The Late John Marquand (12 page)

We watch 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 do 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.

And yet the book made a powerful impact in a lingering and cumulative way. Though the number of copies sold was not outstandingly large, it seemed that these copies were being bought by a different sort of reader than John had been able to reach before, a more sensitive reader, perhaps, better educated and more articulate—not the kind who had found much that was appealing in John's other tales of romance and derring-do. These readers found
John's insider's view of Boston utterly fascinating, and they talked about the book and passed it around among themselves. Publishers used, more than they do today, to distinguish between a mass market and a class market for their books.
The Late George Apley
, ignored by the former, became the darling of the latter. These were people who, just as Marquand was weary of his environment, were weary in 1937 of a national Depression, of a controversial man, Franklin Roosevelt, in the White House, of bread lines and apple peddlers in the streets, of the Spanish Civil War and of John L. Lewis, of the rash of government acronyms coming out of Washington, or reading about Stalin and Hitler in Europe and a Dust Bowl in the Middle West. To these readers,
The Late George Apley
brought, among other things, assurance that somewhere—in Boston, specifically—life went on in an unchanging pattern, generation after generation, with those values and amenities and manners that were specifically upper class still observed religiously, where a world could be found where there was, if nothing else, seemliness and order.

An anonymous critic in the “Notes and Comment” section of
The New Yorker
, in an obituary tribute to John Marquand, wrote of
The Late George Apley
that it was “the best-wrought fictional monument to the nation's Protestant élite that we know of” and added that the book is “the finest extended parody composed in modern America … a detailed Valentine to a city—Boston—such as no other American city can expect to receive.”

In the spring of 1938, when the judges of the Pulitzer Prize Committee announced their awards, the prize for the best book of fiction published in the previous year went to John P. Marquand for
The Late George Apley
.

The title was carried on, through a successful Broadway play and motion picture adaptation with Ronald Colman in the title role. For some reason, Hollywood decided to drop the crucial role of Mary Monahan. Bosley Crowther, then the film critic for the
New York Times
, claimed that
The Late George Apley
had been “botched, but good” by Twentieth Century-Fox. He complained that Joseph L. Mankiewicz's screenplay and Ronald Colman's performance had turned George Apley into a kind of Boston “swell” and had given the story an artificially happy ending. Nonetheless,
the words George Apley—as a name and as a symbol—had entered the American language.

At the time of the announcement of the Pulitzer Prize, Conney Fiske wrote to John in New York to tell him how happy and proud she was for him. She remembers how, in his reply, he told her that he thought that she and Gardi, for their help and moral support throughout the book, should have received the prize instead of him.

The success of
The Late George Apley
taught John a somewhat more bitter lesson. There is, in the novel, an episode some twenty pages long concerning George Apley's efforts to bring a crooked Boston-Irish politician with the not uncommon name of O'Reilly to justice; Apley says, “Before I have finished, this man O'Reilly will face the jury of the criminal court.” In many ways, the episode is hilarious. In others, it is chilling in its exposure of the Boston Establishment's bigotry and anti-Irish, anti-Catholic bias. Quite often, in these pages, it is quite clear that Apley's sentiments about O'Reilly have less to do with O'Reilly deeds than with his faith and country of origin. For example, Apley says, “This O'Reilly cannot be very popular as many persons in every walk of life are anxious to have him punished. I have looked up his record. He went to the Boston Latin School which proves that I was right in always thinking that this school has been losing its grip since my father's time.” Horatio Willing calls O'Reilly “a lawyer and a faithless civil servant,” an “unscrupulous Irish politician,” and—in the course of the twenty pages in question—a great deal else that is either snobbish, unpleasant, or downright insulting.