Abstract
Louis Auchincloss started work on his first published novel, The Indifferent Children, in the fall of 1943, while he was on leave in New York after the USS Moonstone, the converted yacht on which he was serving, had — it seemed, in a fittingly anti-climactic way — collided and sunk in a New Jersey harbour. He temporarily abandoned the novel during the busy months of further military training, as well as during his first months in the English Channel. By September 1944, however, the periods of inactivity in ports gradually lengthened; as a result, Auchincloss was able to report to his mother that he had ‘started on the novel again in spare moments. Think it a good idea, but hard to get much done.’1
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Notes
Auchincloss, The Indifferent Children (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1947) p. 113.
Auchincloss, Introduction to The Indifferent Children (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964) p. V. Cf. also A Writer’s Capital p. 108.
Auchincloss, The Indifferent Children (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1947) p. 16. Subsequent page references are to this edition.
Cf. Auchincloss, A Writer’s Capital, pp. 113–14; and Vincent Piket, ‘An Interview with Louis Auchincloss’, Dutch Quarterly Review, XVIII, no. 1 (1988) 20–1.
William McFee’s review appeared as ‘Another Newcomer Writes an Impressive Novel’, in the New York Sun, 27 May 1947.
Cf. Lewis Nichols, ‘Talk with Mr. Auchincloss’, New York Times Book Review, 27 Sep 1953, p. 28.
Evelyn Waugh to Auchincloss, 13 Nov (1950], in The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory (New Haven, Conn., and New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1980) p. 340.
Auchincloss, ‘Author’s Note’, The Injustice Collectors (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1950) p. vii.
Auchincloss, Sybil (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971) pp. 28, 20, 103.
Auchincloss, A Law for the Lion (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1953) pp. 8, 27, 11, 170. Subsequent page references are to this edition.
The same fantasy and fear of exposure and exhibition recurs in several other novels and short stories by Auchincloss. Cf. The House of Five Talents (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1960) p. 15;
The Country Cousin (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1978) pp.35, 51;
The House of the Prophet (Boston, Mass. : Houghton Mifflin, 1980) p. 166;
‘Narcissa’, in Narcissa and Other Fables (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1983) pp. 1–21.
For a few reprsentative reviews, see Walter Allen, ‘New Novels’, New Statesman and Nation, XLVI (5 Sep 1953) 264;
John Barkham, ‘Shattered Pattern’, New York Times Book Review, 27 Sep 1953, pp. 5, 38
Charles J. Rolo, ‘Eloise and Esther’, Atlantic Monthly, CXCII (Oct 1953) 87–8
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© 1991 Vincent Piket
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Piket, V. (1991). Social Tremors, 1947–54. In: Louis Auchincloss. New Directions in American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21366-5_4
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