A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth by Louis Auchincloss Page B
Authors: Louis Auchincloss
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call homosexual activity, but if you told them that they would react with violent indignation and insist their manhood had been insulted. They hated gays!
Certainly, in those early years when I apprehended a mysterious physical hurt from any sexual urges cast in my direction I must have included romantic love as a door far better left unopened. Indeed, I came to regard love stories as tragedies. But I was never such a fool as to think my views shared. I was quite aware that most people were highly enthusiastic about love, and the more intense it was the more desirable. Great passions, even when they brought destruction in their path, were deemed the most desirable of all, at least to readers or theatre-goers. Somehow or other great passion became associated to me with great character, and the leading male of a romance was apt to seem to me a hero. By great character, I should immediately add, I do not mean goodness. It was not at all necessary that he should be good.
Joseph Wood Krutch, a deep admirer of the dramas of Eugene O'Neill, wrote "that human beings are great and terrible creatures when they are in the grip of great passions." But is this really true of the Mannons in O'Neill's greatest and most terrible drama,
Mourning Becomes Electra?
Christine Mannon poisons her husband so clumsily that her daughter catches her, and her son Orin simply goes to pieces after killing her lover. Are these spectacles really at once "horrible and cleansing"?
It seems to me that Racine is closer to what came to be my concept of tragedy than even Shakespeare. He was deeply bathed in Jansenist religiosity, similar to our Puritanism, and repellent though this may be to many of us, it avoids all sentimentality on the subject of sin. Sin is never in Racine "magnificent." It is a loathsome, disfiguring, and humiliating disease that is nonetheless shameful for being inflicted on the sufferer by a capricious god for no fault of his own.
14. I Begin to Write
I HAD WRITTEN short stories for the school magazine when I was at Groton and had begun to take a serious interest in reading the great English novelists of the nineteenth century. This was much encouraged by a wise teacher of English at Groton, Louis Zahner, who had the wisdom to teach the boys the actual pleasure of literature. I needed this badly because I was inclined to regard both the reading and writing of fiction as primarily a way of balancing my failure to achieve anything like what schoolboys regard as real success. This was justified to my immature way of thinking when my grade of 100 percent in the English college board entrance examination was celebrated by the school by declaring a holiday. I imagined I was really getting somewhere.
A French course that I took under Professor Joseph Seronde in my sophomore year at Yale changed my life. He taught nineteenth-century French fiction and drama, and I found myself electrified (there is no better word) by
Madame Bovary
and
Le Rouge et Le Noir.
But it was by no means only by such famous classics that I was thrilled. I was no less excited by such lesser works as Daudet's
Fromont Jeune et Risler Ainé,
by Hervieu's
Peints par Eux-mêmes,
and by Dumas fils's
Les Idées de Madame Aubray.
Indeed, there was not a single novel or play assigned in the course that did not bring me absolute delight, and delight was something that I had not previously expected from literature. I knew now that the novel form was going to play a significant role in my life, though just how I had only a dim idea.
In the meanwhile, why not write one? I had plenty of time at Yale; preparation for the courses was not hard, and even if I kept an evening free for the movie with friends (Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, and Clark Gable seemed to dominate our lives), the afternoons were utterly unoccupied. The Linonia and Brothers Reading Room of the Sterling Library offered comfortable alcoves where one was never interrupted, and I started work on a novel that
Certainly, in those early years when I apprehended a mysterious physical hurt from any sexual urges cast in my direction I must have included romantic love as a door far better left unopened. Indeed, I came to regard love stories as tragedies. But I was never such a fool as to think my views shared. I was quite aware that most people were highly enthusiastic about love, and the more intense it was the more desirable. Great passions, even when they brought destruction in their path, were deemed the most desirable of all, at least to readers or theatre-goers. Somehow or other great passion became associated to me with great character, and the leading male of a romance was apt to seem to me a hero. By great character, I should immediately add, I do not mean goodness. It was not at all necessary that he should be good.
Joseph Wood Krutch, a deep admirer of the dramas of Eugene O'Neill, wrote "that human beings are great and terrible creatures when they are in the grip of great passions." But is this really true of the Mannons in O'Neill's greatest and most terrible drama,
Mourning Becomes Electra?
Christine Mannon poisons her husband so clumsily that her daughter catches her, and her son Orin simply goes to pieces after killing her lover. Are these spectacles really at once "horrible and cleansing"?
It seems to me that Racine is closer to what came to be my concept of tragedy than even Shakespeare. He was deeply bathed in Jansenist religiosity, similar to our Puritanism, and repellent though this may be to many of us, it avoids all sentimentality on the subject of sin. Sin is never in Racine "magnificent." It is a loathsome, disfiguring, and humiliating disease that is nonetheless shameful for being inflicted on the sufferer by a capricious god for no fault of his own.
14. I Begin to Write
I HAD WRITTEN short stories for the school magazine when I was at Groton and had begun to take a serious interest in reading the great English novelists of the nineteenth century. This was much encouraged by a wise teacher of English at Groton, Louis Zahner, who had the wisdom to teach the boys the actual pleasure of literature. I needed this badly because I was inclined to regard both the reading and writing of fiction as primarily a way of balancing my failure to achieve anything like what schoolboys regard as real success. This was justified to my immature way of thinking when my grade of 100 percent in the English college board entrance examination was celebrated by the school by declaring a holiday. I imagined I was really getting somewhere.
A French course that I took under Professor Joseph Seronde in my sophomore year at Yale changed my life. He taught nineteenth-century French fiction and drama, and I found myself electrified (there is no better word) by
Madame Bovary
and
Le Rouge et Le Noir.
But it was by no means only by such famous classics that I was thrilled. I was no less excited by such lesser works as Daudet's
Fromont Jeune et Risler Ainé,
by Hervieu's
Peints par Eux-mêmes,
and by Dumas fils's
Les Idées de Madame Aubray.
Indeed, there was not a single novel or play assigned in the course that did not bring me absolute delight, and delight was something that I had not previously expected from literature. I knew now that the novel form was going to play a significant role in my life, though just how I had only a dim idea.
In the meanwhile, why not write one? I had plenty of time at Yale; preparation for the courses was not hard, and even if I kept an evening free for the movie with friends (Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, and Clark Gable seemed to dominate our lives), the afternoons were utterly unoccupied. The Linonia and Brothers Reading Room of the Sterling Library offered comfortable alcoves where one was never interrupted, and I started work on a novel that
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