The Late John Marquand

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Not long after the publication of Wickford Point, John and Adelaide’s first child, a daughter, was born to the somewhat middle-aged parents. Adelaide was thirty-seven, John forty-seven. They named the little girl Blanche Ferry Marquand, after her maternal grandmother, but since neither John or Adelaide cared much for the name Blanche, she was called by the pretty name “Ferry.”

  At about this time, Adelaide became interested in the activities of that curious pre-World War II phenomenon known as the America First Committee. From its inception in the summer of 1940, America First had attracted a number of prominent American names, headed by General Robert E. Wood of Chicago, board chairman of Sears, Roebuck and Company, and including in its membership such people as R. Douglas Stuart, Jr., General Hugh S. Johnson, Kathleen Norris, Chester Bowles, Norman Thomas, Henry Ford, Sr., Eddie Rickenbacker, Lillian Gish, and Edward L. Ryerson, Jr. America First was composed not only of pacifists, like Kathleen Norris, but also of outspoken isolationists such as General Wood, and the Committee had been created specifically to counteract the activities of William Allen White’s Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, which advocated coming to the aid of Britain in her struggle against Nazi Germany. The America First Committee was only too happy to welcome on its board Mrs. John P. Marquand, wife of the celebrated novelist. It was already a panel of imposing names. In April, 1941, America First had acquired none other than Colonel Charles Augustus Lindbergh.

  Adelaide pitched into America First work with her customary vigor and enthusiasm. She pinned to her shoulder the little American flag that was the badge of America First and was quick to pick up the America First slogans and repeat them. “We can’t solve the age-old feuds of Europe” was a particular favorite, and she was once overheard to observe, “Some Americans are more American than others.” She took to signing all her letters, whether business or social, with the words, “Yours for better Government.” John was first amused with America First and Adelaide’s involvement, and then appalled.

  One of the disturbing aspects of the America First Committee was the undercurrent of anti-Semitism in some of its members. An effort had been made to avoid any public confrontation with this issue when the Committee had placed—at General Wood’s insistence—Lessing J. Rosenwald, a prominent Chicago Jew and another director of Sears, Roebuck, on the executive committee. But when Henry Ford—who had led an anti-Semitic attack in his Dearborn Independent in the 1920s with the publication of the spurious document “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”—was announced on the committee in the same news release, the outcry among American Jewry was so great that Mr. Rosenwald was forced to resign in embarrassment. A huge rally for America First was arranged to be held at New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1941, and at it the notorious Joe McWilliams, a Jew-baiting Christian Mobilizer, made a dramatic appearance. On the speakers’ dais were Colonel Lindbergh and, in a flowing white gown, Adelaide Marquand.

  The bleakest moment for America First came on September 11, 1941, when Lindbergh appeared before an audience in Des Moines, Iowa, and declared, “The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration.” These “war agitators,” he continued, “comprise only a small minority of our people; but they control a tremendous influence.” He went on to deliver the only faintly veiled threat, “Instead of agitating for war the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.… Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.” In the shocked reaction that followed, the Lindberghs found themselves cut off by a number of their oldest friends and admirers. But Adelaide Marquand announced that she heartily approved of everything Colonel Lindbergh had had to say. One night at a party Adelaide got into a violent and not altogether sober argument with some other guests over Lindbergh and America First. Later, John’s friends labeled it “The Night of Horror.”

  Privately, Carl Brandt approached John. Adelaide, he pointed out, was in the process of doing him irreparable harm in terms of his reputation and his reading public. Couldn’t she, instead of making her announcements as “Mrs. John P. Marquand,” call herself Adelaide H. Marquand, or even employ her maiden name, Adelaide Hooker? Wearily, John said, “I wish she would, but she is my wife, and that is her name.”

  Before she married Carl, Carol Brandt had been warned both by his brother, Erd Brandt, and their friend Samuel Hopkins Adams, that Carl had a serious drinking problem. When one is in love with a man it is easy to ignore such warnings. The trouble had started during Carl’s first marriage, and it expressed itself in a unique way, if indeed every case of alcoholism is not unique. Carl would go for weeks, even months, able to drink in a normal, comfortable, social way, and it would be possible to believe that nothing was out of order at all. Then, for no discernible reason—not because of any visible career or emotional upset—he would disappear from sight, be drunk for days, and then return, or be found, shaken and ill and ready to be committed to a hospital or sanitarium. Carol had tried various means to cope with and even control this behavior. She had scolded, had withdrawn, had tried to reason with him during his sober periods.

  “Through all these bad times,” Carol Brandt recalls, “John was a wonderful comfort to me. He’d come over to the apartment to see me and to visit with the children, who adored him. I used to be terribly angry, furious with Carl for his behavior, but John would always urge me to be calm, to be more sympathetic and understanding. He always believed that Carl was a schizophrenic and should be treated like a person with a mental illness—not ranted at as I tended to do. During these times, John was like a rock for me to lean on.”

  But after ten years of marriage and two children—a son and a daughter—she had toughened herself to endure these terrifying episodes and to recognize a few if not all of the advance warning signs. She had also had to accept the fact that Carl’s drinking had brought him to the point of sexual impotence.

  It had, at least, in terms of his relationship with his wife. He could, he confessed to her, achieve sexual satisfaction with other women, but with her no longer. It was a painful thing for Carl to acknowledge, a difficult period for them both. Theirs had from the beginning been an uncommon sort of marriage. The second marriage for them both, they had entered into it with a full awareness that a perfect relationship between two people is almost never possible to achieve. They had married fully prepared to adjust, to make exceptions, to adapt to situations, to compromise. At the same time, though they were not at all alike, their temperaments balanced. Both were ambitious and in a true sense self-made people, with successful careers they had carved for themselves. Both were tough-minded and humorous about life and its possibilities, but while Carol was strong and taut, Carl was gentle and malleable. “He was the kindest man I’ve ever known,” Carol has recalled. “It was his extraordinary kindness that first drew me to him. I have always believed that it’s a man’s world, but I don’t believe in a woman getting kicked in the teeth for it. Carl’s nature was such that he hated to hurt anybody. I’m a little short on kindness myself, and so I treasured that quality in him.” The Brandts’ marriage had reached another point when one of a series of assessments had to be made. Sometimes these assessments could be made together, and at other times, because of Carl’s disappearances, Carol had to make them on her own. This time, discussing their marriage over a quiet dinner at home, they decided once more to try to make it last.

  When, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombs came raining down on Pearl Harbor, Carl and Carol happened to be staying with friends in Washington who heard the news even before it went on the air. Immediately Carol telephoned John in New York, who said something like, “I want to see you and Carl the minute you get back to New York. I don’t think I can live like this any longer, with what’s going on.” To Adelaide, he said, �
�I want to be with the two people who understand how I feel about this,” and, as soon as the Brandts returned to the city, John went to stay at their apartment.

  It wasn’t many days later that Carl—perhaps it was the pressure of the war news, who knew?—disappeared again, and when he was found he was taken to the Silver Hill Sanitarium near New Canaan, Connecticut, for prolonged rest and treatment. Carol and John, both lonely, unhappy, dissatisfied with the courses their lives were taking, found themselves alone together.

  They had been alone and unhappy in New York at the same time once before, it turned out—but they had been apart. Neither had known the other was there. It had been in 1930, right after Drew Hill’s death. Carol had been a young widow working in the city and John, during one of his periodic separations from Christina, had taken a small bachelor apartment. The friendship that had begun four years earlier in Paris might have continued during that year, and if it had their respective lives might have taken quite different turns. It was interesting to speculate, they both thought, about what might have happened in 1930, before each had committed himself in a different direction. But for some reason, though they had several friends in common, neither had learned—in 1930—that the other was living just a few city blocks away.

  Now, in 1941, they rather ruefully admitted, as two mature people, it was somewhat late to ponder over lost possibilities. But it was something to think about just the same. And so, in those unsettled days at the beginning of the Second World War, it was in this way—hesitantly, at first, and then with great seriousness—that they became lovers.

  “It was more than the physical attraction, which was great,” Carol Brandt recalls, “or the fact that I have always liked older men, and John was ten years older than I. It began to seem as though this was an inevitable extension of our days together in Paris in the twenties, when, as I look back on it now, I first fell in love with him, almost without knowing it. But the main thing was that I have always loved writers, and found them the most fascinating people in the world. John was simply the most important literary figure I had ever known. I was impressed by him. All writers need help and support, and Lord knows he was not getting that from Adelaide. He had great admiration for Conney Fiske’s literary taste, but she was not as aware as I was of the difficulties of the writing process. Carl could help John in important ways as an agent. But John always felt that Carl was too concerned with making money. I knew I could help John in small and practical ways, as well as with love and sympathy and understanding, and perhaps even help him grow as a writer in some small way. I wanted him to depend on me.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  At least one thing had become settled in John Marquand’s Life before Pearl Harbor brought the United States into war, and that was Peter O’Reilly’s lawsuit. It had dragged on for over two years, and though, at its outset, Little, Brown’s lawyers—and John’s—had variously labeled Mr. O’Reilly’s action as “ridiculous” and “absurd” (of all the Irish names in the Boston telephone book, John had been unlucky enough to pick the name of a litigious politician), the lawyers had had agonized second thoughts, as lawyers often do. The case was approaching the expensive pretrial stage. It was quite possible, the lawyers reasoned, that in a city such as Boston a majority of the jurors selected to decide the case might be Irish Catholics. So, very easily, might be the judge. George Apley’s views of the Boston Irish Catholics had not been exactly charitable, and it might not be easy to explain the subtle nuances of fictional satire to members of a traditionally hot-tempered tribe. Some sort of settlement seemed indicated. Finally, in payment for his “great pecuniary damages and loss of business,” his “injured” feelings and reputation, the “disgrace” and “loss of reputation” he had suffered, along with the damage to his earning capacity, credit, and good name, Mr. O’Reilly was persuaded to accept the sum of $600. Little, Brown paid this settlement, which went with a release stating that the money was “not to be construed as an admission of liability on the part of Little, Brown & Company (Inc.) or of anyone else.” Little, Brown and John split the legal fee, which amounted to somewhat more than the settlement.

  It is interesting and perhaps no coincidence that at just about the time Marquand began his affair with Carol Brandt he was putting the finishing touches on a major novel which had adultery as one of its underlying themes, a novel that dealt with a confrontation between love, marriage, and male friendship, and also the novel in which one of the major female characters—Marvin Myles—reminded many people who knew her of Carol Brandt. H. M. Pulham, Esquire is the third of what might be considered a trilogy of New England novels, and, like Wickford Point, it is strongly autobiographical. There is something of John Marquand in the title character of Harry Pulham, but there is even more in Pulham’s best friend, the restless, womanizing Bill King, who commits adultery with Pulham’s wife and who is always “here today and gone tomorrow.”

  Though Bill King betrays his best friend by taking his wife to bed, the reader somehow does not despise him for it. Partly this is because Kay Pulham appears to get so little joy from the affair. But even more it is because of the vastness of Harry Pulham’s trustingness and naïveté. Again and again in the novel Harry Pulham is confronted with evidence that something very off-center is going on between Bill and Kay, and again and again he dismisses it as something that could not be happening. Bill, after all, is a “gentleman,” and gentlemen just don’t sleep with their best friends’ wives. By the end of the book, the reader is almost furious at Harry Pulham for not discovering what is going on under his own roof, practically in front of his very nose, and shortly after the novel’s publication the late Wolcott Gibbs wrote a parody of H. M. Pulham, Esquire for The New Yorker in which the hero comes upon his wife and his friend in bed together and, after an initial moment of slight surprise, accepts the explanation they offer him—they got into bed together to keep each other warm.

  And yet, at the same time, the reader respects and pities Harry Pulham, who says, “I guess I’ve always been a straight,” and one of whose friends keeps referring to him as a “norm.” Like George Apley, Harry Pulham once tries to break away from the restraint of Boston and goes to New York and works for an advertising agency where, though his job involves extolling the dubious qualities of a laundry soap, he nonetheless feels alive, part of a team, and where he falls in love with the beautiful businesswoman, Marvin Myles. Marvin at first can’t decide whether he is “dumb or clever” but soon is perceptive enough to see that he is neither. She tells him, “You’re just yourself. I’ve never seen anyone like you.” And looking at the photographs of the Pulham family that are arranged on Harry’s dresser top, she says to him, “All of you is there, isn’t it? All that you’re going back to? It must be queer, being in two places at once.” And so, of course, did John Marquand think of himself as being in two places at once; he was at one and the same time the wanderer who loved independence and women and travel, and also the man who talked wistfully of putting down roots in peaceful and quiet and changeless old places like Newburyport, Curzon’s Mill, and Beacon Hill. When Harry Pulham brings Marvin Myles back to Boston for a visit, he cannot help noticing that she is by far the best-dressed woman there. This means that she does not and cannot ever belong.

  Just as it did George Apley, Boston reclaims Harry Pulham, and he returns to a life where, as his father explains it, “I can’t recall ever wanting things to happen. I’ve spent all my life trying to fix it so that things wouldn’t happen.” He gets a job selling bonds and with a terrible innocence says, “I don’t want to sell bonds.” “My boy,” says a member of the bond firm, “no one wants to, but that’s the way we live.”

  Of the pathetically small number of people who pass through Harry Pulham’s life, he understands Marvin Myles the best, perhaps because she is the beautiful alien, and he says, “I know the whole secret of Marvin Myles—that she wanted things to belong to her, because what belonged to her gave her a sense of well-being.… Once something belon
ged to her, she would give it everything she had. I know, because I belonged to her once.” He admires this spirit in Marvin Myles, and he also admires and envies the rootless and unfettered existence—going from girl to girl—of his friend Bill King. These two become Harry Pulham’s windows into the world that lies beyond State Street and Beacon Hill. At the same time, both Marvin and Bill see in Harry a figure of stability, strength, and truth to his code, quite different from most of the men encountered in their own topsy-turvy worlds.

  Seeing the inevitability of the path Pulham’s life will take, Marvin says to him, “It makes me frightened when I see you do things that I can’t do. They take you away from me, all those little things.” One of those little things is Kay Motford who, when Harry Pulham first meets her, strikes him as a “lemon.” He cannot understand why his friend Bill does not think Kay is a lemon. Again, she is a type too familiar to Harry Pulham, but to Bill she is an exotic. Of Kay, Harry’s mother says that she is one of their kind, “a dear, sensible girl. She’s one of those girls who doesn’t think about herself, or think about her looks. She thinks of other people.” She does not, like Marvin, want things to belong to her. After Harry’s return to Boston and the bond business—Marvin writes, “Darling, aren’t you coming back?”—Harry Pulham and Kay Motford show up at the same dances and teas and debut parties, appear as usher and bridesmaid at the same weddings, and it is soon apparent to everyone that Harry will marry his lemon; there is absolutely no one else for either of them. On their honeymoon, Kay has a small favor to ask him. Could he please stop saying “Of course?” Harry Pulham replies, “Why, yes, Kay. Of course.”