Morning, Noon, and Night by James Gould Cozzens

First published: 1968

Type of plot: Fictional memoir/Social chronicle

Time of work: Primarily from the 1920’s to the 1960’s

Locale: Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., and an unidentified New England college town

Principal Characters:

• Henry Dodd “Hank” Worthington, the narrator, a successful business consultant
• Ethelbert Cuthbertson “Cubby” Dodd, Hank’s maternal grandfather, a psychologist
• Franklin Pierce Worthington, Hank’s father, a Chaucer scholar and later a college president
• Judith Conway, Hank’s first wife, later a prosperous antique dealer
• Elaine Worthington, the only child of Hank and Judith, eventually thrice married and divorced
• Jonathan “Jon” Le Cato, Hank’s lawyer, best friend, and former schoolmate
• Charlotte Thom Peckham, Hank’s second wife, formerly his employee, later a suicide
• Leon Garesche, Hank’s first (and last) employer, a bill collector and small-time entrepreneur in downtown Boston

The Novel

In a series of related but seemingly random reflections, an extremely prosperous management expert on the threshold of old age (the “night” of the novel’s title) reviews the high and low points of his life, loves, and career, pausing also to ruminate on the lives and careers of certain ancestors. On balance, he feels, his life to date has been uncommonly full and rewarding, mainly as a result of sheer luck.

Born and reared on the campus of an unnamed New England college, descended on both sides from “dynasties” long represented in the college’s faculty and administration, Hank Worthington once briefly considered an academic career of his own; also briefly, but perhaps more tellingly, he entertained hopes of becoming a writer. In the late afternoon or early evening of his life, he draws upon his long-dormant gifts as a prose stylist in an effort to explain, mainly to his own satisfaction, the lessons that he believes he has learned.

From adolescence onward, Hank Worthington has been alternately fascinated and repelled by the implied relationships between “livelihood” and “living,” between a man’s life and his career. Hank’s father, born like himself into the college community, seems never to have questioned his identification with the place, having proceeded through the academic ranks to assume the college’s presidency at a relatively early age. Hank reflects that his father’s presidency, though surely competent, was less than distinguished, and that the college’s trustees might indeed have been delivered of an onerous burden by the fire that erupted briefly in a small English hotel, killing both of Hank’s parents by asphyxiation during their scholarly vacation in the British Isles. The accident proved liberating also to young Hank, providing him with a legacy sufficient to allow him to start his own management-consulting firm.

Of particular interest to Hank, accounting for one of the novel’s longer and more detailed digressions, is the curious career of his long-lived maternal grandfather, E. Cuthbertson Dodd, known as “Cubby” during his last years. As related by his grandson, the career of E. Cuthbertson Dodd is illustrative if hardly exemplary, embracing most of the possible errors and excesses implicit in the developing discipline of psychology. Like most early psychologists, including William James, Dodd was trained as a philosopher; he was also the holder of a possibly spurious degree from a proprietary medical school. Like his son-in-law and grandson after him, Dodd had been born into the college community, as if destined for his teaching post. His career, unmarked except by mediocrity, proceeded without incident until shortly after the turn of the century, when Dodd began publishing a series of papers denouncing the work of Sigmund Freud and his followers as philosophically and scientifically unsound. Before long, recalls Hank, Dodd’s incautious denunciations had touched off a major controversy with strong overtones of anti-Semitism, deriving from the simple fact, observed by Dodd, that most early Freudians were, like Freud himself, of Jewish origin. To be sure, observes Hank, his grandfather was in all likelihood less an anti-Semite, or even a reactionary crusader, than a blundering incompetent who, quite without foresight, had stumbled into an academic battlefield. Thereafter, with the tide turned in favor of the Freudians, Dodd applied his dubious talents, with equally unforeseen and potentially disastrous results, toward the areas of human and animal experimentation. Pressured into retirement, he then spent his days investigating parapsychology and extrasensory perception; eventually venerated as the kindly, white-haired “Cubby,” he died only a few months short of his hundredth birthday, revered and mourned as a college “institution.”

No doubt forewarned by the negative example of his grandfather, Hank Worthington does not suffer fools gladly, and it is his ingrained suspicion of intellectual chicanery that finally steers him away from a writing career. Although he probably possesses the talent, Hank by his own admission lacks the temperament for such a vocation: Initially attracted to the company of writers, he soon comes to mistrust their air of intellectual superiority, particularly with regard to the liberal causes that writers were expected to espouse during the years between the world wars.

After graduation from Harvard, Hank remains there for two additional years, obtaining a master’s degree in anticipation of a probable teaching career at his ancestral college. By that time, however, Hank has become engaged to Judith Conway, who refuses to return to the town where she spent several miserable adolescent years as the daughter of an Episcopal priest. With that door thus closed to him, Hank suddenly perceives that he cares too little about teaching to look for a similar position elsewhere, as easy as it might be to find one. Since he and Judith both enjoy living in Boston, he seeks a job instead through his uncle, Timothy Dodd, vice president of a major Boston bank. The uncle, disdaining to make life “easy” for his bohemian nephew by placing him within the bank, finds work for him instead in the office of Leon Garesche, a major debtor of unspecified ethnic origin who runs a small string of unprofitable enterprises, most notably including a collection agency, on Boylston Street. Hank soon discovers, somewhat to his surprise, that the work agrees with him and allows ample free time both for recreation and for the development of his own ideas concerning the nature and practice of business. As it happens, the same analytical and communicative skills that have seemed to point Hank in the direction of writing or teaching also equip him for troubleshooting in the business world. Following the sudden death of the overworked Mr. Garesche, Hank hires himself out, more or less on a dare, as a management consultant, adding staff and office space as his successes and inherited resources permit. By 1942, when Hank is inducted into the army as a major, the firm of HW Associates, long since removed to New York City, employs nearly two hundred people and occupies a handsome suite of offices on Madison Avenue.

Quite without illusions, without affectation save for his deliberately ornate, occasionally convoluted writing style, Hank Worthington freely admits from the outset that what the consultant offers is essentially a sound-and-light show staged by and for the business world according to its own implicit rules. By the 1960’s, HW Associates has for some time accepted only those potential clients whose problems, as Hank wryly observes, present no problem: Typically, the sources of a company’s inefficiency are clear to Hank and his “associates” even before they accept the job; notwithstanding, the client will be “reassured” by weeks and even months spent studying his problem, with reams of written reports in mute testimony. A sizable bill will then be presented and paid, much as a patient will thus reward his psychiatrist and pronounce himself cured. So successful, indeed, is the Worthington therapy that HW Associates is now obliged to turn down most applications for their services; by the 1960’s, moreover, they have long since deserted their super-modern Madison Avenue offices for their own period-furnished Colonial-style building in the suburbs, presumably Westchester County.

As Hank’s narrative progresses, it is nevertheless clear that his success is built on hard work and considerable skill. As a case in point, he offers the “history” of Judith’s antique business, housed in an old building that Hank and Judith had restored, freely given by Hank to Judith on the occasion of their divorce. Informed by their daughter, Elaine, that the business has failed to turn a profit, Hank offers to review the situation without charge. With Elaine acting as intermediary, HW Associates reviews the “books,” concluding that Judith has misunderstood the nature of her business as a simple retail trade when in fact she should be adding to her commissions the implied functions of service and agency. Hank, although permanently estranged from Judith, is pleased when she heeds his proffered advice; Judith, in turn, is pleasantly surprised when her customers gladly pay higher prices as a symbol of their own status. By the time of Judith’s death from cancer during the 1960’s, her business has flourished into a smaller-scale version of Hank’s own, with a distinguished reputation as well as high profits.

Curiously, both of Hank Worthington’s wives, although younger, are familiar acquaintances from the college community of his birth; at one point, Hank wryly recalls emerging from a church service not long after his graduation from Harvard, never dreaming that he would eventually marry either the shy fifteen-year-old on his left or the chubby ten-year-old on his right. Judith, an art student at the time she marries Hank, happily shares the early years of his career, growing gradually apart from him as he pours more and more of his energies into developing his business; the definitive break occurs during World War II, when an increasingly restless Judith takes several lovers, mistakenly expecting that the most recent among them will marry her once she has obtained her divorce from Hank. Hank, meanwhile, has almost absentmindedly, if not reluctantly, embarked on an affair with Charlotte Peckham, daughter of the college’s bursar and widow of its senior physicist, who has for some years been in his employ first as secretary, later as office manager, and most recently, during the war, as his chief administrative assistant, virtually in charge of the firm while Hank is stationed in Washington.

Like Hank, Charlotte Peckham shows a distinct talent for business despite academic preparation for teaching. Married at twenty-three to a bachelor professor twice her age with a fatal fondness for motor racing, Charlotte turns up in Hank’s Madison Avenue offices not long after Peckham’s death and is hired on the spot; a decade or so later, she becomes Hank’s second wife after Judith’s defection. Some time thereafter, on returning with Hank to their home town for summer residence, she will shoot herself with one of Hank’s father’s guns for reasons unclear to Hank; her death will be ruled accidental, as only Hank has seen her cryptic suicide note.

As Hank’s recollections fade to a close, both of his wives have died; so also has Jon Le Cato, his friend from boarding school and Harvard who has served ever since as legal counsel both to Hank himself and to the firm. His grandchildren, too, are long gone, having perished in a plane crash when their mother Elaine, on the eve of her third marriage, sent them off unbidden to stay with their father. Only Elaine herself remains, divorced once more, in her mid-thirties an enigma more disconcerting to her father than ever before.

The Characters

Well-read, intelligent, skeptical but not cynical, Hank Worthington at the end of middle age is an entertaining and at times engaging narrator, viewing the events of his life and times with the same ironic detachment and informed objectivity that have ensured his success as a “healer” of ailing business firms. Indulging in a mannered literary style that harks back to his earlier possible vocation, Hank clearly seems to be enjoying himself as he recalls his grandfather’s checkered career, or his sexual initiation at the hands of a married woman, a neighbor and distant cousin some fifteen years his senior. Also illuminating are his considered recollections of deskbound but mobile military service during World War II, ranging outward to contemplate the war in general, and his observations with regard to the postwar business world.

Hank’s grandfather Dodd, although drawn perilously close to caricature, provides a generally credible object lesson both in the abuses of learning and in the perils of inbreeding both literal and figurative, perils that Hank himself appears to have escaped. “Cubby’s” bizarre yet still mediocre career stands as proof that breeding is no guarantor of personal quality, nor learning (even when inherited) of professional excellence. Hank’s own father, soon banished to the sidelines by dint of his early death, fares hardly better than “Cubby” when subjected to Hank’s scrutiny, implicitly deemed a failure despite his rather high professional and social standing.

Of Hank’s two wives, Judith Conway is by far the more fully visible and hence more credible: Judith’s father, an Episcopal priest recalled from a prestigious post in Washington because of his increasingly High Church, Anglo-Catholic tendencies, may well have caused in the adolescent Judith the emotional imbalance that underlies her sexual promiscuity; the late Canon Conway, Hank recalls, expressed in his middle years such a yearning for priestly celibacy that he came to detest his wife and daughter for their femininity, having as little to do with them as possible. According to Hank, it was to escape her father’s dour presence that Judith took up the study of art in Boston, the move that led directly to their marriage. Similarly, Judith’s infidelities, witnessed at firsthand by the barely adolescent Elaine, no doubt account in part for the adult Elaine’s unsettled amatory life. Charlotte Peckham, by contrast, is glimpsed only briefly, her suicide unexplained; among the greater ironies is that Judith, who hated the college town, eventually settles near there with her business, while Charlotte, who appeared to like the town, does not survive her first summer of reestablished residence there. At times, indeed, the town itself, unnamed, appears to take on the status of a character, overshadowing Hank’s life even as he moves on to Boston and New York.

Among the novel’s more memorable and stabilizing characters is Jonathan Le Cato, Hank’s longtime corporate and personal counsel as well as his best friend. Resigned to lifelong bachelorhood because of his unprepossessing looks and stature, Jon nevertheless enjoys throughout his adult years the discreet favors of several equally discreet female companions. Born to an old, well-placed Virginia family, Jon willingly plays the role of the courtly Southern gentleman even to the point of self-parody, serving over the years as Hank’s confidant and chief adviser. A fact unknown to Jon, however, is that his lifelong attachment to Hank is underlain with irony; Jon, indeed, will go to his grave without ever suspecting that Hank was the guilty party in the boarding-school petty theft that brought the two of them together, when Hank successfully defended Jon against wrongful accusation.

Critical Context

Morning, Noon, and Night was Cozzens’s last published novel, in a sense a literary valedictory and testament. Although he survived the novel’s publication by a full decade, Cozzens produced no more fiction, apparently deeming his statement to be complete. As the author’s only novel to be narrated in the first person, Morning, Noon, and Night also seems, at least on the surface, to be a personal record of sorts, albeit transposed into art: Born too late to serve in World War I, almost too early to be called for World War II, Hank Worthington is Cozzens’s almost exact contemporary, holder of opinions that the author no doubt shared, particularly with regard to the profession of writing. Here as elsewhere, however, it would be erroneous to assume too close an identity of author with narrator; Cozzens was, above all else, an accomplished ironist, quite capable of subtly prepared, “unreliable” narration.

From the 1930’s onward, Cozzens duly received recognition, although limited, as an outstanding social chronicler and “novelist of manners,” worthy of consideration along with Marquand, O’Hara, and eventually Louis Auchincloss. Although all the novelists named were by turns dismissed among liberal critics as “elitist,” their works as “irrelevant,” Cozzens appears to have fared somewhat worse than the others, in part because of his evident interest in literary form and his often expressed disbelief in the validity of social change. Following the unprecedented success of By Love Possessed (1957), accompanied by certain apparent misquotations in a nationally circulated magazine, Cozzens was branded by the critics as a social and literary product of the Eisenhower Administration, dedicated to the status quo. The appearance of Morning, Noon, and Night during the politically turbulent year of 1968 proved to be strategically unfortunate, and the novel attracted little attention and few sales, despite adoption by a major book club. Notwithstanding, Cozzens’s scholarly editor, biographer, and anthologist, Matthew Bruccoli, considers Morning, Noon, and Night among the author’s finest achievements, amply deserving of sustained critical attention.

Bibliography

Bracher, Frederick. The Novels of James Gould Cozzens. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959. Of the eight novels by Cozzens published between 1931 and 1959, Bracher argues that at least four of them are of “major importance by any set of standards.” Defends Cozzens from attacks by critics for his lack of personal commitment, showing him to be a novelist of intellect whose strength is storytelling. A thorough commentary on Cozzens’s literary career.

Bruccoli, Matthew J. James Gould Cozzens: A Life Apart. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. This book-length story of Cozzens is essentially a biography with useful information on his upbringing and his development as a novelist. Includes a chapter each on Guard of Honor and By Love Possessed and an appendix containing excerpts from his notebooks. A must for any serious scholar of Cozzens.

Hicks, Granville. James Gould Cozzens. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1966. An accessible introduction to Cozzens with some criticism of his novels from Confusion to Guard of Honor and By Love Possessed. Argues that the pretentiousness in Cozzens’s early work was transformed in later novels to “competent, straightforward prose.”

Mooney, John Harry, Jr. James Gould Cozzens: Novelist of Intellect. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963. A straightforward, useful study. Each chapter focuses on a different novel, from S.S. San Pedro to Castaway, and the final chapter covers the critical material available on Cozzens.

Pfaff, Lucie. The American and German Entrepreneur: Economic and Literary Interplay. New York: Peter Lang, 1989. Contains a chapter on Cozzens and the business world, with subsections on “The Business Activities of Henry Dodd Worthington,” “Small Business,” and “Recurring Themes.” Pfaff is particularly interested in Cozzens’s entrepreneurs.

Sterne, Richard Clark. Dark Mirror: The Sense of Injustice in Modern European and American Literature. New York: Fordham University Press, 1994. Contains a detailed discussion of The Just and the Unjust.