“The typical Marquand hero reaches the point of no return when he draws his first breath,” wrote a reviewer in Time in a survey of John’s work. Marquand heroes are always looking back, wondering where it all went wrong, what turn, if taken, might have changed the course of everything. They are always trying to go home again, back to where it all began, and, when they arrive at that polarizing place, they discover that, even though things did not turn out quite the way they dreamed they would, there is little chance that anything could have turned out differently, and that is that. A settlement is reached, a compromise; that is the best a man can hope for. John Marquand himself was just this sort of man. He had wanted to go home again, to Curzon’s Mill, and yet he knew—must have known—that he couldn’t really. Had he let Adelaide push him into a court battle with the cousins he had grown up with, roomed at college with, just to watch a Marquand fictive situation spin itself out in real like? Perhaps, and now he was faced with the inevitable bitter result: Curzon’s Mill was divided, an armed camp, with a family, once close, no longer on speaking terms with one another. And yet—in the Marquand novels, at least—this sort of thing had to happen from the moment one passed the point of no return, which in this particular case might have been that moment when John Marquand encountered the Hooker sisters on the beach at the edge of the Yellow Sea. If he had turned and walked the other way, would it all have been different? Perhaps, but it was too late to wonder now. “In the end … you always drove alone.”
There is a great deal of this feeling of futility and fatalism in John’s “banking” novel, Point of No Return, which was published in the year following the trial and which, at the time, was greeted by many critics as John’s finest work. The book is, indeed, much more than a book about a banker and banking. It is a book about love and marriage, about the nature of success and the American dream. The banking details are rich and, with Ed Streeter’s help, convincing: “The depositors’ room off the vaults had just been re-finished and redecorated and Tony Burton had called the conference there because he wanted to see how everything looked,” John had written. “… There was an efficient smell of oil on all the glittering steelwork.” But the problem that besets Charles Gray could find him in any career. He has reached the point of no return in life where he cannot turn back, where he must, even though he no longer has any real taste for it, compete against his colleague, Roger Blakesley, for the vice-presidency of the staid old Stuyvesant Bank in New York, a position that is about to become vacant. He must compete because that is what he started out doing. Having set his course, Charles Gray must complete the journey, end as it may, as it was charted.
In this enterprise, Charles is aided, or rather pushed forcefully along, by his determined and ambitious wife, another Polly Fulton—and another Adelaide. The way Nancy and Charles Gray go at each other in the novel is a disturbing reminder of what John and Adelaide Marquand’s married life had become by 1949, just as Gray’s disillusion with the considerable success and money he has achieved already is a comment on John’s feelings about his own success and reputation. Charles Gray “felt contented and at peace doing nothing but raking leaves on the lawn, he and his two children.” All the rest is as dust in the mouth. And where did the long journey all begin? Why, in Clyde, of course, the pretty little New England seaport town with its white picket fences, green lawns, and fine old Federalist houses where Charles Gray was born, and born not on Johnson Street, where the best people like the Lovells lived, but on Spruce Street where the might-have-beens like Charles’s father lived—the father for whom nothing ever turned out quite right, the father who should, by rights and heritage, have been successful, but who let every opportunity slip from his hands and whose baffled excuse is that “we can’t help how we’re made, can we?”
John, by 1949, had lost Christina Sedgwick more thoroughly than ever—not only through the divorce, but now she was happily remarried to a man named Harford Powel. Perhaps this fact added special poignancy to the love story in Point of No Return between the young Charles Gray and the beautiful Christina-like Jessica Lovell, whose family owns the finest house on Johnson Street. And it all comes back to Charles when he is called, by the Stuyvesant Bank, to go up to Clyde on business and to revisit the old streets where he had wandered as a boy and where he had wanted to marry Jessica.
In many ways, of course, John’s decision to make Charles Gray a banker was both a brilliant and a revealing one, because in Point of No Return the importance of money as a theme announces itself more honestly than in any of the previous Marquand novels, where money had been a more muted subtheme. Not only does money drive Charles Gray the banker (as money drives every other upwardly mobile American, Marquand seems to say) and his ambitious wife—money to pay the taxes and the mortgage, to pay the children’s school tuition and the dues at the country club—but money and the lack of it were right there at the beginning, back in Clyde. It was money that separated Spruce Street from Johnson, and the Lovells from the Grays. Young Charles Gray had seen this and had made $50,000 from shrewd investments in the stock market, thinking that this would impress Jessica’s father and let Charles have his daughter’s hand. Not so. “Money is one thing,” Mr. Lovell says, “and stock-market money is another.” Mr. Lovell also remarks that it is “too bad” Charles went to Dartmouth and not Harvard. And so there is the crucial difference separating Charles and Jessica. No amount of money Charles might make would ever be good enough for the Lovells, whose money was old, inherited. Furthermore, as far as the town of Clyde was concerned, the Lovells would always be better than the Grays because the Lovells had been shipowners but the Grays had only been ship captains, and there was that world of social difference between the ruling and the working classes.
To further emphasize the money theme, Marquand added a character named Francis Stanley, who has more position and money than the Lovells, to show how even people as secure as the Lovells care dreadfully what people like the Stanleys think and are saying about them, and when the Stanleys comment to the Lovells that there seems to be something going on between young Charles and Jessica there is cause for genuine alarm. It is clear from the outset that by the immutable laws of American social nature Charles and Jessica cannot marry, just as surely as oil and water won’t mix and cream rises to the top. And there is never the slightest suggestion that Jessica will rebel and marry Charles against her father’s wishes, because she is a girl who by breeding and tradition will not only always be a dutiful daughter but who also could not bear to be married to a man her father did not like and who did not like her father. It is the doomed love story—with the sexes reversed, more fully developed, and perhaps more movingly presented—of George Apley and Mary Monahan, and, just as theirs was, the love story in Point of No Return is one of the strongest hinges in the novel.
A particular delight of Point of No Return is its suspensefulness. The reader is kept dangling for over five hundred pages and does not know until virtually the last few paragraphs whether Charles Gray will or will not be handed the vice-presidency. For a while, John considered ending the book with the question still unanswered. This indefinite ending had been the idea of Conney Fiske, who had read what he had written while he was in New York for the Book-of-the-Month Club meeting. She said she thought that the ending was implicit, and it would not make any difference whether the reader was told whether Charles Gray got the job at the bank or not. But John was meticulous about tidiness of construction, and so, though Conney’s notion was tempting to him, he eventually settled for an ending that wrapped up everything neatly. The ending may have a touch of theatricality to it—in real life, of course, matters seldom come to such clean conclusions—but it is probably the most reader-satisfying close the book could have.
For the most part, critics were ecstatic about the new novel. Charles A. Brady, in Fifty Years of the American Novel, published two years later, wrote, “More than ever in this volume is Mr. Marquand the Thackerayan novelist of personal memory, the laureate of the sick, throat-filling, despairing ecstasy of first love. He understands the mystery and magic of the human personality with a mellower comprehension than before.” Reviewers in the daily newspapers were for the most part equally enthusiastic, with one notable exception—Maxwell Geismar in the New York Times. Geismar, while conceding that John Marquand, like Willa Cather, was one of the American “conservators of heritage,” went on to complain that Marquand ought not to have had to “sacrifice, as he does here, everything he knows about American life and expresses so well, to the demands of a sentimental and romantic tale. True enough, Charles accepts his advancement with acrid knowledge that he has lost freedom forever, and this takes character. But it is character that lacks the real courage to make the break, whose virtue is compromise, and whose discipline is the discipline of submission.” Geismar also took exception to Marquand’s “oblique attack” on his subject and situation.
John was furious, and so were his friends, including Charles Morton of the Atlantic Monthly who wrote to John’s publisher about the review, labeling it “patronizing comment by a Deep Thinker—and a nonentity to boot” and adding:
Here we have Marquand writing about the direction or misdirection of a man’s life, his marriage, his work and his place in the world, and I have a great itch to learn what are the “larger questions” which the reviewer thinks Marquand has avoided. What is the objection to “an oblique attack”? Are the bludgeonings by Thomas Mann necessarily better than a more civilized technique? It seems to me that Geismar is an innocent pedant who believes in black and white: to satisfy him, one supposes a main character would have to wind up hanging himself or else by “living happily ever after.”
Indeed, it had been John’s whole point, in the novel, that acceptance was enforced upon Americans and that, within the strictures of the American “game,” there was no real way to “make the break.” The novel ends with Charles Gray, having taken the job, reflecting, “Nancy would understand. Nancy had more ambition for him than he had for himself. Nancy would be very proud. They would sell the house at Sycamore Park and get a larger place. They would resign from the Oak Knoll Club [in favor of a “better” club, more befitting bank vice-presidents]. And then there was the sailboat. It had its compensations but it was not what he had dreamed.” John considered this a realistic, almost grim, ending, the opposite of “sentimental and romantic.” Paul Osborn, meanwhile, given the job of adapting Point of No Return for Broadway, felt that theater audiences would simply not accept such a downbeat ending and gave the hero a redeeming bit of spunk by having him refuse to join the better club—Hawthorn Hill—that his boss suggests. At the time, John commented to an interviewer, “Charles Gray sees he has passed the point of no return and might as well accept it, and that ‘The game in many ways is not worth the candle.’ But evidently the producers found the audiences wouldn’t take to such a pessimistic result. This makes the play seem to mean, ‘The game may be worth the candle if you learn to walk erect.’” Marquand disapproved of Osborn’s ending, which he felt did not ring true, but agreed to it on the grounds that a play was not a novel and that the ending of a play often had to be “souped up.” Osborn was apparently right, for Point of No Return became an immediate Broadway hit, starring Henry Fonda.
Throughout Point of No Return, Marquand managed to skirt sentimentality with remarkable success. Consider this passage, in which Charles Gray muses about the past:
If there were anything in the theory that the past remained intact, he and Jessica Lovell must still have been somewhere, with the other ghosts of Clyde. Perhaps all of that summer might have returned to him again if he had stayed in Clyde. If he had never seen Jessica Lovell again except in the distance, he would have seen the shadows of Jessica and himself around every corner and on every country road. If he walked down Dock Street, he and Jessica might still have been standing in front of the window of Stowell’s furniture store, talking of living room curtains. She had wanted green monk’s cloth curtains.
As Marquand goes from the soft and whispery “other ghosts of Clyde” in the course of one short paragraph to a furniture store and monk’s cloth curtains, it is possible to see the author almost physically reining himself in, resisting an impulse to wax poetic, and pulling himself back to hard and plain reality of living room curtains—real things, tangible things. And so the Geismar charge of romance and sentiment does seem, in the context of this book, oddly misplaced. Suppose, John used to ask his friends, Charles Gray had had the “real courage to make the break,” and instead of taking the proffered job had been last seen sailing off into the sunset to make a new life for himself in Tahiti. Would not that have made it a sentimental and romantic novel?
The theme of going home again, of trying to find one’s youth again, is a familiar one in American fiction. One thinks immediately of Willa Cather’s lost lady and Thomas Wolfe’s Eugene Gant. But John Marquand, by marrying this theme with the theme of the search for meaning in love and marriage, and placing these against the background of American success and money competition, opened up a whole new territory and tradition. The novel set a definite precedent, and in the years that followed a number of Point of No Return-type books appeared, among them John C. Keats’s The Crack in the Picture Window, William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man, David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Cameron Hawley’s Executive Suite, and Hamilton Basso’s The View from Pompey’s Head. After reading the last novel, in fact, John muttered that it seemed more than a case of Basso’s having been influenced by Point of No Return. It was more like stealing.