Ethnic Writer Bears Witness

By John Skow

The moneyed, mannered east Coast upper class that Henry James described and Edith Wharton anatomized was an aristocracy in its own eyes, and a tribe of puffed-up burghers to the older and poorer nobilities of Europe. Its pretensions were exquisite and absurd, but for the few decades that the nation's financial strength was concentrated almost solely in New York City and Boston, its members had the power to impose their measures of status on the rest of the nation.

By the time Louis Auchincloss came along to write such Jamesian, Whartonian novels of manners as The Rector of Justin and The Great World and Timothy Colt, the Society of Mrs. Astor's ballroom no longer meant much, except to itself. The European aristocracy that it had tried to emulate was moribund and more impoverished than ever, and in the U.S. there were simply too many circles of the rich and self-pleased -- in the oil and entertainment industries, in politics, in the media business, among wealthy alumni of Midwestern cow colleges, lately in the computer industry -- for any one social elite to retain its dominance, much less an elite that was running out of energy and wealth.

So Auchincloss wrote about social decay, about the gradual bleeding of moral force and money from the old Protestant families of Manhattan. His Collected Stories (Houghton Mifflin; 465 pages; $24.95) were written from 1949 to the . present, and their themes are remarkably consistent. Again and again, Auchincloss describes pale people who turn their faces, shuddering, from the modern world. His male protagonists are weak and bloodless, his women lumpy and conflicted. As a class, they have even lost their ability to breed. "A virgin to both sexes" is a confessional phrase used more than once, wryly but without regret, by his heroes. Some of them still have money -- old, of course, because latching on to new money would require the burgerlich rapacity that their great-grandparents successfully hid. If they have professions, they are likely to be lawyers, ineffectual but tolerated in the old firms because their names are those of dead founding partners. But their only consistent strengths are snobbery and a watery kind of good taste.

The author seems to have used these stories as sketches for longer fiction, and no single effort stands out as a masterpiece. There is a rough, unshaped quality to some of them not seen in his well-made novels, as if Auchincloss had simply stopped writing when an idea or character ran dry. But the collection as a whole is powerful and chilling. It is as harsh as anything in current literature, an expression of disgust and revulsion maintained over five decades. The author has written some 50 books, is a lawyer from a wealthy old New York family, and his reiterated distaste for Society in decline seems too strong to be anything but personal. One of his characters is an elderly writer who grumbles, "Oh, I have a following yet, I grant. There are plenty of old girls and boys who still take me to the hospital for their hysterectomies and prostates. But ... the young don't read me ... Society is intent on becoming classless, and the novel of manners must deal with classes."

True, and all the more reason that the caustic and readable Louis Auchincloss should be cherished as the last author who could write, not in parody, "Gridley and I did not become personal friends until my election to the Greenvale Country Club in 1934. I should admit here that election to this club was the social triumph of my life. I never could see why Pussy and the children found it stuffy."