General Hap Arnold

To Bertha Cozzens
November 13, 1944

There's nothing the matter with General Giles [Arnold's Chief of Staff] except he is, like General Arnold, illiterate; something which is habitually made too much of by people who do a lot of reading and writing. Either is a drawback in the strictly practical affair of getting an army together and fighting with it. Everything you do starts chains of irrelevant ideas (derived from reading and extended by attempting to express in words shades of meaning).  I have a pet theory that one of the reasons we are winning the war it that, markedly in the German case, and relatively in the Japanese case, the Generals who oppose us have a high proportion of intellectuals.  They waste time weighing complex factors and looking beyond the immediate objective and while they ponder, their simple and single minded opponents take them for all they have. It is what Hitler meant when he talked about military idiots. General Arnold, like his C-O-S, seems to me really dumb - their ideas all absurd and infantile, their crochets cheap and tiresome... but the fact remains that, by being what he is, General Arnold performed the impossible in building the Air Force and Giles who acts as what might be called his General Manager, by being what he is, keeps it going  - James Cozzens

James Joyce

Joyce's word games often have a real interest and the parodies of style, although too often blurred, can be amusing; but they have nothing to do with "Literature", which, to have any value, has to be some presentation of in writing of Milton's new aquist* of true experience.

The striking thing about [Ellman's 'James Joyce'] it is how much more rewarding , in terms of the new aquist of Milton's, the book is than anything Joyce ever wrote. The difference I suppose is simply that when you work through Joyce's complications and obscurities you're a little miffed - a second rate mind has no business to conceal itself that way. It isn't too much and too wise for ordinary expression,  its too little and vapid - the ridiculous or at least exasperating mouse out of the mountain. But Ellman's mind is first rate, his comment on Joyce's sad and silly times is full of instruction; this is not just from books, this is real and human and fine food for thought. - James Cozzens.

* = From Milton's Samson Agonistes: 

 His servants he with new aquist**
Of true experience from this great event
With peace and consolation hath dismissed
And calm of mind, all passion spent.

** = acquisition.

Theodore Dreiser

You can't get very far in reading Swanberg's "Dreiser" without concluding on the evidence fairly and fully  offered, that Dreiser was,  almost at his beginning,  in every way just so plain "awful" - a natural-born cheap bastard; actively dishonest whenever he had the chance, stupidly and grossly undiscerning when discernment was called for; and voluminous producer of perhaps the worst English prose ever yet found and printed and bound in books

It really all boiled down to the problem of censorship. Dreiser's "greatness" as a writer consisted of his "boldness" in writing about sexual matters.  He would write as he saw fit and if the self-appointed "vice societies" got his books banned, so be it. All Liberal writers found this stand excitingly admirable,  but in their excitement many of them plainly managed to make themselves blind to the fact that the un-excised lines were as execrable as all the other lines,  and that the unchanged words were no more "unjust" than all the other words - James Cozzens