Three Friends

THE LATE JOHN MARQUAND

by STEPHEN BIRMINGHAM 322 pages. Lippincott. $10.

J.P. Marquand was one of the shrewdest and best popular fiction writers of the century. He longed to write a modern Madame Bovary, but instead produced solid novels about upper middle class entanglements and sagas of newcomers struggling to join the ranks. His best books--The Late George Apley. Point of No Return--are subtle social and moral commentaries.

Marquand was somewhat like his heroes. Born in very comfortable circumstances, he liked to point out that his family had been gentry in the old town of Newburyport, Mass., since 1732. But his feckless father lost all his money by the time John was 14. He was forced to attend public high school, endure four years of Harvard without benefit of a club, and start his climb in the social world as a writer of magazine serials. By middle age, he was a smart, stingy, sardonic man who had perfected a mellifluous prose style and the art of making money.

It is questionable whether Stephen Birmingham (Our Crowd) should have persevered in writing this biography at all. He failed to get the Marquand family's cooperation and seems to have done little digging on his own. He even neglects to mention when Marquand was born. There is not a single specific incident from his childhood, no material whatever on his experiences at Newburyport High. The Harvard chapter is a discourse that could have come out of the author's The Right People.

What Birmingham did get was the complete cooperation of Marquand's longtime friends and agents, Carol Brandt and her late husband Carl of the literary agency Brandt & Brandt. With a few revisions the book could have been called Three Friends, or even Carol and John. When the Brandts enter Marquand's life, the writing suddenly gets some real texture. We know about weather, clothing, whether drinks were drunk or ice cream spoons licked. We also find out what pleased Marquand and what annoyed him, which situations he could face and which ones he ran out on.

He always fled from domestic problems. He was married twice, first to an ethereal aristocrat who declined to keep house, then to an heiress who tried to run his life. According to Birmingham, Marquand behaved badly to both, absenting himself for long periods of time or berating them publicly. He liked to mimic and mock them, and Birmingham unfortunately lets that tone of parody carry over into his own writing.

Carol Brandt, with whom Marquand had a long, open love affair, seems to have been the only woman who could cope with him. She also seems to have given him a measure of contentment. Yet despite Birmingham's efforts to make her the book's heroine, she comes off as an odd mixture of brazenness and complacency--arranging an abortion for one of John's other girls, supervising travel plans for him and his infuriated second wife.

The literary bedroom gossip in this insubstantial book has already caused both talk and sales. There seems to be a special fascination in the sex life of a man who could not write a bedroom scene to save his life.

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