The Late John Marquand Page 13

  Allen Southby had been identified as Van Wyck Brooks, along with three Yale professors, and as Kenneth Roberts, and Charles Townsend Copeland. The Brill family in its entirety had been said to be “‘just like’ a family in New Hampshire, one in northern Massachusetts, central Massachusetts and southern Massachusetts, also one in Virginia, and is said to be drawn from the Sanger family in ‘The Constant Nymph.’” The Brill boys had been recognized as brothers by a lady in Massachusetts and two ladies in New York, while Cousin Clothilde had been identified as Edna May Oliver. Meanwhile, a reader had written Marquand to say, “It is not a story of a specialized group of people … but a record of family life that has something in it that all families must recognize as their own.”

  To the list of persons in real life whom readers had identified in the novel, Marquand suggested to Reed that he ask some people in the office if they could pick up some more, saying that he thought it would be nice if Reed could work into the publicity this theme of universal application and back it up with the varied identifications. But Marquand wanted to look at the release before it went out, and was concerned that the word “identify” might not be quite the right one. “Resemble” might be better. The lawyers had taught him to choose his words carefully. He incorporated these various resemblances in a nervously humorous piece called “Do You Know the Brills?” which the Saturday Review published in April, 1939, and in which Marquand stated flatly, “I can only say, in conclusion, that I do not know the Brills in Wickford Point. I know a great many people who possess a few of their peculiarities, but that is all.”

  While all this was going on, John and Adelaide Marquand were moving back and forth between 1 Beekman Place in New York and Massachusetts, where finishing touches were being put on the house at Kent’s Island, just a few miles down the road from Curzon’s Mill—the enemy camp, as it were. It was inevitable that there should be a certain amount of friction between the two places.

  There would have been friction anyway, even without Wickford Point. Like the Brills, the Hales were always quarreling, in a perpetual if halfhearted way; often you couldn’t remember who was quarreling with whom or what the battle was about. Adelaide didn’t care for the Hales and said so. She found them entirely too fey and quixotic for her down-to-earth tastes, and shabby gentility was not her Greenwich- and Park-Avenue-bred cup of tea. But she admitted that there were some nice old pieces of furniture at the Mill, and between the three houses—the big Yellow House with its eleven bedrooms, the Red Brick House, and the Mill House that Aunt Greta had fixed up so that it was habitable during the summer—there were a lot of nice old things to pick and choose from.

  Adelaide liked nice old pieces. So did John. His success and very likely his marriage to Adelaide—with her wealth and her Rockefeller connections—had brought out a strong streak of acquisitiveness in his nature, a distinct lust for property and possessions. Now they had a big apartment in New York, and they had Kent’s Island. Soon they would have the house at Hobe Sound, then a house in Aspen, then an island rented in the Bahamas, then a second house in Aspen. Adelaide bought houses the way some women buy shoes; she once casually announced to friends that the Marquands owned eight houses. She bought a house in Massachusetts, which she never lived in, simply because it had “nice apple trees.” In their thirst for real estate, she and John had at least one thing in common.

  For all these places, furnishings had to be collected. In Newburyport, this seemed easy. Up the road, at the Mill, were certain pieces of furniture that John, over the years—rightly or wrongly—had grown to think of as his own. The Mill, after all, was as much a part of his birthright as it was the Hales’. And so he and Adelaide would make little trips over to the Mill to pick up a tilt-top table here, a candlestand there, a portrait that struck their fancy, or a Chippendale chair. Quite often, however, the Hales, returning to their old summer place from wherever they happened to be, took violent exception to these offhand Marquand appropriations. There were stormy scenes, telephone calls, and trips down to Kent’s Island to snatch a portrait off the wall or a night stand away from the bedside. Accusations were hurled back and forth, which Aunt Greta—still the matriarch—did her best to arbitrate. But Aunt Greta was growing old. In Wickford Point, Jim Calder suddenly asks about Cousin Clothilde, the Aunt Greta of fiction who holds the discordant Brills together, “Suppose … she dies.” Jim is hastily told not to think about such things; Cousin Clothilde must never die.

  In Wickford Point, John Marquand wrote, “There was one good thing about the family: at the last moment we could all pull ourselves together and behave quite well.” In real life, however, this would turn out not quite to be the case.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Early in 1938, George Stevens, the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, approached Conney Fiske to ask her if she would like to write an informal profile of her friend, John Marquand. Conney was delighted with the idea. She was not, of course, a professional writer. Had she been one, she would doubtless not have taken the assignment, for most professional writers are reluctant to write about their friends; candor about a friend is an almost certain means of losing him. But Conney agreed and wrote a piece that was warmhearted, feminine—and somewhat indiscreet. Carl Brandt was given the story in manuscript, read it, and was furious.

  To this day, Conney Fiske feels that the reason Carl disliked her story was that she was not a famous or a “name” writer. But Carl’s reasons were actually somewhat different. Conney felt—with a certain amount of justification—that she had been among those people who had been influential in guiding John away from writing his strictly commercial romance and spy fiction and had encouraged his turning to novels of satire and social comment. As a result, in her article, Conney Fiske tended to dismiss John’s earlier popular fiction as not “serious” and as having been written mostly with tongue in cheek. She made the point—which she liked to believe was true—that John had written for the mass magazine and motion picture market only as a means to earn freedom to do his important literary work. No one was quicker than Carl Brandt to realize how professionally damaging to John such implications might be. John, after all, was still writing fiction for the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, and Good Housekeeping. In between The Late George Apley and Wickford Point he had brought out two more Mr. Moto novels—Think Fast, Mr. Moto and Mr. Moto Is So Sorry—both of which had been serialized in the Post and sold to the movies. How would Marquand’s magazine editors and motion picture producers enjoy learning that one of their most popular and productive writers was turning out work for them about which he was not even halfway serious?

  Conney also implied that John wrote only under a compulsion to make money. Again, there was a certain amount of truth in this—John had an obsession about money and about the rich—but Carl felt that to state this in a public way could do nothing but harm to John’s career, in which Carl had a professional stake. In a long and heated letter to George Stevens, Carl wrote:

  No artist that I know is more conscientious or capable than Mr. Marquand is with any work of his that goes in front of the public. To say that he has written pot boiler stuff through the years only to write the Apley or his new books, I for one, and I have been pretty close to him, know not to be the truth. He has taken pride, and rightly so, in the work that he has done for magazines. Out of that work there are things which can stand the test of time to the same extent as GEORGE APLEY or the forthcoming book. To say that he writes only for money is … decidedly untrue. Despite the fact that he, like many another writer, says he would never write another line except for the money in it, he is actively uncomfortable if he does not get an opportunity to do his work. This is particularly true after a long trip or a real vacation.

  Perhaps—to Carl—the most distressing aspect of Conney’s piece was that it came right out and stated that the characters in Wickford Point were based on John’s own colorful collection of aunts and cousins at Curzon’s Mill. This fact wa
s something that John had attempted to glide over as gracefully as possible; now it was to be starkly in print. Conney’s article not only left the impression that John wrote autobiographical fiction but also implied that John wrote only about New England. After Apley and Wickford Point—and with a third New England novel already in the planning stages—John’s publishers were already beginning to drop strong hints that he might profit by broadening his canvas somewhat and transporting his central characters beyond a fifty-mile radius of Boston. In his letter to George Stevens, Carl Brandt reminded him that John had written a clutch of Civil War stories and that he had extensively used China as a background, as well as Hawaii, the South Seas, and France during World War I. He had also written a series of short stories with horses and horse racing as subject matter.

  In his letter to Stevens, Carl begged the editor to cancel or postpone publication of the article and suggested that another writer—“let us say, Quincy Howe”—be substituted. Carl added, “I am quite aware that I am arrogating to myself the privilege of interfering with your editorial judgment. I ask your forgiveness of this simply on the grounds that John is my oldest friend and it hurts like the devil to see a public presentation of him which I know will not do him justice.” Stevens, however, declined Carl’s request, and the article was published with all the material in it to which Carl objected, including the sentence that described him as “a versatile and prolific writer of fiction for the popular magazines … which has also given him the time to devote to more serious work.”

  What Conney caught very well was John’s habit of self-dramatization. He enjoyed crises, and, to hear him tell it, his life consisted of nothing but narrow escapes and near disasters. Something terrible was always happening, or had just taken place, and urgent help from friends was always required. “According to himself,” Conney wrote, “he has always found it extremely hard to cope with the ordinary mechanics of living. He has no ability to catch trains, he usually has no money in his pocket, his sheep on his farm in Newburyport have developed some strange and sinister disease, he has recently been mistaken for a forger of travelers’ checks at Abercrombie & Fitch, and has escaped being thrown in jail by the narrowest of margins. He engages in various sports earnestly but awkwardly, and although he has taken lessons from professionals in golf and tennis, he is always prepared for failure.” She described him at Kent’s Island as leading the life of “a rather distracted country gentleman, followed by dogs who do not obey him very well,” but pointed out that “his apparent ineffectiveness disguises a keen appreciation of fundamentals. He can sum up any situation or personal equation with incisiveness, with tenderness, and always with a strong flavor of that disturbingly amusing cynicism that is Yankee humor.”

  John rather liked Conney’s article and tended to dismiss Carl’s objections to it. But it continued to rankle with Carl. It created a rift between Carl Brandt and Conney Fiske that never completely disappeared. It was fortunate they lived in different cities, and that John could continue his friendship with both people. In clashes of this sort, John usually came out the winner, or at least the nonloser. It was one of a series of collisions that would result, directly or indirectly, from the two kinds of fiction that he had taken it upon himself to write.

  He had also, since the publication of The Late George Apley and the Pulitzer Prize—both of which roughly coincided with his marriage to Adelaide—become excessively preoccupied with the sales figures and royalty statements for his books. The Late George Apley had sold something over 50,000 copies in the hard-cover edition. Wickford Point appeared not to be doing quite as well, largely due to the highly unstable condition of the book market in those darkening prewar days of 1939. On April 30 of that year, Wickford Point reached the number-one position on the New York Herald-Tribune’s list of fiction best sellers, but John’s editor, Alfred McIntyre, wrote to him to warn him against excessive optimism, saying, “I wish I could tell you that this meant lots of reorders, but the fact is that the jobbers and most of the larger booksellers have not yet sold out their initial orders.” The novel had been serialized before publication in the Saturday Evening Post, and—though the Post had presented only a condensed version—McIntyre speculated that prior circulation might have hurt the book’s hard-cover sale; readers who had read it in the Post were not buying the book.

  This has long been an unanswered and probably unanswerable question in publishing. Book publishers tend to believe that previous serialization in a magazine reduces some of the impact of a book’s appearance. Magazine publishers argue that, on the contrary, publication in condensed form in a magazine merely whets the reader’s appetite for the full book and helps get the book talked about before it appears. There is evidence to support both arguments. Authors and their agents, of course, prefer to hope for the best of both worlds—prepublication sale of a book to a magazine, followed by a successful hard-cover sale. In his letter to John, McIntyre added, “We are still advertising it and still hoping for a long continuing sale, but it looks now as if our earlier views as to the likely sales … would not be realized.”

  McIntyre’s less than hopeful tone put John in a dark and discouraged mood. Thanking McIntyre for publishing a book that appeared to be, as John saw it, “a financial flop,” John told McIntyre that Wickford Point’s career convinced him that he would never be able completely to break away from his slavery to the big-paying magazines and that, with his current financial obligations, it looked as though it would be a long time before he could afford to tackle another serious novel. Perhaps he could never afford to do so. Instead, he was immediately going to begin another of his Post serials. So much for the Great American Novel.

  Sensing that his letter had seriously damaged John Marquand’s self-confidence, McIntyre dictated a second, gentler letter reassuring him. “Naturally you are discouraged by my letter, but a book that sells over 40,000 copies is not a ‘financial flop,’ and we haven’t given up hope that ‘Wickford Point’ will sell a good many thousand copies more. Whatever may happen to ‘Wickford Point,’ we haven’t really yet tested the fate of a serious novel by you on the basis of your ‘breaking away from the Post.’ We don’t know how many readers of the Post read ‘Wickford Point’ in its columns instead of in book form.”

  Nor was there any way of possibly knowing. But McIntyre and a Little, Brown vice-president, Roger Scaife, came up with a promotion idea that was daring and—considering that Little, Brown had always been known as a traditional and conservative Boston firm—surprising. They placed a large newspaper advertisement for Wickford Point with a headline that read: TO ANYONE WHO TELLS YOU “I’M READING IT AS A SERIAL.” The copy went on, in effect, to attack the Saturday Evening Post’s serialization of the novel and to assure readers that there was much more to enjoy and discover in the finished book than in the hacked-up Post condensation. In publishing, Little, Brown’s ad created an immediate furor. Nothing like it had ever been done before.

  The ad also drew an immediate and angry response from Stuart Rose of the Saturday Evening Post, who advised Alfred McIntyre that his advertising broadside was a serious attempt “to interfere with our business” and that the Post’s lawyers considered the ad “actionable.” Furthermore, Rose warned, if Little, Brown persisted with such tactics, the Post “will notify all authors and agents concerned that we are no longer interested in their manuscripts … there is no point in our paying large sums for literary material only to submit to deliberate public attack.” He added:

  I am afraid that your whole strategy is based upon the fallacious idea that Post serialization will injure your hook sales. Were your premise sound there might be some point in what you are doing, but I think you’d find yourself in difficulties if you attempted to demonstrate that premise. Take, for example, Walter Edmonds’ DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK. This novel appeared in part in The Saturday Evening Post, yet as a book it sold four or five copies for every one of any previous novel by Walter Edmonds—and none of Edmonds’ previous novels were s
erialized in The Saturday Evening Post either in whole or in part. I could cite numerous more or less parallel cases.

  Mr. Rose, in passing, took a swipe at John Marquand, saying that although the Post had not published all of Wickford Point, nonetheless “We, as editors, might easily assume the position that we published all of the manuscript that was, in our opinion, publishable.”

  Little, Brown apologized for its ad, and Mr. Rose and others at the Post eventually simmered down. But it would remain a dilemma for Marquand—and for Carl Brandt as his agent—whether to accept a serialization offer, which might run to as much as $75,000 in those still-depressed days, or to refuse on the chance that the hard-cover book would earn that much and more as a result. For this reason as much as any other, John Marquand was continually badgering his publishers for sales figures. Each thousand copies more or less that each book sold became a matter of terrible importance. Biweekly and even weekly sales reports to the author were required, and in between there were harried telephone calls between John, wherever he happened to be, and Boston. He was also convinced that his having won the Pulitzer Prize for Apley should have had some impact on the sales of this book as well as his others. Actually, the awarding of literary prizes—unless they are surrounded by violent controversy—has never had much effect at the bookseller’s cash register. But Marquand felt otherwise. For a new edition of Apley that Little, Brown brought out in 1938, John wanted the words “Pulitzer Prize” placed on the book jacket in large boldface letters, but when he saw the result he was dissatisfied. He complained to Bernice Baumgarten that the book would certainly sell more copies if the words “Pulitzer Prize” were set in heavier type. What about a band diagonally across the jacket? Somewhat wearily, Miss Baumgarten passed along Marquand’s thoughts to Alfred McIntyre. But two weeks later Marquand was still unhappy with the jacket, and Miss Baumgarten wrote to McIntyre again, saying, “the Pulitzer Prize line on the bottom of the jacket does not stand out at all. Can we persuade you to put a two-inch band around the book, with Pulitzer Prize Winner in large letters on it? John seems very much concerned about this.”