... 1958: The War of the Intellectuals. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I remember a lot of this - Dwight Macdonald's "By Cozzens Possessed," the yammer about brow placement, Kerouac of course, and the complaints about the Beats - the same people complained about the Beats who complained about rock 'n' roll (it wasn't called rock yet). But it all felt somehow differently from what this piece suggests. At least it felt differently to me. And I be hard-pressed to put my figure on just where the difference lies.
(And I wonder: Is that guy in the picture with the glasses Woody Allen?
I remember this, too. I always like to think Cozzens, with the passage of time, won that war, but I'm biased. Also middlebrow. And the Beats? What they had beats me. That could be Woody, except that all earnest lit'ry nerds looked something like that in the 1950s.
ReplyDeleteThe best that the Beats had, in my view, was Kerouac at his best, which I think is to be found in The Dharma Bums, Satori in Paris and Visions of Gerard. As for Macdonald/Cozzens, I think in the long wun, Cozzens will win - there is Guard of Honor, after all. I think that novelists like Marquand are better than most of the novelists who followed. But people like him wrote for adults, not cliques or critics or academics.
ReplyDeleteBiographer Edmund Morris and the late critic/essayist Noel Perrin both called "Guard of Honor" the best American novel of World War II (it won the Pulitzer, one instance of them getting that right). Having read it and many other contenders for the title, I am inclined to agree. But my favorite Cozzens is an older one, "The Last Adam"; purely an individual taste -- its story simply pleases me.
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