Character Witness

TALES OF MANHATTAN by Louis Auchincloss. 304 pages. Houghfon Mifflin. $4.95.

Readers resort to Louis Auchincloss with much the same misgivings that sensible men feel when they resort to the law. A New York lawyer as well as an author, he has the distinction of inventing fictional clients who write their own verdict of guilty--"guilty with an explanation," as they say in day court. Moreover, their usual character witness--Auchincloss himself--is the kind who lets the cat out of the bag and the client into the pen.

The tales in Tales of Manhattan are based on events in the firm of Arnold & Degener, 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza. The fictional partnership that handles this work could be called Maupassant, Maugham, Cozzens & Auchincloss. This firm is choosy about cases; any messy divorce work is discreetly referred to O'Hara, O'Hara, O'Hara & O'Hara, 10 North Frederick Street, Gibbsville, Pa.

Gilded Gaggle. Auchincloss specializes in a man's estate rather than the estate of man, demonstrating that the three disgraces of Gotham are to be 1) dead broke, 2) alive and broke, and 3) a member of the undeserving rich.

The familiar Auchincloss lawyer and stockbroker characters are joined in this collection by two ancillary types: an auctioneer who casts a cold eye on objects left by the rich dead, and "the matrons," a gilded gaggle of rich old gorgons who hold the purse strings of family fortunes like bowstrings about the necks of their grandchildren. These characters are all united by money--not the new vulgar stuff that was extruded by the bull markets of the '50s and '60s, but the old stable commodity collected in the Civil War. It is the kind of money that nourished Manhattan town houses, cottages at the Cape, boxes at the Met, and others at Woodlawn or Sleepy Hollow cemeteries.

The Moon and Six Guineas is a brittle-brutal study of a once fashionable painter, John Howland, a "Bostonian and Mayflower descendant, educated at Dixwell Latin School and Harvard." He made his first mistake in becoming an artist; his second was to leave--together with his corny canvases--a portfolio of pornographic sketches. His daughter and heir destroy this Back Bay smut. The Auchincloss irony? That the smut just might have restored the reputation of Howland's square work in today's crooked intellectual auction room.

In The Club Bedroom, Auchincloss illustrates the dreadful fate that awaits a poor working girl who marries into a top family, and who expects kith, kin or anyone else to respect her unspeakable class predicament. She loses her room at the woman's club. A Harvard-Yardley soap opera.

The collection of such stories, intricate in pattern, flat in surface, should be called Entails of Manhattan. Within his esthetic code, Auchincloss tells the truth and nothing but the truth. But he does not tell the whole truth, which can be dismissed as irrelevant, immaterial--and harder to write.

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