Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium

I first read James Gould Cozzens’ “By Love Possessed” when I was a teenager and therefore too young to know that I was making a bad fashion blunder. By that time, which was the beginning of the 1960s, Cozzens’s reputation had been thoroughly rubbed out by one of the hit-men at Partisan Review--Dwight McDonald, perhaps, or Philip Rahv, one of the mighty who are themselves by now half forgotten--and it was safe to read only Mailer or Roth or Bellow. But I thought then, and I still think, that Cozzens’ tragic portrait of small-town WASP America was accurate, elegant and in its way as tough as, or tougher than, any of the work of the New York-Chicago school. The spectacle of the ironically named Arthur Winner, a decent man in a mean time, being tarnished by life’s petty falsehoods is deeply affecting, yet bracing too, in the subtle but relentless way it is described. Cozzens was no genius, but this novel (and yes, the title does not help) deserves to live.