Louis Auchincloss, Chronicler of New York's Upper Crust, Dies at 92
Matthew Kruk
Louis Auchincloss, Chronicler of New York's Upper Crust, Dies at 92 By
HOLCOMB B. NOBLE
Louis Auchincloss, a Wall Street lawyer from a prominent New York family
who became a widely read author of dozens of books that plumbed the
world of Manhattan's old-money elite, died Tuesday night in Manhattan.
He was 92.
The cause was complications of a stroke, his son Andrew said. Mr.
Auchincloss lived in Manhattan.
Although he also wrote distinguished short stories, criticism and social
history, Mr. Auchincloss (pronounced AW-kin-kloss) was mainly regarded
as one of America's pre-eminent novelists of manners and a portraitist
of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant upper crust.
"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," Gore Vidal once wrote. "Yet such is the vastness of our
society and the remoteness of academics and book chatters 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."
Mr. Vidal added, "Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much
to tell us about the role of money in our lives."
Admirers like Mr. Vidal portrayed Mr. Auchincloss as the lonely keeper
of a flame who upheld the moral visions, writing techniques and acute
social observations of William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton
and J. P. Marquand.
Others felt differently. Michiko Kakutani, writing in The New York
Times, evoked many of the criticisms of Mr. Auchincloss's work in her
review of the 1984 novel "The Book Class."
"As usual," Ms. Kakutani wrote, "Mr. Auchincloss delineates the manners
and mores of this self-made, American aristocracy with glossy, efficient
prose, garnished with a pinch of irony and a dab of melodrama."
She added: "But while he is adept enough at portraying the effects of a
rarefied milieu on character, his narrative lacks a necessary density
and texture. 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."
"Class prejudice" was Mr. Auchincloss's response to his critics. "That
business of objecting to the subject material or the people that an
author writes about is purely class prejudice, and you will note that it
always disappears with an author's death," he said in an interview in
1997. "Nobody holds it against Henry James or Edith Wharton or Thackeray
or Marcel Proust."
Louis Stanton Auchincloss was born in Lawrence, on Long Island, on Sept.
27, 1917, into an upper-crust clan of Auchinclosses, Dixons, Howlands
and Stantons. Since 1803, when Hugh Auchincloss left Paisley, Scotland,
to establish a New York branch of the family dry goods business, the
families all lived in Manhattan - all with money, all with high social
positions.
Louis was the third of four children of Priscilla Stanton and Joseph
Howland Auchincloss, who was a third cousin of Franklin D. Roosevelt and
a Wall Street lawyer like his father before him. Louis grew up in an
world of town houses, summer homes on Long Island and Bar Harbor, Me.,
private clubs and servants, debutante parties and travel abroad.
Yet, as a child, he thought of himself as neither rich nor aristocratic.
"Like most children of affluence," he said in his 1974 autobiography, "A
Writer's Capital," I grew up with a distinct sense that my parents were
only tolerably well off. This is because children always compare their
families with wealthier ones, never with poorer. I thought I knew
perfectly well what it meant to be rich in New York. If you were rich,
you lived in a house with a pompous beaux-arts facade and kept a butler
and gave children's parties with spun sugar on the ice cream and little
cups of real silver as game prices. If you were not rich you lived in a
brownstone with Irish maids who never called you Master Louis and
parents who hollered up and down the stairs instead of ringing bells."
He attended the Bovee School on Fifth Avenue and in 1929 entered the
Groton School in Connecticut. Unathletic and unpopular, he found Groton
a hard place at first with its punishments, its cold New England
weather, its compulsory cold showers and its emphasis on sports.
Gradually, he earned his place.
His first short stories were published in the school magazine, The
Grotonian, of which he eventually became editor. He also became
president of the dramatic society.
Enrolling at Yale in 1935 he wrote stories for the school magazine there
as well and yearned for a literary life. When he visited his father's
law offices, he said "those dark narrow streets and those tall, sooty
towers" filled him with gloom. In his junior year he completed a novel
modeled on "Madame Bovary," about a New York socialite. The book was
rejected by Scribners, and he rashly decided "that a man born to the
responsibilities of a brownstone bourgeois world could only be an artist
or writer if he were a genius."
So he left Yale before his senior year and entered the University of
Virginia law school.
To his surprise, he found he liked the law, particularly estates law,
and after graduation he joined the prominent Wall Street firm Sullivan &
Cromwell. But World War II began and Mr. Auchincloss enlisted in the
Navy. He served in Naval intelligence, then commanded a craft that
shuttled troops and the wounded back and forth across the English
Channel during the Normandy invasion. He also served in the Pacific
campaign..
During his naval service, he wrote another novel about a New York
socialite named Beverly Stregelinus and called it "The Indifferent
Children." It was published by Prentice Hall in 1947, after he had
returned to Sullivan & Cromwell. The novel appeared under the pseudonym
Andrew Lee because his mother thought the book was "trivial and vulgar"
and feared it would damage his career.
But the novel received favorable reviews and encouraged him to continue
writing while also practicing law. "I think my secret is to use bits and
fractions of time," he said in his 1997 interview. "I trained myself to
do that. I could write, sitting in surrogate's court, answering calendar
call. There is a lot of waiting in the practice of law."
Soon his short stories were appearing under his own name in The
Atlantic, The New Yorker, Esquire and other magazines. They were
collected in "The Injustice Collectors," which appeared in 1950.
In 1951, he resigned from Sullivan & Cromwell, underwent psychoanalysis
"to find out, once and for all, who I am," as he said in his
autobiography, and wrote full time. Three years later he returned to the
law, joining Hawkins, Delafield & Wood, a Wall Street firm specializing
in bonds. He became a partner in trusts and estates, a white-shoe
specialty that he pursued until he retired in 1987. He wrote that at
some point he stopped thinking of himself as a "lawyer" or a "writer."
"I was simply doing what I was doing when I did it," he explained.
"The Rector of Justin" (1964) is regarded by many critics as Mr.
Auchincloss's most important novel. His hero is Frank Prescott, the
headmaster of a Protestant boys' school in New England before the war, a
man of great intellect and idealism who could be noble, generous and
kind but also cruel, callous and arbitrary.
Many assumed Prescott to be Endicott Peabody, the founder of Groton .
But Mr. Auchincloss said it was as much a portrait of Judge Learned
Hand, whom he regarded as the greatest man he had known.
Mr. Auchincloss also earned praise for his 1966 novel "The Embezzler."
Members of the Whitney family were said to have tried to dissuade him
from publishing the book, which drew on the case of Richard Whitney, a
five-time president of the New York Stock Exchange, who went to prison
for misappropriating funds from, among other places, the treasury of the
New York Yacht Club.
Among his other novels were "The Romantic Egoists," "The Great World of
Timothy Colt" (the first of many novels about upper-crust lawyers), "The
House of Five Talents," "Portrait in Brownstone," "A World of Profit,"
"Honorable Men," "Diary of a Yuppie." "The Education of Oscar Fairfax,"
"The Scarlet Letters" and "East Side Story."
His last novel, in 2008, was "Last of the Old Guard."
Some critics compared him with other modern novelists of manners like
John O'Hara and J. P. Marquand. In an essay in The Nation in 1960, Mr.
Auchincloss said both O'Hara and Marquand had illusions about the
resiliency and endurance of American social classes and hierarchies . O'Hara
wrote him, saying: "You obviously have not read all my novels, and I
have not read one of yours. I don't know anything about your importance
as a lawyer, but in my league you are a still a batboy, and 43 is pretty
old for a batboy."
Over the years Mr. Auchincloss would send his reviews to O'Hara with a
cover letter signed, "Batboy." O'Hara was not amused.
Mr. Auchincloss was a prolific short story writer, and his tales were
collected in numerous collections. He also published collections of
literary essays and biographies and edited many works that reflected his
concerns with power and class and money in America. These included "An
Edith Wharton Reader," "Reading Henry James," "Pioneers and Caretakers:
A Study of Nine American Women Novelists," "Reflections of a Jacobite,"
"The Vanderbilt Era," "J. P. Morgan: The Financier as Collector" and
"The Hone and Strong Diaries of Old Manhattan."
Tall, rich, handsome and carrying himself with a slightly military
bearing, Louis Auchincloss was very much a man of the city that he knew
so intimately. He served as president of the Museum of the City of New
York from 1966 to 1990, when he became chairman. He was also chairman of
the City Hall Restoration Committee and a member of the National
Institute of Arts and Letters and the Century Association.
In 2005, President George W. Bush presented him with the National Medal
of Arts.
His wife, Adele Lawrence Auchincloss, an artist, environmentalist and
former deputy administrator of the New York City Parks and Recreation
Department, died in 1991. Besides his son Andrew, of Manhattan, he is
survived by two other sons, John, of Weston, Conn., and Blake, of
Hingham, Mass; a brother, Howland, of Cazenovia, N.Y.; and seven
grandchildren.
In 1986, Mr. Auchincloss wrote a novel called "Honorable Men," which
followed the fortunes of Chip Benedict, the handsome scion of a
glass-manufacturing dynasty, from his prep school days in the 1930s to a
moment of conscience during the Vietnam War, when he resigns his post as
special assistant to the secretary of state in President Lyndon B.
Johnson's administration.
In explaining why he wrote it, Mr. Auchincloss said: "I used to say to
my father, 'Everything would be all right if only my class at Yale ran
the country.' Well, they did run the country during the Vietnam War, and
look what happened!"
Dennis Hevesi contributed reporting.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company