What We Read in the Fifties: Women and Thomas Harrow

Women and Thomas Harrow was John P. Marquand's last novel. It was published in 1958; Marquand (born in 1893) died in 1960. It's another good but not great book. Despite the witty surface, it's very sad. Thomas Harrow (clearly a surrogate for Marquand himself) is a successful but not brilliant playwright; in the course of the novel, he comes to realize that he's squandered his talent and made a mess of his personal relationships. The last line of Women and Thomas Harrow: "In the end, no matter how many were in the car, you always drove alone." 

I'm still trying to figure out why my father thought so well of the novels of John Phillips Marquand. For one thing, Pop was clearly in tune with the author's relentless anti-modernism. In form, Marquand's novels are Victorian. There's no experimentation, nothing unusual or original in content or presentation. Moreover, in all the novels, not a landscape but has been destroyed, not a custom but has deteriorated, not a value but has been compromised. The modern world in Marquand's view has become too subject to analysis, too Freudified. Sometimes Harrow employs, with some resistance, the exact words that I heard without irony from my father's mouth: "No one could escape from convention for long....  It was advisable to accept the mores of one's time, no matter if they shifted. It was better to be in tune... with the beat of marching music."  No dancing to a different drummer either in Marquand or in my father.

Comments

[Frank Allen]

For my own part, I am glad to say that during the reading of "Women and Thomas Harrow" my vocabulary improved by almost 100%

[J.T. Walker]

I read and enjoyed "Women and Thomas Harrow" in my youth, not aware of "modernist" v. "Victorian" world views. Now, in my advanced years, I understand perfectly his thought that "no one could escape from convention too long...". Do I agree with it 100%? I'd have to think long and hard about that but I do know that there is a hell of a lot of truth to that statement.