James Gould Cozzens, By Love Possessed (1957)
Picked up at Oxfam in the first UK Penguin edition, largely because I had read Florence King's codslapping of Cozzens and this work in particular in With Charity Towards None.
It's not that bad. It's not that good, either. It is looooong and could have done with some heavier editing than it got, because there are extensive passages in which Cozzens leaves one gasping for the terse prose of Henry James. (He really needed at least a serious caution from the Ponceyness Police, if not the issue of a Ponceyness ASBO.)
Although there is a good deal more 'unflinching' confrontation of issues of the body (mostly the female body) than one would find in HJ.
What it has is covert prejudices, in that we note that women/non-WASP characters tend to be positioned as less complex and probably not so ethically refined, if not downright nasty, as the WASPs (though there are also horrid revelations about individuals widely believed to epitomise WASP probity). And there is also regret expressed by the viewpoint character that members of a local black extended kinship network who are in many ways highly regarded as respectable and socially valuable members of the community in service roles are now going into the professions and will no longer be available as formerly.
Though on the woman question, the viewpoint character's second wife is 'A perfect woman, nobly planned; to guide, to comfort and command' and also sexy (within suitably appropriate limits). She is even given thoughts and views of her own which are revelatory to her husband in his maunderings.
But under the elaborate labyrinthine verbiage of the style, and the clear aspiration to the highbrow litfic category, is this novel not just Peyton Place, published a year previously, for those of more pretentious tastes?
In both of these we have a small US community of apparent respectability and in the course of the story we are shown the nasty things that lurk in its woodsheds. In BLP we have infanticide, adultery, nymphomania, alleged rape, unmarried pregnancy, neurosis, financial malfeasance, theft by offspring of respected family, thuggishness in another example of ditto, etc etc?
Cannot help but think that this was what kept people reading and not the purple passages.
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