John P. Marquand and the American Failure

BY ALFRED KAZIN

THE hero of John P. Marquand’s new novel, Women and Thomas Harrow, is an American playwright and director of fifty-four who is unhappy with his third wife, unsure of his ability to turn out a new Broadway hit, and who lives in a fabulously costly old mansion in the small New England town where he grew up. He is charming and bright, a gentleman as well as a wit; he is as respectful of the traditions of the little old New England home town (once a famous seaport) as he is of the hard professionalism of the theater, and he would be as much at home in that town as he is in New York were it not for his uncomfortable sense of irony about his life, his mocking awareness of every situation as one which he might have written and directed himself.

It is the unforgotten bite of poverty and comparative social inferiority in his youth that helps to explain his sudden undoing. Ever since his unexpected first success in the 1920s with a sardonic play about a war hero’s return, which enabled him to marry a local girl whose father was a failure, Tom Harrow’s regular success in the theater has driven him to spread himself more and more recklessly. His first wife, Rhoda, who is obsessed with a desire for security, finally left him for real money when he was whooping it up in North Africa during the war; characteristically, he gave her an excessively generous settlement. His second wife, a hard, ambitious actress, still gets lavish alimony from him; his third, a duller woman than the first two, an unsuccessful actress who is getting stouter than she would like, feels imprisoned in the house which her husband keeps up only out of piety to the traditions that surrounded his youth. All these handsome gestures, these symbolic excesses and improvidences, led Tom to risk his investments with a costume musical comedy which failed. With his capital gone, his wife turns on him; his first wife, who had discovered that life with big money can be dull, offers to return both his original settlement on her, and herself. In a fit of despair, Tom barely saves himself from going over a cliff in his big new car and realizes that from now on he must go it alone.

Summarizing the story makes Tom Harrow sound more of a money writer than he is. The point about him is not that he is venal, but that he is used to success; not corrupt, and the very opposite of cheap, he is a writer with a definite public who has always written with professional self-respect and skill. The trouble with him is not that he is a grasping individual, like the self-betraying hero who used to figure in American novels about the vanity of success, but, one of many Americans who have done their best and have enjoyed the profits, he has been betrayed by life itself — by the mediocrity of the society in which he lives. Thomas Harrow reminds us of many Americans today. He suffers not from a lack of honor — the old-fashioned explanation of misery in a highly competitive society — but from a lack of differentiation in both his character and the America he lives with. It is no longer a tragedy of character that such heroes act out, but a world depressed by its own lack of expectation. Tom Harrow has done his best, but the America in which he lives has become increasingly inflationary and socially pretentious, and the disappointment and disgust that sensitive Americans feel about our failure as a civilization trouble him.

Everything Thomas Harrow has to look at is either, like his beautiful old house, too distant from contemporary experience to be meaningful or, like the overlarge and overcolored automobile in which he finally tries to die, an example of the submissiveness and vulgarity that the “juke-box civilization” of mid-twentieth-century America has come to. The house, built by local shipwrights, represents for Tom “a revolt and a craving for luxury which its builder had never known,”while his present wife, Emily, is by his own admission perhaps not so shallow as she seems when she complains that he has absurdly sacrificed a comfortable bathroom to keep an old prayer closet. Tom Harrow has collected three-pronged forks, rattail spoons, pistol-handled knives, Crown Derby china, George the Second candlesticks, Chippendale tables, but recognizes that “he had in reality been travelling rapidly all his life over a shoddy road, decorated meretriciously . . . with plastic refreshment booths and over-night motels . . . places of temporary respite for temporary indulgence, but no more.”When he walks down the main street of the dear old town and passes the church where he was first married, he reads that the next sermon topic is “How happy are you inside?"; and when he steps into the beautiful and simple church, the Reverend Ernest W. Godfrey greets Tom as a fellow professional, describes the church as a psychological filling station for troubled souls, and reveals that he’s been in “this game long enough to know that every single one of us has his own problem and his own method of motivation as well as his particular means of adjustment, and his own particular subconscious mind.”

THOMAS HARROW lives in the American world we all have to live in these days. When he reflects, in the dark night of his soul (the bank is calling in the stocks he put up as collateral), that “national life was approaching an average that expressed itself in gastronomical and in spiritual mediocrity, and he had always hated mediocrity. . . . They would all soon be engulfed in the wave of the commonplace,” we agree that the essence of Tom Harrow’s relation to women has been his concern with old-fashioned standards of aristocratic ease, gaiety, personal honor, which his wives have been too frightened or too hard to respect. These women symbolize the increasing spiritual imperfection, the anxious and external greediness, which to many observers has made the American woman seem unnatural. Tom Harrow, the parfit gentil knight, lavishes enormous marriage settlements on wives who have run off with millionaires and thinks wistfully of his old aunt Edith, who, like so many New England women of her generation, never married but “was able to understand nearly everything from the basis of almost no appreciable experience.” Rhoda, his first wife, his true wife (in his old-fashioned way Tom Harrow reflects that no matter how many times you married, you truly married only once), was constantly worried because change made her feel insecure. Rhoda used to say: “Do you have a feeling that everything is beginning to move so fast that we’ll have to run to keep up with it? ... I like things so I know where they’ll be tomorrow.”

But isn’t this Tom Harrow’s feeling as well? Rhoda’s fear of change took the form of greed; Emily’s, of dread that she would be left alone; Tom’s takes the form of cultural piety to beautiful old houses in old seaports like Newburyport — where John P. Marquand and the heroes of so many of his novels grew up. The ruling and obsessive image in all of Marquand’s novels is that of traveling the American road to the point of no return, to the hour when there is so little time. In this book the conception of life as loss has become the dramatic image of a successful and attractive American trying to kill himself in the chromium, long-finned, grotesquely colored car which incarnates all the showiness that he loathes. It is perhaps not the “shoddy” American road that troubles Tom Harrow so much as it is the mechanical defeat of life itself; it is not our great and confused America of the Eisenhower age, with its weapons that reach to the stars and its people — many of whom look as if all wisdom had been squeezed out of them by the strain of American life — that comes into play so much as it is the fact that people get old, and that when they get old enough, they die.

What bothers John P. Marquand, as it bothers Thomas Harrow, is the suspicion that as people get older in America, they do not get wiser; they just reminisce. No matter how much one may admire Marquand’s social skill, his wit, his sense of tact, above all his cool honesty, one knows that a Marquand novel will sag into flashback as surely as a Shakespearean hero will spout blank verse. What is wrong with so much reminiscence — which in this case, despite all Marquand’s charm and wit, makes a sad, soft, rather self-indulgent book out of Women and Thomas Harrow — is the fact that, among other faults, Marquand no longer bothers to find a very convincing or dramatically interesting frame for these flights into the past. The evening the Harrows are giving a dinner party, Tom tells Emily that they are busted; she denounces him; he gets thoroughly soaked on Martinis, champagne, brandy, Scotch; then, sittingup most of the night in an alcoholic haze of selfreference, he goes over the failure of his life. Technically, this makes a hole in the book only because there is so much formal separation between Tom Harrow in the present and the Tom Harrow he is remembering that we cannot believe very much in the strength of a character who is largely shown on the shady side of his life. The flashback is usually the structural center of a Marquand novel, but in previous books the past was shown as inaccessible — not, as it is symbolically in this book, unrelated. The symbol is that of the unconnection in Tom Harrow’s own mind between past and present America; the American failure is always the inability to find the past or to learn from it: sure breeding ground for nostalgia.

The looseness with which the flashback is handled in Women and Thomas Harrow is significant. It is typical of all those novels in which Marquand presents too uncritically characters who represent his professional experience — the writer in Wickford Point, the play doctor in So Little Time — or the social exclusions of his intimate experience in Newburyport and at Harvard, as in Point of No Return and Sincerely, Willis Wayde. Marquand’s best book is still The Late George Apley, for he functions superbly as a satirist of the genteel tradition. Every social novelist has an evident conception of himself in relation to his subject. Marquand’s role is that of the background observer, the man from the public schools of Newburyport who is relatively the outsider, who can observe upper-crust Boston with a critical sharpness that at the same time reveals his sympathy for a class he was of but not in. What makes The Late George Apley so good is the fact that Marquand himself, setting the scenes and pulling the strings, is evident everywhere and visible nowhere; he knows where he stands and his control is perfect. Even in H. M. Pulham, Esquire, one can see that apart from the jokes at the expense of the booster in the Harvard class of 1915, Marquand is no longer distant enough from Pulham to sustain the satire, for in age Pulham could be a son to Apley, and thus he is not only Marquand’s contemporary and a man who has shared in the same historic experiences, but the symbol of a vanishing social order.

Marquand’s dilemma, even in a relatively satiric and external book about an upper-class man like Pulham, is that he cherishes Pulham’s gentlemanly values far too much for him to stay in the background as a satirist. Instead of feeling free to describe the values of Pulham with the old detachment, Marquand has gone through the same helplessness before the defeat of the past, before the gradual extinction of our old American world, which he once satirized in the helplessness of Apley. And the more he has been forced to write from a point of view too reminiscent of naked experience, the more Marquand has softened and saddened, to the point where all satiric edge eventually disappears from Women and Thomas Harrow. And we are made uncomfortably aware, in what are intended to be the dramatic crises of the book, that there is an excessively personal tone to Marquand’s reflections on the hazards and selfdeceptions of a writer who has relied too long on his own professional facility.

One of the recurrent themes in the book is the hero’s inability to connect life and the theater in which he has worked so successfully. He not only sees every situation with a detachment that cuts him off from immediate human emotion, but when he goes to work in the old coach house he has converted into an office (he keeps the driveway heavily coated with gravel so that Emily in her high heels will not be able to walk down and disturb him), he cannot rid himself of the suspicion that his long habit of easy success has made him a mechanical contriver of situations and effects. Without in the least consciously sacrificing his integrity, he does feel that he has lost his freshness; and this complaint is likely to strike the reader as significant in view of the manifest lack of vital dramatic energy in Marquand’s new novel, in which an increasing impatience and despair have gone hand in hand with the now ungovernable nostalgia.

I admire Marquand very much, for in a society like our own, which is always in danger of being overinterpreted, the social novelist, the novelist of manners—Marquand, Cozzens, O’Hara, and Edith Wharton and Ellen Glasgow before them — nails life down by writing about a particular social class from a definite point of view. America has been more of a society, even a class society, than the long tradition of solitude in our literature reveals to outsiders, and Marquand’s kidding of the transcendentalist tradition in Wickford Point and his outburst against Melville, “the great god of literature in America,” in this new book reflect the impatience of the practiced social observer with the theoreticians and visionaries who have always stood for American literature.

But the social novelist in America has his problem. He writes about a society which does not want to be a society, one in which individuals distrust the very idea of society, in which social distinctions are considered immoral or irrelevant, as they are by solitary voyagers, like Ishmael, to whom the world is a metaphysical problem. Since the social novelist, by the very nature and accessibility of his material, is likely to be prolific and fluent, he must not exploit the fluency of his manner to describe a purely personal crisis. We do not want a novel by Jane Austen to resemble Wuthering Heights, or John O’Hara to lose his temper when describing the country club set in Appointment in Samarra. We want to see the relationships of people who are divided by class; we want to see human beings rise above class but not be unconvincingly free of class. When George Apley has to give up his Irish girl, we are touched, for we recognize the human need to defy convention — and the durability of convention itself. But George Apley— 1866-1934 —still had conventions to submit to, and perhaps it is only a novelist of New England, born in 1892, who can still be so much aware of them. Only in New England or the South, in the day just before our day, were there conventions enough to produce social novels: novels whose essence is that society exists independently and exerts power over those who live in it.

What has happened to Marquand’s novels is perhaps due to the fact that the local traditions which have always represented class in this country have increasingly disappeared under the pressures of a technological society. The novelist of manners, like Marquand (or Cozzens or O’Hara), who has always depended on a tradition stable enough to include the satirist himself, now finds himself angrily crying out against the absence of values themselves. Last year we saw just how angry James Gould Cozzens could get, in a novel whose essential tone is unlimited and profane bitterness at the degradation of the republic. And in Women and Thomas Harrow we can see just how melancholy and nerveless Marquand can get when he is concerned with the same problem of a middle-aged American, now of the old school, who recognizes that he is fighting not for freedom from convention, as George Apley did, but for conventions— standards of belief and behavior that will allow him to function as a human being again in a world where beliefs are shared.

The basic human experience is our consciousness of mortality. Everyone dies, and sooner or later everyone’s life takes shape from that limitation. That is why Proust named his great book a quest of time gone; he recognized that only what is immaterial can remain: still in life, the human mind can transcend its imminent extinction to deliver us from time. Mortality is a theme that a sixty-five-year-old novelist is naturally concerned with, and the fifty-four-year-old hero of this book is immediately concerned with it. And how does Mr. Marquand handle this fundamental problem of our necessary deliverance from time? Tom Harrow does not believe in it; he does not believe in the imagination — which is all we have because his very facility as a writer has made him suspect the imagination. “The late Dr. Albert Einstein, or others vaguely in the Einstein category, had advanced the theory that time, being immaterial, was indestructible—and perhaps it was. . . . Yet, granted that the past was indestructible, exactly where was it now? Was it in good order, in keeping with theories of relativity? He did not believe it was. The past in his experience was in a tangled mess like ticker tape.”The intellectual poverty of this, I firmly believe, accounts for the description of the past in Mr. Marquand’s flashbacks as a mess of ticker tape. There is only one place where the past ever makes sense -inside the creative human mind. To yield this to the American complaint that society has changed too much is to show up cruelly our lack of connection with ourselves. The social novelist in America pays for his lack of ideas when he is left without the social traditions on which he has depended so long for his sustenance as a man and his achievement as an artist.