The Late John Marquand

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Conney Fiske encouraged John with both these New England novels—he was writing, after all, about a world which she also knew, perhaps even better than he—and together they would discuss nuances of the Yankee’s character: his sense of probity and thrift, and also his strong feelings of continuity of family as expressed through property, through roots.

  Meanwhile, John’s Mr. Moto stories were achieving huge popularity, and each new tale of the lisping, bowing, and foot-shuffling little detective was immediately being snapped up for movies that starred Peter Lorre. Despite his complaints about the amounts of money he had had to settle on Christina and to support his children, Marquand was becoming a rich writer. This gave him time and leisure to work on the big novel he had been thinking about, the Boston novel. When he had once mentioned it to Christina, her reaction had been, “We’ll have to leave Boston, of course.” Now this had become the novel he and Conney Fiske talked most about during the long and pleasant afternoons at 206 Beacon Street, and which he was giving her to read, chapter by chapter, as it progressed. Its central character was to be a Boston Brahmin, a man not unlike Gardi Fiske’s father. It was a character who would be approached with Conney’s, and John’s, kind of double sight. That is, the hero of the book would be a man whom one would laugh at for his foolishness and pomposity, but whom one would also love for his integrity and fidelity to his code. As a novel, it would be an important departure for John, the most ambitious project he had ever undertaken—a bid, though he did not come out and say so—for greatness. It would be, perhaps, his Pride and Prejudice. As the novel moved along, Conney Fiske could tell that her husband, in all probability, would not like it. It dissected their own world too surgically, mocked it too cleverly. But Conney Fiske sensed that a major book was under way, and her encouragement was therefore steady and insistent. She also sensed Marquand’s extraordinary excitement with what he was doing. It was an excitement he had not experienced before in anything he had written. With this book, which he planned to call The Late George Apley, he was not writing as a journeyman professional, turning out commercial fiction. He was writing with a true creative joy.

  He could not come out and say this either, but he was writing a novel that could thumb its nose at Uncle Ellery. And at Christina.

  Chapter Ten

  Conney Fiske, in a gentle and friendly way, had for a long time been trying to get Marquand to tone down his writing style, to restrain it, to make it somehow quieter and less fervid—more civilized. Along with a tendency to overwrite, he had a tendency to exaggerate. Exaggeration can present problems to a writer, particularly when he is attempting to write humor. If humor is not reined in and kept under control, it can easily fall over the line and become slapstick. Satire, pushed too far, slips the track completely and becomes farce and, in the process, loses every vestige of credibility. Conney objected, for instance, to a detail in one of Marquand’s short stories in which a woman character is described as appearing in a cocktail dress “from one of New York’s most creative couturières” which was “of hand-painted silk with a brilliant motif of violet and red mixed drinks in long-stemmed glasses.” Conney didn’t believe that such a dress could ever exist, except in a novelist’s somewhat bitchy fancy, and, if it did, that it would have been worn by this character, an expensive lady in an exclusive club at a fashionable resort. But John liked the detail, considered it humorous, and kept it, and there it stands in the story today, looking very much as though Conney Fiske had been right. In writing The Late George Apley—to be a long satiric novel—the problem of maintaining balance, of avoiding overstatement, faced Marquand with each new paragraph. Looking back on his struggles with the novel years later, Marquand confessed that he was not sure that he had been completely successful, or that he had fully resisted “a constant temptation to indulge in slapstick farce.” At times his characters, he admitted, “often more than verge on the preposterous.” It is an honest admission.

  Marquand began writing The Late George Apley in 1934, left it half finished until the end of 1935, after the divorce, and completed it toward the end of 1936. It is an extraordinarily subtle and complex piece of work. To begin with, it is constructed as a series of letters between Apley and his children, friends, associates, parents, grandparents, and other relatives. This epistolatory form of construction was, of course, nothing new, but over this device Marquand laid a parody of the memoir form which was most original. He had run across, in and around Boston, memorial testaments written about deceased worthies of the city—long-winded pieces of biographical puffery designed to place the subject in the most flattering possible light and to overlook, even bury, any of his shortcomings or weaknesses. Marquand had been amused by these testimonials—which usually were privately printed, on heavy vellum, for distribution to members of the family following a funeral, and were usually atrociously written—and decided to parody one of these biographies to tell the story of the late George Apley’s life. Marquand picked, for his fictional biographer, the character of Horatio Willing, pompous Bostonian, prig, prude, bigot, social snob, a man who totally lacks perception or humor and who is otherwise without redeeming social value.

  An indication of how successful Marquand was with this device, and how believable a character he was able to make out of the self-important Willing, was that a number of readers—and a few unwary critics—were caught off their guard and deceived into thinking that Marquand was unintentionally responsible for Willing’s jaw-breaking prose style, with its frequent lapses from proper English syntax, and accused Marquand of writing “bad grammar.” They failed to grasp the point that the bad grammar Marquand wrote for Willing was part of the parody, part of the fun.

  One of the hazards of a Horatio Willing, as a device, is that every detail of Apley’s life, every relationship and every event, is commented on by Willing, comes to us through Willing’s consciousness, and is subject to his whimsical interpretation. But the reader learns, early on, that Willing is a man not to be trusted. He misinterprets everything, shows an utter lack of sensitivity about his subject, does his best to conceal an interesting or revealing fact once he has discovered it, and commits other acts of biographical treachery and deceit.

  And yet, it works. Through the smoke screen thrown up around Apley’s life by Willing, we somehow manage to see Apley even more brilliantly and—since Apley is himself a prude, a snob, a bigot—more understandingly.

  There is, for example, the carefully dusted-off account which Willing gives of the young George Apley’s early love affair with a girl named Mary Monahan. Mary Monahan was not only from the wrong side of the tracks, she was also—her name tells the whole story—Boston Irish, and a Catholic. She was, Willing allows, a beautiful girl and “had many of the externals of a young person of a higher position.” In fact, out walking once with George on Commonwealth Avenue she was actually mistaken by some passers-by as a Baltimore society belle. In other words, she could almost pass as true Quality, but not quite. Willing dismisses Mary Monahan—or “the young Monahan woman,” as he prefers to call her—as a “youthful lapse” of Apley’s, something hardly worth taking note of in the book, and points out piously that “anyone at a certain stage in life may be beset by vagaries which must not be considered seriously.” At the same time, from the few scraps of Willing-edited correspondence between George and Mary which he selfishly permits his readers to see, it is quite apparent that theirs was a deep and passionate romance and that Mary, not at all a lapse, was the only great and enduring love of George Apley’s life and his only chance to break away from the rigid mold into which Boston and the heavy fact of Apley-dom were determined to cast him. Willing promises his readers—though how could he know?—that physical sex was never a part of the relationship between Mary and George, and that “if latitude was offered him by the young Monahan woman … he took no advantage of it. This is the one pleasing aspect of an affair which obviously could not be of long duration.” Do we believe Willing? Not for a minute.

  We wa
tch with a kind of horror as Boston and the Apleys move in on George and Mary and take charge of things. George’s letters to Mary grow desperate as he tries to convince her that as soon as his parents get to know her they will love her as much as he does. “Once they do,” he promises, “you’ll find that all the Apleys stick together, and that you will be one of us.” But of course this can never be. Mary Monahan suddenly drops from sight, and the next we hear of George Apley he has been shipped off to Europe for a long rest. His mother writes comfortingly that she had not realized how “overtired” her dear boy was and assures him that when he comes home he shall have “a mother’s love, a father’s love, or sister’s love.” On a grimmer note, his father writes, sending money, to explain that an early return to Boston is out of the question, as is any further discussion of “various matters,” and, employing a familiar type of emotional blackmail, he explains that this is because of the precarious state of George’s mother’s health. “I will not have her upset further,” his father tells him. “You will view matters in quite a different light after a change of scene and will understand your obligations as a member of our family.” George Apley’s sister, Amelia, writes to him to say, “There is one thing which I think you will be glad to know. No one is talking about you. I have told everyone that you were overtired by your examinations and everyone is most understanding.” She adds, “If you see any sort of brooch in Paris or any pin with pearls, I wish you would buy it for me.”

  From this point in the novel onward, the clamp of Boston conformity closes relentlessly upon George, and every ounce of rebellion is squeezed out of him drop by drop until he becomes what he was predestined to be: another Boston Apley. In the meantime, the Mary Monahan episode—which consumes scarcely half a dozen pages in the text—throws the entire balance of the novel into sharp perspective, making the reader see the aridity of George’s eventual marriage, the painful difficulty he has in understanding his children, the slow coming to grips with an awareness that his life, taken out of its Boston context, may have very little meaning, his agonized grasping at straws at the end for something—family, friends, duty, tradition—that will make it all have some sense. It is, all in all—despite the richly humorous details of Boston life observed in the process—a journey of heartbreak that we are watching unfold. And the omnipresent biographer, Horatio Willing, is there to congratulate Apley on every disappointment and rub his hands on the occasion of each defeat. The more we loathe Willing, the more we admire and sympathize with George Apley for being able to carry on, with as much dignity as he does, in such a world.

  If the novel has one flaw it is perhaps that the reader is never quite convinced that Willing is writing Apley’s biography with the endorsement—at the specific urging, in fact—of Apley’s son, John. Through the pages of the book, John Apley emerges as a very up-to-date, intelligent young man. At the outset of the book, in a letter appointing Willing as his father’s biographer, John Apley says he hopes Willing will tell his father’s story straight and true. “My main preoccupation is that this thing should be real,” John Apley tells Horatio Willing. It soon turns out that Willing is a man of demonstrated dullness, obtuseness, and biographical inability. Couldn’t John Apley have found someone better for the job? Of course if he had there could have been no book, for Horatio Willing is as essential to the success of the novel as George Apley.

  In an introduction to a new edition of The Late George Apley that was published in 1956, John Marquand reflected that “the writing of this novel represented for me a species of personal revolution. I was obviously weary of the many inhibitions which were placed on all writers of salable fiction twenty years ago. I was also weary of many of the restrictions of my environment—a phase of living with which most of us have coped at some time or other. Besides, I like to think that in an exacting literary apprenticeship I had gained a degree of technical skill and maturity that made me wish to move to a new writing area.”

  When, in the autumn of 1936, Marquand had come close to finishing the novel, and when Conney Fiske had read it and pronounced it excellent, Marquand sent off the manuscript to the New York offices of Brandt & Brandt. What happened next almost cost him his friendship with Carl and Carol Brandt. The first person in the office to read the manuscript was a young woman named Bernice Baumgarten. Miss Baumgarten—in private life she was the wife of the novelist James Gould Cozzens—had started out in the Brandt office as a secretary, had been elevated by Brandt, and was rapidly gaining a reputation in her own right as one of the brightest and toughest literary agents in New York. Brandt had developed great respect for her judgment. Bernice Baumgarten read John Marquand’s venture into “a new writing area” and was dismayed. Her immediate reaction was that the book was unpublishable. In all fairness to Miss Baumgarten—who has since moved to pleasant retirement in Florida—she probably could simply not understand the book, and what she could understand she could not believe. Her own background was middle-class-Jewish New York. Upper-class life on Beacon Hill in Boston was as remote from her experience as life on Mars. At the same time, she had been helping John Marquand get top prices for his fast-paced serials and stories of war, romance, and Japanese detectives. The Late George Apley, she felt, was too leisurely a tale for Marquand’s already large audience to accept. His readers would not only be bored with it but infuriated by it. The book was simply too much of a departure from Marquand’s standard for Bernice Baumgarten to swallow. She took the manuscript to Carl Brandt and outlined her objections to it, which were vociferous and heated.

  Brandt read it next, and then Carol. Both Brandts—Carl more so than Carol—liked the book better than Bernice did. But they too were somewhat baffled by it, and neither saw in it any sales potential. Again, for them, it was a long way from anything they had experienced—Carl who had grown up in the South, Carol in suburban New Jersey. And it seemed such a violently revolutionary change for John. If he wanted to alter his literary style, did he have to do so as drastically and suddenly as this? Wouldn’t he be wiser to work up to something like this gradually?

  Next, John wrote to Alfred McIntyre at Little, Brown:

  The last two months I have been working on a thing which I have often played with in the back of my mind, a satire on the life and letters of a Bostonian. I have now done some thirty or forty thousand words on it, and the other day showed it to a friend whose literary judgment I greatly respect, who feels it is a great pity for me to waste my time in going ahead with it. I suppose the most damning thing that can be said about the whole business is that I, personally, have enjoyed writing it, and think it is amusing, and think that it is a fairly accurate satire on Boston life. I certainly don’t want to go ahead with the thing, however, if you don’t think it holds any promise, and is not any good. Besides this, I do not, for purely artistic reasons, feel that the thing can be helped by any great changes such as injecting more plot, or by making the satire more marked. In other words, if it is not any good as it stands, I think I had better ditch it and turn my attention to something else. As this is the first time in a good many years that I have been in a position to write something which I really wanted to write, I naturally feel bad about it. I know you will tell me frankly just how it strikes you, and its fate rests largely in your hands. Tell me quickly.

  McIntyre told him both quickly and frankly, “John, I personally think it is swell. I can’t tell you whether it will sell more than 2,000 copies—it may be too highly specialized. But by all means, go ahead with it!”*

  Privately, others at Little, Brown had doubts about the undertaking. If readers outside Boston would find the book mystifying, readers in Boston would be mad as hell. The novel seemed to poke fun at Boston. The gentry who lived on Beacon Hill would certainly be offended. So without doubt would the Boston Irish, and their church, over the depiction of “lower-class” Mary Monahan.

  Gently and tentatively a feeler went out to Marquand: If, he was asked, he really wanted the novel published, wouldn’t it be wise to d
o so under a pseudonym? John was outraged and deeply hurt. (Over the years, the hurt would continue to rankle. Marquand was never sure just who first made that suggestion. He rather suspected Carl. Many years later he claimed in print that it had been “an officer of Little, Brown.” If so, it could only have been Alfred McIntyre. At the Brandt office, a belief persists that the person who suggested the pseudonym was Bernice, but Bernice is certain she never made such a suggestion, though she does remember being “extremely worried” about the book. As time passed, it became something that John and Carl, by tacit mutual agreement, never talked about.)

  The Late George Apley was published early in the spring of 1937—not without a certain amount of nervousness—above the signature of John P. Marquand, as he had insisted. The Saturday Evening Post, which bought the novel for serialization (George Lorimer was one of the book’s earliest supporters), printed a cautious disclaimer with the first installment, warning its readers that they would not find this the usual Marquand fare. There was, as it happened, no great reaction—no wave of critical acclaim or of admonition. If anything, the critics tended to overlook the size of John Marquand’s literary step and to underrate the book’s importance. In Boston, there were a few bristling reactions from Irish lay Catholics and a few scolding comments from the Catholic press and pulpit. And, on Beacon Hill, there were some disgruntled mutterings that John Marquand had been “a traitor to his class.” Gardi Fiske tended to take this view of his old friend’s book and privately confessed that he hadn’t cared for it (there was a good deal of Gardi in Apley), while Conney Fiske took pains to keep the book from such as her Uncle Wells and Gardi’s father, Andrew Fiske, who might easily find too much of themselves in the characters. In its hardcover edition, the book sold scarcely more than 50,000 copies—enough to make it reach the best-seller list, but several of Marquand’s other titles had sold better.