During the months following the heart attack, John devoted himself to the pleasant and not very wearing task of selecting and gathering together certain of his shorter pieces, which Little, Brown wanted to place in a book under the title Thirty Years and which were to provide a catholic sampling of an author’s work over the span of roughly a generation. Most of these pieces—fiction and nonfiction—had been previously published in a range of magazines, but John also wanted to include some of his unpublished writing—his Harvard commencement address, for example, and one of several papers he had prepared for oral delivery before Newburyport’s Tuesday Night Club, a venerable literary institution of that city. John took his membership in the Tuesday Night Club with great seriousness and worked on these papers, for which he was paid nothing, with as much care and diligence as he did on his novels. He also took a certain amount of quiet satisfaction from the fact that the club’s meetings were frequently held at the High Street house of old Mr. L. P. Dodge, the Newburyport worthy to whom John had come years ago to plead for—and to be refused—the Harvard Club scholarship. John enjoyed the neatness of such little ironies.
Putting together Thirty Years was a somewhat unsettling experience for John Marquand, providing him as it did with the not altogether welcome opportunity to reread a great deal of his own work that had been written almost a generation earlier. He told Stanley Salmen that he honestly believed he had become a better writer and craftsman over the years, and that many of his early stories were “brash and immature.” Some of the early material struck him as downright awful. It seemed to him, he told Salmen, that he had written too many stories about Honolulu, about China, and about U.S. Army generals. Perhaps, he suggested, it would be helpful if someone else could write an introduction or foreword to the collection, in which it could be pointed out that this was not intended as a gathering of superb stories and articles but, instead, a roughly chronological depiction of a writer’s development and growth. He suggested that his friend and fellow Book-of-the-Month Club judge, Clifton Fadiman, might be willing to write such a preface. To write it himself, Marquand pointed out, seemed a touch “ungraceful.”
Salmen approached Fadiman, who was delighted with the idea. He not only agreed to write an introduction, adding, “It can be long or short, casual or friendly or more seriously analytical—whatever you wish. Naturally, one kind of introduction will take more time and effort than another,” but he also, as a former editor (at Simon & Schuster and later at The New Yorker), had a number of specific criticisms of the various Marquand pieces to offer. One story, for example, he felt was “too forced,” another “just a little too slight and, though charming, a bit conventional,” and of another he said, “Don’t pay any attention to me—stories of Southern honor and chivalry just bore me; I prefer John in his more modern moods.” The controversial Holiday article on Boston Fadiman was less than sanguine about. But John—perhaps simply to spite Harry Sions—was insistent that it be included; it was his way of asserting that he was proud of the article, regardless of what anyone said.
Perhaps Fadiman’s most important contribution was to propose a pattern for the book—that is, a scheme by which the articles and short stories could be arranged that would not be chronological, in terms of when they were written, but instead under categories such as “School and College,” “The Wars,” and “Local Flavor.” This idea was a great help in pulling the book together. Fadiman also wrote an introduction that was both kind and candid, pointing out that many of the stories were “tailored to meet the needs of the market,” and that the ending of “The End Game” might be a “secretly ironical bow to the bright tin divinity of the Happy Ending.” Fadiman also noted the “laboratory accuracy” with which Marquand’s fiction noted “a hundred tiny differences of caste and class,” and praised the “absolute rightness” of Marquand’s dialogue, asking, “… can any contemporary American novelist other than Hemingway touch Marquand for dialogue?” Fadiman was also the first critic to point out that what lay behind the celebrated clear and honeyed and unrushed Marquand style was perhaps what lay at the heart of his great appeal: It was his special way of mixing merriment and melancholy, of taking nostalgia and a bittersweet contemplation of temps perdu, and adding grace notes of humor, of being mocking and yet tender toward a past when snows were probably whiter and loves were certainly younger and stronger. This is the particular Marquand emotional stance and the secret of his charm. As Fadiman put it, “He is at once outsider and insider. He is the sympathetic dramatizer of that moment of doubt—the doubt as to whether outer or inner security necessarily coincide—which, though it comes to all of us, is the particular gadfly of the gentility.”
Meanwhile, Sincerely, Willis Wayde, the businessman-hero novel that John had been writing at the time of the heart attack, continued to move along, but slowly. John told Stanley Salmen that although he had written about 325 pages, his hero was still only in the Harvard Business School. This meant that quite a lot of cutting would have to be done. John had, however, already received another big advance from Ladies’ Home Journal, on terms much the same as had been offered for Melville Goodwin, U.S.A., so there was no need to apply undue pressure on the manuscript. He had started the book in the summer of 1952, and it was not until November of 1954 that the Journal was able to publish the first installment of the serial. It was quickly apparent that John Marquand was once again concerning himself with “differences of caste and class,” the unbridgeable social gap between “sincere”—and doggedly ambitious—Willis Wayde, son of a machinist, and the aristocratic Harcourts, leading citizens of Clyde and possessors of ancient wealth whom Willis Wayde aspires to be like; in particular, the difference that separates Willis from old Henry Harcourt’s spoiled and beautiful granddaughter, Bess.
Some reviewers had complained that John Marquand never seemed to like his heroes very much—bumbling, hoodwinked, cuckolded Harry Pulham; pompous, provincial George Apley; down-the-line-military, hard-nosed Melville Goodwin. This critical point is acceptable if, to be acceptable, heroes in fiction must also be likable and, if this is the case, Sincerely, Willis Wayde must be considered an unsuccessful book. Without doubt, Willis Wayde was John’s most dislikable hero yet.
Young Willis Wayde has no taste for sports, for girls, for social life; his push is only for business success, and he goes after this with a single-minded disregard for other people and other things. His father warns him, “You keep on trying to be something you aren’t, and you’ll end up a son of a bitch. You can’t help being, if you live off other people.” Keep in your own place, in other words, and stick to your own kind. “People are divided into two parts,” his father says, “people who do things and the rest, who live off those who do things. Now I may not amount to much, but … I can do anything in that damn mill that anyone else can do, and they all know it, boy. Well, maybe you’ll spend your like living off other people’s doings, but if you have to, don’t fool yourself. Maybe you’ll end up like Harcourt. I don’t know. But you’ll never be like Harcourt.” Willis Wayde has a carefully cultivated veneer of niceness, and a surface charm. But under the polish that he has acquired solely to help him get ahead, it is difficult to see what sort of a person Willis Wayde is. He is not only a repugnant but a hollow character. When Willis and his wife run into Bess Harcourt and her husband at the same restaurant and Willis extends his hand in cheerful greeting, Bess Harcourt orders him out of her way, and when Willis protests Bess says, “Get out, Uriah Heep.”
Another trouble with Sincerely, Willis Wayde was that it was impossible not to compare it with the earlier Point of No Return. Point of No Return, when it appeared in 1949, not only seemed a highly original work but it also had a strong point of departure—a whole generation of bright young men whose lives had been deeply scarred by war and who had returned full of questions and uncertainties and anxieties about the values which, before the war, had seemed so settled and sure. Was success in business worth the candle? The novel’s haunting questions and uncertain answers captured the imaginations of young men—and their wives—all over America, giving the book great pertinence and meaning. But now, half a dozen years later, these questions not only seemed not so fresh but not so pressing. Willis Wayde’s problems seemed less interesting than had Charles Gray’s.
And there was still another problem. Point of No Return had, in a very real sense, created a fictional genre, and there had since been a number of imitators. In 1952, Cameron Hawley’s Executive Suite had appeared, and he had followed this with another businessman novel, Cash McCall. Although Executive Suite was much less expertly written than Sincerely, Willis Wayde, it told a considerably more exciting story, causing Marquand’s novel again to suffer by comparison. Hawley’s hero’s struggles through the jungles of big-company management are accompanied by corporate intrigue, strife, and setbacks, whereas Willis Wayde’s journey to the top appears to carry him serenely through an uninterrupted string of successes.
The beautiful and haughty Bess Harcourt, whom Willis loves and loses, seems more a plot device than a character. Willis, according to the Marquand code, must lose Bess because of the unalterable difference in their backgrounds, but for the first time in a Marquand novel this necessity rang somewhat false, and it seemed to some readers as though Willis might have won Bess if he had unbent a little, let his hair down just a bit, been a trifle less stiff and humorless. Or was it possible that the social dividing lines John had stressed so often in his novels over the years were beginning to disappear in America, and that that was what made the inevitability of Willis’s losing Bess a bit difficult to credit? In any case, the character of Sylvia, Willis’s wife, is much better drawn. And it is she who by the end of the book—as so many previous Marquand characters had done—realizes that her husband is what he is and she had better accept it. It is she who makes the Marquandian compromise.
As the novel progresses—through, to be sure, some interesting and well-detailed episodes of corporate life—the cold genius of Willis Wayde grows even colder. It is almost as though, in developing his story, John Marquand grew to like Willis less and less. Edward Weeks, whose critical opinions John did not always care for, mentioned this fact to John after the book’s hard-cover release in 1955, saying that Willis Wayde “had started out as a rather appealing young man, and wound up as a truly disgusting individual.” John’s first reaction was surprise, and then, after thinking about it for a moment, he said, “You know, you’re right. He turned out to be a real stinker, didn’t he?” The book did not achieve a movie sale, though it did become the basis of a television play, several years later.
Meanwhile, negotiations had been going on since 1950 between the Brandt office in New York and Famous Artists, who represented the Brandts in Hollywood, to obtain a motion picture sale on Melville Goodwin, U.S.A. John Marquand’s career reached its peak not only during the last of the glorious days when mass magazines were paying out huge sums of money for serialized novels but also during the even more glorious days when movie companies were paying even bigger figures for novels to be made into films. Again, the furious movie spending on fiction properties during the postwar decade—also intended to combat television—may have helped motion picture companies into the doleful state they found themselves in by the late 1960s. But in the meantime nearly every one of John’s big books—plus the Mr. Moto stories that had become a whole series of movies—had been bought and made into motion pictures, much to the enlargement of John’s already large bank account.
Because of the sums he had received for Apley, Pulham, and B. F.’s Daughter, John had at first set a price on Melville Goodwin that both Carl and Ray Stark, at Famous Artists, considered too high. He wanted $200,000. Also, he hadn’t wanted any studio to see the book until it appeared in hard cover, on the theory that the studio should judge the book by its full and final version, not by the cut version that was to be serialized by Ladies’ Home Journal. But Carl pointed out that as soon as the Journal installments began the studios would prepare their own synopses of the book, and that it would be far better if John could have his own synopsis prepared and shipped out to Hollywood as soon as possible. John agreed, and Carl prepared a three-page synopsis—something he was good at—and sent it to Stark.
Stark, who was delighted with the synopsis, then proposed, as he put it, “to cook up a little intrigue with this situation, and have Marquand send a little note saying that under no conditions must any studio see the synopsis, but if Darryl Zanuck saw it personally, but was not given a copy to keep, that John didn’t mind Mr. Zanuck reading it in the presence of you or me. I really think this could be an important hunk of strategy, Carl.” Stark also suggested that the same bit of strategy—dangling the bait in front of the big producer’s nose, yet not letting him keep it for copying and circulation around the studio—could be worked with Stanley Kramer.
But, a few weeks later, it was necessary for Ray Stark to report back to Carl that neither Zanuck nor Kramer had nibbled. There was another problem. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had just bought a story titled “The Day the General Returns” (“or something to that effect,” as Stark explained to Carl), and it suddenly seemed as though Hollywood had become awash with Army general stories. And so the Melville Goodwin synopsis began its long, slow round from studio to studio, with brief flashes of interest here and there—sparks that glimmered for a day or so, then died—and the months turned into years, with still no sale. John became discouraged, then resigned to the fact that this novel would never be a film.
Then all at once, in March of 1955, the man who had produced Point of No Return on Broadway wrote to Carl to ask, “Did you ever sell the motion picture rights to MELVILLE GOODWIN, U.S.A.? If not I should very much like to talk to you about it.” Carl wired back that the rights were indeed available and that all parties were open for discussion. John, in the intervening four years, had lowered his sights considerably and reported that he would accept any “reasonable” offer, and presently—by June of that year—an agreement had been struck for $46,500. It was not imposing movie money but a fair price for a property that had gone begging this long, and Carl explained as carefully as he could to John that in the Hollywood market place the price for novels seemed to be declining and that “the six-figure deals” of the late 1940s seemed to be getting harder and harder to come by. The movie production, initially, was to be an elaborate one, co-starring the husband and wife team of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. But, in the process, the producer’s sights also became lowered somewhat, and the result was an indifferent picture called Top Secret Affair, with Kirk Douglas playing Melville Goodwin.
It is hard to see why John, now a rich man, married to a richer wife (Adelaide had inherited over $3,000,000 worth of Hooker Electrochemical stock) should have been haunted by the fear of poverty. But he was, and as he told Carol he continued to worry “that I’ll have to take my dark glasses, my tin cup and cane, and sit in anterooms for work.”
It was not as though he was an extravagant spender. Quite the opposite; when he traveled it was often on an expense account provided by one or another of the big magazines, and in New York he had acquired a certain reputation as a man who often displayed a decided slowness when it came to reaching for a check at one of his clubs, the Harvard, the Century, or the Knickerbocker. Only infrequently, and with great care as to who were the recipients, did he give away copies of his books. He did not even give away photographs of himself, when asked for them by readers. He once received a polite letter from the inmates of a reformatory in New South Wales, telling him that his books were great favorites with the prisoners. Would he be so good as to send a picture of himself to be hung in the prison library? He turned the request over to his publisher.