The Late John Marquand

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  John also had made Melville Goodwin such a thoroughly Army-oriented man that Goodwin hardly ever appeared out of uniform. He wore a full-dress uniform to visit friends in the country and even to call on beautiful Dottie Peale. Joe Green pointed out that most officers eagerly get into civilian clothes as soon as duty hours are over, and that to behave otherwise made Goodwin look ridiculous. He suggested that John supply Goodwin with some decent civilian suits, cut by the same tailor who would have done Goodwin’s uniforms—Brooks Brothers, Morry Luxemburg, or Wilner’s in Washington. Joe Greene went on to point out what he felt were flaws in the development of John’s characters. “The sexual attraction of Dottie and the (possible) lack of it in Muriel are never sharpened up,” he wrote. “In fact, I don’t recall much expression or depiction of fondness between Muriel and Mel [a lack of fondness between John and Adelaide might be offered as a reason]. If such attraction didn’t exist in Muriel for Mel, a forthright character of his type would very likely have been attracted by other women in the 1920s.” Greene found it “hard to keep a visualization of Dottie in mind”—a good point, for in this novel particularly John lets his people emerge more through what they say than by descriptions of how they look. And of Muriel he wrote, “She is not direct and overt enough. She is too ‘special’ in an Army sense that began to disappear 30 years and more ago.” The same thing he found true of Mel Goodwin, who “acts too much like a general of 1925.” But it was the “illogicalities of background” that he found to be the book’s greatest shortcoming, and added, “I would hate to see such a good novel by a first-rate writer appear with unreal people and places in it.”

  John Marquand, though he needed this sort of detailed criticism—with Melville Goodwin in particular—did not always react positively to it. Of Colonel Greene’s long memorandum, six pages of tightly single-spaced notes, John told Stanley Salmen that he wasn’t much worried by Colonel Greene’s comments. John said that he figured he knew the Pentagon pretty well and that it pretty much existed as he said it did; he had been at Washington parties where three- and four-star generals mixed and had observed how, though they might be on a first-name basis, each was careful to pay attention to the other’s rank. As for some of the Colonel’s other points, those could be fixed without much difficulty. Because John wanted Mel Goodwin in uniform for those specific scenes, he would add a sentence or two explaining that Muriel had given away all Mel’s suits while he was overseas; that he had several nice suits made for himself in Germany, but—in the rush of departure to the States—he had left these suits behind in his quarters in Frankfurt; these suits were being shipped but had not arrived yet. John would also make it clear that with a wife and two growing children Mel Goodwin had never been able to afford suits made up by fancy tailors. Thus, with the flick of his novelist’s wrist, did John Marquand cover himself against any sartorial objections that might come from military readers.

  As for Colonel Greene’s character points, John had no comment. His characters, after all, were his personal property. He would sooner let a stranger look through his bank book than let anyone change a character. For Colonel Greene’s trouble, a check went out for $250.

  John may have occasionally been careless about detail—or at least stubborn about altering a detail he particularly liked—but he was meticulous about matters that affected his style or the rhythm of his prose. And when the first installments of Melville Goodwin, U.S.A. appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal, John looked them over carefully. Cuts—often quite deep ones—are always made in magazine serialization, but usually novels are pruned by omitting certain scenes or even certain characters from the story. In this case John noticed to his horror that his novel had been cut by having the “he saids” and “she saids” removed from the dialogue. He complained bitterly to Bruce Gould, saying that he had no objection to deep cutting in his manuscripts, even to the elimination of whole scenes or whole characters in order to make a story fit the available space, but that the snipping out of the “saids” ruined the rhythm of his dialogue and made his speech read “like bad Dumas.” In future installments would the “saids” please be restored? Bruce Gould apologized, and the “saids” reappeared.

  John, in the meantime, was heading for a fracas with another magazine, Holiday. Holiday’s editors, the late Ted Patrick and Harry Sions, had been making approaches to John for some time about John’s writing an article for them. Their approaches had been tentative, and made through delicate feelers to the Brandt office, because John had gained the reputation of having an easily roused temper and a certain amount of artistic temperament. He had become known, in fact, as a writer who was often “crotchety,” and what Holiday wanted from John was a great deal—for which, due to a smaller budget than the mass-circulation magazines, they were prepared to pay rather little. They wanted a long, definitive article on the city of Boston, and they felt that no other author in America had made Boston his literary bailiwick more thoroughly than John P. Marquand. From John the Holiday editors wanted a piece of journalism that would evoke Boston’s special flavor and the special cast of the Bostonian mind, an article that would make readers see, feel, and smell the mustiness of the tufted horsehair sofas in the Somerset Club, hear the sound of the click of teacups on Beacon Hill, the mousy beauty and the haughty pride of the old town. John would furthermore, as they say in show business, have two tough acts to follow. Holiday had already published two beautifully written pieces that had become, in a sense, American classics of journalism—William Faulkner’s “Mississippi” and E. B. White’s haunting evocation of New York City, written from his window on the garden and the sturdy willow tree in Turtle Bay. John’s would be a third of these great “place” pieces.

  John, though he had pretty much given up writing short stories and articles for magazines, was flattered and intrigued by the idea, and after not too much coaxing from Holiday he agreed to write the article. Holiday gave him an extremely generous deadline, and after a few months of silence from John on the project, Carl Brandt was able to write Harry Sions, enclosing the manuscript, “Have no worry, pal, it’s fine or so I think. And I’m not wish-fulfilling either!” Carl did, however, hedge somewhat by referring to the manuscript of the Boston article as a “first draft.” And John had told Carl privately that he had had some difficulty with the article, and some uncertainty about its structure. He had in the beginning used a different lead, then shuffled the pages about and placed the lead, instead, on page ten, adding a new lead to introduce the material that followed. In an uncharacteristically anxious tone, he told Carl that he hoped Holiday would like the piece.

  Harry Sions, a man known in the publishing world as one not easily satisfied, read John Marquand’s Boston and finished it with a sense of bitter disappointment. It seemed to him, frankly, dull, and yet one could not tell a writer of Marquand’s stature that his work was dull—not in so many words. Something had to be done to salvage John Marquand’s Boston, not only for Holiday’s sake, Sions and Patrick agreed, but for the sake of John Marquand’s reputation as a writer. Round one had begun.

  Cautiously, Harry Sions wrote to Carl that he thought John’s article had “the makings of a first-rate story—in fact, a great story, but it will need some fresh material and some changes, especially in the lead.” A few days later, he wrote in greater detail:

  We feel that the lead is too slow, too topical and, frankly, too journalistic.… One suggestion might be to use the theme of the piece, indicated on page 10, as an idea for a lead—the line that begins with “Boston has been shaken by impacts that may well make strong men weep … but it is curious to discover that nothing of its personality has been basically altered yet. It still remains one of the few cities in America with an individuality and flavor entirely its own.” We think a lead along those lines would be more effective.… In addition, we would like some more intimate material, some more feeling of Mr. Marquand’s Boston than now appears in the piece. Perhaps one way of giving the reader this feeling would be to bring p
eople into the piece, people whom Mr. Marquand knows and who would be able to talk about Boston in the language of Boston, the language which Mr. Marquand has been able to interpret with such superb skill. We hesitate to suggest specific types.…

  John took the piece back—it was sent down to him at Treasure Island—with relatively little grumbling. He had, after all, agreed to revise “within reason.” And, within a very short space of time—barely a week, in fact—the Boston article was back on Carl’s desk ready to be returned to the Holiday people, which Carl did with a note that said, “I think it’s much better. Hope you do too.”

  But Harry Sions did not think it much better. A little better, perhaps, but not much. It was strange; perhaps John was too close to his subject, perhaps too far away—the article had been written, after all, in the gentle breezes of the tropics, a long way from Beacon Hill. The tone of the article was oddly limp and flaccid, leisurely and almost disinterested; the author seemed to be yawning all the way through his subject. And the lead was hardly an exciting stimulus to read on: “Though a large city,” the article began, “Boston has many small-town attributes. Everyone seems to know a little about everyone else there, and all good Bostonians are partial to local gossip and anecdote.” When compared with the onrush of emotion with which E. B. White opened his New York piece, “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy,” Marquand’s opening sentences seem very bland.

  John knew some wonderful Boston stories and could tell them at a dinner table at the drop of a hat—such as the tale of the proper Boston businessman who, after many long years of toil at the most uninteresting of desk jobs, was about to be retired and was asked by his company what he would like as a gift to compensate him for all his years of loyal service. He could conceivably have asked for a reasonably luxurious gift. The gentleman thought about this for several days and then said that he would like a raincoat. He was given a raincoat. And there was a story John told on himself of how, many years later, he had been asked back to a reunion of former Boston Transcript employees. A retired composing-room veteran approached John and reminded him that thirty years earlier, when John had worked at the Transcript when just out of Harvard, John had talked of becoming a serious writer. “And what have you been up to since then, Johnny?” the old man asked with a friendly curiosity. John replied that he had been here and there and had also been doing some writing. The old printer clapped the Pulitzer Prize-winning author on the back and said, “Good for you, Johnny! Keep it up!”

  But John had used none of this rich Boston material in his article. It greatly lacked personal material that would have brought it—and Boston—to life. From Holiday’s standpoint, the article was a great disappointment, and yet to ask an author of Marquand’s stature to rewrite twice was a thing few editors would dare do. Harry Sions, however, determined to push on undaunted. Writing to Carl, he said that he thought John’s revisions had “improved it enormously,” but he asked for two things:

  We are just a little concerned, in the first half of the piece, whether Mr. Marquand’s viewing-with-alarm of the Irish and Italians and other encroaching influences is ironic or real … we do think it needs a little more qualification—perhaps a joke or an anecdote or some kind of qualifying paragraph that would avoid the impression that Mr. Marquand is sounding too much like a member of the Somerset Club talking about Curley and Dever.… The only other addition we’d like is some kind of reference, spelling out in more detail, the association between Harvard and Boston.

  But John replied that he had revised his article as much as he intended.

  Holiday now returned to its corner, and all was quiet for several months until the publication date for the article approached. Once again, using Carl Brandt as referee—Sions and Marquand never met, never communicated directly with one another—Harry Sions made a last-ditch attempt to get the kind of story he wanted. In a long teletyped message to Carl from his Philadelphia office, Sions explained his objections. The article, for one thing, was too brief. Sions had wanted at least 7,500 words, “the usual length for our major articles,” but John had given him only about 5,000 words. But, said Sions’s teletype:

  THE CHIEF TROUBLE WITH THE PIECE IS THAT IT SEEMS TO BE WRITTEN OFF THE TOP OF MARQUAND’S HEAD, THAT IT LACKS DEPTH AND PERSPECTIVE.… WHAT WE WANT IS MORE DEPTH AND INTERPRETATION … MATERIAL ON THE CLUBS, LIKE THE ATHENAEUM, THE FAMOUS LIBRARY WHERE YOU CAN ONLY TAKE OUT A BOOK IF YOU ARE A SHAREHOLDER, AND THE SHARES—HANDED DOWN FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION—ARE SOMETIMES SOLD ON MARKET, LATEST PRICE $235 A SHARE. WHAT DO THEY SAY, HOW DO THESE PEOPLE LIVE? HOW HAVE THEY DEVELOPED THE REAL CHARACTER OF BOSTON, PRETTY MUCH THE SAME TODAY, AS MARQUAND POINTS OUT, AS IT WAS IN REVOLUTIONARY TIMES, IN SPITE OF THE IRISH, THE ITALIANS, AND OTHERS WHO HAVE NUMERICALLY DISPLACED THE BRAHMINS. THAT’S THE REAL STORY OF BOSTON AND WE FEEL IT’S THE STORY OF BOSTON THAT MARQUAND REALLY SHOULD TELL AND KNOWS.

  THE PIECE WE HAVE NOW IS A GOOD PIECE BUT HARDLY A DISTINGUISHED ONE, AND FRANKLY A SOMEWHAT LAZY ONE. WE KNOW THAT MARQUAND CAN WRITE A GREAT BOSTON PIECE, EQUAL TO WHITE ON NEW YORK AND FAULKNER ON MISSISSIPPI, IF HE WILL TAKE TIME TO THINK IT OUT AND DO SOME MORE REAL DIGGING.

  As gently as he could, Carl Brandt sifted these somewhat harsh comments through his own intelligence and instincts as an agent and passed a filtered version along to John, saying, “If you feel you cannot do more to make it better in your eyes, then that is that. Quite sincerely and although diffidently, they felt they would be lacking in editorial acumen and good faith to you and to your and their public if they took the easier course and did not put to you their conversation.… Will you give it thought? I have a great desire to have the whole profession talk about ‘Boston’ as they do about ‘New York’ and ‘Mississippi.’”

  But John, perhaps feeling that he had earned the right to be a little lazy, would have no more to do with it, and a few weeks later Harry Sions wrote to Carl to say, “You have done everything in your power, both as a good agent and as a good friend of ours, to try to persuade Mr. Marquand to give us the great piece on Boston that we feel he can and should write. However, we have no way of forcing him to make any changes we suggest, even though we do feel that he is in error.”

  The Boston article was eventually published, in November, 1953, and created no great stir—not the sort of stir, certainly, that Holiday had hoped for. Most of John’s friends in Boston liked it; perhaps that was why he wrote it the way he did. He had had enough satiric fun with Boston in The Late George Apley and H. M. Pulham, Esquire—the latter of which had been called a slur on Boston womanhood—so perhaps he felt it was time to atone for all this with a gentle, noncontroversial, “nice” little Boston piece. In any case, that was what he had written. And in the middle of all the commotion that ensued about it between himself and Holiday, he had written to Carl Brandt to say that never, under any circumstances, was Carl to agree to have him do an article for any magazine, ever again.

  He could afford, he felt, to be choosy. With his Little, Brown royalties being paid on a deferred basis—with a fixed annual ceiling, for tax purposes—he had amassed quite a sizable account, something in the neighborhood of $900,000, in Little, Brown’s treasury. But no interest was paid on this sum. He brooded about this, until one day Brooks Potter, his lawyer friend, suggested that John might have himself made a director of the publishing house. That way, he could have some say in the company that controlled so much of his funds. John thought that a splendid idea, and at one of the rambling and free-wheeling lunches he liked to have with Arthur Thornhill, Sr., president of the company—lunches sparked with martinis and good cheer—John proposed the directorship possibility to Thornhill. The normally affable face of Arthur Thornhill, a tough-minded, self-made businessman, froze. No mention of that notion was ever made again.

  There had, understandably, been few encounters with the Sedgwicks since John’s and Christina’s 1935 divorce. But when their daughter Christ
ina became engaged to a young history professor named Richard E. Welch, little Tina begged her father to give her away at the wedding, which was to be at the Sedgwick-studded Calvary Church in Stockbridge, hard by the Sedgwick Pie and Sedgwick House, and where Uncle Theodore Sedgwick occasionally preached. Although John liked young Welch—despite the fact that he had committed a much talked about faux pas in Boston by showing up at a black-tie dinner at the Somerset Club wearing brown shoes and green socks with his tuxedo—he was reluctant to re-enter the Sedgwick domain and asked Tina please to excuse him. But she persisted, and so he agreed to come to the church services but not to the reception.

  After the ceremony—in the same church where he had been married, and where many of the same people who had been at the wedding now sat primly and solemnly in the same pews, looking simply a little older—John tried to slip away. But suddenly there was old Uncle Ellery, of the Magazine, infirm now and walking heavily with a cane, who stepped across the aisle to John and seized his arm. “John,” he said, “come back to the house with us. I want you to walk with me through the dog cemetery.” And so there was nothing to do but go back with the old man into the scented past of the old garden and the little tract set aside for Sedgwick pets, with their tiny stones marked in Latin, animals loved by Sedgwicks for a century and longer. John found himself, after the emotional ordeal of his daughter’s wedding, very touched and moved as the two men proceeded slowly among the quiet graves, the older man pointing to this stone, then that, with his cane, commenting on each dog as he went. All at once there was a new grave in front of them, with an American flag implanted next to the headstone, surrounded by a small bed of wax begonias. Uncle Ellery peered at the stone and then read its inscription: “To Tubby, the cutest dog that ever was.” Uncle Ellery flung his walking stick at the begonias and cried, “Blasphemy! Blasphemy!”