Abstract
Louis Auchincloss’s ‘treacherous years’ have here been described as a period during which Auchincloss tried to emerge from the creative and critical impasse in his career at the end of the 1960s. It was a period with only few works of fiction, which, moreover, failed to provide Auchincloss with the solution to his fear of a declining creativity. Rather than fiction, Auchincloss wrote much non-fiction, both in meditation on the careers of other writers, and in reappraisal of his own life. Only at the end of the period, with the publication within the same year of The Partners and A Writer’s Capital, was there an expression of renewed hope and courage. In their respective ways, both works had asserted the ‘simple conclusion’ that the only solution to the pain of defeat is the acceptance of the cause of that defeat — namely, the limitations of one’s upbringing, character and talent.
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Notes
Auchincloss’s dramatization of The House of Mirth ran to full houses from 18 to 30 November 1977 at the Herbert Berghof Playwright Foundation, New York.
Auchincloss (ed.), Introduction to Fables of Wit and Elegance (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972) pp.vii–viii.
Auchincloss, ‘Stories of Death and Society’, New York, LX, no. 30 (23 July 1973) 44–5.
The ‘prose poems’ appeared as ‘Sketches of the Nineteen Seventies’ in Narcissa and Other Fables (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1983) pp. 197–213.
Cf. Auchincloss, ‘Speaking of Books: The Trick of the Author as Character’, New York Times Book Review, 1 Feb 1970, p. 2.
Auchincloss, Watchfires (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1982) p. iv.
Auchincloss, Honorable Men (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1985) p. 64.
Jean W. Ross, ‘An Interview with Louis Auchincloss’, Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1980 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1981) p. 7.
Auchincloss, Exit Lady Masham (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1983) p. 110.
Cf. Auchincloss, ‘A Writer’s Use of Fact in Fiction’, Probate Lawyer, X (Summer 1984) 4–5, where Auchincloss suggests that his ‘excuse for going back’ to the eighteenth century was that ‘there may be occasions when a writer of historical fiction may profitably speculate whereas it would be idle for a historian.
Is it not fair to speculate where history is silent?’ Cf. also Auchincloss, The Book Class (Boston, Mass. : Houghton Mifflin, 1984) p. 65, for another instance of the use of fiction for speculation about truth.
Roy Newquist, ‘Louis Auchincloss’, in Newquist (ed.), Counterpoint (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964) p.35.
Cf. Auchincloss in Vincent Piket, ‘An Interview with Louis Auchincloss’, Dutch Quarterly Review, XVIII, no. 1 (1988) 27: ‘I had always kept away from the past because it seemed to me that since I lacked the personal knowledge of it, I had no right to it. I thought my view was too limited for it. When I started out as a novelist I wrote not only about things and events that I knew and people that I knew, but people I could imagine myself being, and events that I could imagine happening to myself. … But gradually I began to wonder why I should be bound in this way, and this caused me to drop a number of limitations.’
Auchincloss, The Country Cousin (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1978) p. 55.3
‘Auchincloss, Louis (Stanton)’, in John Wakeman (ed.), World Authors 1950–1970 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1975) p. 93.
Ronald Steel’s biography came out as Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1980).
Auchincloss, The House of the Prophet (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1980) p. 142.
Cf. Auchincloss’s contribution to ‘Works in Progress’, a symposium in the New York Times Book Review, 15 July 1979, p. 15: ‘I am now in the process of completing a novel … on a theme that I have been turning over for some years: the concept of a deep-thinking, profoundly serious man, a political philosopher and constitutional lawyer, ultimately the author of a widely circulated newspaper column, whose central aim in life is to free himself from any ties that may impede his search for truth, whether such ties be religious, racial, familial, national or even humanitarian.’
In 1983 Auchincloss called the book his ‘most ambitious novel’ — ‘Literature and the Law’, Federal Rules Decisions, CI (St Paul, Minn.: West Publishing, 1984) 280.
Auchincloss, The Book Class (Boston, Mass. : Houghton Mifflin, 1984) p. 36.
Auchincloss, The Cat and the King (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin 1981), p. 61.
Auchincloss, Skinny Island: More Tales of Manhattan (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) p. 83.
Auchincloss, Diary of a Yuppie (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1986) p. 95.
Robert Towers, ‘The Wild Blue Yonder’, New York Review of Books, XXXIII, no. 20 (18 Dec 1986) 29.
Auchincloss, ‘Don’t Mind If I Do’ (letter to the editor), and ‘Robert Towers Replies’, New York Review of Books, XXXIV no. 2 (12 Feb 1987) 41.
Dinitia Smith, ‘The Old Master and the Yuppie’, New York, XIX, no. 32 (18 Aug 1986) 34.
Louis Auchincloss, The Golden Calves (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1988) p. 47.
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© 1991 Vincent Piket
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Piket, V. (1991). Old and New Directions, 1976 to the Present. In: Louis Auchincloss. New Directions in American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21366-5_9
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