Birthday: Louis Auchincloss, Gentleman Novelist

Louis Stanton Auchincloss (1917-2010)
Lawyer, novelist, historian, biographer
Member, Fellow and President, The American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Recipient, The National Medal of Arts

He was the son of a lawyer, a lawyer himself, and the father of another lawyer. His family was old New England WASP stock (Franklin Roosevelt was a third cousin; Jacqueline Kennedy, a cousin by marriage). He went to Groton, then Yale. When his college novel was rejected, he decided he needed a real trade, and went to law school, graduating in time to serve in World War II; he saw action at Normandy and in the Pacific.

Demobbed, Auchincloss returned to Sullivan & Cromwell, took three years off to try writing again, and then joined another white-shoe Manhattan firm. He spent 32 years there, retiring as head of the wills and trusts department and scribbling bits of his next book waiting for cases to be called at court, and at nights and weekends. This, he told The Paris Review in 1994, made it possible to write 67 books over the next half-century:

LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
Writing all those books never seemed to be such a trick, though I certainly don’t think I could do it today with the law firms’ enormous emphasis on hours and clocked time. I did have an estate practice, where the clients were usually dead, which is a help, for they couldn’t always be pushing you.  

INTERVIEWER
And therefore didn’t mind . . .  

AUCHINCLOSS
They didn’t mind, but of course the heirs did, but then they weren’t the clients. 

Auchincloss developed a critical reputation as a profiler of his own world, a la Edith Wharton, Henry James, and William Dean Howells in earlier times; and akin to John P. Marquand, John Cheever and John O’Hara in his own. O’Hara, who had nursed slights and resentments like children, didn’t think much of the comparison. George Plimpton wrote of it,

Back in 1960, when Auchincloss pointed out that O’Hara’s “strange, angry world” was actually the old-fashioned novel of manners in disguise, O’Hara took exception. In his best crusty style he wrote: “I can best reply by pointing out the fact that you obviously have read all my novels, and I have not read any of yours. I don’t know anything about your importance as a lawyer, but in my league you are still a batboy, and forty-three is pretty old for a batboy.” Auchincloss didn’t let the matter drop. Every time a critic linked the two (which was often), he clipped the review or article and mailed it to O’Hara with the signature, “The Batboy.”

The 1960s was Auchincloss’ heyday. His 1964 novel, The Rector of Justin, profiled the headmaster of a New England prep school,and remains his best-regarded work:

That was coming for a long time. I spent six years in school at Groton in Massachusetts, and I always knew I was going to write something about the New England preparatory schools. It was universally believed that I took Endicott Peabody of Groton as my model, but I didn’t. I read biographies of all the famous headmasters of his era, a considerable number of bad books. But they did have a lot in common. From them I was able to put my character together. Physically, I modeled him on Judge Learned Hand, whom I knew very well and strongly admired. I put a lot of Hand’s sayings into the book. I even gave him three daughters, which he had, like King Lear; Judge Hand used to say, I can’t remember which daughter told me this, Goneril or Regan. Yet the only reader who spotted him was Archibald MacLeish, who asked me, Why doesn’t everybody see that you’ve got Judge Hand in that novel? I replied, Because he’s a headmaster. If you wrote a novel about Abraham Lincoln and made him a dentist, you could have him recite the Gettysburg Address and nobody would pick it up. 

The Peabody family and Groton was, appropriately for the time, horrified, but nothing like the family of the late Richard Whitney, of the Whitney Museum family, who, despite having been President of the New York Stock Exchange, stole money and became the basis for Auchincloss’ 1966 novel, The Embezzler.

Auchincloss was the insider novelist when it came to the manners and morals of the WASP class, then at the apogee of their American power and prestige in what Henry Luce called “The American Century.” But the decline had already set in, and, though The Rector of Justin was nominated for a Pulitzer and a National Book Award, Auchincloss lost the the former to Shirley Ann Grau and the latter to Saul Bellow. The literary taste of Americans was moving downmarket, to middle and lower-class protagonists.

But Auchincloss was right to insist that the world itself had not changed that much; he maintained the WASPs had not gone extinct: they had simply “lost their monopoly.” His 1986 novel Diary of a Yuppie, captured the yellow tie and suspenders world of the Reagan Eighties. The corrupting capacities of money was always there in his books, and his world view; as the Internet bubble burst, he said, “When Martha Stewart comes out of jail, everybody will greet her with kisses and love”. President George W. Bush awarded him the National Medal of Arts.

In his obituary, the New York Times noted,

Even near the end of his life, Mr. Auchincloss said the influence of his class had not waned. “I grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in a nouveau riche world, where money was spent wildly, and I’m still living in one!,” he told The Financial Times in 2007. “The private schools are all jammed with long waiting lists; the clubs — all the old clubs — are jammed with long waiting lists today; the harbors are clogged with yachts; there has never been a more material society than the one we live in today.” 

“Where is this ‘vanished world’ they talk about?” he asked. “I don’t think the critics have looked out the window!”

Louis Auchincloss published his last novel at the age of ninety; its title was The Last of the Old Guard. He died three years later.