'I Came to It Surprisingly Late'

Until recently the only book by Louis Auchincloss (1917-2010) I had read was his best-known novel, The Rector of Justin, published in 1964, along with a handful of his short stories. A fiction writer could hardly devise a serious novelist less likely to pander to contemporary readers and critics than Auchincloss. He wrote almost exclusively of old New York and New England, the moneyed classes, just as J.F. Powers seldom strayed from his devotion to Midwestern priests. Auchincloss is a realist of manners. He worked fulltime as an attorney in Manhattan while maintaining the Victorian productivity rate of a book a year. He published more than thirty novels, eighteen collections of nonfiction and seventeen of stories. In nonfiction he specialized in brief biographies that sometimes started as, and often read like, essays or reviews. His subject in any form is human character.

A recurrent presence is Henry James. In his foreword to Reflections of a Jacobite (1961), his first nonfiction title, Auchincloss writes that “I have called myself a Jacobite because so much of my lifetime’s reading has been over the shoulder of Henry James,” whom he describes as “a kindly guide of infinitely good manners, who is also infinitely discerning, tasteful and conscientious.” In a sense, I’m coming to Auchincloss by way of James, whom I reread often. The subjects of the essays that follow in Reflections suggest a self-assembled tradition. In addition to James he considers Saint-Simon, George Eliot, Trollope, Edith Wharton, Meredith, Proust, Marquand and John O’Hara, among others. Auchincloss is a novelist for whom the novel constitutes his essential education. In the collection’s first essay, “Early Reading and Daudet,” he writes:

"For a person who has derived so much of his pleasure in life reading novels, I came to it surprisingly late. It was not until my war service in the Navy that I began to read fiction in any quantity with no aim but that of enjoying it. It was escapism, of cource, the sheerest escapism, but who but a Churchill would not be an escapist in wartime? As I look back on those long years in the Atlantic and Pacific, the oceans seem linked in my mind by the isthmus of the Victorian novel. I associate the atolls of Ulithi and Eniwetok with Barsetshire and Mrs. Proudie and the amphibious-training base at Camp Bradford, Virginia, with The Spoils of Poynton. Nothing else stood so well in that time of spasmodic anxiety and prolonged boredom.”

For no discernible reason my taste for novel reading seems to have returned. I was insatiable for fiction when young, but starting more than twenty years ago, and hardly noticeable at first, the hunger waned. This might be related to the general decline in quality of contemporary literature, especially fiction. The only good short story writer I can think of who is still at work is Joseph Epstein, and I can’t remember the last time I read a new novel. My recent fiction reading renaissance has sent me back to old reliables – Eliot, James, Conrad, Henry Green, even John O’Hara, and now Auchincloss.