Louis Auchincloss at 100

When Louis Auchincloss died on January 26, 2010, the event was overshadowed by the death of J.D. Salinger the following day. Two such diverse novelists it is difficult to imagine—one famed for a single sensationally seminal book; the other the author of some thirty works of refined and lofty fiction. Auchincloss, whose centenary fell on September 27 this year, would not only have expected to be eclipsed; he would have welcomed the timing. It was that patrician preference for a discreet exit.

Auchincloss was arguably America’s pre-eminent novelist of manners and, at his death, probably its most distinguished man of letters. Admirers made a claim for the mantles of Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling; others considered he was closer to William Dean Howells. As a champion of Edith Wharton (his grandmother summered with her at Newport) and an admirer of Henry James, his milieu was comfortably confined to the world he knew—the Waspish world of Old New York and New England. Critics tended to dismiss him as a quaint anachronism. Auchincloss himself said, “The fact that I was a Wall Street lawyer, a registered Republican, and a social registrite was quite enough for half the people at any one party to cross me off as a kind of duckbill platypus not to be taken seriously.” And he was fascinated but rarely dazzled by this world he portrayed.

According to Gore Vidal, his friend and sometime step-cousin (both Jacqueline Onassis’s and Vidal’s mothers wed Louis’s cousin, Hugh (Hughdie) Auchincloss II), “Of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs.” To charges of living in and writing of a vanished world, he said in his memoir, A Writer’s Capital (1974), that he “grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in a nouveau riche world where money was spent wildly and I’m still living in one … There has never been a more material world than the one we live in today. Where is this ‘vanished world’ they talk about? I don’t think the critics have looked out the window.” “The Wasps,” he would say, “haven’t waned. They’ve lost their monopoly.”

Auchincloss’s recurring lament was not really for a vanished world but the disappearance of a sense of shame: “The tragedy of American civilisation is that it has swept away WASP morality and put nothing in its place.” Comparisons with Henry James were inevitable. James was, to Auchincloss, “the great American writer of all time”, and this is reflected in his collected essays, Reflections of a Jacobite (1961). And yet Auchincloss’s familiarity with the world of Wall Street bankers and brokers and his analysis of their ethics were something that James would have envied.

Louis Stanton Auchincloss was descended from Hugh Auchincloss, who arrived from Paisley in 1803 to establish his family’s dry goods store in New York. Louis was born on September 27, 1917, in Lawrence, Long Island, the third of four children of Howland Auchincloss, a Wall Street lawyer, and Priscilla Dixon Stanton. His mother’s family story would appear in his novel Portrait in Brownstone in 1962 and his father’s in East Side Story in 2004. As Vidal put it, the family has “become extraordinarily distinguished for no discernible reason … For idle hypergamy and relentless fecundity there has not been a family like them since those much less attractive Mittel-Europa realtors, the Hapsburgs.” Louis claimed the family made or married their own money. In any case, by the time of his birth, the Auchinclosses had “position”.

As “Cousin” Gore quipped, “He had the bad luck, for a writer, to come from a happy family.” Scarcely affected by the Depression, the family moved from a brownstone on East Ninety-First Street to 1185 Park Avenue and then to 66 East Seventy-Ninth Street. Young Louis had a miserable time at Groton preparatory school before proceeding to Yale, where, intent on being a writer, he read English. Stung by the rejection of his first novel, he decided to join his father’s profession and left Yale for Virginia Law School. He was happy there in Charlottesville and, inspired by the stylish opinions of the great Justice Benjamin Cardozo, he decided that a life of law and letters was possible. He began a second novel. On graduating in 1941 he joined the Wall Street firm Sullivan & Cromwell as a clerk. In 1942 he enlisted in the Navy and served in the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Caribbean.

His third novel, Indifferent Children, was published in 1947 under the name of Andrew Lee to soothe his formidable mother. After the war, he rejoined his firm, specialising in trusts and estates; a field as rich as crime for a budding novelist. When the firm’s managing partner, John Foster Dulles, was accused of running a sweatshop he remarked, “On the contrary, I understand the associates all write novels.”

While contemporaries feared they might not be made partners, Auchincloss was terrified he might. In 1951 he left the law to pursue his writing. He then underwent two and a half years of psychoanalysis, which benefited him, and his writing. A Law for the Lion was written during this time, the Times reviewing it as “an intelligent and pointed study, which now and then is very amusing”. He returned to Wall Street in 1954 and would spend another thirty-two years there, having discovered he did not need so much time to write.

In 1957 he married Adele Lawrence, related to the Vanderbilts, Sloanes and Burdens and so, a woman of his world. When her father took her fiancé to lunch at the Yale Club, he warned Louis that, “with the Vanderbilts, the money had departed but the tastes had remained”. Louis and Adele were as dissimilar as they were compatible and produced three sons, two of whom followed their forefathers into the law.

For a time Auchincloss would meet Norman Mailer and Herman Wouk at the bohemian White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village. Years later, according to the New Yorker’s Larissa MacFarquhar (in an absorbing Life and Letters piece in 2008), Mailer wondered why—as they had “nothing in common”. Auchincloss shot back (not so convincingly), “Nothing in common! We live in the same silly island, publish our wet dreams, and go to the same silly parties—and have for years! It would take a mother’s eye to tell the difference between us. Of course, it is true that I don’t marry quite so much.”

He won acclaim, and a Pulitzer nomination, for his ninth novel, The Rector of Justin (1964). Grotonians were outraged at what they saw as an attack on their founder, Dr Endicott Peabody. Peabody was so forbidding that after he visited his former student Franklin Roosevelt in the White House, the President admitted, “You know, I’m still scared of him.” Auchincloss saw the suggestion of this taking from life as an attack on his imagination and claimed that his Rev’d Francis Prescott was merely characteristic of the great generation of New England headmasters, one of whom was Peabody. An influence he admitted to for Prescott was the great, but complicated, jurist, Justice Learned Hand, whom he idolised. Louis would return to prep school in his penultimate novel The Headmaster’s Dilemma (2007). The Embezzler followed The Rector in 1966 and also provoked the ire of his circle as the Whitneys identified Richard Whitney, President of the New York Stock Exchange, jailed for misappropriation in the 1930s. But mother liked it.

In The Education of Oscar Fairfax (1995), he drew again on his own experience—a young aspiring well-born writer who abandons literature to join his father’s law firm. Reviewing the novel for the TLS, Sylvia Brownrigg wrote:

There is an emptiness at the heart of the novel, which can be traced to a moral emptiness in the heart of the narrator. From such a highly bred and ostensibly principled man, the reader expects virtue; but virtue for this man is impeccable manners … Once this steeliness in Oscar becomes apparent, it is easier to become impatient with the novel’s spoiled subjects. Auchincloss does provide a detailed and often compelling description of their world, but on the whole they remain a narrow, self-satisfied bunch.

Other critics, like the New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani, were more trenchant: “Like the shiny parquet floors of their apartment houses, Mr Auchincloss’s people are just a little too finely polished; a little too tidily assembled.”

Auchincloss had a particular flair and facility for short stories. The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss were published in 1994 and another five collections subsequently appeared. His early collection The Romantic Egoists (1954) had been well received. Powers of Attorney (1963) and Tales of Manhattan (1967) were placed among the most influential collections of American legal fiction. He also wrote more than twenty volumes of non-fiction—biographies of Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, and, as an abiding Francophile, studies of Richelieu, the Proustian L’Abbé Mugnier, and, rather appropriately, le Duc de St Simon. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that Auchincloss did for his world what St Simon had done for Versailles.

By 1980, with his novel The House of the Prophet, he had moved to, and would remain, at the political centre. He observed, “I used to say to my father, ‘If my class at Yale ran this country, we would have no problems.’ And the irony of my life is that they did.”

He was never indolent but there was a nonchalance about his attitude to the law and to his writing. He did not take his writing too seriously, sending his books off to his publisher with little fuss. He might have agreed with a bad review. As a lawyer, he was never one to attract or chase clients. In fact after the two senior partners to him died, his department was running at a loss. But the firm did come to bask at least a little in his literary fame. As his biographer Carol Gelderman (2007) wrote, “In 1986 [the year he retired], the New Yorker ran a cartoon that pictured the door of a law firm listing the not-quite-readable names of partners, below which was the caption, ‘A Louis Auchincloss-type firm’.”

He lived long enough to be feted. In 2000 he was named a “Living Landmark” by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. In 2005 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts and was president of the Museum of the City of New York and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Rather suitably his sixty-fifth, and last, book, a novel, was entitled Last of the Old Guard (2008), sealing his status as the chronicler of the patrician conscience.

A fascinating episode occurred a year before his death, where, for one last time, his life and art appeared to collude. In April 2009 Auchincloss took the stand as a prosecution witness—that magnificent Auchincloss nose aloft, elegant, precise, and in his high-pitched Brahmin accent—in the trial of Anthony Marshall, the son of Brooke Astor, his old friend of sixty years, and her estate lawyer, charged with conspiracy to defraud the grande dame. It could have been a scene from one of his novels and it confirmed that the world of his fiction had not quite disappeared.

As Professor Gelderman put it, in recording the breakup of the Old Order’s monolithic control, Louis Auchincloss brought Edith Wharton’s New York up to date: “His work gives a more complete account of America, a story, after all, of money and its resultant power, or as Gore Vidal has written, ‘the real protagonist of America’.”