The dichotomous nature of his literary output worried John more than most people realized. He was, after all, turning out two different kinds of fiction, and he sometimes wondered if the two were having the effect of canceling each other out. It was not quite as simple as Conney Fiske had made it seem in talking about “serious” novels as opposed to those that were not serious. Both varieties of book took equal time and attention and effort and had to be undertaken with equal seriousness. It was not a case of one kind of writing being easier for him to do than the other. He did seem to be writing for two different kinds of reading audiences, but even that was becoming very difficult to gauge. It was not just his spy and detective novels that were being serialized in the big magazines; his so-called “quality” novels were also being run in places like the Saturday Evening Post, though in cut or otherwise speeded-up versions. So the interrelated questions continued to plague him: Did serialization of novels like Wickford Point and Pulham help him lose serious readers, and did the fact that his Mr. Moto stories appeared in the same periodicals damage him with critics? It was certainly true that those critics whom John sneeringly characterized as “the deep thinkers,” who wrote for the highbrow literary quarterlies, had very little that was kind to say about John P. Marquand, whom they tended to regard as a successful hack. “Don’t take yourself too seriously, and don’t worry too much about your art,” he would say to beginning novelists who sought him out for encouragement or advice. “Write the way you feel and what you want to write. Writing is the loneliest occupation in the world because it is entirely up to you.” But these calm sentiments were only part of his façade. He took himself quite seriously, and he worried a great deal about his art.
These questions were very much on his mind during the early months of World War II because he had, after publishing Pulham, turned to another Mr. Moto novel. It was an idea that automatically had a certain amount of box-office appeal. Mr. Moto was a Japanese. America was now at war with the Empire of Japan. If John Marquand involved Moto in a yarn concerning Germans, Japanese Intelligence, stolen aircraft parts, and the American Navy, in which Moto was outwitted in the end, both the story and the character immediately became more exciting. John thought the idea had merit, but there were difficulties with Adelaide. Adelaide had very little use for Mr. Moto in any of his incarnations, and said so. She considered John’s return to Mr. Moto a regression, and said that also. She was more ambitious for her husband. And so now, for John, there was no longer the problem of writing “something nice” for Uncle Ellery Sedgwick, but instead the more galling one of having to write something nice for Adelaide, whose name appeared next to his own as joint copyright holder of his books.
Carl Brandt, in the meantime, had been urging John to write another Mr. Moto. There was always a ready market for Mr. Moto books, and Carl knew how much John enjoyed doing them. Plotting a spy-detective story was a thing John liked to do almost as a form of mental exercise. Adelaide had no appreciation of this, and also tended to take a disparaging view of Carl Brandt’s efforts as her husband’s agent. Perhaps she regarded Carl as a bit too money-grubbing. In any case, in her letters to Alfred McIntyre, Adelaide had begun inserting small snide references to the Brandts, as well as to Bernice Baumgarten.
With the sort of tug-of-war that was going on over his talent and the direction that his career should be taking, it is perhaps surprising that the new Mr. Moto novel should have got written at all. But it did, and, late in 1941, as the serialization started in Collier’s under the title Mercator Island, John told Alfred McIntyre that no matter what inducements Carl Brandt and Bernice Baumgarten might try to press upon him he had no intention of permitting the new serial to be published in hard covers; he considered it a trivial piece of work, done mostly, he said, because Carl needed the money and, with the income tax the way it was, he himself now found himself with less reason to make money. To hell, in other words, with the financial pressures that had driven him. He would stick to writing the things he wanted to write, and he intended to make that crystal clear to Carl. From now on it was to be all for Art.
One of the financial pressures that may have impelled the new Mr. Moto may have been the fact that John’s and Adelaide’s second child was to be born that year, a son whom they named Timothy Fuller Marquand. Behind John’s determined words we can almost hear the voice of Adelaide Marquand dictating these ultimata. And, almost needless to say, because Carl Brandt could persuade John and could convince him, the serial—retitled Last Laugh, Mr. Moto—was published in book form by Little, Brown in 1942. The story suspends from one of John’s most complex spy plots, and as a result it is almost compulsively readable. It is hardly a perfunctory piece of work but is instead a highly competent thriller in which, almost literally to the last sentence, the reader cannot guess whether Mr. Moto will succeed in his mission or fail, and it sold considerably more copies than Marquand’s other Mr. Moto titles.
Adelaide had been urging John to write a novel that dealt with the Second World War, or events leading up to the Second World War, in some important way, not in terms of a Mr. Moto character. John, in his late forties, was too old to get into this war, though he had, through his friend George Merck, volunteered to take on a stint of civilian work with the Federal Security Agency in Washington. John and Adelaide had taken a big house in the capital where Adelaide, with her customary zeal, had set about to become a Washington Hostess, giving “interesting little dinners” for prominent government and military people. Among the friends invited down were the Fiskes from Boston, to whom Adelaide confided that she was entertaining a “very top-secret V.I.P.”—so important that Adelaide would not even reveal his name in advance. It turned out to be New Englander (and Harvard man) Vannevar Bush, an old friend of Conney’s. As Conney put it, “And so the little Boston mouse ended up cornering the guest of honor—Adelaide was simply furious.”
Meanwhile, John’s son, John, Jr., would soon be of military age. Young John and his sister Tina lived officially with their mother in Boston, in her house at 2 Mount Vernon Square, but they often visited their father and Adelaide.
John had a tendency to let their respective mothers raise his children; having sired them, and having been willing to pay his share of their expenses, he seemed to feel that he had done enough. He either didn’t much care for, or couldn’t understand, children; they made only fleeting appearances in his novels, and he seemed deliberately to be shying away from using them as characters. He had dealt mostly at a distance with his children by Christina, and, as for his children by Adelaide, there was such a difference between his age and theirs that the gap was more than generational; he felt more like a grandfather toward these little things. Seeing his oldest child approach young manhood amid the threats of another war may have made John realize that he had been a somewhat indifferent father.
John had never liked to talk much about his own war experiences. Battery A had been clubby and fun, and he was always full of border anecdotes. The war was something else again. He did not like to remember it, had pushed it far back in his mind, and when other men began recounting their war experiences John would become silent. There was nothing about the war he had fought in that he found either special or worthwhile, though of course one could not forget it, no matter how one tried. He had used certain of his experiences in several short stories, such as “Good Morning, Major.” But he had never put the war or his feelings about it, and what it meant to him to see the world rushing headlong into another conflict, in a book.
By the end of 1942, Marquand—feeling middle-aged, even old—was in one of his “low” periods, moods of depression and discontent that would, with increasing frequency, assail him, and which even his love affair with Carol could not really comfort or bring him out of. The East Coast was under a black-out. Adelaide was shedding no joy into his life. The world was at war, and the past, even the years with Christina, had become suffused with an aura of bittersweet nostalgia. He had taken to musing about the happy times—even though they had not really been quite that—with Christina, who was about to remarry. More than half his life was over, and what seemed like the best of it was through.
It was the early winter of 1943, not one of the brightest moments of the world’s history. His son John had got his orders to report to Fort Devens for military service. John senior had known this was coming, but the actuality of it made him, as he used to say, “very low in my mind.” He often said that he thought a boy should at least be permitted to finish college before going into the Army. “But then,” as he said to Conney Fiske, “this is a tough war, and we all have to take it.”
It sounded very much like the theme for a novel. Or Novel.