The Rector of Justin

The story is told through six narrators: frame narrator Brian Aspinwall, a teacher at Massachusetts Episcopal boarding school Justin Martyr ("Justin" for short; named for the Christian figure), who is asked to write a biography of its founder Francis Prescott; and writings and interviews from five people who knew him. Brian Aspinwall In 1939, Aspinwall begins teaching English at Justin. Prescott's contradictions fascinate him. Prescott is an intellectual, but Justin is laddish and focused on sports. Prescott's oldest friend Horace Havistock is gay, but Justin is institutionally homophobic. The school claims to be more democratic than its peers, but its students are generally rich. After the Fall of France, Havistock persuades Prescott to retire, arguing that their shared world is dying. Horace Havistock Havistock and Prescott went to boarding school together. A Civil War orphan whose family was respectable but not especially wealthy, Prescott resents rich boys like Havistock, who become targets for his cruel wit. Even so, Havistock befriends him. Prescott dreams of building a different kind of boarding school, focused on religious and civic virtue. He has a crisis of faith at Oxford, but reconverts to Christianity after experiencing a vision of his dead father. Havistock persuades his friend Eliza to break off her engagement with the re-energized Prescott, who will always put his career over his relationships. David Griscam The chairman of the Justin board, white-shoe lawyer David Griscam, both idolizes and dislikes Prescott. He appreciated Justin's family atmosphere, but admits that Justin's bullying and code of silence taught him to be "underhanded". Neither Griscam nor his wife share Prescott's Episcopal faith: Griscam is agnostic, while his wife, an evangelical Christian, resents Justin's religious elitism. Griscam insists on sending his two sons to Justin anyway, but neither succeeds there. Appealing to Prescott's ambition, Griscam encourages Prescott to solicit donations from men whose wealth he resents. Prescott wants to expel a donor's son for academic dishonesty, but Max Totten, a cynical scholarship student, agrees to take the blame in exchange for a job at the donor's company. Although Max is expelled, he eventually takes over the family business and becomes one of Griscam's "most valued clients", while the son falls into alcoholism. Cordelia Prescott Turnbull Prescott's daughter Cordelia claims that Prescott started a boys' school due to his own repressed homosexual tendencies. She marries a Catholic to annoy him, but after Prescott gives his approval, she leaves her husband and moves to Paris, where she and her lover Charley Strong (a Justinian who loses his Christian faith in World War I) become part of the Lost Generation of American expatriates. Her mother visits her in Paris and reveals a deep intelligence that was repressed at Justin. Before Strong's death, Prescott reconverts him to Christianity, infuriating Cordelia. She returns to America and marries vulgar businessman Guy Turnbull, but surprisingly, Turnbull befriends Prescott, who craves his respect as a businessman and is impressed by his shameless materialism. Cordelia divorces Turnbull. Prescott confides to Aspinwall that while he has loved his daughters inadequately, he has shown them devotion. Charley Strong In the last surviving chapter of a manuscript that Strong burned before his death, Strong recounts his hero worship of Prescott, which may be rooted in Prescott forgiving him for an early sexual indiscretion. He sees Prescott's Christian discipline as an alternative to the rootlessness of the Lost Generation. Jules Griscam In a memoir written before his death, David Griscam's son Jules implies that his father sent him to Justin because David worried that his materialism would spoil his children. Jules is a poor fit for Justin and Prescott eventually expels him for lying, but David gets Jules into Harvard anyway. Jules concludes that "an act of desecration" is the only real way to get back at Prescott. He vandalizes several school relics and is arrested. When Prescott visits him in jail, Jules claims that Prescott uses religion to aggrandize himself, which wounds Prescott deeply. Jules drunkenly commits suicide, taking his lover with him. Brian Aspinwall After Prescott's successor softens religious discipline and accommodates practicing Catholics, Prescott plots to oust him. Aspinwall dislikes David Griscam's combination of materialism and tightfistedness, but tips him off anyway. Griscam persuades Prescott to relent by introducing him to elitist and racist dissidents on the Justin board, showing that his successor is the lesser of two evils. Prescott bitterly remarks that Justin is no different from any other prep school. He dies of cancer eight months later. Aspinwall resolves to finish his Prescott biography, although he implies that to preserve the idealized memory of Prescott, it will be "in some part [a] work[] of fiction". == Development ==

Concept (center) received the National Medal of Arts in 2005. He stands between President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush.|alt=Refer to caption Louis Auchincloss was sent to his father's boarding school, Groton, and graduated in 1935. Although he later delivered the school's centennial address, he maintained a lifelong ambivalence for the institution, explaining that his first two years of prep school were a "festering misery" and that he was "at first abysmally wretched and later moderately content". He got the idea for The Rector of Justin from his high school English teacher, Malcolm Strachan, whose wife was the publisher of the Atlantic Monthly. Strachan had become a close confidant of Groton's founder and longtime headmaster, Endicott Peabody, and planned to write a novel showing that Peabody's "theology was subtler and more complicated than any of us supposed." After Strachan's premature death, Auchincloss resolved to write the novel his way. In 1960, Groton published a collection of essays from the school community to commemorate its 75th anniversary. In his essay, Auchincloss wrote that the alumni had many different impressions of their high school years, and speculated that the aging Peabody had been "troubled by the number of Grotons he seemed to have created and of how little any of them resembled his own." In addition, although published by the school, the essays voiced several criticisms of Groton. Ellery Sedgwick wrote that despite Groton's high-minded rhetoric, "evil and good have entered into Groton careers in a proportion astonishingly similar to their proportion in any community". George Biddle said that while seven of his classmates were listed in ''Who's Who'', "nearly twice that number could, I suppose, be listed as absolute failures". Auchincloss later sent two of his three sons to Groton, The story details a retired boarding school headmaster who considers opposing his successor's reforms, but ultimately concedes that the school must adapt to the real world. Auchincloss recycles the imagery of the headmaster's lament—comparing himself to a vaudeville act in which a clown is "remorselessly" followed by a spotlight—for Prescott's final monologue in the novel. In Auchincloss' first draft of the novel, David Griscam was the frame narrator instead of Brian Aspinwall, and the book emphasized the rivalry between Griscam and Prescott. He discarded the idea because Griscam's "personality got out of hand". He eventually came up with the idea of making the biographer a younger man who differed from Prescott in every way except their shared religious faith, which they both recognized was "almost totally lacking in the school, the faculty, the parents, and the trustees," who "care[d] only about the appearance of faith". Late in his life, Auchincloss (who said that he had been sexually abused by another student in high school, without the school's knowledge) admitted that he had considered broaching the topic of sexual abuse in The Rector of Justin, but ultimately left it out. He felt that the literary mores of the day would not permit him to address the matter with sufficient candor. He subsequently touched upon this theme in The Scarlet Letters (2003) ''and The Headmaster's Dilemma'' (2007), as well as his 2010 autobiography. Auchincloss submitted a draft of the novel to Houghton Mifflin in July 1963. It was published in July 1964. Inspirations The school Auchincloss sought to build a composite narrative of the American boarding school between the Gilded Age and World War II, explaining that it was "the great era of headmasters". He reviewed a series of headmaster biographies from various schools, including Peabody's Groton, St. Paul's, St. Mark's, and Lawrenceville, but dismissed them as "a dreary lot". Nonetheless, the novel frequently draws from Auchincloss' experiences at Groton in the 1930s. One critic quipped that in one scene, "the Rev. Francis Prescott, founder and first headmaster of Justin Martyr, an Episcopal school 30 miles west of Boston, was speaking about the Rev. Endicott Peabody, founder and first headmaster of Groton School, an Episcopal-oriented school 30 miles west of Boston". The novel mirrors some of the compromises Peabody made to build Groton. According to one story, in 1891, Peabody financed Groton's main dormitory by allowing donors who contributed at least $5,000 (approximately $175,000 in 2025 dollars) to nominate one student for admission, notwithstanding the waiting list. He later remarked that focusing on educating wealthy students was "one of the great mistakes that [he] made as Headmaster". For his own part, Auchincloss commented that Peabody had no other option, since "who else in 1881 was going to support a new school started by three young men?" The rector The character of Frank Prescott was often compared to Endicott Peabody, although Auchincloss protested that the two men "shared not a single characteristic". He explained that Peabody was "simple, straightforward, literal, and always sincere", while Prescott was "complex, arrogant, witty, cynical, intellectual", and "a bit of a charlatan". He admitted that he had borrowed "certain facts and dates" from Peabody's life, but maintained that Prescott was based, at least "in part", on federal judge Learned Hand, Peabody's granddaughter Marietta consoled Auchincloss by telling him that the criticism reflected how little his critics understood Peabody. In addition, Peabody's biographer Frank Ashburn commented that Frank Prescott "only remotely" resembled his subject, and Larissa MacFarquhar wrote that "Prescott is a far more convoluted and ambiguous character" than Peabody. Prescott's title (and thus the title of the book) also refers to Peabody. While Groton did not use the term "rector" for its headmaster (the term was instead used by St. Paul's School), the school community informally referred to Endicott Peabody as "the Rector". Other characters The character of Brian Aspinwall is modeled on Auchincloss' old mentor, Malcolm Strachan. Auchincloss admitted that Aspinwall was "much weaker and less attractive ... than Malcolm had ever been", but rejected claims that the character was a veiled attack on Strachan. He said that he wanted to make Aspinwall as different from Prescott as possible for dramatic effect. Auchincloss based Prescott's friend Horace Havistock on University of Cambridge legal historian G. T. Lapsley. who left America for Europe. == Themes ==

Auchincloss spent most of his career detailing the decline of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants' (WASPs) leading role in American society. Shortly before his death, he explained that while most of his WASP friends were richer in the 21st century than they had been growing up, "everyone has moved up", and the old-money elite had "lost their monopoly." He added that "to have witnessed the disintegration of an economic ruling class in the 1930s from a front row seat ... was all a novelist could ask [for]." In an early chapter of The Rector of Justin, Horace Havistock concedes that "the world of the private school" is necessarily tied up with "the world of personal honor and a Protestant God", and that "when a civilization crumbles, it crumbles all together." The collapse of aristocratic values (pictured), the aristocratic president of the New York Stock Exchange, shocked upper-class society. Auchincloss praised the writings of Oliver La Farge, another unhappy Groton alumnus, which taught him that "Groton without Peabody" is "just this 'dream', this stuffy little group of snooty, cruel boys". urging Peabody's students to avoid "the life of mere vapid ease." However, some students questioned whether Peabody had been successful. Like Prescott, the real-life Endicott Peabody sought to toughen up spoiled aristocrats through harsh discipline and simple living. Auchincloss suggested that this mission was doomed to fail, recalling Peabody "as a David engaged in the seemingly hopeless struggle of preserving some degree of spirituality from the Goliath of materialism that re-invaded the school with each new form of prosperous youngsters." Only at the end of his life does Prescott realize that his school is no different. and Auchincloss said that "I could have almost lived on what [he] expended on shirts and cufflinks." A lapsed Presbyterian, he later wrote that most of his Groton classmates stopped going to church as adults, but hedged that while "the Ivy League of my day" may have been "godless ... it certainly did not lack ideals". The ending of the novel emphasizes that the American aristocracy must reform to survive. Despite his early ambivalence for the reformist Franklin Roosevelt, Auchincloss later admitted that Roosevelt "was not a traitor to his class" but "its last great representative". Auchincloss agreed that Aspinwall was a flawed character, commenting that while Aspinwall ends the book resolving to write a biography of Prescott, "personally, I doubt if Brian would have been able to finish it." == Contemporary reception ==

Commercial response The Rector of Justin was a major commercial success. It topped the New York Times best-seller list for one week, and competed for first place for thirty-five weeks. and had sold 2 million copies by 1966. However, the novel's chief competitor for end-of-year literary honors, Saul Bellow's Herzog, spent 29 weeks at #1, finished third on the yearly rankings for both 1964 and 1965, and sold considerably more hardcover copies (142,000 to 80,000). He recruited George Cukor to direct, Samuel A. Taylor to write the screenplay, and Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn to play the leads. However, Tracy was in poor health and the film was never made. Critical response and awards consideration Critics generally praised the novel. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction, losing to Shirley Ann Grau's The Keeper of the House and Bellow's Herzog, respectively. Although Pulitzer jurors Lewis Stiles Gannett and Maxwell Geismar personally disliked Herzog, they picked The Keeper of the House over The Rector of Justin in part because the latter was "precisely ... the kind of novel to which the prize has been awarded in the past". Geismar also dismissed Auchincloss' work as insubstantial, explaining that while he typically gave Auchincloss favorable reviews, his books were "polished entertainment and nothing else". Despite the award snubs, J. Donald Adams (The New York Times), Leon Edel (Life), and Time magazine argued that The Rector of Justin sealed Auchincloss' place in the league of major American novelists. Auchincloss was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters the following year, and later served as the Academy's president. Stephen Spender said that while he thought Herzog was a more interesting book, "The Rector of Justin is not just another debunking novel about a Victorian prig," because through Auchincloss' detailing of Prescott's internal contradictions, "[f]ew characters in modern fiction have been portrayed so completely in the round." Edith Copeland (University of Oklahoma) was impressed by Auchincloss' "precise, disciplined crystalline prose under perfect control", which had "no need of melodrama". Whitney Balliett (The New Yorker) said that Auchincloss had written a "model novel," with "poise and taste and intelligence ... on every page." Leon Edel praised the novel for "subtly tak[ing] [its] legends apart before our eyes", Reviews were not universally positive, and several commentators argued that Auchincloss should have been more critical of his class. The New York Review of Books, a brand-new "radical chic" literary magazine published by boarding-school alumnus A. Whitney Ellsworth (St. Paul's '54), panned the novel; its critic Robert M. Adams said that Auchincloss' critique of the boarding school system was "fake criticism" and "afraid to ask the questions that hurt". More broadly, several critics noted that Auchincloss' books consistently dealt with a small slice of American society. Artistically, several reviewers, including Edward Weeks (Atlantic Monthly), wrote that the novel's six narrators were too similar; Orville Prescott's otherwise laudatory review dryly quipped that "by a happy chance and a familiar literary convention, the six observers are all expert novelists." == The end of an era ==

According to one academic, "The Rector of Justin brought its author recognition and popularity, but did little in the long run to secure him a prominent place in postwar American literature". By 1985, Vanity Fair noted that Auchincloss "is never mentioned in lists of great American writers" and "has won no important prizes". In 1995, one critic even said that The Rector of Justin was the "only [Auchincloss] book to receive substantial critical praise". Auchincloss was a four-time finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, but his last finalist recognition came in 1967. The search for a new fiction The Rector of Justin was published after at least a decade of growing discomfort with society novelists. The year the novel was published, Howard Mumford Jones and Richard M. Ludwig wrote in their Guide to American Literature that literary fiction had been attracted to a "mood of experimentation" since the mid-1920s. They listed Auchincloss' The Great World and Timothy Colt (1956) as an example of a novel to which contemporary "[l]iterary histories [were] commonly unkind". Auchincloss' friend Gore Vidal added that the literary establishment had been dismissing Auchincloss' style since the early 1950s, and that critics had unfairly criticized him for "never question[ing] [WASP society's] values in any serious way". and Catholic commentators William F. Buckley Jr. and Edward P. J. Corbett. Auchincloss repeatedly argued that his intended audience was much broader than his limited cast of characters. He noted that Proust's works also focused on a limited stratum of society and that non-WASPs like Sidney Lumet (who he said understood The Rector of Justin perfectly) could still enjoy his work. He admitted that he focused on the New York upper class for convenience, as that background "is a familiar one to me and is hence more available as a model." However, he emphasized that ordinary people could relate to his characters' universal problems, questioning why "critics did not resent Anna Karenina or Colonel Newcome." Gore Vidal added that Auchincloss' society was still relevant in 1960s and 1970s America, and that by downplaying the continuing relevance of WASPs in big business and philanthropy, literary critics revealed their own "remoteness ... from actual power".Brown was not the only critic to compare the two novels. His Times colleague J. Donald Adams—a self-avowed traditionalist who believed that the novel of manners was still "the most interesting form of fiction"—called Herzog's victory over The Rector of Justin a "miscarriage of justice" and Bellow's novel "little more" than "vogue". He added that Auchincloss was "the best living American novelist" and that he had "little confidence" in the generation of modernist authors that included Bellow and Norman Mailer. Mailer, for his own part, opined that "the maudlin middle reaches of The Rector of Justin" represented "the bankruptcy of the novel of manners". He praised the character of Moses Herzog because "it says: I am debased, I am failed, I am near to rotten, and yet something just as good and loving resides in me as the tenderest part of your childhood", and concluded that Herzog lay "at the center of the modern dilemma". As Mailer alluded, the Herzog-Justin debate reflected broader disputes about American society. Granville Hicks admitted that "to many people, myself included ... a bewildered intellectual in search of wholeness of spirit belongs more truly to our times than the aged headmaster of a fashionable preparatory school". Time (which at the time "reflected a WASP upper-class point of view") favored Auchincloss' "Establishment tale" and panned Herzog, while rival Newsweek (which catered to urban sophisticates, "underdogs", and fans of the avant-garde) praised Herzog and mocked The Rector of Justin for its "tired sentimentality". In a further twist of the knife, Newsweek suggested that pseudo-intellectuals liked reading Auchincloss because he made them feel sophisticated and "educated." In his 1966 novel Too Far to Walk, John Hersey dramatized the conflict by describing The Rector of Justin as a novel that a college student is assigned to read in a political science class, in contrast to Herzog, which was assigned in a religion and sexuality class flippantly dubbed "Totems and Scrotums". Herzog, like many modernist novels of the time, focused on the trials and tribulations of "the American intellectual male". Drawing from the works of nine American women novelists, he argued that female writers had traditionally provided a "more affirmative note" in American literature, Modernism triumphant Bellow won the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature. When the Swedish Academy presented him with the award, Karl Ragnar Gierow remarked that he had helped lead the "emancipation from the previous ideal style" in American fiction. Gierow added that Bellow's novels demonstrated "penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act or prevent us from acting and that can be the dilemma of our age." Tracing the development of postwar American literary fiction, Leo Robson (The New Yorker) concluded that Herzog helped "tip[] the balance in favor of the poetic and demotic, the Romantic and expansive", which in turn prompted critics to downgrade formalist and realist novels like The Rector of Justin. Catherine Kord (The Antioch Review) agreed that "with the avant-garde seeking new ways of presenting fiction ... Auchincloss's New York can seem quaint or even marginal." Time also proved that the women authors Auchincloss courted were also attracted to literary modernism. One writer suggested that by 1989, "the bulk of [American] novelists—male and female—[were] still closer to Barry Hannah than they are to Louis Auchincloss." Beyond stylistic shifts, Auchincloss was dogged by the perception that novels were not his strong point. Vidal said that while Auchincloss was a "superb short-story writer", he was merely a "good novelist". Frank N. Magill (Salem Press) and Mark Oppenheimer (Tablet) wrote that Auchincloss' post-Justin works tended to recycle the Justin formula, which (in Magill's words) "threaten[ed] to undermine, even in retrospect, the reputation justly earned by his best work." Auchincloss' prolific output also attracted criticism: Auchincloss predicted his own critical decline, but was unable to stop it. During the 1965 awards season, he told Gore Vidal that "the year of The Rector of Justin had given way to the glorious era of Herzog and we are now dim figures of a gentile American past". He concluded that "we had our day, and though we lacked Moral Seriousness, in our Waspish way, we had style." == Modern appraisals ==

The Rector of Justin is generally considered Auchincloss' best work. In 2008, Larissa MacFarquhar (The New Yorker) wrote that The Rector of Justin was Auchincloss' masterpiece "because it is one of the few times he permits his elegiac moralism to dominate a book. He loves his mad Puritans, and believes they are no more." However, not all the attention was positive. Michiko Kakutani (The New York Times) concluded in 1984 that "while [Auchincloss] is adept enough at portraying the effects of a rarified milieu on character, his narrative lacks a necessary density and texture." Oppenheimer embraced how Auchincloss' prose could be from "1920, or 1940—some imagined time when sentences had the leisure to amble around, tasting and then regurgitating highbrow references and allusions, not rushing to any forced conclusion." Auchincloss' death in 2010 prompted a new round of revisionist reflections, which acknowledged his cutting social commentary and, in some cases, used nostalgia for Auchincloss' WASPs to criticize the new American elite. Eric Homberger (The Guardian) remembered him for "interrogat[ing] the values, class consciousness and self-representations of the most powerful people in the world's most powerful nation." Boris Kachka (Vulture) similarly hailed him as the "conscience of an elite", writing that his novels recalled an age where the establishment had a "sense of shame". Rupert Cornwell (The Independent) argued that while Auchincloss had skewered the old elite, "the country was the poorer" for its fall from power. As Ross Douthat (The New York Times) later put it, while the world of The Rector of Justin is gone, the notion of an American elite remains, and that elite’s attempt to replace its founding principles with diversity and meritocracy "is harder than it looks, and even perhaps a contradiction in terms." == Notes ==