The Late John Marquand (24 page)

Carol and John fixed drinks for themselves. Perhaps fifteen minutes later, the telephone rang in the suite. It was Adelaide. She was waiting in the lobby. Where was John? John said, “I'm staying for lunch. I told you so,” and hung up the phone. And that was that Adelaide's reaction was not recorded.

In an effort to keep matters sane and civilized at all costs, John and Carol suggested that the two couples—the Brandts and the Marquands—should all sit down and have dinner together and make peace, if possible. And a few weeks later the four met at the Plaza. John was in his best form, and Carl and Carol Brandt did their best to keep up their end of things. But Adelaide sulked through dinner and would not speak, and the evening was a pronounced failure. At last the Marquands left, and Carl and Carol were left alone.

Carol's love for Carl was and always would be very strong, and she considers him today the most important man—indeed the most important figure—in her life. “It was Carl Brandt who created me,” she has said. The couple lingered over coffee and then ordered champagne. There was an orchestra in the Persian Room, and a dance floor, and they drank champagne and danced to the Plaza's stately dinner music, and it was as though they were two dear friends, once lovers, tied together by bonds stronger than love. Both wanted to keep the “trio,” as Carl expressed it, intact and, most of all, civilized and forgiving, remembering that at each point of the triangle there were children involved, John's five, Carl and Carol's two. Dancing with her husband, Carol said, “And so I guess that's the last we will ever see of Adelaide.”

“It had become, in a very real sense, a
ménage à trois
,” Carol Brandt says. “John was wonderful company. When Carl was sober, we had marvelous trips together. John would make us laugh and laugh. My children loved him too, and they had no trouble seeing how happy John could make both Carl and me. Vicki, who was younger, never thought a thing about what was going on. Carl
junior, being a boy and older, I'm sure was aware of the state of affairs. But it didn't bother him in the slightest. It was a relationship, you see, that's very common, very much an accepted thing in England, though Americans have difficulty understanding how rewarding such a relationship can be.”

Adelaide certainly did not understand it. Nor would she give up. There were nights when she had had too much to drink that she would call up Carol Brandt and scream at her over the telephone. She began a long personal campaign to discredit both Brandts—Carol in particular—with anyone who would listen to her. And so, at last, John was forced to telephone Carol and say, “Look, there's nothing I can say or do. She's my wife; she feels this way; you and I must not see or speak to each other again. I'm sorry.” Sadly, Carol admitted he was right.

When John Marquand was asked to be a judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club, that vast organization that caters to and in some ways dictates the literary taste of America, he was delighted to accept for a variety of reasons. To begin with, Book-of-the-Month Club judgeships are not dealt out lightly, and the position carried with it considerable prestige. Such imposing figures as Dorothy Canfield, Christopher Morley, William Allen White, Clifton Fadiman, and Henry Seidel Canby have all been Book-of-the-Month Club judges. The job carried with it, furthermore, a salary of $20,000 a year, which Marquand really didn't need but which was a sum worth adding to his already comfortable earnings as a writer. With his parsimonious and definitely acquisitive nature, he always seemed to be filling storehouses against the possibility of some future state of poverty. He was the same way with bank accounts from which, having filled them, he hated having to withdraw. But best of all, perhaps, was the fact that the Book-of-the-Month Club gave John a valid reason and excuse to disappear from Adelaide's side, wherever she might be—in Aspen, Florida, or Newburyport—and go to New York for the club's monthly meetings. The highbrow side of Adelaide, of course, regarded the club with a certain disdain, since she felt it pandered to the reading needs of the uncultivated masses. But John immediately saw how the club would open up his life, free him a bit more from the assertive woman who,
on week ends, would scurry about the house saying, “Where's my Sunday
Times?
Has anyone seen my Sunday
Times?
” Copies of the Sunday
Times
always eluded her, even though, as was her habit when she purchased anything, she often bought as many as ten copies of a single issue so that the Sunday
Times
would be close at hand.

And the Book-of-the-Month Club put John in the delightful position of playing critic. Throughout his career John had been the victim of literary judges of one sort or another. Now he was able to mete out justice of his own and to get back at certain of his enemies. Like many writers, John did not enjoy the company of other writers. He shunned literary “sets” and circles, and parties where gatherings of authors were likely to occur. Once, in Italy, his friend Henry James Forman introduced John to a cadaverous man with flaming hair and bloodshot eyes, who Marquand was told was D. H. Lawrence. Afterward, Marquand was asked what he thought of Lawrence. John said, “I think he is a nut.” (Lawrence, meanwhile, asked what he thought of Marquand, said, “I think he is quite mad.”) After meeting Somerset Maugham, who was one of Carol Brandt's friends, John reported to Carol, “I saw your old pansy, Maugham, in Venice. K-rist!”

He was no more charitable in his appraisal of authors whose works came to the attention of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Though by no means a prude, John Marquand was generally uneasy when he encountered fiction that dealt explicitly with sex—particularly when he felt that sex was handled obviously or tastelessly. Of one well-known writer's latest novel, he reported to the club:

He writes with his genitals and all his characters can scarce keep their minds off theirs for a single moment. His women are nymphomaniacs. All his men seem to take two tablespoonsful of Spanish Fly before breakfast. There is more dirty talk in this book about private parts and fornication than almost any I have been privileged to read while a member of the Book-of-the-Month-Club board. However this is what we now term “lusty” and maybe I am undersexed. At any rate the characters are convincing when they can get their minds above their waistlines, which they contrive to do occasionally.

On the other hand, he was a good enough judge of what it took to sell popular fiction to see that the particular novel under
consideration would make a strong selection for the club, and his letter concludes, “Take the book. My objections are old-fashioned and maybe all this thrown-away potency makes me jealous.”

Clearly he relished the role of critic. His appraisal of another novel was:

Here we have a saga of the dear, quaint South, from the turn of the century to the present, full of hillbillies, fiddlers and Bible-thumpers. The first half of it, though it tickled my throat, did not make me vomit. It sounded like a pretty good soap opera that I had heard many times. The second half, when we move forward into radio and into a narrowness less comprehensible than that of the old Scopes trial in Tennessee, made me lose my interest in the whole work. I won't go further with the plot and characters. American readers are too familiar with them both. In spite of its cleanliness and quaintness, it has not the drama, the skill, nor the conviction of the Warren book. I do not think we should take it.

He found the works of William Faulkner unreadable and Hemingway “flat and boring, all on one key.” He did not care much for Robert Penn Warren, John Hersey, or James Michener—particularly Michener. He considered Michener a journalistic show-off and self-promoter who, with no credentials or literary qualifications to speak of, had appropriated as his fictional bailiwick a whole quarter of the globe—the South Pacific, an area about which John felt he knew just as much, if not more. He frequently compared Michener's grasp of the Pacific with that of Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the “old pansy,” Maugham, all of whom John felt had better command of their territory and material than Michener. When Michener's panoramic—and in John's view, pretentious—novel
Hawaii
was submitted to the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1959, John Marquand was vociferously against it. He knew, though, that Michener enjoyed a vast popularity, had also won a Pulitzer Prize, and that the whole subject of Hawaii—which had recently become the fiftieth state—virtually guaranteed the novel a huge success. John was certain that he would be out-voted on the board, and he was. But he could not accept his defeat, and the Club's selection of
Hawaii
as a choice, without complaining that the Club was simply pandering to public taste and the box office.

As for writers whom he admired, he often said that
Madame Bovary
was the greatest novel ever written, and he once privately
admitted that his one secret dream in life was to equal, if not surpass, Flaubert's achievement with that book. Once, to a questionnaire, he replied that the “prose author” he admired the most was Fielding, that his favorite poet was Milton, and his favorite painter Botticelli. But he may not have been entirely serious, because in the same questionnaire he also replied that his idea of unhappiness was “being constantly occupied” and that his favorite hero in life was “the inventor of the safety razor.” He had great affection for the novels of Jane Austen, and once, on a crowded train in Havana, full of people and cocks heading for the cock fights, he was observed thumbing through a copy of
Pride and Prejudice
. But nobody meant more to John Marquand than Flaubert. And when Francis Steegmuller completed his superb translation of
Madame Bovary
in 1958, John was influential in getting the Book-of-the-Month Club to make that work its selection for June-July of that year. Although he was not, as a rule, enthusiastic about living American authors, there were a few that genuinely excited him. He very much admired James Jones's novel
From Here to Eternity
, writing in the Book-of-the-Month Club News that Jones's book had a “whole greater than any of its parts. And the whole rises from depths to magnificent heights with a sweep very often approaching greatness.
From Here to Eternity
is so good that it is in the realm of the impregnable.” He also praised, though more faintly, Herman Wouk's
The Caine Mutiny
, saying, “Unlike so many other contemporary novelists, Mr. Wouk prefers to entertain rather than to advance an ideology, and believes that the best way to bring home a point is by holding his readers' attention. That he succeeds will be quickly apparent to anyone caught up in this rousing tale.”

One of John's greatest joys in terms of the Book-of-the-Month Club, however, was the opportunity it gave him to indulge in his particular style of invective. As he wrote in a memorandum to the club, about Messrs. Swanberg, Thurber, and an author whose name John preferred to forget:

I have spent quite a while with “Jim Fiske” by W. A. Swanberg. The subtitle, “An Improbable Rascal,” strikes me as improbable and also too disagreeable for my taste and perhaps for that of the ordinary reader. The amorality, the greed, and the venality of Fiske, I think,
would finally turn anyone's stomach. I can hardly see the value in a number of hundreds of pages that go into great details regarding his thefts and regarding his horrible associates. I can only feel that in every way the world is getting better and better. When I was a child, Mr. Jay Gould's grandson, Edwin, who went to school with me in New York, asked me to spend a day on the Gould yacht. When my grandfather, who was Mr. Gould's contemporary, heard of it he refused to let me accept the invitation, saying that he would not allow a relative of his to set foot on anything bought by the money of that thieving rascal.

If I had my way, I would not allow anyone to read this book.…

I finished the Ross book on the plane and feel more violently against it than before. It seems to me unduly long and painfully provincial and I thank God I never met Ross if he is like the Thurber profile.

The book will of course be read on Park Avenue, around the Algonquin and in Westport, but I really don't think many people elsewhere will be as fascinated with the New Yorker, interesting and sometimes beguiling though it may be.

Let us face it. The Algonquin Round Table and the whole New Yorker Galerie are a lot of conceited log rollers. Woollcott was second rate and so was Givvs. I'd put Thurber a little higher, and possibly “Andy” White—but not such a hell of a lot. In their proudest days this band of heroes and heroines—including Dorothy Parker—have always stuck in my craw—with their attitudes and silly pranks and their sickening feeling of intellectual superiority.

Actually the New Yorker with its editing and formulas has hurt American letters greatly—and established an intellectual mediocrity worse than the Sat Eve Post. For my money there was only one man in that group who is worth this sort of adulation and that is Bob Benchley. Why in hell not write about him?

To hell with it all. I vote against it—and if my colleagues take it my resignation—long overdue at any rate—is figuratively on the table.…

When I get these photostat manuscripts that smell of ammonia, in order to keep me from dying of asphyxiation, I throw them away page by page. Consequently, to my great joy, I cannot remember the name of the author of the last manuscript you sent me, or even the title of it. This will not be too difficult, however, because it is a short something in epistolary form, dealing with letters written and received by a West Coast—presumably Berkeley or Palo Alto—professor, who
previously was a pugilist and now is a teacher of English who has written a play. This, I trust, will identify it for you.

Now I am as aware as you that I am becoming senile. My mind, I am sure, is somewhere in the Victorian era. I have this scholastic feeling that there should be form, content, and grammar in a piece of so-called literary work. Nonetheless I try to be broad-minded, God knows I try. I try as hard as I can to like young people and the things they do and write. I have a sneaking feeling that this work that I have perused is what may be called hilarious and zany and that beneath its good, clean fun there may be an undercurrent of truth, although I don't know what in hell it is. The only thing I can say for it is that it is short. It could be a part of a dual, but I hope that we have no part of any of it. It is the story of a confused young professor who feels that he is a genius. So, to my amazement, do his friends and associates, and even his wife. Do I give a damn? I do not. Personally I feel that the whole thing is a gross piece of balderdash.