Guard of Honor
by James Gould Cozzens
Summary
Three days, the 2nd to the 4th of September 1943, at Ocanara, an Army Air Forces base in central Florida, where a project organisation studies how the air war should be run. Nothing arrives from outside: no combat and no Germans. The whole enormous novel is generated by the base itself, several thousand people wired together by rank, paperwork and accident.
It opens with a near collision. Major General Bus Beal, the young commanding general, is landing when a Black bomber pilot's plane crosses his approach, and Benny Carricker, Beal's brilliant and uncontrollable copilot, gets out and breaks the other pilot's nose. The victim is one of a group of Black officers newly posted in, and the injustice detonates slowly: the base's segregated officers club becomes a test the Army has written for itself, Black pilots move to enter it, a Northern newspaper gets the story, and every officer at Ocanara discovers what his own principles weigh against his career.
Cozzens tracks it through dozens of officers, most of them named only by rank and surname, with Captain Nathaniel Hicks, a magazine editor in uniform, nearest the centre. The style is formal, precise and demanding, sentence by sentence the most exacting prose on this list, and the book's fascination is procedure: how institutions actually decide things.
Around six hundred pages in three long unchaptered days.
Best for readers who want the war novel as administration rather than combat, written by someone who believed competence was a subject worthy of literature.
Historical Context & Significance
Guard of Honor won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1949, chosen from a field that included Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, and the two books have defined a fork in war fiction ever since: Mailer's combat expressionism became the tradition, and Cozzens's administrative realism became a specialist taste. Brendan Gill in The New Yorker called it the work of a writer at the very top of his powers.
Cozzens knew the material because he had lived at that altitude of the machine. He spent 1943 to 1945 in the Office of Information Services of the Army Air Forces, writing speeches and memoranda for General Henry Arnold's headquarters, seeing every kind of problem a continental air force generates, including the ones about race the service preferred not to name.
His reputation rose through the fifties and then fell hard and has never recovered; he is now the least read Pulitzer novelist of his stature. This book is the standing argument for him, and it has been called the truest account of how the wartime Air Forces worked.