JAMES GOULD COZZENS A Life Apart. By Matthew J. Bruccoli. Illustrated. 343 pp. New York and San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $15.95.
BETWEEN 1931 and the early 1960's, James Gould Cozzens enjoyed a degree of popular success remarkable for a novelist whose work was intellectually demanding and who made not the slightest concession to public taste. Four of his books became best sellers. His ''Guard of Honor'' won the Pulitzer Prize in 1949 and was regarded by some - even in competition with ''The Naked and the Dead'' - as the most important novel to come out of World War II. ''By Love Possessed,'' published in 1957, stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for 34 weeks, received prominent notices in virtually every major and minor review publication in the country, became the No. 1 paperback best seller and in 1961 was made into a popular film.
During the same period, Cozzens was held in the highest esteem by such middlebrow critics as Bernard De Voto, Orville Prescott and J. Donald Adams, who for years exerted an influence that today seems incredible as monitors of the American literary conscience. To them, Cozzens belonged to a species of writer fast becoming extinct, the novelist of manners who was also a moralist and so could be counted on tohelp rescue our fiction from that preoccupation with the unpleasantness that dominated tthe work of so many of Cozzens' contemporaries. Cozzens viewed American society as a broad and complex spectrum of class, power, wealth and privilege, which he clearly accepted as the natural order of things. His characters, furthermore, were not expatriates or decadent esthetes but decent people trying to cope responsibly with life even as they recognized that they were fighting a losing battle.
These critics saw Cozzens as the great novelist of the American upper class establishment, a most welcome antidote to the often disturbingly morbid offerings of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner. It is not surprising that their enthusiastic support, buttressed by the wide distribution provided by the Book-of-the-Month Club, helped give Cozzens a popularity with the middlebrow reading audience that very few novelists of his quality have since had. Yet in the years since his death in 1978, Cozzens has been all but forgotten by that audience, while his former critical supporters have mostly passed from the scene, leaving very few descendants. In fact, Cozzens now seem to have come to rest in that limbo to which writers are consigned when their work has somehow ceased to speak significantly and they await the moment when, with luck, the shifts of history may cause them to be rediscovered.
There is, of course, nothing remarkable about this. It happened to Melville and Henry James, and it happened again, somewhat less drastically, to Hemingway and Fitzgerald. But what is different about Cozzens' case is the suspicion, still held by some, that he was the victim of a process more insidious than the usual posthumous eclipse, that his abrupt descent into oblivion, which actually began almost 20 years before his death, was the result of calculated critical sabotage.
Shortly after ''By Love Possessed'' was published, some of the most influential liberal critics - among them Dwight Macdonald in Commentary and Irving Howe in the New Republic - launched a brutal attack on Cozzens, in part because they found intolerable the densely convoluted prose of that novel but mainly because of the presence in it of certain social and political attitudes that they considered offensively reactionary. In his essay, ''By Cozzens Possessed,'' Macdonald accused the novelist of being anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic and antiblack, priggish in his treatment of sex and brutal in his portrayal of women. The essay became a famous document in the history of higher critical demolition and was largely responsible for making Cozzens infamous as a writer who would never again be taken seriously by liberal intellectuals. Matthew J. Bruccoli belongs to an emergent group of academic critics who believe that Cozzens was unjustly treated and who would like to prepare the way for a more balanced view of his achievement. To that end Mr. Bruccoli previously edited ''A James Gould Cozzens Reader'' as well as a collection of retrospective essays on the novelist, and he now offers the first full-length biography. In so doing, he demonstrates his faith not only in Cozzens' artistic stature but in the idea that an account of his life and personality will ultimately serve the cause of justice. This seems improbable, for in spite of Mr. Bruccoli's best intentions, the portrait of Cozzens that emerges seems more likely to confirm than to dispel the doubts about him that have blighted his reputation.
THE sad truth is that Cozzens is an impossible subject for any biographer, simply because he was the kind of writer - fairly rare in this country - to whom life was worth living almost solely because it gave him the opportunity to write. He did very little in his 75 years except write, and just about everything else he did was designed, whether deliberately or unconsciously, to protect and promote his writing function. The list of things he did not do in his life reads like a catalogue of heroically resisted temptations until one realizes that he had no interest in doing any of them. Mr. Bruccoli states the case flatly and a bit ruefully when he says that he has undertaken to write a biography of ''a reclusive writer who for most of his life had no life apart from his work. ... He didn't associate with other writers. He didn't grant interviews. He signed no manifestoes, attended no cocktail parties, made no speeches, joined no faculties, supported no causes, divorced no wives, courted no columnists, punched no reviewers, advised no Presidents. He stayed home and wrote.''