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REPOSSESSING THE COZZENS–MACDONALD IMBROGLIO: MIDDLEBROW AUTHORSHIP, CRITICAL AUTHORITY, AND AUTONOMOUS READERS IN POSTWAR AMERICA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2010

JOAN SHELLEY RUBIN
JOAN SHELLEY RUBIN*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Rochester E-mail: joan.rubin@rochester.edu
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Abstract

Dwight Macdonald's 1958 attack on James Gould Cozzens's novel By Love Possessed posited that the book's popularity was an “episode” in “The Middlebrow Counter-Revolution” then under way among American critics. That conclusion neglected the strategies of publishing, advertising, and authorial stance that Cozzens and his wife, the agent Sylvia Baumgarten, wielded to create a best seller. Macdonald also did not see how he and Cozzens shared a high-culture aesthetic and competed for power over readers threatening to make criticism irrelevant. Each tried to consolidate that power by depicting his adversary as socially inferior: as Jew, queer, or feminized “middlebrow.” Although Macdonald's appropriation of Cozzens's own values succeeded in damaging Cozzens's reputation, the authority that Macdonald hoped to preserve was likewise about to collapse under pressure from mass culture and postmodern relativism. The Macdonald–Cozzens imbroglio thus provides a useful example of the provisional nature of cultural hierarchy at any given historical moment.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , November 2010 , pp. 553 - 579
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 Macdonald, D., “Masscult and Midcult, I,” Partisan Review 27 (Spring 1960), 203–33Google Scholar and “Masscult and Midcult: II,” Partisan Review 27 (Fall 1960), 589–631, reprinted in idem, Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture (New York, 1962), 3–75; Wreszin, M., A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald (New York, 1994), 284–7Google Scholar; D. Macdonald, “By Cozzens Possessed,” Commentary, Jan. 1958, reprinted in Against the American Grain, 187–212. Citations of “Masscult and Midcult” and “By Cozzens Possessed” refer to the reprinted versions.

2 Other contributory episodes include the 1949 Bollingen Prize controversy and John Ciardi's attack on Anne Morrow Lindbergh's poetry. I have written about the latter in “The Genteel Tradition at Large,” Raritan, Winter 2006, 70–91. David D. Hall underscored the point about continual renegotiation in “Between Cultural History and Book Trades History: A Necessary Awkwardness?”, presented at the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing 2009 annual meeting.

3 Bruccoli, M. J., ed., Just Representations: A James Gould Cozzens Reader (Carbondale, 1978), xivGoogle Scholar; idem, James Gould Cozzens: A Life Apart (New York, 1983).

4 Kazin, A., Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer (Boston, 1973), 97–102Google Scholar; M. Cowley, “The World of Arthur Winner, Jr.: Amid Neighbors Swayed by Passion He Tries to be the Man of Reason,” New York Times Book Review, 25 Aug. 1957, 1; Bruccoli, Just Representations, xvi.

5 Cozzens, J. G., By Love Possessed (New York, 1957), 562Google Scholar.

6 B. Gill, “Summa cum Laude,” New Yorker, 24 Aug. 1957, 106; Cowley, “World of Arthur Winner Jr,” 1. Reviews by Weeks, Fischer, and others are reprinted in James Gould Cozzens: A Documentary Volume, Dictionary of Literary Biography 294, ed. M. J. Bruccoli (Gale, 2004), 292–313, Hereafter DLB. Sales data are from Macdonald, “By Cozzens Possessed,” 187; DLB, 257 and Bruccoli, A Life Apart, 221. The cartoon is reprinted in DLB, 301.

7 See, for example, the recent book by Gordon Hutner, What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960 (Chapel Hill, 2009), which assumes that “middlebrow” fiction (a term Hutner rejects) was “for,” “by,” and “about” a monolithic middle class and faults my The Making of Middlebrow Culture for neglecting class interests. In her work on the Book-of-the-Month Club (A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill, 1997)), Janice A. Radway embraces the concept of class fracture but still makes class her primary analytical category. See also Levine, L., Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA, 1988)Google Scholar.

8 Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition, 4, 62, 106, 143; Cotkin, G., Existential America (Baltimore, 2005), 120Google Scholar.

9 Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition, 263, 295.

10 For versions of the same complaint earlier in the twentieth century see Perry, B., “Literary Criticism in American Periodicals,” Yale Review 3 (July 1914), 635–55Google Scholar; and Hyman, S. E., The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism (New York, 1948), 7–8Google Scholar. In 1963 Hardwick acted on her desire to reduce the downward trend she perceived by helping to found the New York Review of Books.

11 Dwight Macdonald, response to Adam Yarmolinsky, Commentary, Feb. 1958, 164; Macdonald, “By Cozzens Possessed,” 195.

12 Macdonald, “By Cozzens Possessed,” 199–205.

13 Ibid., 208–9.

14 Thus, for example, an advertisement for Jessamyn West's South of the Angels (Harcourt, Brace, 1960), which highlighted the work's 564 pages, credited West for devising “a story worth every page of its telling.” New York Times Book Review, 17 April 1960, 13.

15 Bruccoli, A Life Apart, 89, 93, 101, 110. Alfred Harcourt, trained at Henry Holt and Company, had struck out on his own in 1919, and had quickly developed a list that reflected his interest in nurturing innovating contemporary authors, including Sinclair Lewis. See Madison, C. A., Book Publishing in America (New York, 1966), 340Google Scholar.

16 John Marquand to Sylvia Bernice Baumgarten, 22 March 1957, Box 7, James Gould Cozzens Papers, Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ. Quotations from the Cozzens Papers are used by permission of the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Princeton University Library. Hereafter cited as Cozzens Papers; Bruccoli, A Life Apart, 221; Tebbel, J., A History of Book Publishing in the United States, IV: The Great Change, 1940–1980 (New York, 1981), 388Google Scholar.

17 “The Hermit of Lambertville,” Time, 2 Sept. 1957, 72–8; Bruccoli, A Life Apart, 218.

18 Carl Spielvogel, “Advertising: How They Sold a Best Seller: Why Harcourt Won't Turn to Making Sausages,” New York Times, 20 Oct. 1957, F10; New York Times Book Review, 8 Sept. 1957, BR11 and 12 Sept. 1957, BR23. Harcourt's relationship with the Spier agency, which specialized in writing copy for publishers, reflects the adaptation of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant house founded on gentlemanly ideals to the shift in tone and personnel within the book industry: like Harry Scherman at the Book-of-the-Month Club, Spier was a Jew with Greenwich Village connections.

19 DLB 233; James Gould Cozzens to Cass Canfield, 30 April 1961, Box 24, Cozzens Papers; Bruccoli, A Life Apart, 189, 201; James Gould Cozzens to John Fischer, 28 March 1960, Box 23, Cozzens Papers; English, J., The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 220CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Brier's, E.A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction (Philadelphia, 2010)Google Scholar, which appeared too late for comment in this essay.

20 James Gould Cozzens to Shirley Covington, 23 Nov. 1957, Box 7, Cozzens Papers; James Gould Cozzens to Buss Hall, 14 May 1958, Box 7, Cozzens Papers; James Gould Cozzens to Ben Heller, 9 Jan. 1957, Box 7, Cozzens Papers. Apparently Cozzens did not save most of the negative letters.

21 Cozzens, J. G., Selected Notebooks 1960–1967, ed. Bruccoli, M. J. (Columbia, SC, 1984), 24, 37, 44, 45, 48, 56, 73, 77, 80, 83Google Scholar.

22 Cozzens, Notebooks, 1, 29, 52; James Gould Cozzens to Henry Allen Moe, 22 April 1959, Box 26, Cozzens Papers. On modernist commitments to the representation of reality, see Orvell, M., The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill, 1989), 245Google Scholar.

23 I have analyzed middlebrow institutions of the interwar period in The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill, 1992).

24 Cozzens, Notebooks, 33, 63, 69, 78.

25 Ibid., 9–10.

26 Bloom, A., Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York, 1986), 310–11Google Scholar; Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition, 10–11, 228–32.

27 James Gould Cozzens to Serrell Hillman, c.1 July 1957, Box 24, Cozzens Papers; Cozzens, Notebooks, 5, Cozzens, By Love Possessed, 217; Gilbert, J., Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago, 2005), 191Google Scholar.

28 Macdonald, “By Cozzens Possessed,” 187, 193; Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition, 275.

29 Overstreet, H. A., The Mature Mind (New York, 1949), 42–75, 82, 122Google Scholar; R. Donadio, “1958: The War of the Intellectuals,” New York Times Book Review, 11 May 2008, 39. Variants of the preoccupation with adulthood appear not only in Goodman's Growing Up Absurd (1960) but also in such postwar explorations of the self as David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950) and William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (1956); the theme of innocence marked the work not only of novelists such as Robert Penn Warren (All the King's Men, 1946) but also of scholars of American culture such as Henry May (The End of American Innocence, 1963) and R. W. B. Lewis (The American Adam, 1955).

30 Macdonald, D., “A Theory of Mass Culture,” Diogenes 1/3, (summer 1953), 9–10Google Scholar; Macdonald, “By Cozzens Possessed,” 211.

31 C. Fadiman, “BOMC Report,” Book of the Month Club News, Aug. 1957, 2–3; advertisement, New York Times Book Review, 8 Sept. 1957; Graebner, W., The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s (Boston, 1991), 20Google Scholar.

32 DLB, 316–17; James Gould Cozzens to Emmett Peter, 5 Feb. 1963, Box 27, Cozzens Papers.

33 James Gould Cozzens to David Kiel, 14 June 1960, Box 7, Cozzens Papers; James Gould Cozzens to Betty Van Guilder, 5 Feb. 1958, Box 7, Cozzens Papers; Brodhead, R., Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, 1993), 113Google Scholar; Boorstin, D., The Republic of Letters (Washington, DC, 1989), 49, 61Google Scholar; Cozzens, Notebooks, 16; B. DeVoto, “The Easy Chair,” Harper's, Feb. 1949, 72. “SOP” refers to “standard operating procedure.”

34 Mrs. H. H. Hoenigsberg to James Gould Cozzens, 16 Sept. 1957, Box 7, Cozzens Papers; Karen Lindsay to James Gould Cozzens, 21 Jan. 1958 and 7 Feb. 1958, Box 7, Cozzens Papers; Lou Taylor to James Gould Cozzens, 9 Oct. 1957, Box 7, Cozzens Papers; Emilie Case to James Gould Cozzens, 30 Sept. 1959, Box 7, Cozzens Papers; Hume Peabody to James Gould Cozzens, 11 July (1958?), Box 27, Cozzens Papers.

35 Orlando K. Cellucci to James Gould Cozzens, 17 June 1958, Box 7, Cozzens Papers; Barbara Blanchard to James Gould Cozzens, 30 Dec. 1957, Box 7, Cozzens Papers; Tom Burnam to James Gould Cozzens, 28 Oct. 1957, Box 7, Cozzens Papers.

36 W. L. Saltzman, “To the Editor of Commentary,” Commentary, March 1958, 263; Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” 18–19; Macdonald, “By Cozzens Possessed,” 196.

37 Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” 73; Radway, A Feeling for Books, 221–60.

38 Macdonald, “A Theory of Mass Culture,” 15; Hutner, What America Read, 312; Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition, 361.

39 Cozzens, By Love Possessed, 69, 190, 362; Gill, “Summa cum Laude,” 109; Macdonald, “By Cozzens Possessed,” 210.

40 L. R. Hills, “Structure of the American Literary Establishment, with Shaded Heraldic Tree,” Esquire, July 1963, 41–3; James Gould Cozzens to L. Rust Hills, n.d., Box 24, Cozzens Papers; Bruccoli, A Life Apart, 242. Even Macdonald, listed among the “Working Critics,” was only slightly more “hot” than bland.

41 Kazin, Bright Book of Life, 102, 104.

42 Cozzens, By Love Possessed, 348, 351, 569, 570; Updike, J., Rabbit, Run (New York, 1960), 140, 255Google Scholar.

43 J. Wolcott, “Dwight Macdonald at 100,” New York Times Book Review, 16 April 2006, F27; Donadio, “1958,” 39; Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow. British scholars, notably John Baxendale, whose unpublished paper on J. B. Priestley delivered at the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing 2009 annual meeting, has influenced this essay, are starting to carry out this task for interwar Britain; see Baxendale, J., Priestley's England: J. B. Priestley and English Culture (Manchester, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hutner's attention in What America Read to the expectations that critics brought to “middle-class” fiction between 1920 and 1960 is also very useful.