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, but 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 tutor 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.
In Boston, the Sedgwicks—Christina’s mother in particular—seemed to be doing nothing that was in the least bit helpful in holding the Marquands’ marriage together. Mrs. Sedgwick continued her domineering ways with her daughter and remained disparaging about her son-in-law’s writing. There seemed to be no way to please her. On the one hand, she complained of John’s “writing for money”; on the other, she claimed that John was not earning enough to support a wife and children in the proper Sedgwick style. Christina had grown more vaporous and imponderable than ever. In 1929, signs had been appearing everywhere that the glorious bubble of the twenties was about to burst, and suddenly in Boston there had been earth-shattering news. Kidder, Peabody & Company, one of the most respected investment banking and brokerage firms in the city, had announced that it was in serious financial difficulties. For days, Boston had been unable to talk of anything else. The collapse of Kidder, Peabody would be as stunning an event as if the sun failed to rise in the morning. To the Sedgwicks, it would have very nearly amounted to a family tragedy, since Cousin Minturn Sedgwick was married to a Peabody. A few days after the firm’s crisis, John and Christina Marquand had been driving out to their summer house in Weston with Gardi and Conney Fiske, and all the way out the Fiskes and John had talked excitedly in the car. What did this all mean to the economy of Boston, to the country, to world banking? Suddenly Christina had spoken up in her high-pitched, fluty voice. “What’s this I hear about Kidder, Peabody?”
It was inevitable that word of his marital problems should reach the ears of such men as George Horace Lorimer and Ray Long, who were buying Marquand’s increasingly popular short stories and serials, and it was Lorimer’s suggestion that John get away from Christina and the two children for a while by taking a trip to the Orient to gather new material for fiction. And so, financed by the booming Saturday Evening Post, Marquand sailed for the Far East. When he returned, it was summer again and the Brandts had taken a house for a few months in Bronxville. John joined them there for an extended visit and, dictating to Carol, began a novel to be called No Hero, the first of what would become a hugely successful series of books and stories about a whimsically obsequious, lisping Japanese detective named Mr. Moto.
Carol would return from her office on weekday afternoons, and John would dictate for two hours before dinner. Carol would type the manuscript in triple space. The next day, John would edit the previous evening’s material and, by afternoon, would be ready to start dictating again. On Saturdays and Sundays, they would work for as many as seven to eight hours at a stretch. The work was concentrated and exhausting, but by the end of the summer the novel was finished. Lorimer was delighted with it.
In the year 1933, John Marquand earned $19,000, not at all bad for a writer in the depths of the Depression. Nonetheless that year the Marquands made a decision that on the surface seems foolish and was to prove ruinous. For reasons of economy as much as for anything else, they decided to move in with Christina’s family at Sedgwick House.
It was, of course, a large house with many big rooms, and an argument could be made that it was big enough to hold all the Sedgwicks plus four Marquands, and there were also quaint and quirky details about the old place that rather appealed to Marquand’s sardonic turn of mind as a storyteller, to his sense of the ridiculous. He had always been amused, for example, by the Sedgwick dog cemetery behind the house, a canine resting-place where, beneath tiny headstones in carefully tended graves, reposed Sedgwick pets going back for over a hundred years, their names—“Kozo,” “Kai,” “Benvenuto Cellini”—carved in the ancient stones above inscribed testaments to the departed dogs’ virtues, written in Latin.
For all this, 1933 was hardly the happiest year of the Marquands’ marriage. Christina’s brother, A. C. Sedgwick, Jr., also lived at Sedgwick House and, in the Sedgwick tradition, he was “literary.” That particular year he was at work on a poetic novel to be called Wind Without Rain, and the family was understandably excited about the book’s emergence. Across the hall from A. C.’s workroom, John Marquand was writing one after another of his endless stream of serials and stories that were feeding and clothing his wife and two children—serials that were appearing in magazines with circulations totaling in the tens of millions but which, by Sedgwick standards, “nobody” read. One afternoon, while John was working, Mrs. Sedgwick tapped on John’s door to ask him if he would mind taking A. C.’s dog, whose name was Chou-Fleur, out for its regular midafternoon walk. “I can’t disturb him to ask him to do it,” Mrs. Sedgwick whispered to John. “He’s writing, you know.”
With increasing frequency that year, John would find himself boarding the train at the Stockbridge station to escape to New York for a few days. Sometimes these trips were necessary in order to meet or lunch with editors, but as often as not he would invent reasons for his departures merely to get away from the Sedgwick world. In New York, he would move in with Carl and Carol Brandt. One time, returning to Stockbridge and the Sedgwicks, he brought with him a tankful of tropical fish. Tropical fish had always fascinated him. But this time he presented the tank and fish to Christina’s mother as a hostess present. Mrs. Sedgwick, looking mystified, asked him, “But why would you give me tropical fish, John?” He replied, “It seemed to me a bit chilly up here.” Mrs. Sedgwick rewarded him with her iciest stare.
When Carol Brandt suffered an attack of appendicitis in 1934, her doctor ordered her to take two weeks of vacation and rest. Since this occurred during one of Marquand’s periodic flights from his family, Carl Brandt suggested that he and Carol go to Bermuda and then, rather hesitantly, asked, “Can we take John with us? He doesn’t want to go back to Christina and the children yet.” Carol wasn’t certain whether a holiday à trois was a good idea, but she agreed. It turned out to be one of the happiest times the three had ever spent together. They stayed at the Castle Harbour, which had just opened, and for two weeks they swam, lay in the sun, played three-handed bridge, and drank something they christened “Liquid Sunshine,” a murderous concoction which Carl devised out of several varieties of rum and brandy. Too soon it was time for John to go home and face troubles in Boston, for although these escapes from marriage were diverting they solved no problem.
In Boston he had begun to think about a novel quite different from anything he had written before. It would be a novel about Boston, about the social attitudes that prevailed there which were so different from those in New York, or any place else in the world, for that matter. These were the attitudes that had seemed to present him with nothing but obstacles in terms of Christina and the Sedgwicks.
When, in late 1934, John told Carl and Carol that he intended to divorce Christina, the Brandts were deeply disturbed. It seemed to his friends that for all its ups and downs it was a marriage worth saving, and there were two small children in the picture. John, Jr. was then eleven, and little Christina was only seven. The Brandts begged John to meet privately with Christina to discuss matters, and to meet with her preferably on neutral territory, with no children or Sedgwick relatives on hand to distract the couple from facing their problems. Reluctantly, John agreed to try their suggestion, which was more Carol’s than Carl’s; Carl, having been through one divorce, was less sanguine about the chances of John’s marriage surviving. Carol suggested that the meeting take place at the Brandts’ apartment, which was at 270 Park Avenue, and on the morning of the meeting both Brandts departed for their offices to leave John alone to await Christina. That evening, when they returned, John was alone again, standing in the living room, a drink in his hand, swinging the glass in circles in that characteristic way of his. From his expression, it was clear that the meeting with his wife had been less than a complete success. It was also clear that John had had more than one drink.
“Well,” Carol Brandt asked tentatively, “how did things go?”
John exploded. “Can you imagine?” he asked. “Can you imagine what she said? She said that before we discussed anything I would have to apologize! She said, ‘John, before I say anything, I want you to apologize!’ Apologize!”
And so that marriage was over. It had lasted, in its shaky and fragile way, more than twelve years. A divorce decree was granted to Christina Sedgwick Marquand on May 19, 1935, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and another chapter in the life John Marquand was writing for himself came to an end.