Louis Auchincloss

Came across citation to a work of his, Scarlet Letters, in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. Decided to find the cited book, Scarlet Letters. Started to read it; am enjoying it quite much. Googled Auchicloss, and read his Wikipedia biography.

On of the citation therein is a quote from Gore Vidal: "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.... Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives."^[2].

That led me to look at Vidal's OPAC entry: fairly extensive holdings in Peninsula include 2 autobiographies, two history entries, one about the Bush-Cheney junta, and several in literature.

But, back to Auchincloss. His obit in the Times of New York includes:

His detractors complained that Mr. Auchincloss’s writing was glib and superficial, or else that his subject matter was too dated to be of much interest. Writing in The New York Times in 1984, Michiko Kakutani said that while Mr. Auchincloss “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,” she added, “Mr. Auchincloss’s people are just a little too finely polished, a little too tidily assembled.”

His writing does seem elegant to me, and that is not necessarily a compliment in this context. Another commentator has this:
The author Bruce Bawer, writing in The New York Times Book Review, said that Mr. Auchincloss had the bad luck to live “in a time when the protagonists of literary fiction tend to be middle- or lower-class.”


“These days,” he added, “the general public, though fascinated by the superficial trappings of privilege, seems to have little interest in the deeper truths with which Mr. Auchincloss is passionately concerned — with, that is, the beliefs, principles, hypocrisies, prejudices and assorted strengths and defects of character that typify the American WASP civilization that produced what was for a long time the country’s undisputed ruling class.”


His answer? “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,” he said in an interview in 1997, “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. Very valid point.

The obit continues: Louis was the third of four children of Priscilla Stanton and Joseph Howland Auchincloss, who, like his father, was a Wall Street lawyer; he was also a third cousin of Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Louis was a cousin by marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who worked with him when she was a book editor later in life.)

Interesting connections.

But the novel received favorable reviews and encouraged him to keep 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. Anybody can do it. I could write sitting in surrogate’s court answering calendar call.” 

In the novel, Ambrose Vollard, father of Vinnie, one of the main characters, referes to himself as Hadrian, and to his son-in-law and heir-apparent as Antinoüs. Hadrian was a Roman emperor. Antoniüs was a member of the entourage of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, to whom he was beloved. Antinous was deified after his death.