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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for January 27, 2010

TT: Louis Auchincloss, R.I.P.

January 27, 2010 by Terry Teachout

rv-last07_gr_0499521967.jpgLouis Auchincloss, who has died at the august age of 92, was a novelist whom I admired, albeit with significant reservations.

Auchincloss hit the high C once, with The Rector of Justin. Only one of his other novels, The Embezzler, has anything like the focus and intensity of that excellent book, and it runs a distant second. His other novels are watery by comparison, so much so that it’s tempting to call him a man of one book, though in fact he wrote many books, all of them serious and well crafted and not a few of them gratifyingly readable. Still, it’s no mean thing to write even one novel of significance, and The Rector of Justin, to my mind, definitely qualifies.

I wrote about Auchincloss twice, in 1993 and 1995. Here’s some of what I had to say on those two occasions:

Rarely is it possible to single out the stupidest thing ever written about someone, but in the case of Louis Auchincloss, the booby prize undoubtedly goes to a piece published a quarter-century ago in the New York Review of Books. The author, boggling at the undeniable fact that Auchincloss’ novels are all about New York’s moneyed families, wrote, “I can believe the upper class is human…but fiction seems the wrong medium for the privileged life, which belongs, if anywhere, in the spreads of Country Life or the New York Times society page, or in the moments of awed intrusion that TV likes to purvey.” So long, Henry James! Bye-bye, Marcel Proust!…

Auchincloss is worth reading about not only because he is a good writer but also because his life is so perfectly emblematic of the class that writer-director Whit Stillman, in the movie Metropolitan, called the “UHB”–urban haute bourgeoisie. Auchincloss attended Groton School, Yale University and the University of Virginia Law School, put in a couple of years at Sullivan & Cromwell, served with distinction in World War II, returned to New York to find a place in the trusts and estates department of Hawkins, Delafield & Wood, married well and lived happily ever after. His only deviation from form was a passion for literature that led him to do something wildly uncharacteristic for a white-shoe lawyer: He became a part-time professional writer.

Auchincloss broke into print two years after the war and since that time has turned out roughly a book a year. He writes about what he knows: “I especially want to portray things into which I’ve been fortunate enough to gain insight, that is, the decline of a class. WASPs have not lost their power, but they have lost their monopoly on power.”

All his novels and short stories deal in one way or another with this theme, so much so that many critics have been put off by his exclusive interest in the WASP world–or, to be more exact, by his comparatively untroubled acceptance of its imperatives: “I have always suffered from the suspicion not so much that I write about the wrong people (look at the success of [John] O’Hara and [John P.] Marquand!) but that I write about the wrong people in the wrong way. Perhaps I tend to accept the status quo more than seems acceptable.”

This is a shrewd remark, and it suggests one possible reason why Auchincloss has never written an absolutely first-rate novel: He seems too happy. After a successful round of psychoanalysis (apparently there are such things) in the early fifties, Auchincloss accepted himself without reservation. If this account of his life is accurate, he is an obsession-free, comparatively uncomplicated man whose urge to write is rooted more in his desire to record the splendors and miseries of a social class than in any private passions of his own.

It is surely no coincidence that Auchincloss’s best novel, the 1964 The Rector of Justin, deals with the only episode in his life that appears to have scarred him: his years at Groton. In The Rector of Justin, Auchincloss fuses his cold-eyed inside knowledge of how the world of privilege really works with his angry memories of “being back amid the varnished walls surrounded by boys who are waiting to kill the smallest aspiration.” The result is a novel of considerable power and insight, perhaps the best thing ever written about the American prep school ethos….

He will be missed.

TT: Coming to a TV near you

January 27, 2010 by Terry Teachout

A couple of weeks ago I spent an hour talking about Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong with Brian Lamb of C-SPAN at the network’s studios in Washington, D.C. It was, I said at the time, the best interview I’ve ever done with anyone on any subject–thorough, challenging, well-informed, impeccably fair. Now you can see for yourself. My appearance on C-SPAN’S Q & A will be telecast twice this coming Sunday, at eight p.m. ET and eleven p.m. ET, with a replay on Monday at six a.m. ET.
If you’re not planning to be anywhere near a TV set on Sunday, you’ll also be able to watch my C-SPAN interview on your computer via streaming video by going here.
Incidentally, I’ll be announcing the subject of my next book during the interview.

TT: Snapshot

January 27, 2010 by Terry Teachout

Charles Laughton recites the Gettysburg Address in Ruggles of Red Gap, filmed in 1935:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

TT: Almanac

January 27, 2010 by Terry Teachout

“There is no such thing as justice–in or out of court.”
Clarence Darrow (quoted in the New York Times, April 19, 1936)

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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