirely admirable. ["James Gould Cozzens at Work"]

The reasons for the repudiation of these first four novels were more than technical. In fact, the implication seems to be that it is the greenness of judgment rather than the technical faults which makes those first books "much too painful to talk about."

Confusion is a novel about a girl who develops a sensibility too exquisite to allow her to function in a world that has too little to offer her. In the matter of theme the book bears a close resemblance to a work published in the following year: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Gatsby is described as having "something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away." Cerise D'Atrée, the heroine of Confusion, has something of this same "heightened sensitivity to the promises of life." The descendant of an ancient French family, Cerise is given the best education the resources of her family and the intelligence of her two godfathers can provide. As she grows up, these two well-meaning gentlemen become aware that something has gone wrong. The more sensitive of the two, Tischoifsky, expresses it in this way:

We gave her the past in full measure, we laid a foundation of exquisite sensibility and appreciation. It was to have been her most ready servant. It has turned on her and she is going to be its slave. You can see it. She has a remarkable instinctive taste in things. She has a youthful capacity for idealization, of course. Ordinarily the realization of life as it is—to use that for lack of a better phrase—would fall on semi-developed taste and immature appreciation. Both those safeguards we have obliterated in Cerise, we have put years and constant effort into obliterating. Now you see Cerise stripped of all protection except the unreliable slowness of experience to divulge the full force of disappointment. [Confusion]

Later the disenchanted bride, Jacqueline Atkinson, directly tells Cerise essentially the same thing about herself: "… I'd hate to see it happen to you. And you're one of the ones it would happen to. You're looking for more in life than there is…." The death of Cerise in an automobile accident is meant, I am sure, to emphasize the world's inability to fulfill her, as well as to bring the story to a conclusion.

Fitzgerald and Cozzens in these two books both seem to feel that there is something wrong with a world that can not present such people as Gatsby and Cerise with "something commensurate to their capacity for wonder." The difference between the two novels—aside from any question of superiority of technique—is that The Great Gatsby is ripe Fitzgerald, while Confusion is very green Cozzens.

This motif of a sensitive young person destroyed by an indifferently cruel world is repeated in Cozzens's second book, Michael Scarlett. This is a historical novel, set in Elizabethan England, in which such characters as Nashe, Marlowe, Donne, Shakespeare, Southampton, and Essex figure prominently. But for all its period setting, the main outline of the story is very like that of Cerise D'Atrée. Michael Scarlett is "an exquisite youth" raised by a guardian, educated but sheltered—just as Cerise was. He comes as a young man into a Cambridge and a London alive with faction and is soon unwittingly embroiled. Shakespeare and Southampton speak of him:

"I would have thought," commented Mr. Shakespere, "that my lord Essex, Mr. Marlowe, and Mr. Nashe between them dominated him wholly; they call, and he comes. A strange melancholy of indecision hath smitten you young people, Harry. Him chiefest of all."

"I had not meant to hint I liked him less," answered Southampton quickly, "but that I pitied him more. It was an evil thing he ever came to London. See how an unplanned, undesired chain of event hath placed him in the saddle where he sits neither safe nor happy. Essex was fitted to taste in his championing of the high party. Essex requires aid at a duel (by irony, on Michael's behalf). Michael, with nice swordsmanship, saves the day and Devereux's life; yet so greviously hurting Captain Blunt that he transfers the popular leadership of his party from Essex to himself, which he neither wanted nor needed, and having, can neither manage nor hold. He doth not understand the issue, he cares little for the outcome. Those that do care, borrow his name to forward their own ends. Being confused and not comprehending, he hath submitted thus far." [Michael Scarlett]

Michael's death results from a senseless fight in which he attempts to enable Nashe, wanted for an accidental killing, to escape capture. Nashe refuses to flee, but fights by Michael's side until wounded.

In the last chapter of Confusion, "White Roses," the dying Cerise had gazed from her bed at a vase full of roses and mused that it was "strange that a rose which would presently die should be so beautiful." A rose figures in the closing pages of Michael Scarlett, too. Michael, bleeding to death in the snow, asks a mad prostitute to deliver to Southampton a memento he has carried in his shirt. He dies as she removes the object and inspects it.

"How, a rose?" she murmured, "i' faith, a pretty wooden rose, yet much decayed and dry."

She tossed it up and down as a child tosses a toy.

"Poor rose, sweet rose," she sang, "yet thou'rt very dead."

She looked at it for a space.

"Prithee burn, rose," she said.

It fell into the fire and was lost.

In each novel the roses, living or dead, seem to represent (clumsily, perhaps) the young person whose life and death has been the matter of the story. The suggestion that life is a sad affair because beautiful roses and exquisite young people must die in its confusion can only be described as sentimental. It is undoubtedly this sentimentalism, strikingly evident in the early novels, that makes their author so reluctant to discuss them.

It seems for a time in the third novel, Cock Pit (1928), that the familiar pattern of the first two is to be repeated. The story is set in Cuba against the prominent background of the sugar industry. The principal focus is on the daughter of an engineer at one of the mills.

Ruth Micks is not an "exquisite youth" as Cerise D'Atrée and Michael Scarlett were, but she is superior to and in conflict with her environment. The discerning bank manager, Mr. Britton, observes and judges her:

He took a swallow of wine. Romanticists! His own practical mind made allowances for it as one would make allowances for the difficulties of a cripple.

That cool and calculating efficiency of thought and judgment which made him one of the bank's most trusted managers appraised … them all…. He had nothing but admiration for Ruth, unlikely to criticize an intelligence which he felt to be understandable, like his own. Across it ran the softer stuff, the gentler, yes, stupider, sentiments of Mary and Maurice. Ruth went through them like steel through wax.

No; he held that. Not steel. You missed Ruth altogether if you could see only that clean cutting power. That was superficial, a clear head working easily among muddled ones. His own clear head could recognize that with admiration, but there was something deeper, he knew, for he felt, totally unsentimental, an attachment for Ruth, a sense of understanding her, of seeing what none of these people saw, not even her father. His mind with a clearing flash, like the dropping of the jumbled pieces of a kaleidoscope into perfect pattern, held it there.

By God, he thought, not surprised, for he had known it all along, he supposed; what a rotten shame! Not even her father….

An unutterable and very simple sadness came over him. It turned from Ruth, for that was the end he saw, not temporary, but a final frustration. [Cock Pit]

There is a hint in Britton's meditation, which occurs midway through the novel, that Ruth's story is to end in frustration as Michael's and Cerise's had, but it remains only a hint, ultimately belied by the plot. At the close of the story Ruth is a successful heroine, having conquered by her cleverness and courage the ruthless sugar baron, Don Miguel Bautizo. Don Miguel is not only defeated, he is made to like it, demonstrating that under his ruthless exterior beats the heart of a gallant gentleman.

The musings of Britton serve to illustrate a conflict that will prove most important for an understanding of Cozzens's novels. His opening condemnation of "romanticists" sounds a theme that recurs with increasing emphasis in Cozzens's work. The qualities Britton marks in those "romanticists" are "stupider sentiments" and "muddled" heads, which are opposed to the "understandable" intelligences and "clear" heads of Ruth and himself. Since it is Ruth's clear head that prevails in the novel, we may assume that the author shares to some extent in Britton's condemnation of romanticists. Yet the state of affairs pictured at the end of the story is clearly the result of a sentimental or romantic way of looking at life. To believe that a young woman may triumph over the armed rapaciousness of a large and powerful industry is surely the result of a sentimental conception of reality; and to believe that the unprincipled head of such an enterprise, a man who once quashed the report of a United States Senate Committee, is likely to turn out to be a cavalier old gentleman is even more romantic.

In this way a novel has been produced that specifically attacks muddled thinking and sentiment under the name of "romanticism" but which can be shown to be vulnerable to the same charges in regard to its plot and at least one of its characterizations. This then is the sort of book a young man who thinks that "a fellow who comes to your rooms early in the morning, already drunk,… is entirely admirable," might be expected to write. And this is the sort of book that a middle-aged man, who no longer finds such antics entirely admirable, might be expected to find it "painful" to have written.

Still the struggle between sense and sensibility was clearly joined in this novel, and, if the victory of sense was marred because it was achieved in a sentimental manner, there were to be other struggles. In the works of the eight years following the publication of Cock Pit in 1928, this conflict was renewed again and again. The vague antiromantic notions that began to take shape in Cock Pit were gradually formulated into a complete and consistent doctrine, most explicitly expounded in Men and Brethren (1936); and, finally, this doctrine has been qualified and enriched in the later works.

The Son of Perdition (1929), like Cock Pit, is a product of Cozzens's year in Cuba, but despite the similarity in setting, it is a very different book from its predecessor. It represents a considerable advance in technique: an attempt, perhaps not quite successful, to do more than was done in the early novels. And we can observe in it an important shift in thematic emphasis.

Cozzens's first three novels dealt with the efforts of young people to adjust to their environments. The exquisite youths, Cerise and Michael, perished without succeeding. The clear-headed Ruth triumphed, but in a sentimental way. The central conflict in The Son of Perdition occurs within a mature man. Joel Stellow is the Administrator General of the United Sugar Company, a post that gives him a truly despotic power. The company has its own railroads, its own banks, its own armed guards, even its own villages. Stellow chooses to exercise his power benevolently—insofar as this is compatible with the best interests of the United Sugar Company. And herein lies the central conflict of the novel.

The particular crisis that exposes this conflict is brought about by the arrival in Stellow's little kingdom of a dissolute American, Oliver Findley. Wherever Findley is, there is trouble. In part this is caused by his personal characteristics. He is a liar, a thief, and a drunkard; and these facets of his character cause their share of difficulties. But beyond this, there is something about him that seems to act as a catalyst, bringing into violent action the potential danger or evil latent in any given situation. He strolls into a sugar mill; a man is crushed in the machinery. He asks a bartender to drink with him; the man's boss enters and fires the bartender for drinking on duty. He seduces a Cuban girl; a whole complex of terrible intrafamily emotions, hitherto balanced against one another, are unbalanced, resulting in a murder. From the most serious to the almost trivial, trouble follows in the wake of Oliver Findley. He is thought to be the Devil by Pepe Rijo, the simple mayor of the United Sugar village of Dosfuegos. His relation to Stellow is adumbrated by the book's epigraph:

—those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition.

—St. John 17:12.

Findley, of course, is the son of perdition; Stellow the man who tries to keep "those that thou gavest me."

When Findley turns up at a United mill, General Administrator Stellow tries to find a use for him. A ticket to Habana and fifty dollars are to be his reward for a little chore. Leaving Stellow's office, Findley appraises the great man:

He wasn't sure, as he went out, that he understood Mr. Stellow—the man, that was, apart from the Administrator, the individual in contradistinction to the United Sugar Company. It was probably a shift from one to the other; from the Company, which asked what could be done with a liar and a thief, to the individual who tried to find a use in the face of that absolute nothing. A curious unemotional sympathy which would wish, for reasons too hard to guess, to give a human being a break where it was possible without hampering the Company. He wondered, struck by the thought, if Mr. Stellow, after these many years, had reached a point where he needed to believe that a human being could hamper the Company. [The Son of Perdition]

Stellow soon finds that Oliver Findley is not a man who can be given "a break." The son of perdition is caught stealing the same day. The Administrator, feeling that Habana is not far enough, decides to ship his guest to Bordeaux:

"I don't believe you'll ever get back to Cuba again," he said. "That's all I care about, Findley. Wherever you go there'll be trouble, and it's not going to be here. It's too late to make you over, Findley."

A change close to expression had moved Mr. Stellow's face; nothing direct, like pity or indignation. Only a trace of a sag, a contraction of the gray eyes…. Oliver Findley stood dumbly in the shadows, even his own relief lost in this final astonishment.

For the first time he saw Mr. Stellow as a person. He saw him in the ultimate, incredible obviousness of a human being apart from his position, divested of the small excrescences of habit and particular personality. Mr. Stellow was old, simply, and tired; as all men must be sooner or later. In the Administrator's last words had been also his own epitaph, and all his life, all that the eye had seen and the brain considered, could serve him no better than to make him understand it. [The Son of Perdition]

Findley is shipped off to Dosfuegos for further shipment to France. In the short space of time before he boards the ship he is the cause of an incident that affects Stellow not merely in his capacity as Administrator, but personally.

One of Joel Stellow's few friends, perhaps his only one, has been Vidal Monaga. Monaga is a fisherman, but because of his monumental family pride he is able to meet the Administrator as an equal. Findley casually seduces Nida Monaga, the daughter of Vidal. Nida's brother Osmundo suspects this seduction, and in his attack on Findley reveals to his father that his own relations with his sister are not purely brotherly. The old man, out of pride in his name, murders his son. He is imprisoned by the major of the village until Stellow can get there. On arrival the Administrator asks him to explain why he did it. Vidal explains that recent events have shown him that his son, now a grown man, did not know what it was to be a Monaga; and "Being sure of this, I saw that he would be better dead." Stellow, whose power is unlimited, has a report of accidental death prepared by his doctor. This effort to save his old friend from trial is frustrated by the man's pride in himself. Their conversation is overheard by Findley:

"You are released from the Alcalde's order of arrest," said Mr. Stellow. "The matter is officially closed."

It had never, reflected Oliver Findley, been open. Never in Mr. Stellow's mind, could it have been possible to allow the mechanical processes to grind up the simple stone of this old man. It went farther than that, no doubt. The wordless bond silently and invisibly held them too close. Such destruction would break down something of Mr. Stellow. Some saving faith.

Oliver Findley thought of it, seeing clearly now, moved more than he would have thought possible. He saw too, the transparent farce of it. Mr. Stellow setting up himself against himself. Driving the mills and railroads on one hand, covering the face of the machines with the fiction of this necessary illusion on the other, sustaining futilely the legend of man and his dignity and freedom, long after the last remnants were dust under the revolving wheels….

In the electric lighted room Vidal Monaga said, "No señor…. That I could not do…. It is not much to be a Monaga to any one but me, señor. But I will be turned over to the authorities, please…. Because of justice…."

Finally Mr. Stellow answered: "As you wish." [The Son of Perdition]

To Findley, Monaga's refusal to avoid justice represents a victory for man over the machine: "the machine's inhuman beauty, the reason and might of the machine, confounded so inevitably by the rooted folly, the poor stubborn pride of man."

One of the major faults of the book lies in the difficulties presented by having as its central intelligence a character so depraved as Oliver Findley. How much weight can we put on such a summing up of action as that quoted above? To attribute to such a dissolute wretch the clear insight needed to judge others is an error on the part of the author, equivalent to attributing a gentlemanly soul to a rapacious sugar baron. To rely on such a character to sum up, in the closing lines of a book, the action just culminated, is a technical error stemming from the sentimental error.

Another difficulty in the novel lies in its somewhat disordered complexity. There are numerous minor actions and characters, most of which seem to belong to the plot rather than the theme, and which tend to blur the theme, making the need for clarification of it especially vital. That we are forced to rely on Findley for such clarification thus assumes even greater importance than it might in a betterordered novel.

The significance of The Son of Perdition in the development of Cozzens's ethical attitude is that it represents a progress from the preoccupation with the problems of youth toward the less purely self-centered problems of mature individuals. The struggle within Stellow, between his duty to the company and his care for humanity—though sketched rather than developed in this novel—is a struggle that is more central in life than are the youthful flutterings of the early novels. But the book fails—aside from the technical difficulties—to give a moral order to the struggle presented. Other than a vague preference for people over machines, there seems to be present no unifying moral attitude. Is the triumph of humanity over the machine, acclaimed by Findley, punishment for Joel Stellow or vindication of him? Is Stellow's phrase of acquiescence to Monaga's desire—"As you wish"—the speech of a man who sees a higher truth than his own, or that of a man who has lost "some saving faith?"

This fuzziness of theme persists in the work of Cozzens for some years. His next works attempt by various devices to get around the problem of ethical attitude rather than to solve the problem by taking a stand. This is particularly noticeable in the two short novels, S.S. San Pedro (1931) and Castaway (1934).

It is probably best to consider these two short works together even though the full-length novel, The Last Adam (1933), was published before Castaway. These two novellas are experiments that have not been repeated, though they exhibit excellently some abilities and characteristics of their author. The Last Adam, however, is in the main stream of his development, where it appears as a marked advance over The Son of Perdition in the direction of the major novels.

S.S. San Pedro was first published as a prize-winning story in Scribner's Magazine in August of 1930. It is a fictionalized reconstruction of the actual events in the sinking of the S.S. Vestris in November 1928. The real disaster captured the journalistic imagination in its day because of some mysterious circumstances connected with the sinking. The ship left Hoboken bound for Brazil. She ran into heavy seas almost immediately, took on a list, and struggled ahead with cargo shifting and water entering the ship, probably through the submerged coal ports. The circumstance that disturbed the public so greatly was that the ship apparently had been in this state for a day and a night without sending out an SOS. A theory advanced was that the captain "seems to have been more afraid of salvage than he was of death" ["The Master of the Vestris," Nation 127, 28 November 1928]. The ship sank with considerable loss of life. Cozzens, working from the "transcript of the hearing before the U.S. Commissioner in New York" [Cozzens in a letter to Scholes, 14 March 1956] set about reconstructing one way in which such a disaster might occur. The events are seen through the eyes of the second officer, Anthony Bradell, and the Brazilian first quartermaster, Miro. The officer and the man, each extremely capable at his job, are unable to prevent the disaster. They can do nothing to avoid the ultimate, because of the structure of command, which requires action to be initiated at the top. Captain Clendening is overcome by a strange lethargy that renders him incapable of the necessary action. That this may happen is foreshadowed early in the book by the captain's doctor, who takes Bradell aside before going ashore and warns him about the captain's health:

"The captain," he said very low to Anthony, "is an old man, Mr. Bradell."

"What did you say, sir?" asked Anthony, taken aback.

"People grow old, Mr. Bradell. They break down, they wear out." [S. S. San Pedro]

Dr. Percival, who gives Bradell this warning, has a face like a death's head:

Doctor Percival's tight face was fleshless and almost gray. His lips sank in, rounded over his teeth. They were lips so scanty that you could see the line of the teeth meeting. His eyes, red-rimmed, lay limp in their sockets, appearing to have no color at all. Doctor Percival's intense pale gaze came out of holes covered with soft, semitransparent lenses. His head, one observed, jolted, was utterly hairless, and a pale-reddish star, a mark like a healed wound, lay across the crown. Every modulation of bone showed through a sere leaf of old skin. [San Pedro]

It is this face that Bradell sees at his side as he lies injured at the feet of Miro while the ship is about to founder. The story is told in a dispassionate "documentary" style, combining graphic observation of the physical details of the ship with the rather labored symbolism of the death-doctor. We are given an excruciatingly careful description of a foreordained event; thus no moral issues are raised. By choosing to depict the captain as the victim of forces beyond any man's control, Cozzens avoids the moral questions that might be raised had he made the problem the obvious one of the captain's weighing salvage costs against the possibility of weathering the storm. The whole of the action is carefully removed from the moral world of ethical choices.

Castaway is a story in many ways different from all of Cozzens's work, but bearing a closer resemblance to S.S. San Pedro than to any of his other books. It is the story of Mr. Lecky, cast away, not on a desert island but in a deserted department store. The epigraph is from Robinson Crusoe:

… how infinitely good that Providence is, which has provided in its government of mankind such narrow bounds to his sight and knowledge of things; and though he walks in the midst of so many thousand dangers, the sight of which if discovered to him, would distract his mind and sink his spirits, he is kept serene and calm by having the events of things hid from his eyes….

This epigraph is—like others of Cozzens's—an ironic one. It is precisely Lecky's fear of unseen dangers that destroys any possibility of his leading a peaceful existence in the great store. He is certain that there is someone else in the building: "the idiot" as Lecky calls him. Armed with a shotgun from the sporting goods department and a knife from kitchenware, he hunts the idiot down and kills him brutally. Then he discovers whom he has killed.

Crouching as he turned up the fearful face, he bent his own face toward it, saw it again. His hand on the head, studying the uninjured side, Mr. Lecky beheld its familiar strangeness—not like a stranger's face, and yet it was no friend's face, nor the face of anyone he had ever met.

What this could mean held him, bent closer, questioning in the gloom; and suddenly his hand let go … for Mr. Lecky knew why he had never seen a man with this face. He knew who had been pursued and cruelly killed, who was now dead and would never climb more stairs. He knew why Mr. Lecky could never have for his own the stock of this great store. [Castaway]

Presumably he has killed himself. One critic assures us that this is an allegory that "translates readily into half-adozen frames of reference (centering around a ritual of rebirth)" [Stanley Edgar Hyman, "James Gould Cozzens and the Art of the Possible," New Mexico Quarterly Review 19, Winter, 1949]. If one can believe that Lecky is a "God-Figure," and the idiot a "Devil-Figure" in a "dubious battle long ago joined," then perhaps their struggle has some large moral applications, but I find this conclusion as doubtful as the premises, which are very dubious indeed.

The descriptions of the store are as meticulous as those of the ship in S.S. San Pedro, and the inevitable action proceeds to its conclusion under the same uncommitted camera-eye. But this refusal on the part of the author to commit himself to a moral position could not be maintained in all his works. For, as Henry James said of Dickens, "a novelist very soon has need of a little philosophy…. When he comes to tell the story of a passion … he becomes a moralist as well as an artist. He must know man as well as men, and to know man is to be a philosopher" [Henry James, "The Limitations of Dickens," Views and Reviews, 1908].

Cozzens's philosophy, which seemed rather fuzzy in The Son of Perdition (1929), was to appear in unmistakable clarity in Men and Brethren (1936). In an effort to isolate some of the elements that compose that clarified attitude, I will consider some of the short stories published between 1930 and 1938.

These twenty-one stories tend to divide into three groups. The largest group, comprising almost half of the stories, is composed of potboilers. The second group all deal with the same subject, a boys' preparatory school. The third group includes stories interesting primarily for the light they throw on themes treated at greater length in the novels. The groups can not be dealt with chronologically, for each of them covers nearly the entire span over which Cozzens wrote short stories. There is little that can be said about the potboilers, except to note that they get increasingly slick from first to last; but the prep school stories are significant in that they deal with young people in a way quite different from the treatment of exquisite youths in the early novels. The school in the stories, Durham, is unquestionably modeled on the Kent School in Connecticut at which Cozzens prepared for Harvard. It is relevant to note at this time that Cozzens's first published work appeared in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly while he was in the fourth form at Kent.

The occasion of this event was an article by Edward Parmalee in the January 1920 issue of the Atlantic Monthly that expressed disapproval of the boarding-school system, making the charge that rigid discipline stifled any impulses the boys might have to learn self-government, and asking the question, "would not better results be obtained by a less autocratic and a more democratic system of government?"

Young Cozzens's reply, entitled "A Democratic School," made the point that institutions such as Parmalee was calling for did, indeed, exist and were successful. The prefect system, under which discipline was administered by three members of the sixth form appointed by the headmaster, and two members each from the fifth and fourth forms, elected by their peers, was a truly democratic system, he maintained, and added, "Perhaps it doesn't sound practicable, but then, it works." Note the emphasis on the practical and the present: "I will … offer the solution—not the visionary solution, but the solution that, in one school at least, works to-day." The young man who wrote the article on "A Democratic School" in 1920 seems in certain ways closer to the older man who wrote the Durham stories and the later novels than to the author of Confusion, which appeared only four years after the magazine article.

There are five Durham stories, the earliest appearing in 1930, the last in 1938. The only character who appears in more than one is the headmaster, Dr. Holt. The headmaster is an eminently practical man who understands equally well rebellious young people and demanding parents. The student and the school, as the individual and society in microcosm, provide a type of conflict that stimulates Cozzens to an extremely revealing series of comments on rebellious idealists in general.

"Some Day You'll Be Sorry" (Saturday Evening Post, 21 June 1930) is about a boy who nurtures a grudge against the headmaster. The boy's rebellion is based in part on some rather stimulating reading: "Smith III, as the saying goes, had read a book. It was Paine's Age of Reason." The following observation on Smith by Cozzens is interesting for the generalization it leads to: "Smith III's intelligence was much too acute to waste its strength in a permanent and ridiculous war with his environment. Real rebels are rarely anything but second rate outside their rebellion; the drain of time and temper is ruinous to any other accomplishment."

"Some Day You'll Be Sorry" is an especially interesting story because of its autobiographical overtones. As Frederick Bracher pointed out some years ago, youth versus age is a major theme in Cozzens's work. Now as bits of biographical information begin to become accessible, it is apparent that one of the favorite pastimes of the elder Cozzens has been chastising the recollected figure of his youth.

When, early in his fourth-form year, Smith III took occasion to inform the headmaster that he no longer believed in God, Doctor Holt sighed. Smith III's point had been that he did not see how he could honorably go to chapel when he considered the practice a superstitious farce. It is usual to hear most about the other side of these things—Shelley, at Oxford, is almost unbearably familiar—so it is worth a moment to consider Doctor Holt's position, confronted by a supercilious and impudent youth who appeared to get the only exercise he took from making trouble; who was very justly suspected of smoking without permission; whose marks were bad, and whose comments on life, society and the school were fitted nicely to the puerile sensation they made.

Smith III seems almost certainly to represent the way in which his own youth appeared to the very clear gaze of the maturing James Gould Cozzens in 1930.

A rather more mature rebel is presented in "Guns of the Enemy" (Saturday Evening Post, 1 Nov. 1930). This is a very fine story in which World War I descends on Durham in the form of a French officer. The ensuing conflict—among the agitated students, a young pacifist instructor, and Dr. Holt who sees the war as a monster that will destroy the youth to whom he is devoting his life—is endowed with a significance somewhat larger than that of a minor uprising in a small boy's school. "War was already enhanced by a noble solemnity and an emotional importance. Our attitude was, in fact, exactly that of America; with the special local result that when we took things hard, less than usual was said about it. When little is said, much must be taken for granted. As you know, what people took for granted was that we were fighting for humanity and could no longer allow the Germans to infest the earth." Dr. Holt does not share this attitude. He clearly sees the war as a horror, but he "had the courage—and courage it is if you value your reputation as a thoughtful man—to state: 'Our country, right or wrong.' Most people mistake the statement for jingoism, but it can be—and in Doctor Holt's case it was—the hard, honorable answer to an intolerable question." The man whose attitude disrupts the school is the young teacher, Mr. Van Artevelde. His pacifist leanings provoke a senseless physical assault from a student, whom Dr. Holt is then forced to expel. The school is threatened by a mass resignation in protest against the expulsion, but Dr. Holt, by main force of personality and skill in handling his boys, prevents this. Van Artevelde

was, naturally, a socialist of some sort. In those years directly before the war, almost everyone who had the happiness to be young, intelligent and carefully educated was a socialist. This was in part simple intellectual snobbery, and the first cold wind from the world as it was blew it away, but Van was also an idealist, as well as being stubborn. To men of his temper, socialism's pathetic impracticality is not its worst argument; just as the principal charm of pacifism may be its dangerous unpopularity.

Durham figures only in the background for "Total Stranger" (Saturday Evening Post, 15 February 1936), another fine story, which won the O. Henry Prize. A boy is being driven back to school by his father, who is the object of a grumpy, misunderstanding rebellion on the part of the son. The father "could see no sense in breaking the simple, necessary rules of any organized society; and wasting time was worse than wrong, it was mad and dissolute. Time lost, he very well knew, can never be recovered."

The boy feels this way: "In my position, I supposed that he would always do his lessons, never break any rules, and probably end up a prefect, with his rowing colors and a football letter—in fact, with everything that I would like, if only the first steps toward them did not seem so dull and difficult. Since they did, I was confirmed in my impression that it was impossible to please him. Since it was impossible, I had long been resolved not to care whether I pleased him or not. Practice had made not caring fairly easy." On the trip an incident occurs that makes the son realize that his father was young once—is a human being. He begins to see that his father's is not an impossible goal reached by a perfect human being: "Unfortunately, I never did do much better at school. But that year and the years following, I would occasionally try to, for I thought it would please my father."

The last Durham story, "Son and Heir," (Saturday Evening Post, 2 April 1938), is about another rebellious boy. This boy, an excellent hockey player, is embarrassed by his father's desire to push him. He tries to take out his resentment against his father and the school (the father is Durham '09) by disgracing Durham in a hockey game—not by playing badly, but by acting in an unsportsmanlike manner. Dr. Holt, in a locker room chat, helps him to grow up a little. The author comments: "Having no intent or volition of its own, he might guess that the world—surely it is the sum of a young man's possible education—would pay out to him, not with malice and not with pity, the things that were his."

The view of life implicit and explicit in these stories is consistent throughout. It is the classic conservative view. The father who "could see no sense in breaking the simple necessary rules of any organized society" is pictured as a good man and a not unreasonable one. Dr. Holt, whose principal occupation in the stories is the conservative one of trying to hold together his little world in the face of disruptive influences, is presented sympathetically. The rebels are given short shrift. The name that persistently comes to mind as one reads these stories is Edmund Burke. The positive side: the organic conception of society; and the negative side: the fierce distrust and suspicion of rebels in general are both present. The particular hostility to the influence of Thomas Paine is characteristic of both Burke and Cozzens. Thus a reference to Paine in Cozzens's 1940 interview should not come as a surprise to us.

This Summer I intend to spend many pleasant mornings hanging around court rooms because I plan to write a novel about a lawyer. "The Summer Soldier" probably will be the title. When Paine used that phrase he disdained the people who could be so described, he was calling on the men of his generation to forget their own concerns and fight for the ideal of the Revolution, to lose themselves in an ideal. He had no use for the militiamen who were willing to fight when they could afford the time, but wanted to spend most of the year raising crops, attending to business, taking care of their families.

But as I see it there is a lot to be said for these Summer soldiers. The idealist, the intellectuals, haven't done any too well by the world. [Van Gelder, "James Gould Cozzens at Work"]

The attitude so clearly present in the short stories as early as 1930 is reaffirmed in this interview of 1940, and has remained an important factor in all Cozzens's later novels. The ethical attitude developed from the vague sentimentality of his earliest works through the various negations of what he calls "romanticism," "sentimentalism," and "idealism" to a firm position Cozzens calls simply "realism," and to which I have added the qualifying adjective, moral, to prevent any confusion of this ethical attitude with the literary or esthetic doctrine of realism. It was the development of this ethical attitude that enabled James Gould Cozzens to produce the works we now recognize as major.