Rich man’s burden

It shows in his asides about the family’s three houses, four maids, two nurses, and a chauffeur; and in his retort, amiable but cutting, when his fellow law associates teased him about his social position: “Every one of them was ‘working his tail off’ to create for his children as close a copy of my background as he was able.’’

A note or two of snobbery is inevitable in such a memoir. What is more striking is its chilly distance. (And if the chill is a limitation it is also a kind of salvation. Auchincloss entirely avoids the penny-Arcadian sentimentality of many golden-childhood memoirs.) Even the most painful things are told as if by aerial spotter. The events are there, some of them anyway, but hardly a word about his feelings.

He recounts them without making the effort to go deeper — neither with others nor with himself. He tells us that as a young man he was unable to respond to sexual advances either from women or men; but that a brilliant psychiatrist cured him. That’s it. “I draw the curtain,’’ he writes after giving us part of someone else’s unhappy story.

Auchincloss delivers a decidedly limited strip tease and, chill apart, an occasional vague slippage in the patrician writing style. Memoirs are more demanding than they seem; they require a firm bite, and in his ninth decade, Auchincloss’s may have loosened a bit. Still, enough remains to seize our interest, to entertain, and occasionally to move.

Even an aerial spotter will detect large devastation. The most vividly described is the shock of boarding school after a cosseted and cushioned childhood.