They were legally divorced, but still Adelaide would not let go of John. John had even had her name removed from the copyright assignments of the four jointly copyrighted novels, H. M. Pulham, Esquire, B. F.’s Daughter, Repent in Haste, and Melville Goodwin, U.S.A. Still she tried to remain a part of his life. John was back at Kent’s Island working quietly and steadily on a new novel, pouring himself into this book with more gusto, perhaps, than he had done with any previous book. The telephone would ring, sometimes late at night, sometimes early in the morning, and it would be Adelaide, and she would begin one of her long harangues. At times she would scream and scold. At others she would weep. If Carol happened to be at the house when these calls came through, John would hand the telephone receiver to her, saying, “Listen to this—you won’t believe what is happening.” Carol recalls, “Those calls were perfectly appalling. One really did get the impression of a madwoman on the other end of the line. It did no good to hang up on her, for then she just called back again. If you didn’t answer, she would let the phone ring and ring. The only way John could handle these calls was to let her continue until she was finished or too exhausted to go on. He would plead with her, saying ‘Please, please … just leave me alone.’ He never liked to use four-letter words, either in his fiction or his conversation. But other than use profanity with her he was as firm as he possibly could be—but it did no good.”
There was a terrible moment when John learned that Adelaide had communicated with the Boston Social Register to have his name removed from its listings. John cared about such things as being in the Social Register, and it infuriated him to think that Adelaide could have his name dropped from it because of the divorce. He flew into a dreadful rage and could talk of nothing else for days. Actually, in fairness to Adelaide, her intention may have been to advise the Social Register that John no longer resided at 1 Reservoir Street, as the 1958 edition of the little book had it, but John refused to look at it that way and insisted that she had acted out of malice and spite. In any case, he saw to it that his name was back in the 1960 edition, with his address given as Pinehurst, North Carolina.
But aside from these interruptive episodes, the pace of John’s life had eased and his friends commented that he looked happier and healthier than he had in years. There were fewer of those explosive moments when his normally pink skin became poppy red, reminding those who knew him, uneasily, of his previous heart attack. A few months before undergoing the divorce proceedings, he had published a small book called Life at Happy Knoll, which was a collection of pieces about the goings-on at a fictitious country club, all of which had been originally written for Sports Illustrated. The idea had come from an encounter John had had with Time, Inc., publisher Roy Larsen several years earlier at a meeting of the Harvard Board of Overseers, of which John had been made a member. Larsen’s idea had been for John to write a series of letters such as might come from a member of a country club to the president of the club or the chairman of the house committee, and these letters would comprise, as Larsen put it, “a rather satirical taking off of the things that are funny and annoying about all country clubs.”
It was a frankly frivolous undertaking, but John had been amused by the idea. His protestations to the Brandts to the contrary, John was easily tempted back to his old medium, the magazines. Working with Richard Johnston and Sidney James at Sports Illustrated, he had dashed off a number of Happy Knoll pieces. They were fun to write, were intended to be fun to read, and John had had considerable background as a clubman—particularly as a member of the Pinehurst Club and the Myopia Hunt Club outside Boston—to draw on for material. Sports Illustrated paid him $2,000 for each piece, plus an expense allowance, and John, with his shrewd New Englander’s feelings about money, had even worked out an arrangement whereby the magazine paid his Myopia Club dues and golf charges. In submitting his Myopia bills to the magazine, John was careful to instruct that they be paid to him, direct, so that he could then pay the club out of his own account—lest any member of the club get the notion that he was using members as models for his little Happy Knoll sketches. He was, of course, doing just that, and there had already been some grumbling in corners at both of John’s golfing places, and complaints to the effect that he was exploiting his relationship with members and club officers in the process of putting private clubs into commercial fiction. One can imagine with what consternation the Myopia Hunt Club’s treasurer would view John’s golf bill paid by a check from Sports Illustrated.
Now a gathering of the pieces was between hard covers, and the book, with humorous drawings by John Morris, was selling well. Critics were quick to point out the book’s slightness. The reviews ranged from the Dallas Morning News, which said, “This is Marquand in a lightsome, unimportant mood. But even at pot-boiling John P. remains one of the best of our writers,” to Harper’s Magazine, which called the book “moderately entertaining.” There are indeed some amusing moments. One of the most successful letters is an elaborate rationalization of why the golf pro is a genius and must be kept on in the club’s employ at any cost, despite the glaring fact that he has never in a single instance been known to improve a member’s game by a single stroke. Another reveals how an aging Negro bartender at the club, long past any point of competence at his job, uses information gathered from members when they are in their cups to blackmail the club into keeping him on its payroll. To readers who wanted a chuckle at the vagaries of country club life, the book seemed worth its modest price of $3.75. And John himself, clutching his forehead in mock anguish at the demonstrated stupidity of all reviewers, cried, “It is fun and games, the book was written as fun and games! Can’t they understand that? Must everything I write be so bloody serious? Aren’t I entitled to some fun and games at my age?” He was sixty-three.
Meanwhile, though Carol continued gently to put off his proposals of marriage, she took up the tasks of substitute wife to help him put his new bachelor’s life in order. An extremely organized person herself, she also had a well-trained office staff to call on, and after John’s divorce the Brandt & Brandt letterhead not only contained matters of literary business and contracts—including a nice $71,000 advance extracted from Ladies’ Home Journal for the Marquand novel-in-process—but also shopping advice, household management suggestions, as well as confirmations of hotel and airplane reservations as John continued his restless travels from one part of the globe to another. It was a far cry from Adelaide’s disheveled housekeeping as Carol—writing to John, who was redecorating and furnishing his Pinehurst house—helped cut through domestic red tape:
There has been sent to Miss Pleasants a set of three glass pitchers, two of which will do for martinis—one for a larger party, one for just two or three people—and a third as a water pitcher. The set of three cost under $9. But I think they’re useful and rather pretty. You undoubtedly have a long slender-handled spoon which will serve as a mixer.
I’ve bought you a dozen finger-bowls with matching glass plates—white, of course. The matching plates will serve as dessert plates or else with a doily will serve to terminate a luncheon meal when you are not serving fruit or anything else.
I’ve also, of course, bought very plain, useful lace finger-bowl doilies.
I’ve bought bathroom wastebaskets, Kleenex boxes and wastebaskets that will do for all the bedrooms and the library. They couldn’t be plainer or cheaper.
I’ve also bought a number of ashtrays. I couldn’t remember what you had in the house or what you may need. One always needs more of them.
All of these things have gone from Altman’s, and I trust in due course Miss Pleasants will take the time to acknowledge that they have arrived. I enclose a copy of my letter to her.
Adelaide had trouble catching trains and was forever making John late for appointments, but Carol kept John on schedule:
Your Pan American flight is due in at 11:15 from Rome. I came in by jet from London on Sunday and it was right on the button. What I shall do is find out if your flight is to be on time and if so will meet you with Paul Reilly or one of his chauffeurs. If it’s late, I’ll simply have the car meet you.
Should I be asleep by any hideous chance upon your arrival, pound loudly on the door and we’ll have a bottle of champagne.
Miss Pleasants, handling the details of the house from the Pinehurst end, was no match for Carol’s efficiency and thoroughness. Carol wrote to her:
Now that the time for John Marquand’s arrival is close at hand, I want to make doubly sure that the large carton of sheets and pillow cases addressed to him in your care arrived safely from Gimbel Brothers in New York.
I had hoped there would be word from you on my desk upon my return from a month’s trip to Europe.
Thank you for an early reply.…
In addition to a new novel, John was working on another, very personal project. It was to be a complete rewriting of a biography John had written in 1925 called Lord Timothy Dexter of Newburyport, Mass., and which Minton, Balch had published (before John’s final and permanent alliance with Little, Brown). Lord Timothy Dexter—he conferred the title on himself—was a rags-to-riches New England eccentric who started life as a tanner and ended up in an implausible mansion surrounded by statuary in the center of town, and who even employed his own poet laureate. Dexter’s extravagant career had always fascinated John, who enjoyed the grotesque—the wild contrast, for example, of Dexter’s flamboyant life and house in the middle of staid, quiet, and conservative Newburyport—but John’s earlier treatment of this character had been a noticeable publishing failure, perhaps because readers found Dexter’s outlandish antics simply impossible to credit. There are some creatures, after all, who are too grotesque to stomach. John was rewriting the biography for a number of reasons. First, he had reason to suppose that one reason for the first book’s failure to reach a wide audience was that its author in those days was relatively unknown. In 1925 there was no ready-made readership for John P. Marquand’s books and, in a way, the rewritten Dexter would be a test of that readership’s loyalty. Also, he assumed that thirty-five years later he was a better writer and could therefore give Dexter a better portrayal. But woven into both of these reasons like threads in the tapestry of everything he was doing was John’s wish, once more, to return to the past, to go back to the old streets of Newburyport of his youth and to see, in the process, what had happened since.
Little, Brown was not at all happy about the Timothy Dexter project—it seemed a rehashing of a tired subject that had perhaps been not much good to begin with—and his editor, Alexander Williams, who had succeeded Stanley Salmen, told John so as gently as possible. But John was Little, Brown’s favorite author, and since they had to indulge his whims they agreed to publish it. Even more dubious about the Timothy Dexter book was Carol Brandt. She considered it an utter waste of time and told John so frankly and firmly. At one point, John told Williams, “I’m thinking of dedicating the Dexter to Carol, simply because she says it’s no damn good.” He did not do this, but he forged stubbornly ahead with the book.
He had begun to complain that the Book-of-the-Month Club was working him too hard, giving him too many books to read and review and requiring him to attend too many meetings. He had, after all, been with the club for nearly fifteen years, and much of the freshness and stimulation of the judges’ meetings had worn off. Specifically, he asked to be excused from the January, February, and March meetings—these were his Pinehurst months—unless his attendance was considered “urgent”; otherwise, he would handle the details of these meetings by telephone. This would leave him with six meetings a year, and he also wanted to be free to travel abroad in this period, keeping in touch with the club and keeping up on his reading by mail, telephone, or cable. In addition, he asked that he be given no more than eight books a month to read and that he be asked to do no reviews for the club News unless he felt genuinely enthusiastic about the book in question and volunteered to do so. In the process of airing his grievances, John added that he felt Book-of-the-Month Club meetings too often stressed the commercial possibilities of the books in question, and not the judges’ opinions. Finally, he complained that Harry Scherman, the late chairman of the Book-of-the-Month Club, took too active a part in the meetings of the judges, and tried to influence the selections. In return for a lightened work load, John agreed to accept a cut in salary and, naturally, Carol was delegated to meet with Scherman and Meredith Wood, the club’s president, and state John’s position. Carol did so, tactfully not stressing John’s waning interest in the club and mentioning instead his heart condition. Both men were happy to give John whatever he wanted. And of course there would be no reduction in his salary.
When John’s new novel, Women and Thomas Harrow, was published in 1958—first serially in Ladies’ Home Journal and then in hard cover by Little, Brown—it struck many people that the book represented something of a departure. Bruce and Beatrice Gould, then editors of the Journal, commented that it was the first Marquand novel they could remember in which John appeared truly in sympathy with his hero. Though the book is set again in John’s fictional town of Clyde, Tom Harrow is certainly a far more sympathetic individual than the previous resident of that city whom John had dealt with, the obnoxious Willis Wayde. Harrow is also older—John Marquand heroes tend to age with their author—and, at fifty-four, is a playwright of the generation just previous to Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. He is at a crisis point in his life—financially, in his career, and in his marriage to Emily, an overtalkative nag who enjoys reminding Tom, just as Adelaide reminded John, that all he has done has been to repeat himself for the last five years. Once again, time is the villain and the thief. New and younger and more vigorous playwrights are coming into the theater, the theater is changing, and Tom Harrow, despite his eminence and his success, sees that his own work is becoming old-fashioned, that his best work is behind him, he is past his prime. But it is too late to change course, and he cannot go back. Tom Harrow is of course John Marquand, and his doubts and fears are dark dreams as are John’s.
Long ago, in Tom Harrow’s past, there was the beautiful Rhoda Browne, one of John Marquand’s most subtly delineated female characters. Rhoda Browne’s father not only had a lower-class job—as an automobile dealer—but he was successful at that, while Rhoda’s mother had great social ambitions for her daughter. Tom Harrow’s early success in the theater gives him the money with which to marry Rhoda. But theater money is like a novelist’s money, ephemeral. It comes and goes; it is never sure; a writer is rich one minute and poor the next. It is not like inherited money that is safe and secure, doled out by banks and clipped by coupon. And so, after a few giddy years as the wife of the famous playwright, Rhoda leaves Tom to marry Presley Brake, old-rich and so highly bred that he comments that gin is “a charwoman’s drink.” It is almost as though John had come to blame his loss of Christina on the lack of security afforded by a writer’s livelihood, and of course that was a part of it—a small part. After Rhoda, Tom married briefly and unhappily a successful actress with whom he had had an affair. Then came the garrulous and bossy Emily, who likes to do over old Federalist houses. And so here we have John Marquand the misogynist, with “women” singled out as the cause of all his woes. “Women and Thomas Harrow” was John’s choice for a title—against such others as “Script by Thomas Harrow” and “Lines by Thomas Harrow”—because, as he said to his publisher, “it tells what the book is about.”
Women and Thomas Harrow received, on the whole, good reviews. William James Smith in Commonweal wrote, “In his latest success, Women and Thomas Harrow, Mr. Marquand cites an aphorism of the theater—a ‘bit’ that goes over big once will go over big twice; after that you’re pushing your luck. Mr. Marquand is proof that this does not hold in the world of the novel. He has done his big bit at least half a dozen times and it is still going over great. It is another respect in which he is uniquely successful.” And, to John’s surprise and ill-concealed delight, The New Yorker, whose views in those days probably carried the greatest cachet of any magazine and which had always high-hatted John Marquand novels in its nil admirari fashion, gave the book a rave, saying, “Rarely is there a novel as fine as this one.” And Arthur Mizener wrote a long and enthusiastic letter, saying:
Marquand does not, I guess, any more than Thomas Harrow, need to worry that he is slipping. This is certainly as competent and finished a job as he has done in other novels, much better that way than Willis Wayde.… I think Marquand has never done so well—or indeed developed so fully—the loved Marquand wife as he has in Rhoda; the nearest thing is Charley Gray’s wife, but Rhoda manages to have the defects or limitations more clearly and yet be more charming.… If the book hasn’t anything like the narrative hold of POINT OF NO RETURN or B. F.’S DAUGHTER or MELVILLE GOODWIN, because it has almost no narrative in the direct sense, still it has a couple of characters from whom a lot of onion skins are peeled during the course of the book, and Marquand does that kind of peeling well enough for any man.
Mizener is right about the lack of narrative, or suspense, in the book, aside from the suspense of character being slowly revealed. And in the process of peeling off skins from his onion, John was so firmly in control of his material that he could pause for a leisurely paragraph or two simply to describe a room, or a table setting, or a flower bed, and the reader does not feel unduly irked. At the same time, in this novel, John had developed his celebrated flashback technique to such an extreme that almost nothing of importance happens in the present. It is all in the past. Though the reader is reminded, periodically, that the characters’ lives are going on in the present, it is the long-ago story of Tom and Rhoda that holds the book together.
Perhaps these are two reasons why, from a sales standpoint, the book was a disappointment. Books are always sold by publishers to booksellers on a returnable basis, and in the case of Women and Thomas Harrow Little, Brown sadly overestimated the book’s market. In the months following publication, over 17,000 unsold books were returned from bookstores, leaving the “hard” sales figure under 50,000.
And—another possible reason for the book’s failure to sell well—there is a pervading sadness throughout the book, a sense of mortality and a sense of doom. The usual satiric and comic Marquand touches are scarce here. From the earliest pages to the final half-unconscious attempt at suicide, Tom Harrow broods not only on the past but on death, the fact that his life is more than half over, that all that was best is gone. The nostalgia is carried to such a degree that the tone becomes one of aching, almost unbearable despair. “In the end, no matter how many were in the car, you always drove alone.” Perhaps readers simply had difficulty accepting such a pessimistic book, such dark foreboding.
And yet, since this is John’s most autobiographical book, it is in many ways his most interesting. It is as though he had decided, through the medium of his art, to say: This is all I can, or rather all I choose, to tell you about myself, and my craft, and my feelings about my work and what it has been like to be successful at it and yet, in a sense, to have failed. And this is all I can—or rather all I wish to—tell you about those people I have loved and lost. As Tom Harrow says:
He was on his way toward that bourne they wrote about and that one fact, after birth, that was completely unescapable. These were obvious facts, but now there was an urgent reminder … he too was a part of the big parade. The younger generation, the younger writers … were waiting for him to pass the stand in review. Time was gently nudging so that he would make room for someone else. The show was never over, but pregnancy was continuing, drums were beating, and you had to march along.
And in Women and Thomas Harrow John Marquand seems to be saying: This is my literary last will and testament. There will be no more novels now. This is the last. And so it was.
The hero of Women and Thomas Harrow discovers, at the beginning of the book, that he is about to be wiped out financially. But John was in no such serious straits. He had, however, mistakenly thought that he did not need to pay United States income tax on his British royalties. The Internal Revenue Service discovered this oversight and advised John that he still owed the government $27,000 for previous tax years. It was a blow, of course, but not as stunning a one as John first made it out to be. He talked gloomily of the necessity of selling his beloved Kent’s Island, but his Boston lawyers went to work on the problem. John had begun talking of making some sort of substantial gift to Harvard and had considered giving his share of Curzon’s Mill. An arrangement was worked out, however, whereby John gave the stage, film, and television rights to Women and Thomas Harrow to Harvard, a gift on which an estimate was placed of $150,000. Ironically, the stage, film, or television rights to the novel have never been bought, and so Harvard is no richer from the gift. But it was a large gesture, and the gift deduction in John’s 1958 income tax helped ease the pain of the $27,000 owed.
John spent the winter of 1958–59 in Pinehurst. Carol and her son Carl visited him there, and there were the pleasant little dinners at Conney Fiske’s. Intellectually, she charmed him more than any other woman. Though he continued to boast of how lucky he was to be rid of Adelaide, John was a man who had always needed a woman’s company, and he wanted to marry again. He had proposed several times to Conney Fiske, but she had also turned him down, though for reasons different from Carol’s. Conney was a New Englander by birth and by choice and would have gone with John to live in Newburyport without a moment’s hesitation. But she had been through the agonizing years of Gardi Fiske’s illness. John had a heart condition, and Conney, fond as she was of John, simply did not want to take the chance of finding herself having to nurse another invalid husband. John that winter was lonely and restless, even though there was golf and plenty of parties to go to. There was the companionship of his secretary, Marjorie Davis, but that was not enough. He worked, in a desultory way, on a new novel.
It was to be about a family named Pettengill, and it was to be, he promised, a “gayer” book than his previous ones—a return, in other words, to the fun of Wickford Point and H. M. Pulham, Esquire. He was going to write his way out of his doldrums. He gave Conney Fiske seventy-odd pages of the manuscript to read. She doesn’t recall that it was a particularly memorable opening, but after all it was just a fragment, just a beginning. In the meantime, John was busily planning a photographic safari to Africa for the coming summer. He would go with George Shearwood, a friend from Pinehurst who ran a travel agency, and he would take Marjorie Davis with him. They would visit the three largest game parks in Kenya and then go into a restricted military district to visit a tribe called the Karamojo which was still completely undisturbed by civilization. Best of all, Sports Illustrated wanted six pieces from the trip—the idea would be a Happy Knoll member writing home of his adventures in Africa—and this meant that the expense of the trip, for both John and Miss Davis, would be completely tax deductible.
The African trip was a great success. They stayed at Treetops and watched the wild animals feeding under simulated moonlight, and John promptly perfected a vivid imitation of a wading hippopotamus. They visited a tiny village called Kitale, at the foot of Mount Elgon, and stayed at a local plantation. On the farm, John, with his customary curiosity, wanted to see everything—the coffee and the maize fields and the shambas. He even said that if he were younger he would like to buy a farm like it, recalling that he had once been offered a temple in Mongolia for $100. In the evening he was at his genial and storytelling best, swinging his glass in his hand, telling of how on a trip to the Near and Middle East he had come into Persia and had been asked if he had any alcoholic beverages to declare. “Five beers,” he said and, asked where they were, he replied, “Right inside me.” He had to pay duty anyway. Later, leaping and jumping to a tom-tom’s beat, he demonstrated a dance he had learned from visiting an American Ojibway tribe.
Everywhere the little group went in Africa they were treated as celebrities, and the Famous American Novelist was forever being stopped by reporters who wanted interviews, which John enjoyed, and who asked him literary questions, which he usually tried to dodge. But once, in Kenya, a reporter asked him what he thought of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and he flung his hands heavenward and rolled his eyes in horror, crying, “Hopeless! Absolutely hopeless!”
The group returned in autumn, to Pinehurst again, as Little, Brown was putting the finishing touches on Timothy Dexter, Revisited. The book was published without much fanfare in the spring of 1960 and, as Little, Brown had warned, with only a small sale. But the biography of the Newburyport nonconformist was also an echo of the theme of the last novel, as John wrote of his favorite seaport: “No past can ever return. There is no use weeping over things that are gone. They can never be retrieved in their ancient combinations.” Newburyport was a finer place then than it has become, and “its inhabitants were more skilled in more crafts and more diligent in their work and worship.” Of The Unspeakable Gentleman, he had once explained that in those days he had been “in love with candle light and old ships.” He had not really lost that love.
And “worship”? Had he also wistfully begun to miss the religiosity of his Unitarian ancestors? He used to speak to Carol of “the hereafter—the place you don’t believe in.”
By late spring, 1960, John was back in Newburyport, and on July 14 he came down for the July Book-of-the-Month Club meeting. He was in his usual anecdotal form for that Thursday luncheon and meeting, amusing his fellow judges—John Mason Brown, Basil Davenport, Gilbert Highet, and Clifton Fadiman—with stories of Africa, including the hippopotamus imitation. He shared a taxi with Brown on the long trip uptown from Hudson Street to the Knickerbocker Club where John was staying. John got out of the cab, waved a cheery good-by, and Brown continued uptown.
By Friday, John was back at Kent’s Island. Conney Fiske was also back in Boston, and John had asked her for dinner that night, and to stay on at the house overnight or for the week end if she wished. Conney had to decline because of a previous commitment. She was very sorry. She had dined with him about a week before, and it had been very pleasant, but suddenly in the middle of dinner John did a strange thing. He rose from his chair and went to a cabinet and fetched a Chinese cricket cage that he had bought, years before, on one of his trips to the Orient, and he presented the cricket cage to Conney, saying, “May the crickets always sing for you.” The words curiously moved and touched her.
And so, that Friday night, John dined alone with his youngest son, Lonnie, who was seventeen. During dinner John complained that at his age he couldn’t eat a thing. A few minutes later he said gloomily that he felt as though he was going to have another heart attack. But Lonnie, familiar with his father’s dark moods and his habit of exaggeration, paid little attention when his father talked like this. “It’s probably just nerves,” Lonnie said. John then said that he was going straight to bed. He patted Lonnie affectionately on the head and said good night.
In the morning, Floyd Ray, the houseman-chauffeur whose wife Julia served as John’s cook and housekeeper, went up at the regular hour with John’s breakfast tray. Floyd opened the bedroom curtains and, with the tray in his hands, turned to waken his master. There was a crash that woke Lonnie, and he ran from his room down the hall to his father’s room. Floyd was standing there by the breakfast tray that had crashed to the floor. Floyd said, “Your father won’t wake up!”
Nor did he. He had died in his sleep early that morning, and his death had a kind of completeness one feels at the end of an interesting book. It was over too soon—sixty-six years is not a long life for a man. And yet John had seen Timothy Dexter, Revisited published, that intensely personal project that everyone had assured him would not be successful, but which he had done simply because he had wanted to do it. He was probably “written out” and probably knew it He had got rid of Adelaide, who had become worse than a thorn in the flesh to him. He had made his peace with Harvard. And he had died in the house he had built for himself, in his beloved New England which he himself had helped to create. And so it was over, and his death was another example of fêng-shui, the fitness of things, and a reminder that in the end you always die alone.