Starting in a minor government position with a constantly ill though always delightful spouse in the postwar Paris of 1949 hardly seemed the initiation for a great social career, but it was all Susan Mary, who saw all and forgot nothing, needed. She borrowed the perfect little house from rich and absent American cousins and trained a small staff to give perfect little dinners. She perfected her French and studied French history. But perhaps one key to her phenomenal social success in the French capital lay in her cultivation of an intimate friendship with the famous and beautiful Lady Diana Duff Cooper, wife of the British ambassador and queen of Paris. Lady Diana had long tolerated her husband's mistresses, but she did this most comfortably when she chose them herself. Susan Mary was her prize; she did more than fall in love with Duff Cooper, she had a child by him. Everyone knew, and nobody seemed to care, including Bill Patten, who may have been gallant enough to feel that his illness entitled her to a less afflicted lover.
Certainly there was no romance in the second marriage that she contracted after Bill's long, expected, and sadly received demise. Joe Alsop, the famous political columnist, was a known homosexual, and Susan Mary knew all about it and totally accepted it. Here was her chance to be what she had always dreamed of being!
Nobody in Washington was too great to be asked to her dinner parties. Small and intimate evenings with the Kennedys in the White House were part of her social schedule. But fate can play cruel tricks on the most subtle of social climbers. Susan Mary had reckoned with Joe's tremendous charm but not with his terrible temper. What good does it do to a hostess to plan the perfect dinner party if she must see the guest of honor—be he a Supreme Court justice or cabinet member—reaching for his hat and leaving in a huff because he had just been insulted by Joe? Of course, the quarrel would be made up later—people were used to Joe—but the party was still in pieces.
***
These eruptions caused Susan Mary ultimately to seek an amicable divorce. Joe told me himself that he had assured Washington hostesses that he had no objection to appearing at parties to which his ex-wife was also asked. "Otherwise she would have had no invitations," he typically added.
The sad thing about Joe's characteristically egocentric remark was that it was perfectly true. Susan Mary had spent her life trying to be a kind of Joe Alsop, even to the extent of marrying him, but women in her day didn't have that kind of political influence. Their charm went just so far and no further. A generation later she would have used a man's tools. She might have even been a John Raben.
21. Animal Encounters
TO BEGIN THIS DISCUSSION, which may be ill-timed but which is meant only to be amusing—I must zip back momentarily to childhood, when I never had a pet, either cat or dog. Nor did I want one. During my childhood there had always been one or two of the latter in the house, for my mother loved them, particularly a beautiful boxer whom she had to get rid of when it slit the throats of the two black poodles of our next-door neighbor in Long Island, who was not only a dear friend but the architect of our house.
Mother put the boxer in a kennel until it was time for us to go to Maine, where she gave him to a farmer under condition that she could visit him every summer. The dog greeted her ecstatically on each visit until there came one where she was told he was dead. But driving away she heard him barking. The farmer had been afraid she had come to take him back.
My parents thought it odd that I showed no desire for a pet and thought I might be surprised and pleased if I found a puppy as my principal present under the Christmas tree. But I was only angry when told that because it was of an expensive breed it was in lieu of several toys that I had asked for. And my anger turned to fury when the puppy made a mess and I was told I had to clean it up. My elder brother then offered to swap his copy of Martin Johnson's Safari, which I greatly coveted, for the puppy, which I refused because of the great difference in price. I ended up by being obliged to accept my brother's offer or nothing and told I had spoiled everybody's Christmas.
Well, I certainly hoped I had.
Another controversial present was given me by an eccentric aunt, a yellow and blue macaw whose huge and formidable beak so terrified me it had to be given to the Bronx Zoo where, considering their longevity, it may still be.
Although I never wanted another pet I loved going to the zoo and delighted in watching large dangerous animals safely locked away behind bars. This interest culminated in my adult years in two visits to see uncaged beasts in Kenya and Botswana. The latter country was then still so wild that some of the animals might never have seen a man, and I made a particular friend of our young guide David, who was a specialist in the wild dog, an endangered species. He had managed to make himself an accepted guest at the lair of a particular pack, and he took me there once when they returned from hunting, at always the same hour.
The dogs went about their business of feeding their young, forcibly if necessary, without paying us the slightest attention. "Do they even know we're here?" I asked.
"Watch me," he said and leaped out of the jeep. The whole pack immediately jumped up, and he leaped back in. "They know our bargain," he explained.
Indeed they were almost human in their behavior. Or like the best humans, as David liked to point out. They killed only just what they needed and as quickly and painlessly as possible. When the two alpha females gave birth, the pack counted the litters, knowing just how many cubs they could support and rapidly killed the small surplus. The others were carefully nursed to survival even through serious ailments.
I still preferred elephants. I remember in Botswana looking for elephants in a small jeep bus containing five tourists and a guide. The latter was young and over-adventurous, for he was too close to a suspicious herd when we got stuck in long grass. The herd, led by a huge trumpeting cow, her ears flapping, besieged us in a tight little circle, and we thought our last day had come until the cow, diverted by our guide's odd yodels, decided we were harmless and let us go.
I really think I was not scared until it was over. I kept thinking, "Wow! I never thought it would all end this way!" And I remember, when the dreaded beasts had departed, asking the neat little silent old lady from Cincinnati who was sitting beside me, "Weren't you scared?" and her replying, "Mr. Auchincloss, to use a vulgar word, which I never do, I was scared shitless."
Theodore Roosevelt, though a remorseless hunter, was a great lover of wildlife and liked to speculate that some animals had morals. Certainly the wild dog had more than the lion. The king of beasts has been known to kill his own cubs to bring their mother back into heat for his pleasure.
Elephants are notorious for supporting their own sick and dying and are even believed to mourn their dead. In transporting one of them by air to a zoo, it is wise to prevent their dangerous stamping by placing small animals in their compartment, as they dislike crushing them. On the other hand they will kill a rhino for no reason at all, and a rogue elephant is always to be avoided.
I was not destined to have many contacts with dangerous animals, but the one I most recall did not occur in the wilderness but in the heart of civilization: London. It was during World War II and I was a naval officer on leave who was visiting, for no particular reason, the London Zoo. Many of the animals had been removed to escape the bombing, but when I passed the reptile house I asked a keeper if the dragon lizard of Komodo was still there and was surprised to hear it was. So I decided to go in.
I found the reptile house empty, with neither a visitor nor a reptile, except for one glass cage that contained the very monster I was seeking. It was moving back and forth, perhaps impatient for a delayed meal, and saw in me either the supplier or the meal itself. It even rose on its hind legs and approached the glass so that our heads were almost level. And then the silence was broken by the rattle of a V-1 flying bomb in the sky above. Of course I knew I was safe as long as the rattle continued; its stoppage would signify that the bomb was dropping. And then it stopped and I had a horrid moment of imagining myself and the beast fa
cing each other over the soon to be shattered glass. But a distant detonation soon reassured me and I fled the reptile house.
My interest in this monster stemmed from childhood when I read The Dragon Lizards of Komodo by Douglas Burden, who led an expedition to the little-known Indonesian island where they had uniquely survived. He was a great naturalist and a romantic figure, remarkably handsome, as can be seen in the charcoal drawing of him made by Sargent for his mother when he went overseas in World War I. Happily he survived to bring home the bodies of the dragons so beautifully mounted in the diorama in the American Museum of Natural History.
In later life I knew Burden well, for I married his niece, Adele Lawrence, in 1957, four years after she graduated from Bryn Mawr. A rare and loving creature she was an artist and astonishing companion. I was luckier than could be imagined when she agreed to marry me.
Douglas Burden always behaved peculiarly about the dragons. He seemed to feel that because he had brought them to the attention of the greater public that they were somehow his property and that even scientists of repute should not mention them without giving credit to his role in their rediscovery. I could never convince him that the law gave him no greater rights in the beast than I had.
Part III
The Writing Life
22. Writerly Types
MY WIFE, THE FORMER Adele Lawrence, observed, in the first year of our marriage, 1958, that, as by this time I had received some acknowledgment as a novelist, she had expected to meet more members of the literary world. She did not say this with any particular disappointment; her reading was mostly of detective fiction or works connected with her passion: saving the natural environment.
Adele became the assistant administrator of New York City parks and was a founding trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council. She had simply assumed that writers would see other writers, and had no objection to that. Indeed the oddity of our very happy union was that our interests were almost complete opposites.
"Is there some particular writer you'd like to meet?" I asked her.
She didn't know many, so she picked a famous one. "Well, what about Norman Mailer? You know him, don't you?"
"Certainly. And I happen to have an invitation from him in my pocket. For Wednesday night."
"Fine. Let's go. What time and where?"
"His apartment's in Brooklyn. But there's no point getting there before midnight. It won't get started before then."
"Midnight! In the middle of the week! No thanks. We working folk will be beddy-bye well before that."
She understood thereafter why it was so difficult in that day for writers caught up in the workaday world to see their confreres socially. It was not only the hours; it was the heavy drinking then associated with creative writing that wasted so much time. In my bachelor days, and when I was not practicing law, I had ample time to meet, and did, some of the great literary figures of the time, and adapt myself to their hours. I can recall coming home at eight A.M. after an all-night drinking session with Jean Stafford and Philip Rahv and thinking nothing of it. As a married lawyer-novelist I soon changed my ways.
Childhood had not brought writers into my ken. The only one who came regularly to the house was my parents' great friend Arthur Train, author of the popular Ephraim Tutt stories about a wily but good-hearted old lawyer who didn't hesitate to misuse his legal genius to get an innocent man off the hook. But Train was no Thackeray. At Groton I read deeply in the British nineteenth-century classics: Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, George Eliot, but nothing contemporary, no Hemingway or Faulkner or even Fitzgerald. We were then living in an age where many believed that Galsworthy was the greatest writer in English and Anatole France the greatest in French. I passionately agreed with this evaluation until Proust crept into my life. But with him I preferred the social parts about the parties of the Guermantes. I thought his whole theory that love springs from jealousy was twaddle. As a matter of fact I still do.
I was still in my teens when a great change occurred in my parents' social life. Up until then the gatherings that they hosted or attended had been made up of old friends or relations, lawyer partners or business acquaintances, a congenial but very familiar group, rarely stimulating, never exciting. That changed when they were taken into intimate friendship (mostly because of Mother's wit and wisdom) by the four closely knit and infinitely interesting daughters of Walter and Margaret Blaine Damrosch. The doors of the world of music, theatre, and letters burst open for them. When they went out for dinner Mother might find herself discussing the filming of Rebecca with David Selznick or a revival of Siegfried with Lauritz Melchior or his days as a pianist in a whorehouse with Harpo Marx. Father enjoyed it too, and he was always charming and well liked, but he was less on top of it all than Mother, who had the advantage of feeling at her ease with even such a deity as Kirsten Flagstad.
The broadened social life of my parents made a good many famous names familiar in family chatter, but I cannot say that they had much effect on my early writing efforts. Their bearers simply nodded genially to a junior. I do remember reading the witty and vivid memoirs of Gretchen Finletter, the most intellectual of the Damrosch daughters, about her girlhood, and having a glimmer of how the simplest domestic things could be turned into art, but otherwise the whole business of writing seemed to me to have nothing to do with anyone but myself. It was only when I ceased to regard reading and writing as connected with grades at school and college, but as necessities to my pleasure in life, that they became really me. That was in my sophomore year at Yale in Joseph Seronde's class in nineteenth-century French fiction and drama.
This brings up the larger question of whether writers in general influence each other, the way painters do, as almost all art critics agree. I suspect that the major writers do not, or in a very minor way. Henry James is universally cited as an influence, but on whom? Who writes like him? Percy Lubbock, author of Earlham, is often given as an example, and the book is a good candidate, but it's largely a literary curiosity today.
I once deliberately tried to write an American counterpart to a favorite French novel of mine: Renée Mauperin by the Goncourt brothers. I even started it with the same scene of my heroine talking to a young man while bathing in a stream. But before many chapters were written my characters had taken over, and my novel was very different from its model. Not as good, of course, but different.
During the period of my life when I was free to meet other authors on their own terms I was guided by Vance and Tina Bourjaily who ran a kind of salon for just that purpose, which was ultimately transferred from their apartment to the larger space of the White Horse Tavern. Their eye was very good, for I didn't meet anyone at their gatherings who didn't make some kind of a name for himself. Norman Mailer was their most famous regular. I had admired The Naked and the Dead a good deal more than I did its successors, but I was nonetheless dazzled to receive from him the greatest compliment one writer can give another. He said of my short story The Gemlike Flame that he wouldn't have minded writing it himself!
I found it difficult at first to win acceptance in the group. A registered Republican who was also listed in the Social Register was something of a duck-billed platypus to them. And by the time I had won a kind of welcome at the White Horse I found myself a little bit bored. Alcohol was certainly the bane of writers' meetings in those days, and it rarely improved the quality of the talk. I never had a really interesting conversation at the White Horse, though there were undeniably interesting people there. Perhaps I left too early, but I still doubt if any of the writers profited much from each other's company.
Do writers ever? Jane Austen, so far as we know, had no literary friends of any importance. Henry James had the most of all; he made a point of meeting every author of note in Britain, France, and America, many of whom sent him signed copies of their first editions so that his library when he died, though sold for a song by an idiotic niece, was worth a fortune. Would the late style of the three final novels have been altere
d in the least had he met none of the luminaries he cultivated? I doubt it.
It always surprises me that great authors don't get more personal satisfaction from their gifts. Some, of course, do and did. Trollope, Dickens, Browning, and Tennyson were all reputed to be happy in their trade. And, as I have noted elsewhere, I believe that Shakespeare was in exuberantly high spirits when he finished King Lear. But I have to admit that Henry James, and in our day William Styron, suffered cruel and crippling depressions at the very height of their literary powers. And was Emily Dickinson happy when she dressed in white and kept a door between herself and the friends she talked to? Who knows?
23. Class
AS MY WRITING career advanced, it seemed that, aside from the specific preoccupations of the characters and the stories themselves, a particular preoccupation emerged: class. Given what I have told you so far about my life and upbringing, it would have been shocking had the subject not been one of my major concerns. Class, whether real or imagined, is a subject of interest in America far greater than its actual existence would seem to justify.
No doubt there are areas, particularly in the Old South or parts of New England, where families that have retained their original prominence in the same neighborhood for a few generations are still treated with marks of respect, but it rarely amounts to any considerable political or economic power. Certainly our colonial society, largely based on its British government, was a class society. Its upper class dressed differently than its lower, had a different accent in speaking, married and socialized within itself, and certainly expected to have the major hand in government. But soon dress became uniform; accent varied only with geography; intermarriage was common; society was mixed. On what basis could any segment of the population claim it was an upper class?
A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth Page 12