The Late George Apley
by
[Little, Brown, $2.50]
‘MOST people in the world,’ George Apley’s Uncle Horatio wrote to him, ‘don’t know who the Apleys are, and don’t give a damn.’ John Marquand does know, and does care. Mr. Marquand would be the first to deny that his book is a profound sociological study — any more than lie meant it to be an attack, or a piece of propaganda. He set out to draw a picture of something he has seen. And he has done it with success, and with high entertainment.
George Apley was born on Beacon Hill in 1866 and died on Beacon Street in 1933. Between these dates a great many things happened. George Apley did no more and no less than was to be expected of him. And he wrote a number of letters and memoranda which, pieced out by reminiscence and family documents, are the bones of the biography produced at the family’s request by one Mr. Willing, an old family friend.
The form in which the book is cast is at the same time its chief merit and its greatest drawback. The biographer himself, seen through his comments on the letters, his narrations to fill the gaps, is the best sustained of all the characters in the book. The faintly literary, wholly timid, socially careful man, whose sole emotion is his loyalty to the best he dimly feels that the Apleys must typify, is a superb characterization. He deplores, praises, extols, and deletes with Undeviating perfection.
On the other hand, the biography-by-letter form is a particularly difficult one in which to present an Apley, since many things George writes in his letters he would barely have said, much less written. He would have implied, in one of those involved, faintly adumbrated conversations-by-implication which is Apley art. Although the Apleys have guts, as George’s son John said, they are not robust or audacious. Their timidity makes anxious armor against adventure and emotion,and takes form in the driving preoccupation with detail of rose rust, rentals, wrens, ritual, and relations. Satan, say Apleys, finds some mischief still for ungloved hands to do.
George Apley — and there will be many to say so — does not exist in Boston, and never did. Of course not. He is a type, and of its nature no type exists, any more than the ‘average man’ is a real man. But literary veracity is not malice, unless resentment makes it so. No one but those who admire the Apleys as much as Mr. Willing does can resent the book. There is nothing evil in a precise portrait of Amelia Apley working fiercely on a committee to Save Boston, doubtless her pearls cascading down the flat front of her twice-turned frock. If Catherine Apley collects butter knives, weeps on her wedding trip because New Hampshire is, alas, not Boston, that is her affair. If Aunt Harriet’s burial in the wrong (the preferred) end of the family lot is comic to you, very well. It is not comic to George Apley. Mr. Marquand is as kind as veracity permits, and as far as I am concerned he has done a whacking good job.
CHARLES P. CURTIS, JR.