Auchincloss's Rules of the Game

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE DARK LADY by Louis Auchincloss 246 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $8.95.

The U.S. prefers to see itself as egalitarian though it is much impressed by class. Buck and Jim turned their raft into a royal bedchamber for the King and the Duke, Grace Kelly got a regal send-off when she left Hollywood to become Princess to the world's finest amusement park, and the Kennedys were empurpled by the press.

Yet American literature--as defined by the academic elite--seldom offers sympathetic reflections of homegrown aristocracies. The books of Henry James and Edith Wharton are prominent exceptions, though these writers spent most of their lives abroad While the public enjoys upstairs-downstairs capers, most critics view money and manners as intellectually declasse. Members of the top crust do not match the nation's heroic ideal: the rebellious romantic who spurns corrupting society to hunt his singular salvation in wild nature.

There are no such heroes in the fiction of Louis Auchincloss, and his romantics almost always pay for succumbing to egoism and stepping out of line Auchincloss's novels and story collections (nearly one a year for 20 years) deal almost exclusively with New York City's white Anglo-Saxon Protestant haven of old name and old money, whose corridor of power runs from the brownstones and duplexes of the Upper East Side to the paneled offices of Wall Street. It is an influential, publicity-shy world where the rules of the game are hardened by tradition. The costs, and sometimes the rewards, of breaking these rules are the author's principal subject.

Auchincloss ("My father is Jacqueline Kennedy's stepfather's first cousin") is to the novel-of-manners born. Credentials include Groton, Yale, U S Navy and Wall Street, where the 59-year-old author is an estates and trusts lawyer. What better perch from which to observe human nature. Matters can be hidden from a psychoanalyst that can never be hidden from the man who draws up one's will. Perhaps because they usually survive to become the inheritors, women have been especially strong characters in Auchincloss's fiction. "After the age of about 40," he once observed "an American woman has a better eye with which to see contemporary society than an American man. She is free of the demands of traditional professional life of the American man. Man narrows himself down to one form of conception and becomes harder to reach. "

This view may be dating rapidly, yet it serves to underpin Auchincloss's latest novel. The Dark Lady. It is a Social Register version of A Star Is Born--a tale of two women allied in a successful assault on wealth, fame and political power. The star is Elesina Dart, a beauty of good background who has gone through two marriages and flubbed one promising theatrical career. The impresario is Ivy Trask, a cynical, shrewd middle-aged fashion editor and social arbiter at Broadlawns, the Westchester estate of Judge Irving Stein, banker and art collector.

Ivy's schemes would scorch the ears Truman Capote. In the three decades spanned by the novel-- from the late Depression to the mid-'50s-- she salvages Elesina from failure and alcohol, marries her to Irving and the Stein fortune, and finally launches her toward a seat in the House of Representatives.

Born Actress. But Ivy should have read Auchincloss on the natural superiority of women over 40. Elesina grows into the job as mistress of Broadlawns and proves more formidable than her Svengali. As a born actress, she instinctively understands that the world is more than a stage-- it is an audience. Her repertoire enlarges. She tutors herself in art history and is both dutiful wife to the aging, impotent Irving and ardent lover of his son David. Elesina knows how to balance passion and Pragmatism: What was all of Broadlawns and its treasure compared to a lover like that?" But how long will he love her like that?" In the end she has even become something of an efficiency expert by keeping a homosexual who is her manager, pet confidant and lover.

As usual, Auchincloss steers confidently through the world he knows so well. He telescopes time with delight fully gossipy character sketches and crisp vignettes. His prose is clear and judiciously cool, though his attempts to pump drama into drawing-room confrontations may lead to such awkwardness as "But Ivy's words were still written like the smoke letters of an airplane announcing a public event across the pale sky of Clara's calm..."

Auchincloss's true dramatic moments are in exchanges of dialogue that he expertly stages to define his characers. It is this quality of closet theater that makes his work consistently entertaining--even when his sphere of wealth and privilege may seem hopelessly remote to most readers. Irving Stein provides the best example of this in the current novel. Urged to remember his sons when bequeathing his entire art collection to Elesina, he relents with a few to kens: "Well, suppose I leave them each a painting?...To Lionel the Holbein of Mary Tudor. To Peter the Botticelli To David the big Tiepolo."

R.Z Sheppard

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