The Late John Marquand (26 page)

John was also interested in Mayes's relationship with Sinclair Lewis, and in what Mayes thought of Lewis as a writer. John found Lewis's antics amusing; Herb Mayes found them appalling. John was shocked to hear how Lewis had disrupted a dinner party at Herbert and Grace Mayes's house by picking a fight with Lester Markel, editor of the Sunday
New York Times
, and of how dreadfully Lewis treated his agent, Edith Haggard. Mayes had also been with Lewis one evening at the Stork Club when Lewis, in anger at a waiter, had picked up a knife and smashed a glass with it John found it hard to believe that his friend could be capable of such behavior. At the same time, John could not understand why Mayes published the works of Booth Tarkington, a writer whom John actively disliked. John considered Tarkington a literary traitor since
Tarkington had written—and Mayes had published—a short story in which, very thinly disguised, John's friend George Horace Lorimer, Lorimer's wife, and Lorimer's secretary appeared as the central characters.

Sometimes the story ideas the two men discussed—usually over chatty lunches in the then all-male Oak Room of the Plaza—ended up being written by John, and sometimes the ideas came to nothing at all. Other ideas John mentally filed away and did not use until years later. One idea that Mayes was particularly fond of involved a railroad man who begins as a laborer and works himself up over the years to the presidency of the line, becoming a magnate. But the time comes when he decides that there are more important things in life than money and success, and he will put it all aside and devote himself to art, music, literature, and travel. The kernel of the idea, however, is the hero's discovery of all the things that make his retirement from business impossible—the banks that have placed their confidence in him by making huge loans which are likely to be called if the hero leaves his job; the inept son and son-in-law whom he has brought into the business with him, and who are earning their livelihoods only by virtue of his support; the numerous people at the executive level and all the way down who trust him, whom he has brought along with him up the ladder of success, and who will be likely candidates for removal once he departs. It was a story, in other words, which with Marquandian irony would tell of a man trapped by his possessions, whose very success resulted in his failure to achieve his ultimate objective, which was freedom from responsibility, and who, having gotten everything he wanted, had also lost everything. It did sound like a Marquand theme. But, after Mayes had finished reciting the idea, John thought a moment and then said, “Sounds like a good idea. Why don't
you
write it?” Mayes said, “I'm not a writer.” John said, “Well, I'm not a railroad man.” “It doesn't
have
to be a railroad,” Mayes persisted, “it could be any sort of big company.” But still John shook his head, and that, for the time being, was that.

One day at another of their lunches Mayes asked John whether he played chess. John said that he did, a little, and Mayes asked him if he would consider an idea Mayes had for a story about a chess player. John did not seem immediately enthusiastic, but he
said, “Okay, let's hear the idea.” Mayes's idea was to make the hero one of the men who make a living of sorts playing chess and checkers in booths at Coney Island. It was to make this man the son of a West Point family, a family in which all the boys, from the moment they were able to toddle, were taught to play chess, and in which this had been going on for generations and in which ultimately all the men grew up to be generals or at the very least colonels. The hero, however, would be an escapee from this super-regimented, Army-oriented family, who hated West Point and, finally disowned by his family, had wound up playing chess in a booth at Coney Island.

John, mildly interested in the idea, said that he had never been to Coney Island and had never realized that there were chess players there who played games for a fee. Mayes said that John didn't have to go as far as Coney Island to find such men, and that, if John liked, they could wander after lunch to the vicinity of Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street, where chess partners were for hire in various penny arcades as well as in unoccupied store fronts. John agreed, and after lunch the two men set off for this fairly rough part of Manhattan and spent the better part of an hour watching the chess players there.

Months went by, and Mayes heard nothing from John until one day when Mayes happened to be lunching at the St. Regis with someone else, and John Marquand came into the dining room with a group of people. John stopped at Mayes's table and, after greeting him, said, “Oh, by the way, I've finished that chess story. I'm checking on a few final details in it, but you'll have it within the next few days.”

The story, when it arrived, was called “The End Game,” and when Mayes had read it he was overwhelmed and immediately bought it. It is very likely the best short story John ever wrote. And it is also a John Marquand novel in almost perfect microcosm. In it can be seen, in a kind of miniature view, nearly all the elements of the Marquand craft, the fictional devices that made him, if nothing else, a superb technician, particularly in his handling of time. Henry Ide, the story's narrator and main point-of-view character, muses at one point about “the task of piecing together out of allusions and indirections the details of someone's life.” This is precisely
what the story sets out to do in eight distinct episodes, each set at a different point in time and each of about equal length, in the life of a seedy-looking and tough-talking chess player who sits in a Sixth Avenue penny arcade playing chess for twenty-five cents a game.

The story opens in the fictional present—it was written in 1943—at a New York cocktail party where a number of the guests, including Henry Ide, had had professional or military experience in China before the war. At the party, Henry meets a Colonel Blair, also an Old China Hand and soon due to head back there, and the two men admire an antique ivory chess set in their host's apartment and sit down to play. Rather arbitrarily, the name of a Chinese General Wu is mentioned, and established as a name that will have some significance in the story later on, and as the two men talk Henry keeps thinking that Colonel Blair reminds him of someone else, and the details of the Colonel's life that he reveals seem strangely familiar. At last Henry realizes what it is: The Colonel must be the brother of Joe, the chess player Henry met and played with months ago in the Sixth Avenue arcade. Colonel Blair is stunned; the family has not seen his brother Joe for years. Henry Ide offers to take the Colonel to the penny arcade and find him, much as Herbert Mayes offered to show the chess players to John Marquand.

The story now moves smoothly, in a flashback, to the moment when Henry Ide first encountered Joe, when Henry, lonely and late at night, wandered into the neighborhood of the penny arcade and sat down at one of the chess tables for a game. During the course of the evening that followed, Henry learned a few tantalizing details of Joe, his opponent's life. It became the first of many evenings, during which Henry learned more and more about Joe—of his childhood spent in a series of military posts, of his father, known as “the CO.,” or commanding officer, of Joe's uncles, all Army men, and of Joe's father's determination that all of his four sons will enter West Point and become career Army men. The C.O.'s household, wherever it was, was always run with heel-clicking salutes and discipline, and as a young man Joe tried to be like his brothers and live by the rules of the Army Training Manual, but Joe was different, a dreamer and a romantic who, as John Marquand had done as
a youth, took long walks in the woods and by the rivers and the sea.

“While Joe was talking, Henry Ide was able to see it all as though he had been part of it,” Marquand wrote. And in this effortless and quite artless way, about one third of the distance through the story, the reader is whisked as if by magic out of the consciousness of Henry Ide and into that of young Joe Blair, and we are in Hawaii in the midst of smells of tar and surf, sugar cane and ginger flowers. It is an almost breathtaking transition, and presently we are not too surprised to discover that Joe Blair is in love with a beautiful girl named Ruth Postley. Marquand was not quite courageous enough to make her a native girl, but she is definitely from the wrong side of the tracks and otherwise unsuitable. Her father sweats and wears wrinkled linen suits and her mother sits on her front porch with her feet pushed into dirty bedroom slippers, while inside the house is full of beach sand and dirty plates sit on the table. Mrs. Postley calls people “dearie.” But the Postleys, though common, are kindhearted and gentle people who like Joe Blair and approve of him for their Ruthy. Joe, of course, cannot tell his father of Ruth's existence, and so we have again Marquand's recurring theme of the insurmountable barrier between social classes.

The love story develops tenderly, and at the same time with great suspense toward the inevitable moment when the CO. learns about Ruthy and charges into the Postleys' house to remove his son and order the two never to see each other again. Joe goes with his overpowering parent meekly, but returns secretly to Ruthy's house at night and tells her that he is running away from home. Her father offers to help him arrange passage on a ship out of Honolulu, and Joe promises to come back to Ruthy some day.

The story then shifts back to the present time and to the consciousness of Henry Ide, who is riding in a taxi with Joe's brother, Colonel Johnny Blair, headed for Sixth Avenue. There is a reunion scene between the two men, and in it Joe tells Johnny that he did go back to Hawaii and marry Ruthy; that they are indeed still married, and very happily. It is difficult for Colonel Johnny to understand how this could be, how anyone could have a satisfying life outside the Army, much less as a chess player playing for twenty-five cents a game.

It was at this point that Herbert Mayes would have had the story
end, but John was not satisfied with this ending. He felt that the story did not yet have sufficient shape, that it needed just one more twist or turn of the screw to bring the curtain down on his characters. And so he added a page in which Joe Blair makes one more revelation to his colonel brother, Johnny. Joe has had, it seems, a career in the Army also—the Chinese Republican Army. He has become, in fact, a general in this army. He outranks his brother, and, furthermore, it is to General Joe that Colonel Johnny will soon be reporting on his upcoming assignment in China, where Joe has been called back to the staff of General Wu. Chess playing has been little more than a pastime.

The ending, which is a jolting surprise, does indeed tie together all the scattered threads of the story in one tidy package. It makes it clear, too, that the mention of General Wu in the opening was a conscious plant. But it also in some ways undoes the character of Joe Blair to have it turn out that he has had a military career after all, that he ended up doing more or less what his father wanted, even while, at the same time, doing what his father didn't want. So, in the end, with this final move of the chess piece, Joe turns out to have won, but also lost, and is suddenly somewhat less interesting than when the reader thought of him as the romantic defier of tradition.

The End Game,” which Herbert Mayes published in
Good Housekeeping
in March, 1944, was widely discussed and later became included in numerous anthologies. Though it was admired, several critics pointed out the artificiality of the surprise O. Henry-esque ending—the end a kind of “game” in itself—and John became quite sensitive about this. He began, in fact, to talk about the story, saying that he himself liked it “in spite of a tricked-up ending being tacked on by Herb Mayes.” Herb Mayes did not mind, particularly, being handed the blame for John's ending. But he did mind, several years later, when in an anthology of John's short pieces called
Thirty Years
John wrote in a short preface to “The End Game”:

Mr. Herbert Mayes, who, next to George H. Lorimer and Maxwell Perkins, is the best editor I have ever met, once thought highly of this story, and I hope he still does. He may have been partial to it because he gave me the idea of a chess player in a Sixth Avenue (I
mean Avenue of the Americas) [Mr. Mayes recalls Eighth Avenue] Arcade. I recall that Mr. Mayes personally took me to see one of these places, but aside from this the machinery of the story was my own—and so was the motivation, except, naturally, that I wanted Mr. Mayes to buy it.

In his preface, John went on to explain that in writing “The End Game” he had drawn on his experiences in the Orient and in Hawaii, that he knew well the military mind, that he was a fair chess player, and that “These facts all form essential parts in the story.” John, like a number of other writers, was not overgenerous when it came to giving credit to others for his story ideas. But in reading this preface Herbert Mayes felt quite definitely slighted; he thought he had been responsible for a great deal more detail in the story than John had admitted. The matter rankles with Herbert Mayes—retired now and living in London—even today.

John had begun to think of his novels in groups of threes. Having done a neat threesome of New England novels, he now decided to do the same with World War II as a background.
So Little Time
had been set in the months preceding the war. Next, he explained to Alfred McIntyre, he would do two more war novels—one set during the war, and the other during the months just afterward. McIntyre was enthusiastic about this double-barreled idea, but the results were two of Marquand's least interesting novels,
Repent in Haste
and
B. F.'s Daughter
.

Repent in Haste
, which appeared in the fall of 1945, the shorter of the two, is a slight affair in which, when reading it, one can almost sense the haste with which it was put together. Marquand had made a short trip earlier that year to the West Pacific under the auspices of the United States Navy, and the book, which attempts to take in the whole Pacific War as a background, was the result of these Navy-supervised travels. The theme of the novel, as it keeps recurring to its protagonist, Lieutenant Jimmy Boyden, is “It's funny the way things happen, isn't it, when there's a war on?”—which seems an obvious and not very stimulating observation. The plot is a simple affair, too simple perhaps to hold even a short novel together. It is the story of how William Briggs, a middle-aged war
correspondent and the point-of-view character, comes back from the Pacific theater and calls on Daisy Boyden, the “cute little trick” Jimmy Boyden married—in haste—just before he shipped out. Daisy, meanwhile, has repented the marriage; when Briggs comes to see her she tells him this, and also that she has another lover. It is then Briggs's job to take back this bad news to his friend Jimmy on his next trip to the Orient—and in the process to discover how heroically Jimmy, the war hero, will bear up under this emotional blow.