Guard of Honor

Cozzens' masterful social novels, of which "Guard of Honor" is the towering apex, have been erased from the history of American literature by its guardian - the academic establishment - because of his thorny conservatism and unadorned steel-and-rivets prose style. It's our loss. If you compare the ambition and artistic discipline of this wise and sober novel to, say, the latest annual installment of navel-gazing from Philip Roth (to name a writer who enjoys a comparable level of esteem today), you can only shake your head at the profound dumbing-down of our culture.Inasmuch as only a fraction of any armed force directly participates in combat, this stunningly broad study of a Florida air force base in the latter stage of World War II is actually more relevant to the history of our participation in that struggle than a book like "The Naked and the Dead". And its look at an early chapter in the unfinished story of race integration in America is arguably more germane than ever, although its conclusions do not sit comfortably. (No televised talking head could hope to express them and still keep his job.) If you're interested in a truly adult novel, in the best sense of the word, you can't do much better than this one.

This book exemplifies the "quiet craftsmanship" for which Cozzens has been praised (in Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia, I believe). His style is clean and understated; his plotting is as always complex yet tight; his observations of people are dead-on. But what, in my opinion, really puts this novel above Cozzens's other works is its portrayal of the "life" of a modern complex organization (in this case, the U.S. Army during WWII). American society's transformation from an individualistic focus to an organizational one, which reached completion during FDR's presidency, is one of the most significant developments during the past century and a quarter. Yet almost no novelist has attempted to deal with this transformation artistically, and certainly none has done it as well as Cozzens does here. This book's straightforward style conceals its immense importance.

Although the once enormously popular James Gould Cozzens is all but forgotten today, his 1948 novel GUARD OF HONOR is a big, splendid, riveting piece of work which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The action, presented essentially in real time, centers on three days at a big Florida airbase in l943 and its hapless new commander. What makes this book particularly noteworthy is how the many threads of its tremendously complex plot effortlessly come together - rather like a very skilled wind band leaderlessly playing one of the Mozart serenades. It convincingly shows how small, seemingly random events can collide and build to something far greater than their sum. I've been pushing this neglected minor masterpiece for decades. I was delighted, therefore, to learn that GUARD OF HONOR been reissued by the Modern Library. The event was marked by a generous tribute to the book by, rather surprisingly, the jazz critic Whitney Balliett in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books.

Guard of Honor is a book about fighting a war in which not a single bullet is fired in anger. Readers looking for blood and glory will find it here only in the refracted light of the home front. But, this book IS about blood and glory; as well as boredom, loneliness, stupidity, comradeship, insanity, bureaucracy, death and many other things associated with the armed forces.Cozzens decision to place his novel in Florida during World War II actually allows him to analyze the military culture in the minutest detail without the adrenaline distraction that actual combat would produce. It's a risky choice, but it works brilliantly.The story contains a bewildering number of characters but is centered around two generous and kind men: Colonel Ross and Captain Hicks. Ross represents the command structure trying to hold an unwieldy organization together through the insanity of war. Hicks is the common man thrown into the same situation. How their lives play out is the heart of the book.If you want explosions and gore, this book is not for you. If you want to know how the military lives, thinks and breathes read this book and cherish its portrait of a world very different from civilian life.

The best book about the U.S. Army during the Second World War, Guard of Honor is a forgotten classic and would be turned into a 4-hour movie if anyone could be bothered. A tour-de-force of detail, simple and accurate. A Dickens of a novel