Legal Commentary

Lawyer/novelist, or novelist/lawyer, Louis Auchincloss is dead at the age of 92.  The Times has a lengthy obituary here.  (Appropriately enough, the name on the byline, Holcomb B. Noble, could easily have come from one of Auchincloss's own books.)  It is a fascinating story.  His was a well-born and well-lived life, so to speak.  A "novelist[ ] of manners and a portraitist of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant upper crust," as the obit says, Auchincloss chronicled a world that was disappearing, and that he knew was disappearing.  Both the social milieu he wrote about and the specific world of white-shoe (and white, among other things) law firms that he both inhabited and described in his fiction was in the process of being blown apart, in many ways, by the times -- first slowly and then very quickly.  

It was blown apart by people like my father, among many others, and I can hardly regret it.  But he wrote about this world critically and austerely, if affectionately, and was wonderful at toting up the gains and losses that such a world and its disappearance brought.  Of course, that world did not disappear completely, and in any event some of its habits were absorbed elsewhere.  One need not look very far in the world of elite law firms or elite law schools for people whose backgrounds are highly diverse, but whose manners and insistence that certain norms be rigidly observed are not so far from the Gilded Age-era ways they purported to displace.  In writing about this world, Auchincloss was not the keeper of a mausoleum, but a sensitive portrayer of the seismic effects of a changing era.  Although his depiction of the world of the large law firms was decidedly pre-Finley Kumble, and some may feel it is scarcely recognizable today, I think his stories in the book Powers of Attorney still do a superior job of describing some of the cultural aspects of law firm life, even in our own time.

The obit has plenty of interesting details, for lawyers and others.  It notes that although many assumed that the title character in his wonderful novel The Rector of Justin was modeled after Groton founder Endicott Peabody, Auchincloss himself said the character ("a man of great intellect and idealism who could be noble, generous and kind but also cruel, callous and arbitrary") was drawn just as much from Judge Learned Hand, "whom he regarded as the greatest man he had known."

The obit, and Auchincloss's own work, bears reading.