A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth by Louis Auchincloss

simply a tragedy." But one can still sympathize with those who feel the lack of an assured position in society. The secure person can enter a room of strangers with the confidence that he is just as good as any of them, no matter what title they may devise to describe themselves, and be simply amused by any who deem themselves superior to him. If they exceed him in rank, legally, militarily, or however, that is because the political system calls for ranks and not because one person is entitled to look down on another. In any orderly society, rank has its function.
    I sometimes think that the desire for what one doesn't have is what makes the world go round. I think the greatness of Theodore Dreiser's understanding of the human psyche is demonstrated in his ability to make his reader not only comprehend but actually feel the passionate craving that another human being may have for things about which the reader may have nothing but indifference or even scorn. Sister Carrie's attraction to the cheap baubles in the window of a variety store become as real to us as Clyde Griffith's yearning to join the tacky society that occupies the lakeside summer cottages of his small town. It is the not having, the not belonging that becomes all. Ernest Hemingway is supposed to have said of John O'Hara that when he died, he'd go to Yale.
    Jack Woods, with whom I roomed for two years at Yale, would have understood that. He was neither handsome nor athletic, and he had neither money nor social position. He was the only child of an obscure New Jersey businessman, a suicide, and his dreary Catholic widow. But he had little doubt that his brilliant mind would bring him what he wanted, and it did. When he needed money he would check cash prizes in competitions, enter them, and win. He got high grades without seeming to care for cards.
    But what he desired was to mingle with the socially elite and be a guest at the most glittering New York debutante parties. He was a devout epicurean; he told me once that the one thing in life he could not bear was to hear that someone was having a better time than he was.
    That he used me unsparingly in his successful social club showed his cleverness. The leaders of the class were not at first available to him, but I was, and I knew them all. And it was easy for me in New York to take him as my houseguest to almost any debutante party. Why did I allow myself to be so used? Because Jack never made any secret of what he was up to, and his company was invariably delightful. He always, so to speak, paid his way, and I think he was as fond of me as he was of anyone, which was not much.
    Besides, he read the stories I had begun to work on—we were both on the Yale Lz'i—and I believed him the most acute of critics. When he said of one tale of mine, "For the first time you've been boring," I was overjoyed, for it implied that at other times I had not been.
    Did he have any morals? In sex I don't know; that was a subject he didn't often discuss. But he certainly showed a bad side when he entered into a successful plot with his father's mistress to cover up the evidence of the paternal suicide so that they might collect and share the small life insurance policy. When I reproached him with this and told him it was a crime, he burst into tears and said it was all very well for me to talk that way with a rich father, etc., etc.
    "It's still a crime," I insisted.
    He blubbered but kept the money.
    Jack's attempts at fiction, which appeared in Yale
Lit,
showed a good deal of wit and were decidedly clever, perhaps a bit too self-consciously so. He might well have become an established writer; he was too smart to have failed to correct his errors. What he really lacked was a warm heart; he might have become a Ronald Firbank or a lesser Evelyn Waugh. But on graduation he chose what may have been the field of his greatest aptitude: reporting. I saw less of him now for I was at law school in Virginia. He went to work for