John Phillips Marquand

Notes:

As of 1895, John Phillips Marquand was residing in New York City. For several years he had been a member of the firm Blake Brothers & Co., [Arthur Welland Blake died Brookline, MA, 28 Feb 1893 (his father George Baty Blake, formerly of the firm), John Phillips Marquand, J. E. Brown, George R. Harris, Howland Davis], bankers, New York and Boston, 1884-1896.

Mr. Marquand went to sea at the age of 15 - "before the mast" - to China; after that became a clerk for Thomas Wigglesworth of India Wharf, Boston, for some years; next was clerk with Blake Bros., four years; after which was with David Nevins, Jr., 1857-1859, and was his partner 1859-1866 - Nevins & Co.,; then was admitted to firsm of Hubbard Brothers [Aaron and Nathaniel] & Co., stock brokers, Boston. He has since 1873 been of Blake Bros. & Co., and from 1879 at their New York banking house.

John married Margaret Searle Curzon 6 Dec 1860, Newburyport, Essex Co., MA. Margaret (daughter of Samuel Curzon and Margaret Searle) was born 28 Apr 1828, Newbury, Essex Co., MA; died Unknown. [Group Sheet]

Other Events:

• Graduation: 1889; Harvard College - Cambridge, Middlesex Co., MA

Notes:

Civil Engineer. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Civil Engineer 1891

Phillip married Margaret Fuller 30 Mar 1892. Margaret died Unknown. [Group Sheet]

Other Events:

• Graduation: 1915; Harvard College - Cambridge, Middlesex Co., MA

Notes:

Author of "The Late George Apley" and the Mr. Moto detective series.
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http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/marquand.html

John Phillips Marquand, leading American writer of the twentieth century, was born on November 10, 1893, to Philip and Margaret Fuller Marquand, both descendants of old New England families. Although he was born in Wilmington, Delaware, and lived in Rye, New York, until he was fourteen, Marquand considered himself a New Englander. He was educated at the Newburyport (Massachusetts) High School and at Harvard University, from which he was graduated in 1915. From 1915 to 1917, he was assistant magazine editor of the Boston Transcript. After a brief period as advertising copywriter in 1920 and 1921, he became a novelist and published The Unspeakable Gentleman (1922). Marquand was a frequent contributor of short stories to several popular magazines of the day, most notably The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Collier's, and Good Housekeeping. Many of his novels were also serialized in shortened form in these magazines.

A recurring theme in many of Marquand's works concerns the life and times of the middle and upper classes in twentieth-century New England--particularly Boston—as illustrated in The Late George Apley (1937), Wickford Point (1939), and H. M. Pulham, Esquire (1941). Marquand also wrote several mysteries featuring the Oriental detective Mr. Moto. Film versions of the Mr. Moto mysteries enjoyed great popularity. Marquand's writings were widely received and sold well. In addition, many of his works were successfully adapted for stage and screen.

In 1922, Marquand married Christina Sedgwick. From this marriage, which lasted thirteen years, a son and a daughter were born. In 1936, Marquand married Adelaide Hooker. Two sons and a daughter were born of this union, which also ended in divorce in 1958.

John P. Marquand died in his sleep of a heart attack on July 16, 1960 in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

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A Grandson's Story

An address, "Fathers, Sons, and Grandsons: John P. Marquand," by Richard E. Welch III, delivered in the Meeting House of the First Unitarian Society (Unitarian Universalist), Newburyport, Massachusetts, February 17, 2002.

One of my early memories rests in this very church. I am eight years old, sitting in one of the front pews, very unsettled because my mother is beside me crying. The casket is highly polished mahogany and seems very large. I vaguely realize that the death of my grandfather is a big deal but I am primarily concerned about my mother's tears, the sudden tension around the house, and the swirl of activity that has disrupted my summer. Being a typical egocentric young boy, my thoughts are not on the man who, somewhat out of character, had gone out of his way to tell his grandson animated stories of Egyptian thieves, the Serengeti Plains, and Chinese warlords. This was the rather intimidating grandfather, who—even in my youthful ignorance—I vaguely realized was a somewhat famous person. The man who only days before had insisted that just the two of us soon have lunch—one of those intimidating formal lunches served by some housekeeper and replete with watered down wine and finger bowls—and discuss tales of old Newburyport. But, as I say, I was not reflecting on him. No, I am sure my thoughts were more focused on fishing that afternoon in the Artichoke River or considering some appropriate torture for my older sister.

The grandfather was John Phillips Marquand and his childhood was not as idyllic as mine.

Imagine the following. A young boy, age 13, learns that his father has lost almost all of the family's money. The family will have to move from their extremely comfortable home in the wealthy suburb of Rye, New York. This boy will have to leave his private school classmates and attend a public high school. Even more startling, the mother and father will be leaving their son for an extended and indefinite period. The boy's father, a failed stock broker with an engineering degree, has found a job working on the new project called the Panama Canal and will be departing for that distant location with the boy's mother. The boy is to be shipped off to a small town in Massachusetts named Newburyport. And, he is to be raised by three elderly woman in an isolated country house.

This boy was, of course, John Philips Marquand. While born and initially raised elsewhere, he spent by far his most formative years in Newburyport. The sudden dissolving of John Marquand's immediate family and the resulting upbringing by his three aunts were the defining events in his life.

In 1949, John P. Marquand had reached the peak of both his craft and his fame. He had just published yet another best selling novel, this one went by the title of Point of No Return. The novel was receiving good reviews even from some of his more reluctant literary critics. He had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with his novel The Late George Apley. Every novel he wrote after Apley almost instantly became a best seller. In 1949, his face was on the cover of Time and Newsweek magazines with long feature articles that stressed the fact that this talented novelist of manners had become America's most successful writer of that era. Even the higher brow New Yorker magazine carried a long, glowing and clever profile of the author. John Marquand must have read these complimentary pieces at either his Beekman Place address in New York City or at his country home on Kent's Island in Newbury, Massachusetts. At either address he would have been surrounded by antiques and art work that would later be displayed in various museums. He was a wealthy and successful man. Given his introspective nature, it is almost certain that he recognized the irony of this fame. Here he was, a famous novelist, who was, at heart, still that young, insecure boy living in that charming but run down house with three spinster aunts, attending Newburyport High School and Sunday services in this church.

It does not take a child psychiatrist to understand that being abandoned as a child in the first year of adolescence by your parents and left with elderly women in a remote location would constitute a dramatic, even a shattering, event in one's life. But, as with many a Marquand character, the story is not that simple. When John Marquand was left with his three aunts at Curzon's Mill in Newburyport in his thirteenth year, his feelings were an ambivalent stew of loss, embarrassment and excitement.

He understood, even at the confusing and tender age of thirteen—an age more tender than thirteen is now—that his father was a financial failure. The stock market panic of 1907 had wiped out Philip Marquand's considerable inheritance. More than the reversal of financial fortune was the fact that the son had come to the realization that his father was an embarrassment. Phillip, his investment banker father having been given a comfortable nest egg, together with a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, tried his hand as a stock broker and had failed miserably. Indeed, he seemed to fail at most every professional venture. His father would never be a role model and John Marquand had little positive to say about him throughout his father's long life.

John Marquand drew upon the very ambivalent feelings he held toward his father in his novel Point of No Return. There the father, John Gray, is portrayed as a more sympathetic version of his own, someone who was sure he could beat the system and make a fortune. A man who loved to live high on the hog when fortune smiled upon him, but who frequently lost it all.

I am always reminded of one scene from the novel, set in this very church, each time I actually make it to a service and the offertory begins:

Besides [John Gray] used to say, what was Unitarianism? He was in no position, not for a minute, to embark on a theological discussion or to criticize the tenets of a religion embraced by Emerson and Channing. He realized also that a belief in the brotherhood of man and in the general progress of mankind, onward and upward forever, was a stabilizing influence, good for him and everybody else, particularly for the children. He would have been glad to consider this mild dogma every Sunday and even listen to the asthmatic sound of the organ...if it had not been necessary to have [the minister] tell him about it....The best thing about Unitarianism was that there was no compulsion about attending its services—none at least for him.

Let me interrupt and hasten to add that these lines were penned before the arrival of either the Reverend Bertrand Steeves or the current Reverend Harold Babcock.

But one Sunday, during one of his rare financially flush periods, John Gray appeared dressed and ready to attend services with his family. "John," his surprised wife asks, "why are you going?" He responds: "Let's say I have a new sense of spiritual responsibility this morning that demands direct action."

When it was time for the offering, John Gray flips open his billfold and deliberately drops a hundred dollar gold treasury note into the wooden contribution box for the entire congregation to see.

After the service his wife confronts John Gray and tells him that "at least you might have put it in an envelope."

"That's true," John Gray said. "Of course, that's perfectly true. I've always wanted to do that...ever since I was a little boy. I know it's childish of me, but I don't suppose I am sorry."

Indeed John Gray, much like Marquand's father, never seems sorry. He is always promising his son Charley a pony as soon as he makes his next financial killing. The pony never comes. Eventually, Charley Gray—like the son of John Marquand—came to realize that the pony would never arrive. As the diligent, careful son Charley Gray noted: "His father had never tried too hard. He had never grown measured and tired by trying." It was left to son Charley, and to John Marquand, to try hard and become tired, due to the fecklessness of their fathers.

The embarrassment of such a father also must have been mixed with a great feeling of loss. Suddenly, the mother of this thirteen year old child was leaving. There is no doubt that this boy unequivocally loved his mother. To suddenly be without her for a long, indefinite period of time, obviously had a profound effect upon young John Marquand's relationship with his mother but also, in all likelihood, with the father who was causing this separation.

These feelings, however, were mixed with a certain exhilaration that John Marquand always felt when coming back to Curzon's Mill in Newburyport. He had spent almost every summer of his youth at Curzon's Mill, and this small, remote section of Newburyport was magical to him.

During these boyhood summers Marquand had a chance to know his grandfather, John Phillips Marquand, the man for who he was named. His grandfather was a very successful investment banker in New York who had married Margaret Curzon of Newburyport. As a result, he summered with the extended family at Curzon's Mill. The author would later recall that his grandfather obviously enjoyed the place but was not above complaining that everyone seemed to be living off him as it was only his money that kept the buildings painted and the gardens planted. His grandfather told young John how he first met his wife Margaret Curzon: "They were sitting under an apple tree, Margaret was painting a picture and they asked me to stay to supper and then they found there wasn't any supper. I took Margaret down in the carriage and bought some. That was forty years ago. I've been buying everybody's supper ever since. The whole damn family's supper." Later in his life, the autho—who took pleasure and comfort in thinking that he (like his grandfather for who he was named) had inherited the Marquand trait of achieving success from humble beginnings—found that history was repeating itself only now it was his bank account that seemed to be buying the whole damn family's supper.

Likewise, Marquand was fascinated by his maiden aunts. His grandmother's sister, his great aunt Mary Russell Curzon, lived year round at the Yellow House, next to the Mill, and provided John Marquand with a unique glimpse into the past. Mary Russell Curzon was a well educated woman who had been courted by the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, who would row across the Merrimac to visit the Marquand sisters and write truly boring sonnets about these women, the river, and Curzon's "bowery mill." Another poet—William Ellery Channing—and the artist William Morris Hunt both proposed marriage to Mary. But, displaying an early feminist streak and good sense, she turned them all down, preferring her own company. [An ardent abolitionist, she offered her house as a stop on the Underground Railroad. Once, a very large male slave was delivered hidden in a wooden crate to her remote home. Upon unpacking the crate she made the tragic discovery that the man had been shipped upside down from Boston and was now definitively dead. With little hesitation, this temptress of poets and artists dragged the quickly stiffening body back to the orchard, buried the slave and planted a pear tree over the unmarked grave, a tree that flourishes still.]

This was a woman who read the classics each morning as she arose early, who taught young John Marquand how to build a fire, how to stitch up one's own wounds with sewing thread, and who lived only by candle light and kerosene lamps, lighting both with a flint and steel (as she distrusted matches). As he later wrote, after having traveled extensively in every continent except Antarctica and having made the acquaintance of the powerful, the rich, and the famous, this elderly woman impressed him far more than anyone else that he ever had encountered.

During most of the year, John Marquand lived alone with the three elderly women. All were serious Unitarians and accompanied young John to weekly services in this very church. Here he developed a faith—or at least one was drilled into him—that, while not necessarily a comfort, did hold him throughout a rather tumultuous life.

The Mill and Yellow House were at the end of a long, unpopulated road. There were no neighbors. In many ways, it was a life tinged with antiquity, closely resembling the Federalist era, while the rest of America was hurrying towards the jazz age. But, for this brief interval—and perhaps for the first and last time—he felt truly a part of a place and, thus, in the truest sense, secure.

In the summers things changed when his wealthy and more sophisticated New York cousins would take over one of the buildings. Marquand was fond, yet envious, of these cousins who had retained their money, their family, and their casual confidence. These experiences, when mixed with a acute observation and substantial literary talent, laid the groundwork for Marquand's later gentle yet pointed social satires.

Marquand was hardly the first author to use the pains and embarrassments of youth as artistic fodder. Had his immediate family not been shattered and its wealth lost, the author instead might have become a basically happy, if quietly desperate, member of the upper middle class like many of his fictional characters. And he might never have felt compelled to leave the contentment he found at Curzon's Mill and Newburyport to seek a life that never provided an equivalent sense of comfort and belonging—no matter how much fame and fortune he garnered. Again, this theme of lost security and happiness and the unsuccessful attempt to recapture it in the rush and mobility of contemporary America runs through Marquand's novels, and it often is as much an issue today as it was 50 years ago.

One would hope that the author also learned from the weaknesses and selfishness of his father and that he would make it a priority to raise a family that was not subjected to the same sense of abandonment as he had suffered. But that was not always to be. And, given the demands of writing and the psychic scars he may have carried, maybe it was too much to ask.

John Marquand married twice. He first courted and won Christina Sedgwick from a faded aristocratic family in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Two children were produced, John, Jr. and my mother, Christina Marquand. The marriage, however, failed and, as is often the case, both were a bit at fault. Christina Sedgwick, while charming and delightful, was far from practical and could not create the stable, peaceful home for which Marquand yearned. Marquand, wrapped up in beginning his literary career and feeling inferior to the Sedgwick family, was far from the model husband. Perhaps both were too young to appreciate what they had before it was ruined. But, Marquand did remain close to his first two children throughout his life.

Marquand's second marriage was to a wealthy Connecticut heiress, Adelaide Hooker. While this marriage lasted longer, and produced three children, it was frequently rocked by arguments, affairs, and separations. The result was a chaotic—albeit privileged—upbringing for his last three children. The now famous author's relationship with these three children was little better than his relationship with his own father.

These domestic failures weighed upon Marquand and underlie much of his last novel, Women and Thomas Harrow. It is a darker and more modern novel than his others and was written soon after his first wife had died of cancer at a relatively young age. The novel details the failed marriages of a fictional playwright, but primarily focuses upon the regrets that the main character feels when confronting his first wife and a love that never faded. Once again this church, thinly disguised, is featured prominently and perhaps is best described in the passage read by the Rev. Bertrand Steeves.

In this novel, published two years before his death, Marquand creates the climatic scene where the main character, Thomas Harrow, meets his first wife the day after he has entered the church and relived his first wedding ceremony. Looking back, Harrow, probably much like the author, felt that "he had been careless with human relationships that he had [casually] tossed away a great many things that were valuable" and that now life was closing in upon him. Thomas Harrow tells his first wife, Rhoda, of his entry into the church:

“Yesterday morning when I went to get the mail, a new, young minister in front of the ... church asked me to step inside. Frankly, I'd never been there since we were married ... the place was so dead-quiet Calvinist it startled me. I don't know why it is lately that quiet places do; maybe they make me feel afraid of God, not that I honestly feel afraid. It may be only the thought of an impending conversation.

Rhoda then asks him what he had been thinking in the church and he replies:

... it's so simple that there isn't much to say. All right, I thought I loved you when you were walking up the aisle, and I thought I loved you still. It's as simple as that ...

Soon thereafter, Thomas Harrow leaves knowing that he will never see his first wife again. Thomas Harrow, undoubtedly like the now older Marquand, realizes that the there was little exciting left in his artistic work or his life, that he has squandered human relationships and perhaps his talent. Anticipating that impending conversation with God, he again thinks back to the church and "the vanished minister saying, 'God bless you, Thomas.' Those were days when he had everything without knowing it, youth, and Rhoda, and his untarnished talent." As he drives home, Harrow realizes, based on his life: "In the end, no matter how many were in the car, you always drove alone."

So what is one to take from this? It is that, in the end, it is you yourself who is responsible for your fate and conduct when you have that impending conversation with God.

Well, in that belief, Marquand is simply being a Unitarian and confronting the faith's not always comforting challenges and responsibilities. Or should one focus on the fact that a formerly famous author had a less than perfect father and became a less than perfect husband and father? That he was a man who never truly found happiness and satisfaction? Perhaps, but to love and err is to be human and true contentment is a fragile and rare commodity that is often overlooked until much too late. Still, he was a father who was truly mourned and missed by his oldest daughter, a daughter who got it right and raised a family of five strong willed children in a close, loving, and stable environment. And he was a grandfather who showed a deep affection for his grandson and who took the time to watch over him, proving once again the universal truth that it is much easier to be a grandparent than a parent. But still, he was a man who did enough so that a grandson still fondly remembers him after forty years and is willing to bore an entire congregation in his memory. Overall, that's not so bad. Might we all have such an influence upon our grandchildren.

An address, "Fathers, Sons, and Grandsons: John P. Marquand," by Richard E. Welch III, delivered in the Meeting House of the First Unitarian Society (Unitarian Universalist), Newburyport, Massachusetts, February 17, 2002.
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Marquand, J. P. (1893-1960), American novelist, best known for his satiric depictions of well-to-do society in New England, specifically in Boston, Massachusetts. He is considered a novelist of manners in the tradition of Ellen Glasgow, Edith Wharton, James Gould Cozzens, and Sinclair Lewis, and he won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel The Late George Apley (1937).

Born John Phillips Marquand in Wilmington, Delaware, he lived most of his early years in New York City and Curzon's Mill, Massachusetts. After graduating in 1915 from Harvard University, where he studied chemistry, Marquand worked briefly for the Boston Transcript before serving in the United States Army from 1916 to 1917. In 1921 he began his literary career with the publication of a story in The Saturday Evening Post. By 1931 he had published 59 short stories and 5 serials in The Saturday Evening Post and other popular magazines. In No Hero (1935), published in serial form in The Saturday Evening Post, Marquand introduced his popular character Mr. Moto, a Japanese intelligence agent. Several other Mr. Moto novels appeared, including Thank You, Mr. Moto (1936), Think Fast, Mr. Moto (1937), Mr. Moto Is So Sorry (1938), and Last Laugh, Mr. Moto (1942).

The Late George Apley, a parody of biographers and the eminent men about whom they write, established Marquand's literary reputation. The novel satirizes Boston society and its traditions, as do Wickford Point (1939) and H. M. Pulham, Esquire (1941). Typically, Marquand's protagonists are businessmen, doctors, lawyers, and writers who are successful by upper-middle-class standards. He was especially adept in his characterization of aristocratic society, and a major theme of his work is the defeat of the individual by his class and society. Marquand's novels also include So Little Time (1943), B. F.'s Daughter (1946), Point of No Return (1949), Melville Goodwin, USA (1951), Sincerely, Willis Wayde (1955), and Women and Thomas Harrow (1958).

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John married Christina Sedgwick 1922. Christina died Unknown. [Group Sheet]

John married Adelaide Hooker 1936. Adelaide died Unknown. [Group Sheet]