`The Gemlike Flame'

The kids and I stayed in the park long enough Thursday afternoon for me to finish reading “The Gemlike Flame,” a 1953 story by Louis Auchincloss about four Americans in Venice. The setting and themes will be familiar to readers of James and Wharton. The narrator is an Auchincloss-like fiction writer who meets his expatriate cousin, Clarence, long estranged from the family, and introduces him to a college friend who has deserted his wife and children in the States. Of the cousin, Auchincloss renders this wicked aperçu:

“He attached himself to me with all the pertinacity of the very shy when they do not feel rebuffed, and I began, perhaps ungraciously, to see that he might become a problem.”

An unlikely intimacy, never confirmed as homosexual, takes place between Clarence and Ned, the boyish friend. The relationship is gleefully sabotaged by the narrator’s Aunt Maud, his cousin’s mother. As it was for James and many others, Venice in Auchincloss’ story is both a holy place of European culture and an invitation to perfidy and worse. The mother (“Propped up in her seat she looked as neat and brushed and clean as a big doll sitting in the window of an expensive toy store.”) is a monster, a wealthier, more vulgar descendent of James’ Madame Merle. In a scene reminiscent of Strether Lambert’s belated insight into his nephew Chad in The Ambassadors, Clarence learns his mother has stolen Ned. It’s the night of a society ball, and Clarence sees them together on the canal. In his final sentence, the narrator writes:

“[Clarence] barely turned his head to bid me goodnight as he continued his resolute stride away from the lighted palace and the gondolas that swarmed about it like carp.”

The last word is an aural and moral bon mot: a rude-sounding name for an ornamental fish. By this point we feel a hard-earned compassion for Clarence, a difficult, self-centered but essentially harmless man. We’re left contemplating the frivolity, silliness and cruelty of humanity – the sadistic mother and the mindlessly opportunistic Ned. I closed The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss feeling satisfied. In 20 pages, Auchincloss condenses James’ Roderick Hudson and reminds us that from our fellow humans we ought to expect almost anything.

As I had been reading at a picnic table in the park, a young man unfolded a large wooden mat on the sidewalk next to the playground and set up his boom box. To salsa music he began dancing rather stiffly and self-consciously. Clearly, he wanted attention, whether applause or derision. Most of the children and young mothers ignored him.