The Style’s the Man:

Reflections on Proust, Fitzgerald, Wharton, Vidal and Others

Louis Auchincloss

Discoveries – I’ve searched high and low for this out-of-print book and found it the other weekend tucked away on a shelf just waiting for me at Myopic Books in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood. (The shop is a gem; widely stocked, well-organized.) I was rendezvousing at Myopic with my old friend, Ed Underhill, who decades ago first alerted me to Louis Auchincloss. Ed is a lawyer and a writer, as so was Auchincloss, who I now think of as the great chronicler of the American Establishment. With wit and other considerable skills Auchincloss provides insights in these essays into the lives and work of some of my favorite writers – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gore Vidal, Edith Wharton, Tennessee Williams, Henry James. Auchincloss’ writing comes most alive for me, no surprise, when our interests intersect; yet, his perceptions of others – William Gaddis, Marguerite Yourcenar, Marcel Proust – are educational. (However, his defense of Ivy Compton-Burnett against criticism from Joyce Carol Oates rather proves Oates’ point.) In the midst of all of this literary glory – is there any better “inside baseball” than writers writing about other writers? – two deeply mistaken assertions about the growth of Edith Wharton’s literary reputation jump off the page. Auchincloss, writing in the 1990s, attributes Wharton’s late-20^th century rise to three reasons: “first and foremost to her penetrating analysis of the mores of New York City’s financial upper class, couched in hard, glittering prose and garnished with scathing wit; secondly, to the fact that that class is now enough in the past to have become history and no longer arouses the envy and resentment of the less privileged; and finally to the force of the feminist movement, the extremists of which seek to deify women of past accomplishment.” On those second and third points, ol’ Louis is just flat wrong – and one might say, in fact I think I will say it: myopic. To claim that class somehow stopped mattering in the Clinton years is akin to saying race stopped mattering in the Obama years. Both eras offered a veneer of progress; but, the first only stoked worse economic inequality and the second only revealed deeper racism. And to criticize feminists tell us more about Auchincloss than it does feminists. What really elevated Wharton’s standing? The movies. “The Age of Innocence.” “Ethan Frome.” The style’s the man, indeed.