False Gods
By Louis Auchincloss
Houghton Mifflin, 214 pages, $21
Certain authors have such definite literary reputations that you think you know without having read their work what it would look like if you did. Louis Auchincloss, America`s most steadfast chronicler of its upper classes, is one of these writers, and I was fairly confident that the people in his new novel ”False Gods” would prefer singing from the 1942 Episcopal hymnal to the revised edition; that, if Jewish, they would change their names; that they would mostly live in New York; and that while none is brilliant almost everybody would have graduated from someplace very presentable, like Yale, with a boarding school like Groton having figured in the trajectory-and, of course, that they would be rich or have been rich at some point. I was correct.
Money has the curious effect of making its possessors incurious, and one wonders why Auchincloss hasn`t lost his own curiosity about people who can afford to be different but aren`t. One answer is obvious. He is good at it, as Henry James and Edith Wharton were. Secondly, as Emerson once said, ”no man is quite sane: each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination or blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature has taken to heart.” Auchincloss has always taken the upper classes to his heart, and it is a tribute to his talent that he manages to persuade us to take them to our hearts, too. Sometimes.
”False Gods” is a bit uneven, as the gentle cadence of Auchincloss`
prose occasionally rolls away from him. Here is a lovely sentence: ”His mind, once largely occupied in multiplying a modest inheritance, like a shiny tool kept in a velvet case, was still in perfect order.” And another: ”His round little hands were folded on a spotless blotter.” But then comes a tongue-twister: ”She had viewed with a detachment imbued in her by her older brother Lemuel, a satirical dilettante, the semiludicrous efforts of their Francophile parents to be included in the `gratin` of the old faubourg.”
Auchincloss is not a simple writer and, like Henry James, delivers up long sentences that require one to turn off the TV. But every so often he sounds as if he were trying to give a ”Saturday Night Live” imitation of himself or had fallen asleep while dictating.
The title of ”False Gods” ties this collection of tales together. Each story is labeled with a god who wreaks havoc with the main character.
”Hermes, God of the Self-Made Man” is about the son of a wealthy New York Jew who had changed the family name from Ullman to Leonard to make his family`s life easier. His son, Maurice, goes to Yale, becomes friends with a WASP named Horace and is, for the rest of his life, intermixed in a pleasureably deadly way with Horace`s family and its subtle anti-Semitism. It is an intricate, interesting tale, although the dialogue is a bit ”gee whiz” at times.
”I`d like to put you up for Psi U,” says Horace to Maurice.
”I whistled. Then I tried to pass it off with a pun. `The first Jew in Psi U? It even rhymes. . . . Horry, whom are you trying to kid? You know you`d never get me in.”
Maurice`s girlfriend tells him that her father knows ”Mr. Adams.”
”Oh, I know that,” he replies. ”Billy Phelps let me read his copy of
`The Education of Henry Adams.` It`s been privately printed. He mentions your father, you know.”
There is meant to be something unlovely about a young man who is so passionately interested in this kind of minutiae. But so is Auchincloss, and sometimes one tires of the bright, expensive people, places and things that Auchincloss drops, like Easter eggs, to pep up the grass. Having registered this complaint, however, I think he is right to do exactly that. His people are defined by their passion for the good, correct, authentic and tasteful;
what they lack is passion for life.
”There were early puritans,” confesses Alistar Dows, the protagonist of the final tale, ”Athene, Goddess of the Brave,” ”who had clung to the desperate theory that if they could train themselves to look elected, they might fool even God into supposing they were.” Unfortunately, Dows knows he`s a coward, but is liberated by knowing that everybody else knows it after he proves it during World War II as a naval officer.
”There`s a kind of peace in having touched bottom,” he confesses (in the oak bar of the New York Yale Club.) ”I don`t ever have to pretend again. At the cost of everything I valued in life-or should have valued-my family, my job, my friends, my reputation-I have been given back my life itself. And what`s more, it`s a life so poor and shabby that almost anything I do with it will be an improvement. I`ll be alone in the world, but that may be better than to be the way I was.”
Predisposed to appreciate, but not admire, Auchincloss, I wound up doing both. There is something inspiring about a writer who continues to produce subtle, graceful books that are both compassionate and truthful. It is easy to take cheap shots at expensive people. Auchincloss does not.
