Examples Skinny Island

By Paul Gray

Author Louis Auchincloss has produced some 30 books of fiction, an impressive amount in anyone's case, but even more so for a Wall Street lawyer, recently retired, who writes in his spare time. This productivity has been devoted primarily to variations on a central theme: the manners and mores of well-to- do New Yorkers, not restricted to the fabled 400 of old Manhattan society but not much exceeding a few thousand either. There are those who think this subject was pretty well exhausted by the time Henry James and Edith Wharton got through with it. Others argue that portraits of the genteel rich are beside the point in this century of the common man. Yet Auchincloss, 69, periodically turns out a book so sparkling and assured as to render such complaints irrelevant.

Skinny Island: More Tales of Manhattan offers one of those occasions. The subtitle harks back to an earlier collection, Tales of Manhattan (1967), but the twelve stories assembled here need no prior introductions. The book is a self-contained progression in time: the first story, A Diary of Old New York, occurs in 1875, and the last, The Takeover, sometime in the 1980s, perhaps yesterday. The pieces are connected not just chronologically and geographically but by a common concern as well: the dilemma faced by comfortable people when they must choose between honor and expediency.

In The Wedding Guest, for example, a turn-of-the-century young man named Griswold Norrie looks forward to his nuptials with the rich, beautiful Ione Carruthers: "He and Ione between them would be connected by blood or marriage to every family that counted in Manhattan society!" The only impediment is Griswold's determination to invite Atalanta, his paternal grandfather's widow, to the festivities. Because of her uncertain past and the general belief that she married an old man for his fortune, this woman simply cannot be received by people who matter. Griswold can have either his integrity or his bride. His potential mother-in-law tries to explain things to him: "Society is not just a question of dressing up and giving parties. It is a question of setting a moral example for the whole community."

Auchincloss gently mocks such pretensions, but he takes seriously those people who try to live by the rules. Times may change; strictures remain for the fortunate few. No Friend Like a New Friend is set in the early 1960s. Frances Hamill, widow of an eminent lawyer, banker and adviser to Presidents, finds herself at a dinner party seated next to Manners Mabon, a short, fat, charming bachelor with no visible means of support. Before long, the matron and the dilettante are seen together constantly at art galleries and museums. People begin to talk, and Frances receives a painful reproof from her old friend Alice: "I thought it was important how we appeared to the world . . . It's not that what's inside isn't more important. Of course it is. But I thought you and I believed that our outward selves should reflect, as far as possible, the things we stand for."

All of Auchincloss's characters must struggle with this problem, one so hopelessly old-fashioned as to seem brand new. His graceful, straightforward narratives, so conventional in form, convey a rare impression: people behaving as if their actions meant something beyond the swamp of ego and the self.