Point of No Return

Book review: An analysis of Anglo-America.  In all cases, emphasis added.

Let us consider the author John Marquand, who concentrated on America’s Anglo-American elites, particularly the “Yankee” New England stock.

Marquand's life and work reflected his ambivalence about American society — and, in particular, the power of its old-line elites. Being rebuffed by fashionable Harvard did not discourage his social aspirations…

…In the late 1930s, Marquand began producing a series of novels on the dilemmas of class. Most centered on New England, and some were at least partially set in Clyde, Massachusetts, a fictional seaside community based strongly on Marquand's Newburyport. The first of these novels, 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 Newburyport…

…For all of his ambivalence about America's elite, Marquand ultimately succeeded not only in joining it, but in embodying its characteristics. He forgave the upper crust classmates who had snubbed him in college…

Of particular interest is Point of No Return, which I have read:

Raised in the small town of Clyde, Massachusetts, Charles Gray has worked long and hard to become a vice president at the privately owned Stuyvesant Bank in Manhattan. But at the most crucial moment of his career, when his focus should be on reading his boss’s intentions and competing with his chief rival for promotion, Charles finds himself hopelessly distracted by the past.

Years ago, the Gray family was featured in a sociological study of their hometown. Charles, his sister, and their parents were classified as members of the “lower-upper class,” the unspoken strains of their tenuous social status cast in stark black and white. A chance encounter with the author of the study fills Charles’s head with memories—and when a business matter compels him to return to Clyde, it seems as if fate is intent on turning back the clock. As he reflects on the defining moments of his youth, Charles contends with one of the central mysteries of existence: how our lives can feel both predetermined and random at the same time.

Published in 1949, Point of No Return is a brilliant study of character and place heralded by the New York Times as “further proof that its author is one of the most important living American novelists.”

There is a little bit of Sallis’ Law in this 1949 book; as the WASP protagonist and his wife come home from a country club (inhabited by equally insouciant co-ethnics), he says to his wife (who visited a (“Italian”) shoe shop during the day): “I wonder why Italians always like to repair shoes.”  This is of course completely superfluous to the plot, a bit of WASP contempt for White ethnics thrown in. Whether that is reflective of the author, or if the author is trying to tell us something about his book’s characters, I do not know.  But, again, superfluous to the plot, but interesting as a focus on White ethnic immigrants and children of immigrants trying to make a living as small business craftsmen, while Jews were stealing America away from its founding stock.  Later in the book there is another completely superfluous Sallis’ Law comment, this one about “Sicilian peasants” “hiding women.”  It is quite remarkable that all of the crazed sweaty obsessive fetishism about Italians that we observe in today’s “movement” was already present in embryonic form in a popular 1949 novel.  Again I stress how completely superfluous those comments were to the storyline, unless it was the author’s intention to demonstrate how America’s WASP elite considered White ethnics to be like insects to be contemptuously examined and ridiculed. 

One particularly pompous character in the book was disdainful of those in the town who were not of the “good Yankee stock,” as he put it, and was horrified by how the crude behaviors of the White ethnic Morlocks affected those of the Eloi females. This same person also had class prejudices against his own co-ethnics; thus, his refusal to allow his WASP daughter to marry the “lower-class” (but still upper middle class) WASP protagonist of the book was a defining moment in the life of the latter. Remember, at this time, the Jews were conquering America and today, such an individual would smile benignly as his daughter came home with a brutal Negro.  

Further, the pompous character disparaged “stock market money” as being inferior to “inherited wealth.” Now, as the story line overlaps the stock market crash of 1929, apologists in Der Movement would attempt to retroactively justify the pompous fool’s comments (that were made before the crash, when the market was booming) but that isn’t the point, is it?  He wasn’t criticizing “stock market money” because he thought such investments were unsafe, oh no. After all, he also looked down upon upwardly mobile newly rich neighbors who earned their monies by inventions and/or ownership or productive companies.  The problem with “stock market money” was that it was “crass” and “uncouth” and “undignified” as opposed to the stately dignity of inherited wealth.  That’s why the newly rich created by productive hard work were also looked down upon (even when they were his co-ethnics) – they were crude grasping plebeians, not aristocratic patricians like himself.  When the book’s protagonist, the immediate target of this snobbery, justifiably pointed out that every family had to start somewhere, suggesting that at one point the pompous fool’s own family had to start somewhere, had to be at one time upwardly mobile grasping plebes generating the wealth that now bestowed patrician status, those reasonable comments fell on deaf ears. The pompous fool “had his” and all that’s mattered, who cares about the right or wrong of it?   In addition, the protagonist's wealthy WASP boss also has the same disdain for people who have become rich "the wrong way,"  Thus, he complains about his exclusive community being tainted by people uncouthly earning money through advertising or skin cream business - we certainly can't have that!

No doubt “movement” “traditionalists” and Anglomaniac worshippers of America’s WASP Yankee elites will defend and celebrate this aristocratic disdain for grasping upward mobility and “stock market money,” but, alas, groups like the Jews had no such compunctions or prejudices.  No, money was money, and money was power, and if that money and power was produced by the crudest grasping behavior, so be it.  Stock market?  Criminal activity?  Moneylending? Hollywood?  Peddling? Business ownership?  Sweat shops? Nothing was disdained, nothing was rejected.  With the money and the consequent power came the conquest of America (aided by the brainwashing of the goyim aided by such “crude” moneymaking enterprises like the movie industry, and, later, television) and the dispossession of WASPs who looked down on such lowbrow merchants and fast-talking conmen.  It didn’t matter though, and eventually the WASPs were forced to work with the Jews, as their junior partners, in an alliance to suppress the upward mobility of the White ethnics, a remaining threat that could still be constrained as the Jews were not.  The WASPs were not going to make the same mistake twice; they may have had to settle for second place behind the Jews, but they weren’t going to let upstart White ethnics erode WASP power and prestige (whatever was left of it) any further. If that meant alliances – and in some cases even inter-marriage – with Jews, so be it.  Better to salvage something of patrician exclusiveness, regardless of how degenerate, than show second place with Italians whose parents “worked with shoes” or were “needle workers” or whose parents were “raw Slavs” from Chicago’s slaughterhouses. Holding one’s nose to mingle with Jewish Wall Streeters and Hollywood movie moguls was bad enough, but to deal with hard-working craftsmen and first generation middle-class professionals who came from Europe’s South and East?  Impossible!  Even the Northwest European Irish Catholics were held at arm’s length; even the “lace curtain Irish” were looked down upon.  But – Italians and Slavs?  Greeks and Hungarians?  What?  Are you mad?

In summary, the WASPs were narrowly focused on the epiphenomena of their elitism (and attitudes of contemptuous superiority toward White ethnics) without properly focusing on the actual levels of power, which was seized from the WASPs by the Jews. Instead, WASPs thought that keeping Jews out of country clubs accomplished something useful; instead, that behavior did nothing but embitter Jews and make them more dedicated to their program of vengeance. So, the dispossessed WASPs became junior partners to their new masters, the Jews, and together they waged war against White ethnics. Particularly given the Jewish conquest of America and political dispossession of the founding stock (well underway in 1949), this book is not a flattering portrait of America’s “Yankee” WASP elite

In general, the navel-gazing ethnocultural self-absorption of the book is quite remarkable, but that may be the point. The Wikipedia summary of the book asserts that one of the book’s characters – an academic who did a study of the social structure of a New England town (the home town of the book’s WASP protagonist) - was a parody of real-life academic W. Lloyd Warner who performed similar scholarly activities.  And author Marquand also specialized in these sorts of social critiques in his books, so in a sense the book is a self-mockery of the author’s own obsessions. In any case, the ethnic self-absorption is still remarkable.

Read this for additional context.

[Spoiler alert]

The story line itself was a bit dull and certainly anti-climactic. The protagonist Charles Gray experiences some tragedy. His older brother dies in WWI. His feckless, dithering, procrastinating, romantic dreamer of a father loses all of his money in the 1929 stock market crash and commits suicide, which is covered up.  Charles Gray gives away his own savings to his family, pretending that this money was his father's money (as if it was never lost) and now cannot marry his WASP princess girlfriend (with whom he has had a passionate relationship) - her father, the pompous fool described above, being against the relationship (for class reasons) in the first place. Chuck then goes away, gets a good bank job in NYC, becomes successful, marries another WASP, has children, and is in the running for promotion to be VP of the bank (this is the current day "stress" of the story) after returning from WWII (he had volunteered despite being ~ 40 years old and with children).  He now needs to go back to his small home town on business.  Now, here is where the book goes off the rails - you would expect, as some sort of dramatic climax, that he has a "showdown" with his ex-girlfriend.  But, no.  He visits his best friend from his boyhood - an anxious, hyper-grasping, small town mini-success and finds out that this "inferior man" is now engaged to the former WASP princess. You see, she had been pining away for Chuck for years, but now, middle aged and desperate, she has given up and has fallen in with the grasping friend - her pompous father now too old and demented to object. The friend tells Charles that this old girlfriend is anxious to see Charles - she knows he is back in town - but Chuck refuses.  And that's that.  Perhaps that anti-climax is more realistic; I don't know. He then goes back home and is invited, with his wife, to his boss' elegant mansion for "supper."  From the conversation he believes that he is going to be told that he has lost the promotion to a colleague - another anxious grasping type obviously modeled after his boyhood friend - but instead finds out that he has gotten the promotion, which makes him feel "dull and tired" and not what he "dreamed." Apparently, Chuck is dissatisfied with his rat-race life, and perhaps secretly dreams of having made a life with his former WASP princess, but, no, poor Chuck must "make do" with a successful business career, a helpful wife, and two well-adjusted children. Oh, the agony!  The end.

Apparently then, the entire objective of the book was to dissect "Yankee" WASP culture, since there really wasn't much of an interesting story there at all.