Chronicler of US ruling class dies

Lawyer and prolific author Louis Auchincloss, 92, dies

By Dennis Drabelle
Thursday, January 28, 2010; B05

Louis Auchincloss, 92, a novelist, essayist, biographer, editor and lawyer whose literary beat was the decline of the old WASP world of power and privilege to which he belonged, died Jan. 26 at Lenox Hill Hospital, near his home in Manhattan. He had complications from a stroke.

The author of more than 60 books in a career stretching over seven decades, Mr. Auchincloss was best known for such novels as "The Rector of Justin" (1964), about the founding headmaster of an elite prep school, and "The Embezzler" (1966), about an upper-class Wall Street stockbroker who succumbs to temptation during the Great Depression.

Louis Stanton Auchincloss (pronounced AWK-in-closs) was born in the Long Island, N.Y., community of Lawrence on Sept. 27, 1917, and grew up on Manhattan's Upper East Side. As a youth, he was put off by his father's arid practice as a corporate lawyer and drawn to his mother's artistic pursuits.

But the young man did what was expected of him. He entered Yale in 1935, leaving three years later without a degree to attend law school at the University of Virginia. He found law congenial and, after graduating from Virginia in 1941, returned to New York to work for the white-shoe firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. He interrupted his legal career to serve in the Navy during World War II but rejoined the firm afterward.

All along, however, Mr. Auchincloss had harbored literary ambitions, writing stories for his prep-school magazine and editing the Yale Literary Magazine. In 1947, he published the novel "The Indifferent Children" under the pseudonym Andrew Lee. The book received favorable reviews, and he began placing stories under his own name in such periodicals as the Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker.

In 1951, he resigned from Sullivan & Cromwell to write full time, only to discover that he didn't like being cut off from what he called "the real world." Three years later, he joined the Wall Street firm Hawkins Delafield & Wood, where he remained until his retirement in 1986. He juggled his two callings by confining legal work to weekdays and creative writing to weekends.

As subject matter, however, the law looms large in Mr. Auchincloss's fiction; among his best books is "Powers of Attorney" (1963), a collection of related short stories about a Manhattan law firm. The titles of other novels and story collections suggest the boundaries within which Mr. Auchincloss liked to operate: "Portraits in Brownstone," "A World of Profit," "Tales of Manhattan," "Honorable Men," "Diary of a Yuppie."

His biggest bestseller, "The Rector of Justin," takes place in a proving ground for that rarefied world: a New England boys' boarding school, which, as a graduate of the Groton School in Massachusetts, the author knew well. A portrait stitched together from the diaries and observations of multiple observers, "The Rector of Justin" reaches a climax when the now-retired great man perceives that, despite his best efforts to inculcate high ideals, "snobbishness and materialism were intrinsic in [his school's] makeup."

Mr. Auchincloss took issue with a complaint frequently made about him: that in dwelling on characters and conflicts peculiar to the Eastern upper crust, his fiction is parochial. In a 1997 interview, he replied, "If you look through the literature of the ages, you will find that 95 percent of it deals with the so-called 'upper class,' from 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey' through to Shakespeare with his kings and queens."

'Novelist of Ethics'

Mr. Auchincloss was often called a novelist of manners. In light of all the sinning and thieving in his fiction, "novelist of ethics" might be more accurate. In any case, author Gore Vidal, whose stepfather was an Auchincloss, called attention to a socio-political dimension in his kinsman's handling of his material: "Of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardroom, their law offices and their clubs."

The nature of Mr. Auchincloss's law practice -- trusts and estates -- gave him an intimate knowledge of how, and with what effect, wealth is passed on from one generation to the next.

By the time of his death, with an African American family occupying the White House and citizens of every ethnicity and creed holding positions of power all across the country, Mr. Auchincloss's oeuvre had taken on a patina of yesteryear. One of the pleasures of reading him is to glimpse the sometimes bewildering mores of a bygone subculture.

In "The Rector of Justin," the title character upbraids two boys caught wearing coats but not ties: "When a gentleman undresses, a gentleman goes to bed."

The headmaster's wife recalls a no-no from her patrician mid-19th-century youth: offering the chair in which you'd been sitting to a guest. "Can you think of anything more horrid," she asks, "than a warm seat?"

In the short story "Ares," the cleverest bluebloods in post-Civil War New York City have formed a "Bore Insurance Society," which "listed the biggest bores in Gotham and paid off at so much a head to any member who found himself stuck beside one at a dinner party." The Society may be fictitious, but Mr. Auchincloss made it seem just the sort of thing gilded wits would found.

Mr. Auchincloss's prose ran to compound-complex sentences, with aperçus and literary references tucked into well-balanced clauses. As an essayist and critic, he brought a dry wit to bear on subjects ranging from Racine to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to President Ronald Reagan, "a daydreaming movie star [in] the White House." Mr. Auchincloss explained the 20th-century comeback of Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope by observing that "there is so much of him and most of it is of so consistently high a level of entertainment that reading him can become a drug."

In 1965, Mr. Auchincloss got the jump on a literary movement by publishing "Pioneers & Caretakers: A Study of 9 American Women Novelists," including Ellen Glasgow, Willa Cather and a writer with whom Mr. Auchincloss himself was often compared: Edith Wharton. Not only did he acknowledge the similarities; he wrote and edited several books about Wharton, one of them a brief biography. He also wrote biographies of Cardinal Richelieu, Queen Victoria, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and edited the diaries of two 19th-century Manhattan grandees, Philip Hone and George Templeton Strong.

A passionate theatergoer and book-collector, Mr. Auchincloss was described as "a well-knit six-footer with something of a military bearing." In a 2008 New Yorker profile, he appeared to have hardly slowed down in his early 90s, though he was finding no takers for a manuscript on one of his favorite authors, William Makepeace Thackeray. (An essay on Thackeray appears in Mr. Auchincloss's 1979 collection "Life, Law and Letters"). His last published novel was "Last of the Old Guard" (2008).

Mr. Auchincloss's civic contributions included serving as president of the Museum of the City of New York and as a member of the executive committee of the New York Bar Association. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1965 and received the National Medal of Arts in 2005. He wed Adele Lawrence, an artist, in 1957; the marriage lasted until her death in 1991. Survivors include three sons, John Auchincloss of Weston, Conn., Blake Auchincloss of Hingham, Mass., and Andrew Auchincloss of New York; a brother; and seven grandchildren.

For all his accomplishments, Mr. Auchincloss won no major book awards, and the critical consensus seemed to be that he did not quite measure up to his gifts, with his fiction in particular needing more intensity. Late in life, the prolific author expressed doubts about his impressive rate of production.

"I think I have a tendency to publish too soon," he said, adding that some of his books "could have been quite improved if I'd held them up for a year."

In being both graceful and overly facile, Mr. Auchincloss may have been an exemplar of the class he wrote so much about.