Books: Deflowering of New England

WICKFORD POINT—John P. Marquand —Little, Brown ($2.75).

John Phillips Marquand, 45, is a tall, blue-eyed New Englander, a successful contributor to the Satevepost, who last year won literary as well as financial success with his best-selling novel, The Late George Apley.

Lately Satevepost readers have been following his new serial, Wickford Point. It traces some 30 years in the history of the scatterbrained, snobbish, tumbledownNew England Brills, from Great-Aunt Sarah, who had known the Transcendentalists, to sophisticated daughter Bella, beautiful, jaded, unhappy, to whom men were drawn as sightseers were drawn to the shrine of stuffed-shirt Poet John Brill, “the Wickford Sage.”

Satevepost readers did not know that Author Marquand’s original Wickford Point was twice as long and nearly twice as biting. This week the book appeared in its uncut form, promising to be another best-seller of the stature of The Late George Apley. Comparison of the two versions showed that the Post’s seven installments accented Brill foibles, heightened the picturesqueness of the story, diluted its satire, toned down the dialogue (“so damn screwy” to “so queer”), cut out Narrator Calder’s cynical reflections on love (“all lovers are consummate bores”), on writing popular fiction for the big magazines (“a somewhat ghastly parody on life”), blotted out one character (the narrator’s mistress) entirely. All told, Literary Agent Carl Brandt cut about 90,000 words from Wickford Point, before submitting it to the Post.

The Author denies emphatically—despite apparent resemblances—that Narrator Jim Calder is himself, or that the Brills are drawn from his cousins the Edward Everett Hale (“The Man Without a Country”) family. Author Marquand is descended from old New England ancestry which included Margaret Fuller, minor Transcendentalists, and a privateer in the Revolution who bagged so many prizes he prayed at last: “Lord, stay thine hand, thy servant hath enough.”

Assistant magazine editor of the Boston Transcript for two years after graduation from Harvard (1915), Marquand served in the cavalry on the Mexican border, overseas as first lieutenant of field artillery. After the War he tried reporting for a year on the New York Tribune, quit because it was no place to “make a fortune.” As a bitter ad writer, he saved a few hundred dollars, quit to write popular fiction.

The manuscript of his first book, The Unspeakable Gentleman (1922) was lost from a Manhattan taxi; recovered weeks later, it made him a success. The next ten years he lived in Boston, becoming, he says, “something of an Apley himself.” Now married to Adelaide Ferry Hooker (sister of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3d), he spends his winters in a swanky Manhattan duplex apartment, his summers on an island farm near Newburyport.

Methodical and efficient, Author Marquand dictates first drafts, rewrites slowly. Once fond of reading adventure fiction, he now prefers what he calls “the bitter people”—Maugham and Thackeray. “I have,” declares sardonic Author Marquand, “only three friends in the world and two of those don’t like me.”