The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss

by Louis Auchincloss

  “My dear, you are to Wall Street what Julia Ward Howe was to the Union. And your eyes will never admit that they have seen the glory of the going of the Lord. What I’m doing will no doubt raise the hackles of the old guard. I’m sure I shall be called some very nasty names. But not everyone feels that way. Even in the office some of the younger men think I’m doing a very interesting thing.”

  “I’m sure you’re very persuasive. No one’s ever doubted that. But Hugh questions whether our John, after this, will be accepted at Groton.”

  I laughed in sheer surprise. “But President Roosevelt went to Groton!”

  “And the school is not proud of it, I’m told.”

  “Really, Marion, you and Hugh are being too absurd. Even the stuffiest people aren’t going to hold what I do against a child. The boy may have to suffer a few cracks, but if he’s worth his salt, he’ll crack right back.”

  “Not everyone has your independence, George. Not everyone could take so lightly the bitter feelings that you have aroused.”

  “Lightly! I welcome the resentment of people like that! It actually exhilarates me.”

  This was too much. Marion seemed now to reach for a hidden weapon she had so far been reluctant to use. “Do you know what Hugh says your real motive is?”

  “Oh, do tell me! I delight in Hugh’s theories.”

  “He says you’ve always hated our world. That you’ve been biding your time for the chance to bring it down in ruins about our ears.”

  “And to what, pray, does he attribute this fervid rancor?”

  “To your lifelong resentment of what Mr. Dunbar did to your mother! Nothing less than the destruction of his entire life work would make up to you for that humiliation!”

  “I see. It’s not unclever. For Hugh. But what about himself? Might not his reckless investment policies have concealed an inner drive to bankrupt the firm?”

  Marion stared. “But what would have been his motive?”

  “Ah, the id, my dear, the id. Who can penetrate its murky depths? But no, I shan’t press that theory too far. And as to his of me, well, it might be as true as heaven or as false as hell. I don’t think I really care. What difference do motives make? If they’re unconscious, they’re beyond our control. And even if they’re conscious, are they our true motives?” I smiled in pleasure at the liberating idea. “Isn’t there always a me-me-me behind the fair face of the do-gooder?”

  “Is that what you think you are, a do-gooder?”

  “Well, there you are, my dear. I do. Skip the gold stars. Skip the demerits and black marks. Just look to the effect of what I do. If this new law will bring any kind of order to the marketplace, does it matter that I may be getting a jag out of kicking your old world in the teeth?”

  “It should matter to you. It would degrade you.”

  “Let it degrade me, then. All that matters is the new law. Young John Leslie Manville may have a better Wall Street to work in. Even though he may have a few genes that will make him hanker for the old pirate days.”

  “George, please! That’s a low one.”

  “Oh, Marion, you and I have been through too much not to be occasionally honest with each other. And anyway, we shan’t be meeting too often, as I shall be moving to Washington. And when poor Aggie Norman dies—which can’t be far off now—we’ll get a quiet divorce, and you and Hugh can marry.” I held up my hand to interrupt whatever comment she might have. “No, please, my dear, let’s not discuss that. We both know it’s always been in the cards. There’ll be less scandal in that than in what everyone suspects now. And my heresy will ease whatever shock is left.”

  “Oh, George.” Marion’s voice was lower now, and she put her hand on a table as if to support herself. But she was always transparent. There was a deep gratification for her in my proposed solution. She could be sorry for George Manville and welcome the exclusion of this odd non-conformer from her life. “Will you let me help with the decoration of whatever house you take in Washington?”

  “Oh, a hotel will do me. I have no idea how long I’ll be there. And now you must get on to your party. But tell me one thing before you go. Do you remember the three categories into which your brother Bob used to divide his friends?”

  “No. Why?”

  “They had to be either swell guys, shits or genial shits. I’m wondering if I haven’t at last qualified for the third category.”

  “What on earth are you talking about? I never heard such barnyard language!”

  But I had no need to answer her. I was content. I felt fully the equal of all the Leslies and Dunbars and Normans now. And I was too proud to be proud of it.

  THEY THAT HAVE POWER TO HURT

  1994

  1

  I HAD DREAMED that an old age in Paris would be just what suited me. Oscar Wilde wrote that good Americans go to Paris when they die; I had decided not to wait. I had sucked from the fruit of my native land all it had to offer to one even as greedy as I, and now, as a bachelor of seventy-five who had survived his dearest friends (they had all been my seniors, some by many years), I hoped to sit out a tranquil senility on the porch of a café under a chestnut tree, watching the sprucely clad Gauls go briskly by, intent, as are the truly civilized, on the immediate present, oblivious of the glories and shames of the past and certainly oblivious of a small antique American gentleman, however nattily attired, however much possessed of a certain “air,” who would not have disturbed them for the world, content as he was to dwell only in his memories of an undistinguished but amusing past.

  I am not being modest. Modesty has never been a virtue I admired. If I did not achieve anything great as the assistant art critic of a major New York daily, or as a contributor of urbane tales to popular magazines, or even as an easily identified minor character in a couple of important American novels, I have nonetheless written one short story which achieved something like fame and is still included in anthologies of the “best,” and I recently (and fatally, as it turned out) published a little record of my friendships with some of the major artists and writers of our time which I had thought might provide our academicians with some new insights into the intellectual life of Manhattan in the years immediately following the second war. These nineteen-eighties, in which I write, have witnessed a new interest in our American artistic past (perhaps to balance the fashionable shame at our American political present), and it was this which I had hoped to tap.

  I should have remained silent. My memoir enjoyed only a modest sale, but it proved manna from heaven (or hell) to the English departments of some of our major universities, where the “psychobiographies” of dead writers are manufactured with total immunity from moral as well as legal retaliation. I found myself the subject of many Ph.D. theses which probed with relendess speculations into the nature of my relations with Arlina Randolph, Dan Carmichael and Hiram Scudder, and when one of my references led to the uncovering of Arlina’s letters to me (she had asked me to return them to her to be “destroyed”!) in the unsifted archives of Sulka University (today the great “discoveries” are made, not in attics but in the files and storage spaces of public institutions), there was an explosion of comment that would have led one to suppose it a cache equivalent to the Boswell papers in Malahide Castle. Arlina, the grande dame of American letters, the aristocratic soul supposedly faithful to an elderly spouse rendered impotent by arthritis, had, on the contrary, received her “fulfillment” at the ripe age of forty-three in an adulterous affair! Great news!

  My stomach turned over as I read the fulsome extravagances of smutty-minded professors entranced at uncovering the copulations of their idol. I thought of the due de Lauzun in Saint-Simon’s memoirs, concealed under the bed of the Montespan and chuckling gleefully to himself as the springs bounced to the thrustings of the Sun King. That is scholarship in our day! We have seen in the fantasies of our learned friends the narrow couch of Emily Dickinson groan under the added weight of a lesbian visitor, and the aging Henry James reaching a trembling hand
toward the private parts of a young male admirer. And as if to excuse itself from the charge of mere pornography, Academia insists that these postulated encounters were the source of even greater art. Is not a warmer and more human note detectable in the great Arlina’s prose after Venus’s belated visit? I, anyway, could not detect it. I found her most convincingly described love affair in a story written not only before me, but even before her marriage to “Red” Suydam (who was certainly not impotent in that early day).

  But why, a stranger to these professorial raptures may ask, do I object so? Is it not something for the obscure Martin Babcock to see himself elevated to the status of a priapic muse? Should I not be grateful to supply even a phallic footnote to the history of American letters? And to know that erudite teachers now divide the fiction of Arlina Randolph into pre- and post-Babcock sperm?

  Perhaps I might have succumbed to some such shameful complaisance had I been awarded any credit for my share in Arlina’s “renaissance.” But I have not been. Not a jot. Her so-called passion is depicted as a purely unilateral affair. If one partner was raised to the glory of a cerulean sky, the other was debased to an underworld of smoky fires glinting in the darkness. Dan Carmichael’s clever but malicious drawing of a young satyr, his tiny horns just emerging from his clustered curls, with an impish leer on his deceptively angelic features as he pipes a seductive tune to a group of ludicrously swooning gods and goddesses, has been reproduced in the pages of learned periodicals and interpreted as the great artist’s rendering of me and my “victims.”

  Oh, yes, gods as well as goddesses. Hear what that grand old ham of Yankee fiction, Hiram Scudder, had to say of me in the correspondence dug out of the dead pile of his papers at Gainsville Tech:

  “I agree with you about Babcock. Few of Arlina’s friends felt that he was worthy of the affection she lavished on him. It is always sad to see a person of the first order chained to one of a baser tier. Martin undeniably had charm and a kind of elfin beauty. He seemed to be trying, by a sort of osmosis, to imbibe from more gifted souls some of the talent with which he had not been endowed. But his soul, like his personal stature, was small; he was a busy little animal who played below the belt with both sexes and had no real concept of what went on in their minds or hearts.”

  Certainly not below your belt, horrid old man, embracing young men in homoerotic hugs and extolling their youth and vigor with your stale breath!

  Well, where, anyway, do I come out of all this? With the idea, certainly, that if sex be the clue to unravelling the mystery of artistic creation (and I must assume, I suppose, that it is a mystery), then sex had better not be viewed through the haze of romanticism which obscures even the vision of pornographers. I can provide my own lens in the form of this memorandum which may one day be found among my papers in some university library that accepts any bequest (microfilm, after all, takes up so little space) by a graduate student looking desperately for a novel aspect in the sex life of an American writer.

  2

  I was born in 1912, a so-called afterthought, actually a mistake, ten years after the birth of the last of four siblings born to my parents in the first four years of their marriage, so that I was raised essentially as an only child. My father was a sturdy, hearty gentleman of shallow feelings and fixed ideas. As a stockbroker on Wall Street he had managed to lose the bulk of a not inconsiderable fortune, starting even before the 1929 crash, but he would never acknowledge that it was more than a transitory piece of bad luck, and he continued to haunt his clubs, giving vent, to all who would listen, to his market theories as if he were another Bernard Baruch, and leaving the management of his brownstone and his shingle cottage in Bar Harbor, Maine, to the small income and hard-pressed imagination of his plain and feverishly resourceful wife.

  I say “plain,” but there was an air of undoubted nobility in Mother’s long, sad, brown face and tumbled, prematurely gray hair. She took the reverses of fortune as a judgment on a frivolous society and distanced herself from those friends and relatives who had better survived the crash, as if her new poverty were a monastic garb to be worn with a dignified humility, but in semi-isolation. When I was sent on a scholarship to Saint Stephen’s, a fashionable New England boarding school, and protested bitterly to Mother (Father was a mere cipher in my life) that my clothes and allowance were horridly inferior to those of my classmates, she retorted that it would build my character to endure the sneers of the “purse proud.” And she made the same answer when I begged her not to scandalize the Bar Harbor summer community and cost me my invitations to the swanker children’s parties by taking in boarders.

  I loved Mother and wanted to help her, but I decided early that we would never recover our position by her formula, and certainly not by Father’s, and I learned to grit my teeth and do things my own way. I assessed my cherubic looks and my art of pleasing, and I saw, clearly enough, that the rich dangerous world which Father fatuously thought he still belonged to, and that Mother so fiercely scorned, could, however precariously, be won. The members of the Bar Harbor Swimming Club might disdain one of my parents and dislike the other, but, after all, they had always known them, and they could be cajoled into welcoming “charming young Martin,” who had such a “tough time” at home.

  Mother saw that I was becoming a toady and, worse, a successful one, and she minced no words in telling me so. At last, in my passionate resistance to what I considered her smothering influence, I said things to her that she could not forgive. Ah, that was it; that was what did it! Mothers should always forgive; the gate to redemption should be ever ajar. I thought, when she at last gave me up and accepted my dedication to Mammon with a shrug of contempt, that I was relieved, but of course I wasn’t. The iron had entered into my soul, and no amount of surface gaiety could ever quite cover it. I hated Mother because I loved her.

  At boarding school when, at age fourteen or thereabouts, the boys had begun to lift their heads out of the dusty cellar of wanton blows and wisecracks and to see one another dimly as fellow humans, I was able to make friends with the more prominent and popular of my classmates, compensating for my lack of heftiness with amiability and wit. Teenage boys are not accustomed to sympathy and interest from their contemporaries, and a little precocity in this field can do wonders for a social climber. I also knew how to turn a crowd against an enemy with a deadly but smilingly delivered commentary on some particularly vulnerable aspect of his personality. It is good to be sometimes feared.

  My good looks were usually an important asset, but not always. They were on one occasion a decided liability. In the annual school play I was cast as the heroine with a blond wig, and so striking was my beauty and coyness of manner that two school prefects, one the captain of our football team, fell in love with me and abducted me to the cellar of the chapel, where they took turns necking with me. I will not say that this experience was the origin of a mild taste for homoerotic pleasures which has never entirely deserted me, but it certainly did not contribute to a normal development. The worst part of it was that word got out, and I achieved a reputation that followed me to Yale and was almost surely responsible for my failure to be tapped by the senior society which I had passionately coveted, the dapper and urbane Scroll & Key. Even today, when I think of this and remember our old headmaster, the holy of holies, drivelling on in his God-drunk sermons about purity and manliness while that had gone on beneath his pulpit, I feel a wild rage at the hysterical hypocrisy of those times.

  Thus the pattern of my life was set, changing very little from college to my thirty-fifth year, when I first met Arlina Randolph. I was always well liked, even at times the “life of the party,” but never the most popular, never truly respected by the puritanically serious, suffering a bit from the taint of the clown. In the navy, in the second war, I started as an ensign on an admiral’s staff in Washington and ended there as a senior lieutenant. My imagination and diplomatic skills rendered me indispensable to the old boy, who refused to release me for sea duty, but I coaxed
him to send me on safe missions to dangerous war zones and was thus able to sport all three area ribbons and even one battle star on my lapel to at least look like a combat veteran. But of course these never fooled a real one.

  Following the war, I used my service insurance money to give me a year in Italy studying painting, after which I became a newspaper art critic covering the secondary shows (my boss took the primary), gaining an audience more through my style and wit than my insight. But the thing that made me known was the single hit of the short story I have already mentioned. It was the tale of a man who suffered from a lifelong terror that his immunity from the hideous executions of history—the hangings and quarterings, the racks, the floggings, the burnings alive—would have to be paid for in some future existence. But when he dies, he finds that he is not a victim but an executioner. He must, with full awareness of the agony he is inflicting, wield the axe, pull the cord, light the faggots. It is true hell at last.

  My many friends expected great things of me after the acclaim that greeted this much reprinted tale. But it seemed I was doomed to be a “one story” man. I never hit the same note again. At thirty-five I was like the man in Mallock’s The New Republic, of whom it was said, first, that he had a great future, and later that he might have one, and finally that he might have had.

  But that was not the whole “me.” I have not been a mere leech on the fair skin of a prosperous society. I have always wanted to give as well as take. I am too much of a true epicure not to realize that the good life involves the hand that comforts as well as that which takes. If I have practiced some harmless wiles to open doors not at first thrust wide to greet me, I have still wanted everyone in the interiors attained to be happy there. If I have had affairs with beautiful and elegant women, ever ready to smile on a pleasant unattached young man with a literary flavor, I have always ended them, I hope, with tact and kindness. I have entertained an odd little faith in my own ability—sometimes conceived almost as a duty, perhaps even as a kind of mission in (or excuse for) my life—to augment the well-being of every person with whom I found myself in any serious relationship. And never did opportunities for such augmentation more abound than in the salon of Arlina Randolph.