376
R. W.
FLINT
sufficient excuse for being a
novelist
at all. He is a remarkably
fine satirist, affectionate, observant, penetrating, but he lives only
in his digressions, as many of his contemporaries and subjects
live only on weekends.
Or perhaps you can say that all he lacks are readers who
can forget what they learned in college about the form he
ought
to have as a Novelist of Manners (Jane Austen) and read
him
for
what he is, an accomplished chronicler and wit. As each of his
recent novels has proved more clearly than its predecessor, there
is
no
ideal form for Mr. Auchincloss.
Pursuit of the Prodigal
is somewhat neater and more efficient than
Venus in Sparta
or
The Great World and Timothy Holt
but also poorer in entertain–
ment. In order to work up plots to match the energy of his per–
ceptions and language, Auchincloss has to abandon any pretense
of being a pure novelist of manners and take his people out into
the cold, draughty, muscle-clenching professional world of count–
ing-house and bar. That this masculine agonizing, these wire–
drawn crises of conscience, are reasonably well done I don't dis–
pute for a moment. But it is essentially Horatio Alger stuff and no
more flavorsome than the same kind of thing in Cozzens. Like
tennis you like it or you don't; compared with Trollope I would
say that Mr. Auchincloss finds it irksomely necessary, not engross–
ing for itself. His Wall Street-Long Island society,
as a society,
no longer has the momentum to generate plots of the required
intensity.
But there is a deeper justification than mere plot-carpentry
in these rarified questions of honor in Auchincloss novels; artificial
as they may be, they provide a necessary gymnasium for keeping
up the Old School tone, for propitiating the eternally hovering
Headmaster. Here is the novelist's distinction, that he has taken
his schoolboy ideals more seriously than most. They have split
him
apart; but his satirical half seems not only to require his moralist
half for support but is also able to exist beside it quite separately
and distinctly.
In any event, he is someone to read; extremely good with old
people, decent aunts and selfish aunts, awful old family autocrats,
vague and indefinably "wonderful" matriarchs who seem to own
most of the property. He nicely hits off those splinter groups of
