The Late John Marquand

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “Gene told me that Hemingway had these Siamese cats, and that even the cats were drinking martinis. Hemingway would kick off his slippers and scratch the cats’ backs, and then he began talking about foul blows in boxing and began to demonstrate them on Gene. Gene said, ‘Ernest knows a lot about boxing, but perhaps I know a bit more about it than Ernest. Ed Fink, who was Al Capone’s bodyguard, was my teacher. And all of a sudden Ernest came at me and started swinging. He came up and cut me across the lips, and there was blood, and then he jabbed me in the left elbow. I said to Ernest, “Do stop it, please, Ernest,” but he kept right on punching. I didn’t want to get on the outside—I really pride myself on my in-fighting—and I thought to myself: what Ernest needs is a good little liver punch. There’s a little liver punch, and it has to be timed exactly, and when I saw the moment I let him have it. I was a little alarmed, if I do say so! His knees buckled, his face went gray, and I thought he was going to go down. But he didn’t, and for the next few hours Ernest was perfectly charming.’”

  John was the master of stories like that, stories which involved not only imitations and gestures—he told this story on his feet, dancing about with his impressions of the two pugilists—but which rambled along in that fashion and, as Charles Lindbergh describes them, “Stories that had no real point or punch line, but which were amusing all the way. He was a teller of tales.”

  Those were happy days. Anne Lindbergh also remembers Adelaide’s humor blossoming at Treasure Island. “Because at the end she was such a tragic and distraught figure, one tends to forget her ‘all-fellows-well-met’ gaiety. The over-all impression was of exuberant good spirits. Her particular brand of free-wheeling extravagant humor—often directed against herself—was the perfect foil for John’s dry, urbane satire. And there is no doubt she intentionally played up to him and his stories, and that he responded enthusiastically, and their friends or guests were marvelously entertained’ and amused, and a splendid evening resulted for all concerned. It was a marvelous show that was put on by both of them, in collaboration, and one had the impression that no one enjoyed it more than the two actors themselves.”

  No one troubled to dress up at Treasure Island in anything more than an open-collared shirt and khaki shorts or slacks, and after a leisurely dinner on the terrace there were more stories, more talk, or perhaps John would read aloud to his guests in his big voice. Of course one of his favorite readings was from Stevenson’s Treasure Island, savoring such celebrated lines as Ben Gunn’s “many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese—toasted, mostly—” and

  Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—

  Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

  Drink and the devil had done for the rest—

  Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

  Then, as coffee was being served, Josephas, the caretaker, would silently enter the room with his guitar, and he would sit and sing island songs. Some of the songs were bawdy, some sentimental; Josephas had the calypso singer’s gift of taking the names of the guests around the room and weaving them into the verses of his songs. “He picks the songs up in Bay Street,” John would murmur fondly. Josephas’s last song of the evening, inevitably, was “I love you but Jesus loves you best, Bid you good night, good night, good night,” naming each guest in turn. It was a signal that the evening was over, that it was time for bed in the Great House and the guest house and for sleep with sounds no more disturbing than the noise of land crabs scuttling for each other’s shells along the dark paths, a noise like the quiet grinding of teeth, and the rustling of the furry coconut rats that lived high in the crowns of the palm trees, the clicking of palm leaves in the breeze, and the distant repeated rush of the sea across the sand.

  Gardi and Conney Fiske spent three months with John and Adelaide at Treasure Island during that first winter there, in 1950, and remembered it afterward as one of the happiest times of their lives. They were given a one-room shuttered house with lumpy iron beds a few minutes’ walk from the Great House, where they shared outdoor plumbing—marked by a sign reading “El Retiro”—with secretary Marjorie Davis. The two families seldom met before lunch-time cocktails, with John working diligently through the morning on a new novel, and there were a few upheavals between John and Adelaide, but not many, and none of such importance as to make the guests feel uncomfortable. There were exciting moments, such as the night when Josephas’s brother-in-law, Richard, who drank, nearly burned down Josephas’s house, and John Marquand, shouting commands in the manner of a wartime general, organized guests and staff into a bucket brigade to save the building. Once, puzzled by the increased nuisance of flies in the kitchen, John announced that he and Gardi were organizing an expedition “to investigate conditions in the interior” of Treasure Island, where many of the native staff lived and where, John was certain, no white man had ventured. They came back, several hours later, muttering and shaking their heads sadly. “Worse than the jungle,” was all John would say.

  The Fiskes had brought with them a battery-powered radio which, when he heard of it, thoroughly irked John. The whole point of Treasure Island, he explained, was to get away from the reach of the outside world. He spent an entire evening inveighing against radios and communications in general, and there was a terrible scene when another guest revealed that Josephas himself had a powerful radio receiver and that it was from this that he picked up the latest songs, not “in Bay Street” at all. He could not believe it, John said, it was so incompatible with his dream. But it was not long before John was making daily trips to Josephas’s house to catch the B.B.C. newscasts.

  There was excitement when John’s friend from Hollywood, Cedric Gibbons, art director for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, arrived on a luxurious chartered yacht. Gibbons had once been married to Dolores Del Rio, and his wife of the moment was a starlet named Hazel Brooks. The Gibbons party and crew came ashore, and there was a bibulous evening—the crew, it turned out, had brought their own rum—which ended with Marjorie Davis having to flee her tent and seek protection in the Fiskes’ cottage from an overamorous sailor. In the morning, Eric’s hands shook visibly while serving breakfast, and Richard did not reappear for over twenty-four hours. John labeled it another “Night of Horror,” and, as always, these episodes became the topics of dinner-table conversations for nights to come and of stories that always ended in laughter. But for all the comings and goings, their happiest times seemed to be when a “dry rage” set in, with high tropical winds that made the sea too heavy for the Windrift, the yawl that went with the island, to enter or leave the lagoon, and when the four friends could enjoy perfect isolation, with no visitors and no way to escape. They picnicked on the special island chowder John had discovered, a spicy stew made with fish, Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce, and Bourbon whiskey. At times like these, John seemed most at peace.

  At last, when it was time for the Fiskes to leave—a few days before the Marquands—everyone gathered at the drawbridge to say good-by, grasping their hands and begging them to return. Conney Fiske wept a little as Josephas, guitar in hand, sang his farewell song to her and altered the lyric to “good-by, Mistress Fiske” instead of “good night,” as he had done so many evenings past As she stepped into the Windrift, Josephas handed her a polished pink conch shell, telling her to keep it and “put it to your ear and you can always hear the island’s waves.”

  John had urged the Fiskes to come back to Treasure Island the following winter, and they had agreed to come. They had been planning on it, in fact, when Adelaide wrote Conney a stiff and rather chilly letter, mentioning, as Conney recollects it, something about “the necessity of our privacy” and rescinding the invitation. Conney was both disappointed and hurt by Adelaide’s letter. She had long suspected that Adelaide didn’t really like her; Adelaide, after all, didn’t like any of John’s women friends, all of whom she assumed without question were having love affairs with him. Conney was also certain that John was unaware of the letter and would be furious if he knew about it But Conney was too mu
ch a lady to make an issue of it or mention it to John.

  John invited the Fiskes a third time, the next winter. But by then Gardi Fiske had developed emphysema, as Carl Brandt had, and his health had begun to fail, and his doctors told him he could not go to such a remote place. And so the winter of 1950, like all the happiest and sunniest moments in like and in books, would never happen again.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  That winter of 1950 at Treasure Island, John had been working on another Army novel. He had never lost his interest in what he called “the military mind,” and now there was a new war, in Korea, which caused John to suspect that there was box-office appeal again in military themes. Ironically, of course, the book that was to become Melville Goodwin, U.S.A. was written during a period of great personal serenity in John’s life, and perhaps that is why, for a military novel, it seems uncommonly tempered and peaceful. There are few scenes of violence in the novel, and even the conflicts between the characters are muted and civilized. Melville Goodwin, U.S.A. is, after all, a novel written by a man who had reached his peak, and knew it, and who had learned to relax and enjoy the quite pleasant life which the years of hard work had earned him. Melville Goodwin appears to be a novel written without effort and without pretension, with no bid in it for literary greatness, or even much importance other than to tell a good yarn. With this book, Marquand seems to be saying, “Look, I can do it with no hands!”

  There was still another reason why the book was written. John Marquand’s writing career spanned the great years of American magazines, before competition with television caused so many magazine titles that used to dot the newsstands to disappear from the scene. Collier’s, Woman’s Home Companion, and the old Saturday Evening Post are only a few of the now extinct magazines which provided writers with their daily bread; in those golden days these magazines paid out huge sums of money to writers like Marquand, Edna Ferber, and Somerset Maugham for serialized fiction. Editors like Ben Hibbs at the Post, Herbert Mayes at Good Housekeeping, and Bruce and Beatrice Gould of the Ladies’ Home Journal were given—and spent—huge budgets by their publishers to collect “big” writers’ names with which to decorate their covers, and which were intended to spur newsstand and subscription sales. Such expenditures were considered justified as a way to combat the threat of postwar television. At the same time, such furious spending as magazines did in the late 1940s and early 1950s may have helped speed along their demise.

  After the publication of Point of No Return, Carl Brandt’s office had concluded an arrangement with the Goulds and with Hugh McNair Kahler, the Journal’s fiction editor, whereby John was paid $80,000 for the serial rights to his next and at the time still-unwritten novel. It was a five-figure pig in a poke, but the Goulds must have figured that this investment in the unknown was worth it because they both expressed themselves ecstatic when the deal was closed. John could have copied the alphabet five thousand times and the Goulds, under the terms of the contract, would have had to pay him the money, but of course John was not writing the alphabet, he was writing Melville Goodwin, U.S.A. Herbert Mayes had also advanced John a sizable sum of money for a clutch of promised short stories. Though he had become a rich man—John once told Carol about his surprise, on totting things up, at discovering that he had become a millionaire—the fact that he had received a nonrefundable advance of $80,000 on an unwritten book, a sum the book might never approach earning in hard cover, must have made the writing of Melville Goodwin, U.S.A. a particularly pleasant and easy-seeming task, or so the book reads.

  The book has a bland, straightforward, mature hero, a two-star general who all his life wanted to be a soldier and went into an army career the way his friends went into business, medicine, or law. Once again, his was a small-town boyhood, and, once again, Melville Goodwin fell in love with a beautiful, restless, ambitious, clever, and sophisticated woman who has since married a wealthy publisher, become a widow, and now runs his publishing house. (Carol Brandt had not yet joined her husband’s literary agency, but there had been talk, due to Carl’s illness, of her doing so.) But Goodwin did not marry the glamorous Dottie Peale (Carol Brandt argued vehemently against naming her Dottie, which she felt sounded all wrong for the character, but John was adamant). Instead, he married Muriel, the Adelaide figure who does her limited best to help plan and run her husband’s life. Because he is fifty, General Mel Goodwin is about to be elevated to a solid but unexciting post in the Pentagon, which pleases Muriel but discourages the general. He loves action. And, in Washington, he re-encounters Dottie Peale, falls in love with her all over again, and considers divorcing Muriel, quitting the service, and going off with Dottie to live in Carmel, California.

  Thus the triangle and the conflict are set up, and any number of scenes spring to mind which could ensue. Dottie, we assume, will have a confrontation scene with Muriel, Muriel and Mel Goodwin must face each other for a showdown in the arena of love and marriage, and surely some sort of climactic moment is called for when Mel Goodwin and Dottie Peale face the future and each other and decide which way to turn. Alas, John wrote none of these in his novel. Having drawn his battle line clearly in the story, he backed off from it and wound up the narrative in three pallid scenes: one between Goodwin’s best friend (the narrator) and Muriel, one between the friend and Dottie, and a final one between the friend and Mel Goodwin himself. There is an unconvincing scene in which Dottie comes to Connecticut to see Goodwin’s friend and to tell him tearfully that she never expected the general to marry her anyway, that she doesn’t want to marry him either, or anyone else as stuffy and dull as he is, and that she never did have any taste for moving to Carmel. Hard on the heels of this comes a deus ex machina in the person of General Douglas MacArthur, who sends orders for Mel Goodwin to join him at his headquarters in Japan—with Korea just across the water—so that Mel Goodwin will have the action he so craved. This, it turns out, is something that Muriel and his friends have been trying to negotiate for him, to keep him happy. There the book ends.

  Despite the disappointing conclusion to what might have been a dramatic tale, Melville Goodwin, U.S.A. is full of interesting fictional details—details about Army life, the Pentagon, military intrigue, and amusing moments describing Goodwin’s best friend’s life in a suburban-chic part of lower Connecticut where, by the freakish chance of a resonant speaking voice, the man’s enormously successful career as a radio announcer has landed him, almost against his wishes and against his better judgment. And, though its hero is not as interesting as many other Marquand men, the book is never boring. It is also a book which, in writing, as Marquand realized, required the help of an outside researcher, or authority, to bring its author up to date on what had happened to the military life and mind since he had been separated from the Army more than thirty years before. Little, Brown also realized John’s need for an editor-collaborator on Melville Goodwin, U.S.A., and for this Stanley Salmen—who had become John’s new editor in Boston following the death of Alfred McIntyre—put him in touch with Joseph I. Greene, Colonel, Infantry, Retired, in Washington.

  Joe Greene played an important part in the production of Melville Goodwin, U.S.A., but not as important a part as he could have. When he had read the first draft of the book in manuscript, Greene felt that Marquand’s main trouble was his depiction of the Pentagon. “Marquand,” Greene wrote to Stanley Salmen, “has created a Pentagon that simply never existed. He has somehow carried up into the postwar years a Washington brass and headquarters attitude which has not existed since the Twenties.” John had filled his fictional Pentagon with military theoreticians and strategists, men more experienced in desk and laboratory work than in battle, even though, as Greene pointed out, “Hardly anyone has held a high Army office in the Pentagon since 1943 or 1944 who doesn’t have a whole chestful of battle ribbons.” Marquand had also, Greene felt, made the Pentagon much too stiff and formal, with Army officers calling each other “sir” or using military titles, and he had created a vast social differe
nce between two-, three-, and four-star generals. None of this resembled the real Pentagon, where officers of all rank called each other by their first names and where any general had as much social standing as another.

  Marquand was interested in how social divisions are created and maintained and as a young lieutenant in World War I had detected nuances that put officers who were West Point graduates in one class and those who had received their commissions at Officer Training School, or in the field, in another. This degree of difference, which might have existed in 1917, had disappeared long before 1950, Greene pointed out, and non-West Pointers now so heavily outnumbered West Pointers in the United States Army that if any officer tried to high-hat another, on the basis that one had been to the “Academy” and the other had not, he would find himself in serious difficulty. Greene even produced Department of the Army statistics: in 1916, West Pointers outnumbered non-West Pointers by eight to one; by 1945, non-West Point men outnumbered Academy men by fifty to one. John, however, had made nearly every officer in the book a West Point man and had imbued these characters with a strong sense of superiority in both background and performance.