Word: marquands
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Marquand still becomes choleric when he thinks of the stuff he wrote. "It seemed to me the most dreadful thing to end your days putting your energy into a campaign for Lifebuoy Soap-and all those Phi Beta Kappas sitting around trying to get ideas...
...conference he ironically repeated a slogan which was rather admired in the agency: "Every day an oily coating slowly forms upon the skin." Cried Marquand, as he remembers it: "My God, do you realize that line scans?-'Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime!' By that time," says Marquand, "it was clear that I wasn't taking copywriting quite seriously enough." He decided to go back to Newburyport, try to write fiction...
After a summer's work, he showed up in New York with the manuscript of The Unspeakable Gentleman, an amateurish historical novel which Literary Agent Carl Brandt promptly sold to the Ladies' Home Journal. Says Marquand now: "I will be goddamned if I know why I wrote it. To me it's an indecent exposure and I'm thoroughly ashamed of it." It seemed different at the time: he put his check for $2,000 in the Atlantic Bank of Boston, got a new pair of shoes and had his broken pipes repaired. Admits Marquand...
Over a Barrel. Brandt offered his next story to the Satevepost, and Post Editor George Horace Lorimer liked it at once. For the next two decades, at top rates ($500 to $3,000 for short stories, $30,000 to $40,000 for serials), Marquand's name was synonymous with surefire slick writing. In those days, says Marquand, "I was a simple little boy in the lower echelons, naive about literature and the world in general, just a good boy trying to conform. I thought John Dos Passos was a terrible yellow belly for griping about...
...Marquand says he was forced to keep his nose to the Satevepost grindstone for years to keep his head above the household bills. His wife urged him to try a different vein-advice which he followed later, if not at the time. "She would say, 'Why don't you write something nice for your Uncle Ellery on the Atlantic Monthly?' She didn't realize that my Uncle Ellery would have given me a nice silver inkwell, or a hundred dollars, and that wouldn't pay the bills...