Word: passione
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Education of Arthur Winner. By Love Possessed (570 pp.; Harcourt. Brace; $5) is reared on a theme from the 17th century metaphysical poet Fulke Greville: "Passion and reason, selfe-division cause." This theme is developed almost musically, but it is the austere music of a Bach fugue, architectonic, contrapuntal, slow, majestic, sometimes irritatingly tedious, always impressive if not steadily arresting. It is played in a minor key, for this is a bitter comedy sounding life's black notes. The prevailing mood is irony, starting with the title itself. In Cozzens' meaning, "possessed" stands for "seized...
...Calm v. Passion. Arthur Winner marries again. Clarissa is tall, athletic and thirtyish, an avid latecomer to the art of love. The hour of that art which the couple share in Cozzens' pages has not been paralleled for clinical candor in U.S. fiction since Edmund Wilson singed the censors with Memoirs of Hecate County. Yet Lawyer Winner has a more demanding love-the law. The law is his passion precisely because it rules out passion. He is comforted by its seductive repose, "that majestic calm of reason designed to curb all passions or enthusiasms of emotion...
...squalid case of uncurbed passion soon claims Arthur Winner's professional attention as he undertakes the defense of an alleged rapist, the weak-willed brother of a self-abnegating girl named Helen Detweiler who-this is her form of love -has sacrificed her youth to the brother's upbringing...
...candelabra. He has given his protagonist the usual "failed-priest face," the customary taste for booze, and the symbolical death -Brennan falls from the height of Gaudi's grotesque unfinished Barcelona Church of the Holy Family. It is all pretty thick stuff, but an angry, eloquent passion against the paralyzing Red ticks in Europe's soft underbelly redeems it from mere melodrama...
Everything was over with the Baltic barons. Erick goes on to international adventuring with a gun for hire in Spain, the Gran Chaco and Manchuria, not with any ideological passion but simply because for one of his birth and background, there seems to be nothing else to do. His is a fable of one who survived-but did not live...