The Late John Marquand (29 page)

The result of all this was that as the case moved toward trial the Hales had built up a considerable body of sympathy behind them, and public feeling was running strong in their favor and against John. Much was made in the press of the disparity between the Hales' economic situation and John's, in which the tables had been oddly turned since the days of John's boyhood, when he had come to think of himself as a poor relation compared with the “rich” Hales. The Hales were portrayed as gentle, sweet innocents—and the underdogs—while John was depicted as a selfish bully who, very likely, had an exaggerated opinion of his own importance due to the fame of his books, and who, though he already had a number of houses and apartments—in New York, Newburyport, Hobe Sound, Aspen—wanted more, including everything that belonged to his poor cousins. It was in this highly charged atmosphere that the case came to the Salem, Massachusetts, Probate Court on October 21, 1948, Judge Phelan—a Boston Irishman—presiding.

Here again, John seems to have been somewhat naïve in his approach to the case. His attorney was a Mr. F. Murray Forbes, Jr., of the distinguished Boston firm of Welch, Brown, Forbes and Welch. Thomas Hale, though masterminding the proceedings for his cousins from New York, kept his own name—and that of his Manhattan firm—completely out of the case and, instead, engaged a young lawyer from Salem named James J. Connelly to try the case. Connelly, representing the Hales, had the appeal of a local boy on his way up; he was also a relative and attended the same church as the judge. John's lawyer, on the other hand, came down to little Salem from the big city wearing a cutaway and a silk hat. Before the proceedings got under way, everybody had been wondering what old Phil Marquand felt about it. When the little group gathered in the courthouse it was noticed that Phil was sitting on the Hales' side of the room. Outside, John Marquand was being photographed by
Life
on the courthouse steps looking handsome, prosperous, and confident.

From the outset it was clear that young Jim Connelly was
conducting the hearing beautifully. He pulled out all the stops, and his rich Irish voice quavered with emotion as he described how the powerful rich man was trying to take away his cousins' property. Quietly he reminded the Court that these gentlefolk, the Hales, were the descendants of Edward Everett Hale, the great author. “And today,” Connelly intoned, “we are witnessing Mr. John P. Marquand trying to make these people men without a country.” There was hardly a dry eye in the courtroom, while the color rose on the back of John's neck.

John did not make a particularly good witness when he got to the stand. His usually resonant voice failed him, as did his own theatrical ability. He muttered and mumbled replies to questions. His heart seemed to have gone out of it, and in all likelihood it had. It was, after all, not he but Adelaide who had got them all into this position; just as he had defended her during the America First period, he stood by her through this. On November third, after hearing just a little over a week of testimony, Judge Phelan decided the case. Curzon's Mill should be divided, he declared “in metes and bounds”—into appropriate divisions, to be determined by the land commission, between the opposing parties. The Hales had won.

Adelaide was furious. So were John's Boston lawyers. At first the land commission gave the mill to the Hales—the Mill House that John himself had wanted most of all—along with some land. John's lawyers took an immediate appeal on the technicality that the place split was not worth as much as the place whole. Finally an agreement was reached; John was given the Yellow House, which Adelaide wanted, and the Mill House, which he wanted, while the Hales were given the Red Brick House and the parcel of property across the road. It was, of course, exactly the division which had been suggested to John, and which he had agreed to, in the first place, before Adelaide had begun insisting that Curzon's Mill not be divided. It was like the neat and ironic denouement of a John Marquand novel. And once the case was settled there was no more dropping in, or even any speaking, between John Marquand and the Hales. Cousin Laura Hale had been right.

All this litigation had seriously interrupted John's work on the new novel he was trying to write about a banker. During the ordeal, he made frequent trips back to New York, where he would
arrive unannounced at Carol Brandt's office at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She would turn off the telephone except for West Coast calls, fix him a drink, and listen to him as he paced up and down her office, complaining that he could not understand his cousins, why they were putting him through all this. Now John and Adelaide were off for Europe—to London, Rome, and Athens. Adelaide wanted the trip, she said, to “heal some of the wounds” their marriage had suffered. John just wanted to get away. Adelaide was hopeless when it came to details and planning, and so John had asked Carol to wire ahead to London to reserve a car and a suite at Claridge's. John and Adelaide were seated on deck chairs on the high seas bound for England when a cablegram was delivered from the manager of Claridge's, saying that all arrangements had been made for the arriving Marquands according to Mrs. Brandt's instructions. John started to crumple up the cable and toss it over the rail, but Adelaide snatched it from him. There followed a stormy shipboard scene. As John told Carol later, it was one instance where Carol's famous efficiency had backfired on them.

Chapter Twenty-Two

“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.