THIS is not good. It is not healthy. Three John P Marquand novels in one week, thanks as usual to Abebooks.com.uk. That amounts to binge-reading. It's all the fault of the West Cork Literary Festival, whose brochure offers "An Evening with Anita Shreve" on July 10th. It's only honest to admit that I have not read Anita Shreve. I accept that her books are immensely popular, that her writing is fine, that she has worked for all the success that has come her way. Still, I have been able to continue my reading career without turning her pages. Until now.
The moment came when I noticed among the list of titles, honours and biographical details provided by the festival brochure that Shreve had been awarded the John P Marquand Prize in American Literature in 2010. Undoubtedly, the mention of Shreve will prompt a far more immediate response than the mention of Marquand, if the mention of Marquand prompts any response at all except possibly among readers of not just a certain age but of a certain era.
Leave Joyce out of it; this was not prose to shatter or even to shock the literary world (which at the time was relatively easily shocked, it must be said). In American terms, and John P Marquand was as American as the Stars and Stripes, John O’Hara might be his most popular peer, Sinclair Lewis his most important one, William Maxwell his most neglected one. So leave Updike out of it too, although he and Norman Mailer and Philip Roth were all gathering steam. It isn’t that Marquand belongs to a niche, but that he belongs to a sort of interim, that pause after Henry James and Edith Wharton and before Mary McCarthy or Bonfire of the Vanities .
John Phillips Marquand won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938 with The Late George Apley and by 1944 was reputedly the most successful novelist in America. Yet despite being on the cover of both Time and Newsweek magazines in 1949, all nine of his most important novels have been out of print for many years. As one Amazon comment declares, we don’t read like this any more. Flash fiction this is not. Perhaps one reason for the absence of his titles and the anonymity of his literary career is the fact that he was ignored by American critics and American academia for years of his writing life. The feeling seems to have been that because he wrote short stories quickly and easily for what were then called the “slicks” and which included the Saturday Evening Post, Scribners and the Lady’s Home Journal he didn’t deserve high-brow attention. He certainly didn’t need it; his long series based on the adventures of his detective character Mr Moto brought him financial security, especially as this Japanese secret agent was played by Peter Lorre in eight films from 1937.
Marquand’s background as a member of an elite New England family ensured his social status, enhanced by two ambitious if unsuccessful marriages. He also blotted the social copybook of his times by making use of his experiences not just of his service in two world wars but of the milieu in which he moved: first the advertising business, then the military – Melville Goodwin USA (1952) is on my bedside table right now – and then among the Harvard graduates (of whom he was one) and businessmen of Boston and New York. He had a gift for satire which is usually described as subtle: so much so that after the success of The Late George Apley visitors to Boston wanted to see the locations of the novel, under the impression that it was in fact a biography. That’s very subtle, yet the unleashed sarcasm of his portraits of the self-regarding, unreflective doyens of academic publishing has a Dickensian gusto. In Wickford Point (1939) a pretentious professor is maliciously encouraged to continue with his dreadful novel; short-story editors come in for a tremendous bashing and “amateur” writers are derided with withering irritation. The irritation, in fact, with which Marquand discusses the art or habit of writing itself as hopeful tales for a hopeless people. Perhaps his style could be best described as interrogative rather than investigative. There is a profound, leisurely sadness under some of his most sprightly narratives, as in Women and Thomas Harrow (1959) but more militant titles such as Sincerely, Willis Wade (1955) show a trenchant awareness of a society governed by the priorities of the markets.
The critic Charles Brady once called Marquand a “Martini-age Victorian” and perhaps he had Victorian sensitivities as interpreted by the America of prohibition or the great depression. But there is something magically Chekhovian about his landscape and its characters; a lot happens in drawing rooms or verandas and there is no gun on any table. An author who can unite The Little Toy Dog, Freud and Jung in a single paternal reference deserves a new readership, alerted perhaps by the recent presence of Anita Shreve in Newburyport, where Marquand died in 1960, and now in Bantry, where I feel drawn to a particular reading at the event which runs from July 8th to 14th.
Marquand’s publisher Little, Brown has re-issued The Late George Apley and Wickford Point under its Back Bay Books imprint