In the spring of 1921, Stanley Resor, the president of J. Walter Thompson, called John Marquand into his office, said to him sadly, “John, I don’t believe you have the business instinct,” and suggested that he look for gainful employment elsewhere. Marquand was apprehensive about being out of a job and yet, at the same time, he was relieved. Business instinct or not, he had been able to sell several more short stories, most of which, to be sure, shared a common theme—poor-social-outcast boy falls in love with rich-socially-prominent girl; sometimes he would achieve variety by turning the sexes and social positions the other way around. George Horace Lorimer, the great editor who steered the Saturday Evening Post to its most successful years, was delighted with the new, young, and productive writer who could so easily turn out material that fit the Post’s formula.
Marquand had also acquired his lifelong literary agent, Carl Brandt of the firm of Brandt & Brandt, one of the finest in New York. With the help of Brandt, Marquand was soon being paid as much as $500 for each of his Post stories. Brandt also brought Marquand to the attention of another celebrated magazine editor of the day, Ray Long of Cosmopolitan, and began skillfully to parlay the enthusiasm of one editor against the other, saying to Lorimer, “If you don’t want this one, Long does,” and to Long, “If you don’t take this one, Lorimer will.” In the process, of course, he was slowly but steadily nudging Marquand’s prices upward. And so, in a way, Marquand’s dismissal from J. Walter Thompson could not have come at a better time. He had paid off all his debts from college days and had $400 clear in the bank, a respectable sum in 1921. Also, Carl Brandt had been urging him to try a more ambitious project, a full-length novel, the kind which the Post and other magazines often bought and ran as serials. Serials paid much more than short stories. What was more, John Marquand had an idea for one—a costumed cloak-and-dagger affair that he planned to call The Unspeakable Gentleman. That summer he went back to Newburyport, moved in again with his maiden aunts at Curzon’s Mill, and started to write his book.
Years later, after the Pulitzer Prize and all the rest, he would have liked to forget The Unspeakable Gentleman, for he looked back on it as an unspeakable piece of work. “I regard it with horror!” he would cry, cringing at the very mention of the title. But, as his first novel, it was an unmistakable turning point in his career as a writer. It was written in a florid, portentous style that seemed to have been borrowed from the Victorians. It started out, “I have seen the improbable turn true too often not to have it disturb me. Suppose these memoirs still exist when the French royalist plot of 1805 and my father’s peculiar role in it are forgotten.” And the novel ended, many pages of huffing and puffing later, “‘Very much relieved,’ he said, ‘and yet—and yet I still feel thirsty. The rum decanter, Brutus.’”
The memoirs almost did not exist. A few days after finishing the manuscript, Marquand returned to New York where he intended to deliver it to Carl Brandt. On the night of his arrival, however, he met his Harvard classmate George Merck for a drink at the University Club, and he carried the manuscript with him in a suitcase. Later, he and Merck took a taxi downtown to meet two girls and take them out to dinner. Marquand placed the suitcase in the taxi’s outside luggage rack. When the men got to the address where they were to meet the girls, Marquand discovered to his horror that the suitcase had fallen off the cab. There was no other copy of the manuscript. For days, Marquand was in a state of despair. He placed a pleading ad in the newspapers, and ten days later the suitcase and manuscript turned up. The episode taught him a professional lesson he never forgot, and thereafter he always kept a carbon copy of everything he wrote.
Though The Unspeakable Gentleman was undertaken more or less as a test, to see whether his skills as a short-story writer could be carried over into a longer piece of work, rather than as an attempt to write immortal literature, Carl Brandt immediately saw it as a marketable property. Because it contained ladies in wigs with fans and bombazine petticoats, Brandt offered it to the Ladies’ Home Journal, which promptly paid $2,000 for serial rights. Marquand later liked to claim that the Journal bought the manuscript because the magazine had, lying around the office, some color illustrations that seemed roughly to suit the text, and because it had a new four-color printing process that it wanted to try out, but none of this was remotely true. Ladies’ Home Journal liked The Unspeakable Gentleman because, for all its faults—such as its atrocious style—it was a fast-paced yarn. Scribner’s also liked it and paid Marquand some more money to publish the novel. All at once John P. Marquand—and in those days he was very casual about how he billed himself, sometimes signing his stories with the middle initial, sometimes without, sometimes simply “J. P. Marquand”—was a popular novelist and, in his mind at least, a rich man, a success. This was in 1922.
With his windfall, he set sail for Europe, where Christina Sedgwick was traveling with her parents on one of the Sedgwicks’ periodic Grand Tours. John met her in Rome, told her all that had happened, and she agreed at last to marry him. They became officially engaged that summer, after a seven-year courtship, and were married in September back in Stockbridge in a small ceremony at Sedgwick House.
In retrospect, even the location of the wedding seems ominous. For now that John Marquand was a part of the family, the Sedgwickian influence hung even more heavily over his life. There were, in particular, Christina’s mother and her Uncle Ellery. While steamily romantic stories were pouring out of Marquand’s typewriter, full of slave girls and pirate ships and society girls who were adored by bricklayers, Mrs. Sedgwick did not consider this “writing” at all. In fact, she hardly acknowledged that her new son-in-law worked. She considered his stories cheap pulp fiction and him a hack, and she told him so. Naturally, since none of it appeared in the Magazine, she never read a word he wrote and told him that also, adding to Christina that she hoped she wouldn’t be bothered reading such trashy stuff either. From time to time she would condescendingly say to John, “Why don’t you write something nice for Uncle Ellery?” John, at one point, asked Carl Brandt whether, indeed, anything of his would be suitable for the Atlantic Monthly. Brandt replied that he was sure John could produce an Atlantic Monthly—type story but reminded him that the Atlantic Monthly at the time paid $100 apiece for stories and that it added, if particularly pleased with a piece of work, a silver inkwell as a bonus. Marquand’s stories were by now going for $1,500 apiece to the Post and Cosmopolitan.
It was a good thing that he was able to command these prices, because Christina—and her mother—had very definite ideas about the manner in which she should live. A cook was needed, and then a personal maid. When the Marquands’ first child, John, Jr., was born a year after their marriage, a nurse was required for the child. A certain amount of entertaining was expected from the young Marquands, and Christina, along with her mother, demanded the usual evenings out with Boston society. The Marquand household very quickly became an expensive one to run. Christina’s mother, in a gesture that was intended to be helpful, bought the couple a house in Boston at 43 West Cedar Street, on Beacon Hill, very much a proper address. John christened his mother-in-law’s present “Gift Horse.”
Mrs. Sedgwick ran Christina the way she ran everyone else in her life, and John soon discovered that Christina could not make her mind up about anything without first seeking her mother’s advice. Guests were coming for the week end; what, Christina asked her mother, should she serve them for dinner? Mrs. Sedgwick planned the menu and then said, “Have John run down to the grocery store for these things. He’s not doing anything.”
John, meanwhile, though he had not written anything nice for Uncle Ellery, was writing at full speed for everybody else. He regarded himself as a man writing for a popular market, nothing more. And yet, at the same time, he refused to apologize for any of his work. He considered himself a professional and knew that whatever he chose to write about he could handle ably and well. He found the Sedgwicks’ attitude oppressive. To escape from it, he took a small room in Charles Street and took his writing equipment there. There was no telephone, and when Christina began making interruptive trips to his hideaway he would lock the door and refuse to answer the bell.
In the early winter of 1926, Christina Marquand discovered that she was pregnant for a second time and became distraught. She rushed to her doctor and announced that she wanted to leave her husband; she wanted a divorce. A council of war was called between Marquand and the Sedgwicks, and Christina’s doctor was called in for advice. An abortion was suggested, but Christina’s doctor said that pregnant women frequently behave in this unstable fashion and that John should stand by his wife and “do his best.” With a frequently hysterical woman, this was not an easy order, and the next few months were turbulent ones. From time to time John found himself inventing excuses to escape from the confusion and disorder of his house. He would go to see his friends Gardi and Conney Fiske, who had a big and comfortable apartment at 206 Beacon Street. The Fiskes’ apartment was ordered and well staffed and, since they were childless, it was admirably quiet. It became, little by little, a second home in Boston for John. By the time the new baby—a girl, whom they named Christina, after her mother—was born, dropping in on the Fiskes had become a habit with him and provided some of the most relaxed moments of his life.
Equally relaxed were his visits to New York to see Carl Brandt Brandt had begun performing a service for Marquand that he would continue to perform throughout his life—cutting and editing his manuscripts and helping him space the breaks in his stories for serialization. Brandt also gave Marquand editorial help in ways that not only increased the salability of his stories but also their popularity with readers. Marquand tended, for example, to display a certain reticence in his writing where matters of physical love were concerned. A typical Marquand romantic scene would end with the lovers at breakfast the following morning. “I like to close the bedroom door,” Marquand would protest. But Brandt, knowing that readers were inevitably curious about what went on behind the closed door, would insist on a bit more detail. A typical Brandt scribble on a Marquand manuscript would say, “Now, have him kiss her here!” Once John Marquand set off for a meeting with Brandt, saying solemnly, “I swear Carl won’t make me put a girl in this story, because if I put a girl he’ll want a love scene.” But he emerged from the meeting having inserted both the girl and the scene.
With the birth of little Christina, the expenses of the Marquand household went upward again, and John wrote harder and faster than ever, grinding out stories to pay the bills. When Christina was a year and a half old, she had a serious attack of pneumonia, and she had barely recovered when she was stricken by a second, even more severe, attack. For several days it was doubted that the baby would live. A rib had to be cut and the incision drained, and the child spent most of the winter in Children’s Hospital in Boston, while her father worked long into the nights on a serial called Warning Hill. The Sedgwicks continued to show no appreciation of how hard John was working, or of what he was working for. Scribner’s had published John’s first novel, and a second costumed affair (which had also been a Post serial) called The Black Cargo. But now Little, Brown in Boston offered a thousand-dollar advance for Warning Hill, an exceedingly generous one, Carl Brandt thought, and so did Marquand. He made a major career decision: to leave Scribner’s and make Little, Brown his publisher. Christina’s reaction to this news was of the sort to be expected. “Oh, I’ve heard of Little, Brown,” she said. “I’ve never heard of the other one.”
With their daughter recovered, things returned somewhat to normal, but not really. As a housekeeper, Christina was hopeless. Weeks would go by without her sending out the laundry. The wash would accumulate, stuffed in wads, under her bed. She would invite guests for dinner and forget her own invitation, and the guests would come to her door to find her in a bathrobe with her hair in curlers. During the increasingly fewer hours John spent at home, Christina would confront him with domestic problems. The water faucet in the kitchen sink would not turn off, there was no milk in the house for the baby, the maid had not shown up for work, and so what should she do? Once when little Johnny would not stop crying, Christina became very upset and was convinced the child had appendicitis. There could be no other explanation for it. Friends were called in for consultation. John said that he thought the boy merely needed a good spanking. Christina, weeping, begged him to take their son to the hospital. At last a friend went into the little boy’s room and asked him what he was crying about. Rubbing his eyes, little Johnny said that he was crying because he wanted a pair of brown corduroy pants like those a friend of his had worn at nursery school.
When the Marquands entertained there was usually some sort of crisis which Marquand blamed on Christina’s lack of talent as a hostess. Once, for a party at their house on Beacon Hill, Christina thought it would be an amusing touch to hire an organ grinder and a monkey. She forgot to tell John about it, and when the organ grinder appeared John was furious. He shouted, “Get that music and that man and that animal out of my house!” And once, at a Christmas Eve party, he became so enraged at the way Christina was handling things that he seized the Christmas tree—lights, decorations, and all—and hurled it out a window into the garden of 43 West Cedar Street. Christina went out into the garden to retrieve the tree, came back with a broken branch from which a few ornaments still dangled, and asked forlornly, “Why do we do this?” West Cedar Street quickly became a battlefield; when the Marquands weren’t quarreling the servants that Christina hired were misbehaving. One of her maids went berserk and had to be carried away. John, coming home from his writing office, soon acquired the habit of asking her, “Well, what dreadful thing has occurred at the Marquand house today?”
To be sure, as those who knew him had become well aware, John Marquand had a way of contriving problems for himself. As a novelist, he loved scenes, and so he created them. Situations were his stock in trade, and so he set them up. This way he could observe and study his characters as they came into dramatic interaction with other characters.
It was the same thing where his feelings about the Sedgwicks were concerned. He had begun to complain bitterly to Carl Brandt about his Sedgwick in-laws, and Brandt listened sympathetically. What else could he do? And yet, at the same time, there was something about the Sedgwicks that John admired, respected, even envied—a quality and substance of familyhood, a sense of their being all of a piece, things that he himself often felt he had been cheated out of as a boy. He studied the Sedgwicks with a kind of fascination. He would use them novelistically, later on, just as he would the Hales.