The Late John Marquand (11 page)

At the same time, she possessed—and possesses—a quality that particularly appealed to Marquand: a sense of humor about her own situation and social caste and about the values of upper-class Boston that have shaped Constance Morss Fiske into the definite lady she is. She has John's ability to see both sides of her position and station in life. Like John, she could always laugh at the rituals and mystiques surrounding such venerable Boston institutions as the Athenaeum, the Chilton Club, the Somerset Club, and the enormous and mysterious importance of living on the Hill. At the same time, Conney Fiske would seem to take her membership in all these institutions very seriously; lunching in town she usually prefers the Spartan dignity of the downstairs ladies' dining room in the Somerset Club, and during the years when the Fiskes kept their big house at 206 Beacon Street Conney Fiske did so with an awareness that this was a most impeccable Boston address, and that an impeccable address matters seriously in Boston.

Conney Fiske's detachment was not typical but exceptional for Boston. She could get amusement from observing the old and proper families such as the Lowells and the Lawrences and the Peabodys, people who saw each other over and over again, year after year, who traveled to London and stayed at Brown's Hotel because only here could they be sure of finding other Bostonians, and who, confronted with people from out of town, would simply refuse to engage them in conversation, preferring “our own sort.” And yet she was herself very much a part of this formalized world, part of this pattern, and knew its contours and its rules.

Perhaps her curious combination of serious adherence to form, along with a gentle and detached self-mockery, is best seen watching Conney Fiske on horseback, in the Moore County Hunt. Though she rides the Queen's seat with dignity and authority in her well-worn but expensively tailored riding skirt, and with her sensibly coiffed hair tucked under a black derby hat, it is somehow also clear that she knows perfectly well that she is an oddity, an anachronism, and is getting huge enjoyment from this knowledge.

This specialness of her humor was what endeared Conney Fiske to John Marquand. She was everything that the Sedgwicks were,
but with self-awareness added. She, in turn, understood what John had had to endure from the Sedgwicks and admired his curiosity and industry and grit in the face of it.

Gardiner Fiske, meanwhile, was if anything even more Bostonian. Though Conney's family was richer, the Gardiner and Fiske families bore the more prestigious lineage—the Gardiners, in particular, who include in their family tree all the ancient Lords of the Manor of Gardiners Island, New York, a private fiefdom granted to the Gardiners by the Crown long before the Revolution, and still in the family. In Boston, Gardiners and Fiskes have taken themselves enormously seriously for generations, and men like Gardi Fiske's father, Andrew Fiske, and his aunt, the maiden lady Miss Gertrude Fiske, were so thoroughly Beacon-Hill oriented that one could hardly imagine them more than a block away from Beacon or State Streets; they could not have breathed the air. Gardi Fiske had a bit of this in him too, but he was also a movie-star-handsome, athletic—one might even say dashing—man, who simply did not look the part of a Boston Brahmin. He had a romantic past. During World War I he had been a flying ace who, at one point, had fallen out of the plane he was flying, seized hold of one of the rear struts, and clambered back aboard. He was not at all frightened at the time, he told Marquand, who never tired of hearing about this astonishing feat, because “I know the Bishop, who is Up There, and if there are any good clubs, he'll get me in.” He was referring, of course, to Bishop Lawrence of Boston. Gardi and John had been good friends since
Lampoon
days. Gardi, after the war, had gone to work as a cotton broker and was a member of the Boston Airport Authority, earning a respectable, if not giant, salary, and Marquand had admired Gardi for doing this. It would have been so easy, Marquand often pointed out, for a man in Gardi Fiske's position to live off his wealthy wife. Most of all, Marquand admired Gardi's integrity, his insistence on sticking to his principles. With Gardi there was black and there was white, and no shadings in between.

John Marquand had developed an admiration for the novels of Edith Wharton and Jane Austen. A dog-eared copy of
Pride and Prejudice
could usually be found in his jacket pocket, and he read and reread it many times. Before his divorce from Christina, he had
turned out two novels that reflected the Jane Austen influence and were suggestive of the major novels that would one day follow. The first of these two, published in 1930, was called
Warning Hill
, and the second, published in 1933, was titled
Haven's End
. Both had been first written for magazine serialization, and both had New England settings. Of the two novels,
Haven's End
is the more interesting and the more successful and, later on,
Haven's End
was the only one of his early novels which Marquand chose to list on the traditional “ad page” at the front of each of his books, an indication that he considered
Haven's End
the only title worth owning up to, and that he would just as soon let the others be forgotten.

The fictional town of Haven's End, where the finest houses “still are very fine. They stand on a ridge above the Main Street, where they may overlook the river and the sea,” is very reminiscent of the Newburyport John Marquand knew as a boy, and the Swales, who have ancient roots there, sound very much like his own ancestral Marquands. He was gradually, and somewhat hesitantly, abandoning the costumed melodrama of his first books and coming to grips with his own experience. In the process, his writing style was becoming less turgid and labored, moving toward the honeyed smoothness of the writing in his best books, a style so polished and restrained that there hardly seems to be any style at all. Also in
Haven's End
he made use—somewhat crude and primitive use, to be sure—of the flashback technique that would become the great Marquand trademark in the later books, the perfectly structured and sweepingly cinematic movements backward in time that carried readers deep into the past of the Marquand characters.
Haven's End
opens with the village auctioneer about to put the splendid old Swale mansion on the block. The novel then shifts—too abruptly to be as dramatic as a good flashback should be—into the past history of the Swales. Three-hundred-odd pages later, the story jumps back into the present again as the auctioneer's hammer falls on the final sale.

Conney Fiske encouraged John with both these New England novels—he was writing, after all, about a world which she also knew, perhaps even better than he—and together they would discuss nuances of the Yankee's character: his sense of probity and thrift, and
also his strong feelings of continuity of family as expressed through property, through roots.

Meanwhile, John's Mr. Moto stories were achieving huge popularity, and each new tale of the lisping, bowing, and foot-shuffling little detective was immediately being snapped up for movies that starred Peter Lorre. Despite his complaints about the amounts of money he had had to settle on Christina and to support his children, Marquand was becoming a rich writer. This gave him time and leisure to work on the big novel he had been thinking about, the Boston novel. When he had once mentioned it to Christina, her reaction had been, “We'll have to leave Boston, of course.” Now this had become the novel he and Conney Fiske talked most about during the long and pleasant afternoons at 206 Beacon Street, and which he was giving her to read, chapter by chapter, as it progressed. Its central character was to be a Boston Brahmin, a man not unlike Gardi Fiske's father. It was a character who would be approached with Conney's, and John's, kind of double sight. That is, the hero of the book would be a man whom one would laugh at for his foolishness and pomposity, but whom one would also love for his integrity and fidelity to his code. As a novel, it would be an important departure for John, the most ambitious project he had ever undertaken—a bid, though he did not come out and say so—for greatness. It would be, perhaps, his
Pride and Prejudice
. As the novel moved along, Conney Fiske could tell that her husband, in all probability, would not like it. It dissected their own world too surgically, mocked it too cleverly. But Conney Fiske sensed that a major book was under way, and her encouragement was therefore steady and insistent. She also sensed Marquand's extraordinary excitement with what he was doing. It was an excitement he had not experienced before in anything he had written. With this book, which he planned to call
The Late George Apley
, he was not writing as a journeyman professional, turning out commercial fiction. He was writing with a true creative joy.

He could not come out and say this either, but he was writing a novel that could thumb its nose at Uncle Ellery. And at Christina.

Chapter Ten

Conney Fiske, in a gentle and friendly way, had for a long time been trying to get Marquand to tone down his writing style, to restrain it, to make it somehow quieter and less fervid—more civilized. Along with a tendency to overwrite, he had a tendency to exaggerate. Exaggeration can present problems to a writer, particularly when he is attempting to write humor. If humor is not reined in and kept under control, it can easily fall over the line and become slapstick. Satire, pushed too far, slips the track completely and becomes farce and, in the process, loses every vestige of credibility. Conney objected, for instance, to a detail in one of Marquand's short stories in which a woman character is described as appearing in a cocktail dress “from one of New York's most creative couturières” which was “of hand-painted silk with a brilliant motif of violet and red mixed drinks in long-stemmed glasses.” Conney didn't believe that such a dress could ever exist, except in a novelist's somewhat bitchy fancy, and, if it did, that it would have been worn by this character, an expensive lady in an exclusive club at a
fashionable resort. But John liked the detail, considered it humorous, and kept it, and there it stands in the story today, looking very much as though Conney Fiske had been right. In writing
The Late George Apley—
to be a long satiric novel—the problem of maintaining balance, of avoiding overstatement, faced Marquand with each new paragraph. Looking back on his struggles with the novel years later, Marquand confessed that he was not sure that he had been completely successful, or that he had fully resisted “a constant temptation to indulge in slapstick farce.” At times his characters, he admitted, “often more than verge on the preposterous.” It is an honest admission.

Marquand began writing
The Late George Apley
in 1934, left it half finished until the end of 1935, after the divorce, and completed it toward the end of 1936. It is an extraordinarily subtle and complex piece of work. To begin with, it is constructed as a series of letters between Apley and his children, friends, associates, parents, grandparents, and other relatives. This epistolatory form of construction was, of course, nothing new, but over this device Marquand laid a parody of the memoir form which was most original. He had run across, in and around Boston, memorial testaments written about deceased worthies of the city—long-winded pieces of biographical puffery designed to place the subject in the most flattering possible light and to overlook, even bury, any of his shortcomings or weaknesses. Marquand had been amused by these testimonials—which usually were privately printed, on heavy vellum, for distribution to members of the family following a funeral, and were usually atrociously written—and decided to parody one of these biographies to tell the story of the late George Apley's life. Marquand picked, for his fictional biographer, the character of Horatio Willing, pompous Bostonian, prig, prude, bigot, social snob, a man who totally lacks perception or humor and who is otherwise without redeeming social value.

An indication of how successful Marquand was with this device, and how believable a character he was able to make out of the self-important Willing, was that a number of readers—and a few unwary critics—were caught off their guard and deceived into thinking that Marquand was unintentionally responsible for Willing's jaw-breaking prose style, with its frequent lapses from proper
English syntax, and accused Marquand of writing “bad grammar.” They failed to grasp the point that the bad grammar Marquand wrote for Willing was part of the parody, part of the fun.

One of the hazards of a Horatio Willing, as a device, is that every detail of Apley's life, every relationship and every event, is commented on by Willing, comes to us through Willing's consciousness, and is subject to his whimsical interpretation. But the reader learns, early on, that Willing is a man not to be trusted. He misinterprets everything, shows an utter lack of sensitivity about his subject, does his best to conceal an interesting or revealing fact once he has discovered it, and commits other acts of biographical treachery and deceit.

And yet, it works. Through the smoke screen thrown up around Apley's life by Willing, we somehow manage to see Apley even more brilliantly and—since Apley is himself a prude, a snob, a bigot—more understandingly.

There is, for example, the carefully dusted-off account which Willing gives of the young George Apley's early love affair with a girl named Mary Monahan. Mary Monahan was not only from the wrong side of the tracks, she was also—her name tells the whole story—Boston Irish, and a Catholic. She was, Willing allows, a beautiful girl and “had many of the externals of a young person of a higher position.” In fact, out walking once with George on Commonwealth Avenue she was actually mistaken by some passers-by as a Baltimore society belle. In other words, she could almost pass as true Quality, but not quite. Willing dismisses Mary Monahan—or “the young Monahan woman,” as he prefers to call her—as a “youthful lapse” of Apley's, something hardly worth taking note of in the book, and points out piously that “anyone at a certain stage in life may be beset by vagaries which must not be considered seriously.” At the same time, from the few scraps of Willing-edited correspondence between George and Mary which he selfishly permits his readers to see, it is quite apparent that theirs was a deep and passionate romance and that Mary, not at all a lapse, was the only great and enduring love of George Apley's life and his only chance to break away from the rigid mold into which Boston and the heavy fact of Apley-dom were determined to cast him. Willing promises his readers—though how could he know?—that physical sex was
never a part of the relationship between Mary and George, and that “if latitude was offered him by the young Monahan woman … he took no advantage of it. This is the one pleasing aspect of an affair which obviously could not be of long duration.” Do we believe Willing? Not for a minute.