VINCENT PIKET Louis Auchincloss He Growth of a Novelist
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PDF hosted at the Radboud Repository of the Radboud University Nijmegen The following full text is a publisher's version. For additional information about this publication click this link. http://hdl.handle.net/2066/113624 Please be advised that this information was generated on 2021-10-09 and may be subject to change. VINCENT PIKET Louis Auchincloss he Growth of a Novelist European University Press LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS THE GROWTH OF A NOVELIST LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS THE GROWTH OF A NOVELIST Een wetenschappelijke proeve op het gebied van de letteren PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Katholieke Universiteit te Nijmegen, volgens besluit van het college van decanen in het openbaar te verdedigen op woensdag 5 april, 1989 des namiddags te 1.30 uur precies door VINCENT PIKET geboren op 12 juli 1959 te Nijmegen EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY PRESS NIJMEGEN 1989 Promotor: Prof. dr. G.A.M. Janssens Privately printed and distributed by: European University Press P.O. Box 1052 6501 BB Nijmegen The Netherlands Photograph by courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Company Copyright Vincent Plket, 1989 CIP Data Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague Plket, Vincent Louis Auchincloss : The Growth of a novelist / Vincent Plket. - Nijmegen : European University Press Ook verschenen in handelseditie: Nijmegen : European University Press, 1989. - Proefschrift Nijmegen. Incl. bibliogr. ISBN 90-72897-02-1 SISO enge-a 856.6 UDC 929 Auchincloss, Louis Stanton+820(73)n19,,(043.3) NUGI 953 Trefw.: Auchincloss, Louis Stanton. CONTENTS Acknowledgments lil Introduction 1 PART ONE THE FORMATIVE YEARS Chapter 1 The Boy and the Young Man: 1917-1935 9 Chapter 2 Self and Society: 1936-1946 35 PART TWO THE EARLY NOVELS Introduction 65 Chapter 3 Social Tremors: 1947-1954 75 Chapter 4 Studies o£ Minds under Pressure: 1954-1959 101 PART THREE MATURITY AND RECOGNITION Introduction 127 Chapter 5 Public and Private Discourses: 1960-1963 141 Chapter 6 Messages for Posterity: 1964-1967 181 PART FOUR WEARINESS AND RECUPERATION Chapter 7 The Treacherous Years: 1968-1975 219 Chapter 8 Old and New Directions: 1975-present 255 Conclusion 291 Notes 297 Bibliography 333 Summary 351 Curriculum Vitae 355 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank the following organizations, institutions and persons who in their respective ways have contributed to the completion of this study: The American Council of Learned Societies; The Fulbright- Hays Commission; the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research; Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; Manuscripts Department, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; Mr. Douglas Brown, school archivist. Croton School, Groton, Mass.; Ms. Amy B. Sheperdson, Special Collections, Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University; Ms. Katheryne L. Beam, Special Collections, University Library, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; Mr. Harold L. Miller, State Historical Society of Wisconsin; Mr. Michael Vinson, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University Library, Dallas, Texas; Mr. Robert R. MacDonald, Museum of the City of New York; American Studies Program, Yale University; Belnecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library; Ms. Tira Nelson, Ms. Patti Peterson, Ms. Cary Wyman, Mr. Austin Olney, Houghton Mifflin Company; Hawkins, Delafield, & Wood, New York; Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague; University Library, Catholic University of Nijmegen; Ms. M.G. Fray and Ms. Anjorie Peters Sengers-Schelbergen of the "seventh-floor" library. Faculty of Letters, Catholic University of Nijmegen; Mr. Gordon Auchlncloss, Mr. Stephen Birmingham, Mr. James Oliver Brown, Professor Jackson R. Bryer, Mr. Thomas Q. Curtiss, Ms. Anne Davis, Mrs. Joyce Hartman, Dr. Francisca Van Heertum, Mr. John Leggett, Mr. Chauncey J. Medberry, Ms. Ninette Nells, Ms. Bastienne Otten, Mr. Benjamin T. Pierce, Mr. John Pierrepont, Mr. Stuart Preston, Mr. Richard M. Rossbach, Mr. Samuel P. Shaw, Professor Alan Trachtenberg, Mr. Gore Vidal, Professor Bryan Wolf. Special thanks are due to Mr. Willlts H. Savyer, of New Haven, Connecticut. Finally I should like to express my gratitude to Louis Auchinclosa, who kindly gave me access to his files, patiently answered my questions, and supplied me with a desk both in his Wall Street office and at his home. I dedicate this book to my parents. LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS TUE GROWTH OF A NOVELIST INTRODUCTION In American literature of the postwar period Louis Auchincloss, born in 1917, ranks among the most fertile and versatile writers. Since 1947, when under the pseudonym of Andrew Lee his first novel. The Indifferent Children, came out, he has averaged a book per year, a productivity which is equalled by only few other American writers. Auchincloss's works include novels, collections of short stories, plays, literary criticism, biographies, and history. They reflect a diversity of interests, ranging from the morality and psychology of what is best termed the American middle and upper-middle classes, to American Victorianisra and its twentieth-century vestiges, European history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, and his literary forebears, among whom Henry James, Edith Wharton, John O'Hara and John P. Marguand. It is clear that, despite the multitude of Auchincloss's writings and his long-standing presence on the postwar American literary scene, Auchincloss has achieved neither the prominence, nor the fame or notoriety of some of his literary forebears and contemporaries. Compared to other serious postwar writers, the sales of his books have been average, smaller than the sales of the literary establishment and the writers of commercial fiction, and larger than the little known, noncommercial writers published by the small presses. Only in the 1960s did Auchincloss's sales considerably exceed the average and did his books reach the best-seller lists. Auchincloss has never won a major literary prize, nor has any of his works come to epitomize the literary or social moment in which it originated, as novels like The Naked and the Dead and Invisible Man did with unanimously acknowledged power. Neither has Auchincloss developed--nor has he tried to-- into the kind of literary figure who forms the Intellectual center of a literary group or movement. Only during the years 1952 and 1953 did he frequently seek the company of 2 fellow writers like Vance Bourjaily, Herbert Gold, Jean Stafford, Calder Willingham, William Styron and Norman Mailer, whom he would meet at Bourjaily's parties or in the White Horse Tavern. Yet, Auchincloss was always on the margin of such groups. Not feeling entirely at ease in the presence of great names, he was reserved, shy and formal, and never grew into a "character." As Alfred Kazin has noted, he belongs with Eudora Welty and Bernard Malamud to a class of writers who decline to be "all-out public figures" like Norman Mailer, and do not walk "bottomless" around parties for the sake of self-promotion. Indeed, rather than being a typical bohemian, AUchincloss has lived a regular "bourgeois" life in New York's upper East Side. He has combined the writing of fiction with family life, with his professional duties as an attorney in a Wall Street law firm, and since 1967 with his work as president of the Museum of the City of New York. Rather than belonging to the literary establishment, he is a member of the social establishment. He descends from an upper-middle-class family that has been rooted in New York since 1803, and Is an active participant in "civilized" New York cultural life. After sitting next to Auchincloss at a dinner. Lady Bird Johnson noted in her diary that Auchincloss "was very good company and easy to talk to-- polished, very Eastern." She added, "I couldn't imagine him living or writing about life west of the Mississippi River."2 Indeed, Auchincloss's literary work has hardly ventured beyond the Hudson River, and looks towards Europe rather than the West. It reveals an urbanity and sensibility that is linked with the environment from which it has sprung. Geographically, it is located mainly in New York, Long Island and the Northeastern states, depending on whether its characters are at work, are enjoying their weekend, or are summering on the Atlantic coast. Socially, it focuses on the "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant" upper-middle, entrepreneurial or managerial class of the Northeast, both in the office and at home. Morally and psychologically, it tends to look at Individuals in a state of confusion resulting from the 3 transience of their social and economic security, from the decline of the morality in which they were raised, and from their sense of despair when the beliefs and certainties of the past disintegrate or turn out to be Illusions. The above characterization of Auchlncloss's fiction should reveal that, while his fiction Is set in a very specific and, indeed, exclusive social environment, Auchlncloss's novelistic Interests have never concerned that environment itself. Rather than being "a sort of Cholly Knickerbocker," Auchincloss has always aimed at examining general, moral and psychological questions which, mutatis jnutandis, may be examined in any social setting. Nevertheless, the social angle of Auchlncloss's fiction and, more particularly, its alleged llmitedness, has frequently cropped up in critical evaluations of his writing. Particularly in the 1960s, during the heyday of the leftist critics, Auchlncloss's novels were frequently rejected as socially "irrelevant" because they were concerned with the life of affluent classes. And it was not only leftist critics who maintained that since the "WASP" tradition had declined while the ethnic minorities were emerging, Auchlncloss's novels about "WASP" characters by definition disqualified themselves as vital art. As R.W.B. Lewis argued, "Auchlncloss's historical world is, or is becoming a minor one; and the task he has set himself, as its 4 chronicler, Is inevitably to be a minor novelist." Understandably as well as justly, Auchincloss has always defended himself against such allegations with particular vehemence.