A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth (16 page)

I was still in my teens when a great change occurred in my parents' social life. Up until then the gatherings that they hosted or attended had been made up of old friends or relations, lawyer partners or business acquaintances, a congenial but very familiar group, rarely stimulating, never exciting. That changed when they were taken into intimate friendship (mostly because of Mother's wit and wisdom) by the four closely knit and infinitely interesting daughters of Walter and Margaret Blaine Damrosch. The doors of the world of music, theatre, and letters burst open for them. When they went out for dinner Mother might find herself discussing the filming of
Rebecca
with David Selznick or a revival of
Siegfried
with Lauritz Melchior or his days as a pianist in a whorehouse with Harpo Marx. Father enjoyed it too, and he was always charming and well liked, but he was less on top of it all than Mother, who had the advantage of feeling at her ease with even such a deity as Kirsten Flagstad.

The broadened social life of my parents made a good many famous names familiar in family chatter, but I cannot say that they had much effect on my early writing efforts. Their bearers simply nodded genially to a junior. I do remember reading the witty and vivid memoirs of Gretchen Finletter, the most intellectual of the Damrosch daughters, about her girlhood, and having a glimmer of how the simplest domestic things could be turned into art, but otherwise the whole business of writing seemed to me to have nothing to do with anyone but myself. It was only when I ceased to regard reading and writing as connected with grades at school and college, but as necessities to my pleasure in life, that they became really me. That was in my sophomore year at Yale in Joseph Seronde's class in nineteenth-century French fiction and drama.

This brings up the larger question of whether writers in general influence each other, the way painters do, as almost all art critics agree. I suspect that the major writers do not, or in a very minor way. Henry James is universally cited as an influence, but on whom? Who writes like him? Percy Lubbock, author of
Earlham,
is often given as an example, and the book is a good candidate, but it's largely a literary curiosity today.

I once deliberately tried to write an American counterpart to a favorite French novel of mine:
Renée Mauperin
by the Goncourt brothers. I even started it with the same scene of my heroine talking to a young man while bathing in a stream. But before many chapters were written my characters had taken over, and my novel was very different from its model. Not as good, of course, but different.

During the period of my life when I was free to meet other authors on their own terms I was guided by Vance and Tina Bourjaily who ran a kind of salon for just that purpose, which was ultimately transferred from their apartment to the larger space of the White Horse Tavern. Their eye was very good, for I didn't meet anyone at their gatherings who didn't make some kind of a name for himself. Norman Mailer was their most famous regular. I had admired
The Naked and the Dead
a good deal more than I did its successors, but I was nonetheless dazzled to receive from him the greatest compliment one writer can give another. He said of my short story
The Gemlike Flame
that he wouldn't have minded writing it himself!

I found it difficult at first to win acceptance in the group. A registered Republican who was also listed in the Social Register was something of a duck-billed platypus to them. And by the time I had won a kind of welcome at the White Horse I found myself a little bit bored. Alcohol was certainly the bane of writers' meetings in those days, and it rarely improved the quality of the talk. I never had a really interesting conversation at the White Horse, though there were undeniably interesting people there. Perhaps I left too early, but I still doubt if any of the writers profited much from each other's company.

Do writers ever? Jane Austen, so far as we know, had no literary friends of any importance. Henry James had the most of all; he made a point of meeting every author of note in Britain, France, and America, many of whom sent him signed copies of their first editions so that his library when he died, though sold for a song by an idiotic niece, was worth a fortune. Would the late style of the three final novels have been altered in the least had he met none of the luminaries he cultivated? I doubt it.

It always surprises me that great authors don't get more personal satisfaction from their gifts. Some, of course, do and did. Trollope, Dickens, Browning, and Tennyson were all reputed to be happy in their trade. And, as I have noted elsewhere, I believe that Shakespeare was in exuberantly high spirits when he finished
King Lear.
But I have to admit that Henry James, and in our day William Styron, suffered cruel and crippling depressions at the very height of their literary powers. And was Emily Dickinson happy when she dressed in white and kept a door between herself and the friends she talked to? Who knows?

A
S MY WRITING
career advanced, it seemed that, aside from the specific preoccupations of the characters and the stories themselves, a particular preoccupation emerged: class. Given what I have told you so far about my life and upbringing, it would have been shocking had the subject not been one of my major concerns. Class, whether real or imagined, is a subject of interest in America far greater than its actual existence would seem to justify.

No doubt there are areas, particularly in the Old South or parts of New England, where families that have retained their original prominence in the same neighborhood for a few generations are still treated with marks of respect, but it rarely amounts to any considerable political or economic power. Certainly our colonial society, largely based on its British government, was a class society. Its upper class dressed differently than its lower, had a different accent in speaking, married and socialized within itself, and certainly expected to have the major hand in government. But soon dress became uniform; accent varied only with geography; intermarriage was common; society was mixed. On what basis could any segment of the population claim it was an upper class?

I am not speaking of professions like the clergy or the military or the law but of a class, like the aristocracy or the peasantry or the bourgeoisie. You can't really point to one in the United States. But you can certainly point to plenty of angry resentment against any who claim, or seem by their conduct to claim, to be upper class. The battle for a classless society has been long essentially won but the survivors do not all know it. Jealousy and envy are still rife.

Anyone can claim to be middle class (no one would claim to be lower) but the natural successor to an upper class, if we had one, would seem to be the rich, for money can purchase a great deal of power in a commercial society. But millionaires are rarely popular, and billionaires even less so, and many of them are wisely inclined not to flaunt their wealth. Even if they were sufficiently united to form a class, it would not be a popular or formidable one. America would not care to be dominated by a vision of a line of marble palaces on the cliffs of Newport. The one thing that the rich share in common is apt to be the Republican Party.

I try to recall what traces of class remained in my New York boyhood in the decade following World War I. My most vivid memory is of the destruction of the mansions on Fifth Avenue, which were being sold by the generation following the one that built them and replaced by huge apartment houses. The heirs were now sufficiently socially secure as no longer to need to impress their neighbors with a French chateau or Italian palazzo, and preferred a flat to the bother of running a palace. The wrecking crew of the latter would sometimes allow pedestrians to wander through the doomed ground floor, and I had a nurse who loved to do that, so I had a memorable vision of this twilight of the gods. I suffered at an early age from what the French call
la folie des grandes maisons
and imagined that I was viewing the tragic fall of an empire.

Why did these magnates build so closely together, both in New York and Newport? There was, of course, the pleasure of visibly outdoing a rival, but I think it was more the need to be near someone who was like you. It is not always agreeable to stand out from the crowd and sometimes it is good to be free of the awkward questions that the uninitiated put to you. The very rich are particularly subject to intrusive interrogation about how they spend their money, which their equals spare them. It is the same way that royalties feel about people who want to talk about their rank. Queen Victoria once confided in a relative that she only felt truly at her ease with other royalties. And the exiled Grand Duchess Cyril, whose husband pretended to the Russian throne, told a friend who warned her that she was seeing the wrong people in Paris: "It's so hard to tell, you know. For us there's just us and the rest of you."

Was superiority of birth ever an important factor in any of the New Yorks in which I lived? When I was very young, old city families such as the Van Rensselaers or the Livingstons were certainly spoken of by my grandparents' generation with a certain respect, but that has largely disappeared, partly because history no longer celebrates the families so named and partly because immigrants wishing to identify themselves with their new nation have changed their names to theirs. The only semblance to class distinction that we still have is through wealth. That name and birth count for little is shown by the fact that being called Rockefeller would do you no good unless you were a rich Rockefeller or supposed to be one.

European titles of nobility were much valued by the daughters of the American rich in the nineteenth century, and by a steadily diminishing number in subsequent years, but that was always a kind of parlor game, never taken really seriously by the men. As a child I never thought that my native city was ruled by any identified class, though I was well aware that the downtown world of Manhattan contained a host of my family's relatives and friends who had a great deal to say in the running of the institutions that loomed large in our local life. But they had nothing to do with urban politics, public schools, the police or firemen, or indeed any of the infrastructure of the city. Indeed, they sent us to private day schools and out-of-state boarding schools and colleges.

In a way we were privileged guests of New York; we knew no more of the West side world of Leonard Bernstein's opera than a Californian. Nor did our families want to know more. When we went to Central Park, or even just to walk for exercise in the streets, we were guarded by nurses, or, if old enough to go alone, severely instructed never to talk to strangers. Of one thing we were always aware: that the city was fraught with danger.

If the poor inspired fear in a crowded, poverty-stricken city, the rich inspired not so much fear as the apprehension of condescension. A typical American will boil at the smallest hint that someone feels himself his social superior. This has lessened now, but when I published my first novels the literary establishment was full of liberal or even Marxist critics who wrote as if they were involved in a personal vendetta against characters of mine who struck them as belonging to an upper class that wanted to rule the world.

This hostility, oddly enough, seems to have gone down just as the stock market has produced billionaires whose megafortunes might seem to justify it. Maybe it is because the old poverty has been lessened.

W
ILLIAM A. M. BURDEN JR.,
who had received his fortunes from so many ancestors, came to me with the project of my writing a book about that family financed by him. He was so grave and serious it was almost impossible not to mock him a bit.

"It's a wonderful idea!" I exclaimed. "It's the great American story, isn't it? You have the essential founder of the clan, Henry Burden, the poor Scottish immigrant who comes penniless to our shores and refuses to present any of his letters of introduction to tycoons till he's made his first million, and then he gives a dinner and hands each tycoon his unused letter. That really shows them, doesn't it? And then the horseshoes. Didn't he shod the whole Union army? And we won't ask any questions about the commander in chief being his son-in-law, will we? Nor about the long bitter litigation over management between his two sons that managed to transfer a hunk of the fortune to Joseph H. Choate.

"And didn't the family bring ruin on themselves and Troy by staying too long in horseshoes and ignoring the advent of the automobile? Did that put them out? No! Why? Because they learned what the Hapsburgs had learned. Nube! Marry! They resuscitated themselves neatly at the altar with not one but two Vanderbilt marriages, and Burden Beaux Arts mansions reappeared up and down Manhattan's East side. So what do we need to complete the American success story? But we have it! A crook! Joseph Burden went to jail for embezzlement in the nineteen thirties."

Bill was not amused. "I don't know who's going to write that book," he muttered. "But if I'm paying, it won't be you."

Maybe I was wrong. I might have had fun with it. It had some of the fun and contradictions of the weird American story.

William A. M. Burden Jr., the rich investor and art collector, was a double second cousin of Shiela Burden Lawrence, my mother-in-law. His grandfather was Isaiah Townsend Burden and hers was James Abercrombie Burden Jr., who were brothers and sons of Henry Burden, the ironmaster of Troy, New York. But if the fathers of William and Shiela were first cousins, so were their mothers: Mrs. William A. M. Burden Sr. had been born Florence Vanderbilt Twombly and Mrs. James Abercrombie Burden Jr. had been born Florence Adele Sloane, both granddaughters of William Henry Vanderbilt, once deemed the richest man in the world. His fortune, however, was not divided equally, or even equally
per stirpes:
the bulk of it was left to his two eldest sons. William A. M. Burden Jr., however, received a fortune independent of the Vanderbilts from his maternal grandfather, Hamilton Twombly.