The Late John Marquand (34 page)

John was working on another novel. It would be about a businessman again, and it would even return to Charles Gray's fictional home town of Clyde. In an odd way this was to be a return to
Point
of No Return
, which so many critics had called his best book. Critical reaction to
Melville Goodwin, U.S.A
. had been cool, led once more by the man who seemed to have become John's chief critical enemy, Maxwell Geismar. (When he could bring himself to mention it, John turned the pronunciation of the word “Geismar” into a hideous snarl.) Geismar had complained:

The whole point about Melville Goodwin as an angry officer is that his code of behavior is honest. He believes in his career completely and puts it to the test in the field of combat. A good man if kept in his place; but is this the only possible solution for the problem of belief in a commercial society without established forms of tradition? It might have taken more guts, a word which Marquand's General approves of … if Melville Goodwin himself had really gone through with his disastrous affair with Dottie Peale. But in the struggle with “authority” that runs through Marquand's work, authority, even if stale or false, always wins. The soldier's code is a logical refuge for his disgruntled bankers and despairing playwrights.

Once more Geismar was asking for a novel different from the one that John had written and had missed the point that lies at the heart of most of John's novels. Geismar wanted Marquand heroes to revolt, to turn their backs on “authority”—or at least the confines of their situations—and emerge, at the end, triumphant over their circumstances. But Marquand wrote novels of defeat and compromise, where the “system” or set of systems is always, in the end, too much for the individual. This is not an unfamiliar point of view in American fiction and can be found in the novels of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Wolfe as well. Geismar seemed to feel that the Marquand philosophy of the unbeatable system, expressed in novels of failure or semifailure, was wrong, and therefore faulted the novels for it. Of course Marquand heroes always have something to fall back on, some small thing to shore up against the ruins. In Melville Goodwin's case it was the “soldier's code,” which he had believed in since his childhood, along with the belief that the Army might be the last place in America where you could find a gentleman.

Marquand books, however, were by 1951, when
Melville Goodwin, U.S.A
. was published, immune to bad reviews; they were criticproof. John had a fond and loyal public that had grown with him
through the years, and
Melville Goodwin
sold extremely well, boosting his income, in the year following publication, to well over $100,000. There had also been the lucrative magazine serialization, and there was lively interest in Hollywood for a film version of the novel, though no deal had yet been reached. In 1952, Philip Hamburger of
The New Yorker
spent considerable time with John, in New York and in Newburyport, preparing a three-part profile for the magazine, and when it appeared it turned out that Hamburger—who had noticed instantly the fictive quality of John's life, the way he “wrote” scenes and situations and dialogue for himself—had written a parody of a John Marquand novel. Titled J.
P. Marquand, Esquire
, it neatly and gently mocked the celebrated honeyed Marquand style, the satiric touches, the tongue-in-cheek chapter titles, and of course the long central flashback around which every Marquand novel is constructed. John was flattered and delighted with the profile and quickly wrote Hamburger to tell him so. Later published by Bobbs-Merrill as a book,
J. P. Marquand, Esquire
was cheered by critics, one of whom wrote, “Mr. Hamburger's ‘novel' bursts into flower as a brilliant piece of biography. The author imitates the Marquandian mood and style so effectively that he gives the impression Marquand might have written the book himself.”

Little, Brown, in the meantime, had begun talks with Marquand about a book that might be called
Thirty Years
, a collection of his short stories, articles, and speeches spanning roughly that period of time in his career, interspersed with his own comments on his craft. It was, in other words, a period in John's life when everything seemed to be going well—too well, perhaps, to suit a restless nature that thrived on drama and impending crisis.

One thing that was not going well was the new novel, about the businessman whom John had named Willis Wayde. It was going much too slowly, and John was unhappy with it. Ed Streeter had read portions of the manuscript and had offered suggestions, but in the meantime John's stomach had been troubling him, and once more he was convinced he had an ulcer. In the late spring of 1953 he spent close to two weeks at Presbyterian Hospital in New York, undergoing a series of tests and X rays which revealed an “ulcerous condition” but no frank or apparent ulcer. Somewhat to John's
disappointment, his doctor, Dana Atchley, pronounced his problems largely psychosomatic. John blamed them, of course, on Adelaide.

With Carol Brandt he became increasingly reminiscent, liking to dwell on past episodes and pleasures. “We would talk about the old days in Paris and Maule,” she recalls, “and the afternoon eating ice cream at Walden Pond, when we discussed our respective marital difficulties and were half in love with each other even then, but would not or could not admit it. What would have happened to us, we used to wonder, if we had said to each other what we really thought of saying, as we ate that wretched ice cream? What if we had admitted that we were both having a rotten time and both had become badly fouled up in our personal problems? What if we had said, ‘If things get too bad for either of us let's try to see each other?' Something might have removed that strange repression that used to stand between us. We each might have reached the conclusion that the other might not have minded, and in fact might rather have enjoyed it. As it was, on our way back he never ventured so much as to touch my hand, although I cannot say that the idea did not occur to us in a very forceful way. Perhaps he was afraid that this would have shocked me, which shows how well he used to understand women and himself. In fact he never did do such a thing until some fifteen years later, though through all that lapse of time we increasingly cared for and depended upon each other.

“Of course he was always criticizing me, and reminding me that there were many things about me which he did not admire. He didn't think much of my literary taste, or of most of my clients, or of their output. He thought I was too materialistic, too concerned with power. He disliked my taste in furniture, which, he said, was too Chippendale for him. He claimed to prefer worn carpets and frayed upholstery. He said I was too concerned with ‘gracious living,' and that I put too much wax on my furniture and too much polish on my silver. He told me that he didn't much care for my ‘fox and mink and sable jobs' either, although he said that they had ‘a definite comedy value.' He had an aversion to large pieces of costume jewelry, especially my large bracelets and brooches which he claimed scratched, and had ‘combination locks' on them making them difficult to remove. He complained that I used too much lipstick and he would speak of my ‘long sang de boeuf fingernails,'
and he didn't like girdles either. Of course he used to admit that I had qualities to offset these ‘defects,' but he would say, ‘I haven't time to name them now.' But he also told me once that I was the only woman who had been completely ‘satisfactory' to him in every way. He admitted that this was not a very poetic way of putting it, that it was rather like describing an automobile or a washing machine, but he knew that one of the most precious things about our relationship was that neither of us felt the need to resort to poetry. He knew that nothing he might say or do would in any great measure alter the opinion I held for him, and that this was much the same with me. There was no need to create a good impression. By the time we came together, neither of us had many cards left up our sleeves. Most of the deck was face up on the table, and we were each glad to take a card, any card. The main thing, he said, was that I was the only person he could think of who had never let him down.”

Carl Brandt went up to Kent's Island to visit John that early summer of 1953, read 630 pages—triple-spaced—of the new novel that was in progress, and wrote to Carol that he thought it was “swell” and that “He's got revision and cutting to do but it won't take him long.… I think I can get it to 60,000 words of elegant stuff.” Carl also noted that Kent's Island contained “less mosquitoes, cool, and much less tension between Adelaide and John.” There was a big clambake with a hole dug in the ground, a barrel sunk into it, and fire-heated stones placed in the barrel and covered with wet seaweed. Bushels of clams, corn, sweet potatoes, and halved lobsters in cottonseed sacks were placed on the seaweed, and more seaweed was placed on top of the sacks. John, Adelaide, Carl, and all five of John's children—Johnny, Tina, Ferry, Timmy, and Lonnie—along with Mr. and Mrs. Bicker, John's caretakers at Kent's Island, all had a wonderful party.

On June 11, John went down to Cambridge to receive an honorary degree from Harvard. It amused him, in a grim way, to realize that the universities of Maine and Rochester, Northeastern University, and even Yale had honored him with degrees before his own alma mater got around to it. The possibility of a snub was always there; Harvard's tardiness with a degree reinforced his own
sharply divided feelings about the place, and he used the occasion to have a bit of fun at Harvard's expense. Though his acceptance speech at the commencement exercise was an effective one, he drew laughter when he recited the long list of subjects he had diligently studied at Harvard, and about which he had retained no knowledge at all; though he had studied calculus at Harvard he could not answer his thirteen-year-old daughter Ferry's simple question about algebraic fractions, and though he had majored in chemistry he could not help ten-year-old Lonnie assemble his Christmas fun-with-chemistry set. The commencement address was criticized by some Harvardites as being not sufficiently solemn for the occasion.

After the ceremony, there was a procession from the tent to the Widener Library. John, in cap and flowing gown, was walking with Ed Streeter when he suddenly said, “There's Senator Kennedy ahead of us, walking alone,” and stepped over to the young John F. Kennedy, leaving Streeter, “Like a flower girl walking behind them, poking my head between the shoulders of the two celebrities.”

But through all this John continued to complain that he felt unwell, blaming his condition on “certain environmental stresses,” which meant Adelaide. In mid-July, John was suddenly seized with an excruciating pain in his chest. He was rushed to Anna Jacques Hospital in Newburyport, where it was diagnosed that he had suffered a coronary thrombosis. Carl Brandt wired from New York:

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.”