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

by Louis Auchincloss

  Once I dared to ask him if his "gift" had ever operated in a non-Walpole matter. "Only once," he replied. "I was driving from Farmington to New Haven to reproach a curator of rare books in the Sterling Library for failing to bid high enough for an item at auction that I had wanted for Yale. It suddenly came over me that my mission was futile for the man I wanted to see was lying on the floor in the library stacks with blood on his face. I stopped my car and turned it around to go home. Then I thought it was absurd to act on an inner vision, so I drove to New Haven. At the library I was told that my man had indeed fallen from a ladder while reaching for a highly placed book and received a bad nosebleed. But he was all right. I have no idea why the vision was vouchsafed to me."

  It was certainly a curious story.

  A case revealing a rarely seen side of collecting was demonstrated to me by Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss, the proprietress of Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. The collection, if that word is applicable, consists of a splendid red-brick mansion with wonderful furniture of every period, vast and glorious gardens, a small museum of pre-Columbian art, and a huge library devoted to the history of the Byzantine empire, a college for which is located on the premises. I call it a collection because every item in it, including the very pebbles in the garden stream, were imported under the scrutiny of Mrs. Bliss. She was a realist and faced the fact that the world was full of ugliness. Her own fortune had its origin in a vulgar patent medicine for children. All the more reason, she believed, for keeping the nonbeautiful outside the gates of Dumbarton Oaks.

  The daily emphasis on beauty is favorable to a certain formality, sometimes suggestive of the past, and this was true of Mr. and Mrs. Bliss, who were in their eighties when they came into my life. She spoke of her own part as if she had been a princess, saying once, "That was the time when they were thinking of marrying me to young Mr. Rockefeller." And she ran a kind of court at Dumbarton Oaks. How she was to address and be addressed by the staff was given careful consideration. Ellis Russell, the elderly bachelor who handled her business, was "Mr. Russell" and she "Mrs. Bliss."

  I, as a lawyer, would have normally been treated the same way, but as my elder brother who lived in Washington was on a first-name basis at Dumbarton Oaks, I became "Louis," though she remained "Mrs. Bliss." Jack Thacher, her chief curator and close partner in the whole enterprise, she wished to call simply "Thacher," but he objected and wished to be called "Jack," to which she only agreed if he would call her "Mildred."

  After the death of both Blisses, Dumbarton Oaks, their sole residuary legatee (house, gardens, college, and collections) was administered by Harvard. It was generally believed that this was mandated by their wills and could never be altered, but a senior partner of mine, who had a firm conviction that one should never over-empower the dead hand, had at the last moment persuaded the very reluctant Blisses to give their legatee the power to dispose of the entire property by sale. The Byzantine students were now clamorous in their demand that this power be used to move their institute to Cambridge and be run by Harvard proper. They yearned to be associated with other fellow students in a real academic atmosphere. Of course, they had few friends in political Washington who cared for such learned papers as "Plumbing in Constantinople in the Fourth Century A.D."

  Rumors began to circulate that Harvard was actually contemplating the use of the power as desired by the students. Would Dumbarton Oaks find itself on the auction block?

  I had always been inclined to the liberal side in disputes over how widely to interpret the powers of the charitable fiduciaries faced with difficulty in adapting their mission to modern needs, but I was not indifferent to their moral obligation to deceased founders, and if ever such an obligation existed it was that of Harvard to the Blisses. For decades, they had contributed large percentages of their income to Harvard to support Dumbarton Oaks, always with the assurance that their estates would be wholly devoted to the same end, and indeed on their deaths that promise had been richly fulfilled. It would be shocking indeed to betray them now that they could do nothing to alter the disposition of their funds. I decided that if Harvard so acted it would be incumbent on me to start a letter campaign to the graduates alerting them to what was planned. I was not myself a graduate, but it would be easy to find plenty of people to undertake the job. One had only to recall the bitter fight over the Arnold Arboretum to know how powerful the Harvard conscience could be when aroused. But first, of course, I had to talk to President Bok and Henry Rosovsky, his famous dean of faculty, whose role in the university administration has been compared to that of Richelieu under Louis XIII. I went up to Cambridge and was received by both men. When I had stated my message, the dean asked: "And just what is it that you want of Harvard?"

  "Simply your assurance—no binding commitment—that the present status of Dumbarton Oaks will not be altered for a reasonable time."

  "And how long is that?"

  "I leave it to the conscience of Harvard. With perfect trust."

  The dean and the president put their heads together for a brief conference that I could not hear. Then Bok spoke.

  "You have it."

  It was all I needed.

  19. Fleeing the Law

  AT SULLIVAN & CROMWELL, the associates were dominated day and night by ambition for partnership. Sometimes they regretted for years a failure to achieve it, even when, as was often the case, for the firm looked after its own, they had moved on to better paying and even more distinguished jobs.

  The associates, often married and living on meager salaries, were not apt to be native New Yorkers, and as their rough work schedule gave them little time for social life, their Saturday night drinking parties often included each other or classmates from other law schools. It was in attending such parties that I came to realize a basic difference between us. Whereas in the heart of every man (S&C had then only two women clerks, neither of whom would even be considered for partnership) burned the glow of his yearning to become a member of the firm, in mine was the fear that I might be made one. For the apprehension that I might have chosen the wrong career had already begun to haunt me.

  ***

  How had this bizarre situation come about? The novel that I had written aboard my LST in the last year of the war had been published and attracted some favorable critical notice. Nor did it seem to have done me the harm in my office that Mother had anticipated. It was simply regarded as a curiosity, like a fondness for yoga. It was even said that when, at a bar association dinner where John Foster Dulles was jokingly accused of running a sweatshop at 48 Wall Street, he had retorted: "On the contrary. I'm told the clerks all write novels."

  Anyhow, the idea had now entered my head that I was destined for a literary career and was perhaps wasting my life at S&C. Might I not in some fashion combine the law with literature?

  It was my close friendship with John Raben, an associate in the firm slightly my senior, that persuaded me that the law was ideally too stern a mistress to admit of any partner. He was a splendidly handsome young man, sturdy, well made, with a broad clear brow and a penetrating, evaluating stare, who came of a very different background from mine, the product of urban public schools and the brother of a policeman. He had a brilliant analytical mind and an almost superhuman devotion to and capacity for hard work that ultimately carried him to the headship of the firm in a career interrupted by a fatal cancer in his fifties.

  John had a characteristic that might have killed him earlier had it not settled in one line. He hated to stop anything he was doing, whether it was running or playing tennis or making an argument or even drinking at a party. Fortunately for him the activity that won out was work at the office, and he was married to the only woman in town who was willing to give up almost all social life because of her husband's long night hours dedicated to putting the final statement on registration statements. Connie was always willing to stay home with the children.

  Was John ambitious? Is that why I put him in this chapter? He was glad enough ultimately
to run S&C for he loved S&C and the work it engendered, but it was hard to tell if he had any particular aim in mind. When he started to earn big money, he and Connie didn't seem to know what to do with it. He bought her a mink coat, which she never wore, and when he hired a maid to help her with the housework she asked him what she and the maid would talk about. When they moved to a swell Park Avenue apartment the living room mantel was adorned with the same old family clock that hadn't kept time for a generation. Yet both were happy. And yes, I suppose you could say they had got ahead further than most. He was the perfect corporate lawyer.

  John and I were very close so long as I was in S&C. As he was always there our intimacy inevitably diminished when I left. He was a year or two my senior and definitely took the leadership in our relationship, where he could be very dictatorial. I recall a young lawyer in whose future he took an interest but who showed an undue interest in remaining in the Paris office longer than assigned, drawing this South Pacific comment from John: "I'm going to wash that Proust right out of his hair!"

  ***

  Why he took such an interest in me I don't know, but he seemed to want to train me to be his partner and once actually got me, very much against my will, transferred from my comparatively easy department of wills and estates to the corporate section under his exacting supervision. How I hated it in the weeks before I was unsprung! Night after night with no social life.

  But what I saw in John was a total dedication that I then believed was essential to any real accomplishment, be it law or literature. If I was to be a novelist of any worth I should have to abandon Sullivan & Cromwell, and give to writing what he gave to his registration statements. I finally told him this, and he gravely agreed. Neither of us realized that a novelist may be working even when he dreams.

  On the rare nights when John was not working he would come to my office and take me to a local bar for a drink that would turn out to be more than one. I shall never forget the night when he was still an associate that I sensed a change in his demeanor. I cannot describe exactly what it was, but something exuded from him. Was it a smile? He was never a great smiler. Was it the way he put his glass down on the table?

  "They've made you a partner."

  "It's still a secret" was all he said.

  I didn't immediately share the news and, not so long after, when I told my father I had resigned from my firm he replied, "I have made discreet inquiries and been told you're doing all right. A partnership is never guaranteed, of course, but you're in the running still. Now you want to quit one of the greatest law firms in the country to write? Who's going to support you, may I ask?"

  "You are," I told him, and he did.

  But I made one more stab at another profession. I went up to Yale to consult the friendly Bob French, master of Jonathan Edwards College, about the possibility of getting a Ph.D. and teaching English. He told me just how it could be done, and then added: "You've spent years qualifying yourself for one distinguished profession only to abandon it. Are you qualifying yourself for another to treat it the same way?"

  I took the hint: if you're going to write, write. And so I did for two and a half years, when I returned permanently to the law. I became a partner in a much smaller firm where I enjoyed a limited but happy practice. But "getting ahead" for me had essentially been shifted to the literary field. I had finally worked out a compromise. That term, in my younger days, was most often used when considering the lives of the other sex.

  20. A Few More Words About Women

  WHAT IN MY YOUTH was "getting ahead" for women? In my Yale years (1936–1938) it had become quite acceptable, even in the most stylish social set, for a girl to go to college if she so chose. She was not criticized if she didn't want to; to devote one's nineteenth year to the elaborate business of "coming out" was still perfectly acceptable, and the ultimate goal of marriage was still the destiny of any girl, whether a college graduate or not. And of course one could always go to college and come out.

  At one time a young woman who had reached the age of eighteen was presented to New York society in some form of entertainment, whether it was a reception, a dinner party, or a dance. The invitees were family and friends; there was no particular emphasis on young men. It was not a husband hunt.

  The debutante, as she now could be called, was "out"—out of the nursery or convent or whatever guarded enclave her family had used for female minors. Now she could mingle in an adult community as what our Gallic cousins called a jeune fille a marier, subject, of course, to whatever were the local rules of chaperonage. After dancing had become the more popular aspect of these gatherings it was inevitable that young men should have become of greater and greater importance until even a modest tea dance, the resort of less-endowed parents, required an orchestra.

  As the parties grew in size and came to include other debutantes of the season and their innumerable boyfriends, the family aspect diminished, and the older generation was expected to fade away by midnight and leave the revels to the boisterous young.

  Parents kept pretty careful track of the young women invited, but as a successful dance needed three men to one girl, and as the parties had now swelled to a point where even a mansion couldn't contain them and a hotel ballroom in the city was required, hostesses had to consult professionals who kept lists of eligible young men if they wanted a lively evening. Faced with dozens of young males unknown to him, not to mention house guests roped in at the last moment and numberless crashers, the poor father of the debutante, far from imagining that his daughter might find a husband in the crowd, devoutly hoped she would have none of them.

  What then was the point? Like many fashions it had none. Napoleon is supposed to have said, when his armies were occupying most of Europe, that if fashion wasn't with him in Paris he was nowhere. And to many girls, particularly those on the periphery of the social world, to whom college had not yet presented itself as a viable alternative to a year of dining and dancing, her party was everything.

  Of course, the expense, now that an orchestra and a dance floor were essential even to a minor affair (not to speak of a tent and valet parking in the country), was a problem for even successful professional fathers, but few of them could face the tears and fury of a denied daughter.

  I recall a Yale classmate who gave up his college career to help his parents with the expenses of his sister's coming-out party, but this, of course, was generally considered madness, and I cite it only to show how extreme a folly could wax.

  I knew a beautiful and intelligent girl, the only child of elderly parents of old stock but sadly depleted fortune, who looked upon her party as the only means to restore her own and her family's position in the world—particularly her own. She badgered and bullied the poor old couple into using a valuable slice of their remaining capital to give her a large dinner dance at an elegant country club. During dinner, at which I was her partner, a vulgar clown, an unexpected and unplanned part of the divertissement, struck her suddenly and unreasonably as having ruined her party, and she sobbed for a hysterical moment, her hands over her face. But I soon persuaded her that actually the silly clown had amused her guests, and she quickly recovered. I had seen, however, what it meant to her. It appalled me.

  The party opened up a life for her that seemed to be everything she had wanted. She married a rich and amiable man who bought her everything she desired, including an enormous diamond into whose brilliant interior she used to silently stare during the dismal months when she was dying young of a fatal cancer. What a subject for a Dürer etching.

  Careers for women were talked about but rarely opted for by mothers of children or women of independent means. In my class at law school there were only three woman students, and in the older generation of my family an unmarried aunt who became a trained nurse was a great rarity.

  All the better positions, of course, in the professions, except in teaching, writing, and drama, were the exclusive property of the male. In politics and diplomacy women were often noticed, but
it was largely for their skillful use of purely female tools, such as charm and beauty. In the eighteenth century, a Madame de Pompadour could seriously influence her nation's foreign policy; today a Margaret Thatcher can use the same tools as a man.

  A striking example of what a brilliant woman of my generation could accomplish and not accomplish in the diplomatic world may be seen in the career of Susan Mary Jay (later Patten and Alsop). When she wrote history with an emphasis on chatty biography, her shrewd observation and lively style gave her a success to which her sex was no impediment. But where her real ambition lay it was, which was to influence the great men of her time through the charm and fascination of her salon. She certainly succeeded in getting to know many if not most of the leading political leaders in Paris, London, and Washington, but what in the end did she really have to show for a lifetime of parties? Would she have been content to have had it written on her tombstone that she had given the only dinner party which Colin Powell had left his office to attend during the whole of the Gulf War?

  Susan Mary's assets and liabilities for a career of constant affiliation with the great were evenly balanced. On the plus side she had looks and charm, and her social position, as a direct descendant of our first chief justice and daughter of an ambassador to the Argentine, was assured. Her family was not wealthy but comfortably off, with residences in town and country. On the liability side she suffered the loneliness of an only child with a bereft widowed mother who had lost a husband from a lingering asthmatic ailment. I remember in Bar Harbor summers in my boyhood visiting Susan Mary in the Jays' house on the beautiful Shore Path and hearing her poor father's incessant hacking cough from the second story. When I first met her charming but always ailing first husband, Bill Patten, and heard that same cough, I knew there had to be a romantic element in the pity and love it inspired in the woman exposed to it by parent and lover.