The Late John Marquand

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  For the middle-aged war correspondent, of course, one can easily read the middle-aged John Marquand, and William Briggs is a convincing character. But Jimmy Boyden is thin and unclear. One reason for his failure to come to life on the page is probably the background Marquand chose to give him. Marquand was attempting to answer the question of how it is that extraordinary men, heroes capable of performing extraordinary feats in time of war, can emerge from very ordinary and unexceptional surroundings, but in sketching the youthful environment of Jimmy Boyden Marquand was a bit out of his depth. Jimmy Boyden, we learn, is from East Orange—not West Orange—New Jersey, and East Orange, as everyone knows, is the wrong one of the Oranges to come from. That this should matter in time of war is questionable, but it is still another example of Marquand’s fascination with social divisions. Jimmy’s father is a minor executive “with an annual income of perhaps eight thousand dollars,” and their house, in a middle-class neighborhood, has its “antimacassars on the parlor chairs,” a radio with “Jacobean legs and an inlaid front,” a kitchen with a “breakfast nook” and various small appliances, plus a gas stove that will “cook without watching.” Marquand was familiar with the houses of the very rich and also with those of the genteelly poor, as in Wickford Point. He could even write with authority about the ramshackle beach houses in the back streets of Hawaii, where he had visited. But he had certainly spent very little time in homes of the middle American mediocrity, either in East Orange or in any other part of New Jersey. His description of Jimmy Boyden’s family and home and home life is not only unreal but quite unpleasant, since it is quite clear that Marquand has nothing but disdain for Jacobean radios, antimacassars, and breakfast nooks. By surrounding his protagonist with so much dullness and bad taste, some of it cannot help but rub off on Jimmy Boyden himself. One has trouble really caring about him or his problems.

  Still another reason why Repent in Haste fails is probably that Marquand, though he prided himself on understanding “the military mind,” really understood best the military mind of an earlier war. His short stories set in World War I are all convincing, and he could also vividly evoke the Civil War, and did, in a long series of short stories. But World War II was something else, something Marquand could never really grasp and put together or get into focus—best summed up for him in the baffled observation that it was, indeed, “funny the way things happen … when there’s a war on.” His best evocation of the war years remains in So Little Time, where he could define the mood of uncertainty and impending doom that settled across America in the last few months of unsteady peace when the lights were going out all over Europe.

  Marquand himself was nervous about Repent in Haste, not really certain that it was up to several of his previous books, and for a while toyed with the idea of having the novel published as a serial only, not as a hard-cover book. But Alfred McIntyre, who was hoping for another profitable property for Little, Brown, was a persuasive editor, and John agreed to let Little, Brown have it. Even so, John insisted on having the manuscript read by two Navy experts in Washington, who were instructed to look for flaws, but when Carl Brandt wrote to John that the book might require fixing here and there, John became quite testy about it and suggested that Carl was Overstepping his capacity as a literary agent.

  Repent in Haste was also the first of John’s novels for which he wrote his own blurb for the book jacket. His view of what elements in the book would help its sale is interesting. Saying to McIntyre that there was “nothing like writing fulsome praise about one’s own efforts,” he wrote of his book:

  The natural simplicity of the plot and the writer’s delicately detached method of treatment make this tale highly poignant and convincingly real. The short flashes of the Pacific life that run through it—the transport planes, Pearl, Guam, the smoking Japanese island, the transport bringing back the wounded, and the give-and-take of every-day war life—are all selected with an artistic skill which gives this small book both depth and stature. It is a mingling of love and war and peace and home, and a preview, perhaps, of the world of tomorrow, and no one who reads it can fail to gain a new insight into the thoughts and the environment of fighting men.

  B. F.’s Daughter, the third of what Marquand thought as his “war trilogy,” is both a more successful and a more ambitious novel. It is also the first of his novels to have a woman as protagonist. It contains two familiar Marquand elements, the long central flashback and the double hero—solid, respectable, perfect-gentleman Bob Tasmin, whom Polly Fulton loves, and brash, erratic, arriviste Tom Brett, whom Polly Fulton marries, both these men reflecting Marquand’s twin views of himself. There is also a marvelously realized character in Mr. B. F. Fulton, Polly’s rich and overpowering industrialist father, whose only standard in judging a man is whether or not he would hire him for his company. And in Polly Fulton herself there is Marquand’s first full-length portrait of Adelaide.

  Polly Fulton insists that she is nothing like her father and then spends the book discovering that she is his perfect mirror image. She marries Tom Brett and not Bob Tasmin because she is a woman who must dominate, just as her father dominated everyone and everything in her life, and her troubles with Tom stem from the enormity and relentlessness of her ambitions for him. Bob Tasmin tells her, “I’m sorry for him with you running his Life. Of course that is why you married him.” She is a dangerous woman, Tasmin tells her, because she doesn’t really know what she is doing or why she does it. “You have to run things, like B. F.,” he tells her. “It’s all right as long as you know you’re doing it, but you don’t know.”

  Her husband has a mistress, and Polly discovers it, and there is a confrontation scene between the two women not unlike the scene that had occurred, not many years earlier, between John, Adelaide and Carol that morning in the civilized ambience of the St. Regis. Tom Brett’s mistress, a beautiful divorcée named Winifred James, a career girl who works as a secretary in Tom’s office, understands both Tom and Polly perfectly. In addition to her central problem—that Polly always had much more money than was good for her—Winifred tells Polly that her husband “‘needs someone he doesn’t have to compete with. You’re so brilliant, so charming, such a rare and lovely person, Mrs. Brett. I think you’re too good for him really. I know I’m saying this badly, but he needs someone who loves everything he does without so many perfect standards. I do hope you know what I mean.’” Winifred tries to spell it out to Polly: Tom needs someone “‘who doesn’t—well, keep him stirred up. Someone not quite as lovely—without as many definite ambitions for him. I mean someone common. That is what he needs.’ She raised her hands and dropped them gently on the table. ‘Like me.’”

  In the novel Marquand punishes Polly—and, in the process, Adelaide—by having her demand, and then beg, Bob Tasmin to go to bed with her, and having Bob refuse. Bob is a gentleman, and much as he loves Polly and desires her he cannot betray his code. The novel ends on a familiar Marquand note, with Polly realizing that, in the last, it is always necessary to lower one’s sights a little, to surrender a portion of the dream, to compromise.

  Both Repent in Haste and B. F.’s Daughter sold well. John Marquand had reached the point of popularity where his name alone sold books, regardless of their content, and he had a loyal band of readers across America who made his novels almost unfailingly best sellers. B. F.’s Daughter was by far the more successful of the two titles, and between its publication in the fall of 1946 through June of the following year the book sold over 170,000 copies, an extraordinary figure for any novel. A less expensive edition offered by the Literary Guild (John’s membership on the board of the Book-of-the-Month Club precluded any of his books being Book-of-the-Month selections) sold nearly 700,000 copies. The novel was also sold to the films, and B. F.’s Daughter became a big starring vehicle for Barbara Stanwyck. For Adelaide, who was no Stanwyck, this may have been some consolation—but not much. Adelaide disliked the film version of B. F.’s Daughter and said so vociferously. To Adelaide, the i
ntellectual snob, films were an inferior art form in the first place, and she very nearly succeeded in convincing John of this as well. After the picture’s release he told Carl Brandt that he would have liked it better if the movie rights had not been sold at all and said he considered the treatment of The Late George Apley even worse. The present story he was writing, he said, did not contain any motion picture possibilities. He even suggested a stipulation in his contract that no future book of his could ever be turned into a film. But he could, in the face of upcoming six-figure movie contracts, be persuaded to change his mind.

  Book reviewers were harsh on both B. F.’s Daughter and Repent in Haste—particularly the former, since it was the bigger and, in John’s mind, the more important book. John complained that the critics had “missed the point” of B. F.’s Daughter. The point, in John’s view, was the mood of the period that was reflected in the novel, the sad, frustrated, uneasy mood of the war years, the war that from the home front was so difficult for Americans to understand, and yet the war that reached out and touched and changed every life and every aspect of life irreparably. It is the mood which Polly sums up when she thinks back nostalgically to the years before the war, when life was predictable and clear-cut, “before the war fixed it so that no one had time for anything.” It was very like the mood the same critics had found admirable and telling in So Little Time.

  Marquand had begun to speak bitterly about the critics of his novels, whereas a few years earlier he had insisted that he never even read, much less paid attention, to their views. When B. F.’s Daughter was published—a week from his birthday—he was fifty-three. He had reached that point in life, which every man who works hard at anything reaches, when he had begun to wonder whether perhaps his best work was behind him. In his flying trips to the West Pacific a phrase had caught his ear which navy pilots and navigators used when they passed the mid-point of their flights between the California coast and the Hawaiian Islands and, again, between Hawaii and the coast of Japan. This point was called the “point of no return.” It meant that, no matter what happened now, there was no going back; one could only go on. It was a haunting phrase that might have come right out of the ending of a Marquand novel. It somehow summed up John’s bitter-sad feeling about his own life, the direction his career had taken, his endless ordeal with Adelaide, his lack of connection with his children. It was also a phrase, as he suggested to Alfred McIntyre, that would make an absolutely smashing title for a book.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The novel that would become Point of No Return was long a-borning. It would mark, in fact, the longest gap in time between any of Marquand’s books—nearly three years, since he had been producing a novel a year with almost clocklike regularity. John had decided, as a result of the fun he had had creating B. F. Fulton—who bore no small resemblance to the late Mr. Elon Huntington Hooker of New York and Greenwich, Connecticut—to leave the war and write a book with a businessman hero. Business was something John admittedly knew almost nothing about, though he did have several businessman friends such as Gardi Fiske and George Merck. But for his new novel he had decided on a banker hero, and the obvious person to turn to for advice on banking was Edward Streeter, who had been one year ahead of John at Harvard. Streeter was a vice-president of the Fifth Avenue Bank (later the Bank of New York), had worked previously with the Bankers Trust, and also had a lively career outside banking as a writer of light novels—Dere Mabel, Daily Except Sunday, and others. Streeter seemed an ideal choice, not for collaboration, really, but for editorial help and information. Marquand approached him about this one afternoon in the Century Club, and Streeter agreed that he would be happy to assist in any way he could.

  Streeter, now retired from banking, recalls vividly the summer of 1947 when John Marquand arrived at their vacation house at Martha’s Vineyard wearing a long raincoat and carrying an armful of typescript. Streeter read it that evening and was shocked by what he read. “The book was in ridiculous shape,” he says. “He’d done no research. He was naïve as well as cynical. He said ridiculous things. He wrote that the vice-president of a bank spent his time selling Wyoming sporting ranches, camps in the Adirondacks, and estates on Long Island. I asked him, ‘What do you think bankers run—a real estate operation?’ After a moment, John rather sulkily replied, ‘Well, what the hell do they do?’”

  Streeter recalls that John was almost childish in the way he reacted to criticism. John had written a scene, in the first draft of the novel, in which the directors of the fictional bank were holding a board meeting in the basement of the bank, near the vault. Streeter said to him, “John, boards don’t meet in the cellar. They meet in paneled rooms on the top floor.” But John had been intrigued with the fact that banana oil was used to polish the prison-like steel bars on the doors of bank vaults and said, “You’ve got to admit, Ed, that the way I’ve described the smell of that banana oil is pretty good writing. Couldn’t we keep the scene the way it is, and just add a couple of sentences saying that the board room upstairs was being painted so they’re using the cellar temporarily?” At another point in the story, as Streeter recalls from the original manuscript, John had Charles Gray, the hero of the novel, say to an associate something like, “Well, I’ve got to get back to work. Let’s meet tonight for a drink at the bar of the Harvard Club, where it’ll be quiet and there’ll be no people and we can really talk.” Later on, John had the two men meet in the quiet, uncrowded bar. Streeter asked John if he had ever been to the bar at the Harvard Club, and John admitted that he had not; the Harvard was not one of the clubs he cared much for. Streeter pointed out that the Harvard Club bar was not only an extremely popular but extremely noisy place, and that on most afternoons it is packed to the walls with bodies. John said, “Really? You mean that? To me, that’s shocking!”

  The two men worked on John’s manuscript until two o’clock in the following morning, and Streeter gave John over three hundred specific suggestions. Rather typically, Streeter recalls, John did not ever really thank him for what he had done. Streeter had not expected payment for the work he had done for his friend and would not have accepted it if John had offered it. But when Point of No Return was published—two years later—Streeter remembers, “This is a mean-spirited thought, but he never even sent me a copy of the book.”

  But John could be generous in a perhaps more meaningful way. Edward Streeter had been working on a book called Father of the Bride, and John offered to read that manuscript. The next day—he was an extremely fast reader—John said, “I’m only one voice in five at the Book-of-the-Month Club, but I’ll back this book if you can put it in shape in forty-eight hours.” Streeter telephoned Cass Canfield, his editor at Harper, the book was typed within the required time for the meeting, and, with John’s backing, Father of the Bride became the Club’s dual selection, along with Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

  There were personal difficulties, meanwhile, in John’s life that were slowing up production of Point of No Return. Early in 1948, John’s Aunt Greta—Margaret Marquand Hale Oakman—died. (“Suppose … she dies,” Jim Calder had suggested of Cousin Clothilde, the bulwark of Wickford Point.) She had owned a 40 per cent undivided interest in the houses and property of Curzon’s Mill, and in her will this property was bequeathed to her six children by Herbert Dudley Hale and their half sister, Renée, her daughter by John Oakman. John Marquand had already inherited another 40 per cent interest, and his aging father, Phil Marquand, owned the remaining 20 per cent. John, meanwhile, had been appointed his father’s sole conservator, which gave him control of 60 per cent of the Curzon’s Mill property.

  Adelaide, with her passion for houses, had long had her eye on Curzon’s Mill. In particular, she coveted the lovely old Yellow House, the best house on the property—John once commented that every woman he had ever known had wanted to own the Yellow House —but over the years Adelaide had begun to have grandiose plans that involved the entire property, including the Red Brick House and the Mill
. All three buildings had become even more run down than they had been in John’s youth, and Adelaide envisioned remodeling and restoring them completely. John, too, had a deep sentimental attachment to Curzon’s Mill and its houses, and soon after his Aunt Greta’s death he approached his Hale cousins with a proposition: Since, in a situation of property division such as this one, it was impossible to say which 60 per cent was in John’s hands and which 40 per cent belonged to the Hales, John offered to buy out the Hales’ share of the estate. His offering price was a fair one—$21,500, along with a certain amount of land across the road from the houses. The entire Curzon’s Mill property had been appraised at $33,000, so John was offering two thirds for a two-fifths share.

  The Hales politely but firmly declined the offer. At least one Hale already lived at Curzon’s Mill and looked on it as her home. Her brothers and sister, along with their wives and children, were always coming and going and regarded the place as their summer residence. Nearly ten years had passed since the publication of Wickford Point, but the Hales had not forgotten it, and relations between John and the Hales had remained cool. For this reason, John had turned down a number of offers from motion picture companies to produce Wickford Point as a film, not wanting to open up the whole family controversy all over again. The Hales resented John and Adelaide’s way of appearing at Curzon’s Mill and cavalierly carrying off pictures and pieces of furniture for the Marquands’ Kent’s Island house, and the Hales were also well aware that John and his lawyers had been pressing their mother, long before her death, to make a settlement with John on her share of the property. Certain of the Hales even suggested that John’s legal pestering had shortened their mother’s life, though this was probably an exaggeration. Aunt Greta was a doughty Yankee and a fair match for John Marquand, even when she was old and ill. In a letter to “Dear Aunt Greta” written in March of the previous year, John had pleaded for the property, saying, “I have lived on it, off and on, since I was two years old, and I believe I have been there for a longer period than any of your own children. Furthermore, I feel a deep sense of personal responsibility regarding the future of the place as Aunt Bessie and Aunt Mollie both asked me, in the last years of their lives, to take care of it and not let it go to pieces, as it is in the process of doing now.”