The Late John Marquand Read online

  Herbert Dudley Hale died, and Aunt Greta then married a man ten years younger than she named John Oakman. Aunt Greta and the new Uncle John began taking frequent trips to Europe, where they were taken up by the Paris art world. They returned to Curzon’s Mill with heady tales of fabulous places and glamorous people—all of which seemed forever beyond the young boy’s reach. John Marquand got along well with John Oakman; his uncle, after all, was only thirteen years older than he. Uncle John, who was a heavy drinker, taught young John to drink. They would go down to the old gristmill for their drinking sessions because Aunts Mollie and Bessie and Great-Aunt Mary would never have permitted alcohol to be consumed in the Yellow House. John Oakman hated his wife’s first husband’s family, the Hales. Edward Everett Hale’s library had been stored in the gristmill, and when John Oakman got drunk he would begin throwing Hale’s books into the Artichoke River.

  In 1911, the year John Marquand entered college, the Oakmans gave birth to a daughter, Renée, giving John another cousin. To him, she was more like a baby sister, and Aunt Greta and Uncle John became, in the meantime, more like his own mother and father than the real parents whom he hardly ever saw.

  Though there were always people coming and going at the Mill, and though there were occasional fond letters from his parents in far-off places, it was often a lonely life, for John, as a youth, had a shy and solitary nature. He took long walks down the old paths along the river, under the great stands of white and red pines, past the old boat landing and the rock that, in the family, had always been called “the picnic rock,” reserved for summer picnics. There was even a spot where Sunday night suppers took place in good weather, and there was a family cemetery, at Sawyer Hill. On school days, dressed in what his aunts designated as his “good school suit,” he took the riverbank path to the trolley stop, and the trolley into Newburyport to the high school, his books in a bag slung over his shoulder. Newburyport was then much as it is today, with its collection of fine old Federalist houses along High Street, with their cupolas and widows’ walks, all painted a gleaming white with black shutters, arrayed behind white-painted fences and green lawns. It was an old seafaring town where everyone knew everyone else and, when John walked to school from where the streetcar dropped him, the people he passed on the street included retired captains of sailing ships, who still made daily pilgrimages to the wharves to look at the sea and the sky, and gray and faded little ladies, who wrapped their shoulders in paisley shawls to go out shopping or to tend their flower beds. There was a bookseller on the corner with his stock of musty volumes, brought out and placed on a little street-side shelf in good weather. All these people came to recognize the solemn young scholar, and nodded and waved to him on his way to school.

  While John Marquand was toiling daily at Newburyport High School, his Hale cousins were off at the exclusive Morristown School for Boys in New Jersey. They came back to Curzon’s Mill with stories of the romps and gaieties of boarding-school life, of larking trips to New York night clubs, of dances with beautiful girls imported from Miss Porter’s, Foxcroft, and Madeira, all things John Marquand might once have expected but now could never enjoy. In the crisp and matter-of-fact way they had, John’s New England aunts explained to him that there was no need for him ever to look forward to anything like that. There was no money for it, and that was that. It was what happened when one’s father was a failure.

  Failure and lost chances—they would become linked themes in John Marquand’s best novels.

  Chapter Four

  They were called “The Mount Auburn Street Crowd,” and Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was known as the Gold Coast because all the richest and most social men at Harvard lived there. Today, the only relic of that gilded era is a dry-cleaning establishment that calls itself the Gold Coast Valetorium.

  Mount Auburn Street was the district of Harvard’s famous clubs. In the autumn of 1911, when John Marquand entered Harvard, the clubs were the backbone of the social structure of the college, and the Mount Auburn Street Crowd was the only crowd that mattered. If you did not belong to a club, you were as a nonentity, overlooked on every invitation list. Each club conveyed its own degree of social status. The two top clubs were Porcellian and A.D. These were followed by the Fly, the Spee, the Delphic, and the Owl clubs, but to grasp the vast social gulf that existed between Porcellian and Spee one need only know that at Harvard the local joke had it that Spee members, in order to recruit new men to their ranks, ran about the campus crying in mincing, pleading tones, “Oh, will-you-won’t-you, will-you-won’t-you come and join the Spee?” Socially, Delphic and Owl were beneath consideration.

  Porcellian, in the meantime, was The Club. Founded in 1791, it was the first college club in America. It was very Bostonian in its membership and, like the college itself, very English in its conception, for it was modeled on the men’s city clubs of London. One of the legendary features of the Porcellian Club was a tilted mirror affixed to the building permitting members to look down on passers-by from an unseen vantage point. The loftiest names in Boston’s business and social history had belonged to Porcellian. Owen Wister had been a member, as had T. R. Roosevelt, father of Teddy, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Jay Chapman, and Louis Agassiz, along with numberless Cabots, Lowells, Adamses, Saltonstalls, and Lodges. Male members of the Sedgwick family were automatically Porcellian material. When asked about “P.C.” or the Pig, as the Club was nicknamed, Owen Wister is said to have remarked, “Nothing has ever meant so much to me. It is a bond which can be felt, but not analyzed.” And, years later, in The Late George Apley, John Marquand had Mr. Apley say in a letter to his son,

  I am still quite well-known around the Club, you know, and your first object must be to “make” the Club. I believe that everything else, even including your studies, should be secondary to this. You may call this a piece of worldly counsel, but it is worth while. I don’t know what I should have done in life without the Club. When I leave Boston it is my shield. When I am in Boston it is one of my great diversions. The best people are always in it, the sort that you will understand and like. I once tried to understand a number of other people, but I am not so sure now that it was not a waste of time. Your own sort are the best friends and you will do well not to forget it.

  Life within the Club, meanwhile, centered largely around the consumption of alcohol. Once a year it observed something called “The Day of the Book,” a holiday for which members trained for weeks. On the Day itself, each member was required to consume the following: Before breakfast, a martini; at breakfast, a quart of champagne; thereafter one martini per hour until lunchtime, when two martinis were required; for lunch, one more quart of champagne; throughout the afternoon, the same requirements as in the morning. After dinner, another quart of champagne was the rule, followed by one straight Scotch per hour until midnight, when the Day officially ended. Those left standing were declared the winners. For infractions of rules, members were fined in champagne, and after so-called business meetings the tables in the meeting room were strewn with as many as fifty empty bottles. Cass Canfield, a member of P.C., devised a red-wine fountain with a hose and spigot to make that liquid more available during the dinner hour, and once another classmate horsewhipped a fellow member for allegedly insulting his fiancée and then, after much champagne, thrust the offending hand that had held the whip into the fireplace until it was burned to a stump. Club members sat around watching this partial immolation. The class of 1915 in P.C.—John Marquand’s year—was said to hold the all-time Porcellian record for liquor consumption.

  Marquand was able to mock and satirize the Club in fiction, but at the time he entered Harvard there was no question but that he would have liked very much to have been asked to join Porcellian, A.D., or even the Spee. On the one hand he was already able to see through the pretentiousness and pompousness of the Club’s attitudes, of values which set apart “the best people” from “a number of other people,” one’s own sort from the riffraff. And yet, on
the other hand, there was something about these attitudes and values that he had come almost sheepishly to admire. Perhaps it was the air of security, complacency, and utter self-confidence that the average Porcellian Clubman managed to exude, a certain demeanor and set of responses that he seemed to have been born with. Clubmen seemed personifications of what it meant to be “to the manner born.” At Harvard it was said that you could tell whether a man was of Porcellian caliber after a few moments’ conversation with him. There were even some who insisted that you could identify the Porcellian sort simply by looking at him. Mixed up in John Marquand’s ambivalent feelings about Harvard’s social clubs and their values were his already complicated feelings about his Hale cousins and what seemed to him their better way of life. How pleasant, he must have thought, it would be to be asked into the Sphinx, which was the “waiting club” for both Porcellian and A.D., sort of a halfway club where an undergraduate waited for the nod of acceptance from above. That would certainly show the Hales!

  And yet, throughout his Harvard years, John Marquand was never asked to join any social club at all.

  Years later, John Marquand developed a rationale which he used to explain his “rejection” by Harvard’s clubs. It was all because, he said, he had come to Harvard from Newburyport High School and not from one of the clutch of great New England private schools such as Groton, St. Mark’s, Middlesex, and St. Paul’s. But there were at least two other reasons.

  For one thing, Harvard’s clubs were expensive, with high initiation fees and dues, and Marquand, even if invited to join, could not have afforded it. He had come to Harvard on a scholarship, and even that scholarship had not been easy to get. He had applied, first, to the Harvard Club of Newburyport for a grant. In those days the procedure was a somewhat humiliating one. Young Marquand had been required to appear, hat in hand, at the Federalist mansion of Mr. L. P. Dodge, one of Newburyport’s leading worthies, and to state his case, feeling suddenly acutely embarrassed at being the poor relation of a well-off family. He had tried to explain as best he could his wish to go to Harvard, his qualifications and ambitions—still largely undefined—and his need for financial aid. Mr. Dodge promised to consider his application but, a few days later, turned it down. Marquand, however, was able to obtain a scholarship that Harvard offered to students who were interested in chemistry. He had never cared much for chemistry, he wrote to his parents at the time, but perhaps chemistry would offer a career for him. His father, meanwhile, after various engineering jobs in Los Angeles and San Francisco, had found himself for a while in the Panama Canal Zone as a supervisor of sorts in the digging operations for the canal there. Soon he was back in Wilmington again, as a designing engineer for the Edge Moor Iron Works. John’s mother had faithfully accompanied her husband on his wanderings about the world.

  But an even more important reason why the Harvard clubs overlooked John Marquand was that John Marquand, in those days, was a very overlookable young man. Later on, fame and money helped him acquire poise, an easy heartiness of manner, and an ability to deal with situations. But in those Harvard days he was a shy and gangling youth who positively radiated lack of assurance. He had a good-looking face with high cheekbones, wide dark eyes, and a largish nose. But he wore his hair unfashionably long, parted at the exact center of his head, as though with a knife, and slicked down flat at the sides with a wet comb.

  He had a way of standing, slouched a little to one side, his head cocked at a diffident angle, his feet seeming to shuffle as he talked. Helen Howe has described what she calls his “whipped look,” which she suspects may have been “partly feigned, but expressive nonetheless of his true inner lack of self-confidence.” He was a meticulous dresser, and his high-collared shirts were always clean and starched, his tie neatly knotted beneath his somewhat prominent Adam’s apple, and his cuffs and jackets and knickerbocker trousers hitched up and buttoned and buckled in the proper places. To the supposedly sophisticated youth of Boston, John Marquand may have looked something of a bumpkin, a small-town boy out of his depth in a big university full of rich men’s sons. There was little to suggest the man who would one day pose as a “Man of Distinction” in an advertisement for a liquor company.

  Marquand was not then and never would be much of an athlete. He attacked sports with energy and determination but was hindered by a lack of coordination. At tennis he ran hard around the court, flailing awkwardly at the ball with his racket. His swimming style was vigorous but choppy, a stroke that yielded slow progress through the water.

  Socially he seemed equally inept. Backgammon and reading aloud with three maiden aunts had given him little preparation for what were called the “swell” parties on Beacon Hill. These parties were ritualized and, according to some people, dreadful affairs, yet they were endured because they were and always had been a part of the only social pattern that existed. One went to a tea party during the winter “season,” then on to a dinner party, and then perhaps to a concert, to hear a performance of the Boston Symphony, a string quartet, or a soprano soloist. Then one thanked one’s hostess and went home. Liquor was seldom served at any of these parties. New Yorkers who came northward to Boston for the celebrated coming-out parties in the Somerset Hotel were appalled to find not even champagne in evidence.

  At the same time, it was fashionable—again, this was very English—to be rude to anyone you did not know. The art of the social snub was practiced extensively. One grew accustomed, at Boston parties, to cutting remarks, icy stares, or blank unseeing looks directed at outsiders. John Marquand was invited once to one of the Somerset parties, and to a dinner preceding it at a big house on Commonwealth Avenue. He would recount, years later and in vivid detail, the agony of standing in that drawing room in his rented white tie and tails, rooted at a corner of the carpet while groups of young people drifted and swirled around and about him, laughing and talking to each other and completely ignoring him. After nearly an hour of this, having spoken to no one and having no one speak to him, he bolted from the party and made his lonely way back across the Harvard Bridge to Cambridge to the modest rooming house at 7 Linden Street where he and several other boys shared rooms with a parrot who could say, “Hello, boys!” The boys sarcastically called the rooming house, which was run by two maiden ladies reminiscent of the Curzon’s Mill aunts, “Miss Mooney’s Pleasure Palace.”

  Sometimes on winter evenings Marquand would wander over to Mount Auburn Street and stand quietly in the shadows watching the bold young blades in their tail coats and silk hats and walking sticks swagger as they emerged from Gold Coast parties with beautiful young debutantes on their arms. Marquand, with his developing inner eye, could now see himself not only as the poor relation but also the social outcast, the lonely boy with his nose pressed against the windowpane, watching the shimmering life that was led by the handsome, the witty, and the rich.

  But his Harvard years cannot have been as lonely and unpleasant as he later made them out to be. By his sophomore year he had made the staff of the Harvard Lampoon, which in itself carried considerable weight on the campus. It was at the Lampoon that he first met aristocratic young Gardiner Fiske, who was the magazine’s business manager, and who would remain John’s friend for life. He was then invited to join Professor Copeland’s “Tuesday Night Readings.” The first stirrings of literary ambitions were clearly being felt. He did well in his courses, including chemistry, and made several good friends. Among the residents at 7 Linden Street was James Bryant Conant, who would one day become Harvard’s president. From their fourth-floor rooms they would drop water bags on each other, and there were elaborate duels staged with brooms and pillows. Among the games the young men invented was something they called the Two-Drink Dash. To play it, each man left 7 Linden Street at a different time and, traveling by subway, went to a bar in Boston called the Holland Wine Company, had two quick drinks, and then made it home by the quickest route possible. The winner was the man who made the round trip in the fastest time. The game was made exciting
by the fact that a variety of routes was available. Also, depending on the leniency of the bartender on duty, there was always the question of whether one might or might not be permitted to buy one’s two drinks because of the age limit.

  But once having cast himself in the role of Poor Social Outcast, John Marquand always played it to the hilt It was in keeping with his growing habit of viewing his own life novelistically. Years later, Marquand ran into two of his classmates, Robert Nathan, the writer, and Archibald Roosevelt, one of Teddy Roosevelt’s sons. The talk turned to Harvard days, and to all the bittersweet memories those days evoked.

  Robert Nathan complained that although he had been snubbed and ignored as an undergraduate, now that he was a successful author he was forever being asked to make a speech for Harvard, to give money to Harvard, or to write something for some Harvard cause. “Now it doesn’t seem to matter that I’m a Jew,” Nathan said. Marquand pointed out that his own situation was identical, and he even lacked Nathan’s excuse of being Jewish. “They would ask me where I had gone to school,” Marquand said, “and I would tell them Newburyport High, and a look of horror would pass over their faces. Now I get nothing but letters from classmates addressed ‘Dear Old Johnny,’ and asking me for such and such.”

  Archie Roosevelt smiled and said, “You fellows had it easy. Look at my situation. I was the son of a former President of the United States, perhaps the most famous figure of his time. I had gone to Groton. Do you think anyone paid any attention to me? I never made the Porcellian.”

  John Marquand used to tell this story with amusement. And yet, at the same time, it seemed to puzzle him. He had convinced himself that the fact of Newburyport High School—that and nothing else—had kept him out of Porcellian, A.D., or even the Spee. Newburyport High School had become, as it were, the plot device by which the best clubs had bypassed him. But, in Archie Roosevelt’s case, why? Novelistically, it made no sense at all.