Clearly he relished the role of critic. His appraisal of another novel was:
Here we have a saga of the dear, quaint South, from the turn of the century to the present, full of hillbillies, fiddlers and Bible-thumpers. The first half of it, though it tickled my throat, did not make me vomit. It sounded like a pretty good soap opera that I had heard many times. The second half, when we move forward into radio and into a narrowness less comprehensible than that of the old Scopes trial in Tennessee, made me lose my interest in the whole work. I won’t go further with the plot and characters. American readers are too familiar with them both. In spite of its cleanliness and quaintness, it has not the drama, the skill, nor the conviction of the Warren book. I do not think we should take it.
He found the works of William Faulkner unreadable and Hemingway “flat and boring, all on one key.” He did not care much for Robert Penn Warren, John Hersey, or James Michener—particularly Michener. He considered Michener a journalistic show-off and self-promoter who, with no credentials or literary qualifications to speak of, had appropriated as his fictional bailiwick a whole quarter of the globe—the South Pacific, an area about which John felt he knew just as much, if not more. He frequently compared Michener’s grasp of the Pacific with that of Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the “old pansy,” Maugham, all of whom John felt had better command of their territory and material than Michener. When Michener’s panoramic—and in John’s view, pretentious—novel Hawaii was submitted to the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1959, John Marquand was vociferously against it. He knew, though, that Michener enjoyed a vast popularity, had also won a Pulitzer Prize, and that the whole subject of Hawaii—which had recently become the fiftieth state—virtually guaranteed the novel a huge success. John was certain that he would be out-voted on the board, and he was. But he could not accept his defeat, and the Club’s selection of Hawaii as a choice, without complaining that the Club was simply pandering to public taste and the box office.
As for writers whom he admired, he often said that Madame Bovary was the greatest novel ever written, and he once privately admitted that his one secret dream in life was to equal, if not surpass, Flaubert’s achievement with that book. Once, to a questionnaire, he replied that the “prose author” he admired the most was Fielding, that his favorite poet was Milton, and his favorite painter Botticelli. But he may not have been entirely serious, because in the same questionnaire he also replied that his idea of unhappiness was “being constantly occupied” and that his favorite hero in life was “the inventor of the safety razor.” He had great affection for the novels of Jane Austen, and once, on a crowded train in Havana, full of people and cocks heading for the cock fights, he was observed thumbing through a copy of Pride and Prejudice. But nobody meant more to John Marquand than Flaubert. And when Francis Steegmuller completed his superb translation of Madame Bovary in 1958, John was influential in getting the Book-of-the-Month Club to make that work its selection for June-July of that year. Although he was not, as a rule, enthusiastic about living American authors, there were a few that genuinely excited him. He very much admired James Jones’s novel From Here to Eternity, writing in the Book-of-the-Month Club News that Jones’s book had a “whole greater than any of its parts. And the whole rises from depths to magnificent heights with a sweep very often approaching greatness. From Here to Eternity is so good that it is in the realm of the impregnable.” He also praised, though more faintly, Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, saying, “Unlike so many other contemporary novelists, Mr. Wouk prefers to entertain rather than to advance an ideology, and believes that the best way to bring home a point is by holding his readers’ attention. That he succeeds will be quickly apparent to anyone caught up in this rousing tale.”
One of John’s greatest joys in terms of the Book-of-the-Month Club, however, was the opportunity it gave him to indulge in his particular style of invective. As he wrote in a memorandum to the club, about Messrs. Swanberg, Thurber, and an author whose name John preferred to forget:
I have spent quite a while with “Jim Fiske” by W. A. Swanberg. The subtitle, “An Improbable Rascal,” strikes me as improbable and also too disagreeable for my taste and perhaps for that of the ordinary reader. The amorality, the greed, and the venality of Fiske, I think, would finally turn anyone’s stomach. I can hardly see the value in a number of hundreds of pages that go into great details regarding his thefts and regarding his horrible associates. I can only feel that in every way the world is getting better and better. When I was a child, Mr. Jay Gould’s grandson, Edwin, who went to school with me in New York, asked me to spend a day on the Gould yacht. When my grandfather, who was Mr. Gould’s contemporary, heard of it he refused to let me accept the invitation, saying that he would not allow a relative of his to set foot on anything bought by the money of that thieving rascal.
If I had my way, I would not allow anyone to read this book.…
I finished the Ross book on the plane and feel more violently against it than before. It seems to me unduly long and painfully provincial and I thank God I never met Ross if he is like the Thurber profile.
The book will of course be read on Park Avenue, around the Algonquin and in Westport, but I really don’t think many people elsewhere will be as fascinated with the New Yorker, interesting and sometimes beguiling though it may be.
Let us face it. The Algonquin Round Table and the whole New Yorker Galerie are a lot of conceited log rollers. Woollcott was second rate and so was Givvs. I’d put Thurber a little higher, and possibly “Andy” White—but not such a hell of a lot. In their proudest days this band of heroes and heroines—including Dorothy Parker—have always stuck in my craw—with their attitudes and silly pranks and their sickening feeling of intellectual superiority.
Actually the New Yorker with its editing and formulas has hurt American letters greatly—and established an intellectual mediocrity worse than the Sat Eve Post. For my money there was only one man in that group who is worth this sort of adulation and that is Bob Benchley. Why in hell not write about him?
To hell with it all. I vote against it—and if my colleagues take it my resignation—long overdue at any rate—is figuratively on the table.…
When I get these photostat manuscripts that smell of ammonia, in order to keep me from dying of asphyxiation, I throw them away page by page. Consequently, to my great joy, I cannot remember the name of the author of the last manuscript you sent me, or even the title of it. This will not be too difficult, however, because it is a short something in epistolary form, dealing with letters written and received by a West Coast—presumably Berkeley or Palo Alto—professor, who previously was a pugilist and now is a teacher of English who has written a play. This, I trust, will identify it for you.
Now I am as aware as you that I am becoming senile. My mind, I am sure, is somewhere in the Victorian era. I have this scholastic feeling that there should be form, content, and grammar in a piece of so-called literary work. Nonetheless I try to be broad-minded, God knows I try. I try as hard as I can to like young people and the things they do and write. I have a sneaking feeling that this work that I have perused is what may be called hilarious and zany and that beneath its good, clean fun there may be an undercurrent of truth, although I don’t know what in hell it is. The only thing I can say for it is that it is short. It could be a part of a dual, but I hope that we have no part of any of it. It is the story of a confused young professor who feels that he is a genius. So, to my amazement, do his friends and associates, and even his wife. Do I give a damn? I do not. Personally I feel that the whole thing is a gross piece of balderdash.
My only reason for going into the thing at such length is that I find myself at the present time being exposed to the West. This epistolary novel is a California western piece of work. Westerners, I discover, are becoming arrogant. When in the West you have to wear Pendleton Round-up shirts, and high-heel boots, so that you may look like a Texas ranger. We must even understand the culture of the U.C.L.A.
We must be patient with them, because the West is the growing part of our community, and, with the oil wells, they get 27 per cent off their income tax. Therefore, they are superior to all of us, and now they know it. This piece of work is a complete example of this. It is hideous, and they should all be put in their place.…
He was frequently sarcastic about the works of Sinclair Lewis, whose Main Street had been cited by critics as the perhaps-model for The Late George Apley. But when John finally met Lewis, he rather liked him—particularly the madcap and unpredictable behavior that often overcame Lewis when he was in his cups. The two men had first met at Carol Brandt’s apartment, on a night when Lewis was on his way to the film premiere of Arrowsmith, and when he was already far from sober. He demanded Scotch, and when Carol handed him a glass he shouted, “Do you call that a drink?” and, with a few profanities, seized the bottle and poured himself a tumblerful. Immediately Lewis put himself and John on a first-name basis, Red and John, and, though there were editors and publishers and agents in the room, Lewis launched into a violent tirade against the publishing profession, clutching Marquand by the lapels and saying, “Come on, John, I want to talk to you, let’s get away from these lousy bloodsuckers, these goddamn hucksters, these fucking exploiters.” For several alcoholic hours—the premiere had long since started—the two were inseparable; whenever anyone suggested that he should be at the theater, Lewis would shout, “Let me alone, let me alone, I want to talk to John here. John and I understand each other, we know what a writer is. Keep these goddamn bloodsuckers away from me, will you?” And then, “Come on, John, I want to talk to you, I want to talk to you about your writing, John. Listen, come to Detroit with me! We’ll disguise ourselves as waiters and get jobs in some joint. Will you, John? What do you say? Detroit! Waiters! How about it?” Presently Lewis was singing John a selection of Methodist hymns.
John P. Marquand and Sinclair Lewis never got to Detroit disguised as waiters, but this sort of thing vastly entertained John. It appealed to his sense of the grotesque in life, and he and Lewis became friends, though he could not abide Lewis’s wife, Dorothy Thompson, who, whenever she was around, insisted on doing all the talking and would never let her husband say a word. Lewis’s erratic behavior helped John understand another situation in which a fellow writer, who had been an alcoholic, reformed and went on the wagon, at which point his wife, who had seldom taken a drink before, suddenly became a hopeless drunk. “After all,” Marquand commented at the news, “you can’t live with all that excitement going on around you and then all at once start spending a series of evenings playing crokinole.” Sinclair Lewis—who genuinely admired Marquand’s work—also, in a more rational moment, suggested to John that his three big New England novels, Apley, Wickford Point, and Pulham, should be published in a single volume called North of Grand Central, for which he, Lewis, would write an introduction. (At the time, Little, Brown was not interested in the idea, but the book was later published in 1956—after Lewis’s death—with an introduction by Kenneth Roberts.)
John’s work with the Book-of-the-Month Club took him regularly away from Adelaide, but it did nothing to improve their relationship. And so, one day in her office, Carol was surprised to hear John’s voice on the telephone. Their separation, John said—it had gone on for nearly two years—made no sense. He begged to see her again.
“Of course I agreed,” Carol Brandt says. “I only insisted that this time he must tell Adelaide what was going on. I didn’t want there to be any more lies. If John was going to be with me at my apartment, I wanted her to know it. I was determined to have us behave as much like adults as possible. Ending the separation was a great relief for all of us. Being apart and unable to communicate with each other had been terribly painful for both John and me, and it was also ridiculous—having Carl, who would see John on business, come home to me and say, ‘John sends you his love,’ and so forth. Carl had thoroughly disapproved of the separation and thought John was being stupid to let his wife lead him around by the nose like that. When John and I became lovers again, everybody was happier for it. My children were overjoyed to have John back. It was as though he had rejoined the family.”
Everyone was happier except Adelaide. Though John had asked her several times for a divorce, and she had refused to grant him one, she responded to the new development with hysteria. Once more she took up her verbal attacks against the Brandts, this time concentrating her comments on her own growing children. To them she depicted Carol Brandt as a brazen harlot, a home wrecker, a whore. She was so successful in her characterization that when John took one of the children to the Brandts’ house for dinner, the child was astonished to find not the scarlet creature their mother had depicted but a tall, elegant, handsome woman who wore well-made dresses, who combed her waving and graying hair gently back in a simple style, and who entertained graciously in an antique-filled Fifth Avenue apartment. Their father’s mistress, his children were amazed to learn, was a lady.
Adelaide did hold one trump card, a small one perhaps, but one she decided to use. It was the joint-copyright arrangement—worked out by lawyers for tax purposes—under which John received, starting with Pulham, 75 per cent of the royalties and Adelaide 25 per cent. She would not, she announced, have her royalties paid or her contracts negotiated by the Brandt agency. Her refusal presented something of a dilemma, but Carl was quick to see the way out of it. He suggested that John, in his book contracts, deal directly with Little, Brown; the Brandt office could continue to handle magazine serialization and motion-picture rights. The change was a wrench for both men. As Carl Brandt wrote to John, “Even if I suggested this break in our business relationship, it makes me very sad that something which had endured so long should end.… It is my hope, and a sincere one, that you will find this a happier condition of affairs.”
There was nothing more that Adelaide could do.
John began to play the role of Carol’s literary mentor, and he was forever suggesting good books for her to read. “I remember one winter when he was snowed in at Kent’s Island,” she recalls, “and could only get in and out on snowshoes. He told me that he had this fantasy of the two of us going off to live in some cabin in the north for perhaps six months, completely cut off from everybody and from the outside world. The cabin would be equipped with certain luxuries, of course. John liked comfort. And I remember that among the luxuries he would have brought along were certain books, and I was to read them aloud to him by the Primus stove while he fixed the rabbit snares or jerked the venison, or whatever one does in a cabin in the north woods. He used to refer to me as the literary huckster, and the books were to be read primarily for my profit in addition to my enjoyment. I remember the books were to be primarily Shakespeare, the Bible, an early translation of Tacitus, a good Thucydides, Plato’s Republic, some Fielding, some Jane Austen, Thoreau, Emerson, but not a single one of what he used to refer to as ‘the goddamned Russians.’ All this was intended to be literary therapy for me, to give me something to read other than what he considered the generally lowly output of my clients, including Willie Maugham, and to give me the basis of some solid literary opinions. Needless to say, we never made it to our cabin, but it was a wonderful fantasy.”
While John Marquand was snowed in alone in Newburyport, Adelaide and the children were off in Hobe Sound. In Hobe Sound there was another problem, another embarrassment. The Marquands had had a small house there for several years which John had christened “Nervana.” Nearby were John’s friends the George Mercks, and Philip Barry, the playwright, lived down the road. The president of Du Pont lived on one side of the Marquands, and the president of Morton Salt lived on the other, and little Ferry once asked, “Daddy, are you the poorest man in Hobe Sound?” But the resort—developed by Adelaide’s friend from Greenwich, Mrs. Joseph Verner Reed—had a definitely anti-Semitic cast, and there had been an episode involving Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Hays Sulzberger of New York, the distinguished publisher of the New York Times, when the Sulzbergers
had been politely told that they would be welcome at Hobe Sound but that they could not bring any guests. In the hubbub that ensued over this, John and Adelaide Marquand drew criticism for staying at Hobe Sound, and the whole business of the Lindberghs and America First came back under attack. John had at first enjoyed Hobe Sound, despite the fact that Adelaide had somewhat whimsically decided to furnish the place with some maids’ furniture she had found on sale, and which she thought an amusing touch. But after the Sulzberger incident, John confided to his friend and Hobe Sound neighbor, George Merck, that he could no longer live there comfortably. After all, he pointed out, he had to deal professionally with a number of Jews, including the Sulzbergers, Max Gordon, the producer, and his fellow Book-of-the-Month Club judges, Clifton Fadiman and Amy Loveman, and the Club’s head, Harry Scherman. He could not face any of these friends and associates if he continued to keep a house at Hobe Sound.
Chapter Twenty
The Late George Apley opened on Broadway in November, 1944, with the beetle-browed Leo G. Carroll in the title role, and was an immediate critical and popular success. It would run two years and would earn John Marquand an additional $30,000 a year in play royalties. At that point, at the peak of his powers and career, he was very likely the highest paid novelist in the world.
During the out-of-town tryouts of the play, John had been eager to have the Fiskes—particularly Conney—see it in performance, since Conney had been so important in encouraging, and in some ways even inspiring, Apley as a book. Conney admired the play—Gardi still felt somewhat dubious about the whole Apley business—but she had several specific suggestions to make. Nobody knew her Boston better than Conney, and when on opening night she spotted a French brocade sofa in the set of what was supposed to represent the Apley’s Beacon Hill drawing room she protested that such a stylish piece of furniture would never be placed in a proper Boston house. It was all wrong. The play’s producer, Max Gordon, took her at her word and had the sofa replaced with a more genteelly shabby piece. She also said that she did not feel that the Boston accent of the English-born Mr. Carroll rang true. When this was presented to Carroll, he protested, “I’ve already been taught fourteen different Boston accents!” But he did spend some time talking with Conney, listening to her speech and studying the broadness of her A’s. After catching another performance, somewhat later, Conney reported a marked improvement.
The Late John Marquand Page 19
