The Late John Marquand by Stephen; Birmingham

join Professor Copeland’s “Tuesday Night Readings.” The first stirrings of literary ambitions were clearly being felt.He did well in his courses, including chemistry, and made several good friends. Among the residents at 7 Linden Street was James Bryant Conant, who would one day become Harvard’s president. From their fourth-floor rooms they would drop water bags on each other, and there were elaborate duels staged with brooms and pillows. Among the games the young men invented was something they called the Two-Drink Dash. To play it, each man left 7 Linden Street at a different time and, traveling by subway, went to a bar in Boston called the Holland Wine Company, had two quick drinks, and then made it home by the quickest route possible. The winner was the man who made the round trip in the fastest time. The game was made exciting by the fact that a variety of routes was available. Also, depending on the leniency of the bartender on duty, there was always the question of whether one might or might not be permitted to buy one’s two drinks because of the age limit.
    But once having cast himself in the role of Poor Social Outcast, John Marquand always played it to the hilt It was in keeping with his growing habit of viewing his own life novelistically. Years later, Marquand ran into two of his classmates, Robert Nathan, the writer, and Archibald Roosevelt, one of Teddy Roosevelt’s sons. The talk turned to Harvard days, and to all the bittersweet memories those days evoked.
    Robert Nathan complained that although he had been snubbed and ignored as an undergraduate, now that he was a successful author he was forever being asked to make a speech for Harvard, to give money to Harvard, or to write something for some Harvard cause. “Now it doesn’t seem to matter that I’m a Jew,” Nathan said. Marquand pointed out that his own situation was identical, and he even lacked Nathan’s excuse of being Jewish. “They would ask me where I had gone to school,” Marquand said, “and I would tell them Newburyport High, and a look of horror would pass over their faces. Now I get nothing but letters from classmates addressed ‘Dear Old Johnny,’ and asking me for such and such.”
    Archie Roosevelt smiled and said, “You fellows had it easy. Look at my situation. I was the son of a former President of the United States, perhaps the most famous figure of his time. I had gone to Groton. Do you think anyone paid any attention to me? I never made the Porcellian.”
    John Marquand used to tell this story with amusement. And yet, at the same time, it seemed to puzzle him. He had convinced himself that the fact of Newburyport High School—that and nothing else—had kept him out of Porcellian, A.D., or even the Spee. Newburyport High School had become, as it were, the plot device by which the best clubs had bypassed him. But, in Archie Roosevelt’s case, why? Novelistically, it made no sense at all.

Chapter Five
    Christina Sedgwick was a delicately beautiful blonde creature with slender legs and a tiny waist and an appealing, almost childlike manner. John Marquand met her in Cambridge shortly after his graduation from Harvard with the class of 1915. He had gone to work for the Boston Transcript as a cub reporter and was managing a meager existence on a salary of $15 a week. He fell hopelessly in love with her.
    Years later, after nearly thirteen years of a sometimes-happy-sometimes-not marriage and a bitter divorce, Marquand would romanticize Christina, turning her into an exotic fairy-tale heroine of perfect gentleness, goodness, and grace—into the kind of wife he felt he ought to have had, rather than the perplexing and complicated actuality that Christina Sedgwick was. She certainly had charm, and a dainty and winsome gaiety and humor that could be quite beguiling. But she also, having been brought up as a proper New England lady, was completely