FELLOW PASSENGERS
A Novel in Portraits
Louis Auchincloss
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989
223 pp., $18.95
Turn the conversation to the wealthy, and sooner or later the inevitable happens. With lugubrious solemnity, someone will recite that weary old chestnut from Saint Matthew's Gospel: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven." How reassuring, those words. Not only can we crow triumphantly because all the Rockefellers, Fords, Harrimans, Trumps, and assorted yuppie stock-manipulators and investment bankers will roast in hell, but we can also intone smugly with the Pharisee: "Thank you, Lord, for not making me like other men."
But the Gospels have a way of denying one the comforts of self-congratulatory complacency. Few people mention the next two verses in the nineteenth chapter of Saint Matthew, most likely because this passage takes an unexpected turn and offers salvation to the rich. "When his disciples heard it, they were exceedingly amazed, saying, Who then can be saved? But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible."
Lest this scripture-quoting give the wrong impression, one must make clear that Louis Auchincloss is no Graham Greene, Georges Bernanos, or Francois Mauriac, no tormented composer of grim tales about the cosmic warfare that rages over the souls of fallen sinners. Auchincloss does, however, grasp an essential truth that some people would ignore or controvert: Rich people do have souls; they are as surely God's children as are the poor. They bleed when cut, weep when lashed with grief, ache when bludgeoned with sorrow. One suspects that in the solitude of his midnight reveries, Auchincloss has even on occasion blurted out a shocking confession: He actually likes rich people.
This nasty little secret, obvious to anyone who has dipped into Auchincloss' fiction, probably cooked his goose long ago with many critics. The arbiters of the acceptable follow a basic rule of thumb: Thou shalt, as a novelist, write of the rich only to satirize them, excoriate them, or to hold them up as an object lesson in the inherent wickedness of wealth and class privilege. Under no circumstances shalt thou treat them sympathetically or as other than an especially loathsome variety of the human species. To Auchincloss, as he remarks in his autobiography, A Writer's Capital, published fifteen years ago, critics' muleheaded tendentiousness reveals "a resentment on their part against the rich, a resentment sometimes carried to the point of denying that a rich man can be a valid subject for fiction."
This is not to suggest that Auchincloss defends wealth and privilege. For one thing, he maintains a degree of detachment from the milieu of which he writes, a distancing that permits him both to participate and to observe. "I was perfectly clear from the beginning," he declares in A Writer's Capital,
that I was interested in the story of money: how it was
made, inherited, lost, spent. It never occurred to me that
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