The Late John Marquand

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  For all its seriousness of theme and general pessimism of tone, Marquand could not resist adding comic strokes to So Little Time, and some of them are not a little broad. There is, for example, the character of Walter Newcombe, war correspondent and buffoon. Walter has written a book with the weighty title of World Assignment, which, as the title suggests, attempts to explain the world. World Assignment has been taken with enormous seriousness by the deep-thinking critics and with the as-easily-gulled reading public, and as a result Walter has become in great demand on the lecture circuit for his analyses of the European Situation. But Walter quickly reveals that he has no more grasp of the European Situation than the average tourist of thirty years earlier, and when asked his views of individuals or events connected with the war he has a catch phrase to cover up the vastness of his ignorance: “Don’t get me started on that!”

  Walter Newcombe was Marquand’s way of getting back both at war correspondents, most of whom he either regarded as muddle-heads or outright liars, and at the literary critics who gave the words of these men prominence. If Walter has one redeeming characteristic it is that in his secret heart he knows he is a fool—he has become a celebrity by sheer dumb luck—and he confesses this to his old friend Jeff Wilson; with childlike wonderment Walter asks Jeff if Jeff realizes that he and Walter are the only two boys from Bragg to have made the pages of Who’s Who. Sometimes, to make Walter seem ridiculous, Marquand goes a little far—such as in the scene where Walter tells Jeff how, by sheerest accident, Walter stumbled upon a book in a Liggett’s Drug Store which, when he read it, impressed him deeply. The book is a little on the long side, Walter warns, but it is really well-written: “Every thoughtful American ought to read it.” Walter, furthermore, intends to tell his lecture audiences about this book to help lift it out of obscurity. The book is called War and Peace. It is a funny scene, yes, but, as Marquand himself knew, satire loses its bite when the scale tips toward slapstick.

  Walter Newcombe, incidentally, has also gone to a “wrong” Ivy League college, Dartmouth, though Jeff Wilson went to Harvard. And in So Little Time Marquand managed to take a sly poke at Adelaide and her America First Committee by having Jeff’s Cousin Ethel, from the decidedly “wrong” town of West Springfield (the fashionable side of Springfield is the southeast, as “everybody knows”), be an American Firster.

  To readers more than a generation later, So Little Time may seem an excessively slow-paced novel which takes far too many pages to reach its scattered climaxes. And indeed it was by far the longest novel John had written, nearly six hundred tightly packed pages in the cloth-cover edition, more than a quarter of a million words. In its original state the novel was much longer, and the Marquand device of repeating sentences and key phrases was indulged in to the point of tediousness. Halfway through the manuscript, Marquand himself became very depressed and discouraged about it, and by the time the final page was typed he was not sure what could be done with the bulky pile of typescript. It was at this point that Adelaide, forceful woman that she was, took over.

  Adelaide was determined that a successful novel could be brought out of the manuscript. Working with John, the two cut some three hundred pages out of the vitals of the script, reducing it by nearly a third. It was hard and unpleasant work, for such major surgery to a book is always painful, and there were, needless to say, many and vociferous disagreements between the author and his editor wife over what should be allowed to fall on the cutting-room floor.

  Adelaide objected to John’s habit of repeating certain catch phrases; John insisted that his readers enjoyed this device and expected to encounter it in his books. Adelaide found the first thirty pages of the new novel unduly verbose, creating a top-heaviness at the beginning; John at last agreed to cut in this section. Adelaide found the last twelve pages anticlimactic, but John—backed by the Brandts—insisted she was wrong. There were a few episodes, early in the book, that John had cut out. Adelaide wanted these restored but placed later in the story. And so it went.

  Whether John, even begrudgingly, would admit it or not, Adelaide Marquand must be given some credit for salvaging So Little Time and helping it become a publishable book. But in the process the personal relationship between John and Adelaide did not improve. Adelaide had discovered that she was pregnant with a third child, and John was appalled. It seemed to him grotesque to become a father again at fifty, and he told friends that he had begged Adelaide to get an abortion, which she refused, as was certainly her right. As soon as the baby was born, he announced that he was taking off for Hot Springs, Virginia, for a two-week holiday with Carl and Carol Brandt. Elon Huntington Hooker Marquand—whose name encompassed a number of his mother’s New England ancestors—was left with his mother at Harkness Pavilion. John announced that he did not even intend to telephone New York to see how mother and child were faring. Carol Brandt, insisting that he could not treat his wife so cruelly, finally was told she could write Adelaide a newsy letter about the trip if she wished. She did, but her letter was not well received.

  There was the usual struggle for a title of the new novel. John had been fascinated by the lyric of an old drinking song that went:

  “.… Looking for a happy land

  Where everything is bright,

  Where the highballs grow on bushes

  And we stay out every night.”

  Americans in 1940 and 1941 were, he thought, looking for just such a worry-free place, and for a long time he fought for “Looking for a Happy Land” as the book’s title. Throughout, Alfred McIntyre was steadily pressing for “So Little Time.” John then suggested “The Fifes Will Play” and “Young Men for War” (from the proverb, “Old men for council, young men for war”). Little, Brown cared for neither of these. Coming down on the train from Boston, John had another idea—“Time and Jeffrey Wilson,” which he proposed as a short title, easy to remember, and better than “So Little Time” or “In That Last Year.” It seemed to him admirably lacking in melodrama and fancy thinking. It was the “melodrama” of the words “So Little Time” that he objected to the most.

  But Little, Brown, gently but firmly reminding him that they had chosen the successful titles of his last three books, pressed for their title and John gave in. By the time of the book’s publication, in fact, he had become quite excited about it and was eagerly editing the publicity release about the book that his publisher was sending out to booksellers. Where the release said that this was to be John’s longest book, John penned in the added phrase, “on the broadest canvas he has so far used,” and where the copywriter had said, “perhaps his finest,” John wrote: “We believe it will be considered by many critics his finest.” So much for a man who insisted he never worried about critics. He also wrote a dedication for the book which, perhaps, should have been for Adelaide but instead was for “Alfred McIntyre, in memory of all the trips we have taken together over the rough roads of fiction.”

  For all its length, its leisured rhythms, and its generally melancholy tone, something about So Little Time caught and matched the mood of American readers in the autumn of 1943, with war raging, it seemed, all over the world, and the future dark and uncertain. So Little Time became John Marquand’s first big success; it quickly climbed to the top of the best-seller list and stayed there. Critically, the novel didn’t do exactly what Marquand had hoped it would. The critics did not hail it as a novel of world-shattering importance, though the reviews were good. But the public loved it, and the book made its author a considerable sum of money. Eventually 787,000 copies were sold. That year, his income from royalties nearly doubled, to $74,300, and the next year—as royalties continued to pour in—he earned $92,000. And so now, having survived two labels, first as a writer of potboiler detective stories, second as a writer of light social satire, he would now have to endure the curse of a third: as a writer of immensely popular books.

  It was, very oddly, like a three-act play.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Marquand was not much of a le
tter writer. His letters for the most part were hastily dashed-off affairs, written in his tiny, slanted, almost illegible hand. But he loved, wherever he happened to be, to receive letters from his friends; their letters comforted him and reassured him. And so, before leaving alone for Kent’s Island—and after begging Carol to accompany him, though she could not—he said to her, “Please write to me—just a letter.” And so Carol wrote to him in Newburyport. It was not strictly speaking a love letter, but it was full of affection, telling him how much she missed him, how she was certain that in time their various problems would resolve themselves. But in telling her to write to him in Newburyport, John had forgotten that the Newburyport Post Office had been instructed to forward all mail to the New York apartment, 1 Beekman Place, where Adelaide was. The letter may not have been a love letter, but it contained enough, when she had steamed it open and read it, for Adelaide to infer exactly what her husband’s relationship was with Carol Brandt, and that it had been this way for some time.

  Actually, Adelaide had long suspected this. Like many women, Carol Brandt had a favorite scent that she always used—in those days it was the distinctively Oriental and musky perfume called Shalimar. Once, after meeting with Carol, John had come home to Adelaide with the scent still clinging to him. Adelaide had accused him then of having a love affair with Carol, but John had denied it. Now Adelaide possessed what she considered conclusive proof of his infidelity.

  She immediately telephoned her psychiatrist and asked to see him. She had grown increasingly reliant on psychiatrists and was of that generation of Americans who first discovered Freudian psychoanalysis. Adelaide often said that she was attracted to Freud primarily because Freud believed in monogamy at all costs. And Adelaide wanted desperately to salvage what seemed to be becoming, on her husband’s part, a loveless marriage, just as she wanted to continue to enjoy the honor—and share the spotlight—of being Mrs. John P. Marquand, Wife of the Novelist.

  After several sessions with her doctor, Adelaide decided—whether or not on his suggestion, she never said—to confront John with what she knew. She had, after all, been married to John for more than ten years. She also demanded a meeting with Carol. The Brandts were then living at the St. Regis, and the three corners of the romantic triangle met there on a sunny morning. Adelaide opened the proceedings by demanding that John and Carol promise never to see each other again, that this was a terrible thing that they had done. John replied that he would promise no such thing. Carol, cast in the role of peace saver, explained that Carl was aware of John’s and her relationship, and that, though he did not approve of it exactly, he had accepted it for what it was and understood what it meant to both Carol and John. Carol said that, after all, they were all mature men and women in their forties who should be able to approach situations such as this in a civilized fashion, that the clock could not be turned back, and that screaming or recriminations or histrionics could not possibly help or change things. “After all,” Carol said, “people have affairs all over the world, for better or for worse. Why can’t we behave like sophisticated adults? Why can’t we all live pleasantly with this?” Then she said, “Let’s all calm down, and have a drink, and then some lunch.” John said that he thought that a splendid idea. Adelaide, however, rose a little stiffly from Carol’s sofa and said that she had said all that she intended to say. She would now excuse herself.

  Carol and John fixed drinks for themselves. Perhaps fifteen minutes later, the telephone rang in the suite. It was Adelaide. She was waiting in the lobby. Where was John? John said, “I’m staying for lunch. I told you so,” and hung up the phone. And that was that Adelaide’s reaction was not recorded.

  In an effort to keep matters sane and civilized at all costs, John and Carol suggested that the two couples—the Brandts and the Marquands—should all sit down and have dinner together and make peace, if possible. And a few weeks later the four met at the Plaza. John was in his best form, and Carl and Carol Brandt did their best to keep up their end of things. But Adelaide sulked through dinner and would not speak, and the evening was a pronounced failure. At last the Marquands left, and Carl and Carol were left alone.

  Carol’s love for Carl was and always would be very strong, and she considers him today the most important man—indeed the most important figure—in her life. “It was Carl Brandt who created me,” she has said. The couple lingered over coffee and then ordered champagne. There was an orchestra in the Persian Room, and a dance floor, and they drank champagne and danced to the Plaza’s stately dinner music, and it was as though they were two dear friends, once lovers, tied together by bonds stronger than love. Both wanted to keep the “trio,” as Carl expressed it, intact and, most of all, civilized and forgiving, remembering that at each point of the triangle there were children involved, John’s five, Carl and Carol’s two. Dancing with her husband, Carol said, “And so I guess that’s the last we will ever see of Adelaide.”

  “It had become, in a very real sense, a ménage à trois,” Carol Brandt says. “John was wonderful company. When Carl was sober, we had marvelous trips together. John would make us laugh and laugh. My children loved him too, and they had no trouble seeing how happy John could make both Carl and me. Vicki, who was younger, never thought a thing about what was going on. Carl junior, being a boy and older, I’m sure was aware of the state of affairs. But it didn’t bother him in the slightest. It was a relationship, you see, that’s very common, very much an accepted thing in England, though Americans have difficulty understanding how rewarding such a relationship can be.”

  Adelaide certainly did not understand it. Nor would she give up. There were nights when she had had too much to drink that she would call up Carol Brandt and scream at her over the telephone. She began a long personal campaign to discredit both Brandts—Carol in particular—with anyone who would listen to her. And so, at last, John was forced to telephone Carol and say, “Look, there’s nothing I can say or do. She’s my wife; she feels this way; you and I must not see or speak to each other again. I’m sorry.” Sadly, Carol admitted he was right.

  When John Marquand was asked to be a judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club, that vast organization that caters to and in some ways dictates the literary taste of America, he was delighted to accept for a variety of reasons. To begin with, Book-of-the-Month Club judgeships are not dealt out lightly, and the position carried with it considerable prestige. Such imposing figures as Dorothy Canfield, Christopher Morley, William Allen White, Clifton Fadiman, and Henry Seidel Canby have all been Book-of-the-Month Club judges. The job carried with it, furthermore, a salary of $20,000 a year, which Marquand really didn’t need but which was a sum worth adding to his already comfortable earnings as a writer. With his parsimonious and definitely acquisitive nature, he always seemed to be filling storehouses against the possibility of some future state of poverty. He was the same way with bank accounts from which, having filled them, he hated having to withdraw. But best of all, perhaps, was the fact that the Book-of-the-Month Club gave John a valid reason and excuse to disappear from Adelaide’s side, wherever she might be—in Aspen, Florida, or Newburyport—and go to New York for the club’s monthly meetings. The highbrow side of Adelaide, of course, regarded the club with a certain disdain, since she felt it pandered to the reading needs of the uncultivated masses. But John immediately saw how the club would open up his life, free him a bit more from the assertive woman who, on week ends, would scurry about the house saying, “Where’s my Sunday Times? Has anyone seen my Sunday Times?” Copies of the Sunday Times always eluded her, even though, as was her habit when she purchased anything, she often bought as many as ten copies of a single issue so that the Sunday Times would be close at hand.

  And the Book-of-the-Month Club put John in the delightful position of playing critic. Throughout his career John had been the victim of literary judges of one sort or another. Now he was able to mete out justice of his own and to get back at certain of his enemies. Like many writers, John did not enjoy the
company of other writers. He shunned literary “sets” and circles, and parties where gatherings of authors were likely to occur. Once, in Italy, his friend Henry James Forman introduced John to a cadaverous man with flaming hair and bloodshot eyes, who Marquand was told was D. H. Lawrence. Afterward, Marquand was asked what he thought of Lawrence. John said, “I think he is a nut.” (Lawrence, meanwhile, asked what he thought of Marquand, said, “I think he is quite mad.”) After meeting Somerset Maugham, who was one of Carol Brandt’s friends, John reported to Carol, “I saw your old pansy, Maugham, in Venice. K-rist!”

  He was no more charitable in his appraisal of authors whose works came to the attention of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Though by no means a prude, John Marquand was generally uneasy when he encountered fiction that dealt explicitly with sex—particularly when he felt that sex was handled obviously or tastelessly. Of one well-known writer’s latest novel, he reported to the club:

  He writes with his genitals and all his characters can scarce keep their minds off theirs for a single moment. His women are nymphomaniacs. All his men seem to take two tablespoonsful of Spanish Fly before breakfast. There is more dirty talk in this book about private parts and fornication than almost any I have been privileged to read while a member of the Book-of-the-Month-Club board. However this is what we now term “lusty” and maybe I am undersexed. At any rate the characters are convincing when they can get their minds above their waistlines, which they contrive to do occasionally.

  On the other hand, he was a good enough judge of what it took to sell popular fiction to see that the particular novel under consideration would make a strong selection for the club, and his letter concludes, “Take the book. My objections are old-fashioned and maybe all this thrown-away potency makes me jealous.”