Cozzens Castaway Drawn Out & Dull Or Masterful?

In the act of remembering a great book, I looked up other readers' responses to the memorable James Gould Cozzens' novel, Castaway.

In our online world, it's very easy to access scholarly articles, literary criticism, and round it out with endless blog posts and social media commentary.

One such post I came across was from a reader who did not like Cozzens' style and struggled through Castaway. Reading about his experience, I came back to what is most important about that grand little novel.

Here is a snippet of the reader's thoughts:

It's a sort of book that one reads as a challenge and struggles with, rather than enjoys. It's one of those rare works that crosses Literary Significance with genre content. Still, I have to say I didn't like it much. It often was rather dull and drawn-out for my tastes, even for such a brief work (in hardcover, just over 100 pages). to survive and make sense of things like firearms and cooking would be good grist for their mill.

That part about the dull, drawn-out style was what worked so well for me as a writer reading another writer. The play by play, the drawn out description of each of Mr. Lecky's movements served the narrative so well by heightening the suspense. 

The purpose, whether conscious or not on Cozzens' part, was to give the novel that slow-down affect one gets in a time of panic, when you can feel your heartbeat in your ears, and every footfall seems thunderous when you need to be silent.

Quite brilliant, it seemed, in how the style fit the content, and a lesson for novel writers to really dig deep into why their style and peculiar uses of language or form complements the narrative.

I detailed this effect much more in my article on Cozzens' Castaway. 

Missed Opportunities in Black Magic by Hamdy el-Gazzar

Maybe the most striking aspect of Hamdy el-Gazzar's novel, Black Magic is the missed opportunity to delve deeper into the quiet, but internally unsettling life of a young man living in an apartment above the shop of an old undertaker.

The first twenty pages detail the aged undertaker sewing shrouds for the bodies he will prepare for their graves each week. Not a better chance for an extended metaphor, yet the power set up by el-Gazzar gets squandered by the far too common insights and revelations of Nasir, the protagonist, agonizing over how he feels having struck up an intimate love affair with a women twice his age.

In my last review, we saw how Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf navigated the complex circuits of a very uniquely miserable character. In Black Magic, the legwork is not done well enough, or extensively enough to convince the reader that Nasir has the same quality of unique misery that is worthy to fill up dozens of pages. We're told, but we're not convinced:

...I'm like some great mystic saint, el-Hallaj for example--a person impossible to accept, rejected by his people, his family, his society. I object to nothing and I don't engage in dialog with the apparatus of authority or the high priests of thought or the men of letters, of the sciences, of the administration. I'm not necessarily some kind of obstreperous animal, or a bird that has separated itself from the flock; my deviancy consists in neither allowing myself to be provoked nor provoking others. In return, what is called society subjects me to amazing repression, over and above the normal censorship and taboos. I am suspended--that's all there is to it--far from things and human relations by a tacit decision to be insignificant, to not belong to any category or fit any niche (92).

El-Gazzar's passage--or the translation by Humphrey Davies of the passage--is not poorly written or boring, but it is one dimensional in the novel. It's too much like having a friend you consider a fairly normal chap with regular ups and downs in his life tell you how weird he is, and how he doesn't accept the norms of society, and society, or what is perceived and called society, doesn't accept him (and, would you believe it, even tries to strike him down).

There is very little in Black Magic to back up this statement, and when it's given to the reader, it's not convincing, because it doesn't light up previous passages and incidents, or lend a higher understanding to the pages that come before and after.

Throughout the novel, it is the camera that supposedly sees life in its truest, most basic form--which is a form not many of us wish to encounter. Nasir is called a great photographer but a terrible employee by his boss. He zooms in, often, on his target, as the rest of his team works to cover the function for which they were hired.

The camera captures something more severe each time Nasir uses it. The final, cataclysmic moment is when he steals a very close look at the sheikh reciting in a Sufi gathering. We suffer the following disenchantment:

In zooming in I got closer to his eyes and lips and flesh. What I saw terrified me. I repented my ugly act and removed my eye from the lens. I should have left an appropriate distance--a 'medium' or a 'total,' a general shot, distant or middle-ground.... Why can't you be satisfied with the sublime--the joyous, awe-inspiring sublime? Sublimity, the sublimity of your bewildering, mysterious, exceptional, unique voice, makes my soul shake with longing.... May the earth swallow anyone who seeks beauty here! Beauty is the blasphemy of the lover's love for the beloved. I have been touched, made sick, rendered diseased by this instrument that I know as well as I know the color of my fingernails and the evil of my innermost thoughts, this deranged camera, this wild beast that goes in close and strips away the mask, pulls back and reveals all, wallows in details, makes the blind see, shocks and humiliates, beautifies and lies and divests all of their clothes and their intentions... (176).

For Nasir, the camera strips bare what we're supposed to see, and what is really to be seen.

The least interesting developments in the book concern his ill-fated relationship with an older woman--a woman divorced, once a frequent adulteress, and then gone rusty (as Nasir says).

More than a couple pages littered with poetic prose about the transcendental wonders of passionate sex get in the way of other worthy characters that need more development, more room to act, such as Nasir's abusive male neighbor, Gum'a, who beats his sister every night. Or the old undertaker. Or the treacherous leader of his photography crew.

Fiction at its best should light up new pathways for thought, should turn inside out old ideas and inspire connections between life experience and knowledge. Fiction can be like a slow burning LSD that plumbs the mind and challenges the soul, without the dangers and immediacy of actually putting some of the real stuff on the tongue.

That is why books like Black Magic frustrate me. Not altogether poor or meager in content and insight, but much potential wasted to re-devour the same longing for physical intimacy coupled with the frustrations and confusion of maintaining a supposedly good thing with a lover. And again, it's the camera's work that becomes the catalyst for everything that's wrong with their relationship.

At el-Gazzar's most poetic and haunting, he nails the maddening dance of having fallen too far with someone he'd never meant to, and of the breathless uncertainty ahead. I suspect it would be even more profound if read in the original Arabic:

She will never let herself get trapped into going that extra distance. She draws borders with precision and has a clear, complete map of most things. In her heart is a huge little doll, a daughter who ate lots of hamburgers and pizza and toast and stuffed vegetables and lamb-and-rice in days when they lived in luxury in the Arab Gulf and who doesn't want to stay in Egypt; and in some other space, a young man, whom she now thinks of as a small, fragile shackle--she who believed that she had rid herself of all shackles. She also has a car that she loves. Once I suggested to her that she exchange it for a horse and a small wooden two-seater carriage so that she could progress with the beauty and stateliness of the old fiacre. She agreed, on condition that I be the horse and pull her carriage behind me. She thought I had excellent hooves and a strong back and that I would prove capable of withstanding the blows of the whip, which she would enjoy plying, albeit gently and softly--nevertheless the comparison shocked me ( 180).

Hamdy el-Gazzar. Black Magic. Trans. Humphrey Davies. The American University in Cairo Press. 2007. 186 pages.

Perfecting Space & Scene in The Spire, by William Golding

If you want to see exuberance of faith, built on shaky foundations, and watch it spiral out of control and threaten to bring down an entire community, then read carefully William Golding's The Spire. Dean Jocelin leads us through his vision of erecting a four-hundred foot spire atop his cathedral -- supposedly Golding based it off the Salisbury Cathedral.

Jocelin has pushed his friends and fellow stewards of the church to their breaking points, and most have fallen out with him. His caretaker has deserted the cathedral, and his poor wife drifts clumsily back and forth, eyeing the master builder as he cusses and swears that the pillars of the cathedral will never hold such a spiral. The church is built on no foundations! he reminds the dean again and again. But the dean tells him to have faith. He prays about it, and he mentally wills the pillars to hold, even as they begin to bend:

His will began to burn fiercely and he thrust it into the four pillars, tamped it in with the pain of his neck and his head and his back, welcomed in some obscurity of feeling the wheels and flashes of light, and let them hurt his open eyes as much as they would. His fists were before him on the stall but he never noticed them.... At last, when he understood nothing else at all, he knew that the whole weight of the building was resting on his back (76).

In the midst of all the confusion and chaos, Golding gives the reader an omniscient narrator to pull him through the story, yet most of the time we're in the widely swinging emotions --from sheer happiness and goofy smiling and the raising of the chin in delight, as well as being visited with the warmth of a nearby angel, to anger, irritation with his colleagues, and being accosted by a host of demonic forces.

With the swirl of a character steeped in manic undulations of emotion, and bordering on madness, Golding does a fine job of containing that madness, and sometimes confusing thoughts of Dean Jocelin, by firmly grounding the reader in the church without physical foundation. He shows us many of the corridors, the deanery, the clerestory, the ambulatory, and so on. 

How well Golding lays out the floor plan in a memorable fashion, and not only hands us a humorous kind of outline, but does so with grace and style. This helps organize the placement of unfamiliar words used to describe the many sections of an official cathedral:

He stopped laughing and wiped his eyes. He took the white spire and jammed it firmly in the square hole cut in the old model of the cathedral.   

"There!" 

The model was like a man lying on his back. The nave was his legs placed together, the transepts on either side were his arms outspread. The choir was his body; and the Lady Chapel, where now the services would be held, was his head. And now also, springing, projecting, bursting, erupting from the heart of the building, there was its crown and majesty, the new spire (4).

Those specific details root us in place. Set the scene. From there, Golding's protagonist can swing high or low, through bouts of sanity and clarity, as far as he likes, and the reader should still feel comfortable to go with him because of the specificity of place. Even if that place is built up of unfamiliar words. We know the general layout.

The cathedral becomes a madhouse as the 'army' of workers construct ladders upon ladders, build scaffolding, hang ropes like vines, and crumble the rock flooring and deconstruct sections of the roof. All the while, Dean Jocelin buzzes around, making enemies, irritating the master builder, and forcing his vision forward despite the great chance that the entire church will collapse.

Again, the detail to space is one of Golding's overlooked aspects. As the spire is built in sections,

credit: Hugh Chevallier

rock by rock, the master builder tells the dean that he is fighting a losing battle. The spire has to be strong enough to not topple in the wind and rain storms, yet if he fortifies it too much, the pillars will surely bend and crumble.

Soon after, the pillars being to "sing". The rocks, the stained glass windows, bearing so much weight, and under that pressure, a whining, singing sound strains the ears of all around. The spire is looking to become what most have already been calling it -- Jocelin's Folly.

The master builder frequently begs Dean Jocelin to call it off, but Jocelin reminds him that he is the most skillful builder in all the land, and he punishes the builder's ego by asking him if he's afraid to dare big. To have big dreams. Nobody accomplishes master feats without faith. According to the dean. In a stroke of brilliance, Jocelin keeps the builder on the job past the point of being able to contract any other jobs in the area, effectively netting him to the calamitous project.

Jocelin visits the spire often. He crawls around the scaffolding, and from way up he peers across the countryside and watches the peasants hauling their goods across the bridge.

The dean thinks of the spire as the Great Finger rising over all the land, to be seen by men for miles and miles, calling them to the Church, and yet, most people outside of the dean's innocent call to faith might see it as another kind of stiff, protruding male member.

Golding is a master builder himself, as he describes the haunting sway of the spire, hundreds of feet in the air, as the dean hangs onto it:

The boys of the songschool had left their game on the sill of the arcade again. He could not see the squares of the board scratched in stone, but he could see the white, bone counters of the game that lay on it. He could see some of them; but only some, for the stone between the battlements cut off a corner of the board from his eye. There was a kind of childish security in looking at the game, the white counters, one, two, three, four, five-- 

His cheek was hard against the pinnacle and he knew he had not moved. But a sixth counter had appeared, had slid into view with another square of board under it. He knew he had not moved; but he knew that the tower had moved, gently, soundlessly up here, though down there the pillars might have cried--eeee--at the movement. Time after time, he watched the white counter slide into view, then disappear again; and he knew that the tower was swaying under him like a tall tree (128).

Many readers find The Spire challenging, complicated, yet most say it's one of the most interesting novels they've read. Golding's firmness of place and time contributes to anchoring what is a very complex novel of boundless faith and emotion. As Dean Jocelin wrestles with his angels and demons toward the end of the novel, he thinks to himself, "I traded a stone hammer for four people (214)."

Enjoy Golding's language -- specific to the cathedral, and to the era of the fourteenth century or so. Take note of his heavy verbs, like exploding, smashing, exalting, and jammed, the plunges into stream of consciousness, and the important inch-by-inch mechanical, structural details when delicate space is a matter of faith versus materials, and life and death.

William Golding. The Spire. HBJ. 215 pages.

Plight of the Modern Man in Castaway by James Gould Cozzens

By the end of James Gould Cozzens' Castaway, we see the plight of the modern Western man in all his solitude, surrounded by a mastered material abundance and heaps of time with which to enjoy it, yet the howling void within goes again disconsolate. In this way, the book might be thought of as a parable, but closer to approaching allegory.

It is also, in some ways, a retelling of Robinson Crusoe. There is an ominous footprint, after all, and it is never considered a signifier of hope or a mark from a potential friend.

Castaway was first published in 1934. The material satisfaction one might find today far surpasses what was available then, but the lesson is the same.

Opening the book, the reader finds a man only known as Mr. Lecky prowling the basement of a department store that we learn has nine floors loaded with everything any shopping mall in a major city would sell. But why is he there, and especially, why is he alone? No workers, no shoppers, the place is closed, and Mr. Lecky never once seriously considers leaving the place. We can only deduce something catastrophic has happened in the outside world, and there are not many survivors.

By the time Mr. Lecky has secured himself, has assured himself he's finally alone in the gigantic building, and all nine floors are of his kingdom, under his lordship, he finds himself miserable. The familiar (the department store) has become the unfamiliar (the department store unmanned, idle, eerie), and has become once again, with the help of a sleek apartment floor model with a completely furnished living room, bedroom, and dining room, familiar (as much as home away from home can be).

In his new living room, Lecky reads a book, "...doggedly, paragraph by paragraph, page by page" (105), because of the sketch of a naked woman on the cover. He assumes there must be something worth reading inside. With all his immediate needs satisfied, he figures he might really enjoy a book. He quickly tires of it. On the table are two bottles of witch hazel, which he'd heard a person could drink like alcohol, possibly.

 Outside it was as good as dark, and having got up and seen it, he came back; but he did not sit down or take his book again. He stood bemused, rubbing his chin. Finally he looked at the two bottles on the bureau (105).

And then after having tried a few sips of witch hazel:

It caused him nothing but a feeling of warmth in his stomach, so after a while, he would seem justified in drinking more, if he wished to, hoping to enjoy greater warmth (105).

That was the first lesson I learned in Microeconomics. If one candy bar brings us happiness, the instructor shouted out to us, then by that logic, two candy bars bring us even more happiness. And a third triples the happiness. Until eventually you puke (but he didn't mention that).

Never mind that Mr. Lecky has access to a store of shelves filled with books. Rows and rows of knowledge at his disposal. He could also reflect on what has happened, on what has marooned him in the department store. He could meditate. Develop a longer term plan. He could write about his experience. But quickly he becomes discontented when he's finished the several-days' tasks of securing his fortress.

Every possible good one could need for subsistence, and nearly every other invention to satisfy desires beyond what one needs to live is available, uncontested, and free to Mr. Lecky, yet after he secures his surroundings and hauls everything he'll require for the next few weeks to his stronghold, we see a man discomforted by his own self, by the silence, and by the lack of something as simple as needing a practical chore to do with his hands.

Cozzens leads us along with a slow, considerate prose style. Every consideration of Mr. Lecky is taken into account. Which way he turns, which way he looks, at what does he look, and all of his plans to fortify a section of the mall to secure himself should there prove to be somebody else lurking in one of the nine mega floors. This pushes the larger, circumstantial why and what-for questions further out of range, out of the way.

He learns how to use a gun, but only after a tedious run-through of every gun in the sporting goods section, where he tries to match the ammo with the circumference of the barrel. The reader is kept very close to Mr. Lecky's physical actions, and that effect ties our brains to the must-do, must-have survival mode of a man hunkering down like he's on a deserted island, except with every modern day material good and delight available.

Mr. Lecky had meant only to knock the cover off; but his sharp blow was inaccurate. The neck smashed, strewing glass splinters, syrup, and a few of the figs in a mess on counter and floor. Mr. Lecky was annoyed. Furthermore, he feared that bits of glass might have embedded themselves in the remaining fruit. Setting down his gun, he made a meticulous examination, for he believed that swallowing glass would surely kill him. Partly satisfied that he was not about to eat any, he began to pick the figs out, cautiously looking over each before thrusting it in his mouth. Once or twice the grating of the fine seeds on his teeth made him pause; but hunger urged him on. Setting down the empty bottle, he could think of nothing to fetch and eat next but a second ham (35).

The attention to detail, notably the panicked crunching of the fine seeds on his teeth, is a brilliant exhibit of how careful a man would be who knows there is no doctor on call or nearby, yet can barely contain his hunger.

Cozzens keeps the reader mired in each action, the smashing of a bottle, the taste of the food, the urge of the stomach, the phantom sound somewhere far off in the store. Mr. Lecky's senses might not be the greatest, but that's all he's got. We don't penetrate his mind deeply enough to get a reading on his beliefs or his past with anything more than a superficial glance or plain justification.

This style lends credibility to the earnestness of the narrative. It also invites the reader to chide Mr. Lecky on apparent missteps. It's very easy for the reader to get into the habit of thinking, "Well, you fool, why don't you do this, or that?" Or, "If I were in this situation, I'd certainly do this or that first." And Mr. Lecky's decisions and actions become shocking at points, which turns into reflection for the reader.

For writers who like to over explain their concept, the situation their character finds himself in, and what's at stake, Cozzens' Castaway is a lean example of how suspenseful a literary work can be by dialing back the speculation and sticking close to home to the character's actions. But that has to be done correctly, of course.

Cozzens has entered the reality of his Mr. Lecky with his own consciousness, and the decisions the character makes feels organic and justified by his short conclusions of why he must do one thing, like build a shelter, or another, like secure a lavatory. For Mr. Lecky's faults feel like his own, as does his miserable listlessness by the end.

James Gould Cozzens. Castaway. 1989. Elephant Paperbacks. 115 pages.