state of love, of being in love, were largely factitious. This was not by any means to say that they were false or pretended; but, still, they had not, as the young man himself was likely to imagine, arisen spontaneously. In theory, the feelings resulted when love magically and mysteriously seized on him; in theory, that was what love did. In practice, love did nothing of the kind. He, the truth usually was, seized on love. A young man heard and read of a thing called love. Love was praised everywhere as pure, noble, and beautiful. Love did have to do with the commerce between the sexes; but love as described clearly could not have to do with sex—the physical urges of nature that he knew about. Those had been denounced to him as evil and impure, the associates of what he joined in calling (even if he fairly frequently indulged in them) dirty jokes, dirty thoughts, dirty practices. What those were, must be everything true love wasn’t. Love knew them not. Love, manifestly, was out of this world. Love’s high feelings, at once so exciting and so presentable, could, moreover, be had, apparently, by anyone. A young man would not be long in resolving to have some....
... To the rules of high-mindedness, the flesh is imperfectly amenable. Kisses however chaste, caresses however decent, if the exchange of them is kept up, must have the flesh soon shaping to its natural end, projecting its actual objective. A discipline of mind was required. The witching hour was to be saved intact by a division of consciousness; one part excluding rigidly all that engaged the other part. Held separate, thoughts on the plane of moonlight and roses could proceed regardless of the lower animal. Or, at least, they could so proceed to a point. Due to that blameless neglect of Hope’s to call the halt she (the fair, the chaste, the inexpressive she!) had no need to call; and to her partner in petting’s reluctance to leave, since he was free to remain, there had been awkward occasions when the animal (disregarded by the hour and teased too far) reacted of a sudden, put to the shilly-shally so long imposed its own unpreventable end. Arthur Winner Junior—confusion in the moonlight; dismay among the roses!—was obliged to conceal as well as he could a crisis about which his single shamed consolation was that Hope, anything but knowing, would never know what had happened.
This is not an unselective, unvaluing recording. The author’s value judgments are obvious. Yet it is intended as a Naturalistic recording of “things as they are.”
Observe all the slanted writing. For instance, the author describes as a fact of nature the hero’s attitude toward love. He does not say that this was the attitude of a particular young man—he describes it in generalized terms, as if all young men fall in love only because they have heard about it. “A young man heard and read of a thing called love. Love was praised everywhere as pure, noble, and beautiful.” Since love is praised, according to the author, a young man will be motivated by such praise.
All young men in fact feel nothing, Cozzens implies; they merely tell themselves they feel something because they hear that other people feel it. This amounts to saying that the psychology of all young men is ten times worse than what I presented, in The Fountainhead, in the character of Peter Keating.
“Love as described clearly could not have to do with sex—the physical urges of nature that he knew about. Those had been denounced to him as
evil and impure.” This is a false and awful view of sex—the Christian-mystical view. Cozzens presents the most vicious code of values—man is helpless, sex is a stupid physical urge belonging to his lower animal nature, his “high” feelings are merely a silly romantic illusion—yet he does not state that this is the view of his hero or of the hero’s social group. These value judgments are the ones conventionally held by most people, Cozzens believes, and so he does not consider them estimates. He considers them facts of human nature.
The two elements which constitute style are content (what an author chooses to say) and use of words (the way he says it). Not only is what Cozzens says about man and love horrible; there is something extremely repulsive about the manner in which he says it. If one were to identify the essence of his style in one word,