The Book Class

Louis Auchincloss

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Year: 1984
• ISBN:
  9780547946986
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

The author of Exit Lady Masham explores the lives of twelve members of a high society ladies' book club in New York over the course of sixty years. "If I have a bias it is in my suspicion that women are intellectually and intuitively superior to men, " writes Christopher Gates, the narrator of this book. "But, " he adds, "I certainly never thought they were "nicer." And I very much doubt that anyone could think so who was raised, as I was, in a society in which the female had so many more privileges than the male." Thus, he describes the twelve women who—as debutantes— instituted his mother's "book class" in 1908 and met every month for over sixty years to discuss a selected title, old or new. During their lifetimes, these women did not have any real political or economic clout comparable to that of the men of their day. Only Adeline Bloodgood had ever held a regular job, and only Polly Travers, as a State Assemblywoman, ever played a formal role in politics. For Georgia Bristed, "the hostess had largely consumed the woman, " and Leila Lee was "a beauty in a day when simply being beautiful was considered an adequate occupation." Although most of them were surrounded by a staff of servants and had no discernible responsibilities, these women still lived with serious intent backed by a considerable and undeniable power that in no way derived from "the snares and lures of womanly wiles." Within the protected discipline of their surroundings, their lives were filled with drama and challenge—moments of passion, of betrayal and loyalty, of sweet revenge and joyless conquest, of irony and illumination...

1

WOMEN, WOMEN, WOMEN! I am the slave of women, when I am not their buffoon. As if it was not bad enough to be a decorator, ten to twelve hours of the bloody day, obliged to listen to their yowls of dissatisfaction, to exchange and re-exchange acres of chairs, tables and breakfronts, to mix and remix square miles of blinding colors, to create and re-create parlors and dining halls on a scale that would have exhausted a Michelangelo, to smile bravely when a chef-d’oeuvre is pronounced “too ghastly,” and finally, when one has donned a black tie and escaped, exhausted, into the social fray for a little gin and gossip, to find oneself coupled at dinner with the other type, the lawyer in menacing black sequins, the surgeon in blood-red crêpe de Chine, and be harangued on the injustices to females of which my sex has been guilty!

Of course, it will be argued, because my emotional life has not been notably solaced by the caresses of the fair sex, that I am jaundiced in its respect. But this is not really so. My closest friends and business associates have all been women. Nobody, I am convinced, has been less discriminatory in both his acts and his thinking. If I have a bias, it is in my suspicion that women are intellectually and intuitively superior to men. But I have certainly never thought they were “nicer.” And I very much doubt that anyone could think so who was raised, as I was, in a society in which the female had so many more privileges than the male. I remember replying, only last winter, to a young woman from my office who was handling my slides for a lecture at the Colony Club, and who, after gazing about in some awe, asked if that noble edifice was indeed a women’s club.

“Yes, honeybunch, it is. This club was built in the days when women ran New York—before they got sidetracked in the dreary cul-de-sac of men’s jobs!”

Of course, my assistant retorted promptly and vigorously that women today did not want to control their mates by “bedroom wiles” and that, thank you very much, they were quite willing to take their chances in those “dreary” jobs alongside men, and that, boss or no boss, I had just shown myself a prime chauvinist pig!

This may sound impertinent from an employee, but women today feel very strongly about these matters, and in justice to my assistant, I should explain that she had undoubtedly read this paragraph in a profile written by that bitch Rita Stern, this past winter (1979–1980) for Women’s Wear Daily:

Happy Birthday to Christopher Gates! Our small, sly, sleek, plump, but oh-so-scintillating decorator is sixty. Oh, yes, my dears, he is sixty, bien comptés, if he’s a day. The little-read but poignantly appreciated author of vers de société and spicy romans à clef, who finally hit the big league in chintz and lampshades, may seem boyish for his age, but a certain drawn look under those big blue eyes and a few lines in those round red cheeks betray the inroads of the calendar. Chris, who defied the traditions of his blue-blooded banking forebears to take a hop, skip and flutter into a trade not usually associated with the stern countenances of ancestral Gateses and Gallatins caused a recent brouhaha at a symposium on Channel 13, when he aired his view that women’s lib had cost our sex most of the domestic, economic and political power it had táken our ancestors two thousand years to achieve!

My mistake was in forgetting that persons involved in a crusade lose all sense of humor and proportion. What I was trying to describe at that silly symposium was the remarkable influence exerted by a particular group of American women in a particular place and time. And as that group happened to comprise the women who had dominated my destiny in the formative years of my life, I succumbed to the temptation, prompted, no doubt, by the myriad resentments of childhood, to overdramatize my theme. As a result, I have every women’s libber in the city down on me.

I was at first amused, then irritated and at last fairly alarmed by the tempest I had aroused. I even began to wonder if it would shatter, not simply the teapot in which it should have been contained, but the whole set of porcelain and the tea party as well. I decided at last that I might have an obligation, not only to the women I had offended, but to myself, to state my contention in exact rather than hyperbolic terms.

For, to speak soberly—and there are many who would say it is high time—I never meant to offer a serious argument that women in the past, even in my past, had any real political or economic clout comparable to what men had. And so it may be incumbent upon me now to try to make an assessment of just what their “power” did consist of and what it contributed to or subtracted from their own welfare. I might do well to take advantage of the milestone of my sixtieth birthday to evaluate what effect on my own anguished self these women had. Was I their victim or their product? Or am I simply their survivor?

In any sociological examination the danger is to select a group so small as to be unrepresentative of anything, or one so large as to be meaningless. My danger will be the first, for I shall not be dealing with the South or with Boston. I shall not even be dealing with the City of New York. I am limiting myself to the skinny island of Manhattan, and to the eastern side of Central Park at that. I shall be dealing with the wives and daughters of the managers of money and industry in New York City, what is sometimes called “society,” and I have arbitrarily selected as representatives of this society my mother’s “Book Class.” These were the dozen women who instituted it as debutantes in 1908 and met every month (except, of course, in the torrid summertime) to discuss a selected title, old or new, until the death of Cornelia Gates sixty-four years later. Even then Mother was not the survivor of the group—there are still three living as I write—but by the time she expired, it was felt that it was too small to go on.

All twelve women were what are now called “wasps.” They were white, of course, and had started life as Protestants, although two later became Catholics, and they were “Anglo-Saxon,” if that word be stretched, as it is by some, to embrace persons of English, Scottish, German, Scandinavian and Swiss descent. All were listed in the New York Social Register; all were privately educated; all but one were married. Their means were more varied: Justine Bannard, Polly Travers and Mother were born rich; Mylo Jessup and Leila Lee married rich men; Adeline Bloodgood was almost poor; the others were what was called “comfortable,” which in that group, in the ninteen thirties, meant owning an apartment or a brownstone in town, a house in the country, having five or six maids, two to three cars, several clubs and one’s children all in private schools. None except Adeline ever held a regular job, although Polly Travers became an Assemblywoman from a district upstate, and several held responsible Red Cross or similar posts during both World Wars.

What to my young observing eyes was most remarkable about the group was the extraordinary amount of service that they received from everyone else. Their mothers, who had grown up just after the Civil War, in an America where servants, though numerous, had not yet, thanks to immigration, become numberless, had been trained to cook and sew and clean, to know, in short, the tasks that they were expected to supervise. But the girls of the Book Class could hardly boil water. They never had to go into the kitchen unless to inspect or give an order; they never had to darn a stocking or make a bed or clean a bathroom. As mothers, they never changed or washed a baby. Everything in the household, from marketing to cleaning, was taken off their hands. The bills were paid by their husbands’ secretaries, unless they happened to enjoy keeping a checkbook; all business matters—insurance, taxes, even charitable contributions—were handled “downtown.” Never, I earnestly maintain, in the history of the globe has a class of human beings had so little expected of it. Their decks, so to speak, were cleared for action. They floated, magnificently equipped, clean and shining, battleships on a benign sea ready to encounter—well, what but other battleships?

What did they do, these princesses of privilege, these battle wagons in a world at peace, with all their endowments? Well, isn’t the answer to that precisely the task that I have set myself? I think that all I am going to say at the outset is that they were serious. All twelve women were as serious as a jury drawn up and harangued by a judge at a murder trial. I see them staring at me now, those twenty-four encompassing orbs. Leila Lee—was she serious? Yes, even Leila was serious. At least at the start. And at the end, the very end.

Ah, how I envied them! I saw my lot in the doomed faces of males, destined to the gray death-in-life of Wall Street. Perhaps had I been born to a European aristocracy and seen my father and brother in pink coats riding to hounds on a crystal-clear morning, or passing the port around the dining room table while their waiting wives yawned in the drawing room, I might have imagined diversions in a male future. But I could never believe that Father and his fellow officers at the Gallatin Bank really enjoyed themselves—they talked too much about how hard they toiled. It seemed to me that all the fun in life had been left to the wives. When I went in to say good morning to Mother on my way to school, her immunity from the dull routine inflicted on men was emphasized by her still being in bed, with the breakfast tray before her, letters and papers and magazines strewn about, the cook receiving the day’s order, perhaps even her secretary writing on her pad, for all the world like Ruth Draper’s monologue of the society lady in “The Italian Lesson.” And I had a vision of a morning in the back of her green Rolls-Royce, transported from shop to shop to look at beautiful things, with lunch at the Colony Club, or, better still, a French restaurant, an afternoon at a matinee and then home to dress at leisure for a stylish dinner party. Or, if it was a “working day,” I saw her at the head of a boardroom table, in a comfortable armchair, receiving reports from a respectful staff about the running of a nursing school or settlement house, and leaving, after some perfunctory votes were taken, with a benign sense of duty well done. I would be envious of my sister, knowing that, when she had completed her dozen years at Miss Chapin’s School, she, too, would be eligible for this female existence of multiple delights.

But did these privileged souls ever acknowledge their privileges? Never! That was part of the game. Just as men always emphasized the grimness of their labor (though this, to some extent, may have been true), so did the ladies of the Book Class invariably maintain that they had never a free minute to themselves, that they were expected to be the slaves of their households and offspring, that in entertaining they were constantly encumbered with a required guest list of their husbands’ business associates and that vacation resorts were selected for reasons of golf alone. They did not feel sorry for themselves—that was not their note—but they did want it known, perhaps in anticipation of the doubt in such an observer as myself, that this life was not all beer and skittles.

What did they look like? Of course, they were all approaching middle age when I first started to observe them critically, but I cannot say that, despite a considerable financial outlay on clothes, they did much to resist its onset. Leila Lee told me once that, at fifty, she was the only member of the group that still remembered she was a woman. Had I been able to mold them into a single female, I think she would have been tall, a bit bony, brown-faced, quick-striding, abrupt and of assertive manners, but always polite to inferiors (those, anyway, who weren’t “uppity”), rapid of speech, capable of hearty laughter, and wearing rather bigger jewels than might have been expected. A vulgar observer might have been tempted to use the term “horsy,” but it would have been exaggerated.

Their marriages, on the whole, were known as “happy,” but it had never been their principle that a man should be snared by lures or that, once secured, he should be retained by any sacrifice of candor or normal deportment. It was a man’s duty, if he married at all, to marry within his social sphere, and what was that but the Book Class? One waited; a suitor came. It was the nature of things. And once he had taken the fatal step, well, he had to stick, that was all. Society ordained it. It would be degrading, would it not, for a respectable matron, the mother of a family, to slather her lips with rouge, her cheeks with powder, and swing her hips to induce a man to keep a vow he had already made to God? Of course, there were men who walked out in spite of everything, and others who “made their wives unhappy,” the accepted euphemism for adultery, but there was only one divorce among the dozen members of the Class.

As parents, they were—how shall I put it—more human? They gave in here, anyway, to the possessive urge. I think they would all have agreed that a woman’s first duty was to her babes. The most loving wife among them was certainly Mylo Jessup, yet Mother used to quote even her as saying, when it was learned that Franklin Roosevelt had been stricken with polio, “How glad Eleanor must have been it wasn’t one of her children!” And this sacred obligation to the issue of one’s womb was stretched to embrace grandchildren. I have only to reflect on my own past jealousy of small nephews and nieces to gauge the extent of Mother’s concern for them.

Of their “public lives,” their relation to society in the small as well as the larger sense, I shall have enough to say later, but I should like now to consider them in action, and how better can I do this than show them at one of their book lunches? I reach into the past for a sample, and the one that jumps to mind is at Mother’s on a winter day in Seventieth Street, some time in the mid-nineteen thirties. The book to be discussed is The Scarlet Letter—for only in later years did they confine themselves to current produce—and I, home as usual from Chelton School with bronchitis or asthma or even a heart palpitation, am watching covertly from behind the screen before the pantry door, to the amusement of the two waitresses. Our butler, George, who would never have permitted me to eavesdrop, has been temporarily relieved of his duties on Mother’s theory that a male presence might clog her guests’ ease if a “sexual” topic were to arise.

The ladies have gathered promptly at half-past twelve in the parlor for sherry or tomato juice, and by a quarter to one they are all seated in the dining room. It is agreed, in deference to afternoons presumably crowded, that they will be out by two-thirty. The book will not be discussed until the second course. Soup is for a social “catching up,” and the sound, to me behind the screen, comes like a roar. The ladies all talk at once, yet all hear everything that is said. If there is any significant difference between the sexes, it may be that a woman can talk as she listens, while a man hears only himself.

And now, the soup plates removed, a soufflé is served, amid cries of “Oh, Cornelia, one eats too well here!” Hawthorne’s masterpiece is introduced by the chairman, Justine Bannard, whose job it has been to “bone up.” A few dates and facts are given, and they are off. The voices come to me from across the decades.

I hear Polly Travers, the “politician” of the group. She was born a Wadsworth, of the great upstate landowning family, and she has enjoyed a term in the Assembly in Albany.

“I’m afraid I must confess, Justine, I couldn’t get through the book. It may be the penalty of living in such troubled times. When I think of just one day’s mail! The countless appeals I have to write to this or that committee of the legislature! I found myself actually envying dear old Hawthorne, who could hole up in Salem and write beautiful prose about a woman taken in adultery. If that was all one had to face in a day’s work!”

Even behind the screen I can feel the reaction. The Book Class is fatigued by Polly’s superior airs, and I wait for Mother to invoke the crushing shade of a father who had been Ambassador to England.

“I don’t feel that the classics are all that remote, Polly. I think they have a relevance, even in troubled times. I know that when my father was en poste in London during one of the Moroccan crises, he used to read a chapter of Emma every night before going to sleep. He maintained that Jane Austen restored his sense of proportion.”

“And I suggest it’s an open question if Hawthorne is remote.” This is the voice of Georgia Bristed, renowned for her “salon” of journalists and politicians. Like Polly Travers, she is also guilty of condescension. But aren’t they all? Doesn’t any group with a shared childhood meet for the primary purpose of showing off how much further each has progressed than the others? “Wasn’t there a good deal about the Puritans in the Bay Colony to make us think of Germany today? I had the good fortune of getting Dr. Frankel to address a group in my house the other night. He spoke of the horrors of the prison camps. I know people say these are very much exaggerated, but if one tenth of what Frankel told us is true, it’s an abomination! For example, he told us that the mayor of his village, who had shown sympathy to a Jewish family, was taken out to...”

“Oh, please!” cries Leila Lee. “I can’t bear atrocities. Didn’t we agree to that, Madame Chairman? No atrocities?”

“That’s right, no atrocities, Georgia,” Justine Bannard rules, no doubt with a smile.

“All right, all right, if you want to be ostriches!”

“But I think Georgia has a point.” I recognize the soft voice of Mylo Jessup, my favorite of the group. “I wonder if we shouldn’t discipline ourselves to a certain minimum of horror stories. On Kipling’s theory: ‘Lest we forget, lest we forget.’ We wouldn’t want to overdo it, of course. That might be morbid. But shouldn’t we dedicate at least one meeting a year to the violation of basic human rights?”

Leila again: “Well, that’s fine. Let me know in advance so that I can be sure to skip it. But to get back to The Scarlet Letter, have any of you stopped to consider what a ridiculous plot it has? Hester Prynne is married off as a child to an elderly cripple for whom she hasn’t a grain of affection. They go to the New World, where he is captured and presumably slaughtered by Indians. Two years later, living alone, without friends or family, she is seduced by a handsome young clergyman, with whom half the women of the town are in love. And for this she is made to stand in the pillory and be ostracized for life! Think, girls, of the city we live in today! I mean, can anyone possibly take seriously a book that tells how a girl is tormented for doing—let’s face it—what half the people one knows are doing?”

If, a few minutes before, I could feel the resentment against the State Assemblywoman through the screen, the feeling evoked by Leila’s comments almost blows it down. The group will not give her the satisfaction of a rebuttal—the smallest comment might be construed as evidence that her fancied pre-eminence in the sexual game has even been noticed. She must simply be put down. The chairman now handles this. Justine turns Leila’s point with a scholarly argument. “I went to the Society Library to look up the question of just what did happen to convicted adulterers in the Bay Colony. I found my answer in John Winthrop’s own journal. He records, in the most matter-of-fact fashion, how he sat on a court that condemned a man and woman to be hanged under just thes...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 13
• 14
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH