Robert Cohn

Robert Cohn is introduced as a former middleweight boxing champion of Princeton whose title matters less as an athletic distinction than as a private defense against humiliation. A shy and fundamentally gentle man, he learned to box because treatment as a Jew at Princeton had made him feel inferior; the ability to knock down someone who behaved snootily toward him offered inner comfort, even though he never fought outside the gymnasium. His later life repeats the same tension between apparent achievement and inward vulnerability: boxing gives him a flattened nose and a credential, while writing, money, and travel give him new forms of escape without removing his dependence on other people.

Identity and Early Formation

Robert Cohn comes from one of the richest Jewish families in New York through his father and one of the oldest through his mother. Before Princeton, his military-school experience had not made him race-conscious or taught him to feel different from anyone else; he had played a very good end on the football team and had been accepted without that particular burden. Princeton changed the terms of his self-understanding. There, according to the account of his life, he became painfully self-conscious, and boxing became the method through which he tried to answer the injury.

His connection with Spider Kelly defines the practical side of that transformation. Spider Kelly taught his young gentlemen to box like featherweights regardless of their weight, and Robert Cohn suited the method because he was exceptionally fast. Spider Kelly overmatched him so severely that Cohn's nose was permanently flattened. The injury intensified his dislike of boxing, yet it also gave him a peculiar satisfaction and, in the narrator's ironic formulation, improved his nose. Because the narrator distrusts stories that are too frank and coherent, he doubts the boxing history and imagines alternative explanations for the damaged face before obtaining confirmation from Spider Kelly, who remembered Cohn and had wondered what had become of him.

Robert Cohn's athletic distinction is therefore both real and inadequate. His classmates at Princeton scarcely remembered him, including the fact that he had been middleweight boxing champion. The title has social force for Cohn because it answers a private wound, but it does not make him memorable to the institution that awarded it. In this contrast, bodily competence functions as compensatory capital: useful for imagined self-protection and inward reassurance, but unable to erase shyness, exclusion, or the need for recognition.

Marriage, Divorce, and Financial Position

After Princeton, Robert Cohn married the first girl who was kind to him. The marriage lasted five years and produced three children, but domestic unhappiness hardened him into what the narrative calls a rather unattractive mould. His father had left him fifty thousand dollars, most of which he lost; the remainder of the estate went to his mother. His economic position consequently combines inherited privilege with diminished security, while his emotional history combines a desire for attachment with an inability to act decisively within an unhappy relationship.

Cohn had spent months deciding to leave his wife, but he had not done so because he imagined that separating from him would be too cruel to her. The decision was taken out of his hands when she left him for a miniature-painter. Her departure became a healthy shock precisely because it broke through his prolonged hesitation. The divorce was then arranged, and Cohn went to the Coast. His movement away from marriage is not presented as a clean act of self-determination; it begins with abandonment by his wife, followed by the external event that forces the change he had contemplated but could not perform.

Literary Career and Move to Europe

In California, Robert Cohn entered literary circles and used what remained of his inheritance to back a review of the Arts. The magazine began publication in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, and ended in Provincetown, Massachusetts. At first Cohn was treated chiefly as a financial angel: his name appeared on the editorial page only as a member of the advisory board. Gradually, however, he became the sole editor. The transition from sponsor to editor reveals his attraction to authority as well as to literature. The project was funded by his money, but editing allowed him to exercise control, and he discovered that he liked that authority. He was sorry when the review became too expensive and had to be abandoned.

The magazine's failure leaves Robert Cohn with literary aspiration but without the institutional position he had briefly created for himself. He then follows a woman who had become closely involved in his life and who had hoped to rise along with the magazine. When it became clear that the review would not rise, she urged him to go to Europe so that he could write. They came to Europe and remained there for three years: the first spent traveling and the last two in Paris. During that period, Braddocks was Cohn's literary friend, while the narrator was his tennis friend, so his expatriate life is organized through separate friendships attached to separate parts of his identity.

In Europe, Cohn discovers writing more fully. He writes a novel that is described as poor but not as worthless as later critics claim. He reads many books, plays bridge and tennis, and boxes at a local gymnasium. These activities preserve the old pattern of divided selfhood: intellectual ambition, social recreation, and physical training coexist, but none decisively replaces the others. He is also receiving an allowance of about three hundred dollars a month from his mother, which gives him continued independence while reinforcing the inherited financial basis of his literary life.

Frances and the Constraint of Intimacy

Frances is the woman who takes Robert Cohn in hand, and the relationship exposes his susceptibility to stronger personalities. She had hoped to rise with the magazine, and the narrative states that Cohn never had a chance of avoiding being taken in hand by her. At the same time, he is convinced that he loves her. His dependence is therefore not merely economic or practical: he interprets the relationship as love even while its structure places him in a subordinate position.

For two and a half years, Robert Cohn appears not to have looked at another woman. He is fairly happy, although, like many people living in Europe, he would rather be in America. His contentment is thus qualified by homesickness and by the conditions of his attachment. Near the end of Frances's second year with him, she realizes that her looks are going and changes her attitude from careless possession and exploitation to an absolute determination that Cohn should marry her. The relationship consequently shifts from informal control to an explicit demand for marriage.

The dinner after which this change becomes visible turns Robert Cohn's private constraint into a social scene. After dinner at 1'Avenue's and coffee at the Café de Versailles, the narrator discusses a possible weekend trip with Cohn. The suggested destination is Strasbourg, with a walk to Saint-Odile in Alsace and the help of an American girl who lives there. Frances twice kicks the narrator under the table; when he looks, he sees her chin lifting and her face hardening. The physical gesture communicates the boundary she expects Cohn to observe before he openly explains it.

Cohn later walks with the narrator to the corner, ostensibly to buy a paper, and asks why the Strasbourg girl was mentioned when Frances was present. The narrator sees no reason that knowing an American woman in Strasbourg should matter to Frances, but Cohn answers that any girl would make the trip impossible. His relief when the alternative of Bruges or the Ardennes is proposed shows how thoroughly he has internalized Frances's control. The proposed journey is changed not by an argument or declaration but by a kick beneath a café table, followed by Cohn's acceptance of a safer plan to stay at the Grand Cerf in Senlis, take a hike in the woods, and return home.

Relationships and Narrative Significance

Robert Cohn's principal relationships are organized around dependence, compensation, and partial escape. Spider Kelly gives him a disciplined physical technique through which he answers racial humiliation, but that achievement leaves an injury and does not make him socially remembered. His wife provides the first marriage he enters after receiving kindness, then leaves him for a miniature-painter and forces the divorce he had been unable to initiate. Frances offers companionship and a claimed love while progressively narrowing his freedom. Braddocks connects him to literary life, and the narrator connects him to tennis, but neither friendship displaces the intimate authority Frances exercises over him.

The narrator's presentation also makes Robert Cohn a deliberately unstable object of judgment. The narrator reports the facts of his life while announcing distrust of simple, coherent stories, even verifying the boxing title only after suspecting that the flattened nose had another cause. This skeptical framing prevents Cohn's biography from becoming a straightforward success story. He is wealthy but financially diminished, physically skilled but shy, an editor who likes authority but loses his magazine, a novelist who writes but produces a poor book, and a man who imagines himself in love while allowing the relationship to determine where he may travel.

Robert Cohn's importance lies in the gap between movement and release. He leaves Princeton, marriage, California, and eventually America for Europe, yet each departure carries an unresolved dependence into the next setting. Boxing answers one form of exclusion; money enables a literary venture; travel promises renewal; writing supplies a new identity. Still, in the immediate ending of this portion of his story, a simple suggestion of another woman is enough to redirect his plans. His life is marked by repeated attempts to acquire autonomy, while the decisive choices remain shaped by shame, affection, money, and the authority of others.