years ago that I enjoy books by Louis Auchincloss. The American lawyer and writer, who died in January 2010, aged 93, published for more than six decades a large body of work. A dozen have been translated into Castilian, including novels and collections of stories, sometimes in very mediocre versions. Despite these limitations, we can read some books that deserve Auchincloss, and much grief. For example, Rector of Justin, a new translation that has recently come out of Asteroid-publishing books, of course, that gave birth three years ago another great novel by the author, Oscar education Fairfax, for which he wrote with great tact Roberto Valencia -.
Auchincloss's characters are almost always wealthy professionals, lawyers, law firms and executives of thriving companies. Many of them (as the Auchincloss, really) have a solid literary and artistic inclinations, to reconcile with a deeper commitment to legal and commercial activities, much more lucrative. At the bottom of stage, usually in secondary sites, there are many wives who have the movements of their husbands, or women who have acquired wealth through a rich husband, which achieved a good divorce, or promptly died and bequeathed his fortune. These people can keep, at least in appearance, strict moral principles, linked to a Protestant Episcopalian, or be devoid of any scruple careerists who fight like wild beasts in the jungle of business litigation.
In that environment Auchincloss's characters make decisions, choose moral dilemmas, they look more or less determine their place in the world, often at odds with powerful parents to those that occur in business or fraud is by nature timid or hedonistic. The hypocrisy, attachment, fear or rejection of the conventions of an affluent society and puritanical, guilt, doubt, pragmatism, irony and cynicism are some elements that seasoned the way they act.
Rector of Justin, one of his best known novels, moves slightly to another area, because the protagonist is not a lawyer, but an Episcopal clergyman, Francis Prescott, founder and president for fifty years of an elite school secondary education in New England, responsible for pre-university training of future leaders of industry or offices. The rector, in favor of a rigorous classical education and the humanities and the educational value of sport discipline and is an energetic man, formal, severe, sharp, confident to the arrogance, but also pragmatic, shrewd, worldly. A man wanted from the start, print your label to all facets of the development of the school.
Auchincloss has chosen to portray this powerful man, by a narrator marginal but close to it, a narrator only relatively reliable because its psychological insight is scarce, a young teacher aspiring clergyman, somewhat dull, insecure, weak, scared, perhaps for that very reason becomes tired and loyal fan depositary the confidences of the president, and also the words and papers of other people at different times recalled one time or relevant episode in the life of Prescott. With the diary of that witness imperfect and additional documents Auchincloss weaves a portrait of Prescott which progressively becoming more sophisticated in the eyes of the reader, since they appear more rigid convictions and his greatness as a leader embracing the school, but also its contradictions, stubborn mistakes and some miseries associated with its uncompromising visionary status. At the same time expands the playing field and come into play characters who lived or live with Prescott at some stage in his life: students and alumni, friends and enemies, wives and daughters, managers and patrons of the school-to Prescott scorns but needs, for financial donations are vital.
Auchincloss box, as in all his books, predominantly gray. Prescott or no one is in one piece, and just the description of its passing life, his encounters and conflicts, and reflections on all that make up the subject of the novel. The works of all the characters are full of contrasts. When the book begins, Prescott is eighty years old and refuses to leave the tight control of the school. But ends up resigning at the evidence that students, alumni and wealthy, are not dough he would have wanted, do not have the idealistic character, disciplined and pure that he wanted to print, and no longer meekly seconded his designs. They are much more practical, accommodating and banal, much more dedicated to wealth and the most ruthless capitalist ethic than he dreamed of creating the school. New times (the novel ends in 1945) will accentuate those features, the old models are going to be collapsing, and Prescott includes not without anger and pain that his work has ceased to belong, that their moral weight going evaporating. Diary of a yuppie , Auchincloss novel published in 1980 that Anagrama, describe a more advanced stage this process of loss of old ways of chivalry and Puritans.
Aunchincloss, a man rich and influential in New York, was always a writer away from any experimentalism, and the structural complexity and style of writers so admired by him as Proust or Henry James. In fact, this book is a snippet in which he satirizes, as belonging to a deranged, leaving modern writing serene and classic modes. Is an author who goes all the appeal of his books to the composition of psychological well-drawn characters, acting and go into public disputes, sentimental or conscience, and know how to analyze their behavior. Characters, many Sometimes, as in this novel, keep a diary which recorded the daily events, they turn their innermost thoughts and justified more or less conviction. The reader is present at this inquiry psychological and moral point fascinated, always engaged, enjoying and thinking. At least, I have lived all books by Louis Auchincloss.
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