Cultural Considerations: Essays on Readers, Writers, and Musicians in Postwar America

3. Repossessing the Cozzens-Macdonald Imbroglio: Middlebrow Authorship, Critical Authority, and Autonomous Readers in Postwar America

59 3 Repossessing the Cozzens-Macdonald Imbroglio Middlebrow Authorship, Critical Authority, and Autonomous Readers in Postwar America Dwight Macdonald’s trenchant essay “Masscult and Midcult” (1960) is the most sweeping—and the most famous—formulation by an American of the postwar animus against middlebrow culture. Yet “Masscult and Midcult” was not the opening shot in Macdonald’s war against the pernicious products of the entertainment and publishing industries but, rather, the culminating episode in a campaign the writer had been waging for some time. By the early 1950s Macdonald was already condemning particular works that, in his view, represented philistine assaults on art and language: Great Books of the Western World, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Colin Wilson’s British best seller The Outsider. In 1958 he issued his most inflammatory such piece, a review in Commentary excoriating James Gould Cozzens’s widely praised novel By Love Possessed.1 More pointed and (hard as it may be to believe) more vitriolic than “Masscult and Midcult,” Macdonald’s review, which he titled “By Cozzens Possessed,” is also possibly more interesting than the later essay because it provoked an equally vehement (although largely private) response from Cozzens. An inquiry into the assumptions of both parties to the discussion is especially useful in connecting the mid-century attack on middlebrow culture to the ongoing tensions surrounding the relationships among authors, readers, and critics in modern America. If blogs and Amazon .com have empowered ordinary readers in the digital age, the MacdonaldCozzens affair suggests that, along with other literary tempests in the 60 Readers & Critics immediate postwar period, the episode helped prepare the way for the challenges to professional criticism that technology accelerated. A look at the circumstances that shaped the novel’s popularity and at the values and reading practices that Cozzens and his public exemplified demonstrates as well how designating an author and his audience as “middlebrow” had as much to do with literary politics and institutions as with standards of taste. More generally, Cozzens’s and Macdonald’s shared tendency to misgauge the power of the opposition is an instructive reminder that cultural authority , while it may appear entrenched, is often precarious and always open to renegotiation on the basis of the anxieties in play at a given historical moment.2 Given American academics’ penchant for enshrining alienated intellectuals , Macdonald’s is a far more familiar name than his adversary’s. Born in 1903, James Gould Cozzens was a graduate of the Kent School and completed two years at Harvard before taking what turned out to be a permanent leave of absence in 1924 in order to write fiction. By the early 1930s Cozzens had discovered the subject that became his signature: the lives of white, middle-class men who grapple with issues of duty to others. The Last Adam (1933) portrayed a renegade doctor, Men and Brethren (1936) a priest in the Episcopal Church (of which Cozzens was himself a member). In The Just and the Unjust (1942) he turned to the legal profession, a source of special fascination for him. These vocational novels—especially the lawyer tales—link him to his popular contemporaries John Marquand and Louis Auchincloss.3 Cozzens’s next book, Guard of Honor, was a story of military discipline and race relations set on an air force base in Florida that resembled Cozzens ’s own posting during World War II. Drawing on the 1945 Freeman Field mutiny by African American airmen, the novel carried forward Cozzens ’s preoccupation with middle-class professionals by assigning Colonel Norman Ross, a judge in peacetime, the role of wise negotiator between principle and expediency. As Alfred Kazin noted, Guard of Honor evinced Cozzens’s ability to master an immense amount of technical detail, to render clearly a dizzying array of characters, and to achieve a level of control over structure and language that paralleled the maintenance of moral order on which the plot turned. Guard of Honor won its author the Pulitzer Prize for 1949; Malcolm Cowley and others have called it the best novel about the war.4 The accolades the book received heightened the expectations of both the publishing business and the reading public when, after a nine-year hiatus, 61 Repossessing the Cozzens-Macdonald Imbroglio Cozzens produced his twelfth novel, By Love Possessed, which appeared in September 1957. Its middle-aged hero, Arthur Winner, is an attorney in a small city between New...