Aileen, like many old-maid scholars, was as sophisticated about the past as she was timid about the present, and she perfectly understood that there might have been a streak of cruelty, or even sadism, in such eccentrics as the male Ludlows. But nowhere could she find the slightest evidence that any of them had been guilty of any public or private injustice, and the record of Valerian Ludlow in the Revolution seemed to repudiate the least imputation of Toryism. She had come almost to the end of her documents when a librarian asked her if she would like to see the microfilm of the manuscript of Valerian Ludlow’s journal.
“I should like to look at it, of course,” she replied. “I’ve read it so often in print, I know it almost by heart.”
“You mean the DeLancey Tyler edition.”
“Well, yes. Isn’t that the only one? It’s supposed to be complete.”
“Supposed to be.”
Aileen looked more closely at the young man. “You mean it isn’t?”
He shrugged. “Tyler was a great-grandson of the journalist. He published his book in 1900. You know how prudish people were in those days.”
Aileen knew by the bound of her heart that her search was over. She spent the next two days tensely reading the diary of Valerian Ludlow on the microfilm machine. The librarian had been quite right. There were substantial sections omitted in the Tyler edition. Ludlow had been a vain and easily offended gentleman of exquisite tastes and domineering manner. He had entered in the journal every slight that he had imagined himself to have received, and he had carefully recorded every punishment meted out to a servant. His descendant and editor had left in all his purchases of artifacts, all his recorded dealings with architects and decorators, all his conversations with the great, but he had carefully suppressed the invidious details of the correction of his staff and family. Aileen read breathlessly as she cranked the machine, turning the pages of the neat, flowing, somehow merciless handwriting. The realization that she was on the threshold of her revelation was actually painful.
She found at last this entry, dated July 30, 1747:
I have neglected my journal for a week because of a disturbing episode which, through God’s grace, has now ended happily for most but not all. A group of slaves last Tuesday seized a farm on Lydecker Street and held it against the bailiff and his men for twenty-four hours. What the purpose of these ignorant fellows was we do not know, and they all fled. One constable, however, was killed when his own rifle blew up in his face. Public feeling has been very passionate, and on Thursday morning a large mob called here to demand my Rolfe. I met the leaders at the doorstep, and, I must say, they were very civil. They explained their reasons for believing that Rolfe had been the leading insurrectionist. I found these reasons convincing, the more so as I had had to confine Rolfe to the storeroom only that morning for insubordination. I delivered him up for what I understood was to be a trial, but I doubt that he had one. What is sure is that the mob burnt him alive in Bowling Green. It was a slow fire, and they say the poor fellow’s bellows could be heard for six hours. I have discussed this unfortunate matter with Attorney Reynolds, and he advises me that if no trial occurred, I may be able to demand the price of Rolfe from the City Council, as he was taken under a show of authority.
Aileen turned from the machine with a gasp and rocked to and fro in her agony. For minutes she writhed as if she had been that wretched creature on the fire. How could flesh endure it? Six hours? The tears came at last to her eyes as she gave herself up to the relief of hating mankind. Mankind? Could she hate Rolfe, too, bellowing hour after hour, bound over a small flame like a sausage? Could she hate the man who must have listened, agonized, at that storeroom window while his master negotiated with the mob? Oh, God, God! But there was no God. There was only beauty, and whatever commiseration she felt for Rolfe, she had to prevent him from destroying that. She jumped up as she came out of her daze. If she were only in time!
When her taxi arrived at the museum she fled up the steps and jammed her way through the revolving door.
“Is everything all right, Tom?” she asked the doorman.
“Never a dull moment these days, Miss Post. What had quite a scare an hour ago in your gallery. There was some defective wiring in the broom closet that started a small fire. We’ve had the chief and hook and ladder and all. Some excitement! But it’s all out now.”
She bounded up the two flights to her office and fumbled crazily among her keys until she found the one for the prison window’s case. Then she sped down the gallery and opened it. She paused for just a moment as she faced the hated bars, and murmuring, “Forgive me, Rolfe,” she picked them up and bore them to the window over the courtyard. Looking down to be sure there was no one beneath, she shoved them out, closing her eyes as she heard the clangor of the smashing to a hundred pieces.
For a moment she felt as if someone were pulling her over the sill, dragging her after it. With a violent effort she bounded back and stared about her. She was alone, perfectly alone, although below she could hear the shouts of the alarmed guards. In a moment they would come up, and all would be over. She would lose the job that was simply her whole life. As the inky depression began to surge and bubble about her, like rising water in a filthy tub, she saw at last what it was that the squatting spirit had been after.
“Why me?” she could only groan. “Why, in God’s name, me? Was it such a crime to think that even their possessions were beautiful?”
THE NOVELIST OF MANNERS
1973
ONLY A YEAR after he had been made a partner in Shepard, Putney & Cox, Leslie Carter, at thirty-one, was sent abroad to take charge of the Paris office. In the 1950s this post had been regarded as a sinecure, to be held by a semiretired partner with a taste for Gallic life and a secretary who could get theater tickets for traveling clients. But with the boom of American investment in Europe all this had changed, and by 1972 the position required an expert in international corporation law. Leslie Carter not only fulfilled this requirement; he had always believed, with Oscar Wilde, that when good Americans die, they go to Paris.
He had originally wanted to be a writer. As a Yale undergraduate he had majored in English, specializing in the “lost generation.” The Paris of Hemingway and Fitzgerald had seemed to him a paradise in Technicolor. Like so many of his contemporaries, he had interpreted the postwar malaise of these expatriate novelists, their disillusionment and mordant cynicism, their haunting doubts as to their masculinity, as mere romantic poses adding the final titillation to a world that seemed as colorful as modern America was dull. Leslie wrote his own Gatsby in his senior year, and it was the shock of finding his typescript-baby born dead that had precipitated his decision to go to law school. And for all his success there and afterward, for all his editorship of the Yale Law Journal and early partnership in Shepard, Putney & Cox, he had continued to nurse a secret dream that one day he would awaken with an idea for a novel as perfect as Madame Bovary or The Ambassadors and would shut himself away in the proverbial garret to write it out, in a sacred rage, from the first page to the last. It was only a dream, but it was serious enough to keep him from marrying.
Paris did not give Leslie the idea for a novel, but it gave him another. The explosion upon his senses of the City of Light was dazing. He had so long crossed off his physical surroundings in New York as useless to the imagination that he now found aesthetic adventures in every street comer. Was it his destiny, after all, not to write about life but to live it? He occupied the firm’s beautiful apartment in the seventeenth-century Hôtel de Lucigny in the rue Monsieur, where he was ministered to by a discreet valet and a perfect cook. After only a few months he began to lose that look of cellar whiteness that half a dozen years of overwork in New York had produced. The image in his shaving mirror still had black circles under dark eyes, but it struck him now that his thick, inky hair was more lustrous, his pallor almost romantic. As he crossed the courtyard in the evening on his way out to one of the dinner parties that were now a regular
part of his duties, he would liken himself to an elegant young man in an Ingres drawing, a Balzac hero, a Lucien de Rubempré or a Eugène de Rastignac, ready for the conquest of Paris.
Nor was this fantasy wholly absurd. If the representative of Shepard, Putney & Cox enjoyed no great position in the French capital, he still had easy access to many worlds. This would have been of small benefit to a dull legal specialist with a frumpy wife, but when the word got about that Mr. Carter was young, single, personable and that he spoke quite passable French, he became the favorite jeune américain of many hostesses.
Hubert Cox called him one late afternoon at his office.
“We hear you’re a succès fou,” came the sarcastic voice from across the Atlantic. “I hope you still have time to mind the shop.”
“I was here at eight this morning. And I stayed last night till seven. What do you want? Blood?”
“You’re doing fine, kid. Just fine. But I’ve got a little job for you. You’ve heard of Dana Clyde?”
“The novelist? Of course I’ve heard of him. He was the only thing I read in three years of law school besides cases. He lives here in Paris.”
“Yes. His publishers have retained us to defend a libel suit brought by Giles Stannix. The Washington lawyer-lobbyist.”
“Oh, I know Stannix. Robin Hood in reverse. He robs the poor to give to the rich. And saves his soul by defending an occasional Red in the Supreme Court.”
“You’re worse than Dana Clyde. Anyway, Stannix claims that Clyde libeled him in his last novel, Mary Bell. With a character called Ebenezer Kline. Look it up. Talk to Clyde. We think Stannix will settle for an apology.”
Leslie was thrilled. Dana Clyde was his favorite contemporary author. If he did not number him among the great, he put him in a more beloved category: those who wrote fiction as Leslie Carter might have written it—if Leslie Carter could have written fiction. When he put through a call to Clyde’s apartment in Neuilly, he had the good luck to find himself talking to the great man himself. Clyde’s voice was bland, aristocratic, bored.
“Look, my dear fellow, it’s absolutely preposterous. This fellow Stannix is a notorious shyster. It can’t be anything but a nuisance suit.”
“Very possibly, sir. I still think it would be helpful if you could come to the office to see me.”
“But you know, Mr. Carter, I’m a very busy man. As you are too, I’m sure. Couldn’t we just chat on the phone?”
“I’m afraid that won’t be enough.”
“Oh, very well. If I must, I must.”
In the weekend that had to elapse between this call and their appointment, Leslie reread not only Mary Bell but several earlier Dana Clyde novels. If they now seemed a bit dated, they were still wonderful fun. In an era when the term had not been pejorative, they had been called novels of manners. The opening chapters were usually set in some great Connecticut or Long Island estate, at a brilliant house party presided over by a witty and charming hostess with a mind wide open to all points of view. Her guests would consist of a radical daughter, her surly Red lover, a Joe McCarthy senator, an evangelist aunt, a Pentagon general and so forth. Everybody would be very much aware of who everybody else was, what clothes they wore, what income they enjoyed, what ancestry they boasted of or concealed. There would be passionate arguments and passionate resentments, usually based on each character’s anticipation of a snub by another. But the talk was the great thing, the wonderful, frothy, scintillating talk that splashed and sparkled and finally piled up into waves and breakers that overwhelmed the last chapters in such a riot of fantasy that the end would seem to come in a vapor of bubbles. Dana Clyde was a literary magician, pure and simple.
At their first meeting, in Leslie’s office on the boulevard Haussmann, Clyde sprawled in the armchair before the desk, smoking an English cigarette. He was one of those men who seem to bloom in their late fifties. There was an odd boyishness in his high clear brow, in his furtive eyes, in the ease of his motions, in the surprising raucousness of his laugh. He made Leslie think of a slim, gray, aging Pan.
“This whole business shows how utterly people misconceive the true nature of fiction. My character, Ebenezer Kline, is a universal type. As a matter of fact, I’m a bit ashamed of him. He’s one-dimensional. He lacks flesh and blood. In Restoration comedy he’d have been called Miles Malpractice or Sam Simony. It shows what a guilty conscience Stannix must have if he sees himself under that label. All I can say is—if the shoe fits, let him wear it.”
“Unfortunately, you saw fit to endow Ebenezer Kline with some nonuniversal characteristics. Was it necessary to your plot that Kline should be twice divorced and married to a girl half his age? And that he should live in a yellow colonial house in Georgetown?”
“I had no idea what color Stannix’s house was. On my honor!”
“And did Kline have to have the habit of twisting his hair in back into a tiny ball?”
“Pray tell me, Mr. Carter, whose side are you on?”
“I’m preparing your defense, Mr. Clyde. Sometimes we lawyers have to be novelists, too.”
Clyde chuckled. He was obviously a man who hated to lose his temper. “But there’s still no basic similarity. My character is a bigger man altogether. He has wit and charm, whereas Stannix is only a cheap wisecracker. To tell the truth, Mr. Carter, if Kline is Stannix, it’s the greatest compliment Stannix has ever had.”
“He doesn’t seem to appreciate it. He alleges in his petition that your branding him a shyster has cost him one of his most important clients.”
“But everyone knows he’s a shyster!”
“So it is Stannix.”
“Oh, of course, it’s Stannix,” Clyde retorted impatiently. “I have to get my characters somewhere, don’t I? The point is, it’s Stannix bigger than life.”
“I’m afraid that won’t help us. There is, however, one possible out. We’ve had a veiled hint from plaintiff’s counsel that he might consider a public apology in lieu of damages.”
“Never!”
“Think it over, anyway.”
“Never!”
Leslie had learned to let time rather than argument take care of clients’ questions of principle. Their meeting ended on a pleasant note.
***
Leslie next met his client at a dinner party given by Mrs. Kenyon, part of whose dividends as a large stockholder in Clyde’s publisher was the supply of authors as guests of honor. She took it as much for granted that her shares in a literary venture should make her literary as she did that her residence in Paris should endow her with its luminous qualities. Leslie, obviously, was there on duty as a lawyer, but he wondered why Dana Clyde should have bothered to accept. Surely he was too successful to have to please Mrs. Kenyon. With all Paris to choose from, what did he see in that handsome, banal, Louis XVI apartment with its handsome, banal view of Parc Monceau and its handsome, banal, expatriate guests of long-practiced sociability? The food and wine were good, to be sure, but no better than Dana Clyde could get elsewhere.
Yet he was obviously enjoying himself. The whole table listened and laughed as he described the ridiculous scenario that he was writing for a historical movie called Nero and Poppaea.
“My inspired director, Mr. Millstein, has moments of pure genius, particularly when editing my script. Take, for example, his contribution for last week. The heroine’s mother, a patrician Roman but a secret Christian, is giving a select soiree for others of the unavowed persuasion. At an imperial party in Golden House she murmurs in the ear of a prospective guest: ‘Do come in tomorrow after dinner. Just a few of us. Quite informal. Peter and Paul are coming.’”
Leslie, even at the risk of being conspicuous, declined to join in the roar of general laughter. Later, in the library, where the men had assembled for brandy and coffee, he was surprised when Clyde took him by the shoulder and propelled him to an empty corner.
“Let us have a little private moment. I detest the American postprandial habit of knocking their President.”
Leslie swallowed half his brandy. He was ready now. “I have to tell you, sir, how upset I am that you should throw away your genius on the kind of hokum that Millstein churns out.”
“My dear fellow, you’re very flattering. But I assure you there’s no better place for my poor old ‘genius’ today. Nobody wants to read my kind of novel anymore. It’s passé. I’ve said goodby to fiction.”
“But it’s only five years since The Lifeline was a national bestseller.”
“And only one since Mary Bell was a flop. With the critics, anyway. Oh, I have a following yet, I grant. There are plenty of old girls and boys who still take me to the hospital for their hysterectomies and prostates. But the trend is against me. The young don’t read me. The literary establishment scorns me. It’s better to quit before one is kicked out. Society is intent on becoming classless, and the novel of manners must deal with classes.”
“There still are classes! All over the world. Most of all at home.”
“Well, maybe there are. But not my kind. Oh, you know what I’m talking about, dear boy. Don’t pretend you don’t. I have always dealt with the great world. The top of the heap. How people climbed up and what they found when they got there. That was perfectly valid when the bright young people were ambitious for money and social position. But now they don’t care about those things. They care about stopping wars and saving the environment and cleaning up ghettos. And they’re right, too. When the world’s going to pieces, who has time to talk about good form and good taste? What are such things but pretty little blinds to shut out starvation and mass murder? Do you know what I call the young people today? I call them the moral generation. They’re the first that have ever showed a genuine social conscience.”
The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss Page 28
