Word: boyhoods
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Snubs That Rankled. His boyhood chance for traveling with the home-town upper-upper crust was wiped out by a financial panic. "I can remember distinctly how I felt when we didn't have any more money [after the crash of 1907]. I could feel myself becoming what [Anthropologist W. L.] Warner calls 'mobilized downward.' Of course, I had read Horatio Alger and I was ready to face this change in circumstance in a sportsmanlike manner." In Point of No Return it is Anthropologist Malcolm Bryant who explains such niceties of the scientific vocabulary to Charley Gray...
Insists Marquand: "I still don't think [Wickford] is like my family." But, Apley and Wickford included, his best writing has been about the lives and locales he has known from boyhood. He thinks B.F.'s Daughter, which preceded Point of No Return, failed to come off because its locale, wartime Washington, was a transient experience for him. The middle-class axis he draws on best runs from Newburyport to Boston to New York...
...typical Marquand novel theme. Charley Gray, the boy from Spruce Street, does well enough in life, but there are some things he cannot attain when he most wants to, some things he can never attain. He cannot close the gap between Spruce Street and aristocratic Johnson Street in his boyhood town of Clyde, Mass, (for which, perhaps, read Newburyport). Jessica Lovell lived on Johnson Street and was in love with Charley Gray, but it was clear from the start that snobbery wouldn't let anything good come of it. Charley recalls that when, in the middle...
...cognoscenti has called New Orleans jazz many things, from "a rich and frequently dissonant polyphony" to "this dynamism [which] interprets life at its maximum intensity." But Louis grins wickedly and says: "Man, when you got to ask what is it, you'll never get to know." In his boyhood New Orleans, jazz was simply a story told in strongly rhythmic song, pumped out "from the heart" with a nervous, exciting beat. To Trumpeter Louis, jazz is still storytelling: "I like to tell them things that come naturally...
...when one day a pregnant woman shyly appeared on the steps, little Innes gave her one shrewd glance and screeched joyously: "Arthur! Hooray! It's another baby!" To while away the hours, Arthur began to write stories. "This morning after Breakfast," runs a typical note in Innes' boyhood diary of those days, "Arthur went downstairs and began to write a story about a man with three eyes, while I was upstairs enventing a new waterworks that will send rokets over the moon in two minutes . . . then it was a quarter past...