The Late John Marquand

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  JUST HEARD THAT YOU PLAYED TOO MUCH GOLF. HAVEN’T I TOLD YOU THAT WE ABE BOTH IN OUR DECLINING YEARS. WE SHOULD DECLINE SERIOUS ATHLETICS. ASK ADELAIDE OR MISS BAKER TO LET ME KNOW ANYTHING YOU WOULD LIKE OR WANT DONE. HAPPILY COME UP TO SEE YOU SHOULD YOU WISH IT. THREE WEEKS VACATION AWAY FROM THE WORLD SOUNDS WONDERFUL TO ME. KEEP EM FLYING KID. LOVE

  CARL

  PART THREE

  The Ending

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Naturally John held Adelaide fully accountable for the heart attack. There had been no real easing of tensions between the embattled partners in this failing marriage which, at this point, had managed to survive for sixteen years. So bitterly did John feel about Adelaide now that he left instructions that she was under no circumstances to be admitted into his hospital room, and, when it was possible for him to be moved back to the house at Kent’s Island, the servants were ordered to keep Adelaide off the property. Adelaide was in the meantime off buying that new house for the family at 1 Reservoir Street in Cambridge. But there had been other “environmental stresses” on John than Adelaide. Just a year earlier, Christina had died of cancer. Though they had been virtually estranged, there was, when John learned of her illness, a tender meeting at her bedside and a reconciliation of sorts.

  To ease the tedium of the long recuperative period, Stanley Salmen arranged to have a series of microfilmed books delivered to John’s hospital room. These could be projected on the ceiling above the hospital bed, while the patient lay immobile, and the “pages” turned automatically. In this fashion, John caught up with such titles as Drums Along the Mohawk, The African Queen, and Abigail Adams. After three weeks in the hospital and away from all visitors, John was allowed to get out of bed and walk back and forth across the room three times a day. Adelaide and the two younger boys were returning to Aspen, and John had begun to make plans to return to Kent’s Island with Ferry for company. Later in the autumn, if all went well, he wanted to take a short holiday at some quiet place with Carl and Carol Brandt.

  Of his five children, John had always got along best with the two girls, Tina and Ferry; with Tina off and married, John had become devoted to little Ferry. He loved to tell stories about her. Once, he told Herb Mayes, Ferry had used a dirty word in front of him and had waited to see what its effect on him would be. John had told her to get a pencil and a piece of paper and said, “I know as many dirty words as you do. I know more of them than you do. In fact, I know all of them. Now, I am going to tell you all of them, and you are going to write them down.” He then told her all the dirty words, and she wrote them all down. John said, “Now, if I ever hear you use one of those words, you’ll wish you’d never been born.”

  He considered Ferry a particularly bright child and, remembering how his old aunts at Newburyport had drilled the scriptures and the classics into him as a youth, he once said to Ferry, “I’ll give you twenty-five dollars if you’ll read the Bible, let me ask you ten questions about it, and answer them correctly.” Ferry agreed, and some weeks later came to him and told him she had completed her reading and was ready for the questions. John composed ten reasonable questions, and she answered them all correctly. John gave her the money and then said, “Now that you’ve read it, what did you think of the Bible as a reading experience?” She said, “Daddy, I hate to tell you this, but I think most of it is pretty crappy.”

  The sheer fact of the heart attack was in itself a terrible shock for John, bringing with it as it did whispers of mortality and reminders that there was, indeed, so little time. But John did his best to face it with good spirit. One of his Newburyport neighbors, calling at Kent’s Island soon after John’s return home, reported that after a few minutes’ talk John had suddenly leapt out of bed and, in his pajamas, had seized an antique sword that hung on his bedroom wall, unsheathed it from its scabbard, and, striking a John Barrymore pose, announced in his booming voice, “Death—thus do I defy you!”

  Some months later, when he was able to get down to New York, novelist Louis Auchincloss recalls meeting Marquand at a party at the Thomas K. Finletters’. John was back in his old form, swinging his glass in his hand as he entertained his audience, holding forth on what he called “the lack of taste and reticence” in younger American writers. A few minutes later, he was talking about his weeks in the Newburyport hospital and how, as part of his therapy, an abdominal massage had been prescribed. His nurse, John confided, had whispered to him during the procedure, “How lucky I am to be able to manipulate the lower abdominal muscles of a man like you!” One of the guests at the gathering was the New York grande dame Mrs. August Belmont. When Marquand had finished this anecdote, Mrs. Belmont inquired, “And where, Mr. Marquand, was the taste and reticence in that remark?”

  Carl and Carol Brandt had, in the meantime, made their autumn trip to see him. They had gone to the Ritz, and the visit had included the memorable guided tour of Adelaide’s house in Cambridge, the house John swore he would never inhabit. But Adelaide was stubborn and, perhaps more than anything else, wanted to be Mrs. John P. Marquand. John continued to ask her to give him a divorce, but she would not, and now, after his recovery, there were tearful entreaties and begging letters; they must, she insisted, try to save their marriage. And so John once again relented and moved into 1 Reservoir Street, where life became more chaotic and destructive than ever before. Lillian Hellman recalls one strenuous evening:

  “I had gone up to Boston, to lecture as I recall, and there was a party afterward and both John and Adelaide were there. I had met him only once before, a number of years earlier, at the George Kaufmans’ house, when the two were working on ‘Apley.’ I hadn’t liked him much that first time. He seemed—I don’t know, rather snippy. I had just come back from Russia, and everybody was asking me about my trip, and I felt that Marquand rather liked the center of the stage and this time he wasn’t getting it. Anyway, this second time in Boston he made a great fuss over me, and I enjoyed that, and that made me like him better. He insisted that we leave the party and go back to their house in Cambridge, and so I did. It was a hideous house. It completely bewildered me. It was hideous in the most hideous way, as though it had been deliberately made hideous—hideous on purpose, as though the people who lived in it had worked to make it as ugly as possible, and thought that this made it cute, or amusing. It didn’t. The living room was like a huge, dark Victorian ballroom. Upstairs, there was a bathroom with a huge sunken bathtub with steps going down into it. John, showing me the house, kept saying wasn’t it dreadful, wasn’t it awful?—and this disturbed me, puzzled me. The evening left me with so many unpleasant impressions. One of the little boys, I forgot which, was running about. Adelaide was drunk. She seemed just—a slob. John insisted that we go and wake up Ferry, though it was quite late, after midnight. He said that Ferry had just read The Children’s Hour’ and would be so disappointed not to meet me, though I’m not sure I believe that. We went up to Ferry’s room, and I remember that Ferry had written on her wall, ‘Down with God, Up with Allah!’ and that amused me. It was quite clear that John was enchanted with Ferry. She was twelve or thirteen. I kept having the feeling that Ferry was being used somehow in a power struggle between John and Adelaide. It was a very unpleasant evening, and I came away with the impression of terribly unhappy people, leading crazy lives, in that demented house.”

  It was strange, in the case of the Cambridge house, how as Adelaide herself deteriorated so did her taste in interior decoration. She had taken their first apartment, at 1 Beekman Place, and done it tastefully and beautifully, filling it with fine old English and American antiques, turning it—many of their friends thought—into one of the prettiest apartments in New York. But later had come the Hobe Sound house, furnished with maids’ furniture because she thought it was “cute.” “Cute” and “cunning” were two of her favorite words. And now there was this monstrosity at 1 Reservoir Street, which, indeed, she did seem to find cute in its monstrousness. Carol had helped John decorate several rooms of the ever
growing Kent’s Island house, and Adelaide, on first seeing Carol’s touches in the Kent’s Island entrance hall, had exclaimed to Mr. Berry, one of the caretakers, “It looks just like the anteroom to a whore house!”

  The Book-of-the-Month Club, in the meantime, meant more than an occupation, a salary, and—as he discovered after the heart attack—a welcome source of free medical insurance. It was a consolation in itself, for it helped keep his mind off more depressing matters. John loved to read, and he loved the monthly meetings, which were always stimulating and convivial—bright people, good conversation, in pleasant surroundings, always including drinks and lunch. The meetings were held in the big handsome office of the board chairman, the late Harry Scherman, which overlooked the Hudson River to the west and the towers of Manhattan to the north; oysters on the half shell were served during the “R” months, and there was always a good wine with the meal. The other judges and officers—Dr. Henry Seidel Canby, Clifton Fadiman, Amy Loveman, Christopher Morley, and Meredith Wood, the president of the club—provided a perfect audience for John’s mimicry and wit, which ran to the caustic and derisive and was thus at its best when John was decrying a book of which he thought little. He had a particular loathing for costumed or bosomy melodramas, where the men carried flintlocks and the women wore bombazine or poke bonnets, and he detested reading about cheerful peasants and cherub-faced children. “Why, they’re all so goddamned healthy it’s positively painful!” he would cry, swinging his glass in circles and twisting his face into an expression of utter revulsion. John Mason Brown once described the performances of his fellow judge:

  Others might review a book in reviewers’ terms. Not he. His opinions often took the form of snatches from spoken novels, complete with improvised bits of dialogue, in the manner of the writer being discussed, emphasizing his merits or his weaknesses.… With John overstatement was a game which all of us at the Book-of-the-Month-Club looked forward to having him play. John would moan with outrage. His right hand would reach for his chin and swing his head to one side in agony. His blue eyes would freeze with mock anguish. He would howl to the deity. His contempt, part feigned, part real, would erupt into the brief standbys of eloquent dismissal. These outbursts were grand sport and play-acting of which W. C. Fields would have been proud.

  Dr. Canby, the chairman of the panel of judges, always tried to lead their discussions, but sometimes it was difficult when John’s demonstrations and imitations had the other judges choking on their cutlets and gasping with laughter. “Now, John,” the scholarly Dr. Canby would say crisply, “you’re being too funny.”

  The Book-of-the-Month Club not only got John away from Adelaide; it got him away from his study and his typewriter and what he always called the writer’s “lonely world” of fiction and out into the world of living human beings. There was more to the Book-of-the-Month Club job than reading and attending meetings. The judges also frequently had to deal personally with touchy and temperamental authors, and often these dealings required diplomacy and tact, both of which John was usually capable of summoning. When Allen Drury’s first novel, Advise and Consent, was submitted, the judges liked the book very much but felt that it was over-long and could be improved by cutting. It fell to John to explain the club’s feelings to Drury and to try to get him to do some blue-penciling. John invited Drury to his house in Pinehurst for the week end and, over the course of it, mentioned several places in the novel where the club felt cutting should be done. Drury promised to think this over. A few days later, Drury wrote to John, thanking him for the week end but saying, sadly, that he simply could not cut his book. Nonetheless, he added, it was good to know that his book had come so close to being a Book-of-the-Month Club choice. John loved to tell that story because Drury’s book already was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection—and would be with or without the cuts—though Drury hadn’t realized it.

  Not all such encounters had pleasant endings. When Edna Ferber’s big novel about Texas, Giant, came to the club, the judges admired the book but again felt strongly that it badly needed cutting. Miss Ferber was a novelist who had already gained considerable fame in literary circles for her temper, temperament, and knife-edged tongue, and so it was decided that the two best-looking male judges should arrange to call on Miss Ferber at her Park Avenue apartment to apprise her of the club’s views and try to persuade her to the club’s position. Without question, the two males would not be bearded Morley or stringy Canby. That left Fadiman and Marquand.

  The two men made their appointment with Miss Ferber and, after being ushered into the formidable presence of the authoress and spending twenty minutes or so in polite social chitchat, brought up, as delicately as either man knew how, the subject of cutting. Miss Ferber flew into a rage in which she attacked not only the Book-of-the-Month Club but the two men themselves, their talents as writers, their tastes as judges, and their intelligence as people. Finally, after this had gone on for some time, it all became too much for John, who rose, stiffly and formally, and said, “Miss Ferber, I don’t see anything to be gained by our staying here any longer. You’ve been kind to receive us. The only thing I might add is that I, unlike you, in my professional career, have always been grateful, even if I did not accept their advice, to anyone who took the time and the trouble to read my books and give me any comments and criticism when the books were in manuscript form.” The two men then departed.

  Edna Ferber eventually did make a few cuts in her manuscript, though nowhere near as many as the club wanted, thereby allowing John Marquand, when he told the story, to indulge himself in the quip that “We got just so far and no Ferber.”

  And of course, at the end of the day, there was always the possibility of dinner with Carol at the St. Regis. “During the years of our affair, I think John and I occupied every civilized suite in that hotel,” Carol says now, with a little smile.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  During the months following the heart attack, John devoted himself to the pleasant and not very wearing task of selecting and gathering together certain of his shorter pieces, which Little, Brown wanted to place in a book under the title Thirty Years and which were to provide a catholic sampling of an author’s work over the span of roughly a generation. Most of these pieces—fiction and nonfiction—had been previously published in a range of magazines, but John also wanted to include some of his unpublished writing—his Harvard commencement address, for example, and one of several papers he had prepared for oral delivery before Newburyport’s Tuesday Night Club, a venerable literary institution of that city. John took his membership in the Tuesday Night Club with great seriousness and worked on these papers, for which he was paid nothing, with as much care and diligence as he did on his novels. He also took a certain amount of quiet satisfaction from the fact that the club’s meetings were frequently held at the High Street house of old Mr. L. P. Dodge, the Newburyport worthy to whom John had come years ago to plead for—and to be refused—the Harvard Club scholarship. John enjoyed the neatness of such little ironies.

  Putting together Thirty Years was a somewhat unsettling experience for John Marquand, providing him as it did with the not altogether welcome opportunity to reread a great deal of his own work that had been written almost a generation earlier. He told Stanley Salmen that he honestly believed he had become a better writer and craftsman over the years, and that many of his early stories were “brash and immature.” Some of the early material struck him as downright awful. It seemed to him, he told Salmen, that he had written too many stories about Honolulu, about China, and about U.S. Army generals. Perhaps, he suggested, it would be helpful if someone else could write an introduction or foreword to the collection, in which it could be pointed out that this was not intended as a gathering of superb stories and articles but, instead, a roughly chronological depiction of a writer’s development and growth. He suggested that his friend and fellow Book-of-the-Month Club judge, Clifton Fadiman, might be willing to write such a preface. To write it himself, Marquand
pointed out, seemed a touch “ungraceful.”

  Salmen approached Fadiman, who was delighted with the idea. He not only agreed to write an introduction, adding, “It can be long or short, casual or friendly or more seriously analytical—whatever you wish. Naturally, one kind of introduction will take more time and effort than another,” but he also, as a former editor (at Simon & Schuster and later at The New Yorker), had a number of specific criticisms of the various Marquand pieces to offer. One story, for example, he felt was “too forced,” another “just a little too slight and, though charming, a bit conventional,” and of another he said, “Don’t pay any attention to me—stories of Southern honor and chivalry just bore me; I prefer John in his more modern moods.” The controversial Holiday article on Boston Fadiman was less than sanguine about. But John—perhaps simply to spite Harry Sions—was insistent that it be included; it was his way of asserting that he was proud of the article, regardless of what anyone said.

  Perhaps Fadiman’s most important contribution was to propose a pattern for the book—that is, a scheme by which the articles and short stories could be arranged that would not be chronological, in terms of when they were written, but instead under categories such as “School and College,” “The Wars,” and “Local Flavor.” This idea was a great help in pulling the book together. Fadiman also wrote an introduction that was both kind and candid, pointing out that many of the stories were “tailored to meet the needs of the market,” and that the ending of “The End Game” might be a “secretly ironical bow to the bright tin divinity of the Happy Ending.” Fadiman also noted the “laboratory accuracy” with which Marquand’s fiction noted “a hundred tiny differences of caste and class,” and praised the “absolute rightness” of Marquand’s dialogue, asking, “… can any contemporary American novelist other than Hemingway touch Marquand for dialogue?” Fadiman was also the first critic to point out that what lay behind the celebrated clear and honeyed and unrushed Marquand style was perhaps what lay at the heart of his great appeal: It was his special way of mixing merriment and melancholy, of taking nostalgia and a bittersweet contemplation of temps perdu, and adding grace notes of humor, of being mocking and yet tender toward a past when snows were probably whiter and loves were certainly younger and stronger. This is the particular Marquand emotional stance and the secret of his charm. As Fadiman put it, “He is at once outsider and insider. He is the sympathetic dramatizer of that moment of doubt—the doubt as to whether outer or inner security necessarily coincide—which, though it comes to all of us, is the particular gadfly of the gentility.”