H.M. Pulham, Esq.

by John P. Marquand

Harry Pulham tells his story while he is preparing for his 25th Harvard reunion. Through him Marquand reveals lives of quiet desperation lived by successful people with the "right" background. A deft dissection of the Ivy League milieu and an absorbing read.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literature, Novels, Classics, American

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1942

About the author

Pulitzer Prize for Novel in 1938 for The Late George Apley

John Phillips Marquand (November 10, 1893 – July 16, 1960) was an American writer. Originally best known for his Mr. Moto spy stories, he achieved popular success and critical respect for his satirical novels, winning a Pulitzer Prize for The Late George Apley in 1938. One of his abiding themes was the confining nature of life in America's upper class and among those who aspired to join it. Marquand treated those whose lives were bound by these unwritten codes with a characteristic mix of respect and satire.

By the mid-1930s he was a prolific and successful writer of fiction for slick magazines like the Saturday Evening Post. Some of these short stories were of an historical nature as had been Marquand's first two novels (The Unspeakable Gentleman and The Black Cargo). These would later be characterized by Marquand as “costume fiction”, of which he stated that an author “can only approximate (his characters) provided he has been steeped in the (relevant) tradition”. Marquand had abandoned “costume fiction” by the mid-1930s.

In the late-1930s, Marquand began producing a series of novels on the dilemmas of class, most centered on New England. The first of these, The Late George Apley (1937), a satire of Boston's upper class, won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1938. Other Marquand novels exploring New England and class themes include Wickford Point (1939), H.M. Pulham, Esquire (1941), and Point of No Return (1949). The last is especially notable for its satirical portrayal of Harvard anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner, whose Yankee City study attempted (and in Marquand's view, dismally failed) to describe and analyze the manners and mores of Marquand's Newburyport

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this primarily because former Washington Post book editor Jonathan Yardley once said that J.P. Marquand's neglect by literary critics in recent decades was the most outrageous omission of the century.

Based on this subtle, sad book, I can very well see his point. Henry Pulham grew up in the old Boston society where everything you were and did and became followed a template laid down by an old boys' club. After going to St. Swithin's and then Harvard, Harry enlists in World War I, where -- unlike most of his contemporaries, including the fatuous former Harvard quarterback, Bo-Jo Brown -- he actually saw combat duty and went through a horrific experience being trapped with his troops in no man's land.

When Harry comes back from the war, he is restless, and suddenly his staid and settled world, the Boston winter home, the Maine summer home, the Harvard reunions, the tennis and squash and comfortable sinecures in conservative banking companies, is something he doesn't want to face.

With the help of sardonic Harvard classmate Bill King, who did not grow up in the monied families of Boston, Harry works for awhile in a New York advertising agency (think just pre-Mad Men), and there he meets the first woman he falls in love with, Marvin Myles, who is sophisticated, hard working, ambitious and much too flashy for his Boston crowd.

When his father suddenly becomes ill, Harry must return to Boston, and that leads to a break with Marvin, who has no intention of competing in his insular society, and it throws him into a found-each-other relationship with old acquaintance Kay Motford, who has recently broken off her engagement with his former college roommate.

At this point I'll let you see how the story develops, but even though the plot kept me engaged, the really masterful work Marquand does is to show how Harry is always unsettled by the world he inhabits, knowing somehow that he was made for better things, and yet another part of his personality just as strongly feels he could not live anywhere else, and he judges people by their class and backgrounds even though he is a decent and open hearted man.

What this will lead to, you will have to discover. It was enough to convince me that Yardley is right: Marquand should not be so neglected, and I will re-enter his kingdom again in the future.

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marquand stresses in his preface that the reader will focus more on the characters than on the plot. There is no doubt that this is a character-driven novel. The problem I had is that it is told in the first person. I wanted to better understand this title character and that might have been better in the third person. I could have learned what the other characters thought about Harry Pulham, for instance, and the reader is denied this additional perspective.

But then, the "world" in which his life is lived is so different than anything I have ever experienced. It was the world of those rich enough where servants were a matter of course and private education - not public - was the norm. The book opens when Pulham's classmates convene to discuss their Harvard 25th Class Reunion. The next 300 pages are Pulham remembering his early life, before we return to the year leading up to the reunion itself.

When I left Westwood one September afternoon, home grew smaller and faded into the clouds, like the land when you leave for Europe. After that I was always going away and always coming back, but whenever I came back part of me did not belong there.

and 100 pages later

All at once I felt like a stranger, or as though I had never really known my family. It must have been because their interests were no longer the same as mine. I did not even seem to care whether my friends were interested in me or not. In some way we were all like people speaking different languages.

This is a novel that builds upon itself so that while the early pages made me wonder if I could even warm to it, it was definitely good enough to keep with it and got better the deeper I read. Still, the early parts were weak enough that I can't bring myself to give it 4 stars and it sits toward the top of the 3-star list. I'll be happy to give Marquand another try with his earlier book and Pulitzer winner The Late George Apley.

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since my early twenties, when I first discovered this book, I've re-read it probably every ten years. For me it's classic Marquand, both lampooning and acknowledging the early 20th century eastern blue blood traits of which he was also a part (probably to his everlasting chagrin). It's a story of humble self-reflection and an acknowledgment that one never quite measures up to the lofty standards that one might have at one point hoped to achieve.

Harry Pulham comes across as clueless and naive, which of course in matters of love he absolutely is. But he's also earnest and honest; which earns him a pattern of guilty affection from his wife, Kay, and what amounts to be the same from his so-called best friend, Bill. It's his one true love, the illogically-named Marvin Myles, who is the only person who ever really understands Harry. That she becomes unattainable is what makes Harry a noble if still somewhat of a tragic figure.

[Sunhawk · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating book from another era. If Marquand were writing now, the comedy of manners would be *SO* different, but for me at least, the echoes of classism at Harvard, and the strangeness of the inbred Boston society, are embedded in my memory. Oh, so happy! to have returned to California, but not at all sad of my five years in Cambridge as an outsider.
The sense of dread that every reader must feel, when our hero, too kind and memory-bound for his own good, seems blissfully to ignore what's going on with his wife and best friend as the story nears its end, is subtler than anything written after, say, 1960 I've read. The characterization of his (emphasis on:) class-mates mystified me in 1966, and resonates in the book for me today. I will definitely explore Marquand more deeply.

[Chris Gager · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seems like I read this in prep school. The memory of that experience seems pretty dim, however.

[Tad Richards · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like to go back and read books that nobody much is reading any more, to see what we're missing, and to see what insights I can get into an earlier time. This one delivered all of that. Marquand was a skilled writer -- too facile to have much depth, some said, but there's nothing wrong with being a skilled craftsman, and the insights into character and into an age are real.

We know about the life-altering changes that World War I wrought by reading novels like The Sun Also Rises and The Razor's Edge -- characters for whom the world was changed utterly, so that they could never go back. Harry Pulham's life is changed by the war, but subtly, and he does go back. He's been changed -- he is the only one of his group of upper class Bostonian prep school and Harvard men wh0 actually sees combat. But the pressure is on him by family, friends, classmates, social circle, all of whom have been insulated from change, to come back into their insular world.

H. M. Pulham, Esq. takes Harry beyond the aftermath of the war, through the Twenties and Thirties, up to the 30th anniversary of his Harvard class. It actually asks some of the same questions I asked of my updated Hemingway and Fitzgerald characters in my ( Tad Richards) novel (with Jonathan Richards) Nick and Jake: how do the changes wrought by a devastating event morph into the changes wrought by time?

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a remarkable book that starts out slowly, but that picks up as Harry recounts his coming of age in and after WW I, then through the 1920s. Much of the dialog may seem stilted from the 2022 perspective, but I read this 1941 novel because my father mentions it in his letters from the Philippines during WW II, and to see it from his perspective -- a contemporary one -- gives it a different spin. This is a tale of class and caste, the Northeast, Ivy League classes and inside society, which was both a model and an exclusive, privileged club that ran the country and yet resisted efforts by leaders who made a difference. If you want to know how anyone could resist helping European Jews in WW II, this novel shows you the clanish mentality that made that attitude possible.

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marquand is a master of the subtle social satire, at least if the setting is upper class Boston. Pulham is a kind, honorable man who expects the same from those around him. He is never disappointed since he refuses to see anything different in his family or those he considers friends. Externally his looks to be a sad, or at least, bittersweet life; but I believe Harry Pulham is mostly satisfied--which is perhaps the saddest thing of all of this novel.

[Mervyn E · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have been on a JP Marquand kick and this is the third novel by him I have read and also my least favorite. Just because Mr. Putnam is living a dull life, does the book have to dull also? Page after page of dithering and repetitious daily activity minutely described can become a bit numbing. Perhaps that is the intent of the author, but it doesn’t make for a very interesting reading.

[Sophie · Rating 1 out of 5]

The only reason I stayed with this book for as long as I did is because I actually bought it. Ugh. What a waste of time and money. I didn't care about the characters or the story, nor do I understand why anyone wants to read a book that takes such a negative view of humanity. Did not finish.

[Don · Rating 3 out of 5]

The main character/narrator is a classic "WASP", born and raised in Boston and environs, summering in Maine, Harvard grad. He's a solid, reliable man, totally conventional, with the exception of a brief period after World War I where he worked in advertising in New York and fell in love with a woman outside his social circle.

My problem with the novel is that the character is too conventional and thus quite boring. He's also clueless. The descriptions I've read of the novel all call it a satire. But while it's clearly intended to draw a negative portrait of the social milieu in which the main character grew up and lives as an adult, I'm really not seeing much in the way of humor in it.

[Jo Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very much enjoyed this rather sad, character driven story. Harry Pulham is sweet, pathetic and a bit of a snob but very endearing and wants to do what is right and what is expected of him in early 1900s Boston society. Marquand does a wonderful job of showing the reader that society. I had not read him before, but I will read more of his novels.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this years ago because Marquand was among my grandfather's favorite authors and this his favorite among Marquand's works. He passed away before I was born but was a bit of a writer/poet and a prolific reader in addition to his business interests. The books he left behind provide some idea of what kind of man he was outside of his professional life, which unfortunately dominates the memories of those who knew him.

I didn't think much of the book, felt like a sociological enquiry into ennui inflicted WASPs (Cheever et al do something similar but better), but may check out the film as I'm reading Gaddis' letters now and Gaddis thought highly of the film ("don't miss it").

[Ben Velderman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good story, well-told. But I've got to say, Kay is a bit of a pill.

[John Musgrove · Rating 1 out of 5]

Could not finish. 140 pages in and I have no idea what is going on. Dull and dated.

[Belinda · Rating 2 out of 5]

That was the dullest most pointless book I have read in a long time.

[Nik Hallworth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Salinger-esque. Not a period of American history, or viewpoint, you see much of. Long, but fairly interesting. I liked it, but not essential reading.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my second Marquand, and while "The Late George Apley" seems a stronger book, this one is also well worth reading and I found it to my surprise pretty much of a page-turner. He writes about Boston brahmins in the first half of the 20th Century, both with affection and respect but also an incisive depiction of their limitations. An excellent writer, he "shows, not tells" what they are like. Any judgments are thus the reader's alone.

"Pulham" takes place in the decade before World War II, though since Henry is born in 1892 and you get his whole life story, there are flashbacks which go back to the early 1900's. The meticulous detail makes this a kind of social history which I found fascinating. Certainly, the world view of this social class continued with little change until the early 1960's, which is when my own life intersects with it.

It's fascinating how these privileged people take their lives for granted. Pulham's family has an estate with stables in Brookline, a house in town and a summer house on the Coast of Maine. They live surrounded by antiques, original art, family silver, and many servants. (At one point, someone says of another family: "They only had one maid!"). They are oblivious to how unusual this is, since their social world is hermetically sealed. ("We were a perfectly normal family," Henry says at one point). While marriages are not arranged per se, they choose from a constricted social set in which most choices are probably acceptable. They have all known each other (and only each other) forever. Surprisingly, the novel depicts almost no racism or anti-Semitism, though these attitudes were (and are) undoubtedly typical of this particular elite.

All the men central to the story are Harvard alumni. They have enormous pride in themselves and their school, but Marquand's story makes it clear they are a dull bunch. Their lives consist of continuing the status quo (as Henry's dad says, "I can't recall ever wanting things to change"), working, raising families and a very active social life albeit within their narrow set. It's fascinating that they neither think nor read. ("None of us read much," Pulham says early in the book, and adds later that "Books look nice."). Everyone shares the same attitudes about politics and society.

This would seem to not make much of a story, I know. But there are strong redeeming factors. (1) Henry works hard at being a decent human being, and one comes to feel for him, "You know I'm awfully dull," he says, but somehow I found him more earnest and a bit sad than actually dull. (2) Two characters contrast dramatically with the brahmin mold. One, Bill King, a Harvard classmate, is an iconoclast and makes a career out of the new field, advertising, when everyone else seems to be in finance. The other, Marvin Myles, works with Bill and Henry in New York advertising agency. That they live differently makes Pulham a more poignant character by contrast.

Most of all, this book is about love and finding one's place in the world, which makes it of universal significance. It is not easy to go beyond "measuring one's life in coffee spoons" (T S Eliot, I think), but the vision is there and the question is whether these people can reach for deeper emotional fulfillment. Several people try, and that makes for good reading.

No, they are not us, and for some readers, they may just seem objectionable. But to me, this is a fascinating depiction of a particular society, and as interesting as novels, say, set in contemporary India.

I really enjoyed this book, so why not five stars? Well, the dialogues when the Harvard guys are together are pretty lame. Bo-Jo Jones in particular is a caricature rather than a character. The flashbacks were also occasionally disruptive. And finally, Marvin Myles is not as far from appropriate as would have been best to show the tensions between upper crust Boston and an earthy alternative. But despite these reservations, Marquand is a first-rate writer and this is a book worth reading.

[Bayneeta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this character centered novel as Pulham prepares for his 25th Harvard reunion and reflects back on his life. Pulham is sweet and steadfast, but also naive and a bit pathetic. I found him a very sympathetic character. Marquand's dialogue is excellent. This was my first Marquand book, but it will not be my last.

[Traci · Rating 5 out of 5]

Told in the first person by Harry Pulham, upon approaching his 25th reunion from Harvard. Harry was brought up in wealth, with servants, attending prep schools, raised by nannies, the country club, yacht club, etc. He does serve in WW1, he returns and bucks all convention and works in New York, with a good friend, Bill King, who graduated from Harvard with him, but did not grow up in his wealthy circle. He falls in love with marvin Myles, a woman at the office. But they realize that they can never be together. He moves home after his father dies, and marries Kay, a woman he's known all of his life. Kay may be having an affair with Bill, and Harry reconnects with Marvin, but only for dinner. They realize that though they both think of the other, they can never get back what they had. Harry goes back to accepting that he is living the only life he was born to live. Wether it is right or not.

Written very simply, but very engrossing. 430 pages, but a quick read. Sometimes I could not put it down.

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another of Marquand's fine novels about a lost world, penetrating with an affectionately welded scalpel the lives, loves, and agonies of the north-eastern US WASP upper classes and their difficulties adapting to changing times. World Wars, Depressions, prohibition and advertising, wild music, and the loss of standards and more throw confusion into their lives, yet somehow most of them endure and survive, even as the soil under their feet feels like quicksand. It makes the reader look back wistfully on a world in which the stiff upper lip must always hide the emotional torment of the moment. It's hard for us today to realize that there was a time when people could say, "but you just don't do that kind of thing!" and mean it.

This is an exquisitely written novel that should last just as the novels of Jane Austen have lasted: to show us in perfect, colorful detail how some people once lived. It's also a good story, both romantic and dramatic and very nearly tragic--except that tragedy would be excessive and in bad taste.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This mid-century novel was probably less unusual when it was written than it will seem to readers today. I found its style and story both interesting and refreshing. The protagonist prepares for his 25 th college reunion and faces reflections on his family, friends, social status and work.

I was intrigued by the innocence if the middle-aged title character and his quiet acceptance of both who he is and how other others behave. As the book progresses and the story matures, I became very invested in the title character's understanding of who he was and how he approaches his work, his friends and his family.

This is a fairly sophisticated look at who we are and where we belong, and whether it is right to struggle to change that.
I am a great fan of Mr. bridges and Mrs. bridges., written roughly in the same period, and this book has the same feeling and will give the reader the same kind of exposure to society in mid- century America.

I am grateful to Netgalley for a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book, read it with real interest. As a character study and a study of a certain society, it falls far short of The Late George Apley. If you want Marquand on Boston, read Apley first by all means. People who like Apley, btw, should also read The Rector of Justin.

[Nancy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I started this book -- I'll have to get back to it at some point but the library due date came and I didn't feel the need to renew. I know it's a classic, so I will give it another try. If anyone's read it, let me know if I should make the effort!

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another absorbing Marquand novel. Usual cast of Boston WASPs pursuing what is aptly described as "lives of quiet desperation." Detailed chronicle of upper-class life from the turn of the century to shortly before WWII

[Lauren Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spoilers


I liked the book better in the first half. At the end the affair was so obvious, it was painful. It just didn't seem like anyone would be as naive as Pulham but maybe I'm thinking from now instead of then?

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

I READ 150 PAGES AND HATED EVERY ONE OF THEM. I HAVE NO INTEREST IN ANY OF THE CHARACTERS OR ANY OF THE THINGS GOING ON IN THEIR MINDS OR LIVES. BOOOOOOOORING

[Peer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book reads like an old friend. Maybe I should give it five stars.

[PB · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superbly withering critique on the emptiness of the conformist life, with satire dropped in by the right amounts at the right times.