[White is an author and legal scholar. In the following article, he discusses the themes of bureaucratization, class consciousness, ethics, and contemporary Wall Street legal practices as they are treated in Auchincloss's fiction.]

During the past four decades much has been written on the public image of large New York City law firms. The "Wall Street" firms, as they have come to be called, have been denounced as capitalist predators, hailed as responsible intermediaries between corporations and the public, seen as bureaucratic structures in an increasingly specialized and hierarchical world and viewed as the last bastions of nineteenth century individualism. In most of these accounts, far less attention has been paid to what the Wall Street lawyer does than to what he symbolizes. Although a survey of the literature on Wall Street firms may give some insight into the changing impressions those institutions have made upon the public mind, it yields little understanding of the effect of Wall Street practice upon the individuals who engage in it.

There has been one notable exception to this generalization: the novels and short stories of Wall Street practitioner Louis Auchincloss. Beginning in 1953, Auchincloss has produced novels—A Law for the Lion (1953) and The Great World and Timothy Colt (1956)—and four collections of short stories—The Romantic Egoist (1954), Powers of Attorney (1963), Tales of Manhattan (1967) and Second Chance: Tales of Two Generations (1970)—about the working lives of Wall Street lawyers. The information about Wall Street practice contained in these books has been subordinated, of course, to Auchincloss's major novelistic purposes; it is arguably less "reliable" or "authentic" than a similar nonfictional account might be. Nonetheless it provides a basis for understanding the human dimensions of Wall Street practice missing in other accounts. Through Auchincloss's fiction one gets a sense of how, in a myriad diverse ways, it feels to work for a large New York City law firm.

I propose to concentrate on four themes of Auchincloss's Wall Street fiction: bureaucraticization, class consciousness, professional ethics and the contemporary critique of Wall Street practice by young lawyers. The first three of these are described by Smigel [in The Wall Street Lawyer, 1964] and Carlin [in The Lawyers Ethics, 1967] as central to an understanding of large-firm law practice; the fourth is a matter of much interest for prospective Wall Street practitioners and the firms that interview them. The themes by no means exhaust the material pertaining to Wall Street life in Auchincloss's fiction, and they should not be regarded as, in their totality, serving to define the Wall Street lawyer's universe. They are, however, pervasive and pressing aspects of the world of contemporary Wall Street firms.

Nonfictional accounts of the history of large New York City firms during the twentieth century stress the change in size and structure of the firm unit and a consequent change in the character of law practice. In the early twentieth century, the ancestors of the present Wall Street firms were relatively small in size with a general practice that included anything from litigation to probate work. With rapid developments in technology and the consequent growth of large-size specialized business enterprises, they took on a new appearance. Firms grew in size, became more specialized and compartmentalized, drew an increasing percentage of their business from corporate work and assumed the characteristics of large-scale hierarchical organizations. Of particular importance for the members of those firms was the apparent clash between a mode of their professional heritage—the "free", independent general practitioner—and the increasingly specialized and constrained character of their own practice. The tensions produced by this clash are at the heart of Auchincloss's treatment of bureaucratization.

In developing the bureaucratization and other themes, Auchincloss stresses the interaction of two levels of human response. The first level is the subscription by most of a firm's lawyers, and especially by those holding internal positions of power, to a general professional stance on a particular issue, such as bureaucratization. The second is the emergence of tensions and contradictions in that stance and the reaction to them by individual firm members.

The general professional stance on bureaucratization views it as a necessary but lamentable phenomenon. The change is necessary, as Sheridan Dale, one of the principal characters in The Great World and Timothy Colt, put it, because "when you get up to eighty-six lawyers with an overhead of a million a year . . . you're a big business, and you ought to act like one". Another senior partner, Clitus Tilney of Powers of Attorney, "knew what disorganization did to overhead". For "every sixty minutes dedicated to the law" Tilney "had to devote twenty to administration". Lloyd Deneger, Dale's and Tilney's counterpart in Tales of Manhattan, was able to attribute "the splendid position that [his firm] occupied in the field of corporation law" to the fact that its internal atmosphere resembled "a huge, bright, humming legal machine" far more than "a gentleman's chaos of prima donnas in high white collars at rolltop desks".

But the change is also lamentable: the acceptance of increased organization is continually accompanied by a professed adherence to an older, more informal way of practicing law. Tilney was conscious of "the fashion among [Wall Street] lawyers to affect an aversion to administrative detail, to boast that their own firms were totally disorganized, that they practiced law in a bookish, informal atmosphere, suggestive of Victorian lithographs of county solicitors seated at rolltop desks and listening with wise smiles to the problems of youth and beauty". Some senior partners made serious attempts to approximate the older style. Dale's predecessor, Henry Knox, despised "administrative problems", which he considered "beneath him", and described his firm as "a group of gentlemen loosely associated by a common enthusiasm for the practice of law".

Auchincloss's lawyers and staff members attempt to shape their working lives in response to the ambiguities in their stance toward bureaucratization in two notable ways: through "teamwork" and through the presence of status gradations within the firm.

"Teamwork" for Auchincloss is a concept limned with ironies, some of them savage. The modern Wall Street firm requires a fair amount of co-operation among individuals who are competing with one another for positions of internal power: influence among one's partners or partnerships themselves. Henry Knox's image of law practice implied only a cursory degree of co-operation among gentlemen loosely associated by a common enthusiasm for the law; the complexity of the real-life modern law office necessitates far more interdependence among its members. But interdependence, in a firm staffed by individuals in direct competition with one another for a small number of lucrative positions, faces powerful currents of resistance.

Auchincloss's lawyers resolve this difficulty by defining "teamwork" in anarchistic terms. A "team man" is not one who butters up his superiors or champions the joys of group labor, but rather one who is willing to devote the bulk of his time and energy to producing work that reflects craftsmanship of a superior quality. The firm benefits from this product but recognizes it to be primarily the result of high personal standards and strong ambitions for power and success in the individual lawyer. Auchincloss's lawyers expect their office mates to be primarily concerned with their own ambitions and achievements, even at their colleagues' expense. It is no shock to Clitus Tilney to discover that Chambers Todd, one of his partners, had attempted to entice him to take a college presidency because Todd wanted Tilney's senior partnership. Nor is it surprising to Horace Mason, an associate in Powers of Attorney, to learn that coassociate Jake Platt snoops in his personal files; he cheerfully confesses to Platt that he has snooped in Piatt's.

A second way in which the Auchincloss characters resolve the difficulties inherent in superimposing an individualistic professional model on a large interdependent business organization is the creation and maintenance of informal status gradations. The primary purpose of these gradations is to create a set of specialized identities for the lawyers. An associate working in the corporate department need not see himself in the context of the entire firm but merely in terms of those in his immediate area. He is located at a point in the vertical arrangement of the firm, and he may find solace, as did one of the characters in Tales of Manhattan, in its "orderly, hierarchical atmosphere . . . where one knew precisely at all times what was expected of one and where one rose from tier to tier pretty much in proportion to one's efforts". He may also take comfort in his horizontal location: the "corporate men" in The Great World and Timothy Colt "looked down on everything" outside their department. Departments have their own personalities. In Powers of Attorney a partner in estates sees the corporate department as made up of "bright, intolerant younger men who had been on the Harvard Law Review"', a head of litigation in A Law for the Lion is "not sure" that one of the younger associates "wouldn't turn out to be too tweedy, too social for the discipline and dedication of the litigation group".

Not all associates enjoy their locations. A contemporary of Timmy Colt finds the estates department a "morgue" and feels that he "might as well be an undertaker". A young man in real estate in Powers of Attorney is conscious that working in his department "was like climbing the stairs in a department store while alongside one an escalator carried the other customers smoothly and rapidly to the landing". Some of Auchincloss's lawyers are constrained by their roles. Sylvester Brooks of Powers of Attorney can function only in his wholly ceremonial role as the "perfectly charming and worldly-wise old gentleman" and "supreme arbiter of wills"; his "job was a form, an ingenious face saver, conceived by a benevolent senior partner to keep an old body occupied". Rutherford Tower, a nephew of his firm's founder in the same collection, had been made a partner "for only three reasons: because of his name, because of his relatives, and because he was there".

In other cases, however, a man's personality blends so smoothly with his working role that the two become indistinguishable. Waldron Webb, the senior litigator of Clitus Tilney's firm, "was one of these unhappy men who always wake up angry. He was angered by the sparrows outside his bedroom window in Bronxville, by the migraines of his long-suffering wife, by the socialism in the newspaper, the slowness of the subway, the wait for the elevator, the too casual greeting of the receptionist. It was only the great morning pile on his desk of motions, attachments and injunctions that restored his calm. . . . Litigation, indeed, was more than Webb's profession; it was his catharsis." Harry Hamilton, Webb's counterpart in A Law for the Lion, was able to "play without rival his chosen role of enfant terrible" in the "sober and mild atmosphere" of his firm. He surrounded himself with a "little clique of admirers who aped his cynicism, his heavy humor, his extravagant passion for baseball, and who every evening at six were to be found ambling after him down the corridor on their way to dinner at the same waterfront restaurant".

Other status gradations exist in Auchincloss's firms. Managing clerks, secretaries and women lawyers are set apart by their lack of mobility and the regimented quality of their working lives. In general, status gradations serve as devices through which Auchincloss's practitioners, by limiting the number of persons whose approval is necessary for their professional development, can deepen their sense of autonomy. Although the vertical and horizontal subdivisions of the offices serve as constraints, they also breed a kind of independence by fostering the creation of a plethora of small subfirms, each a microcosm of an older style of law practice, within the large, impersonal whole. One of Auchincloss's characters in Powers of Attorney recalls that the senior partner responsible for establishing in his firm an "elaborate [system of] etiquette" that publicized and reinforced status differences among the employees was remembered by his colleagues as the last of "the great individualist lawyers".

Auchincloss's treatment of the theme of social class runs counter to the traditional identification of Wall Street firms as apologists for an upper-class way of life. In Auchincloss's hands class consciousness becomes a two-edged concept. Sheridan Dale's success with his upper-class clientele, for example, comes from the fact that he is not one of them. Dale's mentor, Cyrus Sheffield, had seen in the "unprepossessing young man from Fordham the future confidant of his rich widows and old maids". Rather than delegating this business "to attenuated young men of better family than brains", Sheffield "had the wits to perceive . . . that affluent ladies from east of Central Park, distrustful of anyone from their own world as for that very reason too soft, would eagerly embrace, in their business affairs a champion from the great murky outside city which they felt to threaten them—that they would prefer to fight, like ancient Romans, barbarians with barbarians".

Alongside a general inclination among members of Wall Street firms toward upper-class life styles, Auchincloss places a sense of the relative insignificance of those styles in forging a successful law practice. Clitus Tilney may wear "aristocratically" unpressed tweeds, cover the walls of his brownstone with Hudson River School landscapes and pour "very cold dry martinis into chilled silver mugs", but he has a "habit of checking the firm's books to see if Rutherford [Tower]'s 'Social Register practice', as he slightlingly called it, paid off. At one point in Jake Piatt's agonizing over his potential partnership, he is disconcerted by an associate's remark that "this firm is properly concerned with its reputation of being a bit on the social side. Having Barry [Schilde] [a Jewish competitor of Piatt's] as a partner might balance things out."

Auchincloss's portrait of the pervasive yet limited influence of upper-class life styles among Wall Street firms suggests that it is one thing to determine that firms are aware of class characteristics among their personnel but quite another to assess the importance of those characteristics. On one occasion Professor Detlev Vagts of Harvard Law School expressed surprise [in Harvard Law Review, 1964] at Auchincloss's emphasis on "sartorial matters and the Social Register", things he felt "made little difference" to Wall Street lawyers. In making that comment Vagts unintentionally captured the essence of Auchincloss's view of Wall Street class consciousness—matters such as dress and club membership receive a great deal of emphasis and are seen as making very little difference.

Auchincloss's lawyers profess a strict adherence to high ethical standards and voice their allegiance to the Canons of Professional Ethics. A senior partner of Tales of Manhattan, his successor recalls, "always insisted that the Code of Professional Ethics should be . . . strictly interpreted. . . . He never held a share of stock in a corporation that he represented. He would not even allow the firm's telephone number to appear on our letterhead, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that we persuaded him to enter it in the directory."

But this public stance does not prevent them from not following their principles when, as one from the same collection puts it, "they stand in the way of old and valued clients". In fact, Auchincloss appears to suggest, the presence of a high-powered clientele may increase the pressures on Wall Street lawyers to behave in unethical ways. "If you ever have the good fortune to secure a big company as your client," Chambers Todd informs a subordinate on one occasion, "you will learn that the word 'unbiased' has no further meaning for you. .. . A good lawyer eats, lives and breathes for his clients." Clitus Tilney wistfully acknowledges the truth of Todd's remark: "I wish we could return to the old days of great integrity. . . . Before we were captured by the corporations. Before we became simple mouth-pieces."

An extended treatment of the effect of clients upon ethical issues appears in The Great World and Timothy Colt. Timmy Colt, the protagonist, is confronted with an ethical question involving the management of a trust.

One of Colt's clients, George Emlen, the nephew of the surviving senior partner in Colt's firm, suggests, upon the maturation of an Emlen family trust, that he take the stock of a small family company that leases textile patents as his third of the trust principal, allowing his two sisters, the other beneficiaries, to divide the cash and marketable securities. The book value of the company stock is worth less than one third of the total trust holdings.

Colt becomes suspicious of George's motives, and he resolves to check his firm's files that pertain to the activities and plans of the Emlen company and of Holcombe textiles, a giant company on whose board of directors George sits. He finally finds a Holcombe memorandum of new business in which the company declares its intention to increase the production of a new kind of washable summer suit and to acquire a series of patents to that end. The Emlen company holds three of the patents. George's scheme becomes clear: he intends to make the Emlen patents available to Holcombe for a reasonable sum in return for Holcombe's eventually steering some business toward one of his textile mills.

Colt then communicates George's scheme to his cotrustee, Florence Emlen, George's mother. But Mrs. Emlen, a figurehead who simply signs releases and distribution papers, fails to grasp the implications of Colt's remarks and turns to George in her confusion. Colt then capitulates, and on hearing from one of George's sisters that they are most anxious to have the distribution made, resolves not to oppose it. Still troubled, however, by "his own deprecated conscience", he confides in Ellen Shallcross, the stepdaughter of his senior partner, with whom he has been having an affair during his separation from his wife. Attempting to save Colt from his dilemma, Ellen tells one of the Emlen sisters the details of George's scheme, only to find that the trust distribution has already been made.

Ellen's information stimulates one of the Emlen sisters to hire a lawyer and sue for a compulsory accounting of the trust, alleging that the trust distribution releases the sisters signed were invalid as fraudulently obtained. Colt's first resolve is to perjure himself at trial, since he is certain that none of the adversary parties can prove that he knew of any arrangement between George Emlen and Holcombe which would have made the Emlen company shares worth more than their book value. But at the last minute Colt takes the stand and simply tells the truth: that he investigated the Emlen-Holcombe files, learned of the patents and concealed this information from the Emlen sisters, thus facilitating an unequal distribution of trust assets and consequently neglecting his responsibilities as trustee.

Confessing that "the case is unprecedented in my experience", the judge refers the matter to the Grievance Committee of The Association of the Bar of the City of New York. Ultimately, Colt learns that the committee probably will not disbar him, since Canon 11 of the New York City Code of Professional Ethics confines abuses "dealing with trust property" to those instances where the lawyer abused his fiduciary position "for his personal benefit or gain". "I'm told", Colt informs his wife, "the committee may regard it as a quixotic breach of trust and only censure me. But it's not going to make it any easier to get a job."

In this example Auchincloss seems to be suggesting that the world of Wall Street practice is an especially difficult one for those, such as Colt, who are "governed by their consciences". At every stage in the Emlen trust proceeding Colt's desire to arrive at a fair and straightforward distribution of the assets runs up against pressures from his clients or his senior partner. Ultimately he is faced with the choice of either deliberately violating his trust or losing his place as junior manager of the Emlen family fortunes. When he temporarily chooses the latter, this choice fills him with such self-hate that he subsequently jeopardizes his career in Wall Street practice.

The Timothy Colts are the casualties of the prevailing stance toward professional ethics in Auchincloss's Wall Street. Those who survive are those who adhere to the dictum of Gerald Hunt, senior partner of the principal firm in A Law for the Lion. Hunt, Auchincloss notes, "was too much a man of the world to find in the application of broad moral rules to individual problems anything but the crudest possible taste". Hunt "professed many principles himself; few people, indeed, professed more", but "to premise one's conduct on their absolute relation to reality, well, that was being childish". Translated into law office terms, Hunt's dictum suggests that a successful practitioner keeps his sense of ethical outrage in the perspective of his clients' interests. To do otherwise is not to live in the world.

Are the major themes of Auchincloss still central to an understanding of Wall Street life? Do the dynamics of bureaucratization, class consciousness and professional ethics still serve as a means of defining the character of professional life for the Wall Street lawyer? Or have those issues been altered by the recent concern among young lawyers for the ways in which large private law firms respond to the presence of minority groups, the problems of poverty and the demands of consumer interests? Has, for example, the specter of the "organization man" become outdated, the WASP upper-class success model been replaced, the multileveled ethical philosophy of a Gerald Hunt been dismissed as hypocrisy? Some of these questions are tentatively addressed by Auchincloss in "The Double Gap", a story in his recent work, Second Chance: Tales of Two Generations.

"The Double Gap" involves an extended dialogue between Albert Ellsworth, senior partner of Carter & Ellsworth, and his grandson, Philip Kyles, concerning the latter's decision not to work for Ellsworth's firm on his graduation from law school. Ellsworth presents an "apologia" for the prevailing professional stance with regard to bureaucratization, class consciousness and questions of professional ethics. Kyles, in his turn, offers a critique of Ellsworth's position and emphasizes what he judges to be the central concerns facing a prospective Wall Street lawyer in the 1970s.

Early in the conversation Ellsworth states that his "greatest concern over the last thirty years" has been "the increase in size of our office". His chief dilemma, as managing partner, has been "to preserve the individualist spirit and the moral standards of the old-time practitioner" in the face of "the fantastic business regulations exacted by modern socialism". To achieve this he has reached out to the spirit of the firm's founder, Elihu Cowden Carter, the individualist lawyer incarnate. Ellsworth, sensing the contrast between his own "drab way" and the "color and inspiration" of his firm's founder, "deliberately set out to create the legend of Elihu Cowden Carter as a religion and a creed to hold [his] office together".

This classic approach to the problem of bureaucracy is ridiculed by Kyles, who finds Carter's French furniture, which Ellsworth had moved from the founder's office to the firm's reception hall, "pompous", Carter's writings "windy", and Carter himself "a brilliant ham actor who persuaded a credulous public to accept the hatchet man of a big, bullying corporation as a, legal philosopher and statesman". In keeping Carter's spirit alive, Ellsworth has revealed himself, in his grandson's opinion, as "a magnificent old cynic" who "can't admit it", a trait "my generation can never understand".

Class consciousness also enters the dialogue. Ellsworth recalls the time "a journalist . . . came to interview me about a book that he wanted to write on the big New York law firms". The interviewer, "was frankly cynical about what he expected to find", Ellsworth notes, "nepotism, old school ties, inter-firm back scratching. I told him that none of the big firms could long survive those things, that character and brains were their indispensable stock in trade. I invited him to use a desk in our office and to open all files that were not privileged. After three months he wrote a piece that justified me." At another point Ellsworth refers to his "great . . . inhibitions about his social inferiority", that marked his courtship of Kyles's grandmother, whom Ellsworth saw as marked by "impulses of generosity" that "reached out to . . . the servants, the hard-working clerks in the office, the poor of her charities, the world itself.

Kyles sees some of these issues rather differently. He remembers his grandmother as one who "could no more love the people in the slums than she could love the members of her own family" and who "tried", in his opinion, "to cover the desert of a heart dried up by a psychic shame with the flowers of charity". Kyles feels that "the gap seems to be narrowing between the big corporations and their lawyers and the Mafia and theirs"; he wants to "benefit [his] fellow men directly, in the ghettoes, the slums, the poor rural areas, the starving parts of the world".

In matters of professional ethics, as well, Ellsworth's attitudes approximate the prevailing attitude of Auchincloss's Wall Street. His "game", as Kyles terms it, is "to be at once the greatest and most ethical member of the whole wide bar". He believes, like one of his peers from another story in Second Chance, that "a law firm is something much more than its clients' problems", that lawyers "must be dedicated to something higher than the client, something higher than mere monetary reward". Yet on occasion he adopts Gerald Hunt's view of the relationship of principles to specific situations, especially those involving important clients. He confesses to Kyles that he looked the other way when the Great American Fruit Company, a major client of his firm, bribed courts in Dutch Honduras, accepting that practice "as a sine qua non to doing business in Central America", and that he allowed the firm "to try and win a case before a judge whom I knew had been fixed" without resigning.

Ellsworth's attitude is described by Kyles as a "compensating game of ethical canons which has the function, at least in the minds of your generation, of raising the lawyer to a higher moral plane than that of his client". For Kyles, this "game" is simply a rationalization for the fact that "clients' best interests" are "the be-all and end-all" of his grandfather's peers' "professional lives". "I want to bust .. . the 'establishment,'" Kyles tells Ellsworth, "you want to romanticize it. Neither of us can bear it as it is."

Auchincloss appears to suggest in "The Double Gap" that, although the themes of bureaucratization, class consciousness and professional ethics may remain central to Wall Street practice in the coming generation, the prevailing responses to those themes among lawyers may be altered. If the respective professional stances combine to form, as Kyles asserts, a "mystique" in which Wall Street practitioners wrap themselves, the capacity of that mystique to survive appears questionable. Kyles informs his grandfather that "those of us who have to earn our bread may go to work for firms like yours, but they won't buy the 'mystique'".

Should this phenomenon occur in great enough numbers or permeate not only the lower but the upper levels of Wall Street firms, the professional world that Auchincloss's characters strive to understand may well become new, and even brave.