Louis Auchincloss's work speaks volumes

NEW YORK -- Carson McCullers published a book in 1947. So did Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, James A. Michener, and Robert Frost. A young lawyer and Navy veteran, Louis Auchincloss also published a novel that year, his first: ''The Indifferent Children." It wasn't a big success, but Auchincloss didn't give up.

This month, Auchincloss, 87, published another novel, ''East Side Story." It is his 60th book, and 43d work of fiction, all but the first with Boston-based Houghton Mifflin. His 17 nonfiction books include essays, memoirs, historical works, literary studies of Edith Wharton and Henry James, and biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

''He is phenomenal in that prolonged, cheerful productivity," said novelist John Updike. ''It's almost unique in the annals of authors. I read the new book with pleasure and admiration. He handles that material with authority and a wry love of the old WASP ruling class." He has done it, moreover, while carrying on a long career as an estate lawyer (now retired) with the old firm of Hawkins, Delafield & Wood at 67 Wall St.

From first book to last, Auchincloss's may prove to be the longest-running literary career in American letters, with no end in sight: He has turned in two new collections, short stories called ''The Young Apollo" and essays called ''Writers and Personality." In a lively interview in his Park Avenue apartment, he proved to be a witty raconteur with a plummy accent, who often breaks into chuckles at his own sallies. One wall in his living room is covered with old books, including all of his own in a long line on one shelf, gold-stamped and bound in green leather. His furnishings are fine but not ostentatious. Paintings adorn the walls, including portraits of the author, and one of his great-grandfather by the American master William Sidney Mount.

Auchincloss's many novels and short stories limn the world he was born into: the monied Protestant upper crust of New York of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the men and women of the old law firms, clubs, Wall Street brokerage houses, and social register who summered in Bar Harbor or on Long Island and were groomed (the men, that is) at Groton and Yale to replicate their ancestors. Their supremacy is past, what with the huge new fortunes of high technology and high finance, but Auchincloss says, ''People don't get pushed out; they only get pushed over. Those families that were rich in the 1920s and '30s, almost without exception, still exist and are still rich."

From the outset, he was dismissed by some critics for writing about that bygone ''narrow world," which galls him. As for bygone, he says, ''The past is five minutes ago. You can't very well stay out of it."

It's true, he said, ''I've stayed pretty close to the things I've observed myself, and the operation of the managerial society on the Eastern Seaboard." Not always in New York, however. ''I've written about the headmaster of a New England school [his one bestseller, ''The Rector of Justin"], a world famous psychologist, about an embezzler. I've written about the things in my lifetime that have had an impact on the culture."

''East Side Story" is a multigenerational saga of the Carnochans, a New York family descended from a middle-class Scottish immigrant in the mid-19th century. Of its many scions, almost all are crushingly unimaginative, concerned mainly with money and meeting family and social expectations. All the men become lawyers or businessmen, and most of the women are the wives of lawyers and businessmen. A few break the mold, usually through misfortune: the terminally ill young Estelle, and the wonderful Loulou near the end of the line, an old maid who becomes a nurse and a clear-eyed observer of her forebears.

Auchincloss says ''East Side Story," which recalls John Galsworthy's ''Forsyte Saga," is ''inspired by my own family." The fictional David Carnochan ''came to this country at exactly the same time as the Auchinclosses and enjoyed the same status in Scotland: businessmen, not impoverished and not grand." The name survived because ''they had many sons -- I myself had three. They stayed in one place and had an extraordinary power of survival. There was no Auchincloss fortune, but each generation, as I say in the book, either made its own or married its money. There were very few rich ones."

Not by Rockefeller or Vanderbilt standards, that is. Born to comfortable circumstances in 1917, the same year as John F. Kennedy, Auchincloss was one of four children and was educated at New York's Bovee School on Fifth Avenue and the Groton School -- the setting of ''The Rector of Justin." Though his father was a corporate lawyer, Auchincloss was already running off the traditional family rails in wanting to write. His ability to write anywhere, in any small snippet of time, began in his Groton days.

He went to Yale, became active in the dramatic club, and wrote stories for the Yale Literary Magazine, but when a draft of a novel was rejected by a publisher he decided to renounce a literary career and entered the University of Virginia Law School. To his surprise, he liked estate law, and after graduation joined an old New York firm. He married Adele Lawrence, an artist who later became active in the New York park system (she died in 1991). After wartime service in Europe and the Pacific (he commanded a landing ship in the Normandy invasion), he resumed his legal practice, and his writing. After ''The Indifferent Children," book followed book.

Along with his writing, Auchincloss maintained a strong interest in the arts. He was chairman of the board of the Museum of the City of New York, and also president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2000, the New York Landmarks Conservancy named him a ''Living Landmark."

How was it possible to raise a family, be a senior partner in a Wall Street law firm, and also write 60 books? By using every available free moment.

Auchincloss drafts in longhand on a yellow legal pad, usually three sheets in a day. He pointed to a large mural by his wife on the corridor wall outside his apartment. It shows a small family seated on a bench in Central Park: the Auchinclosses, about 50 years ago. The mother is holding a baby and a second boy is running about. The man, seemingly oblivious to his surroundings, is bent over a legal pad.

Auchincloss said, ''If I'm on the surrogate's calendar [the New York City Surrogate's Court, which handles estate cases], the case might come up the moment I walk into court, or it might be called an hour and a half later. I'd always have a little notebook that I could write in, in that time. A real writer would learn that trick very quickly if he had to. You shut your mind on and off perfectly well; it's just a matter of habit. A lot of writers have to have complete silence and the fire going, their slippers on and a drink, all very comfortable and so on."

Writing came first. ''The law was always to me a job, a job I liked doing and was interested in," he said, ''but it was not exciting to me as it would be to a great lawyer. I was not a great lawyer. I was a perfectly good, conscientious hack."

Auchincloss's style reminds many people of Henry James (whose work Auchincloss loves) and Edith Wharton, a comparison he disputes. His characters and narrative structures are much more modern, and social topics appear in his books -- such as homosexuality -- that James and Wharton could not write about openly. ''James would not have approved of my way of telling a story at all," Auchincloss says.

Like ''rich," however, ''modern" is a relative term. Auchincloss's style is decidedly refined and formal. In ''East Side Story," almost all the scenes involve conversations between two people, usually related to each other by blood or marriage. Dramatic events occur, but almost always offstage or in the past, reported by the calm and courteous narrator. It's a technique that in a young writer would bring down the ''Show, don't tell!" hammer of creative writing professors, to say nothing of agents and editors. Auchincloss's career preceded such rules. ''I don't believe in any rules at all," he said. ''You have to do the thing that suits you. E.M. Forster put it very well when he said that all these rules are more important to critics than to writers or readers."

''There is a knee-jerk reaction to his writing," said Mitchell Waters, Auchincloss's agent, ''sometimes coming from people who haven't had the pleasure of reading his work, that he is dealing with a rarefied social set that doesn't have much to do with the lives of the majority of the population. He is often dealing with that set, but what he is investigating is generally universal: human nature and what can be extracted from it, that is applicable to our lives."

Auchincloss's attitude toward the people and world he writes about, as faded as an old sepia photograph, is affectionate but not indulgent or apologetic. Some of his characters are kind and wise; many are relentlessly cold, grasping, unimaginative, and dull. His nonjudgmental narrative tone is deceptive. In real life, he isn't cavalier about injustice or prejudice.

''I don't think people have a right to anything," he said. ''Anyone who designed an America which puts several hundred thousand American citizens in jail for doing nothing, as we did to the Japanese in World War II, knows that you have no rights that the majority can't and won't take away any moment they feel like it. There you had a unanimous Supreme Court justifying a completely arbitrary act."

And he's not shy about speaking his mind. He was a guest at a recent holiday dinner given by Roy Goodman, the liberal Republican former state senator from the Upper East Side. ''There were some military people there," Auchincloss said, ''and one was going on about how we've got to get behind our boys fighting in Iraq. Everybody there had good manners. I finally said, 'Look, the fact that our boys are fighting with a lot of courage doesn't mean anything about the war. Men will fight for their country, right or wrong. Whether the war is a good or a bad war is up to us, not to the people who are doing the fighting.' A lot of people were being very mousy, and some of them came up to me afterward and said, 'Thank God you said it.' " He chuckled and added, ''That dreadful colonel was furious."

Auchincloss's new editor at Houghton Mifflin, Jane Rosenman, hasn't yet had a chance to work on his new story collection, but she is already enjoying the relationship. When he met her, Auchincloss said, ''I know that name. There was a person named Rosenman who wrote speeches for Roosevelt." When told that Samuel I. Rosenman had been her great-uncle, he said, ''Well, then, we are going to get on!"

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.

Family ties

From "East Side Story," by Louis Auchincloss

Alone now, so to speak, with David, for they shared rooms in Cambridge, Gordon had much occasion to reflect, with his self-impressed passivity, on the forceful role that his cousin seemed increasingly to be playing in his life. David struck him at times as a leader looking for loyal troops to support him in a battle for ends he had not yet determined but which time was bound to make clear. With his long, bony face and lean, bony figure, his high, balding dome and eyes that could turn in a second from a winning friendliness to an icy disapproval, David seemed to be training his agile intellect to subject other men to his pressures, and he appeared to sense intuitively whom he could bully into submission and to whom it was more politic to kowtow. David was intensely clannish, even for a Scot; he viewed the Carnochans, and in particular his brothers and cousins, as a force to be united in a general push to become a major league in the football games of life. And just where would Gordon fit in? Oh, that was obvious enough. He would be the utterly trustworthy second in command, or executive officer, an aide whose primary value would lie in his unwavering loyalty.