The Late John Marquand Page 15
And so H. M. Pulham, Esquire becomes a story of love and marriage based on compromise, where there is little point in looking back on what might have been. Of course, one does look back, but one is always brought up to the realities of the present and such matters, trivial but persistent, as whether the dog has been let out or whether the pilot light is working properly on the kitchen range. One is sustained in such a life only by adhering to a certain code, a certain set of values. At one point, toward the novel’s end, Harry Pulham enters his house and hears through the closed parlor door his wife’s and his friend Bill’s voices, and Kay saying bitterly, “Let’s not go all over it again. We can’t go back.” For the briefest moment, Harry Pulham wonders: Is there something between Bill and Kay? But he pushes this unchivalrous thought out of his head immediately, thinking that such an idea is unworthy of him. After all, Harry reminds himself, “Bill King was my best friend, and besides he was a gentleman.… As I say, I was ashamed of myself. It made me feel like apologizing to both of them when I opened the parlor door, and I told myself I must never consider such a thing again—not ever.”
Harry opens the parlor door, and what follows is one of the tenderest and yet funniest scenes in all of John Marquand’s novels. Harry asks Bill solicitously if he has everything he wants, and Bill replies harshly, “That’s a damned silly question, and you know it, boy. Nobody ever has everything he wants.” Because Kay looks so distraught, Harry concludes that she has been “doing altogether too much lately,” and, because her hands are cold to the touch, he suggests a hot water bag. “Anything,” Kay says, “anything but a hot water bag!” Harry helps Kay to her feet and she kisses him, which he thinks is “very generous” of her. The ironic point is swiftly and brilliantly made that in Harry Pulham’s ignorance is his only awareness and only happiness. Only ignorance, in Harry Pulham’s world, can make that world even remotely tolerable. He is a man who must say “of course” to life.
Kay, at the same time, suffers from a similar lack of perception. When she discovers, years later and by sheerest accident, that her husband had a love affair with Marvin Myles, she cannot imagine what a woman such as the glamorous Marvin could possibly have seen in a man as dull and ordinary as her husband.
It was probably inevitable that critics should have drawn a comparison between H. M. Pulham, Esquire and Babbitt, the 1922 novel by Sinclair Lewis, since both novels are about men in ruts unable to get out, who go through life wearing blinders. It was said that Marquand’s satiric novel was like Lewis’s but “without the bite.” Actually, it might have been pointed out that Marquand’s satire was much more subtle, much more delicate, written with much more feeling, without Lewis’s stridency and harshness and generally tin ear for human speech. Compare the husband-and-wife confrontation scenes which close both books. When George Follansbee Babbitt and his wife, whom he calls by such names as “old honey,” and “you old humbug,” intended as terms of endearment, are reconciled at her bedside (Mrs. Babbitt is to be rushed off for an emergency operation, a convenient device with which to end the book), she says, “I was wondering what was the use of my living. I’ve been getting so stupid and ugly—” Babbitt replies, “Why, you old humbug! Fishing for compliments when I ought to be packing your bag! Me, sure, I’m young and handsome and a regular village cut-up and—” Lewis writes, “He could not go on. He sobbed again; and in muttered incoherencies they found each other.”
Against the “muttered incoherencies” we have the quiet dignity, almost elegance, of Kay and Harry Pulham’s reconciliation. “So we have to be kind to one another always, don’t we?” Kay says to her husband. “We’re all alone. There’s only you and me.”
Meanwhile, John Marquand and Carol Brandt had no intention of turning Carl Brandt into a Harry Pulham, or of deceiving him about the change that had occurred in their relationship. All three, after all, were sophisticated people, and the only civilized and decent thing to do was to tell Carl what had happened. Adelaide was something else again. She had already begun to suspect John of having affairs with other women, and his tendency to philander had become—as it also had with Christina—one of the problems facing their marriage. The Bill King side of his nature was, to John, something he accepted about himself and thoroughly enjoyed. He had, in fact, since Harvard days. Christina had been unable to accept it. Neither, now, could Adelaide. She was suspicious of every trip he took away from her. She was sure that something was going on between John and each new secretary, and quite often there was. John found it very difficult to sympathize with Adelaide’s jealousies. He had been born, after all, in that “tail-end of the Victorian era,” and he believed in a double standard. But from the beginning it was agreed that Carl should be told. “John and I talked it over,” Carol Brandt recalls, “and decided that I should tell Carl as soon as possible after he got back from Silver Hill. I also thought that John should tell Adelaide. It seemed fairer. But John said he couldn’t bring himself to do that. I didn’t want to be bothered with all the lies and deceptions of trying to lead a double life. But John knew the kind of scenes Adelaide was capable of making, and he simply was terrified of telling her.”
It is always pleasant to suppose that at crisis points in life, or when circumstances abruptly change, all of us can rise to occasions, accept inevitabilities with dignity and courage and even a bit of grace, and carry on. In actual fact, though, few of us find ourselves equipped to do so, and most of us can be counted upon to behave quite badly. And so Carl Brandt’s reaction, when he had taken it in—that his friend who was also his most productive client was now his wife’s lover, and that Carol and John both wanted to continue the affair, that it was much more than a casual interlude that could soon be forgotten—was crucial to both John and Carol, to the future of their respective marriages. “When Carl came home from Silver Hill, we had dinner at the St. Regis,” Carol says, “and I told him what had happened. His first reaction was anger—not at me, but at John. He took the attitude of ‘How can my best friend do this to me?’ which has always struck me as a very strange way for a man to behave. After all, if a woman is to have an affair with a man, isn’t it likely that it will be a friend of her husband’s? As for me, Carl knew me very well. He knew that I was a woman who, if I wasn’t sleeping with my husband, had to sleep with someone. He knew that since the trouble in our marriage had come up there had been other men in my life. But he also knew that, in any choice between another man and Carl, Carl would always come first and that I would never leave him.
“And so, after he had accepted what had happened, I telephoned John, who had gone back to the apartment on Beekman Place, and told him of Carl’s and my conversation. Then Carl talked to John. They talked very quietly and sanely, and both men agreed that they didn’t want the triangle of our friendship broken. Carl also urged John to tell Adelaide, so that all four of us could spread the situation out on the table and look at it as grown-ups. But John said no, that was out of the question, he couldn’t do it, and that was that.”
That was almost that, but the new and perhaps strange plateau upon which the Brandts’ marriage, and the relationship it bore with John Marquand, had moved needed, in Carl Brandt’s mind, some sort of definition from him. He wanted to put it in writing, and so, alone one night soon after their dinner at the St. Regis, he penciled it on a few sheets of yellow foolscap and addressed it to his wife. It is an extraordinary letter from an extraordinary man, who was certainly no Harry Pulham:
Darlink:
Don’t please feel you ought to defend anyone, John or me or you, but believe me with all your power that I am being exactly honest with you. If you ask me how I feel, what I am thinking, I’ll tell you, all on the primary basis that I am alone at fault. But no matter the grievous sin, the bastardly actions, the man can still be hurt even by his own blows. I would like to be different, I’d like in a certain way to be completely abject, but if I were I would be, I suspect, lost not only to myself but to you.
I’m going to say this on
ce and for all time. Wild horses will never again, god helping me, drag it out: If you insist I’ll simply say I’ve buried my dead in this grove of statement … R.I.P.
So:—
John knows in his deepest heart that he did me a bastardly trick—it is in his nature to have the strength of the weak for a very long time, and then to crack and do the easiest and most pleasant (to him) thing. It is in his acquisitiveness, his parsimony, his snobbishness, born all of these out of his early frustrations and rejections. He has made me ashamed of my weakness coming from my real love and admiration for him, in believing that he was my friend and our friend first. And, having all faith in that, I gave him utter trust. I can accept and have accepted the blame that he could justify his taking advantage of that affection and trust. I cannot force myself to feel unhurt that he did a Pearl Harbor instead of declaring war.
But it is gone and over the mill. I will not ever let him know either that I have felt this way, or that, despite my heinous behavior, I have any pride or dignity left.
I will, out of my great gratitude to you for wanting to keep the pattern, and out of my love for the guy which is unchanged, go the whole hog in the rearrangement of his life … and I’ll not let you down.
Any future that we may have as a trio will be a healthier one and a happier one because I will not be the prisoner of my simplehearted trustingness. I have become more civilized, more sophisticated, and consequently harder in my own fashion. But whatever should not eventuate I can take because I will be able to fight for my own side, or not fight as it seems wisest.
I repeat in all solemnity that I have had my say. I have been honest with you, and that I feel as I do (that I can feel as I do) is what remains to me of my manhood out of a self-devastated ruin. I’ll put all this into the deep unconscious forever and aye—and I can do it because I see it and can bring it into the light. Back it goes, kerplunk.
I love and love and love you—and I love John.
Always,
Carl
Chapter Sixteen
The America First Committee, formed as an attempt to keep the United States out of the Second World War, had, as soon as America entered the war, immediately collapsed of its own weight, and Adelaide Marquand found herself once more at loose ends, without a crusade or a cause. Though she had, when she first married John, a modest income of about $7,500 a year, her mother had died and she had inherited several millions of Ferry Seed Company money and stock. When the Marquands were thrust into a loftier tax bracket, the Boston firm of Welch & Forbes, which for a number of years had served as John’s business managers, came up with a plan designed to conserve some of the Marquands’ tax dollars. Welch & Forbes suggested that Mrs. Marquand be considered a “collaborator” or “assistant” to her husband in his literary efforts so that certain deductions for travel, entertaining, and office expenses could be taken that might otherwise be lost if she remained Mrs. John P. Marquand, Housewife.
This idea delighted Adelaide, who had always liked to think that she was, in a real sense, a true aide to her husband in the production of his books. Though both John and Alfred McIntyre had tried to confine Adelaide to the restricted role of copy editor, she was simply too energetic and enthusiastic a woman to be held down. She had to make editorial suggestions, and she was compulsively critical; she could not keep her fingers out of the novelistic pies, and of course this led to arguments—and to much worse than arguments. To formalize the tax setup, Welsh & Forbes proposed that the books be jointly copyrighted by John and Adelaide, that royalties be divided between them, and that letters be passed between John and Little, Brown acknowledging the degree of Adelaide’s assistance. Little, Brown was at first hesitant about this arrangement but eventually agreed, and John agreed also—though somewhat grudgingly, since the agreement had the appearance of giving Adelaide more credit than she deserved. H. M. Pulham, Esquire was the first Marquand novel to bear the joint copyright. Adelaide was overjoyed.
Actually she had done a certain amount of work on the book. John was not a particularly good title man—as, indeed, many novelists are not. The titles for most of his books had been selected by Little, Brown. John had originally wanted to call the Pulham book “Reunion,” since it is a twenty-fifth reunion of his class at Harvard that sends Harry Pulham’s thoughts off into the long central flashback. John had then toyed with the title “The Wild Echoes Flying,” and an even worse one, “Golden Lads and Lassies Must.” In the McCall’s serial, the book had been called “Gone Tomorrow.” Little, Brown had just about settled on the title “H. Pulham, Esq.,” without a middle initial, when Adelaide had a suggestion to make. It seemed to her that people didn’t usually write “Esquire” after a name with just one initial. John’s letters, she pointed out, usually came addressed to John Marquand, Esq.,” or “J. P. Marquand, Esq.,” but never “J. Marquand, Esq.” Somehow “H. Pulham, Esq.” just didn’t sound like a Boston name. Little, Brown thought enough of her comment to give Henry Pulham the middle name of Moulton.
The sales of Pulham were somewhat better than those of Wickford Point, which encouraged John, who liked to worry about such matters. Published in February, 1941, the book was high on the best-seller list by mid-March and by the middle of May had sold 47,290 copies in the United States. By June, it had sold 49,011, and by August the sales had leveled out to just over 51,000 copies. It had been a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and in that less expensive edition had sold 156,800 copies. John had every reason for good cheer. But in the spring of that year an incident took place that was as exasperating as it was comic. At an April meeting of the Boston City Council, that august body voted unanimously to ban H. M. Pulham, Esquire in Boston. The book, the Council stated, constituted a “slur on Boston womanhood” with its depiction of the adulterous Kay Pulham.
Ordinarily, in publishing, it is considered something of a blessing to have a book banned in Boston, since the publicity that such an action generates more than compensates for any loss in sales. But in the case of Pulham there was—to John—the galling fact that sitting on the City Council at the time was none other than Mr. Henry Shattuck, described in the newspapers as “Acting President of Harvard University,” who had voted for the ban. Mr. Shattuck’s vote not only gave the ban a certain academic cachet but gave it from an institution that was world famous for its liberality and was Marquand’s own alma mater. To make matters even more grotesque, John had had, just a few weeks before the Council’s action, a letter from Mr. K. D. Metcalf, Librarian of Harvard University, asking in the most gracious sort of way whether Mr. Marquand would consider donating the manuscripts of both The Late George Apley and H. M. Pulham, Esquire to the library where, Mr. Metcalf assured him, they would be placed in the “New Treasure Room.”
Marquand was indignant. It seemed to him that if Mr. Shattuck’s attitude reflected that of the university, Marquand’s own manuscripts would be more happily housed in some institution that did not tolerate censorship, and he told Metcalf so. It was pointed out to John that Shattuck was not really acting president of Harvard but that he had merely presided over faculty meetings in President Conant’s absence. This struck John as a very minor technical difference, especially since Shattuck had refused either to apologize or to discuss the matter with the press. All of John’s old bitterness and mixed feelings about Harvard, and what he felt had been his rejection there, came back, and he could not help feeling that Harvard had managed somehow to snub him all over again. Quietly and with great determination, he packed up all his manuscripts and shipped them to Yale, in whose library they presently repose.
Elsewhere than in Boston, H. M. Pulham, Esquire had been received with good notices, and by the end of 1941 he had begun somewhat wistfully to think the novel might earn him a second Pulitzer Prize. He had mentioned this to Alfred McIntyre, suggesting that there might be ways in which Little, Brown could get it prominently placed before the Pulitzer Prize Committee. In his personal evaluation of his books, John considered Wickford Point better th
an The Late George Apley, and H. M. Pulham, Esquire better than Wickford Point, and there were prominent critics who agreed with him. Pulham was a good candidate for the Pulitzer, which is awarded by a committee that never reveals what books are under consideration. But the fiction prize for 1942 went to Ellen Glasgow for her novel, In This Our Life.
John was disappointed, but he took his disappointment gracefully. He liked Ellen Glasgow as a writer. He remarked that she had long deserved the prize, and that at least it hadn’t gone to a “punk” such as T. S. Stribling, who had won it for The Store in 1933. Privately he admitted that the prize should probably not be awarded twice to any one novelist, since there were so many good ones around. In the theater, on the other hand, where the supply of talent seemed poorer, it seemed to him permissible that both Eugene O’Neill and Robert E. Sherwood had at that point each collected three Pulitzers, and George S. Kaufman had won two.
Adelaide, meanwhile, had become convinced that her husband was being unfaithful to her with another woman or, perhaps, with several other women. When she had come into her inheritance, it had seemed to John logical enough that she could now be treated as a more or less independent person and therefore—in a sense—ignored. She had her own money, could go where she wished and buy what she wished; there would be no more financial arguments. But to Adelaide this was not enough. She wanted nothing less than to be a complete wife and could not accept the somewhat arm’s-length relationship which John preferred with all his women. One of the great attractions of Carol Brandt was certainly her lack of dependence on him and her lack of possessiveness. She was a successful businesswoman with a career of her own. After marrying Carl she had left the literary-agency business—it represented a conflict of interests—and had gone to work for Louis B. Mayer of M-G-M as his East Coast story scout, with a contract that provided her with $50,000 a year and a chauffeur-driven car. Also, John had always wanted a woman who could organize his life for him and keep track of the small details that were always distracting him, such as appointments and hotel reservations and servants’ pay checks. In terms of sloppiness, Adelaide was even worse than Christina; she simply could not organize anything. There was also the annoying problem of her perpetual lateness. She was never ready on time, and friends learned not to be surprised when the Marquands showed up hours late for a dinner party—or failed to show up at all. This infuriated John, who admired punctuality and order. Once, he and Adelaide were to meet at Pennsylvania Station to take a train to Florida, and when, at the last minute, Adelaide had not appeared, John simply boarded the train and went off to Florida without her.