The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  MAUD

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  GREG’S PEG

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  THE COLONEL’S FOUNDATION

  THE MAVERICKS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  THE SINGLE READER

  BILLY AND THE GARGOYLES

  THE GEMLIKE FLAME

  THE MONEY JUGGLER

  THE WAGNERIANS

  THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER

  1

  2

  3

  4

  THE PRISON WINDOW

  THE NOVELIST OF MANNERS

  IN THE BEAUTY OF THE LILIES CHRIST WAS BORN ACROSS THE SEA

  1

  2

  3

  4

  THE FABBRI TAPE

  PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST BY ANOTHER

  THE RECKONING

  ARES

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  THE STOIC

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  THEY THAT HAVE POWER TO HURT

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  About the Author

  Copyright © 1994 by Louis Auchincloss

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Auchincloss, Louis.

  [Short stories. Selections]

  The collected stories of Louis Auchincloss.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-395-71039-1

  I. Title.

  PS3501.U25A6 1994

  813'.54—dc20 94-14364

  CIP

  eISBN 978-0-544-34351-1

  v1.0514

  The following stories are reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company:

  “Maud” and “Greg’s Peg,” from The Injustice Collectors, copyright © 1949, 1950 by Louis Auchincloss. “Maud” was originally published in The Atlantic Monthly.

  “Billy and the Gargoyles” and “The Gemlike Flame,” from The Romantic Egoists, copyright © 1952, 1953, 1954 by Louis Auchincloss. Both were originally published in New World Writing.

  “The Colonel’s Foundation” (as “Power of Bequest”), “The Mavericks,” and “The Single Reader,” from Powers of Attorney, copyright © 1955› 1962, 1963 by Louis Auchincloss. “The Colonel’s Foundation” was originally published in The New Yorker.

  “The Money Juggler” and “The Wagnerians,” from Tales of Manhattan, copyright © 1964, 1966, 1967 by Louis Auchincloss.

  “The Prince and the Pauper” and “The Prison Window,” from Second Chance, copyright © 1970 by Louis Auchincloss.

  “The Novelist of Manners,” from The Partners, copyright © 1973, 1974 by Louis Auchincloss.

  “In the Beauty of the Lilies Christ Was Born Across the Sea,” from The Winthrop Covenant, copyright © 1976 by Louis Auchincloss.

  “The Fabbri Tape,” from Narcissa and Other Fables, copyright © 1983 by Louis Auchincloss.

  “Portrait of an Artist by Another” and “The Reckoning,” from Skinny Island, copyright © 1987 by Louis Auchincloss.

  “Ares,” from False Gods, copyright © 1992 by Louis Auchincloss.

  “The Stoic,” from Three Lives, copyright © 1994 by Louis Auchincloss.

  “They That Have Power to Hurt,” from Tales of Yesteryear, copyright © 1994 by Louis Auchincloss.

  FOR MY GRANDSON,

  ROBERT MOORES AUCHINCLOSS

  Introduction

  I WAS DELIGHTED when my editor, Joseph Kanon, agreed to bring out this volume, for I believe that much of my best work has been in short stories, and that my best ones have been buried under the bulk of my now out-of-print fiction. The job of choosing the better tales to rescue proved surprisingly easy. They simply jumped out at me from the ranks of their paler brethren. A novel, at least in my experience, can be enriched by a long gestation and much rumination, but my more successful short stories have sprung from a single idea or vision. So, anyway, did those included in this compilation.

  The fashion in short stories of the past half-century has tended to favor those that deal with a single episode, sometimes in a single scene; the turning on of a light, so to speak, to illuminate a dark room. But I have stuck to the leadership of Henry James and Edith Wharton, and at times of Paul Bourget (a master of the short story if not the novel), in giving my tales the scope of months, even of years. Sometimes, indeed, such a story, when finished, will seem to appeal for longer treatment, and on four occasions I have seen fit to develop short pieces into novels. “In the Beauty of the Lilies” was expanded into Watchfires, “The Money Juggler” into A World of Profit, “The Trial of Mr. M” into The Rector of Justin, and “The Great World and Timothy Colt” into a novel of the same title. Some themes will admit of both major and minor handling.

  “Greg’s Peg” and “Billy and the Gargoyles” are examples of subjects that would wither under longer treatment. The reader would not be able to abide more than thirty pages of Gregory Bakewell’s guileless fatuity, any more than he could the repetitions of Melville’s scrivener Bartleby. And Peter Wescott’s defense of his cousin Billy from little hazing friends, at sad cost to himself and even against his own misguided faith in a school tyranny, needs only a single pathetic chapter.

  “Maud,” dear to my heart as my first appearance in print under my own name (it was published in two issues of the Atlantic Monthly), could have been a novel, but it seemed to me that a shorter form was more adapted to its message of a life mangled by a neurosis and partially salvaged by the victim’s uncommunicated realization that nobody but herself will really care if she insists on throwing away a perfectly good life. Amy Stillman in “The Wagnerians,” on the other hand, comes to a different conclusion: she does her damnedest, pathetically enough, to convince herself that she has not so disposed of her life, that it has been a cruel fate that has done her in. As does Brooks Clarkson in “The Prince and the Pauper,” desperately fantasizing himself as a romantically doomed aristocrat when he is really only a common or garden variety of alcoholic. This tale was a conscious effort on my part to write a story in the manner of John O’Hara. I have often wondered what he would have thought of it.

  “The Prison Window” is one of the only three ghost stories I ever wrote. I learned from Henry James’s use of ambivalence in “The Turn of the Screw” that one can thus avoid the trap of this genre of fiction, namely, that if the ghost turns out to be real he may be incredible, and if he’s a fraud he’s ridiculous. My lady curator in the museum is convinced that she is dealing with the ghost of a black slave seeking revenge against the artifacts of the eighteenth-century patroon who allowed him to be burned alive, but she could be dealing with a vandal.

  “The Single Reader” was first published in a volume of legal short stories, but it is really itself almost a ghost tale. The fact that the obsessed diarist is a tax lawyer is not signi
ficant; he could just as well have been a banker or businessman. I have never been a diarist myself, but I am a great reader of them, and I have long been intrigued by their relationship to fiction. Which is which, and can anyone really tell after a hundred years? Did Saint-Simon create the fantastic Versailles of his memoirs? In a French film about the royal chateau, Sacha Guitry, playing the Sun King, snatches a page from the scribbling little duke, glances through it and exclaims, “No, no, Saint-Simon, you’ve got it all wrong! It wasn’t that way at all!” I decided to encapsulate my fantasies in this tale of a monstrous diary that turns its author into a recording slave.

  I have written more stories about lawyers and law firms than on any other theme. I included “The Colonel’s Foundation” for its comic relief and “The Fabbri Tape” as my meditation on Watergate and the possible justification of a coverup as sparing the national pride. I put in “The Mavericks” because it was the widest in scope of all the legal tales, probing into the social classifications that can taint even the firms most dedicated to merit and expertise.

  “In the Beauty of the Lilies” and “Ares” are rare ventures on my part into the past, in each case the Civil War era. Christopher LehmannHaupt pointed out in a review of the former that it contrasted ironically the forced preservation of the union with the forced preservation of an unhappy marriage. Rereading the story after seeing his piece, I was startled but pleased to recognize that it could hardly be construed in any other way, yet his was a construction I had not had the intention or wit to conceive myself! It was a case of brilliantly creative criticism and made me give a hard second look at the whole theory of “deconstruction,” in which the writer takes second place to the critic. Needless to say, I followed Lehmann-Haupt’s guide when I developed the tale into a novel. “Ares,” the second of these historical stories, is a nostalgic ode to the beautiful Lawn of the University of Virginia, in whose law school I spent three happy years.

  “Portrait of the Artist by Another” had its seed in my admiration for Philippe de Champaigne’s famous portrait of Cardinal Richelieu and my discovery that the great French artist had developed an expertise in painting robes because his Jansenist conscience forbade him the use of the nude. Of course my modern narrator in the story couldn’t suffer from any such inhibition; his inability to paint the bare body had to arise from a traumatic experience. This story and “The Reckoning” are examples of the fiction writer’s oft-repeated concern with the art of his rival, the painter; James, Wharton, and Bourget made much use of portraitists; the hero of James’s “The Tragic Muse” is one. But in the second of these stories I decided to make the viewer and not the artist my subject. What are his or her permissible criteria? Is it possible to build a great collection out of purely subjective, highly personal, even eccentric reactions to paintings?

  “The Stoic” and “They That Have Power to Hurt” are my two best efforts in the genre of the long story or novella. It was a form much favored by James, one that is essential for the development of a protagonist not sufficiently sympathetic for a whole novel but too complicated or many-sided for thirty or so pages. My “stoic” was too arid and inner-directed to sustain a reader’s interest throughout a whole volume, yet he had to be seen over years and in different situations. And my narrator in the second novella would have fatally antagonized the reader in a longer form. It will be obvious to students of Edith Wharton that this tale was the result of my disgust at the jubilation of literary critics on discovering that she had had her first real love affair at the age of forty-seven and at their instant attribution to such an experience of a “new vein of passion” in her subsequent work. It seemed to me this denigrated her as an artist. It also seemed to me that it wasn’t true.

  “The Money Juggler” is really more an essay on some of the meaner practices of our financial system than it is a story; I put it in because I couldn’t bear to leave it out. And “The Gemlike Flame” is in for the simple reason that Norman Mailer told me he “wouldn’t have minded having written it himself.” From a fellow writer, and one of such stature, that is the ultimate compliment.

  LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS

  MAUD

  1949

  1

  ALL MAUD’S LIFE it had seemed to her that she was like a dried-up spring at the edge of which her devoted relatives and friends used to gather hopefully in the expectation that at least a faint trickle might appear. Their own natures, it seemed, were rich with the bubbling fluid of hearty emotion, and their very repleteness made her own sterility the more remarkable. She gazed back at them; she tried to feel what they felt, tried to respond to their yearning glances. But what was the use? It had been her lot to live alone, surrounded by smiles and love, by sports and games and homely affection, through cold winters with warm fires and long, bright, boisterous summers. To Maud, the Spreddons seemed to be always circling, hand in hand, the bonfire of their own joy in life. Could they mean it? she would sometimes ask herself. Yet in sober truth they seemed to be what they appeared. Daddy, large and hearty, was always spoken of as one of the best lawyers downtown and was certainly a rich man, too, despite his eternal jangle about being the average father of an average American family. Mummie, stout and handsome, bustled with good works, and the morning mail was always filled with invitations to accept the sponsorship of worthy drives. Brother Fred was captain of his school football team; brother Sam was head of his class; Grandpapa was the good old judge whom all had revered, and beautiful Granny one of the “last” of the great ladies—there was no end to it.

  But why did they always think that they had to draw her in, make her part of it? Why did they all turn to her on those ghastly Christmas Eves, when they gathered around the piano to bray out their carols, and cry: “Maud, sing this,” and “Maud, isn’t it lovely?” And why, when, with the devil in her soul, she raised her uncertain voice to sing the page’s part in “Good King Wenceslaus,” did they say: “That was really nice, Maud. You do like Christmas, don’t you, after all?” It was the “after all” that gave them away. They smelled her out, spotted her for what she was, a rank intruder in their midst; but at the same time, with inexhaustible generosity, they held open the gate and continued to shout their welcome.

  “Damn you! Goddamn all of you!”

  There. She had said it, and she had said it, too, on Christmas Eve, one week after her thirteenth birthday. Not as long as she lived would she forget the shocked hush that fell over the family group, the stem amazement of her father, the delighted animosity of the boys. It was out at last.

  “Maud!” her father exclaimed. “Where did you ever pick up language like that?”

  “From Nannie,” she answered.

  “From Nannie!”

  “Darling!” cried her mother, enveloping her with arms of steel. “Darling child, what’s wrong? Aren’t you happy? Tell Mummie, dearest.”

  “Maud’s wicked,” said brother Sam.

  “Shut up, Sam,” his father snapped.

  Pressed to the lacy warmness of her mother’s bosom, Maud felt welling up within herself the almost irresistible tide of surrender, but when she closed her eyes and clenched her fists, her own little granite integrity was able, after all, to have its day. She tore herself out of her mother’s arms.

  “I hate you all!” she screamed.

  This time there was no sternness or hostility in the eyes around her. There was only concern, deep concern.

  “I’ll take her up to her room,” she heard her mother tell her father. “You stay here. Tell Nannie, if she hasn’t already gone out, to stay.”

  Her mother took her upstairs and tried to reason with her. She talked to her very gently and told her how much they all loved her and how much they would do for her, and didn’t she love them back just a little, tiny, tiny bit? Didn’t she really, darling? But Maud was able to shake her head. It was difficult; it cost her much. Everything that was in her was yearning to have things the way they had always been, to be approved and smiled at, even critically, but she kne
w how base it would be to give in to the yearning, even if everything that stood for resistance was baser yet. She was a bad girl, a very bad one, but to go back now, to retrace her steps, after the passionately desired and unbelievably actual stand of defiance, to merge once more with that foolish sea of smiles and kisses, to lose forever her own little ego in the consuming fire of family admiration—no, this she would not do.

  Alone in the dark she flung herself upon her pillow and made it damp with her tears, tears that for the first time in her life came from her own causing. Why she was taking this dark and lonely course, why she should have to persist in setting herself apart from all that was warm and beckoning, she could only wonder, but that she was doing it and would continue to do it and would live by it was now her dusky faith. “I will. I will. I will!” she repeated over and over, until she had worked herself into a sort of frenzy and was banging her head against the bedpost. Then the door opened, swiftly, as though they had been standing just outside, and her mother and father and Nannie came in and looked at her in dismay.

  2

  Mrs. Spreddon had certainly no idea what had possessed her daughter. She was not without intelligence or sympathy, and responsibility sat easily with the furs on her ample shoulders, but there was little imagination and no humor in her make-up, and she could not comprehend any refusal of others to participate in that portion of the good of the universe which had been so generously allotted to herself. The disappointments that resulted from a failure to achieve an aim, any aim, were well within her comprehension, and when her son Sammy had failed to be elected head monitor of his school she and Mr. Spreddon had journeyed to New England to be at his side; but misery without a cause or misery with bitterness was to her unfathomable. She discussed it with her husband’s sister, Mrs. Lane, who was in New York on a visit from Paris. Lila Lane was pretty, diminutive, and very chatty. She laughed at herself and the world and pretended to worship politics when she really worshiped good food. She dressed perfectly, always in black, with many small diamonds.