James Gould Cozzens, ‘Castaway’ (1934)

Something has happened in the outside world, although we’re not told what. This is how the book opens:

Supported against the stair rail, Mr Lecky might have been sick; but his stomach was empty. When he retched all that rose was a bloodwarm lump—perhaps his heart bounced on the firm spurt of his terror … his utmost mental feat was to recognise, as he finally did, that he had reached the basement of the department store. [3]

He’s listening out for ‘running footsteps, the brush or bump of a quick search for him’. So: he’s being chased, or at least believes that he is. The department store is empty of people. Something in the world outside has changed: ‘there was nothing in sight and no more sound than before; yet his impression of something happening, some important change in progress, had been no illusion’ [5]. Lecky flees through the store, smashes the glass case that contains the shotguns (shotguns for sale in a department store: ah ... America!) and, armed, finally calms down enough to realise that he is hungry.

Most immediately at hand was one side of a bright pyramid of shelves surrounding a pillar. They were entirely filled, he saw, amazed, with sardines. In jars, with olive oil, with lemon and truffles: French fish in tins; Bordelaise; boneless and skinless; Portuguese packings; smoked Norwegian Bristling; sardines in wine sauce, in every shape of tin and glass. … He began to snatch them while he moved in a nervous anguish of greed, disclosing to himself the pyramid’s right size. This was black with caviar in glass of descending size. [21]

He makes a den for himself in one of the store toilets, barricading the entrance with ‘a number of heavily upholstered chairs’ [36] from the furniture department. What has happened outside? We’re not told, but we might take this paragraph to be suggesting some kind of collective madness, perhaps involving (there are scattered hints as to this) cannibalism:

A great evil—no more to be named than met, to be escaped—waited fairly close. … About his madmen Mr Lecky was no more certain. He knew less than the little to be learned of the causes or even of the results of madness. Yet for practical purposes one can imagine all that is necessary. As long as maniacs walk like men you must come close to them to penetrate so excellent a disguise. Once close, you have joined the true werewolf. [46]

One day Lecky encounters a stranger in the store (‘the person he saw faced the other way … twisting back on its key the cover of a sardine tin … he instantly dug out the contents with his fingers, thrust the animal-like, into his concealed mouth’ [50]). Lecky shoots and wounds this person, afterwards pursuing him through the store. He catches up with him as he crawls towards the stairwell, collapsing on the top step. Lecky kicks his body down the stairs, ‘sent it tumbling to the bottom, where it brought up, supported against the stair rail’ [73].

Lecky spends quite a lot of this novel making his way through the store, lingering over various items (the perfume department makes him think of ‘women, young but unlovely and unloved, women, whatever they had been, now at the end of it, and ruined by years or thickened to caricature by fat, ought to be the ones called to mind by perfumes. But they were not. Lecky held the bottle in his hand a long while’ [92]). A bell starts ringing, somewhere below: a ‘sinister, never-explained bell’ [100]. In addition to his lavatory-redoubt, Lecky makes for himself a dining room and a bedroom from what the store avails him. 

Eventually he decides to go down to the basement to see what the ringing is all about. Here he encounters the body of the intruder, lifts it and turns it over to discover, in a Prisoner-esque touch that—you're ahead of me here, aren't you—it is himself.

The moral seems to be: the thing that keep us from contentment, even in the midst of all our modern plenty and wealth, is our terror of ‘the others’, which is really a terror of ‘the Other’, which turns out to be a terror of ourselves. Is this profound, or only faux-profound? There’s perhaps a proto-Ballardian quality to the conceit here, although Cozzens' novel is more fruitily written, and less barren in its vision that Ballard. That debateable land between science-fiction, horror, allegory and roman à these.

So, yes: James Gould Cozzens. Until a couple of years ago I had, to my shame, never heard of him. In his time people seriously pondered whether he was the greatest living American novelist; multiple Pulitzers, considered for the Literature Nobel (until he made it plain he would reject it if offered). Why has he dropped so comprehensively off the radar? I'm wondering (and of course my own left-wing political views will bias my sense of things) whether he was just on the wrong side of the political divide—the triumphs of the 20th century were progressive after all: feminism, fighting racism, the liberalisation of sexual life, embracing diversity. Cozzens was not just right-wing, he was right-wing in a way that misinforms his condition-of-America novels of the necessary grounds of their mimesis. Perhaps he simply missed the larger point of the age through which he lived. There are other right-wing writers still in general esteem, of course; but conceivably those sorts of figures either happened to fall in with the grain of the age; so, Kipling's Kim (amongst others) shows a deep fascination with and joy in multiculturalism, for example. Or else writers who were right-wing in way that seems centre or even centre-left today (Updike maybe). That said, there’s also Saul Bellow … 

My ignorance of even the existence of this writer was punctured when a few years back, randomly curious, I was in a charity shop and picked up an old ‘Writers and Critics’ introductory volume on him from 1964.

From this slim volume I learned that, after a below-the-radar career through the 30s and 40s, Cozzens unexpectedly hit the big time with a novel called By Love Possessed (1957), a bestseller which was ‘condensed for Reader’s Digest (£100,000)’—isn’t that a splendidly of-its-era datum!—and which sold film rights for $200,000. D.E.S. Maxwell notes that this one novel ‘advanced Cozzens from decently successful obscurity to popular acclaim and the fastidious regard of critics previously indifferent to him.’ This latter proved a double-edged sword: left-wing critics soon lined-up to attack him for his imaginative paucity, his ‘morbid or neurotic fear of life’ and for his tendency to praise ‘conformity, the safely patriotic “American virtues”’. Maxwell is superbly, not to say hilariously, high-handed and baroque in his dismissal of these brickbats:

Examining the argument more closely, however, it is clear that the real issue is not the imaginative lesion at which these critics ostensibly cavil. Certain of their own preconceptions are at work. … Cozzens being, for considered reasons suspicious of the blither liberal optimisms, finds himself, despite the manifest angularities and reticences of his conservatism, identified with the extremists of the right … where even such lightweights as John O’Hara and John Steinbeck come in for a reasonable share of earnest attention, Cozzens is ignored.

Yeah, Steinbeck, you lightweight! Nobel prize? What’s that?

I can’t comment on By Love Possessed which I have not, and may never, read. I picked up Castaway intrigued by its Ballardian premise, and thinking it might be a significant piece of overlooked 1930s SF. I’m not sure it is. Cozzens style is elaborate, showy, even indulgently puddingy, nothing like the utility, sometimes awkward declarative prose that works so well to situate Ballard’s various deracinating oddnesses. The obvious comparison here might be High-Rise, although the focus of that novel is on the whole community holed-up in the tall building; in fact Castaway is more like Concrete Island, which is to say, it's a Concrete Island with a larger supply of luxury consumer goods.

In fact my main thought reading this was not Ballard so much as this question: what happened to ‘Department Store Fiction’? Was that even a thing? It’s a question worth asking now that, what with Covid and (I say this not to tempt fate, but) post-Covid, it seems clear that the old culture of town-centre shopping, of collections of retail outlets clustered around one or more gigantic multi-storey department store or stores—that that’s all gone now. It’s a historical, not a current, culture. So how might we sketch the cultural discourse that put such, in their day, massive artefacts at their centre? The starting point I suppose would be Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), but what are the other key texts? Cozzens novel is 1934. What else? Are You Being Served was big in the 70s, and essentially took ‘the department store’ as a type of the whole world, its serving staff a microcosm for society more generally, and parlayed Mrs-Slocombe-feline hilarity out of its premise. James Lovegrove’s excellent though underrated Days (1997) is a late example of the mode, more properly Ballardian than David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd, or indeed than Cozzens. What else though?