It was, on the surface, an odd collaborative team—John P. Marquand and George S. Kaufman, the Protestant novelist of New England manners and the Jewish ex-shoe salesman, turned successful playwright, from Pittsburgh. But from the moment they were brought together—by Harold Freedman, who headed the Brandt & Brandt Dramatic Department—they got along swimmingly and became close friends. George Kaufman once commented that he liked John because “He’s the only person in the world who can make worse faces than I can.” Their collaboration was to prepare The Late George Apley for Broadway.
Working with Kaufman, every trace of Marquand’s decided attitude of social anti-Semitism (which was more a part of his upbringing than anything else, in a world where most Jews were considered not “attractive” and were not admitted into the best clubs) evaporated. On the other hand, George Kaufman, as his daughter, Anne Kaufman Schneider, has pointed out, was a Jew but not very Jewish. The Kaufman household was not at all religious, and the only time a rabbi was ever called was “when someone got married, or someone died.” Neither Kaufman nor any of his family were synagogue-going Jews, not even on the High Holy Days. He even wrote as a Christian. Plays like You Can’t Take It with You, and The Man Who Came to Dinner can hardly be said to contain any remotely Jewish themes, and when Jewish characters entered his work it was always in a minor way—a comedy producer, for example, or Hollywood agent. As a person, Kaufman was a reserved, almost austere man with an Old World manner, and Harold Freedman had been right in suspecting that they would get along.
The Kaufmans had a large and comfortable country house in Holicong, Pennsylvania, in Bucks County, and during the summer of 1943 Marquand spent long periods there, working on the play adaptation with Kaufman. “I write the dialogue and he puts in the punches,” Marquand used to say, which was more or less the case. But it was a true collaboration in which the two men talked out the story line—to overcome the most obvious difficulty, which was to turn a novel composed of a series of letters, with very little dialogue, into a play in which people moved about rooms and talked—then discussed scenes, wrote dialogue, analyzed it, rewrote. Kaufman, of course, was a master at providing “punches” and getting laughs. The summer of 1943, in fact, was not only one of the pleasantest but one of the most interesting of Marquand’s life, for he had become fascinated with the theater and the people who worked in it.
The Bucks County days passed virtually without disagreement or disruption until one week end when Adelaide Marquand arrived to join the little group at the farmhouse. Adelaide took a Friday afternoon train to New Hope, and the Kaufmans met her there. The four had a pleasant dinner.
Beatrice Kaufman, George Kaufman’s wife, liked to sleep late, and on Saturday morning she rang for her maid at around ten thirty and was presently delivered her breakfast tray, the newspapers, and the morning mail. Before arising, Mrs. Kaufman liked to apprise herself of the situation in her household, and she asked her maid if there had been any telephone calls. “Yes,” her maid said in somewhat awed tones, “Mrs. Charles Lindbergh telephoned for Mrs. Marquand.” “I see,” said Beatrice Kaufman. “Have you given her the message?” “Not yet,” said the maid. “Then don’t give it to her,” her mistress instructed. “I will give it to her.”
Adelaide’s friendship with Anne Morrow Lindbergh went back to their girlhood days when Anne Lindbergh’s family, the Morrows, had an apartment in the same building as Adelaide’s parents, the Hookers. Adelaide’s sister Helen and Anne Morrow had been classmates at Miss Chapin’s School, the Morrows had visited the Hookers frequently at their summer place in Greenwich, and both families’ backgrounds were similarly New York and moneyed. It was through her old friendship with Mrs. Lindbergh that Adelaide had first become involved with Charles Lindbergh and his America First Committee, and after that committee’s collapse with Pearl Harbor the two women had remained good friends—Anne Lindbergh admiring Adelaide’s hail-fellow-well-met quality, her bluster and exuberance and cheerfulness, and also what Mrs. Lindbergh recalls as Adelaide’s “sense of mission.” Adelaide had, Mrs. Lindbergh feels, “The deepest respect, almost reverence, for John and his talent, and she wanted to be one of those women, those heroines, who nourish artists and feel that theirs is the highest of callings.” And Adelaide, no doubt, admired Anne Lindbergh’s delicacy of manner, her gentle and shy nature, so unlike Adelaide’s, and perhaps even envied the Lindberghs’ quite obvious devotion to each other. But in the summer of 1943, with war raging in Europe, the Lindbergh name had become anathema to millions of Americans. He had publicly defamed the Jews, had been associated with Goering, and had been labeled as a Nazi.
At around eleven thirty, when everyone had gathered downstairs in the living room, Beatrice Kaufman spoke up in her clearest and coolest voice. “Adelaide,” she said, “while you were asleep this morning, Mrs. Lindbergh telephoned you here.” “Oh,” said Adelaide, I’ll ring her back.” “You may call her back if you wish,” Beatrice Kaufman said, “but you may not do so from this house.” There was an awful moment, and then Adelaide burst into tears and ran out of the room.
A few minutes later she was back, dressed and carrying her suitcase. “John,” she said, “I want you to drive me to the station.” Without a word, John rose and did as she had asked him.
Later in the afternoon, after John had returned to the house, the two men were standing on the front porch of the house. There had been no discussion of the scene that had occurred, and quite obviously both men were somewhat embarrassed by their respective wives’ behavior, Kaufman for his wife’s insulting a guest and John for Adelaide’s poor taste in leaving the Kaufmans’ telephone number as one where the Lindberghs could reach her. It seemed a rather poor show for both women, and it was hard to see how anyone could come out any the better for what had happened. At the same time, the collaboration had to continue, and the two men could not let their wives’ hostility affect either their work or their friendship. The two stood in silence for a while, and finally Kaufman said, “John, why do you associate yourself with people like the Lindberghs?” Marquand thought a moment and replied, “George, you’ve got to remember that all heroes are horses’ asses.”
The novel, meanwhile, that John Marquand had been working on was one that had found him in a new and different mood. The Second World War, as a fact, had affected him profoundly and seemed to fill him with a sense of futility and loss over the fighting and bloodshed he had experienced himself in the first war, barely twenty years earlier. He had trouble accepting this second war, grasping its whole point, or even the whole point of his life. In 1943 he entered his fifties, and with it came a deep sense that there was no way to alter or reshape the past. His marriage to Adelaide had become both a private trial and a public embarrassment, and there was comfort to be found only in brief affairs and in the solidity of his love for Carol, upon whom, as she had hoped he would, he had become dependent. Not only could he call her up at odd hours of the day and night and be certain of finding a sympathetic ear to listen to the details of his latest domestic ordeal, she could do other things. “We could completely level with each other,” Carol says. “There was complete honesty between us. He knew he wasn’t the only man in my life, and he never asked to be. I assumed there were other women in his life and wouldn’t have dreamed of raising an objection. For instance a woman he knew needed an abortion. John knew I knew how to cope with problems like that, and so he came to me, and I arranged it.”
But all the same, the center of his life had become wistful, clouded. There was a line he claimed to have once encountered in James Russell Lowell that he had begun to quote frequently: “The leaves are falling fast that hide our generation from the sky.” And the novel that came from these days would wear a wistful title, So Little Time. In Marquand’s fictive view of himself, he was always two characters—the New England aristocrat, with ancient and distinguished lineage entitling him to membership in the best clubs, and, at the same time, the self-made arriviste who had struggled up from early poverty, through public school in a small town. He could play either role. In his new novel he chose the latter character as his hero, whom Marquand named Jeffrey Wilson. Marquand was also, with this book, flexing his muscles again and attempting still another kind of fiction—fiction on a more serious and therefore perhaps more important level. Books, after all, such as Apley and Wickford Point and Pulham seemed to have achieved their popularity by virtue of their broad comic strokes, and now, in the 1940s, it irked Marquand to realize that whereas once he had been dismissed as a writer of slick detective stories he was now being treated by critics as a writer of light social satire. John Marquand always insisted that he paid no attention to the critics, but he could not help taking in what they said. And So Little Time was in many ways his bid to be placed in the topmost drawer of American novelists, to go beyond, in a sense, the Pulitzer Prize.
Also, Alfred McIntyre and others at Little, Brown had for a long time been urging John to get away from Boston as a locale, to be less parochial and take in a larger landscape. In this sense too he was in danger of becoming type-cast. So Little Time was to be definitely non-New England; to emphasize this point the novel opens with a number of strongly descriptive phrases taking in the vastness of the New York skyline. Also, from very early on the novel announces its mighty theme: America in the twenty months before Pearl Harbor—the world, really, moving inevitably toward war.
Jeffrey Wilson was brought up, and went to public school, in the very small town of Bragg, Massachusetts, a place that sounds very much like the Newburyport of Marquand’s youth, and his growing-up years were spent in a run-down old house full of elderly and eccentric relatives who bear distinct resemblances to the elderly and eccentric relatives in Wickford Point. Jeffrey has worked his way to considerable riches and some celebrity as a sort of literary hack—a play doctor who can turn a Broadway dud into a hit by sleight of hand but who himself cannot do a sustained piece of creative work. Jeffrey has an intelligent and insightful but tiresomely complaining wife, Madge—“You never tell me anything,” she keeps saying—who bears no small resemblance to Adelaide. He is romantically drawn to the beautiful, tough, and brittle actress, Marianna Miller—Carol Brandt—who moves with catlike grace through the ego-ridden jungle of artists, writers, and theater people. Jeffrey also looks wistfully back to the bittersweet days of his youth, and to the golden girl whose presence filled them, his first love from high school, Louella Barnes, for whom it is possible to read Christina Sedgwick. A desperate sense of lost youth, lost time, fills Jeffrey Wilson.
In the background of his domestic malaise—of his marriage, Jeffrey Wilson comments, “No one is exactly right for anyone, not ever”—is the war in Europe, the reports of buzz bombs and blitzkriegs, and a radio announcer who with gonglike regularity intones, from the crackling set, “This—is London.” Jeff Wilson also desperately wants to understand the war, what is happening over there and why. He has a son who, if America gets into the war, will surely have to go. His wife loves Jeffrey more than he loves her; for him, their love has become perfunctory routine. She suddenly asks him, “You’re not sorry, are you? I mean, you’ve liked it, haven’t you? The children and the country and being here in the winter. You have liked it, haven’t you?” His answer, Pulham-like, is, “Why, of course.…” She also urges him, “Don’t worry about the war. You can’t do anything about it.” And there is the subtheme of the novel: a man’s helplessness in the face of the inevitability of history, the onrush of events, old age, with time running out.
For all its seriousness of theme and general pessimism of tone, Marquand could not resist adding comic strokes to So Little Time, and some of them are not a little broad. There is, for example, the character of Walter Newcombe, war correspondent and buffoon. Walter has written a book with the weighty title of World Assignment, which, as the title suggests, attempts to explain the world. World Assignment has been taken with enormous seriousness by the deep-thinking critics and with the as-easily-gulled reading public, and as a result Walter has become in great demand on the lecture circuit for his analyses of the European Situation. But Walter quickly reveals that he has no more grasp of the European Situation than the average tourist of thirty years earlier, and when asked his views of individuals or events connected with the war he has a catch phrase to cover up the vastness of his ignorance: “Don’t get me started on that!”
Walter Newcombe was Marquand’s way of getting back both at war correspondents, most of whom he either regarded as muddle-heads or outright liars, and at the literary critics who gave the words of these men prominence. If Walter has one redeeming characteristic it is that in his secret heart he knows he is a fool—he has become a celebrity by sheer dumb luck—and he confesses this to his old friend Jeff Wilson; with childlike wonderment Walter asks Jeff if Jeff realizes that he and Walter are the only two boys from Bragg to have made the pages of Who’s Who. Sometimes, to make Walter seem ridiculous, Marquand goes a little far—such as in the scene where Walter tells Jeff how, by sheerest accident, Walter stumbled upon a book in a Liggett’s Drug Store which, when he read it, impressed him deeply. The book is a little on the long side, Walter warns, but it is really well-written: “Every thoughtful American ought to read it.” Walter, furthermore, intends to tell his lecture audiences about this book to help lift it out of obscurity. The book is called War and Peace. It is a funny scene, yes, but, as Marquand himself knew, satire loses its bite when the scale tips toward slapstick.
Walter Newcombe, incidentally, has also gone to a “wrong” Ivy League college, Dartmouth, though Jeff Wilson went to Harvard. And in So Little Time Marquand managed to take a sly poke at Adelaide and her America First Committee by having Jeff’s Cousin Ethel, from the decidedly “wrong” town of West Springfield (the fashionable side of Springfield is the southeast, as “everybody knows”), be an American Firster.
To readers more than a generation later, So Little Time may seem an excessively slow-paced novel which takes far too many pages to reach its scattered climaxes. And indeed it was by far the longest novel John had written, nearly six hundred tightly packed pages in the cloth-cover edition, more than a quarter of a million words. In its original state the novel was much longer, and the Marquand device of repeating sentences and key phrases was indulged in to the point of tediousness. Halfway through the manuscript, Marquand himself became very depressed and discouraged about it, and by the time the final page was typed he was not sure what could be done with the bulky pile of typescript. It was at this point that Adelaide, forceful woman that she was, took over.
Adelaide was determined that a successful novel could be brought out of the manuscript. Working with John, the two cut some three hundred pages out of the vitals of the script, reducing it by nearly a third. It was hard and unpleasant work, for such major surgery to a book is always painful, and there were, needless to say, many and vociferous disagreements between the author and his editor wife over what should be allowed to fall on the cutting-room floor.
Adelaide objected to John’s habit of repeating certain catch phrases; John insisted that his readers enjoyed this device and expected to encounter it in his books. Adelaide found the first thirty pages of the new novel unduly verbose, creating a top-heaviness at the beginning; John at last agreed to cut in this section. Adelaide found the last twelve pages anticlimactic, but John—backed by the Brandts—insisted she was wrong. There were a few episodes, early in the book, that John had cut out. Adelaide wanted these restored but placed later in the story. And so it went.
Whether John, even begrudgingly, would admit it or not, Adelaide Marquand must be given some credit for salvaging So Little Time and helping it become a publishable book. But in the process the personal relationship between John and Adelaide did not improve. Adelaide had discovered that she was pregnant with a third child, and John was appalled. It seemed to him grotesque to become a father again at fifty, and he told friends that he had begged Adelaide to get an abortion, which she refused, as was certainly her right. As soon as the baby was born, he announced that he was taking off for Hot Springs, Virginia, for a two-week holiday with Carl and Carol Brandt. Elon Huntington Hooker Marquand—whose name encompassed a number of his mother’s New England ancestors—was left with his mother at Harkness Pavilion. John announced that he did not even intend to telephone New York to see how mother and child were faring. Carol Brandt, insisting that he could not treat his wife so cruelly, finally was told she could write Adelaide a newsy letter about the trip if she wished. She did, but her letter was not well received.
There was the usual struggle for a title of the new novel. John had been fascinated by the lyric of an old drinking song that went:
“.… Looking for a happy land
Where everything is bright,
Where the highballs grow on bushes
And we stay out every night.”
Americans in 1940 and 1941 were, he thought, looking for just such a worry-free place, and for a long time he fought for “Looking for a Happy Land” as the book’s title. Throughout, Alfred McIntyre was steadily pressing for “So Little Time.” John then suggested “The Fifes Will Play” and “Young Men for War” (from the proverb, “Old men for council, young men for war”). Little, Brown cared for neither of these. Coming down on the train from Boston, John had another idea—“Time and Jeffrey Wilson,” which he proposed as a short title, easy to remember, and better than “So Little Time” or “In That Last Year.” It seemed to him admirably lacking in melodrama and fancy thinking. It was the “melodrama” of the words “So Little Time” that he objected to the most.
But Little, Brown, gently but firmly reminding him that they had chosen the successful titles of his last three books, pressed for their title and John gave in. By the time of the book’s publication, in fact, he had become quite excited about it and was eagerly editing the publicity release about the book that his publisher was sending out to booksellers. Where the release said that this was to be John’s longest book, John penned in the added phrase, “on the broadest canvas he has so far used,” and where the copywriter had said, “perhaps his finest,” John wrote: “We believe it will be considered by many critics his finest.” So much for a man who insisted he never worried about critics. He also wrote a dedication for the book which, perhaps, should have been for Adelaide but instead was for “Alfred McIntyre, in memory of all the trips we have taken together over the rough roads of fiction.”
For all its length, its leisured rhythms, and its generally melancholy tone, something about So Little Time caught and matched the mood of American readers in the autumn of 1943, with war raging, it seemed, all over the world, and the future dark and uncertain. So Little Time became John Marquand’s first big success; it quickly climbed to the top of the best-seller list and stayed there. Critically, the novel didn’t do exactly what Marquand had hoped it would. The critics did not hail it as a novel of world-shattering importance, though the reviews were good. But the public loved it, and the book made its author a considerable sum of money. Eventually 787,000 copies were sold. That year, his income from royalties nearly doubled, to $74,300, and the next year—as royalties continued to pour in—he earned $92,000. And so now, having survived two labels, first as a writer of potboiler detective stories, second as a writer of light social satire, he would now have to endure the curse of a third: as a writer of immensely popular books.
It was, very oddly, like a three-act play.