Issue 132, Fall 1994
This interview was conducted on the stage of New York’s Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street YMHA on the Upper East Side before a large and respectful audience. It seemed a rather curious setting in which to find Louis Auchincloss—a personage perhaps more suited to the comforts of the well-appointed drawing room in a brownstone mansion than the bare stage of an auditorium. He sat rather stiffly in a wood-backed chair turned three-quarters to the audience, a microphone set on a stand in front of him. The replies to his interviewer—delivered in the patrician accents one might expect—seemed quite clipped at times, as if to his way of thinking the answers required little amplification. One was reminded that his background is also legal, that it was while practicing law that he worked on his books—a parlay of occupations that has become increasingly popular and fruitful in recent times (witness the success of Louis Begley, Scott Turow, and John Grisham.)
Louis Auchincloss was born on September 27, 1917 in Lawrence, Long Island, the son of a Wall Street lawyer associated with the firm Davis, Polk, and Wardwell. After graduating in 1935 from the Groton School (the venue for his most widely read novel, The Rector of Justin), he attended Yale. There he wrote a four-hundred-page novel about love, suicide and prep-school life modeled on Madame Bovary. When it was rejected by Scribners, he despaired of what he referred to in his book A Writer’s Capital as “dabbling in literature” and, in a complete renunciation of a literary career, quit Yale in his third year and enrolled at the University of Virginia School of Law. To his surprise he discovered that he liked the law. Upon his graduation he joined the prestigious firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. His progress in the practice of law was interrupted by World War II; he served in the U.S. Navy in both the Atlantic (where he took part in the Normandy landings as an executive officer aboard a Landing Ship Tank) and the Pacific theaters of operations. Following the war he practiced law in New York, first at Sullivan and Cromwell, and then for many years with Hawkins, Delafield, and Wood, where he was the head of the firm’s trust and estates department.
During his years as a lawyer he produced an astonishing amount of literary work—thirty-six novels and thirteen books of nonfiction. As his readers well know, Auchincloss’s fictional territory is that of the aristocratic rich. He has often been referred to as the social anthropologist of the American upper class. Naturally, his work evokes comparisons with Edith Wharton and Henry James—authors he admires and about whom he has written extensively—and with the more recent writers, John P. Marquand and John O’Hara, all of whom have written in the timeworn tradition of the novel of manners. Indeed it can be said that Auchincloss rescued the novel of manners from obsolescence following the deaths of Marquand and O’Hara. Back in 1960, when Auchincloss pointed out that O’Hara’s “strange, angry world” was actually the old-fashioned novel of manners in disguise, O’Hara took exception. In his best crusty style he wrote: “I can best reply by pointing out the fact that you obviously have read all my novels, and I have not read any of yours. I don’t know anything about your importance as a lawyer, but in my league you are still a batboy, and forty-three is pretty old for a batboy.” Auchincloss didn’t let the matter drop. Every time a critic linked the two (which was often), he clipped the review or article and mailed it to O’Hara with the signature, “The Batboy.”
It was during the decade of the sixties that Auchincloss was most prolific. He wrote five novels, including The Rector of Justin, The Embezzler, Portrait in Brownstone, A World of Profit, and House of Five Talents (the author’s favorite). The Rector of Justin, published in 1964, was the most successful. It rose to the top of the best-seller lists where for thirty-five weeks it vied with Saul Bellow’s Herzog for first place. It was nominated for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, but lost out—very likely because of the judges’ adversion to Auchincloss’s fixation on WASP society—to Herzog for the National Book Award and to Shirley Ann Grau’s The Keeper of the House for the Pulitzer. Auchincloss was embittered: “What a silly racket,” he wrote Gore Vidal, “and how silly of me to mind. But I do.”
The Auchincloss oeuvre is by no means limited to fiction. His first collection of critical essays, Reflections of a Jacobite, was published in 1961—the first of his thirteen books of nonfiction. Not surprisingly, he has written a number of essays on Proust, as well as pieces on Bourget, Corneille, Daudet, Racine, and Richelieu. A passionate Francophile, he was once described as a man who daydreams about the court at Versailles. Of the English he has written on Shakespeare and the nineteenth-century novelists, and of the Americans, Henry Adams, Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, among others, as well as, of course, John P. Marquand and John O’Hara.
In 1986, Auchincloss retired from the law. He spends his time with his wife Adele in the comfortable post-Victorian clutter of a large apartment on Park Avenue and a renovated farmhouse in Bedford, New York. There is no indication that his literary output has slackened. His newest, a collection of essays entitled The Style’s the Man, is due out this fall.
INTERVIEWER
I’m sure the question most asked of you is how you can write about fifty full-length books, practice successfully as a lawyer and at the same time have something of a family life. I wonder which suffers most because of the others? One would hope not the law; your clients might be outraged.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
Writing all those books never seemed to be such a trick, though I certainly don’t think I could do it today with the law firms’ enormous emphasis on hours and clocked time. I did have an estate practice, where the clients were usually dead, which is a help, for they couldn’t always be pushing you.
INTERVIEWER
And therefore didn’t mind . . .
AUCHINCLOSS
They didn’t mind, but of course the heirs did, but then they weren’t the clients. I found that writing took a bit of adjusting—essentially to be able to use little scratches of time to do it. Lots of writers have to have whole days or nights to get ready to write; they like to be by a fire, with absolute quiet, with their slippers on and a pipe or something, and then they’re ready to go. They can’t believe you can use five minutes here, ten minutes there, fifteen minutes at another time. Yet it’s only a question of training to learn that trick. If they had to do it that way, they’d be able to—the real writers, that is. I can pick up in the middle of a sentence and then go on. I wrote at night; sometimes I wrote at the office and then practiced law at home. My wife and I never went away on weekends. I wouldn’t recommend that anyone else try this method, but it worked for me. And it did for Trollope. I don’t mean to compare myself to Trollope, but it was said that he made a habit of writing from nine to noon, and if he finished a novel at a quarter to twelve, he’d start another. Unfortunately, he put that all into his autobiography, which killed his reputation for decades because people wanted to think of writing as suffering.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think you’d write better if you did suffer?
AUCHINCLOSS
No. And I don’t think most writers do, either. I think Shakespeare got drunk after he finished King Lear. That he had a ball writing it.
INTERVIEWER
Do you get drunk after you finish one of your books?
AUCHINCLOSS
No, I don’t. I’m a very regular person.
INTERVIEWER
Well, how much is the law a benefit? Supposing you had taken up another practice . . .
AUCHINCLOSS
. . . being a doctor? No, I don’t think so.
INTERVIEWER
Perhaps not a doctor, but an insurance man, say. Wallace Stevens comes to mind.
AUCHINCLOSS
Well, that would have been easy, because people in insurance work only from nine to five, at least the insurance men I know.
INTERVIEWER
Doesn’t the law give you situations where you say, Aha! I will write about that?
AUCHINCLOSS
Well, as I look back on my literary career, short stories about the law were suggested by what I had observed or heard of personalities encountered in my practice. I really wrote more about relationships of lawyers to one another in the practice of their profession than I did about actual legal situations. Arthur Train used to write about legal problems in his books; I’ve sometimes done that, but more often I used just the interaction between members of a firm.