Word: marquands
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TIMOTHY DEXTER REVISITED (306 pp.) -John P. Marquand-Little, Brown...
...Marquand's last book is not a novel, but it is only his novelist's hand that saves it from being merely a literary curiosity. Good family boy that he was, Marquand never lost his gossip's and antiquarian's interest in the past of Newburyport, Mass., a place that was never long out of his thoughts in fact or in fiction. In 1925, before he had written anything better than hack historicals, he dusted off some old documents, ran down some dubious legends and wrote a book about a fascinating 18th century eccentric, Lord Timothy...
...sensitivity to the right street, the right family, the right school-recalling, in a less obsessed way, the social preoccupation of John O'Hara, which once inspired Hemingway to groan: "Lord, I wish someone would start a fund to send O'Hara to Yale." Marquand, at least, got to Harvard, the son of an old Newburyport family which, like Charley Gray's, had lost its money and no longer lived on the best street. But he felt ill at ease because he had not prepped at Exeter or St. Mark...
Gradually, Johnny Marquand turned into a Marquand hero, with a certain capacity for drift. He fought through World War I untouched ("I saw a lot of people killed, but I don't think it did very much to me"). As a cub reporter, he seemed willing to hang on at $50 a week on the New York Tribune, but got a job as an advertising copywriter almost by accident. His first novel, a historical called The Unspeakable Gentleman, was not much good, but he sold it, and so, like his characters to come, he was trapped...
Author-Editor Hough (Country Editor, Thoreau of Walden} has published the Vineyard Gazette on Martha's Vineyard since 1920. and knows both New England and newspapering well enough to talk of them with fondness and disgust. He writes of a great American theme that Marquand treated more broadly in The Late George Apley and Santayana with more subtlety and depth in The Last Puritan. But Hough gives it the unique flavor of printer's ink and an old editor's green-eyeshaded wisdom. His novel, written in good journeyman's prose, is an effective polemic...