On Louis Auchincloss, “East Side Story” (Houghton Mifflin, $24.00, 240 pages; 2004)
By David Lehman
Fifty-eight years and sixty books ago, Louis Auchincloss began a literary career unlike that of any other contemporary novelist. Until he retired from the Wall Street firm of Hawkins, Delafield, and Wood in 1986, Auchincloss practiced estate law by day and at night wrote stories and novels on a subject few can be as knowledgeable about: the “old-money” New York upper crust in their Park Avenue penthouses and downtown board rooms.
In such superb novels as “The Rector of Justin” (about the legendary headmaster of an exclusive prep school not unlike Groton, where Auchincloss himself was educated) and “A World of Profit” (about a brilliant financier), he informs us about family traditions and codes of honor but also about deceit and failure, infidelity, greed, and ruin. Where others generalize, he gives us the inside story with warmth and sympathy tempered by a skillful novelist’s cool detachment.
“East Side Story” (Houghton Mifflin, $24.00, 240 pages), his latest effort, shows that Auchincloss – who turned 87 in September – hasn’t lost his touch for narrative fluidity and ease.
More nearly a sequence of interrelated short stories than a unified novel, “East Side Story” is the account of the Carnochan clan from the days of the American Civil War to the present. The family’s initial ancestor came to New York from Scotland in the early 19th century to set up a branch of what his son Peter quaintly calls “the family thread business.”
Each chapter is devoted to a different member of the family beginning with Peter, who dodges the draft during the Civil War and rues the decision for the rest of his life. I like the story of the socialite Alida Carnochan, whose alcoholic husband has joined a born-again sect and renounced the bottle. Alida’s skepticism saves the day; it turns out that the sect’s unctuous leader has had his eyes on the family fortune.
If there is an over-arching theme, it is the family’s tremendous instinct for survival and how one can almost quantify this in dollar amounts. Carnochan men are expected to make or marry money and to pass it along — with the proviso that the heirs augment the pile through professional careers of their own. The Carnochans, the narrator notes, “seemed dedicated to their own permanence.”
Perhaps the central character and certainly the most compelling in my mind is David, the head of the family when it is at the peak of its influence, in the years following the end of World War II. David, a man of imagination and foresight, has become a senior partner at a major law firm. Where others of his class had resisted the New Deal in the 1930s, he could see a paradigm shift in the offing, and he adjusted his policies and politics accordingly. He remains as shrewd as ever. But with David it is always a matter of calculation, never one of conviction, and thus this tremendous asset turns out to be a singular flaw as well.
Chelton, the fictional school to which the Carnochan children go, stands for the principal virtues as Auchincloss enumerates them: “honesty, courage, chastity, industry, cleanliness, patriotism, moderation in satisfying natural appetites, and gentlemanly good conduct.” Where wealth affords nobility, it is important to act with decency if not always with valor. But it is an even greater imperative for the dynasty’s members to retain their prominent social status or improve it.
I have always felt Fitzgerald (“the rich are different from you and me’) was right in his exchange with Hemingway (“yes, they have more money”). It is not money alone that separates the social classes. Manners count. For lessons and examples, consult “East Side Story.” It will make you want to read half a dozen other novels by Louis Auchincloss.
written for Bloomberg, January 2005