Louis Auchincloss

January 28, 2010
Louis Auchincloss, Chronicler of New York’s Upper Crust, Dies at 92
By HOLCOMB B. NOBLE and CHARLES McGRATH


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. 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.”


He attended the Bovee School for Boys on Fifth Avenue and entered the Groton School in Massachusetts in 1929. Unathletic and unpopular, he found Groton a difficult place at first with its punishments, its cold New England weather, its compulsory cold showers and its emphasis on sports. Gradually, he earned his place. His first short stories were published in the school magazine, the Grotonian, of which he became editor.


Enrolling at Yale in 1935, he also wrote stories for its school magazine and yearned for a literary life. When he visited his father’s law offices, he said, “those dark narrow streets and those tall, sooty towers” filled him with gloom. At Yale he made Phi Beta Kappa and while a junior completed a novel modeled on “Madame Bovary,” about a New York socialite. The book was rejected by Scribner’s, and he rashly decided “that a man born to the responsibilities of a brownstone bourgeois world could only be an artist or writer if he were a genius.” So he dropped out of Yale before his senior year and entered the University of Virginia law school.


To his surprise he found he liked the law, particularly estates law, and in 1941, after earning a law degree, he joined the Wall Street firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. When World War II began Mr. Auchincloss enlisted in the Navy. He served in Naval intelligence, then commanded a craft that shuttled troops and the wounded across the English Channel during the Normandy invasion.


After the invasion he was sent to the Pacific and while onboard a ship to Japan wrote another novel, only to throw it in the trash. He finally began his writing career with “The Indifferent Children,” a novel published by Prentice-Hall in 1947 after he had returned to Sullivan & Cromwell. It appeared under the pseudonym Andrew Lee, in deference to his mother, who thought the book “trivial and vulgar” and feared it would damage his career.


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.”

His short stories were soon appearing under his own name in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Esquire and other magazines. They were collected in “The Injustice Collectors,” published in 1950 by Houghton Mifflin, which also brought out the rest of his fiction.

A Lawyer and an Author

In 1951 Mr. Auchincloss resigned from Sullivan & Cromwell, underwent psychoanalysis “to find out, once and for all, who I am,” as he said in his autobiography, and began writing full time. Three years later he returned to the law, joining Hawkins, Delafield & Wood, another Wall Street firm, where he specialized in trusts and estates, a white-shoe specialty that deals exclusively with private individuals. He became a partner and remained at Hawkins, Delafield until he retired in 1987. He wrote that at some point he stopped thinking of himself as a lawyer or a writer.

“I was simply doing what I was doing when I did it,” he explained.

“The Rector of Justin” (1964), which was a best seller and a finalist for the National Book Award, is regarded by many critics as Mr. Auchincloss’s best and most important novel. Its protagonist is Frank Prescott, the headmaster of a New England boys’ school before the war, a man of intellect and idealism who could be noble, generous and kind but also, by turns, cruel, callous and arbitrary. Many readers assumed Prescott to be Endicott Peabody, founder of the Groton School and a great educator of his day. But Mr. Auchincloss said it was as much a portrait of the federal judge Learned Hand, whom Mr. Auchincloss regarded as the greatest man he had known.

Mr. Auchincloss earned praise for his 1966 novel “The Embezzler,” another best seller. But in writing it he was also accused of disloyalty to his class by portraying its failings and decline through the story of a Wall Street embezzler of the 1930s. Members of the Whitney family were said to have tried to dissuade him from publishing the book, which drew on the case of Richard Whitney, a president of the New York Stock Exchange who went to prison for misappropriating funds from, among other places, the New York Yacht Club.

There was an element of moral judgment in all of Mr. Auchincloss’s fiction. An individual’s need to stand up to convention was an early theme, as in “The Romantic Egoists” (1954); guilt-driven self-destruction was another, as in “The Great World and Timothy Colt” (1956), the first of many novels about upper-crust lawyers.

More recently “The Education of Oscar Fairfax” (1995) tells a partly autobiographical story about a well-born Social Register type who abandons his dream of a literary career to join his father’s law firm. “East Side Story” (2004) traces a family not unlike the Auchinclosses from the Civil War to the war in Vietnam.

Among his many other novels were “The House of Five Talents” (1960), “Portrait in Brownstone” (1962), “A World of Profit” (1968), “Honorable Men” (1985), “Diary of a Yuppie” (1986) and “The Headmaster’s Dilemma” (2007).

Mr. Auchincloss also published numerous collections of short stories and literary essays as well as biographies. (Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt were subjects.) And he edited many works that reflected his concerns with power, class and money in America; among these were “An Edith Wharton Reader,” “The Vanderbilt Era” and “J. P. Morgan: The Financier as Collector.”

A Leader in Civic Life

Mr. Auchincloss was a man of the city he knew so intimately, serving as president and chairman of the Museum of the City of New York and chairman of the City Hall Restoration Committee. He was a fixture at the Century Association and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, where he also served as president.

In 2005 President George W. Bush presented him with the National Medal of Arts.

His wife, Adele Lawrence Auchincloss, an artist, environmentalist and former deputy administrator of the New York City Parks and Recreation Department, died in 1991. Besides his son Andrew, of Manhattan, he is survived by two other sons, John, of Weston, Conn., and Blake, of Hingham, Mass; a brother, Howland, of Cazenovia, N.Y.; and seven grandchildren.

Even near the end of his life, Mr. Auchincloss said the influence of his class had not waned. “I grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in a nouveau riche world, where money was spent wildly, and I’m still living in one!,” he told The Financial Times in 2007. “The private schools are all jammed with long waiting lists; the clubs — all the old clubs — are jammed with long waiting lists today; the harbors are clogged with yachts; there has never been a more material society than the one we live in today.”

“Where is this ‘vanished world’ they talk about?” he asked. “I don’t think the critics have looked out the window!”

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.