The Late John Marquand

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  There were more and more long separations from Adelaide—“escapes” he used to call them. John had taken up golf and had been introduced to the golfer’s paradise that is Pinehurst, North Carolina. He fell in love with Pinehurst. He loved the loblolly and the longleaf pines that cover the sandhills, and the picturesque little town itself, with its winding, unnamed streets laid out in a pattern deliberately designed to befuddle interlopers who do not belong in this enclave of the secure and wealthy. Pinehurst is cool and green throughout the winter. Camellias blossom in January, and in early spring Pinehurst bursts into riotous color with the blooms of dogwood, azalea, rhododendron, and spring bulbs.

  John joined the Pinehurst Country Club, with its famous “ninety holes of golf” on five eighteen-hole courses, and began taking lessons from the club’s professional, Harold Callaway. John loved to tell his friends about Callaway’s somewhat unorthodox but effective teaching methods, including the Callaway method of mastering the use of the medium iron: “Imagine a fat man bending over in front of you. You’ve got to swing so the head of the club will go straight up his ass.” John commented, “He made it very clear.”

  John’s golf—like his tennis and indeed all his other athletic endeavors—was never very good. He was self-conscious about this and always went out alone, taking with him just a favorite caddy, a venerable black man named Robert Robinson but always called “Hard Rock.” Hard Rock would flatter and pamper John and on every shot encourage him with, “Very good, Mr. Marquand! Very good!” On their walks across the course, Hard Rock would entertain John with tales of how he, in the early days of Fox-Movietone films, had once been a tap dancer, had performed in movies and on radio with the likes of Major Bowes, and had once danced with Gloria Swanson.

  Pinehurst had the same appeal for John that Boston had, and for good reason. The resort was developed, in the late nineteenth century, by a Boston millionaire, James W. Tufts, of the same family that donated the land on which Tufts University now stands, and, because of this New England connection, most of the resort’s inhabitants have New England roots. The architecture follows suit and is New England in flavor; both the sprawling Carolina Hotel and the Pinehurst Country Club—two of the largest structures in town—might be veranda-ringed hotels on the Maine or New Hampshire coast. Houses are New England Colonial, and modern houses are zoned out. Presently John bought a small Colonial house in Pinehurst called “Nandina Cottage”—too small, really, to accommodate Adelaide and the children (which John considered an important point in his purchase)—just a short distance from the golf course, which had a small apartment for his secretary, Marjorie Davis, above the garage behind the house.

  John Marquand the clubman also admired Pinehurst’s traditions and institutions, such as the Tin Whistle Club, which he also joined, and which was a men’s drinking club so named, according to legend, because a tin whistle had once hung from a tree near the approach to the ninth hole on one of the golf courses. When the whistle was blown, drinks were served. The club’s headquarters, aggressively male, were a book-lined room in the one corner of the country club. Then there was a men’s bridge club called the Wolves, and John joined that. His bridge was no better than his golf, but he loved to drop over to the little Wolves Clubhouse late in the afternoon to talk to whoever was there and to break up, with his funny and highly gesticulated stories, whatever bridge playing might be going on, just as he could—if not checked—break up Book-of-the-Month Club meetings. At the Wolves Club, the half-joking cry soon came to be, “Well, here comes John Marquand—that’s the end of the bridge game.” Once when he took young Carl Brandt, Jr., then a student at Harvard, along to the Wolves Club with him, the young man found himself being scrutinized by an elderly and crusty gentleman. “Is it true that they’re now letting a lot of Jews into Harvard?” the man wanted to know. (As a resort, Pinehurst has long shown a decidedly anti-Semitic cast.) Carl replied that as far as he knew the old quota system had disappeared from Harvard a long time ago. Muttering, the older man walked away, and John, with a sigh, said to Carl, “Well, you’ve just cost Harvard twelve million dollars.”

  But the best thing of all about Pinehurst, perhaps, was that Gardi and Conney Fiske had a house in Southern Pines, less than half a dozen miles away, where Conney wintered her thoroughbred horses.

  Adelaide had begun drinking heavily, and when she and John were together there were terrible scenes. When she got drunk at parties, she would come out with vociferous political opinions, loudly stated, and defenses of her position on the America First Committee. When sober, and asked to expand on these opinions—always considerably right of center, politically—she could not remember what she had said. There were midnight telephone calls to Carol Brandt when Adelaide would scream at Carol and accuse her of stealing her husband and breaking up her marriage. Although everyone knew of Conney’s single-minded devotion to Gardi, Adelaide assumed, as she did of every woman John liked, that Conney Fiske was also having an affair with John and that it had become an accepted thing with the Fiskes just as it had with the Brandts. When John stopped at the Fiskes in Boston to spend an afternoon chatting with Conney and to look in on his ailing old friend, Gardi, who was then gravely ill, under sedation much of the time, and with round-the-clock nurses, Adelaide said to John when he came home, “I don’t see how you can make love to your best friend’s wife in the drawing room while he is dying in a bedroom upstairs!” Or so John told Carol Brandt.

  Once, when John was staying at the Brandts’ Fifth Avenue apartment, Adelaide telephoned late at night and demanded to speak to her husband. Carl, who had picked up the phone, explained that John had gone out to walk the Brandts’ poodle, Beau, and would not be back for perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes. Adelaide said, “Give him just one message. He won’t walk my dog, and tell him he can walk that poodle of yours around and around and around the block until they both drop dead!”

  Marjorie Davis was similarly under suspicion as a love interest. John avoided these confrontations in a characteristic way, by walking away from them and searching for places where Adelaide wasn’t. “Nandina Cottage”—though John thought the name ridiculous—became one of these refuges. Life at Pinehurst settled into a pleasant routine. Day began with breakfast in bed, served by Floyd Ray, his chauffeur-houseman who had formerly worked for John’s Pinehurst neighbor, General George Marshall (about whom John was always asking questions), and whose wife, Julia, had become John’s cook. Then there were a few hours spent dictating to Marjorie, then down the road to a few holes of golf at the club with Hard Rock, followed by drinks at the Tin Whistle and lunch at the club. After lunch, John read and edited what he had dictated that morning, penciling in corrections before final-typing, then strolled over to the Wolves for a rubber of bridge and an afternoon drink. Then, perhaps, dinner with the Fiskes, in their pleasantly child-free, well-staffed, and well-run house, or with one or another of the comfortably-off couples who wintered in Pinehurst, such as the John Tuckermans of Boston, the Wallace Simpsons, the George Shearwoods, the Donald Parsons—he was writing a book on bridge, and John offered to do an introduction—or the John Ostroms. John Ostrom’s pretty wife, Kitty, was a talented interior decorator, and when John, referring to a previous decorator, wailed to Kitty Ostrom, “Miss Pleasants has painted me entirely in ice blue,” Kitty Ostrom took on the job of helping him redecorate. From time to time the Brandts, either separately or together, sometimes bringing one or the other of their two children, came down to Pinehurst to visit him.

  John was working on another novel. It would be about a businessman again, and it would even return to Charles Gray’s fictional home town of Clyde. In an odd way this was to be a return to Point of No Return, which so many critics had called his best book. Critical reaction to Melville Goodwin, U.S.A. had been cool, led once more by the man who seemed to have become John’s chief critical enemy, Maxwell Geismar. (When he could bring himself to mention it, John turned the pronunciation of the
word “Geismar” into a hideous snarl.) Geismar had complained:

  The whole point about Melville Goodwin as an angry officer is that his code of behavior is honest. He believes in his career completely and puts it to the test in the field of combat. A good man if kept in his place; but is this the only possible solution for the problem of belief in a commercial society without established forms of tradition? It might have taken more guts, a word which Marquand’s General approves of … if Melville Goodwin himself had really gone through with his disastrous affair with Dottie Peale. But in the struggle with “authority” that runs through Marquand’s work, authority, even if stale or false, always wins. The soldier’s code is a logical refuge for his disgruntled bankers and despairing playwrights.

  Once more Geismar was asking for a novel different from the one that John had written and had missed the point that lies at the heart of most of John’s novels. Geismar wanted Marquand heroes to revolt, to turn their backs on “authority”—or at least the confines of their situations—and emerge, at the end, triumphant over their circumstances. But Marquand wrote novels of defeat and compromise, where the “system” or set of systems is always, in the end, too much for the individual. This is not an unfamiliar point of view in American fiction and can be found in the novels of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Wolfe as well. Geismar seemed to feel that the Marquand philosophy of the unbeatable system, expressed in novels of failure or semifailure, was wrong, and therefore faulted the novels for it. Of course Marquand heroes always have something to fall back on, some small thing to shore up against the ruins. In Melville Goodwin’s case it was the “soldier’s code,” which he had believed in since his childhood, along with the belief that the Army might be the last place in America where you could find a gentleman.

  Marquand books, however, were by 1951, when Melville Goodwin, U.S.A. was published, immune to bad reviews; they were criticproof. John had a fond and loyal public that had grown with him through the years, and Melville Goodwin sold extremely well, boosting his income, in the year following publication, to well over $100,000. There had also been the lucrative magazine serialization, and there was lively interest in Hollywood for a film version of the novel, though no deal had yet been reached. In 1952, Philip Hamburger of The New Yorker spent considerable time with John, in New York and in Newburyport, preparing a three-part profile for the magazine, and when it appeared it turned out that Hamburger—who had noticed instantly the fictive quality of John’s life, the way he “wrote” scenes and situations and dialogue for himself—had written a parody of a John Marquand novel. Titled J. P. Marquand, Esquire, it neatly and gently mocked the celebrated honeyed Marquand style, the satiric touches, the tongue-in-cheek chapter titles, and of course the long central flashback around which every Marquand novel is constructed. John was flattered and delighted with the profile and quickly wrote Hamburger to tell him so. Later published by Bobbs-Merrill as a book, J. P. Marquand, Esquire was cheered by critics, one of whom wrote, “Mr. Hamburger’s ‘novel’ bursts into flower as a brilliant piece of biography. The author imitates the Marquandian mood and style so effectively that he gives the impression Marquand might have written the book himself.”

  Little, Brown, in the meantime, had begun talks with Marquand about a book that might be called Thirty Years, a collection of his short stories, articles, and speeches spanning roughly that period of time in his career, interspersed with his own comments on his craft. It was, in other words, a period in John’s life when everything seemed to be going well—too well, perhaps, to suit a restless nature that thrived on drama and impending crisis.

  One thing that was not going well was the new novel, about the businessman whom John had named Willis Wayde. It was going much too slowly, and John was unhappy with it. Ed Streeter had read portions of the manuscript and had offered suggestions, but in the meantime John’s stomach had been troubling him, and once more he was convinced he had an ulcer. In the late spring of 1953 he spent close to two weeks at Presbyterian Hospital in New York, undergoing a series of tests and X rays which revealed an “ulcerous condition” but no frank or apparent ulcer. Somewhat to John’s disappointment, his doctor, Dana Atchley, pronounced his problems largely psychosomatic. John blamed them, of course, on Adelaide.

  With Carol Brandt he became increasingly reminiscent, liking to dwell on past episodes and pleasures. “We would talk about the old days in Paris and Maule,” she recalls, “and the afternoon eating ice cream at Walden Pond, when we discussed our respective marital difficulties and were half in love with each other even then, but would not or could not admit it. What would have happened to us, we used to wonder, if we had said to each other what we really thought of saying, as we ate that wretched ice cream? What if we had admitted that we were both having a rotten time and both had become badly fouled up in our personal problems? What if we had said, ‘If things get too bad for either of us let’s try to see each other?’ Something might have removed that strange repression that used to stand between us. We each might have reached the conclusion that the other might not have minded, and in fact might rather have enjoyed it. As it was, on our way back he never ventured so much as to touch my hand, although I cannot say that the idea did not occur to us in a very forceful way. Perhaps he was afraid that this would have shocked me, which shows how well he used to understand women and himself. In fact he never did do such a thing until some fifteen years later, though through all that lapse of time we increasingly cared for and depended upon each other.

  “Of course he was always criticizing me, and reminding me that there were many things about me which he did not admire. He didn’t think much of my literary taste, or of most of my clients, or of their output. He thought I was too materialistic, too concerned with power. He disliked my taste in furniture, which, he said, was too Chippendale for him. He claimed to prefer worn carpets and frayed upholstery. He said I was too concerned with ‘gracious living,’ and that I put too much wax on my furniture and too much polish on my silver. He told me that he didn’t much care for my ‘fox and mink and sable jobs’ either, although he said that they had ‘a definite comedy value.’ He had an aversion to large pieces of costume jewelry, especially my large bracelets and brooches which he claimed scratched, and had ‘combination locks’ on them making them difficult to remove. He complained that I used too much lipstick and he would speak of my ‘long sang de boeuf fingernails,’ and he didn’t like girdles either. Of course he used to admit that I had qualities to offset these ‘defects,’ but he would say, ‘I haven’t time to name them now.’ But he also told me once that I was the only woman who had been completely ‘satisfactory’ to him in every way. He admitted that this was not a very poetic way of putting it, that it was rather like describing an automobile or a washing machine, but he knew that one of the most precious things about our relationship was that neither of us felt the need to resort to poetry. He knew that nothing he might say or do would in any great measure alter the opinion I held for him, and that this was much the same with me. There was no need to create a good impression. By the time we came together, neither of us had many cards left up our sleeves. Most of the deck was face up on the table, and we were each glad to take a card, any card. The main thing, he said, was that I was the only person he could think of who had never let him down.”

  Carl Brandt went up to Kent’s Island to visit John that early summer of 1953, read 630 pages—triple-spaced—of the new novel that was in progress, and wrote to Carol that he thought it was “swell” and that “He’s got revision and cutting to do but it won’t take him long.… I think I can get it to 60,000 words of elegant stuff.” Carl also noted that Kent’s Island contained “less mosquitoes, cool, and much less tension between Adelaide and John.” There was a big clambake with a hole dug in the ground, a barrel sunk into it, and fire-heated stones placed in the barrel and covered with wet seaweed. Bushels of clams, corn, sweet potatoes, and halved lobsters in cottonseed sacks were placed on the seaweed, and more se
aweed was placed on top of the sacks. John, Adelaide, Carl, and all five of John’s children—Johnny, Tina, Ferry, Timmy, and Lonnie—along with Mr. and Mrs. Bicker, John’s caretakers at Kent’s Island, all had a wonderful party.

  On June 11, John went down to Cambridge to receive an honorary degree from Harvard. It amused him, in a grim way, to realize that the universities of Maine and Rochester, Northeastern University, and even Yale had honored him with degrees before his own alma mater got around to it. The possibility of a snub was always there; Harvard’s tardiness with a degree reinforced his own sharply divided feelings about the place, and he used the occasion to have a bit of fun at Harvard’s expense. Though his acceptance speech at the commencement exercise was an effective one, he drew laughter when he recited the long list of subjects he had diligently studied at Harvard, and about which he had retained no knowledge at all; though he had studied calculus at Harvard he could not answer his thirteen-year-old daughter Ferry’s simple question about algebraic fractions, and though he had majored in chemistry he could not help ten-year-old Lonnie assemble his Christmas fun-with-chemistry set. The commencement address was criticized by some Harvardites as being not sufficiently solemn for the occasion.

  After the ceremony, there was a procession from the tent to the Widener Library. John, in cap and flowing gown, was walking with Ed Streeter when he suddenly said, “There’s Senator Kennedy ahead of us, walking alone,” and stepped over to the young John F. Kennedy, leaving Streeter, “Like a flower girl walking behind them, poking my head between the shoulders of the two celebrities.”

  But through all this John continued to complain that he felt unwell, blaming his condition on “certain environmental stresses,” which meant Adelaide. In mid-July, John was suddenly seized with an excruciating pain in his chest. He was rushed to Anna Jacques Hospital in Newburyport, where it was diagnosed that he had suffered a coronary thrombosis. Carl Brandt wired from New York: