Spruce Street Boy

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POINT OF No RETURN (559 pp.)--John P. Marquand-- Little, Brown ($3.50).

Charley Gray closed the door of his $30,000 house in Sycamore Park, Conn, and eased himself into the Buick beside his wife. On this rainy spring morning in 1947, as she did every weekday morning, Nancy was driving him to catch the 8:30 train to his Fifth Avenue bank job in midtown Manhattan. To Charley, this always seemed the friendliest time of the day. He noticed how Nancy's hair curled below the edges of her green hat and he realized gratefully that he could talk to her about the children, or the household budget, and not be nervous about her driving.

This morning, Nancy broke the spell. There was a vice presidency open at Charley's bank and everyone knew it lay between Charley and Roger Blakesley. The strain of waiting for President Anthony Burton to make up his mind had made Nancy taut. "Why don't you ask Burton what the score is?" she asked. "Aren't you tired of waiting?"

For some reason, Charley Gray became mildly irritated. "The little woman kissing her husband good-by," he mocked. "Everything depends on this moment. He must get the big job or Junior can't go to boarding school. And what about the payments on the new car? Goodby, darling, and don't come back to me without being vice president of the trust company."

"Don't say that," she said.

"Why not?" Charley asked.

"Don't say it," Nancy said, her voice louder, "because maybe you're right."

The story of Charley Gray is the story of millions of decent, middle-class U.S. citizens who are doing well, have a fire in their heels to do still better, and in their thoughtful moments suffer a fugitive feeling of discontentment from start to finish. Charley and Nancy have been to college; they have a house and a car, even a membership in Sycamore Park's second-best country club. All they want at the moment (besides the vice-presidency) is a newer car, membership in the Hawthorn Hill Club, prep school for the children and, later, when they can manage it, a rather better house.

But for Charley there is an intangible want that none of these things fulfills, even when it can be bought and paid for. Somehow he feels that life is slapping him around, and it makes him dissatisfied and a little bitter. What is missing?

Life Without Props. For almost two years Novelist John Phillips Marquand has been burrowing at the roots of Charley Gray's discontent. Next week, in his latest and best novel, Point of No Return, he gives his readers no pat answer. But, as a good novelist should, he gives them a shrewd, revealing picture of a broad segment of U.S. society.

The Charley Grays burn themselves out in the race to pass the Blakesleys and creep up on the Burtons; then find themselves at the end with no spiritual props to make life bearable. The question Author Marquand's book raises is: "Are the rewards of all your efforts worth the effort?" But Charley Gray himself may be too busy even to hear the issue stated. Like an aircraft pilot who has passed his own point of no return--the point on a long flight where it takes more gas to go back than to go on to his destination--Charley has to keep going.

This spring, a great many U.S. readers (including thousands of Charley and Nancy Grays) will be reading Point of No Return on commuting trains and at home, after the family car has been run into the garage. Ineligible for Book-of-the-Month Club selection because Marquand is one of the club's five* judges (it can and will be a B-O-M "dividend" book), the novel has already gone through four printings totaling 80,000 copies. Wiseacres in the publishing business look upon the figure as a mild beginning.

Marquand's last six novels, from The Late George Apley to B.F.'s Daughter, have sold 2,600,000 copies. Three of them were book-club choices (H.M. Pulham, Esquire and So Little Time, Book-of-the-Month; B.F.'s Daughter, Literary Guild) ; three of them made box-office movies. Whatever the critics may say about Point of No Return (Marquand says, "I take a dim view of all serious critics--I don't know any who've had a kind word to say for me, ever since I was a little boy"), it is a sure bet that the U.S.'s big Marquand audience will buy it.

It would be strange if his audience didn't. Marquand likes Charley Gray and he is vexed with the people and circumstances that push him around. He thinks Charley is in a rat race; he is frank enough to admit that he finds himself running in it too.

Life With Two Scotches. Last week, J. P. Marquand could look back on 27 years of unbroken writing success. In all those years he has finished every book and story he ever started, has sold everything he has written except one short story ("It was supposed to be funny and wasn't"). The Satevepost alone has paid him something like half a million dollars for the no "slicks" and serials of his that the Post has published over a period of nearly 20 years.

When he tired of writing slicks exclusively and turned to "serious" novels, his first one, The Late George Apley, got him the 1938 Pulitzer Prize, critical acclaim and a big, new reading public. Proceeds from the Apley play and movie settled him even more firmly on Easy Street, and since 1944 his B-O-M job (a part-time reading chore) has brought him another $20,000 a year. Practical, a lover of comfort and the good things of life (including, among others, three cars, two Scotches before dinner), Marquand is by no means contemptuous of money and is mightily pleased that he has made the financial grade. But like Charley Gray, he knows that something is missing. He wishes there were something more at the finish than an annuity and a new station wagon. And he is no more sure than Charley Gray what that something is. Says Marquand: "I've been so warped and conditioned by life that I haven't found anything that will satisfy me."

Charley, like most heroes of Marquand novels, is decent, full of consideration for family and friends, driven by a determination to do things, void of spiritual values. Another Harvardman, Nobel Prize-winning Poet T. S. Eliot, wrote ironically in his early days of such fellow worldlings, later (in The Rock) declared his second-thoughts :

. . . And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people:

Their only monument the asphalt road And a thousand lost golf balls."

Poet Eliot had found that what was missing was God; Marquand's heroes have made no such discovery.

"I'm Like That Too." Since his friend Sinclair Lewis ran a sharp, appraising eye over the social scene in Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922) and Dodsworth (1929), there had been very little of the same kind of serious, satirical appraisal until Marquand produced, in The Late George Apley, his corrosive swipe at life among Boston Brahmins. By now it is plain that Marquand is the foremost practitioner in his field.

What Marquand dislikes in U.S. middle-class life he pillories with relish. But he has the compassion and sympathy for his characters that mark the good social novelist, qualities that have almost disappeared in the craft of U.S. fiction. Like "Red" Lewis, who was fond of Babbitt even when he sneered at his way of life, Marquand cheers for all the heroes in his bewildered gallery, from George Apley to Charley Gray. Says Marquand: "I would hesitate to rank myself with Lewis; I don't think I have nearly the same stature. But I am working in his vineyard."

One persistent difference between the two writers--all question of stature apart --has been the way they handled their heroes. Sinclair Lewis characterized his with such vigor and vinegar that they often approached caricatures. Lewis' readers in the '203 could look at Babbitt and say, "That's my neighbor"; they seldom cared to say, "That's me." Many a Marquand reader can look at Charley Gray and admit, "I'm like that too." The admission is a tribute to the careful literary craftsmanship of John P. Marquand.

"Lord, Stay Thy Hand . . ." Marquand makes no mystery of who his real hero is: "He's the badgered American male--and that includes me--fighting for a little happiness and always being crushed by the problems of his environment." The inclusion of himself in his dictum is important. He has persistently denied that his books are peopled with real-life characters, but few contemporary U.S. novelists have drawn with such bland freedom on their own backgrounds.

There have been Marquands in New England since 1732, when Daniel Marquand left the Isle of Guernsey and settled in the seaport town of Newburyport, Mass., 32 miles from Boston. The first of the family were merchants and sea captains. Daniel's son Joseph made so much money privateering during the Revolution that he once prayed, "Lord, stay thy hand, thy servant hath enough." His more agnostic descendant, John P., considers such an attitude rash and over-trusting, remembers that the Revolutionary Marquand later got wiped out. John's Grandfather John Phillips, a New York broker, "made quite a lot of dough on Wall Street," managed to leave $500,000 of it to his six children.

Among proper Bostonians and New-buryporters living on inherited wealth, John's own father's share was not impressively large, especially after a few disastrous flyers in the stock market (in Point of No Return, Charley Gray's father loses his shirt the same way). In the social hierarchy of Newburyport, young J. P. Marquand felt that while he came of good family and his mother, Margaret Fuller, was a niece of the Transcendentalist of the same name, his status was not quite top-drawer.

Snubs That Rankled. His boyhood chance for traveling with the home-town upper-upper crust was wiped out by a financial panic. "I can remember distinctly how I felt when we didn't have any more money [after the crash of 1907]. I could feel myself becoming what [Anthropologist W. L.] Warner calls 'mobilized downward.' Of course, I had read Horatio Alger and I was ready to face this change in circumstance in a sportsmanlike manner." In Point of No Return it is Anthropologist Malcolm Bryant who explains such niceties of the scientific vocabulary to Charley Gray.

John went to Harvard (Class of '15), but he had to do it with the help of friends and a town scholarship. What was even more socially disastrous, he says, was the fact that he had gone to Newburyport High School instead of Groton, Exeter or St. Mark's. At Harvard, the more snobbish prep-school men of his class cold-shouldered him and sometimes, he imagined, pointedly crossed the street to avoid speaking to him. (John tucked that away, too. Charley Gray, thinking back over what it had been like to go to Dartmouth from Clyde High School, hopes to send his own son to Exeter.) Even today Marquand somewhat sourly remembers that he was a "greaseball" at Harvard and was never invited to join a club. Now Harvard's Alumni Bulletin asks him for literary contributions and the college asks him for money (he has given both), but "those early snubs rankled all my life, up to just a few years ago."

Marquand did make the Harvard Lampoon. Friend Roger Burlingame (Harvard '13) remembers that John would "caricature his classmates in a way that scared us when we got through laughing." When H. M. Pulham, Esquire was published in 1941 (an acid picture of a Har-vardman being smothered by Boston convention), his classmates of a quarter-century before had every right to become thoughtful, if not scared.

Even for a greaseball, however, there were Harvard compensations. In Cambridge, Marquand lived in the same rooming house as young James Bryant Conant, now Harvard's president. Marquand remembers him as a brilliant student who invented the "two-drink dash," a simple game in which a prize was supposed to go to the man who could get by subway to a wine shop in Boston, bolt two drinks and get back in the shortest time. "We spent a good deal of our time doing the two-drink dash, but I don't remember that anybody ever got a prize."

Marquand's badgered males seldom know where they're really heading. Undergraduate Marquand resembled one of his own heroes. He had concentrated on chemistry, like Fellow Dasher Conant, but after hitting the books with some success (he took his degree in three years), he decided that science was not his field. The most attractive job he could find was a place as a cub reporter on the Boston Transcript. He was just learning his way around when President Wilson called out the National Guard, ordered some of it to the Mexican border. A friend reminded John that he had joined Battery A a while before and that he'd better go. "So I did, but I don't really know why. I was never able to have my bunk right or anything. I saw no action."

Then came World War I. J. P. Marquand saw action, rose to the rank of captain, but (though he later recalled it effectively in So Little Time) the war roused in him no Hemingway impulses to write about it. "Of course I got frightened to death on a number of occasions and I saw a lot of people get killed, but I don't think it did very much to me."

Indecent Exposure. Instead, Marquand came back from the war "full of beans and determined to make one billion dollars." He compromised for a $50-a-week job on the New York Tribune Sunday section, then shifted to the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency as a copywriter (after Harvardman Robert Benchley, '12, tipped him off that a job was open).

Marquand still becomes choleric when he thinks of the stuff he wrote. "It seemed to me the most dreadful thing to end your days putting your energy into a campaign for Lifebuoy Soap--and all those Phi Beta Kappas sitting around trying to get ideas."

One day in conference he ironically repeated a slogan which was rather admired in the agency: "Every day an oily coating slowly forms upon the skin." Cried Marquand, as he remembers it: "My God, do you realize that line scans?--'Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime!' By that time," says Marquand, "it was clear that I wasn't taking copywriting quite seriously enough." He decided to go back to Newburyport, try to write fiction.

After a summer's work, he showed up in New York with the manuscript of The Unspeakable Gentleman, an amateurish historical novel which Literary Agent Carl Brandt promptly sold to the Ladies' Home Journal. Says Marquand now: "I will be goddamned if I know why I wrote it. To me it's an indecent exposure and I'm thoroughly ashamed of it." It seemed different at the time: he put his check for $2,000 in the Atlantic Bank of Boston, got a new pair of shoes and had his broken pipes repaired. Admits Marquand: "I have never felt so wonderful in my life."

Over a Barrel. Brandt offered his next story to the Satevepost, and Post Editor George Horace Lorimer liked it at once. For the next two decades, at top rates ($500 to $3,000 for short stories, $30,000 to $40,000 for serials), Marquand's name was synonymous with surefire slick writing. In those days, says Marquand, "I was a simple little boy in the lower echelons, naive about literature and the world in general, just a good boy trying to conform. I thought John Dos Passos was a terrible yellow belly for griping about the war." But at the time, he thought he had the world by the tail. He went to Europe in 1921 ("I was Lord Byron on a triumphal tour. God, it was wonderful!"), and in Rome became engaged to Christina Sedgwick, niece of Atlantic Monthly Editor Ellery Sedgwick. By Marquand's account, his marriage brought him "face to face with the capitalist system."

"My wife had lived in a style to which I was not accustomed. We had to have a maid-of-all-work. Then we had a baby and we had to have a nurse. Then we had to have a car. And ever since then I've been over a barrel."

Marquand says he was forced to keep his nose to the Satevepost grindstone for years to keep his head above the household bills. His wife urged him to try a different vein--advice which he followed later, if not at the time. "She would say, 'Why don't you write something nice for your Uncle Ellery on the Atlantic Monthly?' She didn't realize that my Uncle Ellery would have given me a nice silver inkwell, or a hundred dollars, and that wouldn't pay the bills."

There were other differences. One summer Christina suggested they take their vacation abroad. "Instead I took her on a canoe trip to Minnesota and Ontario." When they were living in Boston and he told her about his idea for The Late George Apley, she remarked, as he remembers it: "That's a good book to write if you want to leave Boston, that's all." They were divorced in 1935.

Prize for a Truth. Marquand's big project was the Mr. Moto series--deftly continued murder stories about an obsequious Japanese detective. He had discovered that he could do the Mr. Moto stories in half the time by dictating them, and he decided to take on Apley too. Most of his friends thought it was a mistake and few besides his publisher, the late Alfred McIntyre of Little, Brown, encouraged him. When it won him the Pulitzer Prize, the first thing he did was to get on the phone and rib the people who had told him to stick to magazine fiction.

He had no great regard for the prize itself; he believes the selections are generally poor and he is appalled that "Hemingway, one of our best writers, has never gotten it." Yet the creation of George Apley (and perhaps the winning of the Pulitzer) made further truck with Mr. Moto distasteful to his creator. He went on writing about Moto, "but it gradually came over me that slick-magazine writing --where the hero slips on a banana peel and the heiress falls in love with him and they get married and go off to Monte Carlo--was baloney. It was very late and very slowly and largely in a spirit of revolt against this business that I began to write something different. In Apley I drew on a life in which I had a stake. You have to write about what you have lived to get at some worthwhile truth."

In Wickford Point, which he finished next, he drew on Newburyport detail, conventionally disguised, for "a story on the various relationships of a family." Some of Marquand's own family thought he drew too close. His cousins the Hales, and Renee Oakman Bradbury decided that they had been drawn to the life, that Wickford Point itself was the old family estate of Curzon Mill. Spurred in part by a sense of having served as Marquand's models, the cousins have so far successfully blocked Marquand in a project on which he has his heart set: purchase of the whole of the 40-acre Curzon Mill property.

Insists Marquand: "I still don't think [Wickford] is like my family." But, Apley and Wickford included, his best writing has been about the lives and locales he has known from boyhood. He thinks B.F.'s Daughter, which preceded Point of No Return, failed to come off because its locale, wartime Washington, was a transient experience for him. The middle-class axis he draws on best runs from Newburyport to Boston to New York.

Along it the Marquand pattern has been evolving: the harried U.S. male battling his environment in successive generations, fighting a losing fight to lead the good life and be a good fellow while trying to be happy and be himself. Marquand's female characters are unfinished portraits, and he knows it. "I have never had a female character really steering. They are usually officious people who are rocking the boat and are worried about the butcher bill and the cat. My first wife thinks all the women are based on her, and my second wife thinks all the women are based on her."

Heads v. Walls. In Point of No Return, readers will find the most skillful elaboration of the typical Marquand novel theme. Charley Gray, the boy from Spruce Street, does well enough in life, but there are some things he cannot attain when he most wants to, some things he can never attain. He cannot close the gap between Spruce Street and aristocratic Johnson Street in his boyhood town of Clyde, Mass, (for which, perhaps, read Newburyport). Jessica Lovell lived on Johnson Street and was in love with Charley Gray, but it was clear from the start that snobbery wouldn't let anything good come of it. Charley recalls that when, in the middle of the kid-glove slugfest for the vice-presidency at the bank, he goes back to Clyde. As he walks through the old familiar scene, he knows that he has passed the point of no return.

Many readers will feel that they would gladly swap places with Charley and take their chances on happiness. Novelist Marquand is pretty sure that they would wind up with the same empty feeling. Says he: "Everybody says 'life is what you make it' and it seems to me, by God, it's mostly environment you're coping with and you have mighty little chance to make it yourself. I don't see that many people are particularly captains of their fate. They bat it out, but do they really get what they want? I'm damned if I think so."

To many of Marquand's readers, Point of No Return will seem a little more troubling and pessimistic than most of his works. But Marquand thinks that man is slowly growing up and that man's hope lies in a prospect of greater maturity. "Most people," he said, "never grow up. The thing we've got to do in our institutions is try to build up more maturity. Mature people are happier. At least they can rationalize the world in such a way that they are not going to beat their heads against a wall. I certainly think that an understanding of other people and of your environment makes for happiness--at least it makes for repose."

Woods v. Rules. At 55, Novelist Marquand is still trying to win repose for himself but finds it a continuing and perhaps hopeless process, with daily ups & downs. He is 5 ft. ii in., with grey hair that is white about the temples, physically alert, and dieting to reduce a slight paunchiness. He and his second wife, Adelaide Hooker Marquand, and their three young children spend most of the year on his Kent's Island farm, four miles from Newburyport. When he is writing, he starts at 9:30 a.m. and dictates for four hours. That is his limit ("my metabolism or something"), and even so his first drafts are always two or three times too long.

He goes over them with his wife (says she: "We fight over every paragraph"), sometimes rewrites as many as three times before he is satisfied. The finished product is technically smooth as cream, too smooth, in the opinion of highbrow critics.

Marquand doesn't farm his place, but does a lot of puttering and passing the time of day with the hired help. A lifelong Unitarian, he takes his children to Sunday school, drops in to listen to the sermon and has recently become a parish committeeman. He is gregarious and likes to be liked, but insists that he has "only three friends and two of those don't like me." Marquand philosophically accepts that as part of the penalty of being a satirist.

For the last few weeks the Kent's Island place has been closed up and the Marquands have been vacationing in Nassau, British West Indies (among other things, to use up some British royalties). Marquand is swimming, sailing, reading a stack of work for the Book-of-the-Month Club and already itching to start another novel of his own.

The theme, he says, will probably be much the same, but without flashbacks to the past. This time he wants to picture a younger man (say 30) swatting it out with life, strictly in the urban world of today--somebody on the down-wind side of the point of no return. He could afford to relax and live on his royalties a while, but he was intent, just now, on saying some more of the things Novelist Marquand wants to say.

Says Marquand: "Given certain qualities, you've either got to take to the woods or get in there and play by the rules that are laid down. I think the happiest people are those who are doing something."

* The others: Henrry Seidel Canby, Dorothy Canfield, Clifton Fadiman, Chistopher Morley.

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