Louis Auchincloss, 1917-2010

Or in a Louis Auchincloss story, she might have added. The Manhattan lawyer Auchincloss, now eighty-five years old, has described in dozens of novels the world of New York’s old money and the lives of those who possess it. These people leave the Upper East Side only to visit a private archipelago of prep schools and yacht clubs. Certain of his characters harp monomaniacally on the subject of family (“It was still important that I was not a Thorn; I was a Seward. Mother, of course, had been a Thorn . . .”), are apt to distinguish between a town’s “principal citizens” and its “smaller folk,” and slam down the portcullis against any contact with modern tawdriness (“Gary had his first experience with lower-class American adult males, and they did not impress him”). Auchincloss has been viewed as beyond parody and beneath literary criticism. His novels are consigned to the ethnic-fiction hell inhabited by books with titles like “In My Mother’s Kitchen in Guatemala”–and to the ninth circle of that hell, for the elitism, crassness, and exclusivity that are his own ethnic group’s most harped-on historical failing.

But to dismiss Auchincloss this way is to underestimate an important novelist of the last half century. Auchincloss is not a cheerleader for his class but a patient unraveler of problems that are far from class-specific. Moneyed barbarian jollity in the world of the Social Register is his books’ backdrop, not their subject. To be sure, there is plenty of precisely rendered period detail, from history (McClellan’s supporters in the 1864 elections tended to think Lincoln was too soft on the South), manners (Victorian women living alone were not supposed even to own sofas), and language (Gilded Age men dining without their wives were said to be en garcon). But to focus on Auchincloss’s Merchant-Ivory side is to reveal one’s own shallowness, not his.

Auchincloss’s subject is not just the decline and fall of the American WASP elite. It is also the moral failings that sped that fall, and the culture in which its moral failings were embedded. In an afterword to “The Rector of Justin” (1964), Auchincloss wrote: “I had become convinced that the central problem in all New England Protestant church schools . . . was the conflict between the piety and idealism of their inspirers and the crass materialism of the families from which they drew not only their students but their endowments.” WASP culture, that is, collapsed for having accentuated the Anglo-Saxon and eliminated the Protestant. But this is not merely a preppy problem. It is the preppy form of an American problem. Observers from Tocqueville to Schumpeter have seen it as the key American problem: the risk that a society will wind up demoralized and undermined by the very dynamism to which it owes its success.

Each of the ten stories in “Manhattan Monologues” is in the first person. Each reflects its narrator’s obsession with an incident or situation that takes on a metaphysical significance, as if the “Spoon River Anthology” were set on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Dropping Emerson’s name as if he’d just left the cocktail party, alluding to the Ring Cycle as familiarly as to a sitcom, the characters here can sound anachronistic–but they are not. Auchincloss reveres the past, but he does not barricade it against modern consciousness and concerns (as many self-proclaimed modernists do, by setting their fiction in either the academy or the Third World).

If anything, he errs in the opposite direction. While the stories here span the last century–three are set in the Gilded Age, four between the wars, and three “nearer today”–one often feels that contemporary preoccupations are being projected back onto mid-twentieth-century characters. In “The Justice Clerk,” set in the 1930s, a young lawyer working for a Supreme Court justice loses his graduate-student wife to radical politics: “Her courses, all in modern history and economics, had brought her as close to the law as she could get. She was inclined to see it as a tool for the disadvantaged, as a substitute, perhaps, for riots or, indeed, for revolution.” In “The Merger,” set in 1970, the heir to a family electronics business is forced to sell it when his brother-in-law–a trust-fund yachtsman with “a large store of unused brains and energy”–decides he likes the attention he gets for denouncing the company’s factory conditions in Guatemala. And the stories of the present day are wholly of the present day: In “The Treacherous Age,” a rich and successful interior designer writes, for a psychiatrist, the narrative of her marriage, in which it is apparent to everyone but the narrator herself that her husband has turned–or has always been–gay.

Auchincloss’s narrators are frequently unreliable. They don’t know what’s pushing them. It’s often sex, of which Auchincloss takes a Freudian view. In “He Knew He Was Right” (Auchincloss is a Trollope fan), a recently divorced New York banker deposits with his lawyer an autobiographical document that he wants his nine- and ten-year-old sons to read when they reach adulthood, “that they may understand . . . that their father was not the moral monster that their mother and her kin have depicted.” He then details a career of conscienceless sexual predation that finds its weirdest expression in his enlisting of his mother as a confidante after each of his conquests. (This Freudian bent, present in most of Auchincloss’s fiction, would have been adduced twenty years ago to prove Auchincloss hipper than he seemed; today it seems the most fogeyish element in his work.)

THE WORLD Auchincloss describes is one in which every prerogative is owed to age–not out of filial piety or a sense of tradition, but because the elderly tend to have a stranglehold on family capital. A favorite Auchincloss theme is the way those whose lives are already behind them reach out to poison all the sexual, intellectual, idealistic, and even ethical promise of youth–to poison anything inconsistent with dynasty-formation, the moral order, or the moneyed person’s whims, which grow increasingly hard to distinguish.

The “moral order” is a society designed to kill off individualism through mob rituals: team sports, school spirit, organized boozing. This is a social glue in two senses: It makes the society cohere, and it traps its members like bugs on flypaper. Where it works, it establishes an easygoing egalitarianism–few are too dim-witted to embrace what Auchincloss calls “the god of football.” Hence Auchincloss’s interest in prep schools, which are religious institutions in theory but in practice spawning grounds for business blockheads. Hence his fascination with those who fail or quail at the Teddy Rooseveltian rituals of manliness: the homosexual and the homosexually inclined, the 4-Fs during World War II, those who limp from childhood polio, the literary kid “caught in the library during our match with Chelton.”

Trouble arises when people try to break away from the flock–usually looking for sex or money, but sometimes for religion or mere autonomy. Individuals are less often ostracized or crushed than warped. Nosy blabbermouths are all over Auchincloss’s fiction, blighting every life they touch. So are those who undermine their best friends with sadistic ridicule, usually to bully them out of their money or their mates. So are sterile wits, hangers-on like the sneering Miles Constable in the story “The Heiress,” whom wealthy Manhattanites seek “in every capacity but that of son-in-law.”

But there is a form of WASP revolt that incites Auchincloss’s interest, and perhaps his admiration, more than any other: the spontaneous uprearing of an atavistic Puritanism. In “The Scarlet Letters,” the longest of the stories under review, the lawyer Rodman Jessup, cuckolded by a satyriac liar he took for his best friend, decides to take the blame on himself in order to protect his father-in-law’s illusions about his daughter: “Arnold Dillard must never have an inkling of what his daughter and Harry were up to,” he thinks. “The disillusionment might otherwise cause Dillard to lose faith in what his whole life had stood for.”

This is not the only instance in modern fiction of a man feigning fault in order to exonerate a straying spouse–one uncle in Mordecai Richler’s “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” starts a rumor that he’s impotent in order to excuse his wife’s philandering. But Rod Jessup is a more extreme character. He is willing to go to the grave having the entire world blame him for something he didn’t do. So is Arthur Slocum, in Auchincloss’s story “Collaboration.” An American expatriate in France who aids the Resistance while his wife collaborates with the Nazis, Slocum protects her after the war by assuming guilt for her crimes.

SUCH DEEDS will strike most modern readers as psychologically unrealistic and dramatically cheap. Yet Auchincloss’s fiction is full of them–and of people whose morality is wholly internal, based on what he calls elsewhere “the selflessness that comes from an absolute knowledge that the praise or scorn of the world is a total irrelevance.” When Rodman Jessup finds the diary in which his wife describes every one of the recherche sex acts she’s performed with his ex-friend, he is struck, more powerfully than by anything else, by the sense that he would like to do the same kind of thing. So his lack of self-pity, his “hint of a fanatic’s strength,” is not stoicism. It is a belief in something like Original Sin. Man, many of Auchincloss’s characters believe, is born so evil that there is no such thing as a cosmic wrong. Grant this–that Auchincloss’s whinnying cocktail-sippers are also souls in torment–and his fiction becomes not just more serious but also more plausible. As headmaster Frank Prescott puts it in “The Rector of Justin,” “I sometimes think it would be impossible for any of us to suffer injustice.”

To ask whether Auchincloss really believes in Original Sin–or merely invokes it to dramatic effect–is to ask a sociological question. Do Cotton Mather’s Protestants still exist? Do Henry Adams’s? They might. WASPs have a hard time figuring this out themselves. “I had observed my parents’ world critically and assessed its value–accurately, I think,” says Livingston Van Rensselaer Schuyler’s daughter. “It still had some of the old trimmings of its former high status, . . . a goodly number were richer than their parents had been. What happened to them was simply that they lost their monopoly.” So it doesn’t defy logic to suppose that Auchincloss’s WASPs may have declined in national importance and lost their public virtue, while remaining, in certain private instances, the same people one would have met a hundred years ago. Perhaps that’s why they are so fascinating. Inside their old-money equivalent of a gaeltacht, a minority culture is implausibly kept alive, in such a way that outsiders can never be sure whether the minority is self-consciously self-preserving or sincerely backward.

Auchincloss has a French novelist’s mind–a fondness for aphorism, speculation, generalization–but an English sense of how novels are built. In his best work, a charming hybrid voice results, and there are signs of that voice in “Manhattan Monologues.” But the writing here is uneven. It can move from apercus to cliches in the space of a short paragraph. (“It was odd how little it took to sunder our marriage. I supposed that was because so little had gone into putting it together. When Nora was through with a man, she tossed him away like a used Kleenex.”) The wit is sometimes stilted and forced (“How did Descartes put it: Je depense, donc je suis?”). At times the book reads like a series of character sketches for an ambitious multi-generational novel of decline.

STILL, it is the ambition of Auchincloss’s project that must be stressed. The difference between the type of fiction he writes and that of many of his contemporaries lies in his willingness to explore how and why people get locked into the gearworks of society–which is to say that he is writing real fiction and the bulk of his contemporaries are not. The story of what happens in one character’s head is not a novel. The novel is a social form; it necessarily involves resistance or conformity to the wills of others. In too many modern novels, this tension between conformity and resistance happens offstage–largely because conveying it believably is the hardest part of writing novels. Auchincloss’s fiction, by contrast, propels people of conscience through a complex society in which to do the right thing is often to step into a baited social trap. His corner of society is not the whole of society. But it is representative enough–and taking it for his subject has stretched his gifts rather than masked his deficiencies.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.