Books: Everybody Met The General?

Everybody Met the General?MELVILLE GOODWIN, USA (596 pp.) —John P. Marquand—Little, Brown ($3.75).

West Point did a bang-up job on Melville Goodwin. It took a small-town druggist’s son from Hallowell, N.H. and turned out an officer who seemed to be all guts and resourcefulness. Mel Goodwin proved that in two world wars, first as an infantryman and then as a tanker. Now he was fiftyish, a major general and still going up. But neither West Point nor combat had taught him how to cope with a civilian hazard like Dottie Peale. At 40, Dottie was a rich publisher’s widow, beautifully preserved. She was out to land Mel Goodwin, and it wasn’t likely that the general’s wife Muriel, a short, dumpy woman, could do much to prevent it.

Mel was restless. As Novelist John Marquand puts it in Melville Goodwin, USA: “He was one of those Samsons ready and waiting for some Delilah to give him a haircut, and Dottie Peale was just the one to do it. Melville A. Goodwin was going to get his hair cut, and medals and stars and clusters would not help him.”

The Nonstop War. Novelist Marquand doesn’t help his hero much either. He lets Goodwin thrash around in the required course the general never studied at West Point: the facts of life. But Marquand is an old hand at arranging the facts so as to get a few things off his own chest, and Goodwin’s uniform does not long conceal the fact that he is just a new variant of an old Marquand hero: the successful U.S. male, vaguely but persistently beset by discontent, his existence complicated by a nonstop war between the sexes.

This time Marquand worries the theme too doggedly, all but writes his book twice. For Sidney Skelton, the novel’s narrator, is a highly successful newsbroadcaster who also has the taste of ashes in his mouth, and so rates a pretty full Marquand treatment himself. Sid hates his broadcasting job with its phony buildup. A working newspaperman, he has made good too fast on nothing but a pleasant voice. He can’t get used to his big new house in Connecticut or to his wife’s yearning to make the social grade.

Sid and the general see things through together—with Sid anticipating the outcome the first time General Mel turns up in civvies: “He looked like a plump and middle-aged nonentity, whom you might meet at a golf club and immediately forget, and whose face you could not place.” The general’s Pentagon pals try to break up the affair with Dottie, but they needn’t have worked so hard at it. It was never Dottie’s idea to live in a cottage with a general turned nonentity. She decides to ditch him, but has the good grace to let Mel think it is, his own idea.

The Women’s Cards. In the end, dumpy Muriel Goodwin runs her hero husband just as she has run him since high-school days. And, up in Connecticut, Mrs. Skelton wins too: Sid decides to stick at his job to make his wife and daughter happy. In marriage, Novelist Marquand seems to be saying a little petulantly, the women hold all the cards.

In Melville Goodwin, Novelist Marquand’s stock does not plummet, but it passes a dividend. His effort to show that Army folk are somehow different from civilians, and stronger on the simpler virtues, falls flat because his examination of Mel never gets beyond his surface manner. The old Marquand narrative skill is still there, with its painless transitions and smooth flashbacks. The talk is easy and natural, whether the talkers are Pentagon brass or radio tinhorns. But they all seem to be saying the things that better Marquand characters have said before.