The Late John Marquand

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Chapter Thirteen

  John Oakman (the pleasantly ne’er-do-well “artist” from Springfield who never painted much of anything, who had married John’s Aunt Greta, and who became John’s secret drinking companion during his teens at Curzon’s Mill) gave his wife a daughter, born in 1911, whom they named Renée. Both Oakmans were Francophiles. “My father decided to name me either for a French queen or a prostitute,” Renée Oakman used to explain. It is also likely that she was conceived in Paris; the Oakmans used somewhat coyly to refer to her, as a child, as “our little French baby.” Renée, though not technically a Hale, joined the small band of Hale cousins who were always dropping in and out of the various houses at Curzon’s Mill, which they considered home.

  When John was a young man in the 1920s, just beginning to get himself launched as a writer of popular fiction, Renée Oakman was a budding adolescent—and a budding beauty, at that. More than her name seemed alien in a family where women had always straightforwardly been called Margaret, Laura, Elizabeth, and Mary. The Hales had never been much on looks, being of stolid and plain-faced Yankee stock—the Hale men almost Lincolnesque—and so Renée, as a presence, struck an odd and somewhat disturbing note in the family. She was almost dismayingly beautiful, with fine, soft blonde hair and lavender eyes. A newspaper reporter once described her as “orchidaceous,” and she acquired, by the time she entered her earliest teens, a habit of making men fall in love with her. Like most beauties, she early became aware of what she possessed and learned from the beginning to make the fullest use of it. Renée was, at the same time, like her Hale half brothers and sisters, to say nothing of her cousins and aunts, something of an eccentric, with a fey wit, a mercurial temperament, and some unlikely notions. She believed, for example, that she could communicate with wild animals. All this, of course, merely added to her strange allure.

  There was no question that John Marquand was captivated by—even, perhaps, in a way in love with—this eighteen-years-younger first cousin, this exotically gorgeous sport that had appeared in an otherwise homely family. There was even a period when John considered giving Renée an elaborate coming-out party for her eighteenth birthday—a lovely dream of giving the loveliest party for the loveliest girl, the land of party John had never been invited to during the years at Harvard. He would turn Renée into one of his debutante heroines. In fact, Renée even got him to promise to give her such a party, though it was a promise he never managed to keep. John eventually soured on Renée somewhat or, rather, realized how flirtatious and fickle she was. Once, at a Newburyport party, when Renée was nineteen going on twenty, she disappeared with the young son of Dana Atchley, John’s doctor. They were gone for hours. The boy was only thirteen. Also, by that time, Renée Oakman had settled upon a more practical career than that of a debutante. She had gone to New York and had quickly been signed up by John Robert Powers, who ran what was then one of the largest modeling agencies in the country.

  Although Wickford Point, the novel that John began working on soon after his marriage to Adelaide, carried the customary disclaimer, “All the incidents in this novel are entirely fictitious, and no reference is intended to any actual person, living or dead,” it was quite clear, once the novel was published, that the character of Bella Brill bore more than a glancing resemblance to Renée Oakman and that other members of the fictional Brill family could find awfully close counterparts among the real-life Hales. Wickford Point in the novel, in fact, sounded in its description exactly like Curzon’s Mill, and a number of people wondered why John had bothered to change the name of the river from the Artichoke to the Wickford.

  The Hales, furthermore, saw themselves portrayed as a family of barmy nitwits, all unemployed and probably unemployable. In Wickford Point, Greta Hale Oakman recognized herself in the character of Cousin Clothilde, a lovable if daft creature who spends her mornings in bed summoning members of her family to her side for long and aimless conversations, smoking their cigarettes, and borrowing their money whenever she can. Then there was the character of Sid Brill, perennial sufferer from stomach pains and tinkerer with useless inventions, who, when his car runs out of gasoline, siphons some out of a cousin’s automobile, always thoughtfully careful to leave “a little bit” in the tank, at least enough to get it to the service station. There was, the Hales decided, more than a little of Robert Hale in this character. Robert Hale’s brother, Dudley, reminded several people of Harry Brill in the novel, the Harvard snob who was always sure that his family connections plus the influential people he knew would get him an address on Easy Street without any effort on his part, and who regularly attended parties to which he had not been invited on the theory that not to invite Harry Brill must have been merely a careless oversight on the part of his hostess. Cousin Mary Brill in the novel—who relentlessly chases every man she meets, only to lose him in the end to her beautiful sister Bella, “Bella the Bitch”—seemed perilously close to the real-life Laura Hale, half sister of the beautiful Renée Oakman. Great-Aunt Sarah in the book, dotty and living in the past, who insists on reading aloud from Pepys’s Diary night after night, cannot have been based on other than John’s Great-Aunt Mary Curzon. Cousin Clothilde’s second husband, meanwhile, a shiftless and unsuccessful muralist named Archie Wright who never quite gets the commissions he wants, sounds not unlike Aunt Greta Hale’s second husband, John Oakman. And the specter who looms over the entire Brill family in the novel, John Brill, the father of Cousin Clothilde’s first husband, is a minor nineteenth-century pastoral poet whom the family takes very seriously and refers to as “the Wickford Sage.” Surely John Marquand cannot have meant this character as anything but a cruel parody of Edward Everett Hale, from whom all the Hales descended and whom all the Hales did indeed take very seriously.

  John Marquand immediately and categorically denied that there was any kinship whatever between the Brills of his novel and the Hales, his cousins, and his denials may have been particularly vociferous because, in the first few months after Wickford Point was published in 1938, there were mutterings from certain Hale quarters about lawsuits for libel and invasion of privacy. Though these died down as the Hales—probably wisely—decided that the publicity attending a legal action would only focus more attention on them and on John’s book, John continued to claim that the book was “at least eighty per cent a figment of imagination,” and to profess amazement that Wickford Point could be construed to bear “any close resemblance to real estate in Newburyport, Massachusetts.” He admitted, with writing The Late George Apley, that “For almost the first time in my life I had written about something that I thoroughly understood. I had translated something of myself and my own experience into The Late George Apley, and I had achieved through my experience an unforeseen depth and reality.” And he confessed that Wickford Point was an attempt to further plumb his own experience, past, and territory he knew well But as for the characters in the book, he wrote—in a preface to a later edition—“When someone utters the trite remark that truth is stranger than fiction, he might as well be saying that truth always is very awkward in the fictitious world. A fictional character, for example, is always a combination of observed traits drawn from an indeterminate number of people. I doubt whether any individual of one’s acquaintance, no matter how vivid his behavior, could effectively stand alone in print.”

  All this, of course, cut very little ice with the Hales. But the fact was—and this was at the heart of the trouble—that John was right. It would indeed have been awkward to have portrayed the Hales as “truth.” So he had taken the Hales’ skeletal characteristics and distorted them, twisted them, heightened them, and exaggerated them. He had fictionalized the Hales, which is to say falsified them, in order to turn them into creatures of comedy. He had intended the comedy to be gentle enough, but the Hales found it a decidedly unpleasant experience to see themselves projected into this new dimension in which they saw certain facts about themselves, and yet not really.

  John had worked harder on Wic
kford Point than on The Late George Apley. He was determined to prove, to readers as well as critics, that he was now a writer of “serious” fiction—fiction that made significant social comment—and not just Post and Journal potboilers. He was aware that his second “serious” work would be judged much more harshly, by much more meticulous standards, than his first, and that book reviewers—not always an overly generous lot—would be waiting eagerly for the follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize Novel to be an artistic disaster, for Marquand to prove himself a “one-book author.” John wanted Wickford Point to be accurate in every detail, and he fussed endlessly over the manuscript—not only polishing scenes and dialogue but making certain that not the tiniest fact or social nuance could be labeled as false or incorrect.

  He was worried, for instance, that some of his readers might feel it was wrong to have the Brills eat salmon in August; perhaps it should have been shad. When one entered an ocean liner, he asked Alfred McIntyre at Little, Brown, did not one customarily come off the gangplank onto the promenade deck? From there, did one go up, or down, to B Deck? Marquand spent a great deal of time worrying about the word “pants” in connection with Bella Brill. In a scene in which Bella skips into an automobile, her mother notices that she is not wearing pants. Alfred McIntyre wondered whether the word shouldn’t be “panties.” John, however, having surveyed his women friends, was convinced that women of 1937 thought of these garments as pants, not panties.

  He worried for fear his Brill characters called each other “darling” too much, and he asked McIntyre to have his staff recheck the manuscript for repetitions of the word. He wondered whether the character of Pat Leighton—the love interest of the narrator, Jim Calder, in the novel—was perhaps awkwardly or artificially introduced. Pat Leighton, a New York career girl who is an early likeness of the celebrated Marvin Myles of H. M. Pulham, Esquire, does not come on stage until fairly late in the narrative, and so, to introduce her and establish her as a character in the story, Marquand had Jim Calder receive a letter from Pat Leighton—a letter that draws comment from Cousin Clothilde. Marquand feared that the letter was an obvious plot device. (It was, but not one that most readers would notice.)

  He spent a great deal of time worrying about the ending of the book, always, along with the opening scene, a crucial moment in any novel. As originally written, the novel ended with Professor Allen Southby and Bella Brill announcing that they intend to marry each other. It is in fact the way the novel must end; no two characters in fiction ever deserved each other more. And yet, at the book’s end, Bella and Southby have only just met each other, and Marquand began to fear that an announcement of marriage on such brief acquaintance was too abrupt to be believable. Perhaps, he considered, Southby should marry Bella’s sister Mary—whom he had known longer but which would have been quite an anticlimax. Finally John decided to close the book in a more subtle manner. The reader is never told, precisely, that Bella and Southby will marry, but one knows that Bella is after Southby and that Southby is smitten. There is no question that the two will marry at some point in that vague area of fictional time after the final sentence.

  Marquand was also quick to change the name of a character originally called “Russell Berg.” A real-life Russell Berg had been discovered in the vicinity of Newburyport, and Mr. O’Reilly’s libel suit was still pending. A line that referred to “that Doctor Cooney, that good-for-nothing one,” was also changed to “that dentist.”

  And so surely Marquand cannot have been too surprised to find that the Hales resented the treatment he had given them. Whether or not the statistic of “eighty per cent” imaginary which he claimed about his Wickford Point people could ever be proved, there was enough there that was recognizable—and recognizable as the object of ridicule—to hurt his cousins deeply.

  Did John Marquand set about to do this deliberately? Perhaps—half deliberately, anyway. He had written The Late George Apley not only as a reflection of his own experience and knowledge of Boston; he had also, in making parody of, and poking fun at, the whole tapestry of Boston snobbism and Boston’s overweening self-pride and pride of family, rather successfully polished off the entire Sedgwick clan, from Uncle Ellery on down. Now, in Wickford Point, he was going back to his growing-up jealousies and bitternesses about the Hales—who had more money, and who made him (or who helped him make himself) feel threadbare. In Wickford Point, the narrator, Jim Calder, is a successful purveyor of serials to magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Cosmopolitan. He sounds very like John Marquand. And, because of some subtle social difference between Jim Calder and his Brill cousins—his feeling that he is somehow not good enough for the Brills—he loves them and yet he resents them. He is very conscious, for example, that when he walks about the town where he grew up and went to school, he is addressed familiarly, by his first name, Jim. His Brill cousins, on the other hand, are not treated that way; they are politely addressed as Mr. and Mrs. and Miss Brill. John Marquand, while learning the value of writing from his own experience, was also learning how to use fiction as a means of getting back at all the people who he felt—rightly or wrongly—had misused him in the past.

  There is, for instance, in Wickford Point the comic character of Allen Southby, whom Cousin Clothilde perpetually misaddresses as “Mr. Northby,” a pompous, tweedy, pipe-smoking Harvard professor who has written a book of criticism and is a take-off on every self-important literary pundit who ever existed. Southby, whose letterhead reads “Martin House Study” and below it, in smaller type, “Dr. Southby,” who quotes Chaucer and delivers profound literary pronouncements, is a man who has become more Boston than Boston in his study pine-paneled with hand-wrought nails, filled with pine-topped trestle tables and old leather-bound books tossed carelessly about. He serves his guests beer in old pewter mugs. His room lacks nothing but a spinning wheel to appear authentically New England, Jim Calder observes sarcastically. And Allen Southby—who is not from Boston but from Minnesota—is not sure whether Jim means that or is being funny. Allen Southby—who high-hatted Jim Calder at Harvard and who, naturally, places Calder’s craft at little more than “putting words on paper”—is John Marquand’s obvious (perhaps a bit too obvious) attempt to get back at all the literary and academic critics who refused to take him seriously as a writer. Southby, of course, is punished with Bella.

  Allen Southby is probably a composite of a number of stuffy and self-important literary critics whom Marquand had encountered over the years, but there is an indication that he intended the character to parody certain aspects of Edward A. Weeks, who succeeded Uncle Ellery Sedgwick as editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Edward Weeks had high-hatted John in Boston during the early days. Like Allen Southby, Edward Weeks, arriving in Boston, had promptly become thoroughly Bostonian, even though—as John wickedly liked to point out—Weeks was originally from Elizabeth, New Jersey. Edward Weeks had not gone to any of the proper New England schools. He had gone to Elizabeth High School and something called Pingry Prep. Weeks had not even gone to Harvard but to Cornell, a college considered only “perhaps” in the Ivy League.

  Marquand’s feelings about Edward Weeks bordered on the paranoiac. Weeks had a series of lectures which he went about the country delivering, and which was called “Authors at Home”—chatty insights into the private lives and thoughts of literary figures. John Marquand had a fantasy scheme which he always wanted to exercise. In it, he would, under an assumed name, engage Edward Weeks as a lecturer and hire an auditorium. A date would be set, and the topic: “John P. Marquand at Home.” On the day of the lecture, with Edward Weeks on the platform and Marquand as an audience of one in the auditorium, John would sit back in his seat, put his feet up, clasp his hands behind his head, and say, “Okay, Ted—do your stuff!” Alas, he never got up the courage to do it.

  There is another writer character in Wickford Point, Joe Stowe. Joe Stowe is a writer of good, serious fiction. In a very real sense, Jim Calder is Marquand before Apley, and Joe Stow
e is Marquand after. In the novel, the two men are best friends. Both are Marquand alter egos.

  Some critics have claimed that Wickford Point is John Marquand’s best novel, and at the time of its publication one reviewer marveled on the book’s structure, “like a braided Indian basket, spiraling from bottom to rim, firmly interwoven, but dizzying to follow.” It is indeed a bit dizzying because the novel leaps backward and forward in time. The flashback technique, which was to become Marquand’s trademark to the extent that he was sometimes given credit for inventing it, works better here than in earlier books but is still somewhat creaky. Whatever else it is, Wickford Point is certainly John Marquand’s most comic novel, with all the disheveled Brills bickering and nattering and accomplishing nothing, yet clinging to their old place like weary barnacles to a rock. And, with the character of Bella the Bitch, who puts men through her like like shirts through a wringer, Marquand proved—to critics who had been observing that his female characters were less successful than his men—that he was capable of creating, and sustaining, a memorable woman in fiction.

  Meanwhile, for all his emphatic denials that his Wickford Point characters were based on anything more than their author’s imagination, Marquand was still somewhat nervous about his Hale cousins’ displeasure. He was also, in view of the O’Reilly claim against Apley, more than a little lawsuit-shy. So was his publisher, Little, Brown. The O’Reilly suit was still in litigation and showed signs of dragging drearily on for months. John Reed, a Little, Brown editor, suggested to Marquand that he write an article about all the various people, the country over, who had seen themselves in the Wickford tribe. Marquand thought that this idea might not only be amusing but also useful. He had in fact picked up at various soirees and cocktail parties in New York a list of people with whom the novel’s characters had been identified. John Brill, for example, the Wickford Sage, had been variously spotted as John Greenleaf Whittier, Edward Everett Hale, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Longfellow. Joe Stowe had been similarly recognized as a portrayal of Sinclair Lewis, Sidney Howard, Ernest Hemingway, and Kenneth Roberts.