There was a time when John P. Marquand was considered the best novelist of manners in America, even — according to a Chicago Sun review quoted on the dust jacket of Repent in Haste, “the best novelist in the country.” He never made such claims for himself, and regretted Little, Brown’s decision to use the Chicago Sun quote, since it only encouraged critics to sharpen their quills, and particularly unfortunate when used to sell so slight a book.
Just 152 pages long, Repent in Haste is undermined by several things, starting with its title. It’s obviously a play on the adage, “Marry in haste, repent at leisure,” and its slender plot is about a Navy pilot who marries a pretty, convivial blonde soon after meeting her at a dance, and then learns that while he’s been out in the Pacific, she’s taken up with an old boyfriend. In fact, it’s not even slender: it’s threadbare and an unsteady skeleton upon which to hang the real story, which is about the death of chivalry.
Well, chivalry may be too grand of a word to put on it. Marquand grew up on a poorer fringe of proper Boston society, the long-standing Old New England establishing where the Lowells talked only to Cabots, and the Cabots talked only to God, as they used to say. They being people like Marquand who lived on the fringes, since the core members of Boston society were so entitled that they were oblivious to their entitlement. As a young man in Newburyport, Massachusetts, he had to go hat in hand to the home of Mr. L. P. Dodge to beg for one of the scholarships given by the Harvard Club to needy young Newburyporters. He didn’t get it, though his family did manage to scrape together enough money to send him anyway.
Marquand was just three years older than F. Scott Fitzgerald, but in comparing the two men, those years put them into different generations. Marquand graduated from Harvard in 1915, which meant he was able to join the National Guard and serve in France as an artillery officer after the U.S. entered the war, while Fitzgerald never got closer to the trenches than Long Island. Where Fitzgerald achieved huge success with his first book, This Side of Paradise, Marquand spent almost twenty years churning out workmanlike magazine stories and adventure novels, including his Mr. Moto detective books, before attaining critical and commercial success on a scale equivalent to Fitzgerald’s with The Late George Apley (1937). Apley, which was a conscious satire of proper Boston society, along with his next novels, Wickford Point (1939) and H. M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), all of them set around Boston, forever marked him as a specialist in a certain time and place.
But that characterization is a mistake. What Marquand is, more than anything, is a specialist in the experience of being on the brink of change. And that’s where the comparison with Fitzgerald is most illuminating. Both Fitzgerald and Marquand would make enough money from their writing to buy their way, at least temporarily in Fitzgerald’s case, into a “better class.” The difference is that Fitzgerald quickly lost any illusions about the qualities of this class. Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby smash up things and creatures and then retreat “back into their money or their vast carelessness … and let other people clean up the mess.”
Marquand and most of his protagonists, on the other hand, may no longer really believe in the old orders but when they look into the future, they see a nihilism that causes them to grab the few certainties they still understand and hold on for dear life. William Briggs, the correspondent who takes Marquand’s place as the observer in Repent in Haste, wants to believe that Lt. Jimmy Boyden, the Navy pilot he befriends, holds onto the same certainties:
They both must have read the American Boy magazine, and The Adventures of Frank Merriwell, and the works of the late Ralph Henry Barbour. They both must have learned not to lie, and not to go back on the crowd. No matter who you might be, you were exposed to certain precepts of conduct. You learned the Lord’s Prayer, and that Christ had risen from the dead, and that you must pledge allegiance to the flag, and that we had fought the British and gained our independence because we could lick anybody in the world.
But the war Marquand and Briggs had known in 1917-1918 and the one experienced by millions like Boyden were fundamentally different. As Marquand had seen on his reporting trips to the Pacific, the scale of the operations could only make one thing in terms of machines and factories producing on a massive scale. The flotilla Briggs sees before the assault on Ulithi “was the greatest concentration of warships that the world had ever seen. They extended over the rims of the horizon, so many that he wondered how an organization could exist that could supply and group and count them and send them on their way.” No wonder that Briggs finds himself thinking not of the soldiers and sailors as individuals but as “a bulk of expendable human material.”
Briggs first meets Boyden at a press conference organized at Pearl Harbor, where reporters hear from a dozen or so recent medal winners about their exploits. Except the men are embarrassed and taciturn and the reporters frustrated at the attempt to feed them material. “These boys would never be able to put their thoughts into words,” Briggs thinks. He runs into Boyden later, though, and the flyer cajoles Briggs into paying a visit to his parents and wife in East Orange, New Jersey when he returns to New York City.
When he does, he finds Boyden’s parents and their home stereotypes of mid-century American middle-class life, with all its accoutrements: “There were antimacassars on the parlor chairs and the radio had Jacobean legs and an inlaid front and the gas stove would cook without watching and there was an automatic electric toaster and an electric percolator in the breakfast nook.” When he visits Daisy, the wife, however, he finds her having an open affair with another Navy officer and intent on getting a divorce as quickly as possible — and she convinces Briggs to carry the bad news back to the Pacific.
The news proves harder for Briggs to deliver than Boyden to take. Boyden shrugs it off as just one of those things that happen during a war. Boyden’s nonchalance, his near-apathy toward the deaths of some of his fellow pilots and crewmen, staggers Briggs. “Did you ever get to thinking what anything was about?” Briggs asks — meaning, does he ever think about why he was fighting, what he hoped to see in the peace afterward. Boyden replies, “What the hell do you mean, what anything was about?” (When he had asked General George Patton a similar question during the battle for Sicily, Patton had snapped, “All this God-damn tripe about the four freedoms!”)
Neither Briggs nor Marquand knows what to do when faced with this utter disregard for the old certainties and values they had grown up with, had held onto for the lack of any others (chasing after material rewards and filthy lucre being, of course, beyond the pale, or at least, the domain of the lowest of all types: New Money). Edmund Wilson noted this failure in his New Yorker review:
The story creates suspense; it has point; it is based on first-hand observation and conscientiously accurate reporting; and it says something rather intelligent about the difference between the older generation of Americans and the young generation of the war. The only trouble is that, here, as elsewhere, Mr. Marquand hasn’t the literary vocation — or maybe metier is the better word. A novel by Sinclair Lewis, however much it may be open to objection, is at least a book by a writer — that is, a work of the imagination that imposes its atmosphere, a creation that shows the color and modelling of a particular artist’s hand. But a novel by J. P. Marquand is simply a neat pile of typewritten manuscript.
That last comment stung Marquand. He didn’t claim to be a great novelist, but he felt his work was more than a pile of typewriting. But if Repent in Haste is a failure, it because neither character nor author could imagine how to carry on in a world where the old certainties were replaced by … nothing. As John Gross puts it in his survey of Marquand’s work, “If the Jimmy Boydens represent the future, then what kind of future could it possibly be with nothing surviving from the past which a middle-aged correspondent could recognize as familiar?”
This question ties to the subject of the book I read just before Repent in Haste, George W.S. Trow’s Within the Context of No Context. Trow’s book — the 1997 edition, that is — is built around the title essay, which appeared in The New Yorker in 1980. Trow’s essay argued that television, more than any other development in his lifetime, replaced a system of values where context mattered with one where “the work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no-context and to chronicle it.” Trow’s critical argument has not, I think, aged well, particularly since the world of television in 1980 is now as old and past as the world of George Apley and William Briggs was in 1980.
What is far more interesting about Trow’s book, particularly in the context (sorry) of Marquand’s book, is his introductory essay, “Collapsing Dominant.” Unlike “Within the Context,” this piece is far more autobiographical. And one of the autobiographical elements specifically relates to Marquand, whose son Trow knew as a classmate at Exeter and whose books were read by his father and his classmates’ fathers: the fedora-wearing men of the Establishment as it existed after the war. Trow calls Marquand’s Point of No Return (1949) the most important novel of the Marquand-John O’Hara oeuvre:
It tells the story of a man from the milieu I am describing whose values are in conflict. He has taken his liberal arts education (the one owned by the upper class) seriously; on the other hand, he is in competition for high office at his bank. Which way will he go? The story is poignant from the point of view of this moment. No one who showed the mildest suggestion of the kind of conflictedness Marquand’s hero was feeling could get in the door of his bank now.
In 1951, Philip Hamburger published a profile of Marquand in The New Yorker. Its subtitle, “A Portrait in the Form of a Novel” was inspired by Apley’s subtitle, “A Novel in the Form of a Memoir,” and even its cover design echoed that of Apley. In it, Hamburger deliberately aped Marquand’s style, both of prose and of structure, working flashbacks into the framework of one day’s journey from New York City to Newburyport that “Allison Craig” (Hamburger) takes with Marquand. The day culminates in Marquand’s presentation of a paper to the Tuesday Club at the very same house where he’d gone to ask Mr. L. P. Dodge for that Harvard scholarship. Now, he is no longer the supplicant. He has been accepted into the fold:
They told him quietly how fond of him they were; how glad they were that he had gone out to the far corners of the world, had written his books, and had brought back just such knowledge as he had displayed this evening. Marquand looked as gratified as a man receiving an honorary degree from the college in his home town. After all, it was something to have best sellers behind one, to read a paper, to be among friends, to have made good. And yet, Marquand felt in his heart a sadness about the past. The past was there, and the past was real, and it could never be wiped out.
And there we have it, the bow with which Hamburger neatly secures his portrait of Marquand. Marquand is the voice of those who feel that the past is here, the past is real, and can never be wiped out.
Others studied Newburyport in even more detail that Marquand. Over the course of two decades starting in the 1930s, W. Lloyd Warner and Paul Lunt led a team of sociologists that conducted extensive interviews and surveys of the inhabitants of what they referred to as “Yankee City.” As reported in their first book on the project, The Social Life of a Modern Community (1941), Warner and Lunt saw this same attitude defining how traditions were not only passed along but used to enforce the status quo:
The young are dependent upon the old for learning the social tradition and for acquiring their social status. This domination of the young by the old insures social stability over successive generations and thus maintains the continuity of a social system
The subordination of the young by the old enables their indoctrination and preserves established values. But what William Briggs encounters in the Pacific is a situation in which the very expendability of the young gives them the privilege to reject those values.
George Trow saw this from another angle. The established values shaken by the war simply could not survive. What can never be wiped out is not the past but change: “I realize now that I am a man from a broken tradition who was convinced by the theater of a moment that his tradition was unbroken and that he was the heir to it.” When he and his classmates arrived at Exeter in 1957, they were “being asked to pretend that the moral dilemmas of a Marquand Hero were alive and kicking, which they were not.” By 1980, when his classmates had children the same age, none of them remembered what the dilemmas of a Marquand Hero were.
But neither Trow nor Hamburger give Marquand due credit for observing, if not fully understanding, as Edmund Wilson was. That paper Marquand delivered to the Tuesday Club at Mr. L. P. Dodge’s house in Newburyport, where the members of the club assured Marquand that the past was real, was “Ascension Island.” It’s reprinted in Thirty Years, and it’s worth quoting to illustrate that Marquand — like his fictional counterpart Briggs — could see the materialistic future, the future where the context was not “no context” but commerce in place of tradition:
Whenever I hear someone say that there is no unified national spirit and no culture in the United States, I think of our airports in Africa, India and the Pacific. It may be true that the Englishman far from home dresses for dinner and has his Number One Boy bring in his gin and tonic, but in all his centuries of colonizing he has never brought his civilization with him wholesale, as our armed forces have brought theirs in this war. Machine shops, plumbing, air conditioning, outdoor movies, ping-pong tables, boxing rings, Time, Newsweek, the weekly comics, Pocket Books, Gillette razors, Williams’ Aqua Velva, Rheingold beer, Johnson’s baby powder, Spam and Planters’ peanuts, all followed our army to the war for the edification of dark-skinned men in G-strings and for the shocked amazement of the French and British.
By the time Marquand presented this paper, he had taken the trip reported in “Return to the Stone Age,” also in Thirty Years. He returns to the same airfield on Kwajelein Island that William Briggs lands on in Repent in Haste. In just four years, all of this has become as expendable as Briggs’ human material:
It had been a boom town when I had seen it in the early months of 1945, one of the main crossroads of the Pacific, and it was a ghost town now. The temporary barracks, which except for the runways and roads, crowded nearly every available square foot of this coral islet, were not built for the moist and humid air of the central Pacific. Every bit of metal on the island was already in advanced stages of corrosion. Water coolers and letter files were crumbling. Typewriters only had a few months’ lifespan. Even a bronze plaque in the island chapel, placed to commemorate the dead in the island invasion, was already almost illegible. Worse still, the hardware, the nails and screws holding the buildings together, the locks and doorknobs, were all beginning to give way.
Marquand clearly saw the same evanescence of “tradition” and “the past” as George Trow. What Repent in Haste demonstrates, sadly, is that instead of attempting to understand what happens when the past is wiped out, he — like his heroes — just held on tighter to the very things that were disappearing.