Mon 4 Sep 2023
JAMES GOULD COZZENS – Castaway. Random House, hardcover, June 1934. Bantam 1007, paperback, 1953. Reprinted several times since.
Mr. Lecky finds himself in the basement of a nine-floor department store. It is night. He is hiding. There may be others. He’s not sure.
If there are others, he’s sure they mean to kill him. Best to keep in hiding until he can get his bearings and set up a safer spot to make camp.
Finally, taking a chance, he emerges. He sees no one. The coast is clear.
He goes from floor to floor, getting the necessities. Canned sardines, a preserved ham, a tin of biscuits, winter coats, a bedroom suite pushed up to door to the restroom, a shotgun, ammunition, a kitchen knife, an axe, flashlights, batteries, candles, a camp stove with paraffin canisters, scattered toy locomotives for an alarm. A stuffed rag doll for companionship.
He’s got everything he needs. Everything in the world.
One day he spies another man, animalistic, slurping the contents of a hastily pried can of sardines. His back is turned to Mr. Lecky. Mr. Lecky picks up his shotgun and shoots, shakily, only wounding his prey, who darts across the store, floor to floor, the most dangerous game.
There’s a feeling that perhaps we’re in some post-apocalyptic world, that perhaps Mr. Lecky is one of the last survivors of this forsaken realm.
But maybe not.
We begin with a lengthy quote from Robinson Crusoe:
“How infinitely good that Providence is which has provided, in its government of mankind, such narrow bounds to his sight and knowledge of things; and though he walks in the midst of so many thousand dangers, the sight of which, if discovered to him, would distract his mind and sink his spirits, he is kept serene and calm by having the events of things hid from his eyes, and knowing nothing of the dangers which surround him!â€
To Cozzens this quote must be a great irony. Imagine, if you will, we had no enemies at all. If there were no dangers. All our needs provided for. We wouldn’t believe it. No enemies? No dangers? We’d have to invent them.
We’ve met the enemy and he is us.
—–
It’s a pretty compelling, short read. Just over 100 pages. But it wasn’t breezy because of Cozzens’s unique sentence construction. A bit old-timey, maybe. Plodding. Uncertain.
And no dialogue.
So it’s interesting that Sam Peckinpah bought the rights and wrote a screenplay. Hard to imagine what the movie would look like. So much of the action happens in Mr. Lecky’s head. And again, no words spoken. So, as written, could be a silent movie. Except for gunshots and shrieks. As of 2018, there were still plans to make the film. Though, alas, too late for Peckinpah.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/castaway-sam-peckinpah-planned-direct-1135342/
I read it because it was mentioned in David Madden’s Proletarian Writers of the Thirties as the book “which caught perhaps better than any other single work (being untroubled by ideology) the mood of the times.†Those times being the Depression. Now I certainly don’t know anything about the veracity of that statement. However, there is certainly a mood presented. Of paranoid isolation. And if that was the mood of those times, then my oh my how things haven’t changed!
September 4th, 2023 at 8:33 pm
James Gould Cozzens Wiki page begins thusly:
“James Gould Cozzens (August 19, 1903 – August 9, 1978) was a Pulitzer prize-winning American writer whose work enjoyed an unusual degree of popular success and critical acclaim for more than three decades. His 1949 Pulitzer win was for the WWII race novel Guard of Honor, which more than one critic considered one of the most important accounts of the war. His 1957 Pulitzer nomination was for the best-selling novel By Love Possessed, which was later made into a popular 1961 film.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gould_Cozzens
And here’s a link to the book’s contemporaneous Kirkus review:
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/james-gould-cozzens/castaway-3/
From which I quote:
“Thoroughly upsetting nightmarish story, with a dubious beginning and a yet more dubious end. A sort of Thorne Smith gone loco, minus his usual interblending of sex phantasms. The story of a man of uncertain mental equipment immured in a department store while civilization has been, apparently swept from the earth. The embarrassment of plenty — with no satisfaction in possession. Parts of it are so well done that it seems a pity that it is confused by nightmares of confusion and — at times — unmotivated horrors.”
September 4th, 2023 at 9:09 pm
Very much J. G. Ballard country reminiscent of Concrete Island or High Rise.
September 5th, 2023 at 5:14 am
It’s also listed in Donald H. Tuck’s ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY with the description, “A notable psychological novel of the terror in a man’s mind.”
September 5th, 2023 at 5:36 am
There’s a short story by John Collier, Evening Primrose, with the same theme. In this story the poet-narrator escapes the contemporary (post-Depression) world in a department store. It may have been a trope of the time, or Collier might be parodying Cozens or even have inspired him.
September 5th, 2023 at 7:16 am
re:comment #4, That Collier story was done on radio
I believe, more than once. Very creepy show that always plays on XM radio at Halloween time. As to
“Castaway”, I’ve never read it or remember seeing a copy of that Bantam pb shown above, but will now look out for a copy. Steve, do you have a copy salted away somewhere?
September 5th, 2023 at 11:22 am
No, the book not being a mystery or out and out sf/fantasy, if ever I saw a copy, I never paid any more than a microsecond on it. That said, the cover does look familiar. Some how, some time, some way, it caught me eye. Go figure.
September 5th, 2023 at 8:37 am
I just skimmed Collier’s Evening Primrose. It was published in 1940–six years after Castaway. I suppose it’s possible that Collier was influenced by Cozzens. The multi-floor department store of yore makes a good setting for a story–one that I’m surprised hasn’t been used more often. And in the wake of the Depression, the department store must have seemed like Eden, a land of plenty in a desert of need. I don’t know if today’s millenials have any idea what a department store is. The department stores I grew up with (even Sears) mostly seem to be gone.
The protagonists of each have quite a different kind of schizophrenia (if, indeed, that’s what’s going on–which we’re never completely sure of). In Collier’s case the schizophrenia is rather benign and bucolic compared with Cozzens’s paranoid psychopath.
Evening Primrose is available online at:
https://mrturpinblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/evening-primrose.pdf
September 5th, 2023 at 10:06 am
Thanks for this interesting review. It reminded me that I went on an enjoyable Cozzens binge back in the 80s, and of the five novels I own, this is the only one I haven’t read, and I’m going to get right on it.
The edition I have is a rather plain looking quality paperback published in 1989 by Ivan R. Dee Inc, a Chicago Publisher I’m not familiar with, and is designated as an ELEPHANT PAPERBACK edition. I have no memory of buying it and had forgotten I had it. Thanks to Tony I’ll read it.
September 5th, 2023 at 10:15 am
By coincidence, I just read Cozzzens’s “Foot in It” in GOLDEN AGE BIBLIOMYSTERIES, edited by Otto Penzler. Short but entertaining.
Stephen Sondheim & James Goldman adapted Collier’s “Evening Primrose” into a musical which ran on
ABC Stage 67 in November, 1966, starring Tony Perkins & Charmian Carr, best known as Liesl Von Trapp in THE SOUND OF MUSIC.
September 5th, 2023 at 6:55 pm
Re the multi floor department store setting, Don Tracey had a series about a department store tec.. Not exactly the same thing, but the same setting.
There are similar settings like hotels, skyrises, and office buildings ripe for similar psychological games many writers have used to some effect though the not quite fantasy not quite strictly paranoid delusion aspect of the Cozzens and Collier are unique as far as I know.
September 6th, 2023 at 7:10 pm
Ya sold me, Tony. I ordered a copy off Abebeooks yesterday.
September 6th, 2023 at 11:25 pm
Thoroughly enjoyed Cozzens’ WWII saga, ‘Guard of Honor’. Lengthy –but savory –read with memorable characters.
Some might say Cozzens “played it safe” in that narrative. Can’t argue with this. He neatly tamped down (almost) all issues of race which another author might have stirred up into a bonfire. I still feel he richly deserves his award even though he avoided controversy. It’s lush entertainment.
I rank Cozzens an extremely poised, self-assured, supple novelist. I’d trust anything from him.