In Memoriam I N
M E M O R I A M
everyone in the ‘Groton family’” believed that the author of The Rector of Justin had “traitorously criticized Dr. Peabody and his School” by depicting the coldness of Justin in its ice age. But those who thought the book perfidious overlooked the way in which Auchincloss pointed, at the end of it, to qualities in the School’s character and tradition that have the power to renew it. Certainly one of the strengths of both Peabody’s Groton and Prescott’s Justin lies in their capacity for regeneration; and it was precisely this power of revival that Auchincloss took up in the last pages of the novel. Like so many of Auchincloss’ books, The Rector of Justin turns not on the too facile distinction between worldly corruption and other-worldly virtue, but on the difference between life-enhancers, whose inspiration is the source of the vibrant and creative traditions, and those whose music is never properly got out. Felix Leitner in Auchincloss’ The House of the Prophet, Ernest Saunders in Last of the Old Guard, Cardinal Richelieu in his 1972 study of the French statesman are heroic vitalists who, like Prescott himself, have a genius for showing that “life could be exciting.” Auchincloss was conscious of the dangers of these overpowering personalities; they invite hero-worship and are often corrupted by it. But in The Rector of Justin the creative ecstasies of Prescott are tempered by his moral imagination; the same inspired perception that has enabled him to create the living tradition of Justin Martyr forces him, at the conclusion of the novel, to acknowledge the shortcomings of his school, and to feel remorse for the way he treated a student he had come to hate. He has learned, he says, “some elementary lessons in humility,” and he again takes up the pastoral crook he had laid aside in the hard days. The implication seems to me obvious: where a tradition can inspire the creativity and excitement that Prescott’s (at its best) did and is at the same time informed by a sense of humility, the tradition can be— and as Prescott’s successor Duncan Moore observes, ought to be—renewed and perpetuated. It is this faith in the possibility of regeneration that makes Auchincloss’ novel one of the great Groton books. Alice Roosevelt Longworth might have dismissed Endicott Peabody as a “slab of New England granite,” but the Rector knew what he was about when he forged the traditions that have shaped our School and have done something to bring out our own latent creativity. To see this it is necessary to get round the Rector of the later years, a forbidding figure obscured by legend and idolatry, and go back, as Auchincloss did in The Rector of Justin, to the Cotty Peabody of the ’80s, a young man full of confidence but also of uncertainty, one who chucked his work in the brokerage to bring the Gospel to gunslingers in Tombstone, a fledgling headmaster who was trying desperately, he told William Amory Gardner, “to make the world . . . better” and who thanked God for the “glorious and most intensely interesting life” of his School. Auchincloss bears witness to the very nearly occult power of the ritual and mystique of the School that is Peabody’s lengthened shadow in the extraordinary lyric of Charley Strong in the 15th chapter of The Rector of Justin. Not the least important element in this mystique is the horror of complacency it engenders, a spirit of self-criticism that has
allowed Groton continuously to renew itself without sacrificing its aboriginal myths and memories. The rigidity of the “hard period” in Groton’s history which made Auchincloss’ school days difficult was, when I first came to the School in 1979, a thing of the past; never elsewhere have I known a place at once so tightly bound together in the fellowship of a compact community and at the same time so hospitable to eccentricity and to the cultivation, by student and teacher alike, of his or her peculiar gifts. § I don’t know whether Auchincloss would have agreed, but I think the reason he was able to throw so much light on our common experience and make vivid the constructive power that creates the extraordinary thing—be it Richelieu’s France or Prescott’s Justin—is that he was himself akin to those heroically creative figures he portrayed in his books. I do not mean simply the prodigious energy that enabled him to write a book a year, and to read widely and deeply in English and French literature, when he was in full practice on Wall Street. I mean too the vitality that resisted all the typical molds. As much as his characters Morris Madison in Powers of Attorney, Peter Carnochan in East Side Story, and Roger Cutter in The House of the Prophet, Auchincloss knew the pleasures of literary escapism, and might have played the flâneur, living vicariously through others and writing it all down in books and diaries. His Horace Havistock, a character he modeled on Gaillard Lapsley, the American expatriate and aesthete, “had learned to apologize to nobody” for taking his “pleasures primarily through the eye and ear.” Yet Auchincloss himself, far from cultivating a fin de siècle aloofness, not only went down to Wall Street every day, he had a rich family life and was an exemplary husband to Adele and father to John ’76, Blake, and Andrew ’82. His personal generosity was remarkable. In Walter Lippmann and the American Century, Ronald Steel observed that while “some people who had courted [Lippmann] in his health neglected him in his decline, others, particularly Louis Auchincloss, Arthur Schlesinger, and the faithful Drew Dudley, regularly came to visit and to divert his mind.” Auchincloss was as generous to the obscure as he was to the great, and amid his many labors he took the time to read carefully and comment thoughtfully on the manuscripts of young scribes and apprentice writers. I remember his voice, as I heard it booming on my answering machine a few years ago, rich, cultivated, its accent that of another world, a now-vanished age. His great subject, he said, was the “decline of a class,” but he harbored no illusions about its virtues and accepted with serenity its decay. “I used to say to my father, ‘Everything would be all right if only my class at Yale ran the country.’ Well, they did run the country during the Vietnam War, and look what happened!” His books are notably unsentimental; there is nothing in them of the romantic nostalgia for a waning patriciate one finds in Waugh and Lampedusa, in Proust and even in Faulkner. He did however once say to me, in connection with the withering of the old WASP ascendancy, “When we are gone, they will miss us.” We will miss him.
Quarterly Fall 2010
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