The Late John Marquand

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Carl Brandt, in the meantime, had been urging John to write another Mr. Moto. There was always a ready market for Mr. Moto books, and Carl knew how much John enjoyed doing them. Plotting a spy-detective story was a thing John liked to do almost as a form of mental exercise. Adelaide had no appreciation of this, and also tended to take a disparaging view of Carl Brandt’s efforts as her husband’s agent. Perhaps she regarded Carl as a bit too money-grubbing. In any case, in her letters to Alfred McIntyre, Adelaide had begun inserting small snide references to the Brandts, as well as to Bernice Baumgarten.

  With the sort of tug-of-war that was going on over his talent and the direction that his career should be taking, it is perhaps surprising that the new Mr. Moto novel should have got written at all. But it did, and, late in 1941, as the serialization started in Collier’s under the title Mercator Island, John told Alfred McIntyre that no matter what inducements Carl Brandt and Bernice Baumgarten might try to press upon him he had no intention of permitting the new serial to be published in hard covers; he considered it a trivial piece of work, done mostly, he said, because Carl needed the money and, with the income tax the way it was, he himself now found himself with less reason to make money. To hell, in other words, with the financial pressures that had driven him. He would stick to writing the things he wanted to write, and he intended to make that crystal clear to Carl. From now on it was to be all for Art.

  One of the financial pressures that may have impelled the new Mr. Moto may have been the fact that John’s and Adelaide’s second child was to be born that year, a son whom they named Timothy Fuller Marquand. Behind John’s determined words we can almost hear the voice of Adelaide Marquand dictating these ultimata. And, almost needless to say, because Carl Brandt could persuade John and could convince him, the serial—retitled Last Laugh, Mr. Moto—was published in book form by Little, Brown in 1942. The story suspends from one of John’s most complex spy plots, and as a result it is almost compulsively readable. It is hardly a perfunctory piece of work but is instead a highly competent thriller in which, almost literally to the last sentence, the reader cannot guess whether Mr. Moto will succeed in his mission or fail, and it sold considerably more copies than Marquand’s other Mr. Moto titles.

  Adelaide had been urging John to write a novel that dealt with the Second World War, or events leading up to the Second World War, in some important way, not in terms of a Mr. Moto character. John, in his late forties, was too old to get into this war, though he had, through his friend George Merck, volunteered to take on a stint of civilian work with the Federal Security Agency in Washington. John and Adelaide had taken a big house in the capital where Adelaide, with her customary zeal, had set about to become a Washington Hostess, giving “interesting little dinners” for prominent government and military people. Among the friends invited down were the Fiskes from Boston, to whom Adelaide confided that she was entertaining a “very top-secret V.I.P.”—so important that Adelaide would not even reveal his name in advance. It turned out to be New Englander (and Harvard man) Vannevar Bush, an old friend of Conney’s. As Conney put it, “And so the little Boston mouse ended up cornering the guest of honor—Adelaide was simply furious.”

  Meanwhile, John’s son, John, Jr., would soon be of military age. Young John and his sister Tina lived officially with their mother in Boston, in her house at 2 Mount Vernon Square, but they often visited their father and Adelaide.

  John had a tendency to let their respective mothers raise his children; having sired them, and having been willing to pay his share of their expenses, he seemed to feel that he had done enough. He either didn’t much care for, or couldn’t understand, children; they made only fleeting appearances in his novels, and he seemed deliberately to be shying away from using them as characters. He had dealt mostly at a distance with his children by Christina, and, as for his children by Adelaide, there was such a difference between his age and theirs that the gap was more than generational; he felt more like a grandfather toward these little things. Seeing his oldest child approach young manhood amid the threats of another war may have made John realize that he had been a somewhat indifferent father.

  John had never liked to talk much about his own war experiences. Battery A had been clubby and fun, and he was always full of border anecdotes. The war was something else again. He did not like to remember it, had pushed it far back in his mind, and when other men began recounting their war experiences John would become silent. There was nothing about the war he had fought in that he found either special or worthwhile, though of course one could not forget it, no matter how one tried. He had used certain of his experiences in several short stories, such as “Good Morning, Major.” But he had never put the war or his feelings about it, and what it meant to him to see the world rushing headlong into another conflict, in a book.

  By the end of 1942, Marquand—feeling middle-aged, even old—was in one of his “low” periods, moods of depression and discontent that would, with increasing frequency, assail him, and which even his love affair with Carol could not really comfort or bring him out of. The East Coast was under a black-out. Adelaide was shedding no joy into his life. The world was at war, and the past, even the years with Christina, had become suffused with an aura of bittersweet nostalgia. He had taken to musing about the happy times—even though they had not really been quite that—with Christina, who was about to remarry. More than half his life was over, and what seemed like the best of it was through.

  It was the early winter of 1943, not one of the brightest moments of the world’s history. His son John had got his orders to report to Fort Devens for military service. John senior had known this was coming, but the actuality of it made him, as he used to say, “very low in my mind.” He often said that he thought a boy should at least be permitted to finish college before going into the Army. “But then,” as he said to Conney Fiske, “this is a tough war, and we all have to take it.”

  It sounded very much like the theme for a novel. Or Novel.

  Chapter Eighteen

  It was, on the surface, an odd collaborative team—John P. Marquand and George S. Kaufman, the Protestant novelist of New England manners and the Jewish ex-shoe salesman, turned successful playwright, from Pittsburgh. But from the moment they were brought together—by Harold Freedman, who headed the Brandt & Brandt Dramatic Department—they got along swimmingly and became close friends. George Kaufman once commented that he liked John because “He’s the only person in the world who can make worse faces than I can.” Their collaboration was to prepare The Late George Apley for Broadway.

  Working with Kaufman, every trace of Marquand’s decided attitude of social anti-Semitism (which was more a part of his upbringing than anything else, in a world where most Jews were considered not “attractive” and were not admitted into the best clubs) evaporated. On the other hand, George Kaufman, as his daughter, Anne Kaufman Schneider, has pointed out, was a Jew but not very Jewish. The Kaufman household was not at all religious, and the only time a rabbi was ever called was “when someone got married, or someone died.” Neither Kaufman nor any of his family were synagogue-going Jews, not even on the High Holy Days. He even wrote as a Christian. Plays like You Can’t Take It with You, and The Man Who Came to Dinner can hardly be said to contain any remotely Jewish themes, and when Jewish characters entered his work it was always in a minor way—a comedy producer, for example, or Hollywood agent. As a person, Kaufman was a reserved, almost austere man with an Old World manner, and Harold Freedman had been right in suspecting that they would get along.

  The Kaufmans had a large and comfortable country house in Holicong, Pennsylvania, in Bucks County, and during the summer of 1943 Marquand spent long periods there, working on the play adaptation with Kaufman. “I write the dialogue and he puts in the punches,” Marquand used to say, which was more or less the case. But it was a true collaboration in which the two men talked out the story line—to overcome the most obvious difficulty, which was to turn a novel composed of a
series of letters, with very little dialogue, into a play in which people moved about rooms and talked—then discussed scenes, wrote dialogue, analyzed it, rewrote. Kaufman, of course, was a master at providing “punches” and getting laughs. The summer of 1943, in fact, was not only one of the pleasantest but one of the most interesting of Marquand’s life, for he had become fascinated with the theater and the people who worked in it.

  The Bucks County days passed virtually without disagreement or disruption until one week end when Adelaide Marquand arrived to join the little group at the farmhouse. Adelaide took a Friday afternoon train to New Hope, and the Kaufmans met her there. The four had a pleasant dinner.

  Beatrice Kaufman, George Kaufman’s wife, liked to sleep late, and on Saturday morning she rang for her maid at around ten thirty and was presently delivered her breakfast tray, the newspapers, and the morning mail. Before arising, Mrs. Kaufman liked to apprise herself of the situation in her household, and she asked her maid if there had been any telephone calls. “Yes,” her maid said in somewhat awed tones, “Mrs. Charles Lindbergh telephoned for Mrs. Marquand.” “I see,” said Beatrice Kaufman. “Have you given her the message?” “Not yet,” said the maid. “Then don’t give it to her,” her mistress instructed. “I will give it to her.”

  Adelaide’s friendship with Anne Morrow Lindbergh went back to their girlhood days when Anne Lindbergh’s family, the Morrows, had an apartment in the same building as Adelaide’s parents, the Hookers. Adelaide’s sister Helen and Anne Morrow had been classmates at Miss Chapin’s School, the Morrows had visited the Hookers frequently at their summer place in Greenwich, and both families’ backgrounds were similarly New York and moneyed. It was through her old friendship with Mrs. Lindbergh that Adelaide had first become involved with Charles Lindbergh and his America First Committee, and after that committee’s collapse with Pearl Harbor the two women had remained good friends—Anne Lindbergh admiring Adelaide’s hail-fellow-well-met quality, her bluster and exuberance and cheerfulness, and also what Mrs. Lindbergh recalls as Adelaide’s “sense of mission.” Adelaide had, Mrs. Lindbergh feels, “The deepest respect, almost reverence, for John and his talent, and she wanted to be one of those women, those heroines, who nourish artists and feel that theirs is the highest of callings.” And Adelaide, no doubt, admired Anne Lindbergh’s delicacy of manner, her gentle and shy nature, so unlike Adelaide’s, and perhaps even envied the Lindberghs’ quite obvious devotion to each other. But in the summer of 1943, with war raging in Europe, the Lindbergh name had become anathema to millions of Americans. He had publicly defamed the Jews, had been associated with Goering, and had been labeled as a Nazi.

  At around eleven thirty, when everyone had gathered downstairs in the living room, Beatrice Kaufman spoke up in her clearest and coolest voice. “Adelaide,” she said, “while you were asleep this morning, Mrs. Lindbergh telephoned you here.” “Oh,” said Adelaide, I’ll ring her back.” “You may call her back if you wish,” Beatrice Kaufman said, “but you may not do so from this house.” There was an awful moment, and then Adelaide burst into tears and ran out of the room.

  A few minutes later she was back, dressed and carrying her suitcase. “John,” she said, “I want you to drive me to the station.” Without a word, John rose and did as she had asked him.

  Later in the afternoon, after John had returned to the house, the two men were standing on the front porch of the house. There had been no discussion of the scene that had occurred, and quite obviously both men were somewhat embarrassed by their respective wives’ behavior, Kaufman for his wife’s insulting a guest and John for Adelaide’s poor taste in leaving the Kaufmans’ telephone number as one where the Lindberghs could reach her. It seemed a rather poor show for both women, and it was hard to see how anyone could come out any the better for what had happened. At the same time, the collaboration had to continue, and the two men could not let their wives’ hostility affect either their work or their friendship. The two stood in silence for a while, and finally Kaufman said, “John, why do you associate yourself with people like the Lindberghs?” Marquand thought a moment and replied, “George, you’ve got to remember that all heroes are horses’ asses.”

  The novel, meanwhile, that John Marquand had been working on was one that had found him in a new and different mood. The Second World War, as a fact, had affected him profoundly and seemed to fill him with a sense of futility and loss over the fighting and bloodshed he had experienced himself in the first war, barely twenty years earlier. He had trouble accepting this second war, grasping its whole point, or even the whole point of his life. In 1943 he entered his fifties, and with it came a deep sense that there was no way to alter or reshape the past. His marriage to Adelaide had become both a private trial and a public embarrassment, and there was comfort to be found only in brief affairs and in the solidity of his love for Carol, upon whom, as she had hoped he would, he had become dependent. Not only could he call her up at odd hours of the day and night and be certain of finding a sympathetic ear to listen to the details of his latest domestic ordeal, she could do other things. “We could completely level with each other,” Carol says. “There was complete honesty between us. He knew he wasn’t the only man in my life, and he never asked to be. I assumed there were other women in his life and wouldn’t have dreamed of raising an objection. For instance a woman he knew needed an abortion. John knew I knew how to cope with problems like that, and so he came to me, and I arranged it.”

  But all the same, the center of his life had become wistful, clouded. There was a line he claimed to have once encountered in James Russell Lowell that he had begun to quote frequently: “The leaves are falling fast that hide our generation from the sky.” And the novel that came from these days would wear a wistful title, So Little Time. In Marquand’s fictive view of himself, he was always two characters—the New England aristocrat, with ancient and distinguished lineage entitling him to membership in the best clubs, and, at the same time, the self-made arriviste who had struggled up from early poverty, through public school in a small town. He could play either role. In his new novel he chose the latter character as his hero, whom Marquand named Jeffrey Wilson. Marquand was also, with this book, flexing his muscles again and attempting still another kind of fiction—fiction on a more serious and therefore perhaps more important level. Books, after all, such as Apley and Wickford Point and Pulham seemed to have achieved their popularity by virtue of their broad comic strokes, and now, in the 1940s, it irked Marquand to realize that whereas once he had been dismissed as a writer of slick detective stories he was now being treated by critics as a writer of light social satire. John Marquand always insisted that he paid no attention to the critics, but he could not help taking in what they said. And So Little Time was in many ways his bid to be placed in the topmost drawer of American novelists, to go beyond, in a sense, the Pulitzer Prize.

  Also, Alfred McIntyre and others at Little, Brown had for a long time been urging John to get away from Boston as a locale, to be less parochial and take in a larger landscape. In this sense too he was in danger of becoming type-cast. So Little Time was to be definitely non-New England; to emphasize this point the novel opens with a number of strongly descriptive phrases taking in the vastness of the New York skyline. Also, from very early on the novel announces its mighty theme: America in the twenty months before Pearl Harbor—the world, really, moving inevitably toward war.

  Jeffrey Wilson was brought up, and went to public school, in the very small town of Bragg, Massachusetts, a place that sounds very much like the Newburyport of Marquand’s youth, and his growing-up years were spent in a run-down old house full of elderly and eccentric relatives who bear distinct resemblances to the elderly and eccentric relatives in Wickford Point. Jeffrey has worked his way to considerable riches and some celebrity as a sort of literary hack—a play doctor who can turn a Broadway dud into a hit by sleight of hand but who himself cannot do a sustained piece of creative work. Jeffrey has an intelligent and
insightful but tiresomely complaining wife, Madge—“You never tell me anything,” she keeps saying—who bears no small resemblance to Adelaide. He is romantically drawn to the beautiful, tough, and brittle actress, Marianna Miller—Carol Brandt—who moves with catlike grace through the ego-ridden jungle of artists, writers, and theater people. Jeffrey also looks wistfully back to the bittersweet days of his youth, and to the golden girl whose presence filled them, his first love from high school, Louella Barnes, for whom it is possible to read Christina Sedgwick. A desperate sense of lost youth, lost time, fills Jeffrey Wilson.

  In the background of his domestic malaise—of his marriage, Jeffrey Wilson comments, “No one is exactly right for anyone, not ever”—is the war in Europe, the reports of buzz bombs and blitzkriegs, and a radio announcer who with gonglike regularity intones, from the crackling set, “This—is London.” Jeff Wilson also desperately wants to understand the war, what is happening over there and why. He has a son who, if America gets into the war, will surely have to go. His wife loves Jeffrey more than he loves her; for him, their love has become perfunctory routine. She suddenly asks him, “You’re not sorry, are you? I mean, you’ve liked it, haven’t you? The children and the country and being here in the winter. You have liked it, haven’t you?” His answer, Pulham-like, is, “Why, of course.…” She also urges him, “Don’t worry about the war. You can’t do anything about it.” And there is the subtheme of the novel: a man’s helplessness in the face of the inevitability of history, the onrush of events, old age, with time running out.