Arbiter of Elegance

THERE'S A CLASSIC 'Life in these United States' anecdote about the owner of a neighborhood grocery store who was a whiz at toting up customers' purchases. Around income tax time he was unaccountably stymied by the 1040 form until he discovered the reason for his mental block. Picking up a stack of grocery bags, he completed the necessary calculations easily in his traditional way--on rough brown paper with a pencil stub. The same psychological process may be manifest in author-lawyer Louis Auchincloss, who finds he can only write novels in longhand or familiar yellow legal pads.

Auchincloss's legal life touches his literary work in other ways, too. Like the legal agreements he draws up during the day, his prose is dry, polished, exact. Moreover, his characters are often two-dimensional, acting unspontaneously, as if according to some imagined contract. No novel better illustrates Auchincloss's legalistic point of view than his most recent one, The Winthrop Covenant.

The title alone is enough to tip off the Auchincloss devotee that a system of quid pro quo operates in this book just as much as in the author's sixteen earlier works. But in The Winthrop Covenant the contractual terms are explicit. Examining the lives of selected Winthrops through our American history, the novel, comprised of nine short stories, considers the pact each family member strikes with the world. The quo of the covenant drawn up by Auchincloss concerns the prerogatives bestowed on every Yankee WASP family by birthright: social position, wholesome looks, refined sensibility, fair intelligence and money.

In return for these wordly advantages, the Puritan ethic dictates the covenant's quid: a sense of mission, "presumably divinely inspired," engendered in each Winthrop as expiation or compensation for his headstart in life. That mission takes many forms. To Governor John Winthrop (1630), the mission entails hounding a religious non-conformist out of the young Massachusetts Bay Colony, in the interest, he believes, of public welfare. To Adam (1902), it means maintaining the standards of Society and the elitism of the Patroon Club by throwing a judicious blackball. Later, John (1967) serves as an advocate for the status quo, hawkishly backing the Vietnam War.

If the expiating missions of statesmen, clerics and professional men intrigue Auchincloss, that of moral and aesthetic critic, described by a minor character, holds for him the greatest interest.

You[Adam Winthrop] have a real life..." she said"... Mine isn't real at all. That's one of the reasons I cover paper with words. But you run great institutions. You buy beautiful things. You are Adam Winthrop, the arbiter elegantiarum of New York."

Adam Winthrop and, to a lesser extent, the other Winthrops in the book are in fact the author himself, thinly veiled. The contractual sense of mission dominates the book as it does Auchin-closs's life. Related both by marriage and blood to the Winthrop family, trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, leader in the Century Club and the Downtown Association, Auchincloss prides himself on being an arbiter elegantiarum. So it is with authority that he writes about his Winthrop kinsmen, worthy judges of men and manners of their own times.

Unfortunately, the author's deep involvement with his novel transforms his work from a historical chronicle of a distinguished New England family to a pointed deposition--sketched on yellow legal paper--on the Puritan ethic. Through all his talk of covenants, missions and Puritan ideals runs an annoying smugness. Novelists John Marquand and John O'Hara also assayed the WASP upper crust in their writings, but rarely presumed to give their characters a moral or aesthetic superiority over the Great Unwashed. Auchincloss, on the other hand, hints that his Winthrops are not only different from you and me, they are better. By birth and from birth they remain arbiters of elegance.