The Late John Marquand

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Though The Unspeakable Gentleman was undertaken more or less as a test, to see whether his skills as a short-story writer could be carried over into a longer piece of work, rather than as an attempt to write immortal literature, Carl Brandt immediately saw it as a marketable property. Because it contained ladies in wigs with fans and bombazine petticoats, Brandt offered it to the Ladies’ Home Journal, which promptly paid $2,000 for serial rights. Marquand later liked to claim that the Journal bought the manuscript because the magazine had, lying around the office, some color illustrations that seemed roughly to suit the text, and because it had a new four-color printing process that it wanted to try out, but none of this was remotely true. Ladies’ Home Journal liked The Unspeakable Gentleman because, for all its faults—such as its atrocious style—it was a fast-paced yarn. Scribner’s also liked it and paid Marquand some more money to publish the novel. All at once John P. Marquand—and in those days he was very casual about how he billed himself, sometimes signing his stories with the middle initial, sometimes without, sometimes simply “J. P. Marquand”—was a popular novelist and, in his mind at least, a rich man, a success. This was in 1922.

  With his windfall, he set sail for Europe, where Christina Sedgwick was traveling with her parents on one of the Sedgwicks’ periodic Grand Tours. John met her in Rome, told her all that had happened, and she agreed at last to marry him. They became officially engaged that summer, after a seven-year courtship, and were married in September back in Stockbridge in a small ceremony at Sedgwick House.

  In retrospect, even the location of the wedding seems ominous. For now that John Marquand was a part of the family, the Sedgwickian influence hung even more heavily over his life. There were, in particular, Christina’s mother and her Uncle Ellery. While steamily romantic stories were pouring out of Marquand’s typewriter, full of slave girls and pirate ships and society girls who were adored by bricklayers, Mrs. Sedgwick did not consider this “writing” at all. In fact, she hardly acknowledged that her new son-in-law worked. She considered his stories cheap pulp fiction and him a hack, and she told him so. Naturally, since none of it appeared in the Magazine, she never read a word he wrote and told him that also, adding to Christina that she hoped she wouldn’t be bothered reading such trashy stuff either. From time to time she would condescendingly say to John, “Why don’t you write something nice for Uncle Ellery?” John, at one point, asked Carl Brandt whether, indeed, anything of his would be suitable for the Atlantic Monthly. Brandt replied that he was sure John could produce an Atlantic Monthly—type story but reminded him that the Atlantic Monthly at the time paid $100 apiece for stories and that it added, if particularly pleased with a piece of work, a silver inkwell as a bonus. Marquand’s stories were by now going for $1,500 apiece to the Post and Cosmopolitan.

  It was a good thing that he was able to command these prices, because Christina—and her mother—had very definite ideas about the manner in which she should live. A cook was needed, and then a personal maid. When the Marquands’ first child, John, Jr., was born a year after their marriage, a nurse was required for the child. A certain amount of entertaining was expected from the young Marquands, and Christina, along with her mother, demanded the usual evenings out with Boston society. The Marquand household very quickly became an expensive one to run. Christina’s mother, in a gesture that was intended to be helpful, bought the couple a house in Boston at 43 West Cedar Street, on Beacon Hill, very much a proper address. John christened his mother-in-law’s present “Gift Horse.”

  Mrs. Sedgwick ran Christina the way she ran everyone else in her life, and John soon discovered that Christina could not make her mind up about anything without first seeking her mother’s advice. Guests were coming for the week end; what, Christina asked her mother, should she serve them for dinner? Mrs. Sedgwick planned the menu and then said, “Have John run down to the grocery store for these things. He’s not doing anything.”

  John, meanwhile, though he had not written anything nice for Uncle Ellery, was writing at full speed for everybody else. He regarded himself as a man writing for a popular market, nothing more. And yet, at the same time, he refused to apologize for any of his work. He considered himself a professional and knew that whatever he chose to write about he could handle ably and well. He found the Sedgwicks’ attitude oppressive. To escape from it, he took a small room in Charles Street and took his writing equipment there. There was no telephone, and when Christina began making interruptive trips to his hideaway he would lock the door and refuse to answer the bell.

  In the early winter of 1926, Christina Marquand discovered that she was pregnant for a second time and became distraught. She rushed to her doctor and announced that she wanted to leave her husband; she wanted a divorce. A council of war was called between Marquand and the Sedgwicks, and Christina’s doctor was called in for advice. An abortion was suggested, but Christina’s doctor said that pregnant women frequently behave in this unstable fashion and that John should stand by his wife and “do his best.” With a frequently hysterical woman, this was not an easy order, and the next few months were turbulent ones. From time to time John found himself inventing excuses to escape from the confusion and disorder of his house. He would go to see his friends Gardi and Conney Fiske, who had a big and comfortable apartment at 206 Beacon Street. The Fiskes’ apartment was ordered and well staffed and, since they were childless, it was admirably quiet. It became, little by little, a second home in Boston for John. By the time the new baby—a girl, whom they named Christina, after her mother—was born, dropping in on the Fiskes had become a habit with him and provided some of the most relaxed moments of his life.

  Equally relaxed were his visits to New York to see Carl Brandt Brandt had begun performing a service for Marquand that he would continue to perform throughout his life—cutting and editing his manuscripts and helping him space the breaks in his stories for serialization. Brandt also gave Marquand editorial help in ways that not only increased the salability of his stories but also their popularity with readers. Marquand tended, for example, to display a certain reticence in his writing where matters of physical love were concerned. A typical Marquand romantic scene would end with the lovers at breakfast the following morning. “I like to close the bedroom door,” Marquand would protest. But Brandt, knowing that readers were inevitably curious about what went on behind the closed door, would insist on a bit more detail. A typical Brandt scribble on a Marquand manuscript would say, “Now, have him kiss her here!” Once John Marquand set off for a meeting with Brandt, saying solemnly, “I swear Carl won’t make me put a girl in this story, because if I put a girl he’ll want a love scene.” But he emerged from the meeting having inserted both the girl and the scene.

  With the birth of little Christina, the expenses of the Marquand household went upward again, and John wrote harder and faster than ever, grinding out stories to pay the bills. When Christina was a year and a half old, she had a serious attack of pneumonia, and she had barely recovered when she was stricken by a second, even more severe, attack. For several days it was doubted that the baby would live. A rib had to be cut and the incision drained, and the child spent most of the winter in Children’s Hospital in Boston, while her father worked long into the nights on a serial called Warning Hill. The Sedgwicks continued to show no appreciation of how hard John was working, or of what he was working for. Scribner’s had published John’s first novel, and a second costumed affair (which had also been a Post serial) called The Black Cargo. But now Little, Brown in Boston offered a thousand-dollar advance for Warning Hill, an exceedingly generous one, Carl Brandt thought, and so did Marquand. He made a major career decision: to leave Scribner’s and make Little, Brown his publisher. Christina’s reaction to this news was of the sort to be expected. “Oh, I’ve heard of Little, Brown,” she said. “I’ve never heard of the other one.”

  With their daughter recovered, things returned somewhat to normal, but not really. As a housekeeper, Christina was hopeless. Weeks
would go by without her sending out the laundry. The wash would accumulate, stuffed in wads, under her bed. She would invite guests for dinner and forget her own invitation, and the guests would come to her door to find her in a bathrobe with her hair in curlers. During the increasingly fewer hours John spent at home, Christina would confront him with domestic problems. The water faucet in the kitchen sink would not turn off, there was no milk in the house for the baby, the maid had not shown up for work, and so what should she do? Once when little Johnny would not stop crying, Christina became very upset and was convinced the child had appendicitis. There could be no other explanation for it. Friends were called in for consultation. John said that he thought the boy merely needed a good spanking. Christina, weeping, begged him to take their son to the hospital. At last a friend went into the little boy’s room and asked him what he was crying about. Rubbing his eyes, little Johnny said that he was crying because he wanted a pair of brown corduroy pants like those a friend of his had worn at nursery school.

  When the Marquands entertained there was usually some sort of crisis which Marquand blamed on Christina’s lack of talent as a hostess. Once, for a party at their house on Beacon Hill, Christina thought it would be an amusing touch to hire an organ grinder and a monkey. She forgot to tell John about it, and when the organ grinder appeared John was furious. He shouted, “Get that music and that man and that animal out of my house!” And once, at a Christmas Eve party, he became so enraged at the way Christina was handling things that he seized the Christmas tree—lights, decorations, and all—and hurled it out a window into the garden of 43 West Cedar Street. Christina went out into the garden to retrieve the tree, came back with a broken branch from which a few ornaments still dangled, and asked forlornly, “Why do we do this?” West Cedar Street quickly became a battlefield; when the Marquands weren’t quarreling the servants that Christina hired were misbehaving. One of her maids went berserk and had to be carried away. John, coming home from his writing office, soon acquired the habit of asking her, “Well, what dreadful thing has occurred at the Marquand house today?”

  To be sure, as those who knew him had become well aware, John Marquand had a way of contriving problems for himself. As a novelist, he loved scenes, and so he created them. Situations were his stock in trade, and so he set them up. This way he could observe and study his characters as they came into dramatic interaction with other characters.

  It was the same thing where his feelings about the Sedgwicks were concerned. He had begun to complain bitterly to Carl Brandt about his Sedgwick in-laws, and Brandt listened sympathetically. What else could he do? And yet, at the same time, there was something about the Sedgwicks that John admired, respected, even envied—a quality and substance of familyhood, a sense of their being all of a piece, things that he himself often felt he had been cheated out of as a boy. He studied the Sedgwicks with a kind of fascination. He would use them novelistically, later on, just as he would the Hales.

  Chapter Seven

  John Marquand first met the woman who would later become Carl Brandt’s wife in the summer of 1926, in Paris. John’s marriage to Christina was then not quite four years old. Carol Hill (as she was then) was a beautiful young woman of twenty-three, ten years younger than John and married to a man named Drew Hill, another writer. It was an era when, or so it seemed, every bright young American took up the pen and wrote—short stories, essays, articles, poems, novels—and everyone who wrote, or wanted to write, carried his ambitions and hopes and, in some cases, talents with him to Paris. The writers and would-be writers perched on the edges of the little chairs in the Left Bank cafés like so many birds after a long flight and sipped apéritifs, smoked Gitanes cigarettes, and talked about writing and other writers. Hemingway had come to Paris, and so had Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Madox Ford. Gertrude Stein was there conducting her salons, James Joyce could be found sniffing around Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, Shakespeare & Company, and it was all very literary and young and Bohemian. Even when it wasn’t, it tried to be.

  John Marquand wasn’t exactly in the category of these other writers, nor did he make any real attempt to join the Paris literary set. If anything, he did his best to avoid that sort of company. For one thing, writers like these rather embarrassed him; they were the ones who wrote nice things for Uncle Ellery. Marquand had come to Paris to get away from Christina and the Sedgwicks, and he was enjoying himself immensely. Christina was also in Europe, traveling with her mother, and there was some vague talk of John meeting Christina and Mrs. Sedgwick at some later point, but it was all very indefinite, and in the meantime John was making the most of his independence. Though his literary star had not risen to the heights it one day would, he was already quite well known, even famous, for his Post and Cosmopolitan stories. He was now earning as much as $20,000 a year, and so he could afford to relax and have a good time.

  Things had already begun to go badly with the marriage. It was Christina’s exasperating sloppiness and carelessness that got most on her husband’s nerves. During his fairly long bachelorhood, he had become a man who required a system and order to things. He liked his shirts, ties, cuff links, studs, shoes in neatly ordered arrangements on his shelves and in his dresser drawers. But Christina, who was inevitably losing something, would paw through drawers and closets in search of the lost objects, disarranging everything, and whenever John encountered another of Christina’s havocs there would be a terrible, bellowing scene.

  John had begun to mimic and mock Christina in front of their friends, just as he would later do with his second wife. He would snarl and hiss out her name, “Christeena.” It was “Christeena doesn’t seem to understand how I make my living” and “Christeena was so busy feeding Johnny an ice cream cone that she drove the car into a tree instead of looking where she was going” and “Christeena thought it would be nice if I interrupted my work to come in and say hello to you ladies. So here I am. Hello.” He would say, “I have to remind Christeena to take a bath, you know. If I didn’t remind her she’d never bathe at all.” He liked to tell their friends that a tradesman had said, “I like Mrs. Marquand. She’s real common.” And he liked to remind everyone that he had had to rent the little room in Charles Street just to get away from Christeena.

  These verbal attacks on Christina both amused and disturbed their friends, who privately wondered how seriously John’s expressions of hostility were to be taken. Though Christina seemed outwardly unperturbed, there were signs that she was beginning to wither under the onslaught of accusations and complaints which her husband leveled at her head, and of hearing all the reasons why he felt she was making his life intolerable. He had begun to make an assertion that he would continue to make throughout his life: “Writers should never marry. At least I should never have.” And Christina once wistfully confided to a friend, “You know, I broke my engagement to him fourteen times. Perhaps I shouldn’t have ever—” and her voice trailed off into silence. And so, by the summer of 1926, there was the first of what would be several separations.

  Christina had begun to say that she thought she was going to have a nervous breakdown—the threat had become one of her few defenses—and the omnipresent Sedgwicks, who were always waiting watchfully in the wings to come to the aid of their beleaguered child, suggested that she join them on the European trip.

  Carol and Drew Hill, meanwhile, were young writers of yet a different sort. Drew Hill had, like John Marquand, worked for a while in advertising, despaired of it, and had come to Paris “to see if I can write,” Paris being the traditional place where one came to find answers to such questions. He had written a few things and sold some of them, but he was having only a limited amount of success. Carol Hill, simply because everyone else was doing it and there seemed not much else to do, had also written a novel. But, because she wasn’t sure quite how one went about such things, she had done nothing about showing it to a publisher. In fact, she had not even let Drew read it.

  Carl Brandt was also Drew Hill’s literar
y agent, and he had written to the Hills to say that John Marquand was in Paris, alone, and might want company or cheering up. Brandt suggested that the Hills get in touch with him. They did, and the three hit it off splendidly from the beginning.

  Marquand had been staying at the Hotel Reservoir in Versailles, and he—who had at that point much more money to spend than the Hills—would motor to Paris and take his new friends out to lunch and dinner at expensive restaurants which they themselves could never have afforded. He took them for drives in the country, for trips on the bateaux mouches, and saw that they were invited to week-end house parties in the country.

  One day, Carol rather shyly mentioned to John that she had written a novel. He insisted that she give the manuscript to him to read, and he took it back with him to the hotel that night. He returned to Paris the next day, told her that he thought the book was certainly publishable, and suggested several editors to whom she ought to send it. Carol Hill’s novel—called Wild—was quickly accepted by John Day and was also sold for magazine serialization. Wild was a tale of flappers in the Flapper Era, written with a what-the-hell, devil-may-care attitude and erratic spelling and punctuation. But it was fast-paced and breezy, and Carol’s views on sex were frank and airy and amusing, and the book eventually sold quite well.

  It irritated Drew Hill a bit to watch his wife’s little book, which she had more or less dashed off, turn her into the more successful writer of the two. But on the whole it was a happy summer for the three friends, and toward the end of it they all motored down to a big house party at a place called Maule. There was a garden behind the house and, in the center of the garden, a mulberry tree whose branches spread so wide that they seemed to embrace the garden, throwing it into a restful late-summer shade. Lunch was in the garden, under the mulberry tree, everyone drank a great deal of wine, and after lunch everyone went upstairs to rest. John Marquand and Carol Hill found themselves alone in the garden, and John confided that he felt depressed. He had been too upset to enjoy the wine. He was worried about Christina, about what was happening to his marriage. Carol said suddenly, “Look, you’ve done so much for me, can I do something for you? Why don’t we sit down and work? It will get your mind off things.” There was a typewriter in the house, and she carried it out into the garden, sat down in front of it, and said, “Now, dictate a story to me.”