The Delaware-born, Harvard-educated writer John P. Marquand (1893-1960) was known for his short stories and serials in the Saturday Evening Post, especially those featuring a Japanese spy named Mr. Moto. In 1934 he began writing his novel about a Boston Brahmin’s life from 1866 to 1933. Its full title is The Late George Apley: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir, but it is framed as a kind of biography drawn from the man’s letters. George Apley’s son John commissions a family friend of the Apleys, a writer named Willing, to make something from a “surprisingly complete dossier of his father’s life” which contains those letters as well as a few speeches and other papers. This Willing, who knew Apley from high school and well beyond, provides commentary on the letters and organizes the story of Apley’s life into chapters with names like “The Boyhood Scene”, and “Solitude”. Willing is Marquand’s narrator, but most of The Late George Apley’s word count is accounted for by Apley’s correspondences. The novel was published in 1937 and in 1938 won the Pulitzer Prize.
The Late George Apley is a satire of its subject’s and supposed writer’s attitudes: Apley’s that “there must be a class which sets a tone” (his own), and Willing’s that the man ought to be defined as “an outstanding success not only in his Harvard class but in society”. Willing is reluctant to include certain letters which show in Apley inconsistency or excess passion, but the son has insisted that a truer, fuller account be given, for a result “more distinctive”. This means a life more clearly distinguished from others in Apley’s milieu, the once Puritan Harvard and Hillcrest set, which purports to influence Boston affairs not only through business and administration, but also through the lively means of social clubs and summer outings.
George Apley opposes all change in Boston. He fails to prevent any. The clubs once formed by associations between distinguished families become pay-to-play. An electric advertisement is placed over the Boston Common. The influence of the Irish and the labor unions grows. Boys and girls are freer with each other at the dances. His great project, taking on a blackmail scheme, finds him scandalized by a set up with a prostitute in a hotel room. As his son will write and he will halfway agree, Boston is to become “a backwater in which the greatest activity is the conserving of wealth and the raking of literary ash heaps”. Obviously that second phrase could be used to name Willing’s undertaking, or in some sense Marquand’s.
For the reader’s purposes, leaving aside all his ineffectual campaigning and principled stand-taking, George Apley is a writer (of all those letters, obviously). And he is more talented than his biographer, Willing, who forms sentences well but has little wit, or power of evocation. To start with wit, Apley takes to calling that electric advertisement “Our Badge of Shame”. He uses Kipling’s phrase “sisters under the skin” in a letter, but covers himself well, dismissing the man’s poems as “Kipling’s jingles”. Immigrant groups, the Irish most vituperatively, he calls "the hyphenated Americans”. In a letter to a school friend, recently married and now his brother-in-law, he regrets to say that his own wife won’t let him leave the house for a proposed expedition to Quebec, but he feels it “high time that we loosed ourselves for a little while from the apron strings which bind us.”
In his letters to the Boston Evening Transcript towards the end of 1918, which Willing credits for their “cogency and force”, Apley calls for the Allied forces to push all the way to Berlin. This effort, as with his more domestic concerns, is futile, though with the consolation of his eloquence, here the “war to end war upon the shell-pocked fields of Château-Thierry, St.-Mihiel, and in the shrapnel-swept thickets of the Argonne”. He is at his best in elegiac mode, whether for doomed youth or for his personal memories. In a letter to a friend he tries to conjure a wilderness retreat in Maine once shared by a few, now turned into a kind of summer camp: “the dripping water from a canoe paddle, the scent of balsam, the sweet smell of pond lilies and mud, the weariness of a long carry”.
There is this other kind of elegy not for something dead or absent but for things which have changed. Boston changes, as mentioned, but Apley, much as he is a quintessentially insular Boston type, can see that it goes as the world goes. The following is from a letter that urges his son John to fulfill one of his family obligations, those summer stays in the wilderness.
It seems to me that you and other young people whom I know are not as contented as I used to be at your age. I suppose it is because the world is moving faster. I was aware myself of this change when your mother and I gave up our carriage and began using an automobile.
One can call this eloquent for a certain simplicity, a quality only achieved when the writer risks sounding like a child with good grammar; automobiles are faster than carriages, but he is not being too literal. The humility is poetic, or at least poignant. “It seems to me”, “young people whom I know”, and “I suppose” can make even the crank’s fretting about the kids distinctive. He arrives at the same tone without equivocation after some comment on the behavior of the youth at a “coming-out party at the Somerset”. He is here ambivalent about his own approach to love when he was young, and wonders if he really has anything to teach: “At any rate, it all seems a little beyond me now. It is time for younger people to bother about these things. It is time for us to sit by the side of the road and to watch the parade go by.”
A later letter to John promises continuity but has a note of lament over change. George is enticing John back to Boston with the promise of cigars and a “touch of the old Madeira”. He writes that “There are still a few bottles in the cellar waiting for you, John, though I am afraid the increasing motor traffic on Beacon Street has shaken them a bit.” This is getting away from George Apley’s skill at the sentence level, and serves better as an example of Marquand’s skill in handling the theme of change in Boston, though it is necessarily Apley’s thematic skill too, if not just the result of his preoccupations. The theme is reiterated very often towards the end of The Late George Apley, as is Apley’s concern with the maintenance of his houses and gardens. Upon the birth of his grandson, George Apley will get some grand thoughts arranged in another letter to John. His world has been in decline, he feels. There is a new materialism, “material gratification of the senses”, Mammon, and everything comes too easily: heat, cold, money, romance, success. “We have all grown soft from this ease,” Apley writes. He’s not joking, but that overview of American life looks a little different when he concludes it all with this: “When everything is totaled up we have evolved a fine variety of flushing toilets but not a very good world, if you will excuse the coarseness of the simile.”
There is a comic episode in the novel, leading to a bit of Apley melodrama, from which Willing draws an imaginative comparison of his own. This is the talent which Marquand has apportioned largely to Apley; here it’s more refined and we learn that Willing has probably been holding a lot back. Apley’s wife finds in the Hillcrest home library a volume purchased from the George Washington library, unopened since then, and Apley finds in it a single human hair, which he sends to the Congressional library for investigation. The excitement leads Apley to write, “I feel as though everything for me had stopped.” Willing reassures us that Apley was very active in Boston society and business at the time, and that stopping really was only a feeling:
If Apley had said that everything had stopped, it was only because he was being carried evenly on the stream of life, experiencing that same motionless sensation which a canoeist feels upon a quiet stream, although the landscape is gliding by on either side. Now and then some feature of this landscape would surprise him.