The Late John Marquand

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  In Boston, the Sedgwicks—Christina’s mother in particular—seemed to be doing nothing that was in the least bit helpful in holding the Marquands’ marriage together. Mrs. Sedgwick continued her domineering ways with her daughter and remained disparaging about her son-in-law’s writing. There seemed to be no way to please her. On the one hand, she complained of John’s “writing for money”; on the other, she claimed that John was not earning enough to support a wife and children in the proper Sedgwick style. Christina had grown more vaporous and imponderable than ever. In 1929, signs had been appearing everywhere that the glorious bubble of the twenties was about to burst, and suddenly in Boston there had been earth-shattering news. Kidder, Peabody & Company, one of the most respected investment banking and brokerage firms in the city, had announced that it was in serious financial difficulties. For days, Boston had been unable to talk of anything else. The collapse of Kidder, Peabody would be as stunning an event as if the sun failed to rise in the morning. To the Sedgwicks, it would have very nearly amounted to a family tragedy, since Cousin Minturn Sedgwick was married to a Peabody. A few days after the firm’s crisis, John and Christina Marquand had been driving out to their summer house in Weston with Gardi and Conney Fiske, and all the way out the Fiskes and John had talked excitedly in the car. What did this all mean to the economy of Boston, to the country, to world banking? Suddenly Christina had spoken up in her high-pitched, fluty voice. “What’s this I hear about Kidder, Peabody?”

  It was inevitable that word of his marital problems should reach the ears of such men as George Horace Lorimer and Ray Long, who were buying Marquand’s increasingly popular short stories and serials, and it was Lorimer’s suggestion that John get away from Christina and the two children for a while by taking a trip to the Orient to gather new material for fiction. And so, financed by the booming Saturday Evening Post, Marquand sailed for the Far East. When he returned, it was summer again and the Brandts had taken a house for a few months in Bronxville. John joined them there for an extended visit and, dictating to Carol, began a novel to be called No Hero, the first of what would become a hugely successful series of books and stories about a whimsically obsequious, lisping Japanese detective named Mr. Moto.

  Carol would return from her office on weekday afternoons, and John would dictate for two hours before dinner. Carol would type the manuscript in triple space. The next day, John would edit the previous evening’s material and, by afternoon, would be ready to start dictating again. On Saturdays and Sundays, they would work for as many as seven to eight hours at a stretch. The work was concentrated and exhausting, but by the end of the summer the novel was finished. Lorimer was delighted with it.

  In the year 1933, John Marquand earned $19,000, not at all bad for a writer in the depths of the Depression. Nonetheless that year the Marquands made a decision that on the surface seems foolish and was to prove ruinous. For reasons of economy as much as for anything else, they decided to move in with Christina’s family at Sedgwick House.

  It was, of course, a large house with many big rooms, and an argument could be made that it was big enough to hold all the Sedgwicks plus four Marquands, and there were also quaint and quirky details about the old place that rather appealed to Marquand’s sardonic turn of mind as a storyteller, to his sense of the ridiculous. He had always been amused, for example, by the Sedgwick dog cemetery behind the house, a canine resting-place where, beneath tiny headstones in carefully tended graves, reposed Sedgwick pets going back for over a hundred years, their names—“Kozo,” “Kai,” “Benvenuto Cellini”—carved in the ancient stones above inscribed testaments to the departed dogs’ virtues, written in Latin.

  For all this, 1933 was hardly the happiest year of the Marquands’ marriage. Christina’s brother, A. C. Sedgwick, Jr., also lived at Sedgwick House and, in the Sedgwick tradition, he was “literary.” That particular year he was at work on a poetic novel to be called Wind Without Rain, and the family was understandably excited about the book’s emergence. Across the hall from A. C.’s workroom, John Marquand was writing one after another of his endless stream of serials and stories that were feeding and clothing his wife and two children—serials that were appearing in magazines with circulations totaling in the tens of millions but which, by Sedgwick standards, “nobody” read. One afternoon, while John was working, Mrs. Sedgwick tapped on John’s door to ask him if he would mind taking A. C.’s dog, whose name was Chou-Fleur, out for its regular midafternoon walk. “I can’t disturb him to ask him to do it,” Mrs. Sedgwick whispered to John. “He’s writing, you know.”

  With increasing frequency that year, John would find himself boarding the train at the Stockbridge station to escape to New York for a few days. Sometimes these trips were necessary in order to meet or lunch with editors, but as often as not he would invent reasons for his departures merely to get away from the Sedgwick world. In New York, he would move in with Carl and Carol Brandt. One time, returning to Stockbridge and the Sedgwicks, he brought with him a tankful of tropical fish. Tropical fish had always fascinated him. But this time he presented the tank and fish to Christina’s mother as a hostess present. Mrs. Sedgwick, looking mystified, asked him, “But why would you give me tropical fish, John?” He replied, “It seemed to me a bit chilly up here.” Mrs. Sedgwick rewarded him with her iciest stare.

  When Carol Brandt suffered an attack of appendicitis in 1934, her doctor ordered her to take two weeks of vacation and rest. Since this occurred during one of Marquand’s periodic flights from his family, Carl Brandt suggested that he and Carol go to Bermuda and then, rather hesitantly, asked, “Can we take John with us? He doesn’t want to go back to Christina and the children yet.” Carol wasn’t certain whether a holiday à trois was a good idea, but she agreed. It turned out to be one of the happiest times the three had ever spent together. They stayed at the Castle Harbour, which had just opened, and for two weeks they swam, lay in the sun, played three-handed bridge, and drank something they christened “Liquid Sunshine,” a murderous concoction which Carl devised out of several varieties of rum and brandy. Too soon it was time for John to go home and face troubles in Boston, for although these escapes from marriage were diverting they solved no problem.

  In Boston he had begun to think about a novel quite different from anything he had written before. It would be a novel about Boston, about the social attitudes that prevailed there which were so different from those in New York, or any place else in the world, for that matter. These were the attitudes that had seemed to present him with nothing but obstacles in terms of Christina and the Sedgwicks.

  When, in late 1934, John told Carl and Carol that he intended to divorce Christina, the Brandts were deeply disturbed. It seemed to his friends that for all its ups and downs it was a marriage worth saving, and there were two small children in the picture. John, Jr. was then eleven, and little Christina was only seven. The Brandts begged John to meet privately with Christina to discuss matters, and to meet with her preferably on neutral territory, with no children or Sedgwick relatives on hand to distract the couple from facing their problems. Reluctantly, John agreed to try their suggestion, which was more Carol’s than Carl’s; Carl, having been through one divorce, was less sanguine about the chances of John’s marriage surviving. Carol suggested that the meeting take place at the Brandts’ apartment, which was at 270 Park Avenue, and on the morning of the meeting both Brandts departed for their offices to leave John alone to await Christina. That evening, when they returned, John was alone again, standing in the living room, a drink in his hand, swinging the glass in circles in that characteristic way of his. From his expression, it was clear that the meeting with his wife had been less than a complete success. It was also clear that John had had more than one drink.

  “Well,” Carol Brandt asked tentatively, “how did things go?”

  John exploded. “Can you imagine?” he asked. “Can you imagine what she said? She said that before we discussed anything I would have to apologize! She said,
‘John, before I say anything, I want you to apologize!’ Apologize!”

  And so that marriage was over. It had lasted, in its shaky and fragile way, more than twelve years. A divorce decree was granted to Christina Sedgwick Marquand on May 19, 1935, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and another chapter in the life John Marquand was writing for himself came to an end.

  PART TWO

  A Middle

  Chapter Nine

  Of all Marquand’s friends, the person whose literary taste and judgment he admired the most was Conney Fiske. Carl Brandt might help him as an editor, telling him where to cut and splice and fill, and Carol—or any other good stenographer—could make the creative process easier by taking down the novels and stories as he dictated them, but only Conney Fiske, in Marquand’s opinion, had true critical ability. Throughout his life he expressed nothing but disdain for book reviewers, particularly those who sought to elevate their calling by claiming to be “critics.” “Nothing but a bunch of ex-obituary writers,” he used to say, and he insisted that he hardly ever bothered to read what they wrote about his books and never paid any attention to anything they had to say. But he paid attention to Conney Fiske, and early in their friendship he began his lifelong practice of letting her read his manuscripts as they progressed, a few chapters at a time, and listening to her opinions on the work in progress.

  Conney Fiske today is a small, gingery lady who, by her good tweed suits, her little hats, and her quiet demeanor, would be recognized almost everywhere as a Bostonian. Like others of her own and of other generations, she possesses the curious ability to carry the distinctive stamp of Boston with her wherever she goes. Boston is in every inflection of her speech, every gesture, every turn of mind and shade of thought. Her sense of quality is Bostonian, which means that more emphasis is placed on duty, probity, good manners, and quiet accomplishment than on money or show. Conney Fiske was born rich, the daughter of a hugely successful manufacturer, but she would probably shudder at the thought of indicating that she was anything more than comfortably—and respectably—well off. It is typical of her sense of propriety that in her sprawling old farmhouse (“It’s not really old, only nineteenth century”) in suburban Framingham, the furniture should be old and fine, but upholstery is threadbare and rugs are thin and worn. An air of shabby gentility hangs over the whole place and, in summer, when one jumps into the icy waters of her somewhat old-fashioned (and certainly unheated) fill-and-draw swimming pool, one is joined by tiny and quite unobtrusive green frogs. Now in her seventies, Conney Fiske has all her life been an ardent horsewoman and is proudest of her stable, her thoroughbreds, and her private jumping course. When she foxhunts, which she does regularly “in season” from her winter home in Southern Pines, North Carolina, she rides using “the Queen’s seat,” that is, sidesaddle, a position that seems appropriate to one who is clearly a Boston gentlewoman.

  But Conney Fiske is also, by Boston standards, something of a sport, a maverick. Though she has been widowed for a number of years, her existence is hardly typical of the “proper” Boston widow who spends her days paying calls and pouring tea. Conney Fiske travels extensively and almost compulsively in her own country and abroad, always seeking out new places and experiences and people, satisfying her restless curiosity about the world and its beings. “In Boston, they think I am a little crazy, of course,” she often says. Though she toils for proper Boston causes—the hospitals and Radcliffe College, of which she is a trustee—she is far from the typical committeewoman. She also possesses a definite chic, which is not at all what one thinks of as Boston standard-dowdy. She is justifiably proud of her slender figure and slim legs, and of tiny feet which are always handsomely and expensively shod.

  At the same time, she possessed—and possesses—a quality that particularly appealed to Marquand: a sense of humor about her own situation and social caste and about the values of upper-class Boston that have shaped Constance Morss Fiske into the definite lady she is. She has John’s ability to see both sides of her position and station in life. Like John, she could always laugh at the rituals and mystiques surrounding such venerable Boston institutions as the Athenaeum, the Chilton Club, the Somerset Club, and the enormous and mysterious importance of living on the Hill. At the same time, Conney Fiske would seem to take her membership in all these institutions very seriously; lunching in town she usually prefers the Spartan dignity of the downstairs ladies’ dining room in the Somerset Club, and during the years when the Fiskes kept their big house at 206 Beacon Street Conney Fiske did so with an awareness that this was a most impeccable Boston address, and that an impeccable address matters seriously in Boston.

  Conney Fiske’s detachment was not typical but exceptional for Boston. She could get amusement from observing the old and proper families such as the Lowells and the Lawrences and the Peabodys, people who saw each other over and over again, year after year, who traveled to London and stayed at Brown’s Hotel because only here could they be sure of finding other Bostonians, and who, confronted with people from out of town, would simply refuse to engage them in conversation, preferring “our own sort.” And yet she was herself very much a part of this formalized world, part of this pattern, and knew its contours and its rules.

  Perhaps her curious combination of serious adherence to form, along with a gentle and detached self-mockery, is best seen watching Conney Fiske on horseback, in the Moore County Hunt. Though she rides the Queen’s seat with dignity and authority in her well-worn but expensively tailored riding skirt, and with her sensibly coiffed hair tucked under a black derby hat, it is somehow also clear that she knows perfectly well that she is an oddity, an anachronism, and is getting huge enjoyment from this knowledge.

  This specialness of her humor was what endeared Conney Fiske to John Marquand. She was everything that the Sedgwicks were, but with self-awareness added. She, in turn, understood what John had had to endure from the Sedgwicks and admired his curiosity and industry and grit in the face of it.

  Gardiner Fiske, meanwhile, was if anything even more Bostonian. Though Conney’s family was richer, the Gardiner and Fiske families bore the more prestigious lineage—the Gardiners, in particular, who include in their family tree all the ancient Lords of the Manor of Gardiners Island, New York, a private fiefdom granted to the Gardiners by the Crown long before the Revolution, and still in the family. In Boston, Gardiners and Fiskes have taken themselves enormously seriously for generations, and men like Gardi Fiske’s father, Andrew Fiske, and his aunt, the maiden lady Miss Gertrude Fiske, were so thoroughly Beacon-Hill oriented that one could hardly imagine them more than a block away from Beacon or State Streets; they could not have breathed the air. Gardi Fiske had a bit of this in him too, but he was also a movie-star-handsome, athletic—one might even say dashing—man, who simply did not look the part of a Boston Brahmin. He had a romantic past. During World War I he had been a flying ace who, at one point, had fallen out of the plane he was flying, seized hold of one of the rear struts, and clambered back aboard. He was not at all frightened at the time, he told Marquand, who never tired of hearing about this astonishing feat, because “I know the Bishop, who is Up There, and if there are any good clubs, he’ll get me in.” He was referring, of course, to Bishop Lawrence of Boston. Gardi and John had been good friends since Lampoon days. Gardi, after the war, had gone to work as a cotton broker and was a member of the Boston Airport Authority, earning a respectable, if not giant, salary, and Marquand had admired Gardi for doing this. It would have been so easy, Marquand often pointed out, for a man in Gardi Fiske’s position to live off his wealthy wife. Most of all, Marquand admired Gardi’s integrity, his insistence on sticking to his principles. With Gardi there was black and there was white, and no shadings in between.

  John Marquand had developed an admiration for the novels of Edith Wharton and Jane Austen. A dog-eared copy of Pride and Prejudice could usually be found in his jacket pocket, and he read and reread it many times. Before his divorce from Christina, he had tu
rned out two novels that reflected the Jane Austen influence and were suggestive of the major novels that would one day follow. The first of these two, published in 1930, was called Warning Hill, and the second, published in 1933, was titled Haven’s End. Both had been first written for magazine serialization, and both had New England settings. Of the two novels, Haven’s End is the more interesting and the more successful and, later on, Haven’s End was the only one of his early novels which Marquand chose to list on the traditional “ad page” at the front of each of his books, an indication that he considered Haven’s End the only title worth owning up to, and that he would just as soon let the others be forgotten.

  The fictional town of Haven’s End, where the finest houses “still are very fine. They stand on a ridge above the Main Street, where they may overlook the river and the sea,” is very reminiscent of the Newburyport John Marquand knew as a boy, and the Swales, who have ancient roots there, sound very much like his own ancestral Marquands. He was gradually, and somewhat hesitantly, abandoning the costumed melodrama of his first books and coming to grips with his own experience. In the process, his writing style was becoming less turgid and labored, moving toward the honeyed smoothness of the writing in his best books, a style so polished and restrained that there hardly seems to be any style at all. Also in Haven’s End he made use—somewhat crude and primitive use, to be sure—of the flashback technique that would become the great Marquand trademark in the later books, the perfectly structured and sweepingly cinematic movements backward in time that carried readers deep into the past of the Marquand characters. Haven’s End opens with the village auctioneer about to put the splendid old Swale mansion on the block. The novel then shifts—too abruptly to be as dramatic as a good flashback should be—into the past history of the Swales. Three-hundred-odd pages later, the story jumps back into the present again as the auctioneer’s hammer falls on the final sale.