The Late John Marquand

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Chapter Five

  Christina Sedgwick was a delicately beautiful blonde creature with slender legs and a tiny waist and an appealing, almost childlike manner. John Marquand met her in Cambridge shortly after his graduation from Harvard with the class of 1915. He had gone to work for the Boston Transcript as a cub reporter and was managing a meager existence on a salary of $15 a week. He fell hopelessly in love with her.

  Years later, after nearly thirteen years of a sometimes-happy-sometimes-not marriage and a bitter divorce, Marquand would romanticize Christina, turning her into an exotic fairy-tale heroine of perfect gentleness, goodness, and grace—into the kind of wife he felt he ought to have had, rather than the perplexing and complicated actuality that Christina Sedgwick was. She certainly had charm, and a dainty and winsome gaiety and humor that could be quite beguiling. But she also, having been brought up as a proper New England lady, was completely impractical, incapable of coping with the realities of life. She had led what is called a sheltered existence, and much of its shelter was the creation of her own personality. Sometimes she seemed to be living on another star.

  She never, for instance, seemed to know quite where she was. She would go out for a walk and soon find herself lost and, when she asked for directions and these were pointed out to her, she would smile sweetly and then turn and walk dreamily the opposite way. Her ethereal vagueness could be both endearing and exasperating, for in addition to being vague she was also forgetful. She would forget invitations and show up in the wrong places for appointments. She would make dates with Marquand and then fail to appear. He began proposing marriage to her soon after their first meeting, and sometimes she would accept his proposals and sometimes she would demur. When she accepted, she would have forgotten the acceptance a day later. Everything about Christina was haphazard and disorganized. One afternoon she was seen walking on Beacon Hill and holding one end of what was clearly a dog’s leash, apparently quite unaware that no dog was attached to the other end. Once in a restaurant she was observed carefully gathering up three gloves. She was a child-woman who had to be guided and led, and in this capacity she had always been served by her mother, Mrs. Alexander C. Sedgwick of Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

  Perhaps it was Christina’s Princess Lointaine quality that supported John Marquand’s feeling from the beginning that, socially, he was from the wrong side of the tracks. Certainly his Marquand-Fuller lineage was every bit as distinguished as Christina’s. Still, she was a Sedgwick, and John Marquand was very much aware that, as they say in New England, “Sedgwicks are Sedgwicks.” Sedgwick House in Stockbridge, the family seat, is an imposing yellow house that addresses a wide elm-shaded lawn facing Main Street, a local landmark pointed out with pride to visitors. In the Stockbridge Church the Sedgwick pews are placed in a chancel so that Sedgwicks can sit above everybody else. Beyond the church lies the Sedgwick burial plot, a circular piece of real estate known as the Sedgwick Pie. At the center of the Pie reposes an ancient ancestor, Judge Theodore Sedgwick, and around him lie all the other Sedgwicks, their heads away from the center in order that, at the sound of the last trump, all the Sedgwicks may rise and face Judge Theodore who, it is assumed, will have a verdict of his own to deliver to each of them. The Sedgwick servants, meanwhile, are buried separately, “below the salt.” So seriously are the Sedgwicks taken in Stockbridge that it is said that in spring all the peeping frogs in the local ponds chirp “Sedgwick, Sedgwick, Sedgwick.”

  Though most Sedgwicks are comfortably off, there is no Sedgwick family fortune, as such, to speak of. But the Sedgwicks have long represented other things in Boston. More than money, they have stood for intellectual achievement, civic rectitude, cultural responsibility—qualities which traditional Boston has always admired. Sedgwicks have provided Boston with scholars, teachers, essayists, poets, clergymen. They have, meanwhile, not been shy about marrying money, and several Sedgwicks have married Cabots and Peabodys. Perhaps the most important fact about the Sedgwicks, as far as young John Marquand was concerned, was that Christina’s uncle, Ellery Sedgwick, was then the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, the only magazine that proper Boston deigned to read and take seriously. In Boston, when one spoke of the Magazine, one meant the Atlantic Monthly, just as to speak of the President did not mean the occupant of the White House but the head of Harvard. To Marquand, a hack reporter for a daily newspaper, the presence of the great editor of the Magazine in Christina’s family tree was awesome. Uncle Ellery, who set the literary taste of New England, became a gray eminence in the background as John and Christina’s courtship started on its uncertain path.

  It was the spring of 1916, and between his work at the Transcript and courting Christina John Marquand had also joined Battery A of the Massachusetts Field Artillery, a National Guard unit. “Preparedness” had become the popular if somewhat vaguely defined motto of those pre-World War I days, and young men all over America were starting to set their military courses. But John’s joining Battery A was done, more than for any patriotic reason, to impress Christina and her family. Battery A was something of an elite corps. There were, to begin with, only 190 men in it, and nearly all of them were Harvard men of “good” families. There were two Peabodys, a Cabot, an Appleton, a Bradley, and an Otis, along with Gordon Hammersley from the New York Social Register and a Philadelphia Strawbridge. Battery A provided a pleasant diversion, and its assignments were far from strenuous; the Tuesday night winter drills were held at Boston’s exclusive New Riding Club, and, in spring, maneuvers moved out to the country club in suburban Brookline. Members of Battery A were permitted to exercise their horses in the bridle paths along the Fenway and Jamaica Pond, and they were frequently accompanied by young debutantes riding sidesaddle in dark blue habits with derby hats secured to their heads by black elastic bands under their chins. Locally, the young men in Battery A were called “The Blue Bloods,” and it was said that the unit was composed of “millionaires’ sons and willy-boys”—epithets which the carefree young blades hardly minded in the least. The swath they cut in their snappy uniforms on their thoroughbred horses was part of the fun of playing soldier. For John Marquand, membership in Battery A was an even headier experience because he had, in a real sense, been invited to join his very first club.

  Then, on June 19, 1916—the day before Harvard Class Day, and just when everyone who was anyone had made his or her summer social plans—the blow fell. Pancho Villa, the Mexican bandit, had been causing trouble at the border, including several raids into United States territory, and, supported by the Mexican authorities, a detachment of American troops was ordered into Mexico under General Pershing. Federalized state guards were to back up the expedition. The Massachusetts Militia, including Battery A, was ordered to report for immediate duty.

  Battery A at the Border! It became the rallying cry of a whole generation of young Bostonians, the source of an endless supply of comic anecdotes which only those who had shared the experience could appreciate or understand. From the outset, the adventure had a musical-comedy quality as weeping mothers and girl friends with parasols assembled in huge Pierce-Arrow touring cars to kiss the troops good-by from their departure point in Framingham. As their train made its way across the country into the Southwest, flag-waving crowds gathered at station stops to cheer on the youthful Soldiers. Once, outside St. Louis, when the train made an unscheduled stop near an inviting stream, a number of young men took the opportunity to bathe and were forced to run naked down the tracks when the train started up without them. Song, ribaldry, and whiskey were the order of the day and night aboard the rattling cars.

  When the group reached Fort Bliss, outside El Paso, a pattern of life was established. By day there was the dreary routine of army camp life in the dusty desert under a hot summer Texas sun. But the nights were cool, ideal for partying, or for going to dances at the El Paso del Norte Hotel, or for simply sitting around in tents telling stories. Baseball teams and track meets were organized, but, as the summer weeks wore on, tedium set i
n which was aggravated by the fact that not the slightest trace of an enemy appeared on the horizon. There was talk of abandoning the outfit and going home, and one evening, after much gin, a young Peabody and one of his Lowell cousins set out on foot to go back to Boston. They were found the next day, passed out, in the desert about fifteen miles from camp. No disciplinary action was taken against the two by the commander of this detachment of innocents.

  Then, just as abruptly as it had been ordered into Texas, Battery A, in September, was ordered back to Massachusetts. In Boston, the men were given heroes’ welcomes. Accompanied by local ice-wagon horses, they were marched through the city’s streets past cheering crowds. The newspapers praised their courage and the fact that they had “sacrificed so much and had rushed away to serve if need be on foreign soil.” Battery A had, of course, accomplished absolutely nothing; not a weapon had been fired. But the men of Battery A had acquired a shared experience that they would treasure for a lifetime, and John Marquand had made more friends in three months than in all his years at Harvard. They were, furthermore, friends of what he liked to consider his “class.”

  Six months later, America was in the war, and Marquand set off for Officers’ Training Camp at Plattsburg, New York, embarked upon a much more serious military commitment. Plattsburg was quite different from the palmy life with Battery A, and Marquand found the routine there both wearying and terrifying—and yet, again for Christina’s sake, he was determined to succeed at it. One false step in the three-month training program and he would have been sent home in disgrace. But he passed the course and, in July, 1917, received his commission as a first lieutenant in the United States Army.

  From Plattsburg, Marquand was transferred to Fort Devens in Massachusetts, and from there to Fort Greene, North Carolina. Because he had learned to both write and speak French at Harvard—though he spoke with a decided New England accent—it was decided by army higher-ups that he could be put to good use in France as an interpreter with a Military Police unit. This struck Marquand as an interesting enough assignment but, just before departing Fort Greene, he was reassigned—in what always struck him as typical military lunacy—to an artillery brigade with the Fourth Division, stationed outside Bordeaux.

  From the time of his arrival in France, the war became a nightmare experience for Marquand which, in later years, he could never drive out of his mind and never really bear to speak about. He fought—most of the time with the 77th Regiment Field Artillery—in the bloody battle of the Vesle River, and at St. Mihiel, and in the Argonne, and the war, for him, consisted mostly of mud, the noise of shells exploding, and the sickening sight of dead men’s bodies lying everywhere. It was his first sight of bloodshed, and it left an indelible impression, one he could not erase. In November, 1918, he spent a few hours in Paris and was there when the Armistice was declared. His reaction to the news was one of exhausted relief.

  Years later, he would turn his wartime experiences to fictional use in a series of successful war stories. And the disparate natures of his two wartime adventures—in Battery A and in the bloody trenches of France—gave him a rather special double-edged view of military life. He was to view the military and its endeavors the same way he could view the strivings of the American upper crust, both as an insider and as one a bit removed, looking in. Fighting and killing he could treat as comic, even ridiculous, on the one hand (as it had seemed in Battery A, although touched with comradeship) and brutal and deadly and dreadful on the other (as it had been in France). Editors would regard his interpretation of war and killing as unique.

  Immediately after his discharge from the Army, Marquand headed—after a brief, almost perfunctory, but of course required visit to his parents, who were back in Wilmington—to New York, where he decided his first task was to make some money. Only by making money—now that he had proved himself a man—could he win Christina and persuade the Sedgwicks to let him carry off their daughter.

  For a while, he had a job as a Sunday feature writer for the New York Herald. While there, he became acquainted with another young writer named Robert Benchley, and one night, when the two men were having a drink and talking about ways to make money, Benchley told Marquand that there was more of it to be made in advertising copywriting than in newspaper work. Immediately John applied for a job at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency and was taken on as a copywriter for the princely sum of $60 a week, nearly twice what he had made at the Herald.

  Later on in life he would defend his move from the more prestigious world of journalism into the hustling, hard-sell, dog-eat-dog scramble of advertising by claiming that advertising copy was better for a writer than newspaper work since it dealt with “basic human fears and emotions.” Perhaps he eventually came to believe this, but at the time he wrote ads sheerly for the money, and he hated the work. He wrote advertising copy and slogans for such Thompson accounts as Veedol, Tydol, Lux, and Yuban Coffee. For a while he was the chief copywriter on the Lifebuoy Soap account, a product for which he retained a lifetime aversion. He was at one point assigned to an account that advertised rubber heels and was sent out on a field trip with the following mission: He was to stand at a curb and count how many people stepped from the sidewalk onto the street toes first, and how many stepped off heels first. After several hours of curbside study Marquand returned to the office with his answer: “Two hundred on heels, three hundred and fifty on toes.” “No,” he was told, “that’s not the right answer for our client. Go back and find another.”

  To save money, he had been living in New York with his Hale cousins. One night after dinner he picked up a copy of the Saturday Evening Post and carried it up to bed with him to read. The issue contained perhaps half a dozen short stories and part of a serialized novel. The next morning, Marquand carried the Post down with him to breakfast and said to his cousin, Dudley Hale, “You know, these stories are simple to do. They’re all about a man of low social standing who falls in love with a girl who’s socially above him.” That night he came home and laboriously typed out a short story. It was about a prize fighter who falls in love with a debutante. He shipped the story off to the editors of the Saturday Evening Post, who promptly bought it. It was his first published short story. In this casual, almost accidental way, John Marquand became a writer of fiction. The flighty, otherworldly debutante in the story reminded people who knew her of Christina.

  Chapter Six

  In the spring of 1921, Stanley Resor, the president of J. Walter Thompson, called John Marquand into his office, said to him sadly, “John, I don’t believe you have the business instinct,” and suggested that he look for gainful employment elsewhere. Marquand was apprehensive about being out of a job and yet, at the same time, he was relieved. Business instinct or not, he had been able to sell several more short stories, most of which, to be sure, shared a common theme—poor-social-outcast boy falls in love with rich-socially-prominent girl; sometimes he would achieve variety by turning the sexes and social positions the other way around. George Horace Lorimer, the great editor who steered the Saturday Evening Post to its most successful years, was delighted with the new, young, and productive writer who could so easily turn out material that fit the Post’s formula.

  Marquand had also acquired his lifelong literary agent, Carl Brandt of the firm of Brandt & Brandt, one of the finest in New York. With the help of Brandt, Marquand was soon being paid as much as $500 for each of his Post stories. Brandt also brought Marquand to the attention of another celebrated magazine editor of the day, Ray Long of Cosmopolitan, and began skillfully to parlay the enthusiasm of one editor against the other, saying to Lorimer, “If you don’t want this one, Long does,” and to Long, “If you don’t take this one, Lorimer will.” In the process, of course, he was slowly but steadily nudging Marquand’s prices upward. And so, in a way, Marquand’s dismissal from J. Walter Thompson could not have come at a better time. He had paid off all his debts from college days and had $400 clear in the bank, a respectable sum in 1921. Also,
Carl Brandt had been urging him to try a more ambitious project, a full-length novel, the kind which the Post and other magazines often bought and ran as serials. Serials paid much more than short stories. What was more, John Marquand had an idea for one—a costumed cloak-and-dagger affair that he planned to call The Unspeakable Gentleman. That summer he went back to Newburyport, moved in again with his maiden aunts at Curzon’s Mill, and started to write his book.

  Years later, after the Pulitzer Prize and all the rest, he would have liked to forget The Unspeakable Gentleman, for he looked back on it as an unspeakable piece of work. “I regard it with horror!” he would cry, cringing at the very mention of the title. But, as his first novel, it was an unmistakable turning point in his career as a writer. It was written in a florid, portentous style that seemed to have been borrowed from the Victorians. It started out, “I have seen the improbable turn true too often not to have it disturb me. Suppose these memoirs still exist when the French royalist plot of 1805 and my father’s peculiar role in it are forgotten.” And the novel ended, many pages of huffing and puffing later, “‘Very much relieved,’ he said, ‘and yet—and yet I still feel thirsty. The rum decanter, Brutus.’”

  The memoirs almost did not exist. A few days after finishing the manuscript, Marquand returned to New York where he intended to deliver it to Carl Brandt. On the night of his arrival, however, he met his Harvard classmate George Merck for a drink at the University Club, and he carried the manuscript with him in a suitcase. Later, he and Merck took a taxi downtown to meet two girls and take them out to dinner. Marquand placed the suitcase in the taxi’s outside luggage rack. When the men got to the address where they were to meet the girls, Marquand discovered to his horror that the suitcase had fallen off the cab. There was no other copy of the manuscript. For days, Marquand was in a state of despair. He placed a pleading ad in the newspapers, and ten days later the suitcase and manuscript turned up. The episode taught him a professional lesson he never forgot, and thereafter he always kept a carbon copy of everything he wrote.