The Late John Marquand Page 7

  Marquand was doubtful. He was not at all sure that this approach to writing would work. He had never dictated a story before. He had either typed it out—and he was a very poor typist—or had written it in his tiny, slanted longhand which was so difficult to read it had to be transcribed. “Try it, anyway,” Carol suggested. He did, and all at once he discovered that it worked quite well. In fact, it worked wonderfully. Carol quickly noticed that if John stood facing her as he dictated, he became distracted, trying to decipher her reactions to his words. If a line was supposed to be humorous, he would wait for her to smile, and so on. Carol solved this problem by turning around and typing with her back to him. The work went fast. Carol, who had been trained as a secretary, typed speedily and accurately, getting the words down on paper just as fast as John could say them. In a little over two hours, working that afternoon and the next, the story was done.

  It was a long war story called “Good Morning, Major.” Though the action of the story takes place in a stateside Army training camp, on a troop ship, and on a battlefield in France, it deals with a familiar Marquand theme: the differences that mark the upper classes and the lower. The narrator—the Major of the title—and his friend, Lieutenant Billy Langwell, are both newly commissioned officers, just down from Harvard. Billy Langwell, “one of those nice New York Langwells,” is a “slender and almost delicate” young man, whose “family wanted [him] to be an aide.” He wears custom-made boots and expensive whipcord breeches. His antagonist, General Swinnerton, is a hard-nosed, tough-talking Regular Army officer who has fought his way upward through the ranks in a hard career of mud and blood. Lieutenant Langwell observes that the General “isn’t quite a gentleman.” The General, for his part, senses the elegant young officer’s feeling of social superiority and accuses him of thinking that the General is a “mucker,” while the Lieutenant is a “dude”—expressions, of course, which nice families like the Langwells would never use. In the heat of battle, however, the General is required to turn to the younger officer for help in reading a map that is full of French words and place names, and later Billy Langwell’s valor in carrying out a dangerous mission demonstrates to the old General that there is something to be said for upper-class values and education, after all. At the same time, the narrator, seeing with what bravery the General accepts the news of the death of his son, learns that there is also something to be said for the values gained from the school of hard blocks of a Regular Army man.

  Marquand shipped the story off to George Lorimer at the Post, who was delighted with it. In fact, Lorimer considered it one of the very best stories Marquand had ever done. Apparently, so did a lot of other people. The Post published “Good Morning, Major” in the winter of that year, and the story was promptly scooped up and placed in a number of distinguished anthologies. It was reprinted in The Best Short Stories of 1927, in C’Est la Guerre: Best Short Stories of the World War, and still another book called Best Short Stories of the War. More than ten years later, the story was placed in a volume called Fifty Best American Stories. It was a story that might even have impressed Uncle Ellery.

  And in the process of its creation Marquand had made a discovery about himself that was of overwhelming importance to his career as a writer, as an artist: He could talk his stories and novels straight into type. One whole awkward and painful step in the creative process had been instantly eliminated for him. The work not only went faster; it came out sounding, and reading, better. And so this became the new pattern of his work. He would dictate for a few hours, then read over the typescript. He would pencil in small cuts and changes, and have the manuscript final-typed. This lucky discovery—to Marquand it seemed next to miraculous—of a new and quicker and easier and better way of writing was very much like other odd bits of luck and happenstance that helped him forward as a writer and as a man. To implement the luck, of course, there was one thing he would always need: someone who could take dictation as rapidly and well as Carol Hill had that afternoon under the big mulberry tree at Maule.

  That same afternoon he revealed to Carol his secret dream, which was to write at least one great novel—an American Madame Bovary.

  Chapter Eight

  It was during Marquand’s months with Battery A at the Mexican border that he first began developing his skill as a raconteur and discovered that he could hold an audience. Perhaps it was the intimacy and camaraderie of military camp, the sense of outing and adventure that goes with bivouac life, that brought out Marquand’s storytelling knack. But certainly the ease with which he had learned to tell anecdotes helped him make the transition from physically writing his books and stories to talking them—and virtually acting them out—to a typist. His was something very close to a histrionic talent. At Harvard, he had not been known as a particularly funny fellow, or wit. And yet at the encampment of Battery A Marquand soon became the funniest man around, celebrated for his comic stories. On warm and lazy Southwestern evenings Marquand and his squadron mates would gather outside their tents. A bottle of whiskey would be produced, and soon someone would say, “John, tell us the story about—” and he would be off on one of his raucous tales, amid gales of laughter. It was in Battery A, too, that he met some of the men who would remain his best friends for life, such men as William Otis and George Merck. These men had all been with him at Harvard but—they were part of the Mount Auburn Street Crowd—he had never really got to know them there.

  Just what comprised Marquand’s gifts as an anecdotist is worth considering. He had, for one thing, a deep and resonant voice, and during his four years at Harvard, and more years reading aloud with his cultivated aunts at Curzon’s Mill, he had developed what is called the American educated accent. The American upper-class accent is designed to command attention and respect, and Marquand’s voice did this. When he started to speak, others stopped to listen. But he would also imitate a number of regional accents, and these imitations were part of his humor. Then there were his exaggerated gestures, the violent flinging about of his arms as he talked, the contortions of his face into a variety of theatrical expressions, and the way he had of pacing up and down, shoulders hunched like a prize fighter, as he told his stories. Under strict analysis, one would have to admit that he overtold his stories just as he overwrote several of his books. Yet, though the reader might be aware that a Marquand book was overwritten, the reader was seldom bored. Neither were his listeners. In his tales he was a successful user, as he was in the novels, of the device of repetition. He would single out, for humorous effect, a certain word or phrase and repeat it, each time changing the inflection and emphasis slightly, and the cumulative effect of these repetitions, with variations, was hilarious. The more stories he told, the more he became in demand as a storyteller. And, in the process, the painful shyness that as a younger man had encased him like a shell simply fell away.

  To be sure, when one had laughed one’s way through one of John Marquand’s anecdotes—as he did in the novels, he used the flashback technique, and so his listeners became involved in an intricate tapestry of time—one sometimes wondered what it was, exactly, that was so funny. Strictly speaking, when you examined his most popular tales they turned out to be of a rather primitive order. “John, tell us the story about Milo Junction, Maine!” his friends would cry again and again. The Milo Junction, Maine, story was one they never seemed to tire of. It is a ramshackle affair that meanders toward a punch line which asserts that when you look down into a toilet bowl you will see Milo Junction, Maine—and a resident of Milo Junction who looks up at you and says, “Well, how would you feel if you’d been pissed on all of your life?” For some reason, this bromide would bring down the house.

  Then there was the story John told about the Yankee carpenter who refused to build a two-holer outhouse for a country farmer. After a lengthy build-up the story ends when the carpenter explains, “By the time you decided which hole to use you’d have shit in your pants!” It is a disservice to his storytelling to repeat these whiskery chestnuts, bu
t it is a testimony to his theatrical artistry that he could not only hold an audience with them but also make them come out very, very funny. He was a personification of the cliché about joke-smiths: It wasn’t so much the jokes he told as the funny way he told them.

  Meanwhile, his talent as a funnyman was definitely helping to destroy his marriage to Christina because, with her natural ineptitude, she became the perfect target for his humor. There is no question that Christina hated being the butt of her husband’s jokes. But still she sat there smiling her tentative smile as he told them, while their friends laughed at them and at her, the ideal sitting duck.

  From their European wanderings, Carol and Drew Hill had returned to New York, and now their marriage was also in difficulty. Part of the trouble was the publication of Wild. But with Drew Hill there were deeper career problems. He not only seemed to lack the ability but also—and more important—the discipline that a writing career requires. It was not so much that he wrote badly but that he had trouble getting himself to work at all. He could not seem to make the vital first step that a writer must take, which Sinclair Lewis once described as “applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” Instead, he made a series of wandering journeys, hitchhiking about the United States in order to get, he said, “the feel of grassroots America.” Whether he got this or not, he was unable to get the words on paper, while his wife, as the money was running out, grew increasingly impatient with him.

  With the publication of her novel, Carol Hill had also acquired Carl Brandt as her literary agent, and with Drew off on his cross-country travels she now saw as much of Carl as she did of any man. Frequently Marquand was there, and the three-way friendship began that was to last for so many years. Sometimes, when John was in New York, Carol would help him by taking dictation (he had found a secretary in Boston who could do the same thing), and often the three would have lunch, drinks, or dinner together. Drew Hill’s absences from New York grew longer. At last Carol went to Carl Brandt privately to ask him the question that had been most on her mind: Was her husband really a writer? Sadly, Brandt shook his head and said that he thought not; he did not believe Hill possessed whatever mysterious ingredient it takes to write and suggested that he ought to consider going back into advertising or some other kind of work. “But John’s a better judge of writing than I am,” Carl Brandt said. “Why don’t you ask John what he thinks?”

  So, in the middle of the summer of 1927, Carol Hill journeyed up to Weston, Massachusetts, the Boston suburb where the Marquands had taken a house for the summer while Christina waited for the second baby, and met John there. John took her for a drive in his new Cadillac car, of which he was very proud since it was his first Cadillac and symbolized his success, even though it was full of bugs and crotchets.

  They drove at random about the green New England summer countryside, through the old towns of Lexington and Concord, and at last paused for rest and refreshment at a rather garish little pavilion that had been erected at the edge of Walden Pond where, not that many years before, Henry Thoreau had found both surcease from pain and a tranquillity unclouded by domestic difficulties. They ordered ice cream. Carol, who already knew about John’s troubles with Christina, now told him about hers with Drew and what Carl Brandt had said. John immediately agreed and added that if either one of them had the equipment to be a writer it was probably Carol. They then sat there in silence, spooning their ice cream. It was one of those moments where nothing more needs to be said, where perfect agreement has been reached between two people, and complete understanding. Each knew the exact nature of the torments the other was undergoing, and the shared feeling, over the prosaic plates of ice cream, made it as tender and meaningful an afternoon, though meaningful in a different way, as the afternoon just a summer before when the two had produced a successful short story under the mulberry tree at Maule.

  Drew Hill was a handsome and a charming man but also, in ways that his wife was slowly beginning to grasp, a weak one. Carol, on the other hand, was a restless and ambitious young woman with drives that were gradually defining themselves and becoming focused. Raised in suburban New Jersey, the daughter of a man who owned a furniture business, she had attended Barnard College for a while and then, eager to get on with life, had left school and married Drew Hill—perhaps too hastily. Despite what John Marquand said that day by Walden Pond, Carol knew that she also was not a writer. She had written her novel “out of desperation and boredom, because everybody else was writing.” She was bright enough to realize, as she has said, “that I would never be any better than second-rate at writing.” She was also a great believer in setting goals for herself, of deciding what she wanted and going after it Her husband’s inability to concentrate his energies in a specific direction made her both impatient with him and apprehensive about what their future together might be. Drew Hill, however, did take John’s and Carl’s advice and went back into the advertising business. For a while he worked with an agency, and then he took a job with the advertising department of Bankers Trust Company.

  On Memorial Day of 1929, Drew and Carol Hill and Carol’s father went on a picnic trip in a canoe on the Connecticut River. The canoe, caught on a sudden fluke current, overturned. Carol and her father made it safely to shore, but Drew, who had suffered a gassing in the First World War, disappeared, and his body was not recovered until ten days later. It was a violent end to a life that had, for the most part, been unfulfilled and unproductive. It was also now necessary for his widow to find a job. Carl Brandt immediately came forward and helped Carol find a place with a fellow literary agent, Ann Watkins.

  Carl Brandt was a gentle, kindly, and witty man, whose manner combined something of the courtly Old-World Southern gentleman with a certain bawdiness of humor that was very New York and very contemporary. No one liked an off-color joke better than he. And yet he could be professorial—even owlish—in his evaluations of authors and their works. He contained, much as John Marquand did, both a serious literary side and a comic side, and it was little wonder that the two men had fast become friends. Brandt’s childhood had been not unlike John Marquand’s. The son of a moderately prosperous doctor, the house physician at the Homestead Hotel in Hot Springs, Virginia, he had spent his early years in a cottage on the grounds of the resort. His father, however, deciding that Carl and his brother Erd were becoming “spoiled” by life among the wealthy Homestead guests, sent the two boys to live with a Baptist clergyman and his wife in a hamlet some fifty miles from Hot Springs where they were to learn Latin, English, and the Bible. Here, in a house without central heating or indoor plumbing, lit by oil lamps and with only corncob mattresses to sleep on, life was very much like John’s at Curzon’s Mill. The clergyman, Father Gwathmey, and his wife used corncobs for another and more intimate purpose in the outdoor privy that stood hard by the house, and once, as a cruel prank, Carl and his brother placed a corncob that had been soaked in turpentine in the privy for Father Gwathmey’s personal use. It was about a week before Father Gwathmey could sit down again with comfort, and this became one of Marquand’s favorite stories. “Carl, tell the story about Father Gwathmey and the corncob!” he would implore. Brandt had been orphaned at the age of sixteen and had had to work and fight hard for everything he achieved, just as John had, in a sense, been abandoned by his parents and sent out to make his own way.

  Carl Brandt was a shrewd and exceptionally graceful trader, who maneuvered his way through the often treacherous jungles of New York publishing with dignity and ease and charm, behind which lay a solid tough-mindedness. It was said that Carl Brandt cajoled—even wooed—good prices and favorable contracts out of editors and publishers for his clients, and that his soft-sell methods were so persuasive that one agreed to his terms without even sensing the hard-sell muscle that rippled underneath. Brandt’s Yankee-like trader’s instinct was still another thing that endeared him to Marquand.

  Now that Carol Hill was herself a literary agent, she found Carl Brandt an invaluable tut
or and adviser. Carol, widowed, and Carl, who had been divorced from his first wife for several years, saw even more of each other—socially, as well as in a business sense—and it wasn’t long before Brandt asked Carol to marry him. For Carol, a lonely young woman of twenty-seven, nothing seemed more natural than to accept, and the two were married in May, 1931, not quite two years after Drew Hill’s death. Carl Brandt was forty-one. This drew the threads of the three-way friendship even more tightly together.

  John was not averse to making a certain amount of use out of his friends. After all, what were good friends for? Carl was his agent and editor. Carol could take dictation and type his scripts. He rewarded them with the pleasure of his company, and there is no doubt that, as his own marriage continued its unsteady course, he enjoyed being the third point in a triangle that included a happily married couple. In New York he had Carl and Carol Brandt; in Boston, Gardi and Conney Fiske. In these triangles he felt safe, comforted, loved—and assured of free lodgings, which he definitely appreciated. In New York it was Carl Brandt to whom he turned for carfare for the return trip to Boston, and to whom the dollar bills fluttered back through the mails.