More Auchincloss

Larissa MacFarquhar, Life and Letters, "East Side Story," The New Yorker, February 25, 2008, p. 54

Keywords
Auchincloss, Louis; Writers; Lawyers; Novelists; Groton School; “The Rector of Justin”; Peabody, Endicott LIFE AND LETTERS about novelist Louis Auchincloss. Writer describes Auchincloss and his agent, Mitchell Waters, on their way to record an interview for Barnes & Noble. Auchincloss, who has published sixty-four novels, asked Waters if he had been able to place his monograph on Thackeray. “No,” Waters said, apologetically. The car turned onto the West Side Highway and Auchincloss recalled sailing to Europe on ocean liners with his parents. Auchincloss’s father came from a family that had something of a presence in the New York of the great old clans, although it wasn’t clear why. There was never a fortune. Each generation of Auchincloss men either made or married its own money. Louis as a boy was extremely concerned with his family’s material glamour. As late as his twenties, Auchincloss was a delightfully impenitent snob. Tells about his relationship with his mother, who was a formidable figure, and did everything she could to talk him out of writing fiction. “She just thought I was not a very good writer,” said Auchincloss. In 1957, just shy of his fortieth birthday, Auchincloss married Adele Lawrence, who was descended from the Burdens, Sloanes, and Vanderbilts. They had three boys. A life of early nights and settled repetition suited Auchincloss and he has always been very grateful that one was granted him. Auchincloss, who turned ninety in September, ventures out occasionally, but mostly he stays in, reading in an armchair in his living room. When he is not reading, he is writing. He has never taken himself or his writing too seriously. He packs his books off to the publisher without fuss. Writer describes Auchincloss’s apartment, where he has lived since 1959. Discusses how he combined his writing life with his family obligations and his career as a lawyer. Mentions his extended family connections to Gore Vidal and Jacqueline Bouvier. Writer tells about Auchincloss’s education at the Groton School and discusses his changing attitudes to WASP establishment values. The Reverend Endicott Peabody founded the school in 1884 with the goal of producing brilliant men of high ideals, dedicated to public service and untempted by materialism. Though Auchincloss had a difficult time at the school, he succeeded academically and eventually embraced the Groton system. It wasn’t until later that he began to take a more critical view of the school. By 1980, when Auchincloss published “The House of the Prophet,” he had moved to the political center and was ready to condemn his moral inheritance more completely than he had in “The Rector of Justin,” a quarter century before. “The tragedy of American civilization is that it has swept away WASP morality and put nothing in its place,” Auchincloss wrote in 1980.

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