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Last of the Old Guard

Many years ago the novelist Alison Lurie assured me that while there was an upper class in the United States, it played very little part in the lives of most Americans: that was why Louis Auchincloss (1917–2010), the prolific author of novels about New York’s WASP ascendancy, remained an acquired taste over there. Or as an American critic once put it, ‘For all its merits, [his work] is out of context today.’ What nonsense! growled Auchincloss’s distant kinsman, Gore Vidal, when I mentioned this to him shortly afterwards. The caste to which ‘cousin Louis’ belonged, and about which he wrote so perceptively, was still firmly in the saddle, so he was doing Americans a favour by showing how their rulers behaved ‘in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs’.

Eventually I met the writer himself in the appropriate setting of a lawyer’s office high above Wall Street. A tall, somewhat forbidding figure, he received me in his braces, behind a desk strewn with printouts of the trust funds he administered. ‘Have you read my book?’ he boomed, sounding rather like President Roosevelt (another distant cousin). Assuming he meant his latest novel I said ‘Yes’. But it soon transpired he was referring to his slim apologia, A Writer’s Capital (1974), unpublished in Britain and largely unheralded in the States. In this he explains how, against the odds, he managed to reconcile being born a writer and brought up to be a Wall Street lawyer.

Devoted though his comfortably off parents were, their example convinced him, from an early age, that whereas women led a cushy life at home, men were ‘doomed to go downtown and do dull, soulbreaking things to support their families’ (shades of the Forsytes). Seeing where his father worked, which he did one day as a small boy, gave him the creeps: ‘Never shall I forget the horror inspired in me by those dark narrow streets and those tall sooty towers . . .’ And yet Wa

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Many years ago the novelist Alison Lurie assured me that while there was an upper class in the United States, it played very little part in the lives of most Americans: that was why Louis Auchincloss (1917–2010), the prolific author of novels about New York’s WASP ascendancy, remained an acquired taste over there. Or as an American critic once put it, ‘For all its merits, [his work] is out of context today.’ What nonsense! growled Auchincloss’s distant kinsman, Gore Vidal, when I mentioned this to him shortly afterwards. The caste to which ‘cousin Louis’ belonged, and about which he wrote so perceptively, was still firmly in the saddle, so he was doing Americans a favour by showing how their rulers behaved ‘in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs’.

Eventually I met the writer himself in the appropriate setting of a lawyer’s office high above Wall Street. A tall, somewhat forbidding figure, he received me in his braces, behind a desk strewn with printouts of the trust funds he administered. ‘Have you read my book?’ he boomed, sounding rather like President Roosevelt (another distant cousin). Assuming he meant his latest novel I said ‘Yes’. But it soon transpired he was referring to his slim apologia, A Writer’s Capital (1974), unpublished in Britain and largely unheralded in the States. In this he explains how, against the odds, he managed to reconcile being born a writer and brought up to be a Wall Street lawyer. Devoted though his comfortably off parents were, their example convinced him, from an early age, that whereas women led a cushy life at home, men were ‘doomed to go downtown and do dull, soulbreaking things to support their families’ (shades of the Forsytes). Seeing where his father worked, which he did one day as a small boy, gave him the creeps: ‘Never shall I forget the horror inspired in me by those dark narrow streets and those tall sooty towers . . .’ And yet Wall Street, after four years in the US Navy, was where he ended up. Why? The short answer is his formidable mother, a serious, intelligent and cultivated woman who was nevertheless bound by the shibboleths of the ‘brownstone, bourgeois tribe’ to which she belonged. Put simply, she believed that for someone like him writing was well enough as a hobby, but unless you were another Tolstoy or Proust you needed a profession, because it was better to be a second-rate lawyer or doctor than a hack ‘writing romans à clef that only one’s friends bought and snickered at’. She had, Auchincloss insists, his best interests at heart and after three carefree years at Yale doing courses she considered ‘impractical’ and writing a first, unpublished novel, he submitted to the same yoke as his father and went to law school. To his surprise Auchincloss enjoyed studying law: ‘For what was a case but a short story? What was the law but language?’ He particularly enjoyed writing succinct summaries of cases called ‘decisions’, comparing their composition to that of a sonnet. Then, shortly after he’d qualified, America entered the war. Once again, he deferred to the tribal elders and answered the call. But conscious that he was the least belligerent of men – at school he’d been mocked as a sissy – he opted for a desk job in Naval Intelligence, only to invite the elders’ scorn for dodging the column. Eventually, after a dispiriting period shuffling papers around in the Panama Canal Zone, he went to sea as a deck officer aboard a slow and clumsy tank landing craft, taking part in the D-Day landings and the cross-Channel ferrying of matériel that followed. The nearest he came to death was when, loaded with ammunition, his vessel was hit by a bomb which failed to explode. It was not a heroic interlude, but at least he had ‘made the grade’. In Civvy Street he faced the same dilemma as before: how to serve two masters. He found the Law congenial, but the urge to write – ‘to make some sense of my experiences’ – was overwhelming. ‘Jack Kennedy told Harold Macmillan that if he didn’t have a woman every three days he’d get a headache. Writing’s a bit like that with me,’ he explained. Under pressure from his parents, who considered it ‘trivial and vulgar’, he published his second novel pseudonymously. But when he bit the bullet and decided to give up law and write fulltime they could not have been more supportive. Auchincloss doesn’t really account for this change of heart, but it was permanent. Even when he skated on thin ice with subversive novels like The Rector of Justin, The Embezzler and The House of Five Talents, they stuck by him. To Auchincloss’s surprise there was no improvement in his writing when he did it full-time, nor did he write more. Meanwhile a ‘brilliant’ analyst persuaded him to stop agonizing over whether he was a ‘lawyer’ or a ‘writer’ and simply follow his star, which meant doing whatever was appropriate at a given moment. So he began practising law again, specializing in trusts and estates, which dovetailed neatly with what he would later define as his task as a novelist: ‘I was perfectly clear from the beginning that I was interested in the story of money: how it was made, inherited, lost, spent.’ This was no way to make friends and influence people in the egalitarian republic of letters that then prevailed. At literary parties his social credentials meant that most people there refused to take him seriously and he could not believe his ears when, unprompted, Norman Mailer said he wouldn’t have minded writing a short story of his himself. But when, years later, Mailer confessed that he was amazed they got on so well given that they had nothing in common, he expostulated, ‘Nothing in common! Why, we live in the same silly place, go to the same silly parties and publish our wet dreams. Of course it’s true that I don’t marry quite so much.’ Mailer was not amused. Other people wondered how such a prolific writer could hold down a full-time job, to which he would patiently reply that as long as you weren’t under somebody else’s thumb – which, as a partner, he wasn’t – you could regulate your day: ‘I seem to have time to do the things I do.’ ‘There is’, observed S. J. Perelman, ‘such a thing as too much couth’, and even sympathetic critics have conceded that perhaps Louis Auchincloss’s stories are a little too polished, his characters a little too ‘tidily assembled’. But I think that, at a time when much American fiction was nasty, brutish and anything but short, his urbane cautionary tales made a refreshing change. Later, particularly after the death of his beloved wife Adele in 1991, his writing became increasingly elegiac. It was suggested that the title of his final novel, The Last of the Old Guard, would fit the author himself, who was quoted as saying that ‘the tragedy of American civilization is that it has swept away WASP morality and put nothing in its place’. Given that he could be trenchant as well as tender towards his subject matter, these lines of Auden’s might serve as an appropriate epitaph: ‘The class whose vices/He pilloried was his own/Now extinct, except/For lone survivors like him/Who remember its virtues.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 46 © Michael Barber 2015


About the contributor

Michael Barber is planning to write a book about Gore Vidal from an English perspective.

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