Louis Auchincloss
Gelderman, Carol
j ohn O'Hara was a strange and angry soul, and when Louis Auchincloss allowed as much, he occasioned this reply from the fat man: "I don't know anything about your importance as a lawyer, but in my...
...The essence of the genteel man is his unflappability, as everyone knows, and as critics began frequently comparing the two writers, Auchincloss would send O'Hara the clippings, not forgetting to sign them: "Bat-boy...
...L ouis Auchincloss: A Writer's Life is a work of fandom, not criticism, beginning with the first sentence: "Louis Auchincloss has written a handful of books that rank among the best in American literature...
...The Richard Whitney scandal, he notes, was the product of an ethic now unknown on Wall Street: His crime just rocked society...
...that is, saying everything that came to his mind...
...she was one of his many cousins...
...Few families of the Social Register have seen one of their issue infiltrate the vulgar ranks of the best-seller lists, and none could have been more chagrined than the family of Louis Auchincloss...
...He quit his first Wall Street job to write full-time, only to end up in psychoanalysis and then back on Wall Street for good...
...Auchincloss had hit the ground running...
...His mother, a domineering and protective woman of refined literary sensibility, thought the book "trivial and vulgar," and implored him to use a pseudonym...
...Auchincloss is our Lampedusa of the brownstones, and as such has occasionally aroused disgust from the critics...
...Indeed, the WASPs of whom he writes are in every sense a tight-lipped bunch, and Auchincloss has often horrified them with unflinching descriptions of their inner lives...
...And in fondly reminiscing about country weekends spent with the German Jews with whom he first worked as an attorney, he remarks with giveaway WASPishness that, for all their cultivation and aesthetic refinement, they "rather scanted the cocktail hour...
...His best book, The Rector of Justin (1964), lost the Pulitzer to a now-forgotten novel about miscegenation...
...j ohn O'Hara was a strange and angry soul, and when Louis Auchincloss allowed as much, he occasioned this reply from the fat man: "I don't know anything about your importance as a lawyer, but in my league you are still a bat-boy, and forty-three is pretty old for a bat-boy...
...This is a preposterous claim...
...More than a few in the Groton community went into a tizzy over The Rector of Justin, and members of the Whitney family tried to dissuade him from publishing The Embezzler (1966), a novel that draws heavily on the case of Richard Whitney...
...But no member of Auchincloss's circle was more consistent in demanding alterations in his work over questions of propriety than his mother, to whom he routinely showed manuscripts for approval...
...To this the dutiful son acquiesced, and the publication of Andrew Lee's The Indifferent Children (1947) began a career that has spanned twenty-two novels and some thirteen story collections...
...Whitney, five-time president of the New York Stock Exchange, went to prison for misappropriating funds from, among other places, the Stock Exchange Gratuity Fund and the treasury of the New York Yacht Club...
...Gelderman is loath to address the writer's shortcomings—some of the novels are terrible—or the possible origins of Auchincloss's work in his conflicted maternal relationship...
...But except for the early 1960s, when he enjoyed a vogue on the best-seller lists and was a serious candidate for themajor prizes, Auchincloss has been largely neglected...
...His father was appalled when young Auchincloss decided to publish the first novel, fearing it would destroy his son's career as a Wall Street attorney...
...Rather, he has been slighted because of his choice of subject matter, which is the WASP class in American life...
...Not all writers require biographies, and Auchincloss's life, apart from his fiction, does not reward scrutiny overmuch...
...As a bachelor, Auchincloss maintained much-commented-on friendships with older women, and then married a woman fourteen years his junior...
...Many of his friends wouldn't speak to him until his dying day...
...He has been called "anachronistic," "claustrophobic and rigid," and, of course, "not fashionable...
...I can believe the upper class is human," steamed a writer in the New York Review of Books in 1972, "'but fiction seems the wrong medium for the privileged life, which belongs, if anywhere, in the spreads in Country Life or The New York Times society page...
...They felt he had let them down...
...As Gore Vidal (himself a former Auchincloss in-law) wrote in 1974, "Such is the vastness of our society and the remoteness of academics and book-chatterers from actual power that those who should be most in this writer's debt have no idea what a useful service he renders us by revealing and, in some ways, by betraying his class...
...But Cabell's work evokes vividly an era now passed, and Auchincloss's prolific life's work will no doubt do the same for generations yet to come...
...In his "second" career as a novelist, he has never transcended the conventionality of the second-rate...
...only the disingenuous could claim he belongs next to Hemingway or Hawthorne or even Howells...
...But even if this is the stuff of a truly interesting writer's life, let it be said at once that Gelderman's is not that life...
...The reason is not just the author' s uneven output, for worse writers have often fared better at the novelist hustle...
...Of Henry James he rightly remarks that what he "never learned was how to make his characters reveal themselves in dialogue...
...The Injustice Collectors (1950), his next book (published under his real name), brought extravagant praise from Walter Lippmann and Evelyn Waugh...
...Yet Gelderman fails to rise above the level of see-Dick-in-analysis: "[Auchincloss] lay on a couch, yielding himself up to free association...
...Whether or not a writer's relationship with his mother is the scrim through which his work should be read, Auchincloss's mother saw his very insistence on writing about the clandestine corridors of WASP life as what he called a betrayal of "allegiance within the citadel...
...Nowadays, you commit a crime and you write a book about it...
...There was Groton, Yale, University of Virginia law school, service in the war, Wall Street...
...Few achieve even that much...
...The best moments in the book are the novelist's own reflections—on his achievements and those of other writers, and on the downward spiral of the WASP class that has spanned his life and times...
...Auchincloss's work is as close as we have to an encyclopedia of the lives of the upper class in twentieth-century flux...
...The genteel gentiles, in Vidal's phrase, are not apt to return soon to literary favor, and one has a difficult time resisting the conclusion that Auchincloss will end up a modern-day James Branch Cabe11, a stuffed moose-head in a dusty and forgotten corner of American letters...
...Regardless of the merits of his recent work, the adulatory tone is especially ill-suited to a gentleman of the old WASP class, and I should imagine the novelist—now in his seventy-sixth year and with another story collection forthcoming—would be a bit embarrassed by it all...
...He finally desisted upon the request of O'Hara's wife, who nabbed Louis at a family reunion...
...Even so, his apostasy was genuine: to this day, he rues the use of the pseudonym...
Vol. 26 • April 1993 • No. 4
