Books: Yankee Clown

TIMOTHY DEXTER REVISITED (306 pp.) —John P. Marquand—Little, Brown ($6.50).

J. P. Marquand’s last book is not a novel, but it is only his novelist’s hand that saves it from being merely a literary curiosity. Good family boy that he was, Marquand never lost his gossip’s and antiquarian’s interest in the past of Newburyport, Mass., a place that was never long out of his thoughts in fact or in fiction. In 1925, before he had written anything better than hack historicals, he dusted off some old documents, ran down some dubious legends and wrote a book about a fascinating 18th century eccentric, Lord Timothy Dexter of Newburyport, Mass. Marquand was never satisfied with the effort. Now, 35 years later, Timothy Dexter Revisited gives a curious old codger his due.

Newburyport. just after the Revolutionary War, was fast slipping its Puritan chains. The rich, the decent and the God fearing still ran things, but there was plenty of heavy drinking, and sons of the well-to-do liked to prove their nonchalance by slipping a hundred-dollar bill into a sandwich and eating it. Poor Timothy Dexter wanted desperately to break into the upper crust, but he hadn’t a prayer. All he had was money, made by buying up Continental dollars for pennies when most people thought they would become worthless. Overnight a man of affairs instead of a lowly leather dresser, he was still despised by the other well-to-do. He was uncouth, uneducated, a prodigious boozer and a shameless wencher. His wife was a shrew, his son a boor, his poor daughter none too bright and also addicted to the bottle. Dexter bought the finest house in town, and sat in it spitting tobacco juice on the carpets and getting drunk every night.

Perhaps he became an eccentric just to show he didn’t give a damn about those who snubbed him. He collected a circle of hangers-on who called him “Lord” Timothy and he gloried in the title. In his curious book called A Pickle for the Knowing Ones; or Plain Truths in a Homespun Dress, he proclaimed: “Ime the first Lord in the younited States of Amercay … It is the voice of the peopel and I cant help it.” He kept a private poet and had him crowned at an elaborate public ceremony, once brought a lion from New York and invited the public to his house to look at him, “nine pence, each person.” Long before his death, he had an elaborate tomb built on his grounds and enjoyed sitting in it during the heat of the day. But he made his most glorious splash when he had a local artist carve some 40 lifesize wooden figures, including one of himself, which were scattered around his grounds and became the town’s most irresistible attraction.

Author Marquand’s feelings about Lord Timothy are mixed. He grudgingly admires some qualities in a self-made Yankee who wasn’t as silly as he seemed. But he admits that Dexter “suffered from senile concupiscence, he was ill-educated, and he was vulgar when drunk or sober.” He sees him as a caricature of his period, but his dubious hero gives him a chance to revisit a time and a way of life that Marquand found more gracious and attractive than the “five o’clock shadow of mediocrity” that is creeping over Newburyport. It was only a little way down the road, in neighboring Newbury, that death found Marquand himself two months ago.