The Late John Marquand (16 page)

He spent a great deal of time worrying about the ending of the book, always, along with the opening scene, a crucial moment in any novel. As originally written, the novel ended with Professor Allen Southby and Bella Brill announcing that they intend to marry each other. It is in fact the way the novel
must
end; no two characters in fiction ever deserved each other more. And yet, at the book's end, Bella and Southby have only just met each other, and Marquand began to fear that an announcement of marriage on such brief acquaintance was too abrupt to be believable. Perhaps, he considered, Southby should marry Bella's sister Mary—whom he had known longer but which would have been quite an anticlimax. Finally John decided to close the book in a more subtle manner. The reader is never told, precisely, that Bella and Southby will marry, but one knows that Bella is after Southby and that Southby is smitten. There is no question that the two will marry at some point in that vague area of fictional time after the final sentence.

Marquand was also quick to change the name of a character originally called “Russell Berg.” A real-life Russell Berg had been discovered in the vicinity of Newburyport, and Mr. O'Reilly's libel suit was still pending. A line that referred to “that Doctor Cooney, that good-for-nothing one,” was also changed to “that dentist.”

And so surely Marquand cannot have been too surprised to find that the Hales resented the treatment he had given them. Whether or not the statistic of “eighty per cent” imaginary which he claimed about his
Wickford Point
people could ever be proved, there was enough there that was recognizable—and recognizable as the object of ridicule—to hurt his cousins deeply.

Did John Marquand set about to do this deliberately? Perhaps—half deliberately, anyway. He had written
The Late George Apley
not only as a reflection of his own experience and knowledge of Boston; he had also, in making parody of, and poking fun at, the
whole tapestry of Boston snobbism and Boston's overweening self-pride and pride of family, rather successfully polished off the entire Sedgwick clan, from Uncle Ellery on down. Now, in
Wickford Point
, he was going back to his growing-up jealousies and bitternesses about the Hales—who had more money, and who made him (or who helped him make himself) feel threadbare. In
Wickford Point
, the narrator, Jim Calder, is a successful purveyor of serials to magazines such as the
Saturday Evening Post, Ladies' Home Journal
, and
Cosmopolitan
. He sounds very like John Marquand. And, because of some subtle social difference between Jim Calder and his Brill cousins—his feeling that he is somehow not good enough for the Brills—he loves them and yet he resents them. He is very conscious, for example, that when he walks about the town where he grew up and went to school, he is addressed familiarly, by his first name, Jim. His Brill cousins, on the other hand, are not treated that way; they are politely addressed as Mr. and Mrs. and Miss Brill. John Marquand, while learning the value of writing from his own experience, was also learning how to use fiction as a means of getting back at all the people who he felt—rightly or wrongly—had misused him in the past.

There is, for instance, in
Wickford Point
the comic character of Allen Southby, whom Cousin Clothilde perpetually misaddresses as “Mr. Northby,” a pompous, tweedy, pipe-smoking Harvard professor who has written a book of criticism and is a take-off on every self-important literary pundit who ever existed. Southby, whose letterhead reads “Martin House Study” and below it, in smaller type, “Dr. Southby,” who quotes Chaucer and delivers profound literary pronouncements, is a man who has become more Boston than Boston in his study pine-paneled with hand-wrought nails, filled with pine-topped trestle tables and old leather-bound books tossed carelessly about. He serves his guests beer in old pewter mugs. His room lacks nothing but a spinning wheel to appear authentically New England, Jim Calder observes sarcastically. And Allen Southby—who is not from Boston but from Minnesota—is not sure whether Jim means that or is being funny. Allen Southby—who high-hatted Jim Calder at Harvard and who, naturally, places Calder's craft at little more than “putting words on paper”—is John Marquand's obvious (perhaps a bit too obvious) attempt
to get back at all the literary and academic critics who refused to take him seriously as a writer. Southby, of course, is punished with Bella.

Allen Southby is probably a composite of a number of stuffy and self-important literary critics whom Marquand had encountered over the years, but there is an indication that he intended the character to parody certain aspects of Edward A. Weeks, who succeeded Uncle Ellery Sedgwick as editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
. Edward Weeks had high-hatted John in Boston during the early days. Like Allen Southby, Edward Weeks, arriving in Boston, had promptly become thoroughly Bostonian, even though—as John wickedly liked to point out—Weeks was originally from Elizabeth, New Jersey. Edward Weeks had not gone to any of the proper New England schools. He had gone to Elizabeth High School and something called Pingry Prep. Weeks had not even gone to Harvard but to Cornell, a college considered only “perhaps” in the Ivy League.

Marquand's feelings about Edward Weeks bordered on the paranoiac. Weeks had a series of lectures which he went about the country delivering, and which was called “Authors at Home”—chatty insights into the private lives and thoughts of literary figures. John Marquand had a fantasy scheme which he always wanted to exercise. In it, he would, under an assumed name, engage Edward Weeks as a lecturer and hire an auditorium. A date would be set, and the topic: “John P. Marquand at Home.” On the day of the lecture, with Edward Weeks on the platform and Marquand as an audience of one in the auditorium, John would sit back in his seat, put his feet up, clasp his hands behind his head, and say, “Okay, Ted—do your stuff!” Alas, he never got up the courage to do it.

There is another writer character in
Wickford Point
, Joe Stowe. Joe Stowe is a writer of good, serious fiction. In a very real sense, Jim Calder is Marquand before
Apley
, and Joe Stowe is Marquand after. In the novel, the two men are best friends. Both are Marquand alter egos.

Some critics have claimed that
Wickford Point
is John Marquand's best novel, and at the time of its publication one reviewer marveled on the book's structure, “like a braided Indian basket, spiraling from bottom to rim, firmly interwoven, but dizzying to follow.” It is indeed a bit dizzying because the novel leaps backward
and forward in time. The flashback technique, which was to become Marquand's trademark to the extent that he was sometimes given credit for inventing it, works better here than in earlier books but is still somewhat creaky. Whatever else it is,
Wickford Point
is certainly John Marquand's most comic novel, with all the disheveled Brills bickering and nattering and accomplishing nothing, yet clinging to their old place like weary barnacles to a rock. And, with the character of Bella the Bitch, who puts men through her like like shirts through a wringer, Marquand proved—to critics who had been observing that his female characters were less successful than his men—that he was capable of creating, and sustaining, a memorable woman in fiction.

Meanwhile, for all his emphatic denials that his
Wickford Point
characters were based on anything more than their author's imagination, Marquand was still somewhat nervous about his Hale cousins' displeasure. He was also, in view of the O'Reilly claim against
Apley
, more than a little lawsuit-shy. So was his publisher, Little, Brown. The O'Reilly suit was still in litigation and showed signs of dragging drearily on for months. John Reed, a Little, Brown editor, suggested to Marquand that he write an article about all the various people, the country over, who had seen themselves in the
Wickford
tribe. Marquand thought that this idea might not only be amusing but also useful. He had in fact picked up at various soirees and cocktail parties in New York a list of people with whom the novel's characters had been identified. John Brill, for example, the Wickford Sage, had been variously spotted as John Greenleaf Whittier, Edward Everett Hale, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Longfellow. Joe Stowe had been similarly recognized as a portrayal of Sinclair Lewis, Sidney Howard, Ernest Hemingway, and Kenneth Roberts.

Allen Southby had been identified as Van Wyck Brooks, along with three Yale professors, and as Kenneth Roberts, and Charles Townsend Copeland. The Brill family in its entirety had been said to be “‘just like' a family in New Hampshire, one in northern Massachusetts, central Massachusetts and southern Massachusetts, also one in Virginia, and is said to be drawn from the Sanger family in ‘The Constant Nymph.'” The Brill boys had been recognized as brothers by a lady in Massachusetts and two ladies in New York,
while Cousin Clothilde had been identified as Edna May Oliver. Meanwhile, a reader had written Marquand to say, “It is not a story of a specialized group of people … but a record of family life that has something in it that all families must recognize as their own.”

To the list of persons in real life whom readers had identified in the novel, Marquand suggested to Reed that he ask some people in the office if they could pick up some more, saying that he thought it would be nice if Reed could work into the publicity this theme of universal application and back it up with the varied identifications. But Marquand wanted to look at the release before it went out, and was concerned that the word “identify” might not be quite the right one. “Resemble” might be better. The lawyers had taught him to choose his words carefully. He incorporated these various resemblances in a nervously humorous piece called “Do You Know the Brills?” which the
Saturday Review
published in April, 1939, and in which Marquand stated flatly, “I can only say, in conclusion, that I do not know the Brills in
Wickford Point
. I know a great many people who possess a few of their peculiarities, but that is all.”

While all this was going on, John and Adelaide Marquand were moving back and forth between 1 Beekman Place in New York and Massachusetts, where finishing touches were being put on the house at Kent's Island, just a few miles down the road from Curzon's Mill—the enemy camp, as it were. It was inevitable that there should be a certain amount of friction between the two places.

There would have been friction anyway, even without
Wickford Point
. Like the Brills, the Hales were always quarreling, in a perpetual if halfhearted way; often you couldn't remember who was quarreling with whom or what the battle was about. Adelaide didn't care for the Hales and said so. She found them entirely too fey and quixotic for her down-to-earth tastes, and shabby gentility was not her Greenwich- and Park-Avenue-bred cup of tea. But she admitted that there were some nice old pieces of furniture at the Mill, and between the three houses—the big Yellow House with its eleven bedrooms, the Red Brick House, and the Mill House that Aunt Greta had fixed up so that it was habitable during the summer—there were a lot of nice old things to pick and choose from.

Adelaide liked nice old pieces. So did John. His success and very
likely his marriage to Adelaide—with her wealth and her Rockefeller connections—had brought out a strong streak of acquisitiveness in his nature, a distinct lust for property and possessions. Now they had a big apartment in New York, and they had Kent's Island. Soon they would have the house at Hobe Sound, then a house in Aspen, then an island rented in the Bahamas, then a second house in Aspen. Adelaide bought houses the way some women buy shoes; she once casually announced to friends that the Marquands owned eight houses. She bought a house in Massachusetts, which she never lived in, simply because it had “nice apple trees.” In their thirst for real estate, she and John had at least one thing in common.

For all these places, furnishings had to be collected. In Newburyport, this seemed easy. Up the road, at the Mill, were certain pieces of furniture that John, over the years—rightly or wrongly—had grown to think of as his own. The Mill, after all, was as much a part of his birthright as it was the Hales'. And so he and Adelaide would make little trips over to the Mill to pick up a tilt-top table here, a candlestand there, a portrait that struck their fancy, or a Chippendale chair. Quite often, however, the Hales, returning to their old summer place from wherever they happened to be, took violent exception to these offhand Marquand appropriations. There were stormy scenes, telephone calls, and trips down to Kent's Island to snatch a portrait off the wall or a night stand away from the bedside. Accusations were hurled back and forth, which Aunt Greta—still the matriarch—did her best to arbitrate. But Aunt Greta was growing old. In
Wickford Point
, Jim Calder suddenly asks about Cousin Clothilde, the Aunt Greta of fiction who holds the discordant Brills together, “Suppose … she dies.” Jim is hastily told not to think about such things; Cousin Clothilde must never die.

In
Wickford Point
, John Marquand wrote, “There was one good thing about the family: at the last moment we could all pull ourselves together and behave quite well.” In real life, however, this would turn out not quite to be the case.

Chapter Fourteen

Early in 1938, George Stevens, the editor of the
Saturday Review of Literature
, approached Conney Fiske to ask her if she would like to write an informal profile of her friend, John Marquand. Conney was delighted with the idea. She was not, of course, a professional writer. Had she been one, she would doubtless not have taken the assignment, for most professional writers are reluctant to write about their friends; candor about a friend is an almost certain means of losing him. But Conney agreed and wrote a piece that was warmhearted, feminine—and somewhat indiscreet. Carl Brandt was given the story in manuscript, read it, and was furious.