So Little Time, by John P. Marquand (1943)

It’s a little hard to believe now how important So Little Time was to John P. Marquand’s career. He’d already won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his 1937 epistolary novel, The Late George Apley, and his two subsequent mainstream novels, Wickford Point (1939) and H. M. Pulham, Esq. (1942), had received enthusiastic reviews and bestseller list sales numbers. His five Mr. Moto detective novels had not only sold well but spawned eight film adaptations in the space of three years.

When So Little Time came out in the late summer of 1943, however, Marquand’s critical and commercial reputation skyrocketed. By the end of September, Little, Brown proclaimed that they’d sold over 400,000 copies — and that didn’t include the likely more than 200,000 copies sold as September’s feature book of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Marquand biographer Millicent Bell reports that the book earned the author over $90,000 in 1943. To put those numbers in terms relative to 2026, it was as if Marquand had made $1.7 million from selling over 1.4 million copies today.

The novel received feature billing in every book section in the country (and this was a time when every newspaper had at least a weekly book review section). A. C. Spectorsky, book editor of the Chicago Sun and one of the most influential critics of his time, declared, “Let’s face it, John P. Marquand is the major American novelist writing today” — a line Little, Brown happily trumpeted from their ads. One of the few skeptics among the first wave of reviewers, Philip Toynbee wondered in response, “Is it really true that Marquand is superior to Hemingway, Dos Passos, Willa Cather, Steinbeck, Mary McCarthy, Farrell, Carson, McCullers…?” — and ironically, all the names in Toynbee’s list are far better recognized today than Marquand. (In fairness to Marquand, he objected to his publisher’s use of the blurb, which he knew was neither deserved nor likely to go undisputed.)

The Saturday Review devoted two pages to So Little Time, with the headline, “J. P. Marquand’s Literary Wizardry.” The Chicago Tribune hired Lloyd C. Douglas, whose Biblical novel The Robe was one of two to outsell So Little Time, to review the book, then ran another feature review a week later. Philip Rahv, editor of Partisan Review, said it was “the first novel of the 1940’s in which the decade is pictured with a feeling of self-conscious contemporaneity.” Rahv argued that the book brought out the best in Marquand by forcing him to move beyond his accustomed environs of Boston and its suburbs to a national stage. And Diana Trilling, who was more divided in her feelings, acknowledged that Marquand provided convincing descriptions of a wide range of characters and scenes: theater rehearsals, Park Avenue apartment, Connecticut manors, Hollywood at the height of the studio system, Washington, D. C. in the chaos of the first weeks after Pearl Harbor.

If there is a reason to read So Little Time now, it’s because of its evocation of a narrow slice of time — America between the spring of 1940 and the first weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the country’s entry into World War Two. And although Marquand employs a large cast, virtually all his lead players operate in a world of privilege. His protagonist, Jeffrey Wilson, a man in his later forties, earns a comfortable living as a play doctor — a profession that even then, in Broadway theater’s golden age, was probably pursued by fewer than a dozen people. His work pays for his Manhattan apartment with its butler and cook and an upstate farm with resident handyman and seasonal cook. It puts his children in boarding schools, his older son through Harvard, and freed his wife to do … well, whatever it was that women did:

It was never clear to him exactly what it was that women did do in New York. They were always out somewhere on meaningless errands of their own. They filled the busses and Schrafft’s and all the teashops and the Museum of Modern Art and the Plaza and all the department stores.

Jeffrey is a veteran of World War One, having served as a bomber pilot with the American Expeditionary Force and survived being shot down between the lines. As he watches events in Europe, his attitude is not that of pacifist, isolationist, or interventionist. Perhaps one of the reasons So Little Time was accepted by such a large audience was that Marquand takes no political stance whatsoever. He simply watches and worries, as did millions of Americans. “War worry,” in fact, was the predominant mood in the country and blamed for everything from stock market doldrums to underweight babies.

Jeffrey’s wife, Madge, tells him, “Don’t worry about the war. You can’t do anything about it.” But Jeffery’s primary worry is not for his country but for their son, Jim, a junior at Harvard and hence likely to find himself putting his life at risk as his father did. As the Phony War on the Western front comes to a sudden end with the blitzkrieg attacks on France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, however, he finds it harder to ignore that concern, but no easier to confide in others about them.

Only late in the story does he admit to Madge why he keeps talking about time running out:

“We haven’t any right to interfere with Jim. He hasn’t got much time.”
“What do you mean by that?” Madge asked. “Much time for what?”
Jeffrey put his hands in his pockets and leaned his shoulders against the wall.
“Much time to live,” he said, “perhaps.”

Although Philip Rahv felt that Marquand had moved beyond his roots in writing So Little Time, there are numerous parallels between Marquand and his protagonist. Both men have draft-age sons, both Harvard students: Marquand’s son, John P. Marquard, Jr. (who worked under the name of John Philips) turned 18 in 1941. Marquand was also a veteran of World War One, and having served in the artillery, he had a better sense of the violence of the front-line than Jeffery Wilson would from spending most of his combat time several thousand feet above it. He and Jeffrey operated in similar economic and social circles, which is certainly the source of the wealth and (we assume) accuracy of the details that fill the book.

Early on, for example, Jeffrey and Madge drive out to spend a weekend at the large Connecticut manor that its owners — living comfortable on the interest on their millions in bonds — are transforming into a pastiche of rural living: “In taking your place at the seventeenth-century trestle table, which Fred had found on Madison Avenue, you had to be careful not to stumble over spits and pots and candle molds and pestles and mortars and other ancient implements which had been collected on the old kitchen hearth.”

Marquand was considered a satirist of the East Coast establishments, principally of Boston, but later of New York and Washington, D.C. as well, and this side of his work comes out most clearly in his portraits of the comfortably rich. “It’s time we got more socially conscious,” declares one of the bond babies, “How about a drink?” They pride themselves in having more discriminating literary tastes than the middle class, not deigning to “have their books picked out beforehand by anyone like Henry Canby and his crowd at the Book-of-the-Month Club. (Ironically, Marquand would join the board of judges of the club in 1944.)

He reserves his most scathing criticism for Walter Newcombe, an old acquaintance of Jeffrey’s from his days as a young newspaper reporter who had become a bestselling author for his inside report on the world at large, World Assignment. Newcombe stands in for figures like John Gunther, Dorothy Thompson, Negley Farson, and Vincent Sheehan who had become the eyes and ears on the world for millions of readers. Marquand takes the benefit of hindsight to mock the sort of overconfidence that resulted from their access to senior decisionmakers. To a luncheon audience in March 1940, Newcombe grossly misreads the stand-off between France, Britain, and Germany:

Herr Hitler had not struck. Now he had thrown away his one chance. Now it was too late. There had been gaps in the line, but those gaps had been repaired during those dull months of the “sitzkrieg,” the months that the cynics had called the phony war. The noose was drawing tighter.

“Old Chamberlain with his umbrella is pinching that monkey Hitler and his ‘Uns,” Newcombe quotes a Cockney cab driver. The predilection of reporters like Newcombe to use improbable man in the street quotes to spice up their accounts is a prime irritant for Marquand, though when he wrote his own reports from a tour of American operations in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific in 1944 and 1945, collected in Thirty Years, he was not above engaging in the same ploy. Marquand so disliked these pundits that he included an even more pompous version named Milton Ouerbach, who consistently predicts disasters in his radio dispatches shortly before American victories, in his next novel, B. F.’s Daughter.

If Marquand had a sharp eye for external details, however, that same precision and nuance is almost completely lacking in his treatment of the thoughts and feelings of his characters. For a man extremely well paid to inject life and tension into plays, Jeffrey Wilson comes off as a well-intentioned but largely inarticulate lunk. “Jeffrey was old enough to know that nothing ever turned out quite the way one hoped,” Marquand tells us after we’ve spent over 500 pages with the guy, as if we couldn’t say the same thing for just about everyone on our block. Looking back of his months of anxiety and uncertainty a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, Jeffrey offers a bland if drastic assessment: “Nothing was meant to last forever, and now everything in the world which he had known, living and inanimate, seemed to have come to a momentary stop. Everything was waiting for the stagehands and the vans.”

When, nearly 600 pages into the book, Jeffrey finally has an opportunity to have a heart-to-heart talk with his son, he not only balks, but Marquand then tells about all the things he doesn’t say. I quote here at length in part to illustrate that one of Marquand’s chief weaknesses is his tendency to write prose of deadening woodenness:

“Sometime,” he said, “I’d like to talk to you about war, but never mind it now.”

Jeffrey could have told him a good deal about the West Coast and Oregon. He still felt that he knew camps and the army better than Jim did. There were things that might make you very unhappy in the army if you did not understand them. When you were young, for instance, all field officers seemed very old and a removed from the realities of military life as a group of strange animals. When a young officer came in contact with his superiors he generally considered them overbearing and stupid and usually they were. Nevertheless, he wanted to tell Jim that this apparent stupidity and this West Point conceit, which every civilian officer hated, was apt to cloak a distinct combative ability when you got into a fight. He wanted Jim to realize that he must suspend judgment on majors and colonels and to realize that they were not as bad as you thought they were. He wanted to tell Jim a great many things that had happened in the A.E.F. in France which he had never told anyone, but which he thought might be useful if they got into war. He wanted to tell Jim to remember that everyone was afraid and not to be ashamed of it. He wanted Jim to realize that there were times to be careful and times not to be. He wanted to tell Jim about Stan Rhett that day they were shot down; and there never seemed to be an opportunity — never the time or the place. Madge or Charley was always there, or Sally Sales. There was never any time.

Writing about an inarticulate character doesn’t mean that a writer has to don inarticulateness like a hair shirt. In Something Happened, Joseph Heller wrote a book of almost equal length to So Little Time about Bob Slocum, a protagonist even less verbally adept than Jeffrey Wilson, and yet managed to find a tone that’s both bland and mesmerizing. In Marquand’s case, I think the problem is a weakness that underlies much of his work after his early and more explicitly satirical novels.

As I wrote about Marquand’s shortest and weakest novel, Repent in Haste, “Marquand is, more than anything, is a specialist in the experience of being on the brink of change,” but while they don’t kid themselves that there’s any going back, when they look ahead, “they see a nihilism that causes them to grab the few certainties they still understand and hold on for dear life.”

In a review of Thirty Years for Harper’s in 1955, Randall Jarrell burst Marquand’s bubble of prestige in much the same way that Dwight Macdonald when he savagely reduced James Gould Cozzens to the state of a pompous hack in his review of By Love Possessed a few years later. Under a “veneer of patiently observed objective detail,” Jarrell wrote, they all…

Seem versions of the same subjective fable, one designed to say to him and also to us: “You were right to do as you did; or if not right, still, you had no choice; or if you had a choice, still, it’s the choice all of us necessarily make wrong: life’s life. If only — but it doesn’t matter. And … and it was all so long ago.” The fable is told in a series of flashbacks, of sighs as elegiac, nostalgic, and wistfully submissive — as mannered and unvarying — as a Puccini opera. These flashbacks are not optional technique, but compulsory content: because of them the hero never has to make, in close-up, a clear choice to kiss or kill — the choices are always obscured by the haze of the past, of rueful and lyric recollection.

Just as Jeffrey Wilson balks at telling his son the simple truth that he’s afraid that he will get killed, wounded, or scarred, physically or mentally, in combat in this new war — afraid because he’s clearly scarred from his own experiences in the last one — so Marquand balks at forcing Jeffrey to make any real change in his life. He accepts his son’s hasty marriage, a marriage not much better founded than the marriage portrayed in Repent in Haste, but at the end of the book, Jeffrey still has his Park Avenue apartment, his upstate farm, his wife, his work, his friends, etc. If there’s been any real change aside from the fact that his son is now an Army lieutenant (in the artillery, like Marquand) and facing the same risks that have worried him for the last 600 pages.

If Marquand’s prose and protagonists can be wooden, he is at least a master of the craft of keeping the reader engaged. I first read So Little Time over the course of a five-day work trip to Turkey over twenty years ago, and I somewhat dreaded taking on the 614-page beast when I chose it as my response to Pete Tosiello’s call for readers to take part in a “Marquand summer.” And yet once I got started, the pages rolled by every bit at effortlessly. It helps to have a strong streak of nostalgia for the 1930s and 1940s, especially for descriptions of Park Avenue apartments, Seventh Avenue clubs, comfortable Connecticut weekend retreats, and American misreadings of the war in Europe. But Marquand was just as much a sure hand at magazine fiction as F. Scott Fitzgerald, and if he lacked Fitzgerald’s artistry, he was no slouch when it came to entertaining his readers.

I debated donating most of my copies of Marquand’s novels to our local library’s sale recently. Given how many copies of most of them were sold, they’re neither collectable nor too hard to find replacements for. But perhaps he’s my answer to the English middlebrow women writers who’ve become the comfort reading of generations, and so, for the moment, I’ll hang on to them. I’ll certainly need a midcentury comfort read in future and I’ve yet to read Wickford Point or write about Point of No Return. If you’re looking for an American male equivalent to Dorothy Whipple or E. M. Delafield, you can’t go far wrong with John P. Marquand, and that might be the best place to place him in our literary landscape.

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So Little Time, by John P. Marquand
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1943