http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/opinion/19everson.html?_r=1&src=rechp
Showing posts with label Auchincloss. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Auchincloss. Show all posts
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Friday, January 29, 2010
Auchincloss
(c) 2010 F. Bruce Abel
As my readers know, Louis Auchincloss is one of my favorites. Click on this label for my earlier blogs on him. He died at age 92 this week.
By HOLCOMB B. NOBLE and CHARLES McGRATH
Published: January 27, 2010
Louis Auchincloss, a Wall Street lawyer from a prominent old New York family who became a durable and prolific chronicler of Manhattan’s old-money elite, died on Tuesday night in Manhattan. He was 92.
Enlarge This Image
Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
Louis Auchincloss in 1985.
His death, at Lenox Hill Hospital, was caused by complications of a stroke, his son Andrew said. Mr. Auchincloss lived on the Upper East Side.
Although he practiced law full time until 1987, Mr. Auchincloss published more than 60 books of fiction, biography and literary criticism in a writing career of more than a half-century. He was best known for his dozens and dozens of novels about what he called the “comfortable” world, which in the 1930s meant “an apartment or brownstone in town, a house in the country, having five or six maids, two or three cars, several clubs and one’s children in private schools.”
This was the world he came from, and its customs and secrets were his subject from the beginning. He persisted in writing about it, fondly but also trenchantly, long after that world had begun to vanish.
Mr. Auchincloss’s last book, published in 2008, was “The Last of the Old Guard,” and though it was set at the turn of the 20th century, the title in many ways fit the author himself. Mr. Auchincloss had a beaky, patrician nose and spoke with a high-pitched Brahmin accent. He had elegant manners and suits to match, and he wrote in longhand in the living room of an antiques-filled apartment on Park Avenue.
Admirers compared him to other novelists of society and manners like William Dean Howells, but Mr. Auchincloss’s greatest influence was probably Edith Wharton, whose biography he wrote and with whom he felt a direct connection. His grandmother had summered with Wharton in Newport, R.I.; his parents were friends of Wharton’s lawyers. He almost felt he knew Wharton personally, Mr. Auchincloss once said.
Like Wharton, Mr. Auchincloss was interested in class and morality and in the corrosive effects of money on both. “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,” Gore Vidal once wrote. “Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives.”
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.”
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.”
“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.”
Louis Stanton Auchincloss (pronounced AW-kin-kloss) was born on Sept. 27, 1917, in Lawrence, on Long Island, joining an upper-crust clan of Auchinclosses, Dixons, Howlands and Stantons. Since 1803, when Hugh Auchincloss left Paisley, Scotland, to establish a New York branch of the family dry goods business, the families all lived in Manhattan — all with money, all with high social positions.
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.)
Born Into Money
Mr. Auchincloss grew up in a world of town houses, summer homes on Long Island and Bar Harbor, Me., private clubs and servants, debutante parties and travel abroad. Yet as a child he thought of himself as neither rich nor aristocratic.
“Like most children of affluence,” he said in his 1974 autobiography, “A Writer’s Capital,” “I grew up with a distinct sense that my parents were only tolerably well off. This is because children always compare their families with wealthier ones, never with poorer. I thought I knew perfectly well what it meant to be rich in New York. If you were rich, you lived in a house with a pompous beaux-arts facade and kept a butler and gave children’s parties with spun sugar on the ice cream and little cups of real silver as game prizes. If you were not rich you lived in a brownstone with Irish maids who never called you Master Louis and parents who hollered up and down the stairs instead of ringing bells.”
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An earlier version of this obituary misstated the location of the Groton School and the name of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Dennis Hevesi contributed reporting
As my readers know, Louis Auchincloss is one of my favorites. Click on this label for my earlier blogs on him. He died at age 92 this week.
By HOLCOMB B. NOBLE and CHARLES McGRATH
Published: January 27, 2010
Louis Auchincloss, a Wall Street lawyer from a prominent old New York family who became a durable and prolific chronicler of Manhattan’s old-money elite, died on Tuesday night in Manhattan. He was 92.
Enlarge This Image
Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
Louis Auchincloss in 1985.
His death, at Lenox Hill Hospital, was caused by complications of a stroke, his son Andrew said. Mr. Auchincloss lived on the Upper East Side.
Although he practiced law full time until 1987, Mr. Auchincloss published more than 60 books of fiction, biography and literary criticism in a writing career of more than a half-century. He was best known for his dozens and dozens of novels about what he called the “comfortable” world, which in the 1930s meant “an apartment or brownstone in town, a house in the country, having five or six maids, two or three cars, several clubs and one’s children in private schools.”
This was the world he came from, and its customs and secrets were his subject from the beginning. He persisted in writing about it, fondly but also trenchantly, long after that world had begun to vanish.
Mr. Auchincloss’s last book, published in 2008, was “The Last of the Old Guard,” and though it was set at the turn of the 20th century, the title in many ways fit the author himself. Mr. Auchincloss had a beaky, patrician nose and spoke with a high-pitched Brahmin accent. He had elegant manners and suits to match, and he wrote in longhand in the living room of an antiques-filled apartment on Park Avenue.
Admirers compared him to other novelists of society and manners like William Dean Howells, but Mr. Auchincloss’s greatest influence was probably Edith Wharton, whose biography he wrote and with whom he felt a direct connection. His grandmother had summered with Wharton in Newport, R.I.; his parents were friends of Wharton’s lawyers. He almost felt he knew Wharton personally, Mr. Auchincloss once said.
Like Wharton, Mr. Auchincloss was interested in class and morality and in the corrosive effects of money on both. “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,” Gore Vidal once wrote. “Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives.”
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.”
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.”
“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.”
Louis Stanton Auchincloss (pronounced AW-kin-kloss) was born on Sept. 27, 1917, in Lawrence, on Long Island, joining an upper-crust clan of Auchinclosses, Dixons, Howlands and Stantons. Since 1803, when Hugh Auchincloss left Paisley, Scotland, to establish a New York branch of the family dry goods business, the families all lived in Manhattan — all with money, all with high social positions.
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.)
Born Into Money
Mr. Auchincloss grew up in a world of town houses, summer homes on Long Island and Bar Harbor, Me., private clubs and servants, debutante parties and travel abroad. Yet as a child he thought of himself as neither rich nor aristocratic.
“Like most children of affluence,” he said in his 1974 autobiography, “A Writer’s Capital,” “I grew up with a distinct sense that my parents were only tolerably well off. This is because children always compare their families with wealthier ones, never with poorer. I thought I knew perfectly well what it meant to be rich in New York. If you were rich, you lived in a house with a pompous beaux-arts facade and kept a butler and gave children’s parties with spun sugar on the ice cream and little cups of real silver as game prizes. If you were not rich you lived in a brownstone with Irish maids who never called you Master Louis and parents who hollered up and down the stairs instead of ringing bells.”
1
2 Next Page »
An earlier version of this obituary misstated the location of the Groton School and the name of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Dennis Hevesi contributed reporting
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Monday, December 15, 2008
Madoff and Dreier -- Time to Get Out Your Auchincloss
F. Bruce Abel
(c) 2008
We now start to hear about the lawyers who were a part in the derivatives scam. After all a derivative is nothing but a piece of paper between two parties. I can "sell" you a $1 billion derivative. Even though I would not be a thinkable counterparty.
Get out your Auchincloss novels. Or, type in "Auchincloss" for searching on this blog. Or click on that label below to accumulate the same material.
I, a lawyer, grew up at the tail-end of the WASP era, when lawyering was viewed as a public service by the wealthy on Park Avenue and the upper East Side, and a White-shoe lawyer would never, never cheat, lie or steal, and would be from a well-connected family of the east coast. Or so I thought.
Get the made-for-TV movie "Love Letters" and see beautiful writing of this era.
To get a taste for a midwestern example of that type of lawyer growing up, living and working as a lawyer in Cincinnati, Ohio, call Sam Allen of Glendale, Ohio.
(c) 2008
We now start to hear about the lawyers who were a part in the derivatives scam. After all a derivative is nothing but a piece of paper between two parties. I can "sell" you a $1 billion derivative. Even though I would not be a thinkable counterparty.
Get out your Auchincloss novels. Or, type in "Auchincloss" for searching on this blog. Or click on that label below to accumulate the same material.
I, a lawyer, grew up at the tail-end of the WASP era, when lawyering was viewed as a public service by the wealthy on Park Avenue and the upper East Side, and a White-shoe lawyer would never, never cheat, lie or steal, and would be from a well-connected family of the east coast. Or so I thought.
Get the made-for-TV movie "Love Letters" and see beautiful writing of this era.
To get a taste for a midwestern example of that type of lawyer growing up, living and working as a lawyer in Cincinnati, Ohio, call Sam Allen of Glendale, Ohio.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Thursday, May 15, 2008
A YouTube For You Auchincloss Addicts
His themes on the Gothic Groton prepschool in East Side Story and perhaps many other books:
http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/for-the-moment-too-many-veejays/
http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/for-the-moment-too-many-veejays/
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
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.
The New Yorker’s archives are not yet fully available online. The full text of all articles published before May, 2006, can be found in “The Complete New Yorker,” which is available for purchase on DVD and hard drive. Many New Yorker stories published since December, 2000, are available through Nexis. Individual back issues may be purchased from our customer-service department at 1-800-825-2510.
More Auchincloss
East Side Story
by Louis Auchincloss (Houghton Mifflin; $24)
December 20, 2004 Text Size:
“East Side Story” (Houghton Mifflin;; $24); Auchincloss, Louis; New York; Presbyterians; Carnochan Family Auchincloss’s sixtieth book is a novel of power and hypocrisy in upper-class New York that, like much of his previous fiction, focusses on the agonizing conflict between America’s proudly Protestant face and its tawdry capitalist backside. The book consists of eleven linked portraits chronicling the rise of the fiercely Presbyterian Carnochan family, from Old World Scottish thread merchants in Colonial America to lawyers, bankers, and business tycoons in the modern era. The Carnochan men follow their forebears to Yale and, with a few exceptions, to worldly success. But, dedicated to little more than “their own permanence,” they also expose the moral bankruptcy of their class. Auchincloss, who is eighty-seven, and himself something of a Gotham patrician, casts a chilly eye upon the American empire that families like the Carnochans helped to build.♦
Auchincloss
Auchincloss, not Auschinclaus, etc.
Will start The Embezzler today. Will continue to see if the recent New Yorker article on Auchincloss is on line, so I can readily place it on my blog.
In the process of looking on line, I came across another wonderful article on him. Click on Title above or cut and paste the following:
http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/books/10790/
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Today's New Yorker
I have a rule: When the New Yorker arrives I will read one article without putting it down. Otherwise I will never read anything in it.
Today I just read a beautiful article on 90-year old Louis Auchincloss. The writer is Larissa MacFarquhar.
I'll check to see whether it's on the web. If so, I will put in on my blog.
I always was "bored" by Louis Auchincloss. I still am. But not by Larissa MacFarquhar.
The depiction of the upper eastside and attitude, and the '50's, brings back memories of my years at Yale.
Wonderful reading on a snowy afternoon in Cincinnati.
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