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Silver Spoons and China Cups
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13491 |
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BOOK WORLD
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3 / 1995 |
3,823 Words |
| Author
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James Thompson
James Thompson, who lives in Nashville, is the author of
several books, the most recent of which is The Church, the
South and the Future. |
In the early 1950s, New York's literary bohemians hung out regularly at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village. Dylan Thomas held court there until he drank himself to death in 1953, and on a given night the milling throng might feature such notables as Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, William Styron, and James Baldwin. The rowdy crowd would occasionally include a dignified, elegantly dressed gentleman, sometimes in evening attire, who looked out of place among the roisterous literati. Despite his deceptive appearance, Louis Auchincloss was, like many of the bar's patrons, a novelist, but he was also, to everyone's amazement, a Wall Street lawyer. Most of the White Horse's writers and poseurs dismissed him, a friend would later recall, as a "rich boy dabbling in literature."
Auchincloss might have passed muster with the barroom critics if he had devoted his talents to an acceptable subject: disaffected intellectuals, say, or degenerate southerners, or tough guys cribbed from Papa Hemingway. Not only was Auchincloss a well-heeled Wall Street lawyer, but, most unforgivably, he dared to write about ... well-heeled Wall Street lawyers. Defying literary fashion, he would spend the next four decades tracing the circulation of money--"how it was made, inherited, lost, spent"--through the upper reaches of New York society.
Although the critics had to admit that Auchincloss could turn a phrase and tell a good story, they could never forgive him for squandering his art on the rich. In the estimation of his detractors, he would never be more than a minor novelist "associated with the tinkle of silver on teacups," as Auchincloss once complained.
That adds up
... (1999 of 24147 Characters)
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