About book The Collected Stories Of Louis Auchincloss (1994)
My favorite story in this collection is "Gemlike Flame." Young Peter Westcott is abroad in Venice, rounding off his education on the Continent as young men and women did in those days, when he calls upon his older cousin Clarence "Clarry" McClintock who is abroad as an erstwhile painter and esthete, enjoying his family money and privacy. Their meeting is interrupted by the near penniless Neddy Bane, also abroad but for different reasons: he has fled his responsibilities, which include a wife in New York. Neddy is an opportunist and talks big about being an artist. Clarence is smitten and offers to "preceptor" Neddy. Peter knows Neddy's character and watches the "affair" run its course. There is a brief interlude, both comic and painful, of dealing with Clarence's mother, who uses men to sustain her lifestyle. The mother-son exchange is caustic and pointed. All throughout the narrative the prose is meticulous and to a high standard that shows Auchincloss can tell a story in lapidary language without diluting content or lessening the demands on the reader."Gemlike Flame" (1953) cannot avoid invoking that other great story in Venice. Where Thomas Mann has his Gustav Aschenbach fixated on a young boy, Auchincloss shows Clarence's desperation and resignation of his impossible love with dignity, where Mann has Aschenbach write within the novella imitative Mann sentences, Auchincloss seems to incriminate himself in the confrontational conversations between Peter and Clarence with Peter as Auchincloss. An angry and heartbroken Clarry says, "You pretend to be on the side of the angels..but I wonder if you're not really the worst of all bigots." p.165.Louis Auchincloss like John Updike wrote about WASPs, acknowledging how they, for better or worse, shaped American society and thought. He cautiously celebrates his class and does not refrain from criticizing them. While he does not apologize for them, neither does he offers up his exemplary language to say that Americans do have culture, taste, and refinement. His good manners tell him that he should not have to announce it with fanfare, but rather that discerning readers will find the gems.
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