Harvard '15

H. M. PULHAM, ESQUIRE--John P. Marquand--Little, Brown ($2.50).

Of a New England long since gone to seed, John Phillips Marquand writes with affectionate malice. The Late George Apley (1937) was a full-length portrait of a Boston Brahmin who was left like Old North Church amid a new environment. Wickford Point (1939) examined the Brill family who made up for their lack of money, brains or usefulness with proud descent from a minor contemporary of Emerson and H. D. Thoreau. Last week, in H. M. Pulham, Esquire, Marquand wryly celebrated his Harvard class of 1915 and its type of New England gentleman.

H. M. Pulham, Esquire embodies the reflections of a Boston investment counsel when his 25th Class Reunion Committee asks him for a brief biography. His life, he thinks, is not exciting: Bill King had said that life was made up of loving and making money, but it was a good deal more than that. Life was made up of letting the dog out, of hitting your thumb with the hammer when you were driving nails, of getting someone to fix the washer in the laundry faucet, of Christmas and friends to dinner. . . . It always seemed that, when I finished with one particular problem, there would be time to read or time to think--but there was always something else. . . . From the depths of memory a troubled tale emerges.

Reading The Education of Henry Adams, Harry Pulham was impressed with "how little Mr. Adams' surroundings changed from the beginning to the end of his life, for he ended just where he started --in the horse-&-buggy age, without the addition of very much plumbing. Yet here in my own life, which is not entirely over, I am already in an entirely different world." A well-to-do upbringing full of Tennysonian sentiments, St. Swithin's prep school ("Play up--and play the game"), Harvard clubs, Boston society and Maine coast summers equipped Harry Pulham with snobberies and ideals for living in Boston of the 1890s. Suddenly he found himself an infantry lieutenant in France, an advertising man in cynical post-war Manhattan. He was baffled by a world full of labor trouble, Communism, economic upset, a League of Nations. But he played the game in the old St. Swithin's spirit, learned to forget the war, never questioned his standards, left Manhattan and the Illinois girl he loved for the narrowing circle of Bostonian complacency. He married, had children, paid taxes, grew middleaged: "If I had had the guts--" I sometimes find myself thinking, and a part of the old restlessness comes back.

Marquand's writing puts the ideas of T. S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock into the language of a Saturday Evening Post serial. Years of entertaining readers of The Ladies' Home Journal, McCall's, etc., brought Marquand enough money so that he could try his hand at more serious fiction. But thanks to that rigorous training, his serious books are 1) far easier reading than literature needs to be, 2) almost as profitable as the serialized adventures of his Japanese sleuth, Mr. Moto.

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