Of all Marquand’s friends, the person whose literary taste and judgment he admired the most was Conney Fiske. Carl Brandt might help him as an editor, telling him where to cut and splice and fill, and Carol—or any other good stenographer—could make the creative process easier by taking down the novels and stories as he dictated them, but only Conney Fiske, in Marquand’s opinion, had true critical ability. Throughout his life he expressed nothing but disdain for book reviewers, particularly those who sought to elevate their calling by claiming to be “critics.” “Nothing but a bunch of ex-obituary writers,” he used to say, and he insisted that he hardly ever bothered to read what they wrote about his books and never paid any attention to anything they had to say. But he paid attention to Conney Fiske, and early in their friendship he began his lifelong practice of letting her read his manuscripts as they progressed, a few chapters at a time, and listening to her opinions on the work in progress.
Conney Fiske today is a small, gingery lady who, by her good tweed suits, her little hats, and her quiet demeanor, would be recognized almost everywhere as a Bostonian. Like others of her own and of other generations, she possesses the curious ability to carry the distinctive stamp of Boston with her wherever she goes. Boston is in every inflection of her speech, every gesture, every turn of mind and shade of thought. Her sense of quality is Bostonian, which means that more emphasis is placed on duty, probity, good manners, and quiet accomplishment than on money or show. Conney Fiske was born rich, the daughter of a hugely successful manufacturer, but she would probably shudder at the thought of indicating that she was anything more than comfortably—and respectably—well off. It is typical of her sense of propriety that in her sprawling old farmhouse (“It’s not really old, only nineteenth century”) in suburban Framingham, the furniture should be old and fine, but upholstery is threadbare and rugs are thin and worn. An air of shabby gentility hangs over the whole place and, in summer, when one jumps into the icy waters of her somewhat old-fashioned (and certainly unheated) fill-and-draw swimming pool, one is joined by tiny and quite unobtrusive green frogs. Now in her seventies, Conney Fiske has all her life been an ardent horsewoman and is proudest of her stable, her thoroughbreds, and her private jumping course. When she foxhunts, which she does regularly “in season” from her winter home in Southern Pines, North Carolina, she rides using “the Queen’s seat,” that is, sidesaddle, a position that seems appropriate to one who is clearly a Boston gentlewoman.
But Conney Fiske is also, by Boston standards, something of a sport, a maverick. Though she has been widowed for a number of years, her existence is hardly typical of the “proper” Boston widow who spends her days paying calls and pouring tea. Conney Fiske travels extensively and almost compulsively in her own country and abroad, always seeking out new places and experiences and people, satisfying her restless curiosity about the world and its beings. “In Boston, they think I am a little crazy, of course,” she often says. Though she toils for proper Boston causes—the hospitals and Radcliffe College, of which she is a trustee—she is far from the typical committeewoman. She also possesses a definite chic, which is not at all what one thinks of as Boston standard-dowdy. She is justifiably proud of her slender figure and slim legs, and of tiny feet which are always handsomely and expensively shod.
At the same time, she possessed—and possesses—a quality that particularly appealed to Marquand: a sense of humor about her own situation and social caste and about the values of upper-class Boston that have shaped Constance Morss Fiske into the definite lady she is. She has John’s ability to see both sides of her position and station in life. Like John, she could always laugh at the rituals and mystiques surrounding such venerable Boston institutions as the Athenaeum, the Chilton Club, the Somerset Club, and the enormous and mysterious importance of living on the Hill. At the same time, Conney Fiske would seem to take her membership in all these institutions very seriously; lunching in town she usually prefers the Spartan dignity of the downstairs ladies’ dining room in the Somerset Club, and during the years when the Fiskes kept their big house at 206 Beacon Street Conney Fiske did so with an awareness that this was a most impeccable Boston address, and that an impeccable address matters seriously in Boston.
Conney Fiske’s detachment was not typical but exceptional for Boston. She could get amusement from observing the old and proper families such as the Lowells and the Lawrences and the Peabodys, people who saw each other over and over again, year after year, who traveled to London and stayed at Brown’s Hotel because only here could they be sure of finding other Bostonians, and who, confronted with people from out of town, would simply refuse to engage them in conversation, preferring “our own sort.” And yet she was herself very much a part of this formalized world, part of this pattern, and knew its contours and its rules.
Perhaps her curious combination of serious adherence to form, along with a gentle and detached self-mockery, is best seen watching Conney Fiske on horseback, in the Moore County Hunt. Though she rides the Queen’s seat with dignity and authority in her well-worn but expensively tailored riding skirt, and with her sensibly coiffed hair tucked under a black derby hat, it is somehow also clear that she knows perfectly well that she is an oddity, an anachronism, and is getting huge enjoyment from this knowledge.
This specialness of her humor was what endeared Conney Fiske to John Marquand. She was everything that the Sedgwicks were, but with self-awareness added. She, in turn, understood what John had had to endure from the Sedgwicks and admired his curiosity and industry and grit in the face of it.
Gardiner Fiske, meanwhile, was if anything even more Bostonian. Though Conney’s family was richer, the Gardiner and Fiske families bore the more prestigious lineage—the Gardiners, in particular, who include in their family tree all the ancient Lords of the Manor of Gardiners Island, New York, a private fiefdom granted to the Gardiners by the Crown long before the Revolution, and still in the family. In Boston, Gardiners and Fiskes have taken themselves enormously seriously for generations, and men like Gardi Fiske’s father, Andrew Fiske, and his aunt, the maiden lady Miss Gertrude Fiske, were so thoroughly Beacon-Hill oriented that one could hardly imagine them more than a block away from Beacon or State Streets; they could not have breathed the air. Gardi Fiske had a bit of this in him too, but he was also a movie-star-handsome, athletic—one might even say dashing—man, who simply did not look the part of a Boston Brahmin. He had a romantic past. During World War I he had been a flying ace who, at one point, had fallen out of the plane he was flying, seized hold of one of the rear struts, and clambered back aboard. He was not at all frightened at the time, he told Marquand, who never tired of hearing about this astonishing feat, because “I know the Bishop, who is Up There, and if there are any good clubs, he’ll get me in.” He was referring, of course, to Bishop Lawrence of Boston. Gardi and John had been good friends since Lampoon days. Gardi, after the war, had gone to work as a cotton broker and was a member of the Boston Airport Authority, earning a respectable, if not giant, salary, and Marquand had admired Gardi for doing this. It would have been so easy, Marquand often pointed out, for a man in Gardi Fiske’s position to live off his wealthy wife. Most of all, Marquand admired Gardi’s integrity, his insistence on sticking to his principles. With Gardi there was black and there was white, and no shadings in between.
John Marquand had developed an admiration for the novels of Edith Wharton and Jane Austen. A dog-eared copy of Pride and Prejudice could usually be found in his jacket pocket, and he read and reread it many times. Before his divorce from Christina, he had turned out two novels that reflected the Jane Austen influence and were suggestive of the major novels that would one day follow. The first of these two, published in 1930, was called Warning Hill, and the second, published in 1933, was titled Haven’s End. Both had been first written for magazine serialization, and both had New England settings. Of the two novels, Haven’s End is the more interesting and the more successful and, later on, Haven’s End was the only one of his early novels which Marquand chose to list on the traditional “ad page” at the front of each of his books, an indication that he considered Haven’s End the only title worth owning up to, and that he would just as soon let the others be forgotten.
The fictional town of Haven’s End, where the finest houses “still are very fine. They stand on a ridge above the Main Street, where they may overlook the river and the sea,” is very reminiscent of the Newburyport John Marquand knew as a boy, and the Swales, who have ancient roots there, sound very much like his own ancestral Marquands. He was gradually, and somewhat hesitantly, abandoning the costumed melodrama of his first books and coming to grips with his own experience. In the process, his writing style was becoming less turgid and labored, moving toward the honeyed smoothness of the writing in his best books, a style so polished and restrained that there hardly seems to be any style at all. Also in Haven’s End he made use—somewhat crude and primitive use, to be sure—of the flashback technique that would become the great Marquand trademark in the later books, the perfectly structured and sweepingly cinematic movements backward in time that carried readers deep into the past of the Marquand characters. Haven’s End opens with the village auctioneer about to put the splendid old Swale mansion on the block. The novel then shifts—too abruptly to be as dramatic as a good flashback should be—into the past history of the Swales. Three-hundred-odd pages later, the story jumps back into the present again as the auctioneer’s hammer falls on the final sale.
Conney Fiske encouraged John with both these New England novels—he was writing, after all, about a world which she also knew, perhaps even better than he—and together they would discuss nuances of the Yankee’s character: his sense of probity and thrift, and also his strong feelings of continuity of family as expressed through property, through roots.
Meanwhile, John’s Mr. Moto stories were achieving huge popularity, and each new tale of the lisping, bowing, and foot-shuffling little detective was immediately being snapped up for movies that starred Peter Lorre. Despite his complaints about the amounts of money he had had to settle on Christina and to support his children, Marquand was becoming a rich writer. This gave him time and leisure to work on the big novel he had been thinking about, the Boston novel. When he had once mentioned it to Christina, her reaction had been, “We’ll have to leave Boston, of course.” Now this had become the novel he and Conney Fiske talked most about during the long and pleasant afternoons at 206 Beacon Street, and which he was giving her to read, chapter by chapter, as it progressed. Its central character was to be a Boston Brahmin, a man not unlike Gardi Fiske’s father. It was a character who would be approached with Conney’s, and John’s, kind of double sight. That is, the hero of the book would be a man whom one would laugh at for his foolishness and pomposity, but whom one would also love for his integrity and fidelity to his code. As a novel, it would be an important departure for John, the most ambitious project he had ever undertaken—a bid, though he did not come out and say so—for greatness. It would be, perhaps, his Pride and Prejudice. As the novel moved along, Conney Fiske could tell that her husband, in all probability, would not like it. It dissected their own world too surgically, mocked it too cleverly. But Conney Fiske sensed that a major book was under way, and her encouragement was therefore steady and insistent. She also sensed Marquand’s extraordinary excitement with what he was doing. It was an excitement he had not experienced before in anything he had written. With this book, which he planned to call The Late George Apley, he was not writing as a journeyman professional, turning out commercial fiction. He was writing with a true creative joy.
He could not come out and say this either, but he was writing a novel that could thumb its nose at Uncle Ellery. And at Christina.