Word: marquands
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Poet Eliot had found that what was missing was God; Marquand's heroes have made no such discovery...
Life With Two Scotches. Last week, J. P. Marquand could look back on 27 years of unbroken writing success. In all those years he has finished every book and story he ever started, has sold everything he has written except one short story ("It was supposed to be funny and wasn't"). The Satevepost alone has paid him something like half a million dollars for the no "slicks" and serials of his that the Post has published over a period of nearly 20 years...
...settled him even more firmly on Easy Street, and since 1944 his B-O-M job (a part-time reading chore) has brought him another $20,000 a year. Practical, a lover of comfort and the good things of life (including, among others, three cars, two Scotches before dinner), Marquand is by no means contemptuous of money and is mightily pleased that he has made the financial grade. But like Charley Gray, he knows that something is missing. He wishes there were something more at the finish than an annuity and a new station wagon. And he is no more...
Charley, like most heroes of Marquand novels, is decent, full of consideration for family and friends, driven by a determination to do things, void of spiritual values. Another Harvardman, Nobel Prize-winning Poet T. S. Eliot, wrote ironically in his early days of such fellow worldlings, later (in The Rock) declared his second-thoughts...
...cold-shouldered him and sometimes, he imagined, pointedly crossed the street to avoid speaking to him. (John tucked that away, too. Charley Gray, thinking back over what it had been like to go to Dartmouth from Clyde High School, hopes to send his own son to Exeter.) Even today Marquand somewhat sourly remembers that he was a "greaseball" at Harvard and was never invited to join a club. Now Harvard's Alumni Bulletin asks him for literary contributions and the college asks him for money (he has given both), but "those early snubs rankled all my life...