The Late John Marquand

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  When John’s new novel, Women and Thomas Harrow, was published in 1958—first serially in Ladies’ Home Journal and then in hard cover by Little, Brown—it struck many people that the book represented something of a departure. Bruce and Beatrice Gould, then editors of the Journal, commented that it was the first Marquand novel they could remember in which John appeared truly in sympathy with his hero. Though the book is set again in John’s fictional town of Clyde, Tom Harrow is certainly a far more sympathetic individual than the previous resident of that city whom John had dealt with, the obnoxious Willis Wayde. Harrow is also older—John Marquand heroes tend to age with their author—and, at fifty-four, is a playwright of the generation just previous to Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. He is at a crisis point in his life—financially, in his career, and in his marriage to Emily, an overtalkative nag who enjoys reminding Tom, just as Adelaide reminded John, that all he has done has been to repeat himself for the last five years. Once again, time is the villain and the thief. New and younger and more vigorous playwrights are coming into the theater, the theater is changing, and Tom Harrow, despite his eminence and his success, sees that his own work is becoming old-fashioned, that his best work is behind him, he is past his prime. But it is too late to change course, and he cannot go back. Tom Harrow is of course John Marquand, and his doubts and fears are dark dreams as are John’s.

  Long ago, in Tom Harrow’s past, there was the beautiful Rhoda Browne, one of John Marquand’s most subtly delineated female characters. Rhoda Browne’s father not only had a lower-class job—as an automobile dealer—but he was successful at that, while Rhoda’s mother had great social ambitions for her daughter. Tom Harrow’s early success in the theater gives him the money with which to marry Rhoda. But theater money is like a novelist’s money, ephemeral. It comes and goes; it is never sure; a writer is rich one minute and poor the next. It is not like inherited money that is safe and secure, doled out by banks and clipped by coupon. And so, after a few giddy years as the wife of the famous playwright, Rhoda leaves Tom to marry Presley Brake, old-rich and so highly bred that he comments that gin is “a charwoman’s drink.” It is almost as though John had come to blame his loss of Christina on the lack of security afforded by a writer’s livelihood, and of course that was a part of it—a small part. After Rhoda, Tom married briefly and unhappily a successful actress with whom he had had an affair. Then came the garrulous and bossy Emily, who likes to do over old Federalist houses. And so here we have John Marquand the misogynist, with “women” singled out as the cause of all his woes. “Women and Thomas Harrow” was John’s choice for a title—against such others as “Script by Thomas Harrow” and “Lines by Thomas Harrow”—because, as he said to his publisher, “it tells what the book is about.”

  Women and Thomas Harrow received, on the whole, good reviews. William James Smith in Commonweal wrote, “In his latest success, Women and Thomas Harrow, Mr. Marquand cites an aphorism of the theater—a ‘bit’ that goes over big once will go over big twice; after that you’re pushing your luck. Mr. Marquand is proof that this does not hold in the world of the novel. He has done his big bit at least half a dozen times and it is still going over great. It is another respect in which he is uniquely successful.” And, to John’s surprise and ill-concealed delight, The New Yorker, whose views in those days probably carried the greatest cachet of any magazine and which had always high-hatted John Marquand novels in its nil admirari fashion, gave the book a rave, saying, “Rarely is there a novel as fine as this one.” And Arthur Mizener wrote a long and enthusiastic letter, saying:

  Marquand does not, I guess, any more than Thomas Harrow, need to worry that he is slipping. This is certainly as competent and finished a job as he has done in other novels, much better that way than Willis Wayde.… I think Marquand has never done so well—or indeed developed so fully—the loved Marquand wife as he has in Rhoda; the nearest thing is Charley Gray’s wife, but Rhoda manages to have the defects or limitations more clearly and yet be more charming.… If the book hasn’t anything like the narrative hold of POINT OF NO RETURN or B. F.’S DAUGHTER or MELVILLE GOODWIN, because it has almost no narrative in the direct sense, still it has a couple of characters from whom a lot of onion skins are peeled during the course of the book, and Marquand does that kind of peeling well enough for any man.

  Mizener is right about the lack of narrative, or suspense, in the book, aside from the suspense of character being slowly revealed. And in the process of peeling off skins from his onion, John was so firmly in control of his material that he could pause for a leisurely paragraph or two simply to describe a room, or a table setting, or a flower bed, and the reader does not feel unduly irked. At the same time, in this novel, John had developed his celebrated flashback technique to such an extreme that almost nothing of importance happens in the present. It is all in the past. Though the reader is reminded, periodically, that the characters’ lives are going on in the present, it is the long-ago story of Tom and Rhoda that holds the book together.

  Perhaps these are two reasons why, from a sales standpoint, the book was a disappointment. Books are always sold by publishers to booksellers on a returnable basis, and in the case of Women and Thomas Harrow Little, Brown sadly overestimated the book’s market. In the months following publication, over 17,000 unsold books were returned from bookstores, leaving the “hard” sales figure under 50,000.

  And—another possible reason for the book’s failure to sell well—there is a pervading sadness throughout the book, a sense of mortality and a sense of doom. The usual satiric and comic Marquand touches are scarce here. From the earliest pages to the final half-unconscious attempt at suicide, Tom Harrow broods not only on the past but on death, the fact that his life is more than half over, that all that was best is gone. The nostalgia is carried to such a degree that the tone becomes one of aching, almost unbearable despair. “In the end, no matter how many were in the car, you always drove alone.” Perhaps readers simply had difficulty accepting such a pessimistic book, such dark foreboding.

  And yet, since this is John’s most autobiographical book, it is in many ways his most interesting. It is as though he had decided, through the medium of his art, to say: This is all I can, or rather all I choose, to tell you about myself, and my craft, and my feelings about my work and what it has been like to be successful at it and yet, in a sense, to have failed. And this is all I can—or rather all I wish to—tell you about those people I have loved and lost. As Tom Harrow says:

  He was on his way toward that bourne they wrote about and that one fact, after birth, that was completely unescapable. These were obvious facts, but now there was an urgent reminder … he too was a part of the big parade. The younger generation, the younger writers … were waiting for him to pass the stand in review. Time was gently nudging so that he would make room for someone else. The show was never over, but pregnancy was continuing, drums were beating, and you had to march along.

  And in Women and Thomas Harrow John Marquand seems to be saying: This is my literary last will and testament. There will be no more novels now. This is the last. And so it was.

  The hero of Women and Thomas Harrow discovers, at the beginning of the book, that he is about to be wiped out financially. But John was in no such serious straits. He had, however, mistakenly thought that he did not need to pay United States income tax on his British royalties. The Internal Revenue Service discovered this oversight and advised John that he still owed the government $27,000 for previous tax years. It was a blow, of course, but not as stunning a one as John first made it out to be. He talked gloomily of the necessity of selling his beloved Kent’s Island, but his Boston lawyers went to work on the problem. John had begun talking of making some sort of substantial gift to Harvard and had considered giving his share of Curzon’s Mill. An arrangement was worked out, however, whereby John gave the stage, film, and television rights to Women and Thomas Harrow to Harvard, a gift on which an estimate was placed of $150,000. Ironically,
the stage, film, or television rights to the novel have never been bought, and so Harvard is no richer from the gift. But it was a large gesture, and the gift deduction in John’s 1958 income tax helped ease the pain of the $27,000 owed.

  John spent the winter of 1958–59 in Pinehurst. Carol and her son Carl visited him there, and there were the pleasant little dinners at Conney Fiske’s. Intellectually, she charmed him more than any other woman. Though he continued to boast of how lucky he was to be rid of Adelaide, John was a man who had always needed a woman’s company, and he wanted to marry again. He had proposed several times to Conney Fiske, but she had also turned him down, though for reasons different from Carol’s. Conney was a New Englander by birth and by choice and would have gone with John to live in Newburyport without a moment’s hesitation. But she had been through the agonizing years of Gardi Fiske’s illness. John had a heart condition, and Conney, fond as she was of John, simply did not want to take the chance of finding herself having to nurse another invalid husband. John that winter was lonely and restless, even though there was golf and plenty of parties to go to. There was the companionship of his secretary, Marjorie Davis, but that was not enough. He worked, in a desultory way, on a new novel.

  It was to be about a family named Pettengill, and it was to be, he promised, a “gayer” book than his previous ones—a return, in other words, to the fun of Wickford Point and H. M. Pulham, Esquire. He was going to write his way out of his doldrums. He gave Conney Fiske seventy-odd pages of the manuscript to read. She doesn’t recall that it was a particularly memorable opening, but after all it was just a fragment, just a beginning. In the meantime, John was busily planning a photographic safari to Africa for the coming summer. He would go with George Shearwood, a friend from Pinehurst who ran a travel agency, and he would take Marjorie Davis with him. They would visit the three largest game parks in Kenya and then go into a restricted military district to visit a tribe called the Karamojo which was still completely undisturbed by civilization. Best of all, Sports Illustrated wanted six pieces from the trip—the idea would be a Happy Knoll member writing home of his adventures in Africa—and this meant that the expense of the trip, for both John and Miss Davis, would be completely tax deductible.

  The African trip was a great success. They stayed at Treetops and watched the wild animals feeding under simulated moonlight, and John promptly perfected a vivid imitation of a wading hippopotamus. They visited a tiny village called Kitale, at the foot of Mount Elgon, and stayed at a local plantation. On the farm, John, with his customary curiosity, wanted to see everything—the coffee and the maize fields and the shambas. He even said that if he were younger he would like to buy a farm like it, recalling that he had once been offered a temple in Mongolia for $100. In the evening he was at his genial and storytelling best, swinging his glass in his hand, telling of how on a trip to the Near and Middle East he had come into Persia and had been asked if he had any alcoholic beverages to declare. “Five beers,” he said and, asked where they were, he replied, “Right inside me.” He had to pay duty anyway. Later, leaping and jumping to a tom-tom’s beat, he demonstrated a dance he had learned from visiting an American Ojibway tribe.

  Everywhere the little group went in Africa they were treated as celebrities, and the Famous American Novelist was forever being stopped by reporters who wanted interviews, which John enjoyed, and who asked him literary questions, which he usually tried to dodge. But once, in Kenya, a reporter asked him what he thought of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and he flung his hands heavenward and rolled his eyes in horror, crying, “Hopeless! Absolutely hopeless!”

  The group returned in autumn, to Pinehurst again, as Little, Brown was putting the finishing touches on Timothy Dexter, Revisited. The book was published without much fanfare in the spring of 1960 and, as Little, Brown had warned, with only a small sale. But the biography of the Newburyport nonconformist was also an echo of the theme of the last novel, as John wrote of his favorite seaport: “No past can ever return. There is no use weeping over things that are gone. They can never be retrieved in their ancient combinations.” Newburyport was a finer place then than it has become, and “its inhabitants were more skilled in more crafts and more diligent in their work and worship.” Of The Unspeakable Gentleman, he had once explained that in those days he had been “in love with candle light and old ships.” He had not really lost that love.

  And “worship”? Had he also wistfully begun to miss the religiosity of his Unitarian ancestors? He used to speak to Carol of “the hereafter—the place you don’t believe in.”

  By late spring, 1960, John was back in Newburyport, and on July 14 he came down for the July Book-of-the-Month Club meeting. He was in his usual anecdotal form for that Thursday luncheon and meeting, amusing his fellow judges—John Mason Brown, Basil Davenport, Gilbert Highet, and Clifton Fadiman—with stories of Africa, including the hippopotamus imitation. He shared a taxi with Brown on the long trip uptown from Hudson Street to the Knickerbocker Club where John was staying. John got out of the cab, waved a cheery good-by, and Brown continued uptown.

  By Friday, John was back at Kent’s Island. Conney Fiske was also back in Boston, and John had asked her for dinner that night, and to stay on at the house overnight or for the week end if she wished. Conney had to decline because of a previous commitment. She was very sorry. She had dined with him about a week before, and it had been very pleasant, but suddenly in the middle of dinner John did a strange thing. He rose from his chair and went to a cabinet and fetched a Chinese cricket cage that he had bought, years before, on one of his trips to the Orient, and he presented the cricket cage to Conney, saying, “May the crickets always sing for you.” The words curiously moved and touched her.

  And so, that Friday night, John dined alone with his youngest son, Lonnie, who was seventeen. During dinner John complained that at his age he couldn’t eat a thing. A few minutes later he said gloomily that he felt as though he was going to have another heart attack. But Lonnie, familiar with his father’s dark moods and his habit of exaggeration, paid little attention when his father talked like this. “It’s probably just nerves,” Lonnie said. John then said that he was going straight to bed. He patted Lonnie affectionately on the head and said good night.

  In the morning, Floyd Ray, the houseman-chauffeur whose wife Julia served as John’s cook and housekeeper, went up at the regular hour with John’s breakfast tray. Floyd opened the bedroom curtains and, with the tray in his hands, turned to waken his master. There was a crash that woke Lonnie, and he ran from his room down the hall to his father’s room. Floyd was standing there by the breakfast tray that had crashed to the floor. Floyd said, “Your father won’t wake up!”

  Nor did he. He had died in his sleep early that morning, and his death had a kind of completeness one feels at the end of an interesting book. It was over too soon—sixty-six years is not a long life for a man. And yet John had seen Timothy Dexter, Revisited published, that intensely personal project that everyone had assured him would not be successful, but which he had done simply because he had wanted to do it. He was probably “written out” and probably knew it He had got rid of Adelaide, who had become worse than a thorn in the flesh to him. He had made his peace with Harvard. And he had died in the house he had built for himself, in his beloved New England which he himself had helped to create. And so it was over, and his death was another example of fêng-shui, the fitness of things, and a reminder that in the end you always die alone.

  Aftermatter

  All lives do not end as neatly as well-made novels. Some have loose ends. Some never stop ending. Some, it almost seems, go on too long. Adelaide …

  Adelaide insisted on coming up to Newburyport for John’s funeral, even though all his friends begged her not to, knowing that he would not have wished her there. But she came, and even as Eddie Goodwin at Curzon’s Mill was clearing the underbrush on Sawyer Hill, traditional burying place of Marquands and Hales, Adelaide was trying to take over arrangements. Final
ly, someone had to remind her, “You are not the legal widow.” Brooks Potter, meanwhile, had earlier received humorous but nonetheless serious and specific instructions from John requesting that a certain Newburyport undertaker, whom John considered a “parvenu,” not be used, and that his grave on the Hill be placed “as far as possible” from the Hales’.

  There was a big crowd at the church, and John’s old friend Ed Streeter remembers that as he looked around the church it seemed decidedly familiar to him, even though he knew he had never been inside it before. Then he remembered: He had been in that church before in Point of No Return.