The Young Apollo and Other Stories
by Louis Auchincloss
Summary
An evocative and elegant collection of new stories from an American master reveals in precise, aphoristic prose “not only the textures of this world but also its elemental and evolving truths” (New York Times). From Edwardian garden parties to the Manhattan demimonde of the 1970s, Auchincloss travels with economical grace and agility in this collection, which illuminates the moral ambiguities, both personal and professional, of New York’s moneyed class. A loving chronicle of a waning world, this new collection crystallizes a world now gone but forever fixed in our romantic imaginations, uncovering its flaws and all too human foibles, as well as its considerable charms
Excerpt
I have decided to put my thoughts about Lionel Manning together in this memorandum. I have to make up my mind, and soon, whether or not I shall
accede to Senator Manning’s request that I compose a short life of his son, Lionel, or “Lion” as we elders used to call him. It is now five years since Lion died of heart failure, aged thirty-one, in 1913, just before the outbreak of the long and terrible war that has cast the stain of doubt over the ideals we thought our boys were fighting for, as seemingly exemplified in the golden image of my young friend. I use the word “young” more in contrast to my own seventy summers than to emphasize a life so cut short, for it was characteristic of Lion in the matter of friendship to take no account of age, which endeared him to many of my contemporaries. Perhaps he offered us the illusion of some kind of life after death.
There is a cynical side of my old crusty bachelor self that whispers that it may have been just as well that Lion died when he did. After all, there is something fine and noble in an early demise. We can always now see him in a halo of glory, with his gleaming blond hair, his laughing gray-blue eyes, his gracefully molded features, his splendid muscular torso; we can hear his excited tones voicing his high principles; we can feel that he has taken his proper place in the gallant and inspiring company of the slain English friends whom he met as a Rhodes scholar. Don’t we glimpse through the darkness of today the broad green lawn of an Edwardian garden party and wonderful young men in blazers and white flannels talking of the great things they would do in a future they would never have?
The wrong people have survived this war. My own “sacred circle,” as some envious folk have described it, came through without a scratch. How shall I describe the circle? It consists of a small group of individuals, more or less prominent in the arts — writing, sculpture, painting — all of whom live in Washington without being native to the city, and none of whom, with the notable exception of George Manning, has the least connection with government. All are old, of course, and none hail from the kind of background that might be expected to produce great art. Ella Robinson, the novelist, for example, was born of Boston Brahmins; Elihu Tweed, the sculptor, was the son of a New York governor; and my own father, siring a historian, was a United States Supreme Court justice.
We used to fancy that we represented a kind of American renaissance. In the two decades preceding the war, our country was emerging from its long dependence on European culture. The notorious low value that Henry James accorded the subject material which America offered to the writer of fiction had been totally revised; we now claimed equal rights, so to speak, on Parnassus. And the young man whom we all held as our joint heir apparent, who was going to be the great poet of the future, to whom we were all more or less John the Baptists, was Lion Manning.
Copyright © 2006 by Louis Auchincloss. Reprinted with permission by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Reviews
“This elegant new collection continues [Auchincloss’s] unflinching examination of New York’s wealthy socialite class”—Library Journal
”Auchincloss has a talent for pulling the curtain back on perfection, for peering behind the sublime façade”—The Seattle Times
Author's Biography
Louis Auchincloss was honored in the year 2000 as a “‘Living Landmark”’ by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. He has written more than sixty books, including the story collection Manhattan Monologues and the novel The Rector of Justin. The president of the Academy of Arts and Letters, he resides in New York City.