In The Winthrop Covenant, his collection of stories examining the rise and fall of the Puritan ethic in New York and New England, Louis Auchincloss examines the movement from public to private redemption in the world of the privileged. Although Auchincloss, almost inevitably, begins by introducing imagery that reflects the traditional view of the American as a prelapsarian Adam and his country as a fresh Eden, he goes beyond these images in his nine stories to bring the tale nearer completion with true and false prophets, a proto-feminist trinity, and even a new gospel with its false—and possibly true—messiahs. In the ironic wit of his delicately poised prose, Auchincloss traces the difficulties of characters who confuse their own search for salvation with their attempts to become saviours.

Auchincloss's first story, "The Covenant", establishes the terms of his theme, the "preoccupying sense, found in certain individuals, of a mission, presumably divinely inspired, toward their fellow men" [as stated in his foreword to The Winthrop Covenant]. The story focuses on William and Anne Hutchinson's alienation from the old world, their decision to join John Winthrop's colony in the new one, and their subsequent problems with the authorities of the new colony and with each other. William and Anne are never quite in agreement on the matter of the covenant. William's problems stem from a lack of conviction that he is among the elect, a fear that never seems to affect the other characters in the story. His solution is to envision a new covenant for the new world, a covenant that would provide "a fresh start for everybody". Where the founders of the Bay Colony proposed an ideal site for the working out of the old covenant, restricting participation as far as possible to the elect, William seeks to escape that covenant into a new one. Both visions, of course, were to prove inadequate.

William's illusions might never have happened had he remembered the time when his grandmother had quietly challenged her husband's theology and received a blow for her presumption: "And William thus dimly derived this early lesson: that there were two forces in the world, authority and the resistance which authority generated". Authority reappears in the story in the fixed, sinister gleam of Queen Elizabeth, the hard little light of John Winthrop, and even the earnestly limited vision of Anne. At every point that humanity asserts itself, as when the Bay Colony ministers try to strengthen the colonists' confidence in their labours by skirting the debate between work and grace, an authoritarian figure demands the reassertion of the rule of principle and force. William finally acknowledges his illusion by voluntarily joining his wife in her exile in Rhode Island, while understanding that she is moving inexorably towards martyrdom. Only as a martyr can she fulfill her mission. Perhaps realizing that the new garden had always been an illusion, at the end of the story William sits, cared for by his married daughter who visits, ironically, from Providence, starting out to sea, to the past, to the old world.

Auchincloss's next story is, appropriately, "The Fall", a letter from a young clergyman about his deathbed interview with Major General Wait Still Winthrop, one of the Salem witch trial judges. In the course of attempting a confession, General Winthrop can only complain about the pride of those he tried. Complaint easily metamorphoses into justification:

"But every man in that first settlement knew that he lived under a divine light as bright as any that shone in Europe. Brighter even. It was that shared spirit that saved the Bay Colony from wolves and Indians, from frost and hunger. We were united, Mr. Leigh! And because our union had no king or pope to protect it, it was vital that we should learn to maintain that consensus. It was not easy. We were soon threatened by separatists. The witch Hutchinson was the first. Then came the Quakers. But the community was never threatened as perilously as in 1692. God alone knows the full extent of the deviltries with which our colony then seethed. But when the accused in Salem were given the chance to help the magistrates to reassert the indispensable cohesion of a colony in covenant with God, they refused. By God, I say they deserved their deaths! They had denied their Puritan heritage!"

The fall is confirmed in the general's eyes by the witches' refusal to repent and in our eyes by his refusal. In one case a force for disruption is inadequately dealt with; in the other the delusion of a new covenant and its corollary, the conviction by the covenanted of their right to enforce it, overcome deathbed reservations.

Wait Still Winthrop's granddaughter becomes the central figure in the third story, "The Martyr", an account by a young French tutor of a family's attempt to escape its fate. A young European sent to the wilderness for the indiscretion of socializing with the philosophes offers an ideal vehicle for Auchincloss's examination of the Winthrops' preoccupation with duty. Rebecca Bayard, the Winthrop, fears that her children, Katrina and Sylvester, may suffer for the sins of their great-grandfather and thus encourages them to become just like their father, the rather mindless, visceral Patroon of Bayardwick on the Hudson River. With the aid of the tutor, Rebecca attempts to help a man she believes to be a slave accused of arson to escape. Unfortunately, Katrina betrays the attempt and the man is caught and hanged. Only then does Bayard tell Rebecca that the man who died was a free man whom "Sylvester had bribed .. . to take the part because he wanted you, Rebecca, to believe that you had saved a man's life. He told me he had to exorcise the Winthrop curse". Although she attempts to establish a messianic role for herself—the tutor rather superfluously notes to Sylvester, "Your mother wishes to take on her own shoulders all the sins of the world"—the myth she finally recreates is an older one, that of Orestes. Having set the Winthrop's furies to work, Rebecca sends the tutor home: "I hope you will forget all about the bleak new world in that sunny land". She dies and neither child marries, perhaps to avoid passing on the family's guilt. Bayard, however, passes through all this apparently oblivious to the world of guilt and memory which overwhelms his wife and children.

The Paris to which the tutor returns becomes, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the setting of "The Diplomat". Samuel Shaw Russell, a young diplomat, is the first Winthrop to reject the family mission, to refuse to see himself "as another link in that chain of special human obligation which began in Boston in 1630". Russell can only arrive at this position after resolving two conflicts. The first is with his image of his father, the bearer of the sacred name, Everett Winthrop Russell, who believed that

God viewed with especial favor his domain in the northern New World. He professed to see signs of divine partiality in our successful escape from ancient tyranny, in our preservation from cold winters and Indians, in our deliverance from the German mercenaries of George III. God manifested His will through individuals, divinely selected, whose impact upon history was undoubted. Where, he would ask, would Massachusetts have been without our ancestor John Winthrop?

Russell's second conflict is with the wily Talleyrand's old-world criticism of the new land: "There is something in your air that . . . well, that I grasp only with difficulty. It is a kind of repudiation, not exactly of the past, but of all that I, at least, find most important in this vale of tears. The douceur de vivre—we might put it that way. Americans are not strong on douceurs. You believe more in morals. You even seem to believe that morals began with you'." His father's position falls after the young man envisions himself a great bird of prey soaring over the American continent. The somewhat secular mysticism of this vision gives him a "sense of human powerlessness" which establishes him as an outsider in both the game of diplomacy and the mission of the family.

Winthrop self-righteousness reasserts itself forcefully in the next two stories. The first, "In the Beauty of the Lilies Christ Was Born Across the Sea", fulfills the promise implicit in its orphic title. Winthrop Ward, whose flights of imagination combine casual anti-Black, anti-Semitic, and anti-Irish prejudices with violently sexual fantasies, organizes the economic interests of New York against the lover of his cousin's (and partner's) wife. Ward is so preoccupied with playing his roles—overtly as an arbiter of behaviour and covertly as a hero—that even his language takes the flavour of melodramatic nineteenth-century prose: "'She has not submitted to the lewd embracements of that fiend'." In the next story, "The Arbiter", Adam Winthrop, a more comfortably established guide to the mores and morals of New York than his predecessor, tries to discourage the novelist wife of a friend from travelling to Paris. He insists that her genius can only develop at home. Both Winthrops oppose movement towards self-fulfillment by women they admire. And both base their opposition on an aversion to passion. When Annie Ward points out to her cousin that she has learned from works like Jane Eyre, The Scarlet Letter and Phedre that "passion is the whole thing in this world", Winthrop Ward reacts by staring at her, "sobered by the enormity of her misconstruction. 'But those books and plays all point out the pitfalls of illicit love'." In a similar outburst, Ada Guest, Adam Winthrop's protege, points out her newly found understanding about him and his fellow members of her salon: "You are dry, Adam, all of you! Dry with the dust of New York, derivative rather than inspired, clever rather than forceful. . . . The old Puritan fire has gone out." But where nothing challenges Adam's condemnation—even Bob Guest, Ada's husband, returns alone from Paris to rejoin Adam's circle—Winthrop Ward suffers the anguish of a perceptive wife who recognizes and criticizes both his public and private roles. Her suggestion that his reality relies as much on fantasy as his dreams leads him to the story's penultimate prayer. In asking God's forgiveness for any carnal thoughts, he offers a Winthrop extenuation, "My conduct has been correct, even if my heart has been sinful."

Auchincloss's pair of arbiters are followed by a pair of Winthrops who turn inward. The first, Danny Buck, refuses to take a public role in judging his friend and superior, the headmaster of Farmingdale Academy, Titus Larsen. After the chairman of the board of trustees asks Danny to keep a journal to see if Larsen has become incapable of governing, Danny finds that this diary, from which the story receives its title, "The Mystic Journal", soon begins to fill with fantasies of jealousy and resentment, fantasies which he must repudiate. Although Danny recognizes that his journal is a false gospel and burns it, he suggests to the chairman of the board that its very existence might, in some magical way, have actually helped Larsen. But the chairman sees something else, the traditional Winthrop sense of self-righteousness and the Puritan ethic manifesting themselves in a purely private way:

"What concerns you is not the capacity or incapacity of Titus Larsen to be headmaster, but the moral capacity or incapacity of Daniel Buck to judge him. The drama for you is all in you. You are happy now, obviously. Why? Because it has been decided that Titus Larsen is qualified to continue in Farmingdale? No. Because it has been decided that Danny Buck was almost a sinner and has now ceased to be! What does it matter, I ask you, what happens to a million schools and headmasters so long as Danny Buck saves his own soul?"

The next story, "The Triplets", continues this transferrai of the Winthrop sense of mission from the external world to the internal one. The central character is Natica Seligman, daughter of the Winthrop triplets, three sisters who act in unison with their children. The triplets, who exist for the most part outside the story, function as an indivisible but impotent trinity. While they counsel Natica to "love and let love"—a strange Winthropian injunction—they cannot help her penetrate the privacies of a husband who has decided to leave a successful public career for teaching. As with most Winthrops, Natica must sort out her relationship with her family before she can resolve her problems with her husband. To help her, the triplets' greatest admirer and closest friend tries to define the ambiguous nature of the current Winthrop role:

"The triplets are so manifestly the fine flower of a great tradition. Who dares to challenge them? They have combined their great ancestor's passionate mission to save the world with all that is beautiful and luxurious in the world to be saved. We may suspect, at least down here in benighted New York, that the mission is defunct and that its lovely ministers are frauds—or let us say illusions—but what have we that is better?"

A bit later, sensing that he might have been too negative in his assessment, he suggests they retain an important function for society as the "masks our civilization wears." Only when Natica discovers that her husband suffers from a debilitating disease, however, can she seek redemption in his illness. When he rebuffs her, she resolves to explore a new dimension of the family's tradition:

She would give up the mask, at any rate, even if that was all she had left from the Winthrops. Without it she might expose herself as a cipher to the world. But perhaps to be a cipher was better than to be a pose. So long as the tablet was blank, there was no reason to assume that one could not write on it. At any rate, she would have given up the mission, or the burden of seeming to have one. From henceforth the mission would be only to herself.

As her words reveal, the need for a mission remains; her only hope for individual salvation lies in imposing its demands on herself rather than others.

Auchincloss's last story, "The Penultimate Puritan", a long letter from a mother to her son resisting the Vietnam war in Stockholm, returns explicitly to the biblical theme in its opening sentence: "Here beginneth the first chapter of the gospel according to Althea Stevens Gardiner The story concentrates on the relationship between Althea Stevens and John Winthrop Gardiner, seen from the perspective of a deserted wife whose husband abandoned her for a little "chit of a girl." Althea, sets the tone for her epistle with the comment:

You will remember from your sacred studies at Farmingdale that in the first century Christians believed that Christ would come again to judge the world in only a few years time. They also believed that this second and final coming would be preceded by a false one, that of an antichrist, who would spread fire and destruction along with his false doctrine. Your generation believes only in the false coming. You see the future as terminated by a hypocrite with a hydrogen bomb. Your father sees only the bomb.

It takes Althea some time after her marriage to realize that John needed an antichrist even more than a Christ: when Hitler fails to offer a sustained evil, communism becomes an adequate substitute as John joins the CIA. After the Vietnam War leads to a rupture between father and son, with the father supporting clandestine activity while demanding of his son strict adherence to traditional values, Althea raises the inevitable question of Winthrop spouses and gets the inevitable response:

"And what is [your faith] based on? Do you even believe in God?"

"My faith is in me."

But just as the father's self-righteousness motivates him, the son, Jock's, self-righteousness forces him into deserting from the army and condemning his father and country. His mother sees accurately the source of his protest, a source consonant with that projection of the ego implicit in the covenant: "You and I, Jock, want to tear down the Establishment because we loathe and resent it—not because we give a damn about the great unwashed." His act of protest, the flight to Europe from a postlapsarian garden of Eden, merely reverses the original progress and aligns him as firmly with the other Adamic figures in the stories, as does his ironic surname, Gardiner.

If John is the penultimate Puritan and Jock the ultimate one, where is the saviour, the figure who might either fulfill the Winthrop mission or establish a new covenant? There is a comic possibility in Althea's dowdy, dreaming daughter Christine "with her rosy view of an imminent socialist future." But the story dismisses Christine so fully that it is hard to think of her as more than a naive innocent who has translated the Winthrop legacy into a vague desire to do good for the world. If Jock can be seen as the Baptist, then the true messiah might be his as yet unborn stepbrother, the child John's lover bears. That child offers the possibility of extending his father's mandate against the forces of darkness or of emerging as the first truly spontaneous symbol of love in a far from spontaneous clan.

Auchincloss's tale is not finished, as, of course, it cannot be. In fact, it serves as but a chapter in his writings, for all of his works deal, directly or indirectly, with the preoccupying sense of mission. Despite Gore Vidal's observation that he "plays God with his characters" [in The New York Review of Books XXI, No. 12 (July 18, 1974)], however, he does so no more than most other novelists. And, as Vidal has also noted, as a member of the class he portrays, Auchincloss shares the temptations, illusions, and frustrations of their postlapsarian state. Defining and redefining that state has become his preoccupying mission, a mission which is, appropriately, more Promethean than messianic.