James Gould Cozzens - Controversy

Controversy

Cozzens eschewed both fame and publicity, to the point that he publicly stated he would refuse a Nobel Prize when speculation that he was under consideration became prominent. In 1957, however, he broke with his long-standing penchant for privacy (for which he was dubbed "the Garbo of U.S. letters" in the article that resulted) and granted Time magazine an interview, over the objections of his wife, as the basis for its cover article of September 2, 1957, marking the release of By Love Possessed, for which Cozzens had been nominated for a second Pulitzer.

Short-story writer and critic Patrick J. Murphy wrote that Cozzens' responses during the interview were verbalizations of his writing style: often tongue-in-cheek, using parody and sarcasm, quoting other works without attribution, and punctuated by laughter. As sometimes happened with his prose, this style did not translate well into print, and the results were further distorted because the information seemed to be gathered by one reporter but the article written by someone different.

An immediate barrage of readers' letters followed and were published, attacking Cozzens as being a snob, an elitist, anti-Catholic, racist and sexist -- criticisms that were soon picked up by acerbic critics including Irving Howe, Frederick Crews, and Dwight Macdonald. Cozzens also became a symbol of "The Establishment" and the antithesis of the growing counterculture of the 1960s because his works negatively portrayed or lampooned those against authority and "the system".

Detractors painted Cozzens as a hardcore political and religious conservative, though he was never politically minded nor strongly religious. His attempts to counter this incorrect image met with little success, and he soon forfeited whatever fan base he gained from By Love Possessed. His reputation was further lambasted in 1968 by critics (in particular John Updike) of his final book, Morning, Noon, and Night, written for a youthful audience that had no interest in structured, complex style or themes that favored the notion of societal stability.

As a result, sales of all his books suffered, and Cozzens has virtually disappeared from the American literary scene; he remains, however, fairly well known among those familiar with the literary criticism of George Steiner, John Derbyshire, and Matthew Bruccoli, all of whom have described his work in laudatory tones.