E-Mail This Article Printer-Friendly Version

By Carolyn See
whose reviews appear in Style on Fridays.
Friday, August 11, 2000; Page C02

HER INFINITE VARIETY
By Louis Auchincloss
Houghton Mifflin. 240 pp. $25

We are told by jacket copy that Louis Auchincloss has created in his fictional heroine here "an irresistible Cleopatra, lovely, wily, and mercurial," and helpfully supplied the Shakespeare quote to go with it: "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety."

But Clara Longcope, whom we first see in 1937 and last encounter at the beginning of the Kennedy administration, isn't very infinite and doesn't have much variety. In fact, Auchincloss has invented his Clara as a bit of a self-absorbed fiend. Is he being ironic, wicked or simply accurate? At some level, as America's most refined storyteller and most delicate dinosaur, the author remains remarkably opaque in his intentions.

Auchincloss takes, as always, the society of old New York and New England as his material. The very rich are the people he knows, and he never tires of them as subjects. This time he examines what a well-brought-up, well-connected young woman might have encountered in the mid-20th century, were she consumed with vast and unladylike ambition. What, indeed, was open to her? How might she amass important wealth? What professions might she follow?

Of course, if she was of this social class, and in this time period, she would be constrained to pursue her success through men. She would be forced to use the wiles of a "courtesan."

Except Clara isn't much of a courtesan, really. We first see her as the headstrong daughter of a wimpy, semi-successful professor at Yale (with no real scholarship to his credit, only a master's degree and not much money). Predictably, Clara falls in love with a poor but handsome undergraduate, but her mother speaks to her sharply: What good will his spectacular looks and very thin purse do her in later life? No good at all, Clara is forced to concur.

So Clara embarks on a series of marriages and liaisons, and has a go at a career. Even then, remember, women could make names for themselves in magazine publishing (think Clare Boothe Luce). And Clara schemes and schemes, backbites at the office and ends up in a high position at a stylish periodical.

For her first marriage, Clara picks a bozo millionaire, part of a family headed up by a deceptively amiable matriarch: "She exuded the air of the born aristocrat who has never looked to anything but inherited right to support her rule. She was beneficent and good-tempered, but that, Clara felt, was because rebellion, or even the thought of it, never existed in her domain." (Is Auchincloss putting a bit of a Barbara Bush spin on things here? He would seem to have someone like her in mind when he writes of certain society matrons: "They wear their often splendid jewels more like adorned heathen idols than enticing females.")

A very dumb, rich husband is born to be left, and Clara bails out on her first one with a daughter and the beginnings of a hefty fortune. Then comes an extremely wealthy publishing magnate (Henry Luce?) and more scheming and to-ing and fro-ing from Clara as she tries, with little success, to engineer his run for public office. One remembers what a drag it used to be in the old days, to try to get your husband to do what you wanted him to do, when he plainly, absolutely, didn't want to do it--and there was absolutely no way that you, as a woman, could do it by yourself alone.

More money and more lovers follow. And I don't want to give away the plot, but what has been traditionally the finest accolade bestowed on women like these? After giving small fortunes in donations and presiding over endless parties for endless guests, they generally end up as ambassadors to some country or other.

I remember standing in a crowded receiving line at the ambassador's residence in Paris, part of a rout of desperate, frowsy American writers gaping and gabbling and collectively dying for a drink--but we couldn't get one until we'd shaken the hand of then-Ambassador Pamela Harriman. It was a long, long wait but there she finally was, petite and impeccable, dressed in aqua, propped up on merciless three-inch heels with a bandage on her nose, greeting each and every one of us politely. Her aides said she'd been working since 8 that morning.

What does it take to "succeed"? Auchincloss is, of course, deeply loyal to his vision of an old-fashioned American aristocracy, but he's quite unkind to his heroine, the deeply flawed Clara. Love is never in the cards for her; her own daughter can take her or leave her alone. Her ambition brings her "nothing" in the end, but it's a very pretty nothing, with plenty of power and wealth. I'm not sure what the author means to say here. Perhaps, as he often does, he's exercising elegance for its own pure sake.

UPCOMING IN BOOK WORLD

The following books are scheduled to be reviewed in Style next week:

THE END OF WAR: A Novel of the Race for Berlin, by David L. Robbins. Reviewed by Carlo D'Este.

THE MEASURE OF A MAN, the autobiography of actor Sidney Poitier. Reviewed by Jabari Asim.

IS THAT A GUN IN YOUR POCKET? Women's Experience of Power in Hollywood, by Rachel Abramowitz. A study of female movie executives. Reviewed by Stephanie Zacharek.

FIRST WORDS, by Rosetta Loy. A memoir of growing up in fascist Italy. Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley.

THE GRAVITY OF SUNLIGHT, by Rosa Shand. A novel of romantic entanglement in Uganda. Reviewed by Carolyn See.

Find Book World online at www.washingtonpost.com/books and, in Sunday's paper, folded inside the comics, in the plastic bag.