Milestones: J. P. MARQUAND

You Can Go Home Again

THE typical Marquand hero reaches the point of no return when he draws his first breath. In later years, during the inevitable, muted crises, he will ask himself where he took the decisive turn. Was it the school he went to? The wife he married, or did not marry? The job he took? His creator, one of the best social novelists the U.S.has produced, considered these questions vital. Again and again, he said that men are shaped by their environment, and no writer could match him in describing the environments that cradled or smothered, polished or abraded, buoyed or drowned his heroes. But in the end, his people are shaped by the past to which they are born. The decisive element in every Marquand novel is character, a quality he seemed to see as halfway between fate and breeding.

He worked in the great tradition of Edith Wharton, Henry James and Sinclair Lewis. But where James did mannered, brilliant black-paper silhouettes of a special world and Lewis slashed unforgettable caricatures of the world at large on slightly beer-stained sketch pads, Marquand carefully painted portraits—so smooth that one never noticed the artist at work—and conceived a world narrow enough for him to master and wide enough for the reader to enter.

It was the world, essentially, of the small New England town, the big New England town and, sometimes, New York. It was the world which James Gould Cozzens also made his own, of businessmen, bankers, lawyers, doctors, writers. Marquand had no sense that such professions were too mundane to provide human drama, although he chose to avoid the more violent forms of love, death and despair.

A satirist who more than half loved the subjects of his satire, an observer with a fond but unforgiving eye for detail, he left a record of American life that criticized without insisting on condemnation and entertained without stooping to farce. Above all, he found individuality where only conformity was supposed to exist and gave the reader a feeling not only of recognizing but of understanding himself.

Essentially, he wrote the same novel again and again. It is always the tale of a man musing over his past to find an explanation for the present, searching for some way to break the accidental but inexorable timetable of his life. But there is no way out. H. M. Pulham, Esq., the caste-conscious Harvard snob, resigns himself to life in a narrowing circle of middle-aged Bostonian complacency (” ‘If I had had the guts’ —I sometimes find myself thinking, and a part of the old restlessness comes back”). Melville Goodwin, U.S.A. tries to break out of the Army closed circuit, away from the old ways, the old wife, the old family—but in the end he goes home, as all Marquand heroes must.

Often the Marquand hero does not try to break out but to break in. He is the middle-aged American who is fighting, says Alfred Kazin, “not for freedom from convention, as George Apley did, but for conventions—standards of belief and behavior—that will allow him to function as a human being in a world where beliefs are shared.1′ He is troubled by the materialist itch of American life, whether he is Charley Gray, the nice poor boy who wants to be a nice rich man but still plays by the rules, or Willis Wayde, who has torn up the rules and claws his way to uneasy success—the only Marquand hero the author seems to have loathed.

“You have to write about what you have lived to get at some worthwhile truth,” said Marquand, and once he gave up the light fiction, the historical novels and the Oriental adventure stories about Mr. Moto with which he learned his trade, he wrote about a life in which he had a vast emotional stake. The Late George Apley reached back to an earlier generation, the dying Boston Brahmins of Beacon Hill. But that Back Bay pride and self-assurance is what Marquand himself was always reaching for.

George Apley may have been a snob—but he also had something for which his creator had undisguised admiration: “Essential and undeviating discipline of background.” Wickford Point came even closer to home. It was the story of a popular writer, a Harvard graduate, reacting against the decadence and futile ancestor worship of his tumble-down New England family. And if the hero had the unmistakable air of the author himself—the pipe-smoking, tweedy, dressed-by-Brooks-Brothers blueblood—the hero’s family was also unquestionably Marquand’s.

He had a sensitivity to the right street, the right family, the right school—recalling, in a less obsessed way, the social preoccupation of John O’Hara, which once inspired Hemingway to groan: “Lord, I wish someone would start a fund to send O’Hara to Yale.” Marquand, at least, got to Harvard, the son of an old Newburyport family which, like Charley Gray’s, had lost its money and no longer lived on the best street. But he felt ill at ease because he had not prepped at Exeter or St. Mark’s.

Gradually, Johnny Marquand turned into a Marquand hero, with a certain capacity for drift. He fought through World War I untouched (“I saw a lot of people killed, but I don’t think it did very much to me”). As a cub reporter, he seemed willing to hang on at $50 a week on the New York Tribune, but got a job as an advertising copywriter almost by accident. His first novel, a historical called The Unspeakable Gentleman, was not much good, but he sold it, and so, like his characters to come, he was trapped.

He lived unspectacularly, wrote diligently and successfully enough to become rich in a quiet sort of way, was elected a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers (“Perhaps,” he once admitted in a speech to fellow alumni, “we are all more fascinating and a little better than other people for being Harvardmen”). In his books, the flashbacks he handled so brilliantly kept reaching farther into the past—beyond Harvard, beyond newspaper days, beyond his two marriages and divorces, eventually even beyond George Apley. His latest, unpublished book, Timothy Dexter Revisited, is a new treatment of an early subject, the story of a colonial eccentric that gave him a chance to reminisce about 18th century Newburyport, the home of his ancestors.

It was near there last week that he died, at 66, in his sleep.

“My thoughts,” he said some time ago, “continually return to the place where my ancestors have come from and where I spent most of my childhood . . . For me, and I am willing to wager for everyone else, the road one takes, no matter how far it goes, leads to a contradictory sort of frustration, because it always leads to accidental beginnings. It always turns toward home.”