Auchincloss's productivity as a writer of short stories rivals his output as a novelist. . . . Although his literary reputation will no doubt ultimately rest on his novels, he is an able practitioner of short fiction. Gore Vidal has called him "a superb short-story writer," and he has been praised for his "thoroughly disciplined technical skill and artistry" in William Peden's standard study of modern American short fiction. Occasionally Auchincloss's stories are overly contrived, and several of the longer ones seem outlines for novels, but at their best they are very good indeed. They display their author's psychological acuity and quick grasp of the ironies interwoven in complex human relationships. They achieve their effects—often pathetic as well as ironical—with admirable ease and economy of means, and in several of the stories that depict contemporary manners, an almost uncanny pre-science accompanies Auchincloss's usual versimilitude of detail.

When they have been published separately, Auchincloss's stories have appeared almost exclusively in general-circulation magazines. None have appeared in the "little" magazines, and, though Auchincloss has published three stories in The New Yorker and several in Harper's and The Atlantic, most of his work has made its way into magazines that cater to an even broader popular audience, magazines ranging from the old Saturday Evening Post to McCall's, Cosmopolitan, and Playboy. In an age of shrinking markets for short fiction, Auchincloss has been fairly successful as a short-story writer, though he has achieved nothing on the scale of the commercial success of such earlier writers as John Marquand or even Edith Wharton. . . .

Anyone who considers Auchincloss's short stories, however, encounters much the same paradox that is raised by the novels. Because the stories are not self-consciously difficult on the surface, they appeal to a popular audience. Yet, at the same time, they are marked by a profound literariness. While they meet the expectations of the average reader much more completely and easily than many stories published in, say, The New Yorker, they are frequently allusive and sometimes depend for their full effect upon knowledge of particular literary antecedents. Plot is also much more important in a typical Auchincloss story than in the stories of such writers as John Cheever and John Updike, both of whom share Auchincloss's interest in contemporary manners, but whose stories are often vignettes or brief impressionistic sketches. Auchincloss's stories, in contrast, often deal with events that develop over many years, and they may rely upon unexpected twists in plot or ironic conclusions. Almost always, they fulfill our conventional expectations for narrative, for a "good story."

Though the publications in which his stories have been published tell us much about Auchincloss's fiction, their wide appeal should not be overemphasized. Auchincloss has never aimed for a particular magazine audience. He has never been influenced by contracts with a magazine publisher, like Wharton and Marquand, nor has he been exclusively associated with a single journal, like Updike or Cheever. Indeed, almost half of Auchincloss's stories were first published as parts of collections rather than in periodicals.

Within the obvious limits imposed by their author's choice of social milieu and geographic location, Auchincloss's stories display a good deal of variety, and his interests as a story writer have changed as his career has developed over the years. As in his early novels, Auchincloss is often interested in the weak—failures or misfits who nonetheless possess peculiar strength despite their awkwardness or oddity. Though the settings of the earlier stories are always richly realized and authentically portrayed, Auchincloss's primary focus is upon the psychology of his characters. Throughout his career, he has been interested in the figure of the artist; like Henry James he frequently depicts writers, artists, or people who spend their lives acquiring works of art. Even though several collections are set in law firms, that has not limited him from pursuing extralegal interests in many of the stories involving lawyers. The more recent stories, especially those written since the late 1960s, have often tended to deal with social change in the worlds they portray. With his sardonic wit and elegant eye, Auchincloss has always been a fine chronicler of his times. Some of his keenest commentaries on contemporary life are contained in his stories.

THE COLLECTIONS

More than most other short-story writers, Auchincloss has attempted to construct unified collections of stories. All his collections have coherent rationales—either a unifying theme or a set of recurring characters. In some cases Auchincloss's quest for unity has led to a literary form that mediates between the usual collection of unrelated stories and the novel. Indeed, several reviewers have mistakenly referred to two of his collections, The Partners and The Winthrop Covenant, as novels, and one of his recent novels, The Book Class (1984), comes close to being a collection of short stories. Since all the collections are so carefully planned, it is useful to describe each one briefly.

The first volume of stories, The Injustice Collectors, published in 1950, takes its title from a term coined by the psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler. Injustice collectors, as Auchincloss explains the term, are "people who are looking for injustice, even in a friendly world, because they suffer from a hidden need to feel that this world has wronged them." Each story focuses upon one such collector—the girl who destroys her chances of marriage to the most eligible young man in the Maine summer resort by unleashing her impossible parents in a nasty dispute with the boy's father, for example, or the LST commander who ruins his career by his inability to accept assistance from his executive officer in his first attempt to bring his ship alongside a larger supply ship. The characters and settings are typical of Auchincloss's early work: shy girls and matrons in New York society, expatriate Americans in Paris, eccentrics in Maine resort towns. Each story is related with precision and dry humor, often by a first-person narrator who is himself the subject of Auchincloss's ironic scrutiny. Because of its craftsmanship, The Injustice Collectors remains in many respects Auchincloss's finest collection.

The Romantic Egoists (1954) depicts a similar group of outsiders, many of whom also display the same self-destructive tendencies. Though the outsiders in The Romantic Egoists share a self-preoccupation that is romantic in its intensity, the collection is unified not so much by a common theme as by the use of a single first-person narrator, Peter Westcott, whose responses to the cruder, but more vital characters he observes often shape the individual stories. F. Scott Fitzgerald adopted an almost identical title, "The Romantic Egotists," for the original version of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, and Peter Westcott is Fitzgeraldian in his sympathy and urbanity. The characters and situations depicted in the collection are more varied than those in The Injustice Collectors. In addition to "The Great World and Timothy Colt," which Auchincloss reworked and expanded into the novel of the same title, there is another law-firm story, as well as a fine story about prep-school life, "Billy and the Gargoyles," two stories about life in the U.S. Navy, a Fitzgeraldian study of a rich schoolmate, a sketch of an elegant divorcée transformed by her boorish second husband, and a powerful story about a middle-aged American in Venice, "The Gemlike Flame." Even in The Romantic Egoists there are hints of the unifying techniques that characterize the more tightly integrated collections that follow. Auchincloss repeats characters and settings. Lorna Treadway, the elegant divorcee in one story, appears again as a minor character in "The Great World and Timothy Colt." The first two stories in the collection deal with overlapping events from Peter Westcott's prep-school days.

Auchincloss's next collection, Powers of Attorney, published in 1963, makes full use of interlocking characters and situations. All the stories involve the partners and employees of the Wall Street law firm of Tower, Tilney & Webb. Rather than producing boring homogeneity, this unifying device yields a broad panorama of characters from secretaries to senior partners. Several of the stories portray weak or pathetic characters—the old partner who is so irrelevant to the firm that no one even blames him for a costly mistake in a will that he has officially approved, or the nostalgic executive secretary at a farewell reception who delivers a tipsy speech punctuated by her own hiccups—while others portray the hard-driving litigators and managing partners in the firm.

At the center of the collection is Clitus Tilney, the head of the firm, and the man who has transformed Tower, Tilney into a modern, highly efficient corporate organization. Tilney is not above forcing a rival representing the older, less organized style of legal practice out of the firm by giving secret advice to the other side in a lawsuit brought by the rival. Although Tilney's conduct is unethical, Auchincloss does not sit in judgment. He does not see the senior partner as radically evil, and in the final story in the collection, "The Crowning Offer," he celebrates Tilney's innate pleasure in practicing law. As in A Law for the Lion and The Great World and Timothy Colt, Auchincloss stresses the bureaucratization of legal practice and the ways in which modern Wall Street firms have become subservient to their largest corporate clients. Although every story involves a member or employee of the firm, several stories diverge from law-firm life per se to describe the personal dilemmas of wives or clients.

In Tales of Manhattan (1967), Auchincloss again uses the device of interconnected stories. In this volume, however, the tales are grouped in three separate sets. The first section, "Memories of an Auctioneer," includes five stories told in the first person by Roger Jordan, the vicepresident of a leading auction gallery. The final story in the section, "The Money Juggler," which Auchincloss later expanded into the novel A World of Profit, recounts four friends' memories of their college classmate, a shady businessman whose tactics they deplore, but from whose activities they have all profited. In each of the preceding stories, items offered for sale by Roger's gallery lead him into interesting quests that reveal the personalities or lives of their owners.

The second group of stories in the volume, "Arnold & Degener," is another law-firm series. Each story is cast as a chapter in the firm's history written by a specific partner. Here the very act of telling becomes an act of appropriation as each writer attempts to impose his own image on the firm, to assert his dominance over his subject, or to express long-concealed anger or jealousy. As in The Rector of Justin, which immediately preceded this collection, and in The House of the Prophet, published twelve years later, writing biography becomes an attempt to assert personal power as well as a search for the true pattern of events.

The final section, entitled "The Matrons," contains three stories and a one-act play. At the center of each work is the sort of upper-class woman well beyond middle age for whom Auchincloss seems to have special sympathy and affection. Two of the stories depict figures from the turnof-the-century New York described in The House of Five Talents. One is an aged "extra man," somewhat like the protagonist in Edith Wharton's "After Holbein," who is taken under the powerful wing of his wealthy hostess. The other is a gentle alcoholic who becomes for a brief time manager of the Metropolitan Opera House, whose experiences are recalled by his elderly niece who knew him in her girlhood. Another story is a study of the relations between a "perfect," noninterfering mother and her daughters on the occasion of her seventieth birthday.

The relation between a mother and her grown daughter generates the action of Auchincloss's slightly Ibsenesque play, The Club Bedroom, which was performed at the A.P.A. Theatre in December 1967 and televised on the New York educational channel. Influenced by the popular monologues of Ruth Draper, the play is Auchincloss's only stage production. It does not seem out of place in Tales of Manhattan, for the events of the plot build to an ironic climax reminiscent of the endings of several of the stories. In the final scene, Mrs. Ruggles, the genteel but impecunious protagonist whose dwindling resources help support her daughter's affair with a married man, is denied her one small hope for the remaining years of her life—a permanent room in the fashionable ladies club to which she belongs. The only person who might conceivably have a grudge against her, the wife of the man with whom her daughter is involved, happens ironically to be chairwoman of the committee that must approve requests for rooms in the club.

Auchincloss's fifth collection, Second Chance: Tales of Two Generations, was published in 1970. Although not all the stories are equally successful, Second Chance is arguably Auchincloss's best collection of stories of manners. As the subtitle suggests, many of the stories deal in some way with the so-called generation gap, a source of much painful discussion in the late 1960s. Auchincloss is concerned not only with the relationships between parents and children but also with the connections between grandparents and grandchildren, old people and young, contemporary figures and their historical antecedents; and he is interested as well in different "generations" of behavior within the lives of individuals. In the fine title story of the volume, for example, a middle-aged business man abandons the assumptions of his own generation and lives out the "new morality" of the young. Second Chance is decidedly Auchincloss's most topical collection. "The Cathedral Builder" was obviously suggested by the decision of the Episcopal Diocese of New York during the late 1960s to abandon plans to finish the construction of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and other stories in the collection involve a black English teacher at a private school and the takeover of a publishing house by a large conglomerate.

In The Partners (1974), perhaps his most popular collection, Auchincloss returns to the technique of interlocking stories involving members of a large Wall Street law firm. The Partners is also his most highly unified collection. The central character, Beekman ("Beeky") Ehninger, a senior partner in the firm of Shepard, Putney & Cox, appears in all but two of the fourteen stories and is thus far more fully developed than Auchincloss's usual protagonists. In contrast to Clitus Tilney, the aggressive, self-confident senior partner in Powers of Attorney, Beeky is a conciliator and negotiator who often doubts himself. Married, like Michael Farish in Venus in Sparta, to an older woman who has been divorced, he is troubled by a milder and nondebilitating version of Michael's sexual insecurity. As in the previous law-firm collections, Auchincloss provides a number of incisive views of human relationships in large corporate firms. Though several stories are satiric or critical, the collection as a whole comes around—in the final story especially—to a wry but genial endorsement of the special desire of some men to practice law in firms. Having negotiated the merger of Shepard, Putney & Cox with a larger firm headed by an old prep-school rival of his, Beeky decides to retire. He makes the decision at a party, in a kind of comic epiphany: he will retire from the firm only to set up "a crazy new law firm" composed entirely of "duplicates," the redundant lawyers who must be dropped from the two firms because of the merger. At the end of the story, Beeky goes to bed happily, clutching this new "fierce little resolution." In all the stories in which he appears, Beeky's great gifts are his gregariousness, loyalty, and fellow-feeling; he is, above all, a man who shares the love Auchincloss's own father felt for his law firm as a human institution.

The Winthrop Covenant, Auchincloss's seventh collection, grew out of the American Bicentennial in 1976. It is an attempt to explore one strand in the American character—"the rise and fall of the Puritan ethic in New England and New York"—as displayed in the lives of members of a single family, the Winthrops. Written especially for this volume, the nine stories cover the years from 1630 to 1975. Though Auchincloss does not fully achieve his ambitious historical aim, the collection contains several fine stories, such as "The Arbiter" and "In the Beauty of the Lilies," set in those particular periods of American history in which Auchincloss is most at home. . . .

In his . . . collection, Narcissa and Other Fables (1983), Auchincloss returns to the looser organization found in his earliest collections. Though none of the stories are fables in the conventional sense of the term, each deals in some way with a favorite Auchincloss theme: the moral confusion that arises when older values lose their legitimacy and are not replaced by anything even remotely satisfactory. As a sort of coda, there are twelve "Sketches of the Seventies"—a new genre for Auchincloss but one well suited to his sensibility. None of the sketches is longer than a page or so, but each captures a moment in which the ironies or shortcomings of fashionable life in the 1970s are revealed. The range of settings, situations, and types of stories in the volume—from sketches to long stories, from a tale about an elegant expatriate in Florence in the 1920s to a wry first-person narrative by the victim of a corporate takeover in the 1970s—reminds one of the variety that Auchincloss is capable of and attests to his continuing vitality as a short-story writer.

Because of their sheer numbers, it is impossible to analyze all, or even a significant fraction, of Auchincloss's stories in detail here. The rest of this chapter, however, will suggest the variety and range of the stories as well as some of Auchincloss's artistry by considering a sampling of his work: two strong early stories; a series of stories on a single theme, writers and writing; and several recent tales in which Auchincloss offers keen commentary on the changing manners of the last two decades.

"GREG'S PEG"

Most of the early stories tend to be more obviously polished performances than the more relaxed stories in some of the later volumes, and two of them, "Greg's Peg" and "The Gemlike Flame," are especially powerful and carefully cratted. The former story, published in The Injustice Collectors, depicts the improbable rise to social prominence of a thirty-five-year-old innocent, Gregory Bakewell, who is taken up by the members of the fast set at a Maine summer resort. The tale is told by the middle-aged headmaster of a boarding school who befriends Greg and urges him to make something of himself. In a carefully controlled narrative, Auchincloss sketches the strange rise and fall of Greg, while at the same time revealing the enigmatic character of the narrator.

Greg is an unprepossessing, even grotesque character, "an oddly shaped and odd-looking person, wide in the hips and narrow in the shoulders," whose "face, very white and round and smooth, had, somewhat inconsistently, the uncertain dignity of a thin aquiline nose and large, owl-like eyes." Dressed in white flannels and a red blazer—garb seldom seen outside a schoolboy's sixth-form graduation ceremony—Greg is "a guileless child" who still lives with his widowed mother. Having been educated by private tutors, he has never left home or really done anything with his life. Thus he presents a challenge to the headmaster, who takes him mountain-climbing and advises him to spend the winter away from his mother so that he can "learn to think." Though Greg seems deaf to the narrator's appeals, he does respond in his own way. Over the next three summers, he carries out an elaborate campaign to make himself a social leader in the resort community. Beginning at the bridge table with his mother's elderly friends, Greg gradually comes to meet their children and grandchildren and is finally adopted by the hard-drinking, sophisticated set in the resort. In showing Greg's social progress, Auchincloss provides a succinct anatomy of the various generations and groups in an old-line summer resort.

Greg becomes a "character" in Anchor Harbor, and thus immune to criticism, but his new role as "one of the respected citizens of the summer colony" does not really represent an advance for him. Though "his spotless white panama was to be seen bobbing on the bench of judges at the children's swimming meet," and he has become a sponsor for the summer theater and outdoor concerts, his winning costume at the annual fancy dress ball reveals his true nature: twice in a row, he goes dressed as a baby. Greg starts to drink too much, and, as his mother realizes, his frenetic new life is killing him. The climax of the story occurs when, for the last time, Greg does the little drunken dance that gives the story its title. The narrator, who has carefully avoided seeing "Greg's peg" before, observes his actions at the tennis club dance with fascination and horror:

His eyes were closed, and his long hair, disarrayed, was streaked down over his sweating face. His mouth, half open, emitted little snorts as his feet capered about in a preposterous jig that could only be described as an abortive effort at tap dancing. His arms moved back and forth as if he were striding along; his head was thrown back; his body shimmied from side to side. It was not really a dance at all; it was a contortion, a writhing. It looked more as if he were moving in a doped sleep or twitching at the end of a gallows. The lump of pallid softness that was his body seemed to be responding for the first time to his consciousness; it was only thus, after all, that the creature could use it. (Injustice Collectors)

Greg's macabre dance is cut short by some rowdy visitors who hoist him on their shoulders in mock triumph and throw him into the swimming pool. The young visitors are put to rout by Greg's indignant friends, who fish him out of the pool, but he is never the same again. He seems to realize that even the admirers who applauded him and called for his dance that summer were really on the side of the young men. Rather than become a social leader, he has turned into a pet or mascot. The Bakewells do not return to Anchor Harbor the next summer, and two years later the narrator learns that Greg has died in Cape Cod, where he is remembered dimly, if at all, as "a strange, pallid individual" carrying a market-basket for his mother.

Like the characters in the other stories of The Injustice Collectors, Greg is impelled to seek out his own humiliation. Part of the effect of the story comes from the pathos and oddity of his situation. Yet Auchincloss carefully avoids the predictable psychologizing that a character like Greg might evoke. Rather than the conventional domineering mother one might expect, Mrs. Bakewell turns out to be a brisk, efficient woman who does not pressure her son to stay at home and who recognizes far more clearly than the narrator the evil and destructiveness of the frivolous society Greg has entered. Indeed, she is both a comic figure, as she announces to the headmaster that she has read his books and disapproves of them, and a moral voice in the story, when she questions his belief in heightened awareness as the ultimate goal in life.

It is Auchincloss's expert handling of the narrator, however, that gives "Greg's Peg" its distinctive interest. Though honest and perceptive, the headmaster also has a gloomy, misanthropic side. When he first meets Greg, he is still recovering from the death of his wife. He takes pleasure in coming to Anchor Harbor, a place not unlike Bar Harbor, Maine, in the early fall after most of the summer people have gone. His headmasterly desire to improve Greg's character leads, ironically, to Greg's downfall, and his partial complicity in the downfall gives the story its bleak edge. After he finds that Greg has never heard of him or his wife, the headmaster finds himself "oddly determined to imprint my ego on the empty face of all he took for granted." For him Greg is "a perfect tabula rasa" and he eagerly seizes the "responsibility of writing the first line." His grand miscalculation is to presume that the blank surface that Greg presents is capable of being inscribed with any sort of definite message. Greg remains, throughout, the "lump of pallid softness" that is revealed in his little dance, incapable of being shaped by the headmaster's version of muscular Christianity.

When the headmaster finds out what his advice has wrought, he angrily abandons his protégé. A couple of times thereafter, and especially as he watches the grotesque little dance, he thinks he glimpses an appeal for rescue in Greg's eyes, but he is uncertain and takes no action. When Mrs. Bakewell suggests that he save Greg, he points out that "people don't save people at Anchor Harbor." The headmaster is of course not directly responsible for Greg's downfall—he could not, after all, have predicted Greg's elaborate campaign for social selfadvancement. But the vehemence with which he rejects Greg's overtures for continued friendship and the impassive tone in which he relates the story suggest puzzling depths in his character. One shares the narrator's uneasy interest in Greg's fate, while Auchincloss skillfully leads one to ask uncomfortable questions about the narrator's own role. Though it might initially seem merely a story about an eccentric in the fashionable setting of an old summer resort, "Greg's Peg" is an elegantly unsettling examination of a perceptive but flawed individual who intervenes in someone else's life without fully knowing his own motives.

"THE GEMLIKE FLAME"

"The Gemlike Flame," first published in New World Writing for 1953, and reprinted in The Romantic Egoists, is a brilliantly developed portrait of another lonely figure. The story depicts Clarence McClintock, an American expatriate in Venice, at a crucial and revealing moment in his life. Like "Greg's Peg," the story, in its sympathy and focused intensity, is a good example of Auchincloss's early style at its best.

Clarence McClintock is seen through the eyes of his cousin Peter Westcott, the young novelist who appears in all the stories in The Romantic Egoists. Peter is an ideal narrator, a sympathetic observer who knows Clarence's past but is objective and honest about his own responses. He encounters Clarence—a sort of legend in his family, "personally distinguished and prematurely bizarre"—on a visit to Venice. Emotionally scarred by a domineering mother who waged a bitter custody battle for him when he was a child, Clarence had come to Italy many years before "to admire it and be left alone." Since he had never bothered to make any friends in Venice during all this time, Clarence clings to Peter as an embodiment of a past that remains very real to him. When Peter is beginning to feel trapped, he introduces his cousin to Neddy Bane, a charming but feckless college classmate who has left his wife and now dabbles in painting. Inevitably, their relationship is broken up by Clarence's mother, who arrives in Venice for an elaborate masked ball that represents everything the serious and almost ascetic Clarence abhors. "Quite remorseless in her pursuit of pleasure," his mother in effect steals Neddy away. At the end of the story, having desperately tried to keep his friend away from the ball, Clarence catches sight of Neddy in a silly costume kneeling at the feet of his mother, and he stalks off alone into the night.

Early in the story Clarence warns Peter that he "burns with a hard gemlike flame." The phrase, from the Conclusion to Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance, points to the heart of the story: Clarence's unexpected intensity as revealed in perhaps his only serious relationship with another human being. Practically everyone except Peter—and especially Clarence's mother—is eager to see his friendship with Neddy as a tawdry homosexual affair, but Clarence regards it, ironically, as an ideal love and his own highest contribution to Art, insofar as he supplies the order and discipline Neddy needs to paint. That Neddy is a totally unworthy object of devotion ultimately means very little, for Clarence has found "a love that I've looked for all my life." Even Peter has difficulty understanding that there is something ineffable in his love, "a quality in his feelings that was over and above what is called sublimation, a quality that made of it something higher than—." Peter's sentence breaks off as he realizes how hopeless the task of explaining that "something higher" would be, and the story proceeds to the final scene, in which Clarence turns away to guard the gemlike flame alone: "Should not true flame-tenders, the people like himself, enjoy in solitude the special compensations of their devotion?" he seems to ask. Clarence continues to walk resolutely away from the scene of the ball, as described in the strong final image of the story, "away from the lighted palace and the gondolas that swarmed about it like carp."

"The Gemlike Flame" is a fine story not because of the exotic, Jamesian situation of wealthy Americans abroad, but because Auchincloss refuses to cheat the reader of the complexity of Clarence's feelings, even though he offers no alternative to the psychological explanation that comes to Peter's mind. Despite the abundance of specific detail, the power of the story comes from the absolute economy of its essentials. In A Writer's Capital, Auchincloss recalls his extreme pleasure when Norman Mailer told him at a party that he would not mind having written the story himself. Though Mailer's sensibility and interests are radically different from Auchincloss's, he was right to admire this story.

STORIES ON WRITERS AND WRITING

Peter Westcott's presence in all the stories of The Romantic Egoists is only a suggestion of the prominence of writers and the act of writing in Auchincloss's stories. No fewer than ten stories are directly concerned with writing fiction, biography, or autobiography, and the essential situations and characters in another half dozen stories are drawn from previous works of literature. Several of the latter stories are explicit homages to James or Wharton. Given Auchincloss's admiration for James, this persistent interest in art and the artist as a theme for short fiction is hardly surprising. What is distinctive, however, is Auchincloss's repeated attention to the effects of all sorts of writing on not only authors but other people as well. The stories about writers and writing, which come from all periods of his career, are among his most characteristic and effective.

In Auchincloss's fiction, the activity of writing is invariably more than a simple recording of events or a form of creative expression. Writing may well be a mode of communication or self-revelation, but at the same time it may also be an act of aggression, a defense mechanism, or a means of appropriating, and thereby controlling, someone else's life. This sense of writing-as-appropriation, as has been suggested, is particularly prevalent in some of the law-firm stories (as well as in the biography-novels, The Rector of Justin and The House of the Prophet). One of the "Arnold & Degener" stories in Tales of Manhattan raises the issue in a striking, though comic fashion.

In "The Senior Partner's Ghosts," Sylvaner Price decides to write the biography of Guthrie Arnold, founder of Arnold & Degener and his mentor. Though he appears to others as "a man of no accessories, no appendages, no stray bits or loose ends," Price fancies himself a romantic a la Victor Hugo. Unlike the usual law-firm history, his biography will be a work of art, a vivid evocation of Arnold's true personality. As Price sits down to dictate portions of his book, horrible revelations of cutthroat buccaneering practices on Arnold's part tumble out of his mouth. Shortly thereafter, as if possessed by "the evil genius of Guthrie Arnold," Price makes a speech at a meeting of the firm urging his partners to take business away from a rival firm whose senior corporate expert is dying of cancer, and a few days later he finds himself involuntarily tearing up a page from the will of a deceased client. After the latter episode, Price suffers a stroke and is hospitalized. His partners make him consult a psychiatrist, who assures him that his visions are merely the result of long-suppressed guilt. After one more disquieting excursion into sensational biography, Price gives up private composition and free association and dictates an ordinary, boring firm history in the presence of his censorious secretary. Though the new biography kills off any humanity in its subject, "what did it matter, so long as there was peace?"

On one level, "The Senior Partner's Ghosts" offers a humorous explanation for the dullness of many official histories of law firms. At the same time it also points up the disparity between the respectable front of the large corporate law firm and the aggressive activities of some of its partners. Even if Sylvaner Price's memories of Guthrie Arnold are the product of an overheated imagination as the psychiatrist suggests, they describe plausible instances of dubious professional conduct—behavior no doubt occasionally encountered by the lawyers who first read the story in The Virginia Law Review.

More generally, the story is a study of an ordinary, seemingly bloodless professional man who cherishes a secret romantic streak in his nature. Price is silently pleased, for example, to learn that a young partner's wife has compared him to King Philip II at the Escoriai. The comic denouement of the story suggests how difficult it is for a man like Price to escape the bounds of the professional persona he has assiduously cultivated for forty years. Perhaps the psychiatrist is right: in Price's mind, only his godlike mentor Guthrie Arnold is permitted to get away with expressing the romantic side of his nature. Yet, like several other psychiatric opinions in Auchincloss's fiction, this diagnosis, though correct in its way, seems reductive. Sylvaner Price creates his own hero and a myth of the firm, which he can control, but the hidden power of the subconscious mind is more difficult to contain. Though its tone is fanciful rather than portentous, "The Senior Partner's Ghosts" reminds us of the dangerous power of the writer's imagination. It is not a major story, but it illustrates Auchincloss's masterful skill in balancing a number of disparate elements in a single story without capsizing what is admittedly a light vessel.

In two other law-firm stories, both from Powers of Attorney, Auchincloss further explores the uneasy connection between writing and human relationships. For Morris Madison, the tax attorney in "The Single Reader," writing fulfills some of the same secret desires that it reflected in the mind of Sylvaner Price. Madison, however, is not troubled by "ghosts" as Price was. Over a period of thirty years he fills more than fifty morocco-bound volumes of his diary with carefully polished and often bitingly satiric entries. As the years go by, the diary takes over his life. He rearranges all the engagements outside the office in order to provide the best possible raw material for the diary and even leaves money in his will for its posthumous publication. When he shows a few representative volumes to the woman he wishes to marry—the "single reader" of the title—she recoils in horror, not because the diary is bad (it is brilliant), but because she fears becoming a human sacrifice to its insatiable appetite.

In "The 'True Story' of Lavinia Todd," writing is not only self-expression but also a rueful emblem for failed communication and the inconspicuous self of the writer. Mrs. Todd, a middle-aged woman who is deserted by her husband, pours out the story of her betrayal in a long account that is accepted for publication in a woman's magazine. Rather than offend her husband, the candid story of their marriage and his callous behavior seems to bring him back to her side. He invites her out for dinner, praises the story, and asks for a reconciliation. She discovers, however, that he has never read the story and has only praised her work because his colleagues and several powerful clients have expressed their admiration. The "true" Lavinia Todd remains unread, and the art of the story, which has merely mirrored life, is once again mirrored in her own life.

The stories in which Auchincloss borrows situations or characters from previous authors may strike contemporary readers as overly derivative. This is not the case at all. Somewhat like the early films of François Truffaut, the best of these stories are hommages, or tributes, to Auchincloss's masters, James and Wharton. A good example of this type of tribute in its simplest form is "The Evolution of Lorna Treadway." This slickly written tale from The Romantic Egoists involves a sophisticated divorcée who marries a boorish Texas oilman and adopts all his values, becoming vulgar and trivial herself as she throws large parties to advance her husband's business career. While the narrator of the story talks with the husband, he momentarily plays with a Jamesian conclusion for his tale. "How neat it would have been," he thinks, if the oilman "had become with marriage the suave, accomplished man of the world, if he and Lorna, in other words, had changed places," so that people would pity him for being tied down to the giddy, unsophisticated "bride of his earlier and poorer days." But, of course, "that would have been strictly fiction." Though the pliant heroine might have come out of an Edith Wharton story such as "The Other Two," Auchincloss's story remains firmly anchored in the sharply defined reality of the fashionable world it describes.

In "The Diner Out," from The Partners, Auchincloss takes the basic situation of Wharton's "After Holbein" and grafts it onto a story about an aging attorney, Burrill Hume, who faces the bleak prospect of retirement from practice. The grafting is not quite successful—and perhaps few if any of the young attorneys who first read the story in Juris Doctor would have caught the allusion. But the final lines, in which Hume recognizes his approaching death, acquire added resonance by their direct reference to the ending of Wharton's story, in which the senile, dying protagonist, leaving a dinner party given by an even more senile old lady, takes a "step forward, to where a moment before the pavement had been—and where now there was nothing." Auchincloss has transmuted Wharton's mordant comedy into sympathetic humor tinged by pathos.

Auchincloss renders his most elaborate and subtle tribute to Henry James in "The Ambassadress." In this story from The Injustice Collectors, he reenvisions the main characters of James's late novel The Ambassadors from the perspective of Chad Newsome, the young man who must be rescued from the clutches of Europe, rather than through the consciousness of Lambert Strether, the middle-aged protagonist and rescuer in the novel. Auchincloss's central character and narrator, Tony Rives, is a somewhat older Chad Newsome endowed with a good deal of Lambert Strether's sensibility. The rescue mission in the story is carried out by Tony's older sister Edith Mac-Lean, who parallels Sarah Pocock in James's version, but who also reflects some aspects of Strether's experience. Edith not only manages to bring her brother home but also gets him to marry her husband's niece—something her counterpart in the novel had been ordered to do but does not accomplish. In Auchincloss's ironic version of the tale, Edith's triumph is even greater, for it also includes taking away Gwladys Kane, the older woman to whom Tony had been attached, and making her one of her own friends. Edith's deepening relationship with Gwladys excludes Tony, which throws him into renewed acquaintance with the niece and eventually leads to his marriage. Strether's respect for the older woman in the novel (Madame de Vionnet) is transformed in Auchincloss's story into something that appears to be an instance of successful social manipulation by a powerful woman. And yet, in the concluding scene of the story, which takes place at his wedding, Tony still does not know whether his sister consciously plotted to draw Gwladys away from him or things merely worked out to her advantage by a lucky coincidence.

"The Ambassadress" is not merely a witty reworking of a Jamesian situation but a finely articulated tale of complex relationships in a closely knit group of people. As might be expected in a short story rather than a novel, Tony is a more limited character than Strether. In Tony's appreciation of his expatriate life, one finds none of Strether's luminous vision of European culture. Tony's reeducation, unlike Strether's, teaches him the power of strong family ties, which can even reach across the Atlantic. Tony returns to New York to be married, not with Strether's sense of renunciation and all it entails, but with a sense of how life is determined—albeit for the best—by forces we do not understand. Auchincloss is finally more interested in the complex psychological dynamics at work in a given situation than in James's theme of enlightenment and renunciation. The result is more realistic; though not so richly resonant, nonetheless subtle: a sharper, brisker story, but still a work worthy of the master.

The three stories that focus directly upon professional writers, "The Question of the Existence of Waring Stohl," "The Novelist of Manners," and "The Arbiter," show the aggressive or hostile impulses in writers who make use of people around them as material for their art. Auchincloss, a writer who himself draws much of the material for his fiction from life, shows a decided tendency to stress this exploitive side of the artist. In the earliest of the three tales, "The Question of the Existence of Waring Stohl," reprinted in Tales of Manhattan, a distinguished professor of English befriends one of his students, a young novelist with very little talent and an obnoxious personality. No one understands why he goes out of his way to cultivate the young man's acquaintance until the novelist dies and leaves him his unpublished journal. The journal becomes the central piece of evidence in the professor's last and greatest work: a literary history in which the young writer becomes the embodiment of the superficiality and vacuousness of his era, a "non-author" whose novel is called a "non-book." The professor wins a Pulitzer prize, and the young novelist receives a negative sort of immortality. In "The Arbiter," one of the stories in The Winthrop Covenant, the novelist Ada Guest bases one of the characters in her best novel, "a sterile dilettante, who is trying to hide his business failure in a drawing room success," on her long-time friend Adam Winthrop, and she seems likely to make similar use of her husband later. Though Auchincloss's primary interest in this fine story is the relationship that develops between the two men, Ada shows the same voracity in using material from life for her art.

Why this strange voracity in appropriating other people's lives? For the novelist of manners, as for the historian or journalist, it may be inevitable. Discussing class distinctions in an essay on Marquand and O'Hara, Auchincloss has observed that the novelist of manners "has two points of view about the society in which he lives: that of a citizen and that of an artist, The latter is concerned only with the suitability of society as material for his art. Just as a liberal journalist may secretly rejoice at the rise of a Senator McCarthy because of the opportunity it affords him to write brilliant and scathing denunciations of demogogues, so will the eye of the novelist of manners light up at the first glimpse of social injustice." So too, within the limits of human decency or the libel laws, the novelist of manners may exploit the human material he finds around him, often in a seemingly amoral fashion.

"The Novelist of Manners" looks most directly at this exploitive tendency and suggests it may also be a weapon for striking back when the author is wounded. Published in The Partners, the story describes the relationship between a young lawyer and the novelist Dana Clyde. It is at once an interesting psychological study and an oblique defense of the novel of manners in the late twentieth century. The hero of the story, Leslie Carter, a junior partner in Shepard, Putney & Cox, has been sent abroad to take charge of the firm's Paris office. A frustrated novelist who unsuccessfully tried to write his own Great Gatsby in college, he eagerly makes his way into French society, much like the young Proust. He is delighted to find that his firm must represent Dana Clyde, whose society novels he has admired since college, in a libel suit brought by someone maligned in his latest book. After the suit is settled, he attaches himself to Clyde as a kind of disciple, urging him to write "the last great novel of manners of the western world"—the great work he himself could never write. His life takes on new meaning, for he now has a mission: "to save Dana Clyde and make him compose his masterpiece."

When, however, after some urging, Clyde retires to a hillside in Malaga to write the great book, he mysteriously breaks off all connection with the younger man. The reason for the break is revealed only when Leslie reads the manuscript of the new novel. One of the main characters is a wickedly satiric potrait of himself as an absurd young lawyer who becomes the fifth husband of the novel's heroine, but who proves impotent on his wedding night and commits suicide. On his return to Paris, Clyde avoids Leslie entirely, and Leslie must seek an explanation for the malevolence of the portrait from the novelist's wife. Quite aware of what might happen all along, Mrs. Clyde had tried to warn Leslie, but he would not listen. Instead, his badgering has forced Clyde to recognize that he is an irrevocably second-rate writer. As Leslie admits, the new novel is "Dana Clyde at his best," but it is hardly the "last great novel of manners" he had predicted. In creating the character of the young lawyer, Clyde has gotten revenge against Leslie for destroying the saving illusion on which he has operated for many years—the idea that, if only he had worked harder, he could have written another Madame Bovary. At the end of the story Leslie recognizes that he has been a fool. The novel of manners "does still have a function," he says, "if only to prove to a poor thing like Leslie Carter that he doesn't want to write one any more."

Considered as a whole, the story recalls a pattern found in several of James's stories, in which a second-rate artist is protected by a wife who clearly sees her husband's lack of genius and the complication and interest of the plot arise from the entry of some third person who upsets the equilibrium achieved by the couple. In Auchincloss's variation of the pattern, however, Leslie is innocent of any intention to denigrate Dana Clyde's work. After having been attacked in the novel, he learns several lessons. He recognizes the folly of his own hidden aspirations to be a novelist and the ridiculousness of trying to live out those aspirations in someone else's career, and he is presumably a bit wiser about rushing in to meddle in someone else's life. Under Auchincloss's scrutiny, a seemingly casual relationship turns out to have multiple, ramifying effects.

Viewed in its biographical and historical context, however, "The Novelist of Manners" gains further interest. The story takes place in 1972, in a period when, as Dana Clyde is well aware, the novel of manners is in eclipse. "Oh, I have a following yet, I grant," he says to Leslie. "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." Clyde's plaint is heard frequently in Auchincloss's writings of the late 1960s and 1970s: "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 for such things. They care about stopping wars and saving the environment and cleaning up the ghettos. And they're right too. When the world's going to pieces, who has time to talk about good form and good taste?" Leslie suspects that Clyde's endorsement of social activism is not quite sincere, but the general question remains valid and pertains to Auchincloss's work as well.

Though much of the passage sounds as though it might fit Auchincloss himself, James Tuttleton is right to maintain that Dana Clyde is not Auchincloss. As is true of many of his characters, there are elements of Auchincloss in Clyde, but there are also details from Auchincloss's personal history in Leslie Carter as well. Like Leslie, Auchincloss was impelled on his way to law school by the failure of a novel he had written in his last year at college. Though Dana Clyde is not Auchincloss, it is nevertheless correct to see the story in the context of Auchincloss's own work and the tradition of the novel of manners in the 1970s. As usual, Auchincloss keeps his claims for what he and others like him are doing quite modest and somewhat sardonic. Leslie's final words about the function of the novel of manners do not constitute a ringing general defense. But, as the story itself suggests, this sort of fiction is certain to endure in some form. Wherever human folly displays itself in faulty behavior, there is a need for the novel of manners, and, whether or not it is in current critical favor, fiction that evokes a particular time and place always seems to find an audience.

Obviously, however, even the most faithful rendering of the manners and customs of a given era will not necessarily yield great art. In a story from his most recent collection, Auchincloss carefully distinguishes between life and art and takes a more sanguine view of the writer in his role as an artist. Worthington Whitson, the absurd Mauve Decade dandy who is the protagonist in "The Artistic Personality," has, like the characters in the other stories, been wronged by a novelist, Alistair Temple. But Auchincloss varies the pattern. Rather than exploiting Whitson as a character in his fiction, Temple had staged an elaborate drama in real life that led to Whitson's downfall as "the acknowledged arbiter elegantarium of Fifth Avenue and Newport" at the end of the nineteenth century. The reader sees Temple obliquely, through Whitson's indignant remarks almost twenty-five years later in a conversation with Bernard Berenson, who admires one of Temple's novels and wants to know more about him.

As he questions Whitson about Temple, Berenson speculates about the artistic personality. Temple had cleverly engineered a situation in which the prominent hostess with whom Whitson was allied was tempted, against Whitson's advice, into attending a ball given by an unacceptable new family. This event effectively destroyed Whitson's authority as a social arbiter and put an end to his grandiose scheme to set standards for entry into New York society. For Whitson, Temple's actions represent betrayal—a betrayal all the more perfidious because the novelist arranged the episode deliberately "to divert himself by creating a drama in New York society." But for Berenson his actions are those of an artist. "You mean he constructed a scenario for his own inspiration? He modeled a plot out of real life? And then never used it?" he asks. "Perhaps," he suggests to Whitson, "you provided the scaffolding, my friend, which he had later to remove" when he wrote his greatest novel. Berenson toys with Whitson throughout the dialogue, however, and when the absurd Whitson decides at the end of the story that perhaps he can claim some renown for having helped a great novelist, Berenson laughingly rejects his own speculation.

In the course of the conversation one learns that Temple not only has played a clever trick on Whitson but that he himself was the most ardent of social climbers, in no way removed from the society he set out to satirize. Temple's actions and his character in life finally do not matter, for according to Berenson one "must distinguish . . . between an artist's individual personality and his artistic one." In the light of his masterpiece, Temple's personal failings are irrelevant: "The artistic personality is the creator. And that is something totally detached from the vulgar appetites, from greed, from Mammon, from snobbishness and social ambition. Alistair Temple the man may have been everything you think. But Alistair Temple the artist had not the smallest ounce of worldliness. Of that I am convinced." Though there is much else going on in the story—in his conversation with Whitson, for example, Berenson himself may be constructing a "scenario" not unlike Temple—Auchincloss provides, in the distinction between the two personalities, a final line of defense for all the voracious novelists in his fiction. Though it is presented in a complicated, oblique fashion and hedged about by ironies and qualifications, Auchincloss's view of the writer in "The Artistic Personality" is essentially Romantic. Art, especially great art, works in a mysterious way its wonders to perform; by some unfathomable process, the work of art, if it is worthy, transcends its creator. Like Henry James, Auchincloss accepts only the highest view of the writer's art.

CHRONICLES OF OUR TIME

"But why is the artist whose subject is society any better than that society?" Whitson asks Berenson in the story just discussed. "Because he must see it in a different light. He illuminates it," Berenson replies. At their best, Auchincloss's stories about contemporary life do indeed manage to illuminate society and thereby illuminate the lives of everyone.

Since the beginning of his career as a writer, Auchincloss has kept careful watch on what was going on in the various worlds he has inhabited. In his first novel, The Indifferent Children, he captures the essential futility of the military bureaucracy, and in The Great World and Timothy Colt he presents a definitive account of life among young associates in the large corporate law firms during the early 1950s. Because of their smaller scope, however, the short stories have provided him with an especially useful medium for observing particular changes in business, society, and the professions. Indeed, in the last decade and a half, as his novels have tended to be increasingly concerned with the past, Auchincloss's keenest observations in contemporary life have most often been found in his stories.

In the stories in his four most recent collections, published from 1970 to 1983, Auchincloss notes many of the changes in sex roles, relations between generations, and behavior at the office witnessed in the 1960s and 1970s. Sometimes, as in "The Marriage Contract," published in The Partners (1974), Auchincloss simply looks at the enduring problems of marriage as they are manifested in a new situation. Marcus and Felicia Currier are both lawyers, representatives of the sort of two-career couple that was becoming more common in the early seventies. The stresses on their marriage come from new sources—managing two careers, including a temporary move to another city by Felicia, competing for professional success, and simultaneously raising two children—but the fundamental conflict for control between Marc and Felicia is not radically different from the conflicts between husbands and wives that one encounters in the novels Auchincloss wrote in the 1950s.

At times, however, from his basically conservative perspective Auchincloss can be amazingly prescient about trends in American society. "The Double Gap," which appeared in 1970, for instance, nicely predicts the disillusionment and grim professionalism that set in during the early 1980s among those who had been the idealistic young people of the sixties. Cast in the form of a series of memos between a young law student and his grandfather, who is the senior partner in a large law firm, the story vividly states the case for both sides of the debate between generations during the era of the "generation gap." Neither advocate persuades the other, but, after the grandson has refused for the last time his grandfather's offer to join his firm and has totally rejected his justification for practicing corporate law, the grandfather writes one more memo. Warning his grandson that in his zeal for representing the downtrodden he too may become "a one-client man" not unlike a dishonest former member of his firm, he wishes him good luck.

I'm glad that I've made you independent so you won't be compelled, like your breadwinner friends, to go to work for a firm in whose "mystique*' you cannot believe. I am convinced, sincerely convinced, that you will do big things. I am only disappointed that you will not be doing them with me. And I cannot help but wonder a bit, when you and your contemporaries have scraped all the gilt off the statue of life (gilt which I call passion and you call sentimentality), whether you will not be a bit disappointed at the dull gray skeleton that you find beneath. (Second Chance)

By the end of the decade in which this story appeared, not only had the idealists of the sixties come face to face with the dull gray skeleton, but their younger brothers and sisters were rushing cynically into law and medical school without even the passion that justified the grandfather's career.

Though "The Marriage Contract" and "The Double Gap" accurately illustrate Auchincloss's responses to social change, neither represents his short fiction at its best. Another story of the 1970s, "Second Chance" is richer, more finely wrought, and characteristic of its author's unique strengths. In this, the title story of Auchincloss's 1970 collection, Gilbert Van Ness divorces his wife of more than twenty years, takes an entirely new job, and marries a younger woman—a common enough occurrence in recent years and a topic of much discussion when the story appeared. Auchincloss approaches this central situation from a fresh perspective, however. We see Gilbert's midlife transformation through the eyes of his brother-inlaw Joe, who has known him since college and who handles the divorce for the family. Before he leaves his first wife, Gilbert seems a failure, "a Confederate officer returning to his ruined plantation after Appomattox." After the divorce he becomes an almost instant success in a flashy Madison Avenue advertising agency, quickly rising to president and ultimately marying the daughter of the founder. Joe is blamed by his wife's family, the Kilpatricks, for letting his old friend off with a one-time financial settlement rather than a percentage of Gilbert's future earnings.

The central drama in the story is not Gilbert's amazing luck but rather his more stable brother-in-law's uneasy response to his success, which Auchincloss depicts with great sublety and tact. When the Kilpatricks start complaining about the settlement, Joe finds that he would rather have them believe that he was swayed by his longtime friendship than that Gilbert's "stronger personality had put it over my weaker one. Or that I had been dazzled—even envious—at the prospect of his liberty." Later in the story Gilbert accuses him of fearing the idea that one can "start again and win" and argues that his moral indignation is merely a convenient way of avoiding an opportunity to change his own life. "You hate me because I remind you in your indolence that you could do it, too. That it's not too late." It is this "demon of the second chance" that Joe must confront in himself.

After he gets home from the party at which he talked to Gilbert, he carefully considers his indictment. He is reasonably certain that it is not valid, but a small doubt remains. When he attends an impressive dinner party at Gilbert's apartment, he is almost convinced again that Gilbert has been right all along—until he notices a very small detail. Gilbert hands a fork to his bulter without even pausing in conversation. Obviously there was a speck on it, but the fact that the butler knows just what to do with the fork reveals "the enormous amount of domestic machinery that must have been hid behind that simple gesture." Rather than being the free soul that he claims to be, Gilbert is a fraud. "I had exorcised the demon of the second chance," Joe comments at the end of the story. "I had saved my marriage, not from dissolution, but from the cloying idea that I wanted its dissolution. Or that I had wanted to be like Gilbert. Or that I had thought it might be unmanly not to be like Gilbert. Now he could go on handing spotted spoons to his butler for eternity. I simply did not care."

That the major psychological insight of the story should turn upon this small detail of manners is thoroughly characteristic of Auchincloss's approach. The lawyer-protagonist is also typical of Auchincloss's reserved and invariably decent heroes; both his dilemma and its resolution seem fitting. Yet, in spite of the rather specialized elements present in "Second Chance," the story describes and offers surprisingly immediate and generally accessible commentary upon an ordinary experience shared by many men of the protagonist's age. In addition to this, Joe is expertly placed in the context of his marriage and his relations with his wife's family. We are given just the right amount of psychological and social background, and Auchincloss's tone, faintly ironic but generally sympathetic, achieves sufficient distance to permit us to see the humor in the narrator's situation. In "Second Chance" and in several other stories like it, we see what makes Auchincloss's short fiction entertaining and valuable.