Abstract

Dwight Macdonald's 1958 attack on James Gould Cozzens's novel By Love Possessed posited that the book's popularity was an “episode” in “The Middlebrow Counter-Revolution” then under way among American critics. That conclusion neglected the strategies of publishing, advertising, and authorial stance that Cozzens and his wife, the agent Sylvia Baumgarten, wielded to create a best seller. Macdonald also did not see how he and Cozzens shared a high-culture aesthetic and competed for power over readers threatening to make criticism irrelevant. Each tried to consolidate that power by depicting his adversary as socially inferior: as Jew, queer, or feminized “middlebrow.” Although Macdonald's appropriation of Cozzens's own values succeeded in damaging Cozzens's reputation, the authority that Macdonald hoped to preserve was likewise about to collapse under pressure from mass culture and postmodern relativism. The Macdonald–Cozzens imbroglio thus provides a useful example of the provisional nature of cultural hierarchy at any given historical moment.