The Late George Apley: Marquand's Critique of Boston WASP Elite

Introduction: Why Read About George Apley?

The title of John P. Marquand's novel The Late George Apley may at first seem unprepossessing. Why should a reader choose to open a book when it is already quite obvious what will happen at the end — namely, that the main character will die? Furthermore, the subject is not a famous person but a fairly undistinguished man, and the book promises little in the way of narrative excitement or suspense about his death or his life. According to the novel's opening pages, George Apley is a member of a well-known fictional Boston society family — at least within Marquand's created world. Apley is not a particularly prominent figure, either within the context of the book's fictional universe or in the real world of American history. So why should a non-Bostonian of a different class than Apley's take any interest in the man's life?

Marquand the author — as distinct from the fictional narrator who composes Apley's memoir — argues that it is not Apley himself who is especially fascinating, but rather what Apley represents: a bygone era of American urban life. The book highlights an important period in American history, when the nation was shifting toward a more urbanized, industrialized, and socially fluid identity. Although the ostensible author of the memoir boasts of his loyalty to the Apley family and presents himself as an editor of the lives of many prominent Bostonians, many of the details that Marquand actually selects constitute a subtle critique of Apley's social niche.

John P. Marquand wrote The Late George Apley in 1937. The novel is set in Boston and attempts to portray another age, when people like Apley formed a kind of American urban aristocracy with its own rigid manners, customs, and mores that seem foreign to readers today. George Apley was born in the nineteenth century and died "on the water side of Beacon Street," only a short distance from his birthplace, on December 13, 1933 (3). "I am the sort of man I am because my environment prevented my being anything else," Apley admitted near the end of his life (3).

Apley as a Product of His Environment

Apley, in other words, barely traveled outside the world into which he was born; he is a kind of hothouse product of his very cultivated environment. He lived in an age before mass transit made the world a smaller place, and — more importantly — before social mobility made America a more diverse and integrated community of many different classes and geographic origins. The voice of the narrator speaks of this past age with regret, while Marquand himself regards it with humor.

The narrative conceit of the book is that the author is reconstructing the life of George Apley through letters: letters Apley's father wrote to him while he was growing up, instructing him in how a proper Bostonian of a higher class should behave, and the letters Apley himself wrote to his own children for the same purpose. Apley's willingness to become a public figure after death stems from his son's desire to commemorate his father's life, despite their troubled relationship. But rather than commemorating Apley's existence, the text forces the reader to judge him — and to reflect, with some relief, on how much society has moved forward since Apley was born and died.

Family, Class, and the Roots of Insularity

Significantly, to discuss Apley, his biographer begins by writing about the man's family rather than about Apley himself. This forms the real beginning of the narrative and demonstrates how slow things are to change in Apley's world. Apley's Uncle William, for example, refuses to install modern plumbing or buy more than one suit per year and lives in a drafty house he could well afford to heat (10). Uncle William lives like a poor man on a point of principle. Apley's grandfather abandons his beloved stately home and his favorite section of Boston because he spotted a man in shirtsleeves, deciding that the riffraff were moving into his neighborhood (26).

Looking back on his own life early in the book, Apley's fondest memories are of the Harvard-Yale game, not his wedding (5). He expresses amazement that someone could sell cargo for three times its worth without being a Harvard Business School graduate, and he speaks dismissively of a man who succeeds in business despite having attended Harvard Law, because anyone could see that his "true proclivities" were beneath the legal profession (18; 21). For the elite members of the old-money Apley circle, actively striving to make money in business is viewed as lowering oneself and corrupting the family name.

Apley seems like a snob, and his main redeeming quality is that he eventually recognizes the limits of his environment and his emotional makeup. The novel raises a genuine question: is it possible to write an effective book about a character who changes very little and inhabits a world that changes equally little, even as the America outside Apley's social sphere is transformed, especially in the wake of the Great Depression? Apley and his social set remain essentially the same — as though he were born already "the late George Apley," committed to ensuring that the only public notice of his life would be his birth announcement and his obituary.

Yet the very existence of the book suggests a certain uniqueness, or at least a hint of societal change on the horizon: it is Apley's son who requests that his father's heritage and life be brought before the public. The son was a source of considerable consternation to his father during his lifetime — he married a divorced woman and, worse still, moved from Boston to New York City. Much of the novel's humor arises from the obvious distance between Apley's worldview and that of the modern reader.

Conclusion: Apley as a Portrait of Vanishing America

Although this is a moving statement, at times when reading the book it is hard not to wonder why the reader should care about a man committed not to changing things, but to keeping things the same. Apley says he was a victim of his environment — a victim of the pleasureless, aristocratic atmosphere in which he was raised. This sounds like a self-serving excuse, though it may also reflect the sensibility of our own era, which tends to see human life as full of possibilities rather than limitations.

Still, the story of Apley's life and death is a compelling introduction to turn-of-the-century America and its customs and cultural assumptions — regardless of whether the reader agrees with Apley that he had no choice but to obey the conventions of his parents and social equals. Marquand has written a novel that functions simultaneously as an affectionate elegy and a quiet indictment, and in that tension lies its lasting interest.

Works Cited

Marquand, John P. The Late George Apley. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2004.