In the midst of all the national attention paid to the death of J.D. Salinger, there slipped away with less notice than it should have received the death of another novelist—the author of 60 books and perhaps the most under-appreciated literary talent of the century: Louis Auchincloss, who died on Tuesday at the age of 92.
It really is not much of an exaggeration to say he was the Edith Wharton of our time—but we didn’t seem much to want to read novels set in that Whartonesque world, and Auchincloss received praise mostly of the “Ah, yes, Auchincloss, of course” sort. He deserved better, and a good place to start in understanding why is the fine essay Christopher Caldwell wrote about him a few years ago in the Weekly Standard.
Just as an aside, isn’t Chris Caldwell close to being the most versatile magazine writer in America? His literary essays don’t receive the acclaim that his political pieces do, but they’re very, very good.
February 1st, 2010 | 11:24 am
Thank you. Caldwell’s essay is not only very good but profound. Remaining on the subject of writing American novels, look closely at this by Caldwell,
“THE WORLD Auchincloss describes is one in which every prerogative is owed to age–not out of filial piety or a sense of tradition, but because the elderly tend to have a stranglehold on family capital. A favorite Auchincloss theme is the way those whose lives are already behind them reach out to poison all the sexual, intellectual, idealistic, and even ethical promise of youth–to poison anything inconsistent with dynasty-formation, the moral order, or the moneyed person’s whims, which grow increasingly hard to distinguish.
“The “moral order” is a society designed to kill off individualism through mob rituals: team sports, school spirit, organized boozing. This is a social glue in two senses: It makes the society cohere, and it traps its members like bugs on flypaper. Where it works, it establishes an easygoing egalitarianism–few are too dim-witted to embrace what Auchincloss calls “the god of football.” Hence Auchincloss’s interest in prep schools, which are religious institutions in theory but in practice spawning grounds for business blockheads. Hence his fascination with those who fail or quail at the Teddy Rooseveltian rituals of manliness: the homosexual and the homosexually inclined, the 4-Fs during World War II, those who limp from childhood polio, the literary kid “caught in the library during our match with Chelton.”
“Trouble arises when people try to break away from the flock–usually looking for sex or money, but sometimes for religion or mere autonomy.
Individuals are less often ostracized or crushed than warped.”
Warped.
The ones who are warped tend to develop into what everyone else will describe as “eccentric”. G.K. Chesterton wrote quite well about England being exceptionally good at the development of eccentrics. If you reread the excerpt of Caldwell’s, you could say applies to the aristocracy of England. Here’s a snippet from Chesterton’s Humour:
“Humour, in the modern use of the term, signifies a perception of the comic or incongruous of a special sort; generally distinguished from Wit, as being on the one side more subtle, or on the other side more vague. It is thus a term which not only refuses to be defined, but in a sense boasts of being indefinable; and it would commonly be regarded as a deficiency in humour to search for a definition of humour. The modern use of the term, however, is by no means the primary or necessary use of it; and it is one of the cases, rarer than is commonly supposed, in which derivation offers at least an approach to definition. Everybody knows that `Humor’, in the Latin sense of `moisture’ was applied here as part of the old physiological theory, by which the characters of men varied according to the proportions of certain different secretions in the human body; as, for instance, that the predominance of phlegm produced the phlegmatic humour. By the time of the full consolidation of the English language, it had thus become possible for Ben Jonson and others to use the word `humour’ rather in the sense of `the ruling passion’. With this there necessarily went an idea of exaggeration; and by the end of the process the character of a humorist was more or less identical with what we should call an eccentric. The next stages of the development, which are rather slow and subtle correspond to the various degrees in which the eccentric has become conscious of his eccentricity. England has always been especially rich in these eccentrics; and in England, where everything was less logical and more casual than in other countries, the eccentric long remained, as we should say, half unconsciously and half consciously humorous. The blend, and the beginnings of the modern meaning, may perhaps be dated at about the time of Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels; when Guy Mannering complains of Councillor Pleydell as `a crack-brained humorist’. For Pleydell is indeed laughed at for his little vanities or whims; but he himself joins in the laugh and sees the humour of his humour. Since then the word has come to be used more and more exclusively of conscious humour; and generally of a rather deep and delicate appreciation of the absurdities of others.
“Nevertheless there clings to the word Humour, especially when balanced against the word Wit, a sort of tradition or atmosphere that belongs to the old eccentrics whose eccentricity was always wilful and not infrequently blind. The distinction is a fine one; but one of the elements remaining in this blend is a certain sense of being laughed at, as well as of laughing. It involves some confession of human weakness; whereas wit is rather the human intellect exerting its full strength, though perhaps upon a small point. Wit is reason on its judgment seat; and though the offenders may be touched lightly, the point is that the judge is not touched at all. But humour always has in it some idea of the humorist himself being at a disadvantage and caught in the entanglements and contradictions of human life. It is a grave error to underrate Wit as something trivial; for certain purposes of satire it can truly be the sword of the spirit, and the satirist bears not the sword in vain. But it is essential to wit that he should bear the sword with ease; that for the wit the weapon should be light if the blow be heavy; that there should be no question of his being encumbered with his instrument or laying open his guard. But humour can be of the finest and yet lay open the guard or confess its inconsistency. When Voltaire said, commenting on the judicial murder of Byng, “In England they kill one Admiral to encourage the others,” it would immediately be recognized as humour. But we rightly class Voltaire as a wit, because he represents the consistent human reason detesting an inconsistency. We shall be very wrong if we despise him as a wit, for that French clearness has depths of irony; there is, for instance, more than is seen at a glance in the very word `encourage’. But it is true that the wit is here a judge independent of the judges, unaffected by the King or the Admiral or the English Courtmartial or the mob. He is abstract justice recording a contradiction. But when Falstaff (a model of the humorist become or becoming conscious) cries out in desperate bravado, “They hate us youth,” the incongruity between the speech and the corpulent old humbug of a speaker is present to his own mind, as well as to ours. He also discovers a contradiction, but it is in himself; for Falstaff really did bemuse himself with youthful companionship which he knew to be like a drug or a dream; and indeed Shakespeare himself, in one at least of the Sonnets, becomes bitterly conscious of the same illusion. There is therefore in humour, or at least in the origins of humour, something of this idea of the eccentric caught in the act of eccentricity and brazening it out; something of one surprised in disarray and become conscious of the chaos within. Wit corresponds to the divine virtue of justice, in so far as so dangerous a virtue can belong to man. Humour corresponds to the human virtue of humility and is only more divine because it has, for the moment, more sense of the mysteries…”
Many of the really good English novelists were eccentrics who made their points using satire. Or humo(u)r. They were not necessarily aristocratic themselves but had interacted with aristocracy since their early years. Through that interaction they were given a window into a world similar and as strange the one Auchincloss inhabited and recorded. Interestingly, Caldwell does not say whether Auchincloss was and eccentric or employed humor. I wonder if Auchincloss had used humor, if he would be more well-known and appreciated today?
One can only think of how Barbara Pym’s excellent use of humor was eventually recognized and did lift her out of the obscurity she never deserved.