The Late John Marquand (7 page)

From the time of his arrival in France, the war became a nightmare experience for Marquand which, in later years, he could never drive out of his mind and never really bear to speak about. He fought—most of the time with the 77th Regiment Field Artillery—in the bloody battle of the Vesle River, and at St. Mihiel, and in the Argonne, and the war, for him, consisted mostly of mud, the noise of shells exploding, and the sickening sight of dead men's bodies lying everywhere. It was his first sight of bloodshed, and it left an indelible impression, one he could not erase. In November, 1918, he spent a few hours in Paris and was there when the Armistice was declared. His reaction to the news was one of exhausted relief.

Years later, he would turn his wartime experiences to fictional use in a series of successful war stories. And the disparate natures of his two wartime adventures—in Battery A and in the bloody trenches of France—gave him a rather special double-edged view of military life. He was to view the military and its endeavors the same way he could view the strivings of the American upper crust, both as an insider and as one a bit removed, looking in. Fighting and killing he could treat as comic, even ridiculous, on the one hand (as it had seemed in Battery A, although touched with comradeship) and brutal and deadly and dreadful on the other (as it had been in France). Editors would regard his interpretation of war and killing as unique.

Immediately after his discharge from the Army, Marquand headed—after a brief, almost perfunctory, but of course required visit to his parents, who were back in Wilmington—to New York, where he decided his first task was to make some money. Only by making money—now that he had proved himself a man—could he
win Christina and persuade the Sedgwicks to let him carry off their daughter.

For a while, he had a job as a Sunday feature writer for the
New York Herald
. While there, he became acquainted with another young writer named Robert Benchley, and one night, when the two men were having a drink and talking about ways to make money, Benchley told Marquand that there was more of it to be made in advertising copywriting than in newspaper work. Immediately John applied for a job at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency and was taken on as a copywriter for the princely sum of $60 a week, nearly twice what he had made at the
Herald
.

Later on in life he would defend his move from the more prestigious world of journalism into the hustling, hard-sell, dog-eat-dog scramble of advertising by claiming that advertising copy was better for a writer than newspaper work since it dealt with “basic human fears and emotions.” Perhaps he eventually came to believe this, but at the time he wrote ads sheerly for the money, and he hated the work. He wrote advertising copy and slogans for such Thompson accounts as Veedol, Tydol, Lux, and Yuban Coffee. For a while he was the chief copywriter on the Lifebuoy Soap account, a product for which he retained a lifetime aversion. He was at one point assigned to an account that advertised rubber heels and was sent out on a field trip with the following mission: He was to stand at a curb and count how many people stepped from the sidewalk onto the street toes first, and how many stepped off heels first. After several hours of curbside study Marquand returned to the office with his answer: “Two hundred on heels, three hundred and fifty on toes.” “No,” he was told, “that's not the right answer for our client. Go back and find another.”

To save money, he had been living in New York with his Hale cousins. One night after dinner he picked up a copy of the
Saturday Evening Post
and carried it up to bed with him to read. The issue contained perhaps half a dozen short stories and part of a serialized novel. The next morning, Marquand carried the
Post
down with him to breakfast and said to his cousin, Dudley Hale, “You know, these stories are simple to do. They're all about a man of low social standing who falls in love with a girl who's socially above him.” That night he came home and laboriously typed out a short
story. It was about a prize fighter who falls in love with a debutante. He shipped the story off to the editors of the
Saturday Evening Post
, who promptly bought it. It was his first published short story. In this casual, almost accidental way, John Marquand became a writer of fiction. The flighty, otherworldly debutante in the story reminded people who knew her of Christina.

Chapter Six

In the spring of 1921, Stanley Resor, the president of J. Walter Thompson, called John Marquand into his office, said to him sadly, “John, I don't believe you have the business instinct,” and suggested that he look for gainful employment elsewhere. Marquand was apprehensive about being out of a job and yet, at the same time, he was relieved. Business instinct or not, he had been able to sell several more short stories, most of which, to be sure, shared a common theme—poor-social-outcast boy falls in love with rich-socially-prominent girl; sometimes he would achieve variety by turning the sexes and social positions the other way around. George Horace Lorimer, the great editor who steered the
Saturday Evening Post
to its most successful years, was delighted with the new, young, and productive writer who could so easily turn out material that fit the
Post
's formula.

Marquand had also acquired his lifelong literary agent, Carl Brandt of the firm of Brandt & Brandt, one of the finest in New York. With the help of Brandt, Marquand was soon being paid as much
as $500 for each of his
Post
stories. Brandt also brought Marquand to the attention of another celebrated magazine editor of the day, Ray Long of
Cosmopolitan
, and began skillfully to parlay the enthusiasm of one editor against the other, saying to Lorimer, “If you don't want this one, Long does,” and to Long, “If you don't take this one, Lorimer will.” In the process, of course, he was slowly but steadily nudging Marquand's prices upward. And so, in a way, Marquand's dismissal from J. Walter Thompson could not have come at a better time. He had paid off all his debts from college days and had $400 clear in the bank, a respectable sum in 1921. Also, Carl Brandt had been urging him to try a more ambitious project, a full-length novel, the kind which the
Post
and other magazines often bought and ran as serials. Serials paid much more than short stories. What was more, John Marquand had an idea for one—a costumed cloak-and-dagger affair that he planned to call
The Unspeakable Gentleman
. That summer he went back to Newburyport, moved in again with his maiden aunts at Curzon's Mill, and started to write his book.

Years later, after the Pulitzer Prize and all the rest, he would have liked to forget
The Unspeakable Gentleman
, for he looked back on it as an unspeakable piece of work. “I regard it with horror!” he would cry, cringing at the very mention of the title. But, as his first novel, it was an unmistakable turning point in his career as a writer. It was written in a florid, portentous style that seemed to have been borrowed from the Victorians. It started out, “I have seen the improbable turn true too often not to have it disturb me. Suppose these memoirs still exist when the French royalist plot of 1805 and my father's peculiar role in it are forgotten.” And the novel ended, many pages of huffing and puffing later, “‘Very much relieved,' he said, ‘and yet—and yet I still feel thirsty. The rum decanter, Brutus.'”

The memoirs almost did not exist. A few days after finishing the manuscript, Marquand returned to New York where he intended to deliver it to Carl Brandt. On the night of his arrival, however, he met his Harvard classmate George Merck for a drink at the University Club, and he carried the manuscript with him in a suitcase. Later, he and Merck took a taxi downtown to meet two girls and take them out to dinner. Marquand placed the suitcase in the
taxi's outside luggage rack. When the men got to the address where they were to meet the girls, Marquand discovered to his horror that the suitcase had fallen off the cab. There was no other copy of the manuscript. For days, Marquand was in a state of despair. He placed a pleading ad in the newspapers, and ten days later the suitcase and manuscript turned up. The episode taught him a professional lesson he never forgot, and thereafter he always kept a carbon copy of everything he wrote.

Though
The Unspeakable Gentleman
was undertaken more or less as a test, to see whether his skills as a short-story writer could be carried over into a longer piece of work, rather than as an attempt to write immortal literature, Carl Brandt immediately saw it as a marketable property. Because it contained ladies in wigs with fans and bombazine petticoats, Brandt offered it to the
Ladies' Home Journal
, which promptly paid $2,000 for serial rights. Marquand later liked to claim that the
Journal
bought the manuscript because the magazine had, lying around the office, some color illustrations that seemed roughly to suit the text, and because it had a new four-color printing process that it wanted to try out, but none of this was remotely true.
Ladies' Home Journal
liked
The Unspeakable Gentleman
because, for all its faults—such as its atrocious style—it was a fast-paced yarn. Scribner's also liked it and paid Marquand some more money to publish the novel. All at once John P. Marquand—and in those days he was very casual about how he billed himself, sometimes signing his stories with the middle initial, sometimes without, sometimes simply “J. P. Marquand”—was a popular novelist and, in his mind at least, a rich man, a success. This was in 1922.

With his windfall, he set sail for Europe, where Christina Sedgwick was traveling with her parents on one of the Sedgwicks' periodic Grand Tours. John met her in Rome, told her all that had happened, and she agreed at last to marry him. They became officially engaged that summer, after a seven-year courtship, and were married in September back in Stockbridge in a small ceremony at Sedgwick House.

In retrospect, even the location of the wedding seems ominous. For now that John Marquand was a part of the family, the Sedgwickian influence hung even more heavily over his life. There were,
in particular, Christina's mother and her Uncle Ellery. While steamily romantic stories were pouring out of Marquand's typewriter, full of slave girls and pirate ships and society girls who were adored by bricklayers, Mrs. Sedgwick did not consider this “writing” at all. In fact, she hardly acknowledged that her new son-in-law worked. She considered his stories cheap pulp fiction and him a hack, and she told him so. Naturally, since none of it appeared in the Magazine, she never read a word he wrote and told him that also, adding to Christina that she hoped she wouldn't be bothered reading such trashy stuff either. From time to time she would condescendingly say to John, “Why don't you write something
nice
for Uncle Ellery?” John, at one point, asked Carl Brandt whether, indeed, anything of his would be suitable for the
Atlantic Monthly
. Brandt replied that he was sure John could produce an
Atlantic Monthly—
type story but reminded him that the
Atlantic Monthly
at the time paid $100 apiece for stories and that it added, if particularly pleased with a piece of work, a silver inkwell as a bonus. Marquand's stories were by now going for $1,500 apiece to the
Post
and
Cosmopolitan
.

It was a good thing that he was able to command these prices, because Christina—and her mother—had very definite ideas about the manner in which she should live. A cook was needed, and then a personal maid. When the Marquands' first child, John, Jr., was born a year after their marriage, a nurse was required for the child. A certain amount of entertaining was expected from the young Marquands, and Christina, along with her mother, demanded the usual evenings out with Boston society. The Marquand household very quickly became an expensive one to run. Christina's mother, in a gesture that was intended to be helpful, bought the couple a house in Boston at 43 West Cedar Street, on Beacon Hill, very much a proper address. John christened his mother-in-law's present “Gift Horse.”

Mrs. Sedgwick ran Christina the way she ran everyone else in her life, and John soon discovered that Christina could not make her mind up about anything without first seeking her mother's advice. Guests were coming for the week end; what, Christina asked her mother, should she serve them for dinner? Mrs. Sedgwick
planned the menu and then said, “Have John run down to the grocery store for these things. He's not doing anything.”

John, meanwhile, though he had not written anything nice for Uncle Ellery, was writing at full speed for everybody else. He regarded himself as a man writing for a popular market, nothing more. And yet, at the same time, he refused to apologize for any of his work. He considered himself a professional and knew that whatever he chose to write about he could handle ably and well. He found the Sedgwicks' attitude oppressive. To escape from it, he took a small room in Charles Street and took his writing equipment there. There was no telephone, and when Christina began making interruptive trips to his hideaway he would lock the door and refuse to answer the bell.

In the early winter of 1926, Christina Marquand discovered that she was pregnant for a second time and became distraught. She rushed to her doctor and announced that she wanted to leave her husband; she wanted a divorce. A council of war was called between Marquand and the Sedgwicks, and Christina's doctor was called in for advice. An abortion was suggested, but Christina's doctor said that pregnant women frequently behave in this unstable fashion and that John should stand by his wife and “do his best.” With a frequently hysterical woman, this was not an easy order, and the next few months were turbulent ones. From time to time John found himself inventing excuses to escape from the confusion and disorder of his house. He would go to see his friends Gardi and Conney Fiske, who had a big and comfortable apartment at 206 Beacon Street. The Fiskes' apartment was ordered and well staffed and, since they were childless, it was admirably quiet. It became, little by little, a second home in Boston for John. By the time the new baby—a girl, whom they named Christina, after her mother—was born, dropping in on the Fiskes had become a habit with him and provided some of the most relaxed moments of his life.