Apley, Wickford Point, and Fulham: My Early Struggles

by JOHN P. MARQUAND

I BEGAN to write The Late George Apley in the autumn of 1934, after twelve years of earning my living as a contributor to popular magazines. As it happened, this was the first time in a hectic period of child-rearing and bills that I could afford to write something that might not be readily salable. It had never occurred to me that the concept of this novel would cause upset or malaise to many of my literary advisers. The truth is, as I see it now, that in America all writers are classified as producers of only one sort of writing, and anyone deviating from this anticipated line is conventionally considered to be committing a heresy. At this time I was known as a writer of popular periodical fiction, a stigma which is still remembered by illdisposed critics who mention my slick magazine style. When I began The Late George Apley, I was told frankly that this sort of thing would ruin my market and that I would face serious financial loss. I can even recall that an officer of Little, Brown & Company, who were then and still are my publishers, suggested that the novel should appear under a pseudonym because it was so markedly different from any of my previous work. I have never been able to be patient with this sort of literary calcification, which in its higher forms is brightly illustrated by the Calvinistic snobbery of many English Ph.D. aspirants on any American college campus. I have never understood why a sinner is not allowed at least to attempt reformation in the American world of letters.

I imagine, casting back over this space of time for some sort of perspective, that the writing of this novel represented for me a species of personal revolution. I was obviously weary of the many inhibitions which were placed on all writers of salable fiction twenty years ago. I was also weary of many of the restrictions of my environment — a phase of living with which most, of us have coped at some time or other. Besides, I like to think that in an exacting literary apprenticeship I had gained a degree of technical skill and maturity that made me wish to move to a new writing area. I began The Late George Apley in 1934, left it half finished until the end of 1935, and completed it toward the end of 1936; it was published in 1937.

I cannot recall, as is now stated, that The Late George Apley was “greeted with acclaim” by the critics. Though well received, it did not set the world on fire even after receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1938; and I doubt whether the original edition’s sale ever exceeded 50,000 copies. In v iew of this restrained reception, it surprises me that it is frequently referred to as my best-known work. In fact, last year a very prominent elderly Bostonian said to me in a stern voice, “You have been writing for a long time, Marquand, but nothing you have ever done has quite come up to your first novel, Sorrell and Son.” This reaction may afford a valid argument against longevity, but it also throws a disturbing light on an American literary convention. If you have ever written one book which is “acclaimed by the critics,” you are seldom again allowed to deviate from its direction. Ever since The Late George Apley my novels, no matter what their characters or locale, are known in advance to be about wealthy and snobbish citizens who live in the vicinity of Boston.

Incidentally, although this may be wishful thinking, I do not believe that The Late George Apley is the best book I have ever written. In fact, I think that I am an abler writer now than when I wrote it, and that I can deal successfully with more difficult literary problems than any confronted in this novel. Actually, one of the reasons for the success of The Late George Apley is the simplicity and originality of the literary framework on which it was constructed.

Technically, it is written in the epistolatory form, which is about as venerable a device as the novel itself, but here there is possibly a new addition in that the device is also a parody. I conceived the idea for its structure after having read several volumes of collected letters of V.I.P.’s in Boston (and elsewhere) throughout which were scattered numerous biographical interpolations prepared by an often unduly sympathetic editor. I could not recall

ever having seen this type of book either parodied or translated into fiction. The Late George Apley attempted to do both — an attempt which had the advantage of an added depth and scope over the Richardsonian collection of imaginary letters. The main character could be illuminated not only by his own letters and those of his family and friends; he could be further explained by the fictitious biographer who collected and arranged this material. The biographer of the late George Apley, Mr. Horatio Willing, is, as I believe any reader will perceive, a pedantic, vain, and unskillful Boston man of letters. Nevertheless, his longwinded pom posity is not a bad device for setting the tone of this novel, since Mr. Apley himselt was a carefully nurtured product of a pompous and self-conscious prov incial environmont, whatever may have been its virtues.

The worst aspect of the whole Apley scheme is that one cannot very well use it a second time without confronting the implication of repetition.

I am sorry for this, because the form is an excellent vehicle for satire. Indeed, its main difficulty is that it offers a constant temptation to indulge in slapstick farce, and seriousness should always be the watchword of successful satirical fiction. Looking back over my struggles with The Late George Apley,

I am sure that I succumbed occasionally to this temptation. Mr. Willing and Mr. Apley often mote than verge on the preposterous. Also, in my efforts to show that Mr. Willing’s pretensions were fallible, I permitted him to use hideously tong sentences filled with grammatical lapses. Though deliberate, this did not always achieve the effect I intended. Wholehearted exaggeration seldom does. Instead of Mr. Willing’s being thought illiterate, I have discovered I am the one who takes the blame. It has been stated correctly that there are sentences in The Late George Apley that would cause any welltrained Boston schoolboy to blush for shame. They are my fault now, not Mr. Willing’s, and I hope that the experience has taught me to be more careful.

Looking back on the writing of this novel, I think I originally conceived it as a savage attack on the old water side of Beacon Street. Then, as I continued, I discovered that Mr. Apley was a sitting duck and that savage satire directed at him was incapable of long sustention. It finally dawned on me that Mr. Apley, like anyone in any rentier class, had many admirable sides to his character. If the book has any value today, I believe it is because (Mr. Apley still has his own sort of universality. Wherever a few generations of leisure combine with inherited security, there will develop a pattern of manners, attitudes, and politenesses. There are Apleys in Paris and London today, and thev are no doubt developing in Moscow and Peking. They will never become, I hope, entirely extinct.

2

AFTER writing The Late George Apley I reviewed the bidding of my literary career and made several discoveries which I have regarded ever since as of basic importance. I observed that I bad been writing for a number of years about clipper ships and about boy and girl romances at country clubs, and had even traveled in the Orient to saturate myself in matters of background. I had frequently endeavored to reconcile the demands of magazine fiction with those of what is often referred to as “serious” in our more enlightened literary supplements. Then, when I completed The Late George Apley, to my surprise I found that the task ol writing it, though occasionally difficult and discouraging, was far easier than the effort I had previously expended on obviously mediocre serial stories. Yet the result was apparently better than anything I had achieved previously.

The reason for this was so obvious that I should have recognized it years before, for almost ihe first time in my life I had written about something that I thoroughly understood. 1 had translated something of myself and my own experience into The Late George Apley, and I had achieved through my experience an unforeseen depth and reality. In fact, I had been able to make an indirect comment on life as I had known it, which indeed may be the only valid reason for writing any novel.

It occurred to me then that every writer is limited by the area of his experience. By his drawing on imagination, his experience may become as distilled and blended as pre-war Napoleon brandy, but experience must be there if he is to write significantly. Otherwise, no matter how great, maybe his skill and brilliance, he is a huckster who is trafficking in the inflated currency of artificiality*. Last summer, if I may be forgiven a personal digression, 1 traveled through the Orient with my son, who like myself has literary aspirations. Observing him as he faced the impact of these hitherto unexperienced countries, with their endless scenes of unfamiliar fascination, I found myself living over again my old enthusiasms and many of my errors. I watched him try, as I had once, to absorb the sights and sounds and customs of alien worlds so that he might use them as material for fiction. But the truth is, according to my own observetion, that no one can write well and deeply of scenes and people that one has observed as an outsider. It is necessary, in order to write well of them, to have participated in some measure in a region’s life, thought, and emotion.

For instance, I believe if necessary that I could write a reasonably good story with a Chinese background because I am a professional writer who has traveled in China. There would be reality in the details that evoke a picture in the casual reader’s mind, and yet in the last analysis my story could only be a piece of contrived entertainment. I could never write with the feeling and conviction of Kipling or Conrad or even the author of Peking Picnic because f have never truly lived in distant parts. Admittedly, other writers have achieved marvelous results from similar experience. There are, for example, the exotic tales of Mr. Maugham, who can deal with blood, thunder, spices, and pandanus leaves as well as anybody in the business. In fact, from the point of view of craftsmanship, Mr. Maugham at his best is often superior to either Conrad or Kipling; but still his tales of the East lack the authentic ring of his Human Bondage or the effervescent malice of his Cakes and Ale. Mr. Maugham observed bis spice islands, his rubber plantations, and his Cantonese street scenes as a tourist or else as a Very Important Person. The stories he heard were related over gimlets by planters, merchants, and their ladies at the club of a Saturday night while the Southern Cross blazed above the palm trees and the servants padded noiselessly about their business. Sometimes, I admit, these tales of Mr. Maugham’s are so good that occasionally I still have the feeling that I am sitting at the feet of a maestro, until I hear Satan speaking as he spoke in Kipling’s poem, saying, “It’s pretty, but is it art?”

When Tolstoy indicated that a writer who has seen a street fight should be able to create a battle, it seems to me that his implication goes further than many authorities recognize. What he actually was saying is that, though fiction must have its inception with its aulhor’s experience with reality, at the same time reality must be distilled by imagination into an illusion of reality before it can fit suitably on a printed page. When someone utters the trite remark that truth is stranger than fiction, he might as well be saying that truth always is very awkward in the fictitious world. A fictional character, for example, is always a combination of observed trails drawn from an indeterminate number of people. I doubt whether any individual of one’s acquaintance, no matter how vivid his behavior, could effectively stand alone in print.

In writing Wickford Point I started with a few memories of my childhood and adolescence that centered around a country place once owned by my great-grandfather. I added to these some patterns of relationship observable in almost any family. I was greatly surprised, and I still am, that some of my near relatives should have identified themselves with people in this book and should have thought that Wick ford Point, which is at least eighty per cent a figment of imagination, bore any close resemblance to real estate in Newburyport, Massachusetts. If my characters in this novel are successful, they are a long way from being photographically “true to life.” They must be vastly more bizarre than living people in order to exist upon a printed page. Also, I think the same is true with all novelistic settings. For example, not even the most poetic author of a brochure advertising a new Florida development can transcribe his eulogy into fiction without many technical changes.

My difficulties with Wickford Point are experienced in some degree by every novelist who deals with the contemporary scene. If bis characters are believable, any reader will detect resemblances among his own acquaintances. There is only one way to escape this dilemma: put the girls in hoop skirts and put the boys in pumps and short trousers and give them rapiers and snuffboxes, or, if you want them to be cruder, flintlocks and coonskin caps. Somehow no one ever thinks a man in a coonskin cap resembles his Uncle Gus.

3

I DISTINCTLY recollect how I got the idea for H. M. Pulliam, Esquire — and it is unusual for a writer to remember exactly what started him on a novel. The II. M. Pulliam concept came to me after examining at the house of a friend the bound volume of a report commemorating (he twenty-fifth anniversary of his graduation from Harvard University. I was drawn to this tome because my own twentyfifth was only about two years around the corner.

I had never realized until that moment what an amazing document any twenty-five-year class report of any college class anywhere must be. In that period since graduation the lines of success and failure have been drawn, and the future pattern of the life of anyone is apparent. It occurred to me that such a record could be turned into an excellent vehicle for fiction, and today I have only a single regret that I obeyed this impulse.

Unfortunately, H. M. Pulham was my third successive novel that dealt with Boston and New England. Ever since its publication I have been identified by critics as a regionalist, incapable of writing a real novel like Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. It seems since Pulham that no matter what my efforts may be I am always writing about Boston. Self-consciously and often with hopeful determination I have moved my characters to Hollywood, Washington, New York, and Paris, and also to New York suburbs and Palm Beach, but I am still a regionalist.

I don’t know why this fact should cause comment. It seems to be perfectly all right for deceased novelists to have used the same background for a number of their works. Sherlock Holmes operated consistently from Baker Street. Thomas Hardy stuck to rural England. Balzac confined his efforts to Paris. Trollope is remembered today for his novels set within the confines of a single imaginary rural county. John Galsworthy’s fiction deals with London and stately country houses. It is not my intention to edge myself by any sort of implication into even the rear end of this illustrious parade. I only mention the works of these maestros to prove that excellent fiction can be written using an unchanged locale, and even wealthy individuals, instead of jumping all over the map.

Frankly, I submit that human nature is about the same whatever the environment. People in New England seem to me to have the same drives, strengths, and weaknesses as the inhabitants of New York, Miami, or Tolstoy’s Moscow. Also, although the thought may not be ns universally accepted as it was once, people all possess their own qualities of interest no matter what their walk of life may be; and whether they live in a New York cold-water walk-up or on the right side of ommomvealth Avenue, they all can point a moral and adorn a tale.

It is my hope that H. M. Pulliam, who did his best within his limits to be a good schoolboy, a good son, a good soldier, a good lover, husband, and father, and a loyal Harvard man, may help to confirm this thesis. It amazes me, as I think of this forthright hero, to recall that the Boston City Council, whose membership at the time included one of the Corporation of Harvard Cniversity, once voted unanimously to request Boston’s chief of police to ban the book on the ground that il was unfair to Boston womanhood. For a mad moment I hoped that the police chief might follow this strong hint and place me in the category of Boston s literary marly rs, a roster which includes the names of H. L. Mencken and Ernest Hemingway. Pulham, however, did not make the grade, because, I imagine, the man who headed up the police force on this rather distant occasion must have believed as I do that women are not universally virtuous in any community.

The late Bliss Perry once remarked that the infidelity of Mrs. Pulliam with her husband’s close friend, Mr. King, which aroused the chivalrous instincts of the Boston City Council, left a bad taste in the mouth. Mr. Perry’s observation is correct. Marital infidelity is painful, unwise, gauche, and generally unattractive. Nevertheless, it appears to be practiced with increasing frequency and gusto by characters in the modern American, and even in the politer English, novel. It has entered also, if memory does not betray me, into the plots of many famous fictional works of other epochs. It even appears, according to the newspapers, to be a fairly constant social problem in daily life. This, however, is no reason why it should be employed in fiction unless it accomplishes an artistic purpose. I have sometimes wondered, if I were to write H. M. Pulham again, whether I might not leave out this unhappy sequence as one neither relevant nor necessary to the main lines of the plot. On the whole I think I should not.

If H. M. Pulliam, Esqmre has any artistic value, il lies in the tragic implications which, I hope, contrive to cast their shadows even over the passages ol slapstick comedy. I have often been criticized for dealing with superficialities, but H. M. Pulliam, Esquire does not seem to me to possess this fault, and the treachery practiced by Mrs. Fulham and Mr. King adds substantially to its depth. In this regard, there is one point of which I was not sure when I was writing the hook and on which today I can still render no definite decision. Harry Fulham, in spite of an obviousness and a perennial desire for conformity which must have been exasperating to his wife, was also endowed with considerable perceptive sentiment. Did he suspect this liaison, and did he stifle his suspicions out of loyalty or out of a wise reluctance to face the repercussions which might ensue? I am not sure, but I rather hope it was the latter.

There is one other point in H. M. Pulliam that has always elicited my retrospective interest. I completed the first draft of this novel some time in the late slimmer of before the late Wendell

Millkie had been called “the barefoot boy from Wall Street” and many months before June, 1940, which marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of my graduation from college. I had indulged in none of the festivities or social preliminaries that surround a twenty-fifth reunion before I wrote the book. I wrote the scenes in H. M. Pulham by using the same apprehensive imagination that occurs in the morning before an afternoon’s appointment with my dentist. And yet after several mature and crowded days with my classmates, I found that there were almost no mistakes in my preview and that my imaginative pictures had been so correct that I have been accused of being a reporter rather than a writer. This still gives me satisfaction. For once at least, having seen a street fight, I was able to create a battle.