New Babbitt

SINCERELY, WILLIS WAYDE (511 pp.)--John P. Marquand-- Little, Brown ($3.95).

When Willis Wayde was a young man, his father had a serious talk with him. "Willis," said the old man, "you keep on trying to be something you aren't, and you'll end up a son of a bitch . . . A lot of people do before they know it, son." Willis Wayde does, before he knows it.

The typical Marquand hero is usually caught in the middle-classic double play: Ford to Buick to Cadillac. But where The Late George Apley had a lot of endearing old charms and H. M. Pulham, Esq. wore his stuffiness with a certain dignity, Willis Wayde comes closer to being a thorough s.o.b. than any previous Marquand hero.

He is a kind of Babbitt, but without old George F.'s fundamental decency and guilelessness. The U.S. has become quite fond of the Babbitt who read Edgar Guest, but a pseudo-sophisticated Babbitt who reads The New Yorker is almost unforgivable.

Shades of Uriah Heep. Not that it is all Willis Wayde's fault. When he first arrives at Clyde, Mass, from Denver, he is a likable youngster. But he is quickly made to feel that he and his parents are nomads from the great American desert west of Boston. His father, a brilliant, roving engineer, works at the Harcourt Mill. The Harcourts are a fine old feudal Yankee clan, and they soon inspire young Willis with the desire to be something he is not. He imitates their manners and their games, even buys (secondhand) their kind of clothes. But he can never really relax with them--not even when he takes to the woods with Bess Harcourt, the boss's beautiful, blonde granddaughter.

Willis Wayde's fiber proves much tougher than the thinning Harcourt strain, and Bess would like to love him--but how can she really love this solemn youngster who reminds her of Uriah Heep? She drops him for a gentleman who plays good tennis and wears the right kind of white ducks. At that point, a chilling transformation begins in Willis. Slowly his eagerness turns to cold ambition, his good manners into a calculating weapon, his yen to be like the Harcourts into an unconscious drive to destroy them.

All this happens casually, pleasantly, without a crack in the customary Marquand mood. Willis Wayde's minor monstrosities, which outweigh his major villainies, sneak up on the unsuspecting reader, as they sneak up on Willis' unsuspecting wife--a professor's charming daughter named Sylvia. Willis turns out to be the kind of man who pops out of bed of a morning and drops to the floor to do 20 pushups, religiously devotes 15 minutes a day to the Five-Foot Shelf of Harvard Classics, and methodically sprinkles wheat germ in his orange juice. On their honeymoon, he and Sylvia scarcely sit down to a cozy little dinner when he drags her table-hopping to meet a business idol of his, stifling Sylvia's protests with the reminder that it never hurts, as Willis always puts it, to "sweeten a contact." As he zooms along to corporate heights, Willis Wayde seems like the prototype for David Riesman's "other-directed" personality. He assiduously collects antiques, not because he really likes to, but because he finds it a useful conversational ploy in his business dealings. He poses in front of mirrors to see if his tailored clothes hang with just that offhand casualness that will give him an edge in a stockholders' meeting.

Emily Postscripts. Inevitably, the day comes when Willis Wayde's growing firm takes over the Harcourt Mill in a merger.

Willis expansively feels that he is doing Clyde and the Harcourts a big favor, but before novel's end he guillotines the town's economy and rubs out the last traces of his first friendships and loyalties.

Willis has an infinite capacity for sentimental self-deception. He can persuade himself that his mean dealings are really high-minded, that his sales-convention humor is funny, that his cliche-laden speeches are profound. He has the most dreadfully patronizing mannerisms that ever drove a wife (or a reader) to fury, and even when he tries to be tender, he just manages an Emily Postscript. "I wish you'd kiss me, dear," says Sylvia. "Why, certainly," replies Willis. "It will be a pleasure, honey." Yet just as Sylvia puts up with him, so in the end does the reader. For Author Marquand manages a highly skillful double-switch with the reader's emotions. Early in the book, he smoothly turns the nice youngster into a glossy horror; later on he turns the horror into a rather sad character who compels sympathy. Novelist Marquand's plot may sag at points, but the caricature of his hero is fascinating, down to the last page, when wise and forbearing Sylvia tucks in her husband with a kiss and a Nembutal. Perhaps the most pathetic thing about Willis Wayde is that, in his own peculiar way, he believes in what he is doing, is sincere even in the dreadful, calculating little social-business notes he always signs: Sincerely, Willis Wayde.

If, like Babbitt, this figure should become a word in the English language, a Wayde will denote a man whose tragedy is lack of roots, whose sin is trying to be something fre is not.

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