The Little Men

CHILDREN & OTHERS by James Gould Cozzens. 343 pages. Harcourf, Brace & World. $5.95.

It is too awful to contemplate what would have happened if Salinger's Hoiden Caulfield had, by some mischance, got into Cozzens' Durham School.

Dr. Holt, the great, hairy headmaster, would roar: "Get out of this room! I'm sick of the sight of you! Report yourself on detention for a month. If you're absent from chapel, the prefects will take care of it. Get out of my sight!" A dozen of the best would be the lot of Hoiden Caulfield, just for not believing a lot of crummy stuff about God.

Durham School, which numbers no Zen adepts among its alumni, is the stern focus of many of the 17 stories that comprise James Gould Cozzens' latest book--his first in seven years and a Book-of-the-Month Club choice for August. The school, rather than the un-Salingerian types who attend it, is the real hero, and Cozzens deeply approves of the headmaster's speech above (which is delivered to a character named Smith III).

Worst of Life. Cozzens here turns the same unsmiling, nonextremist conservative eye on the U.S. school (Eastern prep division) which he has cast on other U.S. institutions--marriage and the law (By Love Possessed), the military establishment (Guard of Honor), the clergy (Men and Brethren), and medicine (The Last Adam). In the past, the animator has been an individual who, by partial dissent, has lifted the various strands of a society into a tension which made them as visible as struts in a Dymaxion dome.

In these stories, Cozzens seems to have dismissed the rebel in favor of a celebration of the structure itself. Human life, bearable at best, is seen as unbearable and detestable when its natural savagery, passion and poetic lunacy are unconstrained by custom or civilizing institution. This view is seldom given a voice in fiction--even in realistic fiction of Cozzens' unfashionable kind. When institutions are matched against idiosyncrasy, writers have a temperamental bias in favor of the private sensibility.

Expendable Elements. It is doubly rare for a writer of Cozzens' cast of mind to write about childhood at all, when human life, in his terms, is at its very worst. Childhood itself is the villain in these stories, and the thoughts of youth are wrong, wrong thoughts. With these ground rules in mind, Cozzens' stories can be read as thoroughly enjoyable entertainments, watching how Cozzens deals with what might be called the expendable elements of child nature, and how he sets about getting boys to behave --as little boys were once told to behave --"like little men." It is only as such pre-men that James Gould Cozzens has much time for boys.

"Smith Ill's intelligence was much too acute to waste its strength in a permanent and ridiculous war with its environment. Real rebels are rarely anything but second-rate outside their rebellion." And so it proves with Smith III. He graduates from Durham vowing revenge, makes very good, and returns in ten years to speak at the old boys' dinner, which, like all old boys' dinners, is primarily designed to extract contributions to help perpetuate a system and a tradition that has made them what they are today. Here is Smith's long-awaited chance to score off his old adversary. But no. Durham got him in the end. Smith's speech eloquently extols the stoic virtues of Durham and Dr. Holt himself, and, as one alumnus put it, "nets Dr. Holt an extra hundred thousand." Smith himself pledges more than he can afford. "The old place has a sort of hold on one, hasn't it?" says one old boy to Smith III.

Tears over Rugby. There are two curious things about this key story. One is that Cozzens himself was involved in similar scenes when as a boy atheist he confronted the redoubtable Father Sill, headmaster of Kent School. He too was redeemed. The other is that (ignoring the sub-literature of "school stories"), nothing like this has been written for a long, long time. It would be necessary to go back to Tom Brown's Schooldays, where Thomas Hughes shed an old boy's tears over Rugby.

Away from. Durham School, Cozzens encounters in a heightened form the difficulty of all who would write of their childhood: how much hindsight is permissible? Adult wisdom-after-the-event may make order of the bewildering charades of childhood, but in doing so may dull and blur a strict accounting of the child's own original vision. There is fascination in these set pieces about family politics, death and the huge mysteries of sex, but the central figure of the child--the fictionalized young Cozzens--is curiously reduced from the unique looniness and divinity of childhood to that of a sane, but ill-informed adult who just hasn't got things straightened out yet. The effect is oddly stiff and pathetic in a surely unintentional way--like the little boy in the sailor hat in a family group, with eyes as solemn as those of his bewhiskered or befeathered elders.

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