John Marquand first met the woman who would later become Carl Brandt’s wife in the summer of 1926, in Paris. John’s marriage to Christina was then not quite four years old. Carol Hill (as she was then) was a beautiful young woman of twenty-three, ten years younger than John and married to a man named Drew Hill, another writer. It was an era when, or so it seemed, every bright young American took up the pen and wrote—short stories, essays, articles, poems, novels—and everyone who wrote, or wanted to write, carried his ambitions and hopes and, in some cases, talents with him to Paris. The writers and would-be writers perched on the edges of the little chairs in the Left Bank cafés like so many birds after a long flight and sipped apéritifs, smoked Gitanes cigarettes, and talked about writing and other writers. Hemingway had come to Paris, and so had Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Madox Ford. Gertrude Stein was there conducting her salons, James Joyce could be found sniffing around Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, Shakespeare & Company, and it was all very literary and young and Bohemian. Even when it wasn’t, it tried to be.
John Marquand wasn’t exactly in the category of these other writers, nor did he make any real attempt to join the Paris literary set. If anything, he did his best to avoid that sort of company. For one thing, writers like these rather embarrassed him; they were the ones who wrote nice things for Uncle Ellery. Marquand had come to Paris to get away from Christina and the Sedgwicks, and he was enjoying himself immensely. Christina was also in Europe, traveling with her mother, and there was some vague talk of John meeting Christina and Mrs. Sedgwick at some later point, but it was all very indefinite, and in the meantime John was making the most of his independence. Though his literary star had not risen to the heights it one day would, he was already quite well known, even famous, for his Post and Cosmopolitan stories. He was now earning as much as $20,000 a year, and so he could afford to relax and have a good time.
Things had already begun to go badly with the marriage. It was Christina’s exasperating sloppiness and carelessness that got most on her husband’s nerves. During his fairly long bachelorhood, he had become a man who required a system and order to things. He liked his shirts, ties, cuff links, studs, shoes in neatly ordered arrangements on his shelves and in his dresser drawers. But Christina, who was inevitably losing something, would paw through drawers and closets in search of the lost objects, disarranging everything, and whenever John encountered another of Christina’s havocs there would be a terrible, bellowing scene.
John had begun to mimic and mock Christina in front of their friends, just as he would later do with his second wife. He would snarl and hiss out her name, “Christeena.” It was “Christeena doesn’t seem to understand how I make my living” and “Christeena was so busy feeding Johnny an ice cream cone that she drove the car into a tree instead of looking where she was going” and “Christeena thought it would be nice if I interrupted my work to come in and say hello to you ladies. So here I am. Hello.” He would say, “I have to remind Christeena to take a bath, you know. If I didn’t remind her she’d never bathe at all.” He liked to tell their friends that a tradesman had said, “I like Mrs. Marquand. She’s real common.” And he liked to remind everyone that he had had to rent the little room in Charles Street just to get away from Christeena.
These verbal attacks on Christina both amused and disturbed their friends, who privately wondered how seriously John’s expressions of hostility were to be taken. Though Christina seemed outwardly unperturbed, there were signs that she was beginning to wither under the onslaught of accusations and complaints which her husband leveled at her head, and of hearing all the reasons why he felt she was making his life intolerable. He had begun to make an assertion that he would continue to make throughout his life: “Writers should never marry. At least I should never have.” And Christina once wistfully confided to a friend, “You know, I broke my engagement to him fourteen times. Perhaps I shouldn’t have ever—” and her voice trailed off into silence. And so, by the summer of 1926, there was the first of what would be several separations.
Christina had begun to say that she thought she was going to have a nervous breakdown—the threat had become one of her few defenses—and the omnipresent Sedgwicks, who were always waiting watchfully in the wings to come to the aid of their beleaguered child, suggested that she join them on the European trip.
Carol and Drew Hill, meanwhile, were young writers of yet a different sort. Drew Hill had, like John Marquand, worked for a while in advertising, despaired of it, and had come to Paris “to see if I can write,” Paris being the traditional place where one came to find answers to such questions. He had written a few things and sold some of them, but he was having only a limited amount of success. Carol Hill, simply because everyone else was doing it and there seemed not much else to do, had also written a novel. But, because she wasn’t sure quite how one went about such things, she had done nothing about showing it to a publisher. In fact, she had not even let Drew read it.
Carl Brandt was also Drew Hill’s literary agent, and he had written to the Hills to say that John Marquand was in Paris, alone, and might want company or cheering up. Brandt suggested that the Hills get in touch with him. They did, and the three hit it off splendidly from the beginning.
Marquand had been staying at the Hotel Reservoir in Versailles, and he—who had at that point much more money to spend than the Hills—would motor to Paris and take his new friends out to lunch and dinner at expensive restaurants which they themselves could never have afforded. He took them for drives in the country, for trips on the bateaux mouches, and saw that they were invited to week-end house parties in the country.
One day, Carol rather shyly mentioned to John that she had written a novel. He insisted that she give the manuscript to him to read, and he took it back with him to the hotel that night. He returned to Paris the next day, told her that he thought the book was certainly publishable, and suggested several editors to whom she ought to send it. Carol Hill’s novel—called Wild—was quickly accepted by John Day and was also sold for magazine serialization. Wild was a tale of flappers in the Flapper Era, written with a what-the-hell, devil-may-care attitude and erratic spelling and punctuation. But it was fast-paced and breezy, and Carol’s views on sex were frank and airy and amusing, and the book eventually sold quite well.
It irritated Drew Hill a bit to watch his wife’s little book, which she had more or less dashed off, turn her into the more successful writer of the two. But on the whole it was a happy summer for the three friends, and toward the end of it they all motored down to a big house party at a place called Maule. There was a garden behind the house and, in the center of the garden, a mulberry tree whose branches spread so wide that they seemed to embrace the garden, throwing it into a restful late-summer shade. Lunch was in the garden, under the mulberry tree, everyone drank a great deal of wine, and after lunch everyone went upstairs to rest. John Marquand and Carol Hill found themselves alone in the garden, and John confided that he felt depressed. He had been too upset to enjoy the wine. He was worried about Christina, about what was happening to his marriage. Carol said suddenly, “Look, you’ve done so much for me, can I do something for you? Why don’t we sit down and work? It will get your mind off things.” There was a typewriter in the house, and she carried it out into the garden, sat down in front of it, and said, “Now, dictate a story to me.”
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.