Louis Auchincloss (1917-2010) was born into a privileged family of businessmen, lawyers and stockbrokers.
Though, according to him, the Auchincloss menfolk owed their wealth, not to inheritance, but to advantageous marriages and their personal acumen.
He studied at Yale but, midway through his degree, transferred to read law at the University of Virginia, eventually graduating in 1941.
Aside from wartime service in naval intelligence and three years as a full-time writer, he pursued a legal career until retirement. In 1957 he married Adele Lawrence, some fourteen years his junior and descended from the Vanderbilts. They had three sons: two lawyers and an architect.
Despite his lawyerly pursuits, Auchincloss was a prolific novelist, publishing his first in 1947 and his last in 2008. ‘Portrait in Brownstone’, his eighth novel, appeared in 1962.
The brownstone in question is the 53rd Street New York townhouse in which the principal characters live throughout their lives.
Linn Tremain, returning from a previous artistic life in Italy, becomes a successful stockbroker, taking as his second wife the beautiful Dagmar Denison.
She soon surrounds herself with various siblings, including Lily Denison and her husband, Gerald Trask, who comes to work for Tremain. Ida Trask, their daughter, is the central character in the novel.
As the narrative begins, it is 1950. Ida is in her early 60s, married to Derrick Hartley, who now runs Tremain’s company. They have two children in their 30s: Dorcas and Hugo. Ida’s cousin, Geraldine, an alcoholic, has just committed suicide by throwing herself from her hotel bedroom.
We learn that Geraldine and Derrick had an affair. Ida discovers for the first time that Geraldine had wanted Derrick to divorce Ida and marry her instead.
Then we are taken back to the 1900s, where we witness Ida and Geraldine in childhood. When Derrick arrives on the scene in 1911, he joins Tremain’s company and pays court to Ida, only to become fascinated by Geraldine.
He tries to win her but, at the critical moment, they have a minor riding accident during which he drops her in the mud.
Meanwhile, Ida still loves Derrick and, after some considerable manoeuvring, they marry.
Geraldine reappears in the mid-1930s, following her husband’s death. She and Derrick embark on an affair but, when Derrick refuses to divorce Ida, Geraldine ends the relationship.
At this point the narrative veers off to examine Dorcas’s relationships, first with an obnoxious publisher, Robin Granberry, then with an ambitious young lawyer, Mark Jesmond, who joins what is now Derrick’s company. Dorcas marries Mark.
Next in line is Hugo, who has a married mistress, Kitty Tyson. When her husband dies he seems at first inclined to marry her, but is also attracted to his youthful cousin, Alfreda Denison.
Ida, after decades of being manipulated by others, now finally comes into her own, plotting successfully to separate Hugo from Kitty and unite him instead with Alfreda.
As the novel draws to a close, Derrick has grown suspicious that Dorcas and Mark are trying to push him into retirement. Following a big argument, Derrick has a heart attack, forcing his retirement anyway.
We see Ida and Derrick together at Hugo and Alfreda’s wedding. Derrick is confined to a wheelchair. He finally reveals to Ida that Geraldine ended their affair, not him.
He is at last reconciled to Ida, and full of praise for her, knowing that she will be caring for him for the rest of his life.
The novel is elegantly written, if somewhat turgid in places. It is divided into seven parts, but also into sections, depending whether the focal point is Ida, Derrick, Dorcas, Hugo or Geraldine. Only Geraldine’s sections adopt the first person pronoun; the others are narrated by an omniscient author.
The blurb on the back cover of my Penguin Modern Classics edition (which disintegrated as I read it) says:
‘Perhaps inevitably, it is not the breadwinners, the empire-building menfolk, who emerge as the strong ones, but their women, who subtly manipulate and shape the course of events.’
This may be true of Ida in the end, but not through most of her life. It did not strike me as a universal rule in the novel, or as the key message that Auchincloss wanted to convey.
Much of the narrative deals with the power struggles within relationships between men and women, and between women as rivals for men’s affections.
More often than not, it seems that the more unscrupulous party is most likely to emerge victorious.
Perhaps Ida manages to buck that trend with both Geraldine and Derrick. But, when her son’s future happiness is at stake, she discovers that she, too, is prepared to be unscrupulous.
Not a bad novel, really, though unlikely to keep you gripped.
TD
August 2025
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