The Late George Apley opened on Broadway in November, 1944, with the beetle-browed Leo G. Carroll in the title role, and was an immediate critical and popular success. It would run two years and would earn John Marquand an additional $30,000 a year in play royalties. At that point, at the peak of his powers and career, he was very likely the highest paid novelist in the world.
During the out-of-town tryouts of the play, John had been eager to have the Fiskes—particularly Conney—see it in performance, since Conney had been so important in encouraging, and in some ways even inspiring, Apley as a book. Conney admired the play—Gardi still felt somewhat dubious about the whole Apley business—but she had several specific suggestions to make. Nobody knew her Boston better than Conney, and when on opening night she spotted a French brocade sofa in the set of what was supposed to represent the Apley’s Beacon Hill drawing room she protested that such a stylish piece of furniture would never be placed in a proper Boston house. It was all wrong. The play’s producer, Max Gordon, took her at her word and had the sofa replaced with a more genteelly shabby piece. She also said that she did not feel that the Boston accent of the English-born Mr. Carroll rang true. When this was presented to Carroll, he protested, “I’ve already been taught fourteen different Boston accents!” But he did spend some time talking with Conney, listening to her speech and studying the broadness of her A’s. After catching another performance, somewhat later, Conney reported a marked improvement.
John, of course, would never admit it because of Adelaide, but he had become a writer who could work well with a collaborator and who, at times, even needed the help of collaboration. There was the happy experience with George Kaufman, for instance, and there were the editorial taste and guidance of Conney Fiske. He had begun the habit of using his friends as sounding boards for his ideas, buttonholing them with questions about their careers and lives which he would then employ in his fiction. If a character were to be a bond salesman—as in Pulham—John would huddle for hours with Gardi Fiske, learning details of a bond salesman’s business day. If the character were to be a banker, John would turn to his banker friend and former Harvard schoolmate, Edward Streeter, of the Fifth Avenue Bank.
Then there were the professional editors with whom John discussed his story ideas and who frequently came to him with ideas of their own. First and most important had been George Horace Lorimer of the Post. After Lorimer’s death, the editor in New York whom John had come to respect the most was Herbert R. Mayes, who for many years headed two large Hearst magazines, Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping. Mayes, seven years younger than Marquand, came, like George Kaufman, from a background quite alien to John’s—New York City-born, Jewish, educated at city public schools, a self-made success. And yet the two men, though they never became close friends, had early established a strong and productive author-editor relationship, and each had great respect for the other’s views.
Although John disliked Maugham personally, he found Herb Mayes’s working arrangements with him fascinating. John tended to regard Maugham as his literary counterpart in England—Maugham was also vastly successful, a man whose books and short stories became lucrative plays and movies—and saw him, somewhat warily, as his chief competition in the marketplace of American fiction. John, for example, was always trying to find out how much Mayes paid Maugham for his stories—and Mayes was always careful to keep this figure a secret, since he often paid Maugham as much as $10,000 for a short story, while he paid John Marquand about half this amount. John, having written a story, disliked making revisions. So do all writers, but John was particularly stubborn about it. John and Mayes had disagreed about a story of John’s called “Sun, Sea, and Sand”—the same story in which Conney Fiske had taken exception to the dress with the printed cocktail glasses. When the story came to Mayes’s desk he sent it back, saying that he thought the story took too long to get under way and that he thought the name of the leading character, Epsom Felch, was absurd. He asked John to change it, but John refused. Mayes then told John about the trouble he had had with a Somerset Maugham story called “A Woman of Fifty.” Mayes had told Maugham that he would not accept the story unless Maugham eliminated a long section that did not seem to belong, and after a certain amount of grumbling Maugham made the requested cut. John was astonished at this. Why, he wanted to know, would Maugham—a man of such stature—agree to this? Herb Mayes shrugged and said that he supposed Maugham needed the money. John shook his head and said, “I could believe that about almost any writer other than Maugham.” Yet he still would not cut “Sun, Sea, and Sand.”
John was also interested in Mayes’s relationship with Sinclair Lewis, and in what Mayes thought of Lewis as a writer. John found Lewis’s antics amusing; Herb Mayes found them appalling. John was shocked to hear how Lewis had disrupted a dinner party at Herbert and Grace Mayes’s house by picking a fight with Lester Markel, editor of the Sunday New York Times, and of how dreadfully Lewis treated his agent, Edith Haggard. Mayes had also been with Lewis one evening at the Stork Club when Lewis, in anger at a waiter, had picked up a knife and smashed a glass with it John found it hard to believe that his friend could be capable of such behavior. At the same time, John could not understand why Mayes published the works of Booth Tarkington, a writer whom John actively disliked. John considered Tarkington a literary traitor since Tarkington had written—and Mayes had published—a short story in which, very thinly disguised, John’s friend George Horace Lorimer, Lorimer’s wife, and Lorimer’s secretary appeared as the central characters.
Sometimes the story ideas the two men discussed—usually over chatty lunches in the then all-male Oak Room of the Plaza—ended up being written by John, and sometimes the ideas came to nothing at all. Other ideas John mentally filed away and did not use until years later. One idea that Mayes was particularly fond of involved a railroad man who begins as a laborer and works himself up over the years to the presidency of the line, becoming a magnate. But the time comes when he decides that there are more important things in life than money and success, and he will put it all aside and devote himself to art, music, literature, and travel. The kernel of the idea, however, is the hero’s discovery of all the things that make his retirement from business impossible—the banks that have placed their confidence in him by making huge loans which are likely to be called if the hero leaves his job; the inept son and son-in-law whom he has brought into the business with him, and who are earning their livelihoods only by virtue of his support; the numerous people at the executive level and all the way down who trust him, whom he has brought along with him up the ladder of success, and who will be likely candidates for removal once he departs. It was a story, in other words, which with Marquandian irony would tell of a man trapped by his possessions, whose very success resulted in his failure to achieve his ultimate objective, which was freedom from responsibility, and who, having gotten everything he wanted, had also lost everything. It did sound like a Marquand theme. But, after Mayes had finished reciting the idea, John thought a moment and then said, “Sounds like a good idea. Why don’t you write it?” Mayes said, “I’m not a writer.” John said, “Well, I’m not a railroad man.” “It doesn’t have to be a railroad,” Mayes persisted, “it could be any sort of big company.” But still John shook his head, and that, for the time being, was that.
One day at another of their lunches Mayes asked John whether he played chess. John said that he did, a little, and Mayes asked him if he would consider an idea Mayes had for a story about a chess player. John did not seem immediately enthusiastic, but he said, “Okay, let’s hear the idea.” Mayes’s idea was to make the hero one of the men who make a living of sorts playing chess and checkers in booths at Coney Island. It was to make this man the son of a West Point family, a family in which all the boys, from the moment they were able to toddle, were taught to play chess, and in which this had been going on for generations and in which ultimately all the men grew up to be generals or at the very least colonels. The hero, however, would be an escapee from this super-regimented, Army-oriented family, who hated West Point and, finally disowned by his family, had wound up playing chess in a booth at Coney Island.
John, mildly interested in the idea, said that he had never been to Coney Island and had never realized that there were chess players there who played games for a fee. Mayes said that John didn’t have to go as far as Coney Island to find such men, and that, if John liked, they could wander after lunch to the vicinity of Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street, where chess partners were for hire in various penny arcades as well as in unoccupied store fronts. John agreed, and after lunch the two men set off for this fairly rough part of Manhattan and spent the better part of an hour watching the chess players there.
Months went by, and Mayes heard nothing from John until one day when Mayes happened to be lunching at the St. Regis with someone else, and John Marquand came into the dining room with a group of people. John stopped at Mayes’s table and, after greeting him, said, “Oh, by the way, I’ve finished that chess story. I’m checking on a few final details in it, but you’ll have it within the next few days.”
The story, when it arrived, was called “The End Game,” and when Mayes had read it he was overwhelmed and immediately bought it. It is very likely the best short story John ever wrote. And it is also a John Marquand novel in almost perfect microcosm. In it can be seen, in a kind of miniature view, nearly all the elements of the Marquand craft, the fictional devices that made him, if nothing else, a superb technician, particularly in his handling of time. Henry Ide, the story’s narrator and main point-of-view character, muses at one point about “the task of piecing together out of allusions and indirections the details of someone’s life.” This is precisely what the story sets out to do in eight distinct episodes, each set at a different point in time and each of about equal length, in the life of a seedy-looking and tough-talking chess player who sits in a Sixth Avenue penny arcade playing chess for twenty-five cents a game.
The story opens in the fictional present—it was written in 1943—at a New York cocktail party where a number of the guests, including Henry Ide, had had professional or military experience in China before the war. At the party, Henry meets a Colonel Blair, also an Old China Hand and soon due to head back there, and the two men admire an antique ivory chess set in their host’s apartment and sit down to play. Rather arbitrarily, the name of a Chinese General Wu is mentioned, and established as a name that will have some significance in the story later on, and as the two men talk Henry keeps thinking that Colonel Blair reminds him of someone else, and the details of the Colonel’s life that he reveals seem strangely familiar. At last Henry realizes what it is: The Colonel must be the brother of Joe, the chess player Henry met and played with months ago in the Sixth Avenue arcade. Colonel Blair is stunned; the family has not seen his brother Joe for years. Henry Ide offers to take the Colonel to the penny arcade and find him, much as Herbert Mayes offered to show the chess players to John Marquand.
The story now moves smoothly, in a flashback, to the moment when Henry Ide first encountered Joe, when Henry, lonely and late at night, wandered into the neighborhood of the penny arcade and sat down at one of the chess tables for a game. During the course of the evening that followed, Henry learned a few tantalizing details of Joe, his opponent’s life. It became the first of many evenings, during which Henry learned more and more about Joe—of his childhood spent in a series of military posts, of his father, known as “the CO.,” or commanding officer, of Joe’s uncles, all Army men, and of Joe’s father’s determination that all of his four sons will enter West Point and become career Army men. The C.O.’s household, wherever it was, was always run with heel-clicking salutes and discipline, and as a young man Joe tried to be like his brothers and live by the rules of the Army Training Manual, but Joe was different, a dreamer and a romantic who, as John Marquand had done as a youth, took long walks in the woods and by the rivers and the sea.
“While Joe was talking, Henry Ide was able to see it all as though he had been part of it,” Marquand wrote. And in this effortless and quite artless way, about one third of the distance through the story, the reader is whisked as if by magic out of the consciousness of Henry Ide and into that of young Joe Blair, and we are in Hawaii in the midst of smells of tar and surf, sugar cane and ginger flowers. It is an almost breathtaking transition, and presently we are not too surprised to discover that Joe Blair is in love with a beautiful girl named Ruth Postley. Marquand was not quite courageous enough to make her a native girl, but she is definitely from the wrong side of the tracks and otherwise unsuitable. Her father sweats and wears wrinkled linen suits and her mother sits on her front porch with her feet pushed into dirty bedroom slippers, while inside the house is full of beach sand and dirty plates sit on the table. Mrs. Postley calls people “dearie.” But the Postleys, though common, are kindhearted and gentle people who like Joe Blair and approve of him for their Ruthy. Joe, of course, cannot tell his father of Ruth’s existence, and so we have again Marquand’s recurring theme of the insurmountable barrier between social classes.
The love story develops tenderly, and at the same time with great suspense toward the inevitable moment when the CO. learns about Ruthy and charges into the Postleys’ house to remove his son and order the two never to see each other again. Joe goes with his overpowering parent meekly, but returns secretly to Ruthy’s house at night and tells her that he is running away from home. Her father offers to help him arrange passage on a ship out of Honolulu, and Joe promises to come back to Ruthy some day.
The story then shifts back to the present time and to the consciousness of Henry Ide, who is riding in a taxi with Joe’s brother, Colonel Johnny Blair, headed for Sixth Avenue. There is a reunion scene between the two men, and in it Joe tells Johnny that he did go back to Hawaii and marry Ruthy; that they are indeed still married, and very happily. It is difficult for Colonel Johnny to understand how this could be, how anyone could have a satisfying life outside the Army, much less as a chess player playing for twenty-five cents a game.
It was at this point that Herbert Mayes would have had the story end, but John was not satisfied with this ending. He felt that the story did not yet have sufficient shape, that it needed just one more twist or turn of the screw to bring the curtain down on his characters. And so he added a page in which Joe Blair makes one more revelation to his colonel brother, Johnny. Joe has had, it seems, a career in the Army also—the Chinese Republican Army. He has become, in fact, a general in this army. He outranks his brother, and, furthermore, it is to General Joe that Colonel Johnny will soon be reporting on his upcoming assignment in China, where Joe has been called back to the staff of General Wu. Chess playing has been little more than a pastime.
The ending, which is a jolting surprise, does indeed tie together all the scattered threads of the story in one tidy package. It makes it clear, too, that the mention of General Wu in the opening was a conscious plant. But it also in some ways undoes the character of Joe Blair to have it turn out that he has had a military career after all, that he ended up doing more or less what his father wanted, even while, at the same time, doing what his father didn’t want. So, in the end, with this final move of the chess piece, Joe turns out to have won, but also lost, and is suddenly somewhat less interesting than when the reader thought of him as the romantic defier of tradition.
The End Game,” which Herbert Mayes published in Good Housekeeping in March, 1944, was widely discussed and later became included in numerous anthologies. Though it was admired, several critics pointed out the artificiality of the surprise O. Henry-esque ending—the end a kind of “game” in itself—and John became quite sensitive about this. He began, in fact, to talk about the story, saying that he himself liked it “in spite of a tricked-up ending being tacked on by Herb Mayes.” Herb Mayes did not mind, particularly, being handed the blame for John’s ending. But he did mind, several years later, when in an anthology of John’s short pieces called Thirty Years John wrote in a short preface to “The End Game”:
Mr. Herbert Mayes, who, next to George H. Lorimer and Maxwell Perkins, is the best editor I have ever met, once thought highly of this story, and I hope he still does. He may have been partial to it because he gave me the idea of a chess player in a Sixth Avenue (I mean Avenue of the Americas) [Mr. Mayes recalls Eighth Avenue] Arcade. I recall that Mr. Mayes personally took me to see one of these places, but aside from this the machinery of the story was my own—and so was the motivation, except, naturally, that I wanted Mr. Mayes to buy it.
In his preface, John went on to explain that in writing “The End Game” he had drawn on his experiences in the Orient and in Hawaii, that he knew well the military mind, that he was a fair chess player, and that “These facts all form essential parts in the story.” John, like a number of other writers, was not overgenerous when it came to giving credit to others for his story ideas. But in reading this preface Herbert Mayes felt quite definitely slighted; he thought he had been responsible for a great deal more detail in the story than John had admitted. The matter rankles with Herbert Mayes—retired now and living in London—even today.
John had begun to think of his novels in groups of threes. Having done a neat threesome of New England novels, he now decided to do the same with World War II as a background. So Little Time had been set in the months preceding the war. Next, he explained to Alfred McIntyre, he would do two more war novels—one set during the war, and the other during the months just afterward. McIntyre was enthusiastic about this double-barreled idea, but the results were two of Marquand’s least interesting novels, Repent in Haste and B. F.’s Daughter.
Repent in Haste, which appeared in the fall of 1945, the shorter of the two, is a slight affair in which, when reading it, one can almost sense the haste with which it was put together. Marquand had made a short trip earlier that year to the West Pacific under the auspices of the United States Navy, and the book, which attempts to take in the whole Pacific War as a background, was the result of these Navy-supervised travels. The theme of the novel, as it keeps recurring to its protagonist, Lieutenant Jimmy Boyden, is “It’s funny the way things happen, isn’t it, when there’s a war on?”—which seems an obvious and not very stimulating observation. The plot is a simple affair, too simple perhaps to hold even a short novel together. It is the story of how William Briggs, a middle-aged war correspondent and the point-of-view character, comes back from the Pacific theater and calls on Daisy Boyden, the “cute little trick” Jimmy Boyden married—in haste—just before he shipped out. Daisy, meanwhile, has repented the marriage; when Briggs comes to see her she tells him this, and also that she has another lover. It is then Briggs’s job to take back this bad news to his friend Jimmy on his next trip to the Orient—and in the process to discover how heroically Jimmy, the war hero, will bear up under this emotional blow.
For the middle-aged war correspondent, of course, one can easily read the middle-aged John Marquand, and William Briggs is a convincing character. But Jimmy Boyden is thin and unclear. One reason for his failure to come to life on the page is probably the background Marquand chose to give him. Marquand was attempting to answer the question of how it is that extraordinary men, heroes capable of performing extraordinary feats in time of war, can emerge from very ordinary and unexceptional surroundings, but in sketching the youthful environment of Jimmy Boyden Marquand was a bit out of his depth. Jimmy Boyden, we learn, is from East Orange—not West Orange—New Jersey, and East Orange, as everyone knows, is the wrong one of the Oranges to come from. That this should matter in time of war is questionable, but it is still another example of Marquand’s fascination with social divisions. Jimmy’s father is a minor executive “with an annual income of perhaps eight thousand dollars,” and their house, in a middle-class neighborhood, has its “antimacassars on the parlor chairs,” a radio with “Jacobean legs and an inlaid front,” a kitchen with a “breakfast nook” and various small appliances, plus a gas stove that will “cook without watching.” Marquand was familiar with the houses of the very rich and also with those of the genteelly poor, as in Wickford Point. He could even write with authority about the ramshackle beach houses in the back streets of Hawaii, where he had visited. But he had certainly spent very little time in homes of the middle American mediocrity, either in East Orange or in any other part of New Jersey. His description of Jimmy Boyden’s family and home and home life is not only unreal but quite unpleasant, since it is quite clear that Marquand has nothing but disdain for Jacobean radios, antimacassars, and breakfast nooks. By surrounding his protagonist with so much dullness and bad taste, some of it cannot help but rub off on Jimmy Boyden himself. One has trouble really caring about him or his problems.
Still another reason why Repent in Haste fails is probably that Marquand, though he prided himself on understanding “the military mind,” really understood best the military mind of an earlier war. His short stories set in World War I are all convincing, and he could also vividly evoke the Civil War, and did, in a long series of short stories. But World War II was something else, something Marquand could never really grasp and put together or get into focus—best summed up for him in the baffled observation that it was, indeed, “funny the way things happen … when there’s a war on.” His best evocation of the war years remains in So Little Time, where he could define the mood of uncertainty and impending doom that settled across America in the last few months of unsteady peace when the lights were going out all over Europe.
Marquand himself was nervous about Repent in Haste, not really certain that it was up to several of his previous books, and for a while toyed with the idea of having the novel published as a serial only, not as a hard-cover book. But Alfred McIntyre, who was hoping for another profitable property for Little, Brown, was a persuasive editor, and John agreed to let Little, Brown have it. Even so, John insisted on having the manuscript read by two Navy experts in Washington, who were instructed to look for flaws, but when Carl Brandt wrote to John that the book might require fixing here and there, John became quite testy about it and suggested that Carl was Overstepping his capacity as a literary agent.
Repent in Haste was also the first of John’s novels for which he wrote his own blurb for the book jacket. His view of what elements in the book would help its sale is interesting. Saying to McIntyre that there was “nothing like writing fulsome praise about one’s own efforts,” he wrote of his book:
The natural simplicity of the plot and the writer’s delicately detached method of treatment make this tale highly poignant and convincingly real. The short flashes of the Pacific life that run through it—the transport planes, Pearl, Guam, the smoking Japanese island, the transport bringing back the wounded, and the give-and-take of every-day war life—are all selected with an artistic skill which gives this small book both depth and stature. It is a mingling of love and war and peace and home, and a preview, perhaps, of the world of tomorrow, and no one who reads it can fail to gain a new insight into the thoughts and the environment of fighting men.
B. F.’s Daughter, the third of what Marquand thought as his “war trilogy,” is both a more successful and a more ambitious novel. It is also the first of his novels to have a woman as protagonist. It contains two familiar Marquand elements, the long central flashback and the double hero—solid, respectable, perfect-gentleman Bob Tasmin, whom Polly Fulton loves, and brash, erratic, arriviste Tom Brett, whom Polly Fulton marries, both these men reflecting Marquand’s twin views of himself. There is also a marvelously realized character in Mr. B. F. Fulton, Polly’s rich and overpowering industrialist father, whose only standard in judging a man is whether or not he would hire him for his company. And in Polly Fulton herself there is Marquand’s first full-length portrait of Adelaide.
Polly Fulton insists that she is nothing like her father and then spends the book discovering that she is his perfect mirror image. She marries Tom Brett and not Bob Tasmin because she is a woman who must dominate, just as her father dominated everyone and everything in her life, and her troubles with Tom stem from the enormity and relentlessness of her ambitions for him. Bob Tasmin tells her, “I’m sorry for him with you running his Life. Of course that is why you married him.” She is a dangerous woman, Tasmin tells her, because she doesn’t really know what she is doing or why she does it. “You have to run things, like B. F.,” he tells her. “It’s all right as long as you know you’re doing it, but you don’t know.”
Her husband has a mistress, and Polly discovers it, and there is a confrontation scene between the two women not unlike the scene that had occurred, not many years earlier, between John, Adelaide and Carol that morning in the civilized ambience of the St. Regis. Tom Brett’s mistress, a beautiful divorcée named Winifred James, a career girl who works as a secretary in Tom’s office, understands both Tom and Polly perfectly. In addition to her central problem—that Polly always had much more money than was good for her—Winifred tells Polly that her husband “‘needs someone he doesn’t have to compete with. You’re so brilliant, so charming, such a rare and lovely person, Mrs. Brett. I think you’re too good for him really. I know I’m saying this badly, but he needs someone who loves everything he does without so many perfect standards. I do hope you know what I mean.’” Winifred tries to spell it out to Polly: Tom needs someone “‘who doesn’t—well, keep him stirred up. Someone not quite as lovely—without as many definite ambitions for him. I mean someone common. That is what he needs.’ She raised her hands and dropped them gently on the table. ‘Like me.’”
In the novel Marquand punishes Polly—and, in the process, Adelaide—by having her demand, and then beg, Bob Tasmin to go to bed with her, and having Bob refuse. Bob is a gentleman, and much as he loves Polly and desires her he cannot betray his code. The novel ends on a familiar Marquand note, with Polly realizing that, in the last, it is always necessary to lower one’s sights a little, to surrender a portion of the dream, to compromise.
Both Repent in Haste and B. F.’s Daughter sold well. John Marquand had reached the point of popularity where his name alone sold books, regardless of their content, and he had a loyal band of readers across America who made his novels almost unfailingly best sellers. B. F.’s Daughter was by far the more successful of the two titles, and between its publication in the fall of 1946 through June of the following year the book sold over 170,000 copies, an extraordinary figure for any novel. A less expensive edition offered by the Literary Guild (John’s membership on the board of the Book-of-the-Month Club precluded any of his books being Book-of-the-Month selections) sold nearly 700,000 copies. The novel was also sold to the films, and B. F.’s Daughter became a big starring vehicle for Barbara Stanwyck. For Adelaide, who was no Stanwyck, this may have been some consolation—but not much. Adelaide disliked the film version of B. F.’s Daughter and said so vociferously. To Adelaide, the intellectual snob, films were an inferior art form in the first place, and she very nearly succeeded in convincing John of this as well. After the picture’s release he told Carl Brandt that he would have liked it better if the movie rights had not been sold at all and said he considered the treatment of The Late George Apley even worse. The present story he was writing, he said, did not contain any motion picture possibilities. He even suggested a stipulation in his contract that no future book of his could ever be turned into a film. But he could, in the face of upcoming six-figure movie contracts, be persuaded to change his mind.
Book reviewers were harsh on both B. F.’s Daughter and Repent in Haste—particularly the former, since it was the bigger and, in John’s mind, the more important book. John complained that the critics had “missed the point” of B. F.’s Daughter. The point, in John’s view, was the mood of the period that was reflected in the novel, the sad, frustrated, uneasy mood of the war years, the war that from the home front was so difficult for Americans to understand, and yet the war that reached out and touched and changed every life and every aspect of life irreparably. It is the mood which Polly sums up when she thinks back nostalgically to the years before the war, when life was predictable and clear-cut, “before the war fixed it so that no one had time for anything.” It was very like the mood the same critics had found admirable and telling in So Little Time.
Marquand had begun to speak bitterly about the critics of his novels, whereas a few years earlier he had insisted that he never even read, much less paid attention, to their views. When B. F.’s Daughter was published—a week from his birthday—he was fifty-three. He had reached that point in life, which every man who works hard at anything reaches, when he had begun to wonder whether perhaps his best work was behind him. In his flying trips to the West Pacific a phrase had caught his ear which navy pilots and navigators used when they passed the mid-point of their flights between the California coast and the Hawaiian Islands and, again, between Hawaii and the coast of Japan. This point was called the “point of no return.” It meant that, no matter what happened now, there was no going back; one could only go on. It was a haunting phrase that might have come right out of the ending of a Marquand novel. It somehow summed up John’s bitter-sad feeling about his own life, the direction his career had taken, his endless ordeal with Adelaide, his lack of connection with his children. It was also a phrase, as he suggested to Alfred McIntyre, that would make an absolutely smashing title for a book.