Fiduciary Matters

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE PARTNERS by LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS 254 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $6.95.

Snobbery is no slave to the pull of gravity. It can move from the bottom up as well as from the top down. Take, for example, the case of the novelist and short-story writer Louis Auchincloss. In part because he is widely read, he has been consistently snubbed by what is conveniently called the critical community. Auchincloss, 56, a graduate of Groton and Yale and a practicing Wall Street lawyer, writes mainly about the declines and cushioned falls of good-family New Yorkers. He is a lucid, confident and tidy observer of this small community; yet many critics (expecting, maybe, Henry James) refuse to accept Auchincloss as the teller of well-tailored stories that he is.

In The Partners, Louis Auchincloss could not be plainer about how he operates within his chosen limits. His 20th work of fiction, the book is not truly a novel but a set of stories loosely linked by principal characters who happen to be members of the same Wall Street law firm. Each incidental anecdote and character sketch is arranged to show how time and change have affected the values and manners of Auchincloss's narrowing circle.

This casual form fits the author like an old sports coat. Indeed, he used it ten years ago in Powers of Attorney. The characters are distinctly and intentionally minor. This includes Beekman ("Beeky") Ehninger, whose amiably flaccid presence is spread thinly but creamily throughout the book. At 56, Beeky is more legal lap dog than beagle. By his own admission, he cares more about the firm than he does about the law. His main contribution to Shepard, Putney & Cox was to have saved the firm in 1946 by retiring the aging, respected founder and then pirating two brilliant school chums from a rival firm. Backed by a good name and private fortune, Beeky earns his keep by representing rich members of his family. But as death and inheritance taxes take their toll, he eventually accepts his own obsolescence.

Like Ehninger, most of the other male characters in the book are pallid. It is the women who are vivid and demonstrate by far the sharpest appetites. Beeky's wife, for example, is a ribald triple divorcee, an exploded sex bomb 15 years older than her husband. A menopausal female member of the firm demonstrates maternal ambitions by deviously trying to get a young lawyer to marry her daughter. Another woman solicitor, young and brilliant, undergoes great turmoil when she leaves Shepard, Putney, etc., where her husband is also a lawyer, in order to head for Washington and a dedicated life in public service practice.

Despite his rather reserved, fiduciary tone, Auchincloss generates some psychological subtlety and emotional range. He also manages to comment on his own situation as a novelist of manners--through a character who is a novelist of manners. "Society is intent on becoming classless, and the novel of manners must deal with classes," says the N.O.M., who allows that his following can be found among the "old girls and boys who still take me to the hospital for their hysterectomies and prostates."

sbR.Z. Sheppard

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