My father was a great admirer of the popular American novelist John P. Marquand and I remember that he specifically urged me to read Marquand's best known work, The Late George Apley. Marquand's heyday was in the 1930s and 1940s, and I don't think that he's much read now, although it's good to see that two of his many novels are still in print. Yesterday I re-read The Late George Apley. It's a fine book. The conceit is this: George Apley, an extremely wealthy Bostonian of the Cabot-Lodge-Saltonstall class, has recently died, and an old Harvard chum has been hired to condense Apley's letters and papers into a biography. The fatuous editor, who portrays Apley as an exemplary being, reveals to his readership much more than he himself can possibly understand. We hear of Apley's rectitude, his generosity, his civic-mindedness, his loyalty to his class — but along the way we indirectly learn many truths; for example, that Apley should have married the beautiful and intelligent but alas Irish Mary Monahan, but instead was hustled into a ceremony with a drab woman of his own circle. "Remember," his father assures him, "beauty is only skin-deep." Apley upholds proper Louisburg Square values, but occasionally he catches a glimmer of the idea that the rules of upper-class Boston have circumscribed and warped his life. At the end, his daughter has married (gasp) a journalist and his son (double gasp) a divorcee. In his last weeks, Apley becomes just a trifle less unbending: "It even occurs to me tonight, although this is simply a whim of the moment and probably not quite sound, that you (he's writing to a long-time friend) and I may have missed something in our day." But he can also say of his daughter's husband, that "his peculiarity of speech and manner indicate that he comes from a very long distance, probably the Middle West, a place I have not seen, nor do I wish to see it."
Here's Marquand at his best. Young George (we're now in the 1870s) has a daft grandmother. One day, at a "festive occasion," she turns to her aged contemporary the Reverend Nathaniel Pettingill, and blurts out: "Young man, should you ever go blackbirding, be sure to select Negroes that are brought down from the mountains, they are stronger and healthier than the Blacks from the coast." Our brainless narrator explains that her outburst "displays the vagaries of a dear old lady's mind," but readers now know that the great Apley fortune was built on slave-trading. (The artistry of the moment is borrowed from Dickens, and specifically from Mr. F's lunatic Aunt in Little Dorrit, who, at dinner, for no discernible reason, suddenly cries out to the company that "when we lived at Henley, Barnes's gander was stole by tinkers." But on the whole Marquand owes far less to Dickens than to Howells).
I can't help wondering why my father was so insistent that I read the book. My father had as much rectitude as anyone I've ever known, and perhaps he was attracted to the nobler side of Apley's personality. Or was he trying to warn me away from the kind of conformity which stifles poor George? Or, a very conventional man himself, did he suspect that he himself was enmeshed in Apleyan-like coils? Or did he simply enjoy long ironic narratives?
Is it time for a Marquand revival?
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