A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth

by Louis Auchincloss

  A Voice from Old New York

  A Memoir of My Youth

  Louis Auchincloss

  * * *

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT

  Boston ||| New York ||| 2010

  * * *

  Copyright © 2010 by Louis Auchincloss

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce

  selections from this book, write to Permissions,

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  WWW.HMHBOOKS.COM

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Auchincloss, Louis.

  A voice from old New York : a memoir of

  my youth / Louis Auchincloss.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-547-34153-8

  1. Auchincloss, Louis. 2. Auchincloss,

  Louis—Childhood and youth. 3. Authors,

  American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3501.U25Z46 2010

  813'.54—dc22 [B] 2010015894

  Book design by Patrick Barry

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 43 2 1

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION: Turning Back [>]

  Part I: How It Was

  1 | Genealogy, et cetera [>]

  2 | John and Priscilla [>]

  3 | What Some Call "Society" [>]

  4 | A Few Words About Women [>]

  Part II: Education and After

  5 | Teachers, Beloved and Otherwise [>]

  6 | My Life in Crime [>]

  7 | Bar Harbor [>]

  8 | Bad Sports [>]

  9 | Religion [>]

  10 | The Great Depression [>]

  11 | The Brits [>]

  12 | Cohorts [>]

  13 | A Hang-up [>]

  14 | I Begin to Write [>]

  15 | Sea Duty [>]

  16 | Fear [>]

  17 | A Return to Society [>]

  18 | The Firm [>]

  19 | Fleeing the Law [>]

  20 | A Few More Words About Women [>]

  21 | Animal Encounters [>]

  Part III: The Writing Life

  22 | Writerly Types [>]

  23 | Class [>]

  24 | Burdens [>]

  25 | A Would-be Writer, Not Forgotten [>]

  Part IV: Farewells

  26 | My Mother [>]

  27 | And Please Do Not Forget [>]

  EPILOGUE: Words [>]

  * * *

  TURNING BACK

  An Introduction

  I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;

  A kind old nun in a white hood replies;

  The children learn to cipher and to sing,

  To study reading-books and histories,

  To cut and sew, be neat in everything

  In the best modern way—the children's eyes

  In momentary wonder stare upon

  A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

  —WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS,

  Among School Children

  Reading, writing, and talking about books have occupied much of my life, and so, not surprisingly, it is here where I find I must begin.

  When I retired from the practice of law at age sixty-nine I had more than enough time for the writing of my novels, and I gladly accepted the offer of my friend James Tuttleton, head of the English department at New York University, to teach there. They had adopted a policy of inviting known authors, without academic qualifications, to give courses, and Tuttleton had in mind that I might give one on Henry James and Edith Wharton, as I had written books on both. Ultimately I did give such a course to a small group of graduate students, but what I had in mind was a more extensive course for undergraduates on Shakespeare and his contemporary dramatists.

  I had long wanted to do something to rebut the idiotic theories that the man from Stratford couldn't have written the thirty-seven plays attributed to him. My ambitions were further aroused by a conversation with the brilliant U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia who told me that he favored the Earl of Oxford as the true author of Shakespeare's works. Hearing this from such an informed and learned man shocked me considerably. So I drew up a detailed plan for what we might cover that would illustrate my case. Each week, I envisioned, the students would read a play of Shakespeare's, along with something by a contemporary, say, Jonson, Marlowe, Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher, Tourneur, Middleton, or what have you.

  My idea was to show that Shakespeare, with his education and background, fitted perfectly into his times; that he wrote for the theatre in much the same way as the others, using similar plots, ideas, and devices. But, in short, I wanted to demonstrate that he was simply so much better than the others that, in his hands, all the conventions seemed new, fresh, and alive. To think his plays were written by Bacon or Oxford is, in my opinion, to show a tin ear.

  A man with a tin ear for music has no trouble confessing it, but one with a tin ear for poetry may be genuinely unaware of it. Especially in these, prosaic-at-best, times. Such a reader is aware of hearing the same words that a poetry lover does, and he believes that he gives them the same meaning. What is it then, he must ask himself, that sets the interpretations of experts apart from his own? When Hamlet ends his tragedy with the line "You that look pale and tremble at this chance," the less initiated reader hears only a simple sentence. Why is it experienced readers and scholars hear more and deeper meanings than the newcomer? How does one come to appreciate all these nuances?

  When I, attempting to make the seriousness of a judge appear trivial, approached the dean with my project, he looked doubtful. "I know, I know," I said, responding to that look people get when their manners conflict with their purpose. "Shakespeare is sacred territory, and I don't belong to the union."

  "Well, what are your qualifications then?"

  "I'm a doctor of letters of NYU."

  There was a moment of surprised silence before the dean recovered himself. "But that was honorary."

  "You should be more careful in handing those things out."

  However minimal the dean considered my chances of success, I had won a victory, of sorts. The following fall, I found myself facing some thirty young men and women, only five or six of whom had ever read a play by the bard. That many of them had no ear for poetic language became only too clear when I read their papers, into which it was distressingly common for them to insert, with the stunning confidence of Dickens's errant urchins, plagiarized passages. The fact that they didn't realize that it was impossible for me not to recognize the shift from their own clumsy prose to that of a more elevated variety spoke worlds of their difficulties with language. And perhaps with life.

  Would a student deaf to poetry respond to prose? Fortunately Shakespeare wrote both, and I had some success in reading aloud Hamlet's peerless speech to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

  "I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave overhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours."

  The unrestrained emotion and humanity of the piece always stopped the class, at least for a few moments. The students' attention to something so archaically expressed pleased me. It is something I cheerfully recall when the earth to me, too, seems a "sterile promontory." I remember how Shakespeare reached acr
oss time to touch their feelings. I cannot claim to expect any comparable impact. But I believe in words, for their power to articulate what others have previously sought to communicate, along with their capacity to show us that most terrifying vantage, ourselves.

  I find myself some years past my ninetieth birthday as I approach this task of remembering (or, at other times, continuing, happily, to forget) my life. I cannot say if, like Shakespeare, I am a man who fit perfectly into his times, or if I stood par. Nor can I be sure whether I have, either on the page or in my daily existence, revealed a tin ear for life or art. But I believe I can take you back to those who dominated the places of my youth, and those who shared them. I believe I may try to examine those who, for whatever reasons, never gained admittance to the places I dwelled merely by advantage of birth. This book is not for me, not just, as memoirs sometimes are, a record of my terrors or complaints. It is for those who I have passed my time with, those who showed me that there was much to admire, along with all the others who have made my life, the people I have been fortunate enough to encounter, the voices I remember and would like to introduce to you.

  Part I

  How It Was

  1. Genealogy, et cetera

  OF MANY PEOPLE it does not tell us much to describe them as residents of New York City because so large a portion of those so situated were born and raised elsewhere or are even recent arrivals. In my own case, the description is only too telling, as all eight of my grandparents lived the bulk of their lives in this marvelous place.

  I was born in 1917 to parents who had been wed in their early twenties in 1911. My father, Joseph Howland Auchincloss, named for a great uncle who had been a Civil War general, was a member of a prominent New York law firm known by the abbreviated title of Davis Polk. (The senior partner was the former Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis.) My mother, the former Priscilla Stanton, was a member of a large, close-knit, and socially active clan, the Dixons, who lived in neighboring brownstones on West Forty-ninth Street and summered in shingle villas by the sea in Southampton.

  Both of my parents lived to be old and were devoted to their four children, John, Priscilla, myself, and Howland. But a seldom-discussed shadow complicated our lives. My father suffered all his life from severe periodic depressions that sometimes caused him to suspend the practice of law for as much as a year. It was as though something in his spirit simply fell away upon occasion and, whatever his exertions, could not be regained. Yet my father remained charming and popular with the world at large, whatever the cost to himself. We were not raised to show our problems or disappointments in public.

  The term "getting ahead" invokes a sacred American goal. Yet it was not one ever much emphasized by my father, who was utterly content with his partners, his practice, his family, and his sports. He had no hankering for political office or other distinction. Until the onslaught of his nervous ailments in late middle age, he seemed as happy as a man could be. And why should he not have been? To support his devoted wife and children he could count, in the year 1931 for example, on the following assets: a modest but ample brownstone in Manhattan; a house in Long Island for weekends and summer; a rented villa in Bar Harbor, Maine, for July; four housemaids; two children's nurses; a couple to maintain the Long Island abode; a chauffeur and four cars; several social clubs; and private schools for the children.

  Mother used to warn us when we went to the country for the weekend: "Now don't expect anything fancy; we've just got the couple!" Father would add that "the couple" referred to most often in such circumstances was actually never more than one and a half people. (One always drank and the other was, unfailingly, a treasure.) But even so!

  My father managed all of the above on an income of a hundred thousand dollars a year, out of which he managed to make an annual saving. Of course the dollar went further then, but still. Yet it never occurred to me that we were rich. We lived only as other successful lawyers' and doctors' families did.

  I was quite aware of who the rich were. They inhabited Beaux Arts mansions rather than brownstones and had butlers and sometimes organs in the front hall. One of Father's uncles had married a Standard Oil heiress. Now she was rich. She had thirty in help.

  The younger members of my world took the fact that it was supported by armies of domestic servants, like our beloved Maggie, largely for granted. That these domestics were mostly recruited from an Ireland that could no longer support its own we accepted. Without thinking too much about the circumstances. Just as we accepted the brownstone stoops that ascended to our front doors and the lights on stilts that controlled the traffic on Fifth Avenue. I don't recall even discussing with another child the plight of the poor women who lived in narrow cubicles on the often cold top floors of our brownstones and who worked around the clock with one day off a week and nothing to do on it. At Christmas, one heard the parental whispered warning about not giving too much to the maids because "they give it all to the church."

  The help weren't the only group often ignored. I didn't meet any Jews until I was sent to Bovee on Fifth Avenue at Sixty-fourth Street, which, unlike the other fashionable boys' day schools of the time, had no restrictions. I don't know why Father selected it, but it had a high reputation and most of the boys came from Protestant families. My time there was a great blessing, for getting to know some Jewish boys made me question the casual anti-Semitism that sprinkled the conversation at home and in the houses of family friends and relations.

  I don't recall people (grownups, of course) giving any particular reason for objecting to Jews, except that they were supposed to be grasping in money matters. It simply seemed to be accepted that they were to be avoided at all costs in terms of social mixing. It was as if they carried some easily contractible and unattractive, though not necessarily dangerous, ailment.

  Although I neither understood nor sympathized with the prejudice—I liked my Bovee Jewish friends and admired their wealth—I saw that the attitude, however displeasing, was a natural phenomenon of the parents' generation. When we moved our summer residence from Long Island's south to north shore, I gave my friends Father's reason as placidly as if it were a change of weather: "Because of the Jews."

  Mother was too intelligent for prejudice but too indifferent to fight it. A friend of my father's attending a reception at the Stantons as a young man told me that he once found my mother, Priscilla, then eighteen, pouting in a corner at some sort of gathering. She complained: "Mother asks all her pet Jews, but won't have mine."

  Mother's prejudices were non-denominational. What she complained about in me was my admiration of wealth. "My grandmother's snobbishness has come back to earth in Louis," she used to say.

  Her grandmother, born Babcock, had been a rigid, bewigged old dowager with the rough candor about money of an earlier New York society. "Don't say you don't like Mrs. Kings-land," she once reproached my mother. "She has three million dollars."

  The elderly lady was not much impressed by Mother's engagement to an Auchincloss. "I suppose it's better than being the last leaf on the tree" was her comment. She thought of Mother at twenty-one as an old maid! She herself had been married at sixteen.

  Despite the fact that there were few with whom she could discuss his depression, Mother gave my father unfailing and needed support. She had no ambition for the glories of the world, but she possessed a strong desire to hang on to the benefits of her family's share of the status quo for her children. She had great faith in the economic opportunities available to her sons if they followed the normal course of their class and fortune. She dreaded their striking out into untested areas.

  In all of this she was an average mother; the trouble was that she was not an average woman. She was brilliantly imaginative, well read, and independently daring; she should have been the writer in the family. As it was she gave too much of her fine mind to the care of her offspring at the expense of their independence.

  But where these children were concerned she was abjectly timid; she deemed i
t her sacred duty to spare them all risks, emotional and physical. Her fine mind was singularly free of prejudice, but she saw danger to her dependents in the unconventional. And she saw it in any overemphasis on the arts, which she could not justify except in the case of near genius, which she certainly did not recognize in my literary aspirations, with the result that she used all her formidable talents to discourage my writing. She quite sincerely believed she was sparing me the bitterness of failure. But there was in her also a curious pessimism about the ability of her children to achieve success in any field. If one of us fell in love, for example, she tended to assume it would be unrequited.

  2. John and Priscilla

  MY BROTHER JOHN, six years my senior, was a sober, serious man with a fine clear mind who interrupted a promising career in the State Department to share a life of pleasure and leisure with a rich and devoted wife. Armed with discrimination, taste, and moderation, they achieved both happiness and success in the sort of existence that often offers less than that.

  John was a brilliant student at school and college, but he was totally devoid of personal ambition and made not the slightest change in his natural good manners in greeting no matter how famous a visitor. When our cousin Janet Auchincloss (Mrs. Hugh D.), whose daughter Jackie would become first lady, beckoned to him at a crowded Washington party to come and talk to her, he simply shook his head. Asked later to explain this, he told her:

  "But Janet, to get near you I have to elbow my rough way through a gaping crowd. I don't do that."

  "Look whom you leave me with."

  Janet was right. The great are left with the wrong people.

  ***

  Once, when I pointed out to my older brother that I found his group in Newport on the stuffy side, he replied that their dinners were good and their guests on time and never inebriated. I retorted that he would have been happy with the formality and regularity of the court of Versailles, and he did not deny it. For a long time it seemed to me that this propriety was inconsistent with a serious life, that such an attitude must indicate a certain triviality of spirit or even of heart. I was wrong.