Writing Life

Last night I wrote here about my Uncle Alec, who died on Friday at the age of 68. An hour ago my wife asked me, “What are you going to write about tonight?” “I don’t know,” I answered, “But I hope it’s not another farewell to a deceased relative or friend.” Then I went online and discovered that a friend, of sorts, had just died.

Louis Auchincloss, who died Tuesday at the age of 92, lived a long and productive life. For nearly five decades he was a Manhattan lawyer specializing in trusts and wills. Somehow, he also managed to write more than 60 books of fiction during that period. He also published biographies, essay collections, histories, criticism, and memoirs. But it is his fiction that will probably be his longest lasting contribution to American letters. He was almost certainly the greatest chronicler of upper-crust American society since Edith Wharton, whom he admired and emulated. Unfortunately, literary fashion in the last two thirds of the 20th tended to smile favorably on those who wrote about the so-called “common man.” The impoverished southerners found in the fiction of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, the dust bowl Okies of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, the small-town burghers of Sinclair Lewis, the impoverished bohemians of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, the antiestablishment drifters of Kerouac, and the social outcasts of Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy – these were the fictional types deemed most worthy of a reader’s attention by most 20th century critics and academics. Writing sympathetically about the rich and powerful struck most critics as both passé and morally questionable. The 20th century was widely regarded as the century of proletarian struggle. Those who showed too much interest in wealth and society were often deemed crass, vulgar, out of step, or elitist. Auchincloss wrote as seriously and as truthfully about the society he was born into as Faulkner did about his Mississippi milieu. But Faulkner’s work was much more in sync with the literary fashion of the times. Auchincloss was writing realistically about rich people in an era when intellectual fashion deemed the rich and privileged worthy only of satire and disdain. Even his own mother condemned his first book as “trivial and vulgar,” according to his obituary in today’s New York Times. If not for this cultural prejudice, Auchincloss might well be as highly regarded today as Hemingway or McCarthy. Instead he occupies a sort of literary limbo – revered by a small cadre of fans who recognize him as one of the best American novelists and short story writers most Americans have never heard of.

Curiously it was the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center towers that first brought Auchincloss to my attention. I had never been to New York at that time and knew little about it. To me, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island were all just names. I knew nothing about how the five boroughs of New York differed from each other socially, culturally, and demographically. But while reading about the terrorists attacks I became curious to know more about Manhattan, this island of commerce that seemed to represent the worst of American capitalism, greed, and secular hubris to those who hated this country. I had often heard Louis Auchincloss referred to as a chronicler of life among Manhattan’s moneyed elite, but I had read none of his fiction. By chance, shortly after September 11, I came across his novel Her Infinite Variety while browsing through a bookstore and brought it home to read. I loved it. Aside from its fascinating details about a world that is totally foreign to me – wealthy east coast America – I liked it for its vivid characterizations and its cleverly constructed plot. After reading it, I went on an Auchincloss binge. I read at least a dozen of his novels and nearly as many of his short story collections over the course of about a year. This wasn’t easy because Auchincloss is not a terribly popular author, especially here on the west coast, a section of the country that his books seem to totally ignore. His books generally receive small print runs and to go out of print rapidly. Go into a Borders or a Barnes and Noble tomorrow and see if you can find one of his novels or short story collections on the shelves there. I’ll bet that you can’t.

About a year after the 2001 attacks, I wrote a fan letter to Auchincloss. In it, I told the author how the terrorist attacks had, in a roundabout way, led me to his works. I praised his most recent novel, which at that time was Her Infinite Variety, the first Auchincloss book I had read. But I also praised his short stories, which I think are among the best American stories of the last half century. What I like in particular about his stories is the way that he is able to pack a lot of incident – and often decades of passing time – into a relatively short number of pages. He possessed an uncanny ability to detail the entire life of a character – birth, upbringing, education, marriage, professional rise and fall, and death – in a space of twenty pages or so and never give the reader the impression that the story is being rushed.

When I sent my fan letter to Auchincloss, I never expected a response. His literary output alone was enough to convince me that the man kept himself incredibly busy. But he also served on the boards of various corporations, charities, and cultural institutions. He was president and chairman of the Museum of the City of New York. He was chairman of the City Hall Restoration Committee. He served as president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Surely a man with all these responsibilities wouldn’t have time to respond to a fan letter written by someone who had barely paid any attention at all to Manhattan and its environs until the recent terrorists attacks.

But he did. Just a few weeks after mailing off my letter to Mr. Auchincloss’ Park Avenue Apartment, I received a very thoughtful and entertaining reply. Here are some excerpts from the letter he sent me, dated November 21, 2002:

Dear Mr. Mims,

I little thought, on that day of infamy, September 11, 2001, when, attending an early board meeting on Chambers Street and gazing in horror at the flames pouring out of the hole in the Trade Center tower made by the first plane, that it would be the occasion of bringing my fiction to the attention of an appreciative California reader. Chains of causation are indeed unpredictable. At any rate I was touched and pleased by your letter, particularly as I had just read a long monograph in the Yale Review of books entitled “Rediscovering the forgotten fiction of Louis Auchincloss.” Perhaps, like Lazarus, I am being pulled from my tomb. All I can do is shake myself and gasp gratefully.

I loved what you said about Her Infinite Variety. I wrote it to delineate the last woman who would have to use her sex appeal to attain power. Which does not mean that women will not still use it, if they have it in abundance. My point is that today they don’t any longer have to use it. They can make it on their brains and ability even if they’re plain Janes. It’s the difference in short between Marietta Tree whose dazzling charm substantially helped her to become what she was in the United Nations and Madeleine Albright who made it, so to speak, on her own. All this has happened in the last thirty years and, of course, none of my reviewers picked it up. They are convinced I write about nothing but money and society, whereas the Rector of Justin dealt with fundamental problems in private education in the middle of the century, The Embezzler with a crime that helped to increase government power over the financial world, and the House of the Prophet [explored] the role in American life of a great pundit, based on the life of Walter Lippman, whose lawyer I was in his later years.

I like, too, your appreciation of the time factor in my short stories. I have never seen why time should be reduced to a few days or even hours as the fashion, established by the all powerful New Yorker magazine has long dictated.

Mr. Auchincloss went on to discuss his interest in Edith Wharton and his vast collection of personal items related to her – a watercolor of her as a child (the earliest known likeness of Wharton), one hundred of her letters, and a privately printed copy of her verses. He closed the letter by saying, “Thank you for the shot in the arm you have given me!”

In many ways Louis Auchincloss was more like a 19th century man of letters than a 20th century one. He didn’t publish a big self-important mega-tome every ten years that attempted to reinvent the art of fiction a la Pynchon or DeLillo. Instead he reliably produced a new book (sometimes two) in just about every year of his literary career. His first book was published in 1947. His latest was published in 2008. Like Jane Austen he focused on the foibles and frailties of the small segment of society on which he was an expert. He tilled a small patch of literary ground but from it he brought forth nourishing and abundant fruit. If you are unfamiliar with that fruit and would like a taste of it, you couldn’t do better than to get a hold of The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss, a gathering of tales that treat many of the author’s favorite subjects: the obligations that come with wealth and privilege, the danger of straying from one’s social class, the virtues and limits of tradition, the lure of money and power and the corrupting influence of both. The book is out of print, but the rewards it provides far outweigh the difficulty of tracking down a copy.

Louis Auchincloss had a gift for epigrammatic writing. Few of his American contemporaries produced more quotable lines. His works were chock full of words of wisdom. In the novel Honorable Men he wrote: “It may be gratifying to watch one’s moral superiors fall on their faces, but it is also a good idea to look around and see whether there is anyone left to lean upon.” No whiff of scandal ever attached itself to Louis Auchincloss. He never fell on his face as a writer, as a lawyer, or as a human being. For the duration of my life, I hope to lean upon his example to the best of my ability.

Auchincloss always suspected that his work would get a fair appraisal only after his death. In his New York Times’ obituary he is quoted as saying, “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. Nobody holds it against Henry James or Edith Wharton or Thackeray or Marcel Proust.” Perhaps he is correct. Perhaps, like Lazarus, he is about to be pulled from his tomb. I certainly hope so.

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