The Embezzler by Louis Auchincloss

First published: 1966

Type of plot: Social chronicle

Time of work: 1910-1960, with emphasis upon the 1930’s

Locale: Primarily New York City and its suburbs

Principal Characters:

• Guy Prime, the title character, a New York stockbroker
• Reginald (Rex) Geer, Guy’s college friend, a banker
• Angelica Hyde, Guy’s wife, and, much later, Rex’s wife
• Evadne Prime, the daughter of Guy and Angelica
• George Geer, Rex’s son, Evadne’s husband

The Novel

The Embezzler centers on one of the most significant, if least understood, episodes in recent American history, the consequence of which was federal control of the stock market. Perhaps fittingly, the title character Guy Prime is the first to tell his side of the story, followed in turn by his former friend Reginald (Rex) Geer and finally by Angelica, Guy’s ex-wife, currently married to Rex. Guy’s memoir, purportedly written in 1960 for circulation among his relatives after his death, credibly evokes the atmosphere of the Depression and the New Deal, double occasions of his crime and subsequent imprisonment. Now living in self-imposed exile in Panama, Guy seeks to explain, and in part, to justify, his own highly visible role in the scandals that led to federal control of the American stock market. By way of background, he evokes his childhood and adolescence, culminating in his decisive friendship with Rex Geer at Harvard. Indeed, until the crisis provoked during the 1930’s by Guy’s ruthless speculations, the two men have usefully complemented each other, each supplying what the other lacked. Rex, the son of a New England parson, supplies the sybaritic Guy with much-needed stability; Guy, meanwhile, provides his straitlaced friend with the rudimentary social graces needed for success in his chosen field of banking. It is Guy, moreover, who generously uses his own connections to provide Rex with a scholarship and later with a job. Guy, temperamentally unsuited to banking, accepts his father’s help in starting a brokerage house; Rex, meanwhile, remains with the bank, setting the stage for the confrontations that eventually follow.

Even with the help of multiple viewpoints, it is difficult to ascertain precisely to what extent Guy Prime’s defalcations were motivated by his knowledge of Rex Geer’s romantic involvement, starting in 1933, with Guy’s wife, Angelica. In any event, Guy had severely overextended himself during the early Depression years, investing in such then questionable ventures as prefabricated housing and tranquilizer pills. At first, he borrowed from various relatives to cover the inevitable shortfall. Eventually, however, he began borrowing from Rex. As each of the narrators points out, however, he did not do so until after learning of Rex’s affair with Angelica, suggesting that he might have envisioned Rex’s loans as a form of compensation. Notwithstanding, Guy soon became so reckless in his speculations that mere loans from Rex no longer sufficed; within two years, he began pledging customers’ stocks to provide needed collateral despite the threat of exposure.

The central point of the action, such as it is, occurs during 1936, when Guy is asked to show auditors a block of stock held in trust by his firm for the country club of which he, Guy Prime, is cofounder and prime mover. For the first time, the prospect of imprisonment becomes a reality, since more than half of the securities are by then in Rex’s bank as collateral for one of Guy’s personal loans. After considerable deliberation, during which he also consults Angelica, Rex agrees to cover the shortfall with his own personal funds, but only on condition that Guy liquidate his brokerage house and retire from the market altogether. Guy agrees, asking only enough time—over the summer—to set his affairs in order, but it is not long before he is trading more recklessly than ever, ostensibly in an effort to save his highly respected firm. A subsequent shortfall, twice as great as before, results in yet another appeal to Rex and a by now predictable refusal. Guy’s firm goes into bankruptcy, and Guy goes to jail, happily and almost willingly. His memoir, composed some twenty-five years after the fact, suggests that his arrest and conviction were a pretext for the enactment of legislation that the Roosevelt Administration had been waiting for at least three years to sign into law. The rest, Guy grandly implies, is history.

The subsequent testimony of Rex and Angelica, prepared in response to Guy’s memoir (released following his death in 1962), expands the narrative through individual perspective without adding much in the way of continuity. As seen by both his former friend and (more perceptively) by his former wife, Guy was in essence a generous soul given by nature to extremes of self-aggrandizement and hero-worship, tending to glorify both his well-derived but modest family and the situations in which he found himself. Rex Geer, who has retained the scruples of the minister’s son into and through the tribulations of Wall Street in the 1930’s, still castigates Guy for his lack of moral fiber, meanwhile ruefully admitting that Guy’s memoir, coming as late as it did, might well suffice to clear his name with subsequent generations.

The Characters

Despite the attention duly paid to the customs of the rich and the politics of power, The Embezzler is arguably less a novel of manners than a novel of character, the sociopsychological chronicle of three strong characters in perpetually sublimated conflict. Thanks to the author’s skillful use of multiple viewpoints, most of the questions remain open and unanswered, suggesting the ultimate human fallibility even of those whose actions and decisions will become binding upon humanity in general: Whatever the reason for Guy Prime’s actions and their subsequent results, implies Auchincloss, the repercussions are still to be felt.

Whatever the reasons for his gradual lapse into crime and his eventual disgrace, Guy Prime remains one of Louis Auchincloss’s most engaging and plausible characters, considerably more so than most of John P. Marquand’s tycoons or John O’Hara’s would-be politicians. Born to marginal privilege, the only male offspring of a mismatched late marriage, Guy grows up determined to “set things right,” using his position and connections to intervene even in matters well outside his proper sphere; thus does he infelicitously play matchmaker between Rex Geer and his rich cousin Alix Prime, a disturbed young woman whom he suspects of frigidity but whose real problem, Angelica will later explain, turned out to be quite the opposite. Indeed, Guy’s gravest flaw appears not to be greed, but rather a chronic and perhaps willful tendency to misread human character.

Rex Geer, whose ingrained Yankee habits of integrity and thrift will stand him in good stead as a Wall Street banker, is perhaps less interesting than Guy but no less credible; indeed, he is sufficiently complex as to elude Guy’s well-meant attempts to understand him, a fact which renders the novel’s major conflicts all but inevitable. After his brief affair with Angelica Prime, Rex will return contritely to his arthritic wife, Lucy, his former childhood sweetheart, and remain faithful to her until her death in 1948. Far from seeing his loans to Guy as a payoff of any kind, Rex is motivated mainly by recalled loyalty and friendship. Blaming Guy for the eventual invasion of private interests by the federal government, Rex will grow old lamenting the fact that his old friend has betrayed him.

Angelica, reared mainly in Europe by a well-to-do expatriate mother, is something of an exotic compared to either of her husbands. Her birthright Roman Catholicism, for example, contrasts sharply with both Rex’s Congregationalism and Guy’s hereditary Episcopalianism. Well-read and intelligent, Angelica is the sort of woman who, in a later time, might well have become truly liberated, defining herself through her choice of career. Instead, she responds to Guy’s increasing infidelities with an understanding whereby she will devote all of her energies to building and maintaining their estate, Meadowview, while Guy devotes his to the establishment and expansion of the Glenville Club. This understanding has been in force for approximately ten years when Rex, at the advice of his doctors, takes up horseback riding with Angelica as his tutor, the event which leads to their affair. A brief reconciliation with her husband, deliberately stage-managed by Guy after the breakup of her affair with Rex, finds Angelica most reluctantly pregnant in her middle forties, despite Guy’s predictable male jubilance; her subsequent miscarriage while riding, which may or may not have been an accident, completes her estrangement from Guy and coincides with the latter’s reckless plunge into speculative trading.

Critical Context

Published only two years after the unprecedented success of The Rector of Justin, The Embezzler added to Louis Auchincloss’s growing, if belated, renown as a chronicler of manners and society, worthy successor to the late John P. Marquand and the aging John O’Hara. As in the earlier novel, Auchincloss here derives considerable effect from the use of multiple first-person narrators, each of whom sheds light where the others leave shadows.

In retrospect, The Embezzler can be seen as the last truly remarkable novel of Auchincloss’s finest period. Beginning with The House of Five Talents (1960), Auchincloss began to hit his stride as a novelist, continuing his success with Portrait in Brownstone (1962) and The Rector of Justin. In The Embezzler, Auchincloss draws fully upon the strengths implicit in the three earlier novels, particularly (as noted above) with regard to narrative technique. If some critics tend to prefer The Rector of Justin, The Embezzler must still be rated as a close second, showing the author at the height of his powers.

Bibliography

Auchincloss, Louis. Interview by George Plimpton. The Paris Review 35 (Fall, 1994): 73-94. A fascinating interview in which Auchincloss talks about the writing process. He reveals that his work as a lawyer has helped him to develop his characters and that his characters are not wholly fictional. He also speaks about his early works, which were rejected, as well as his ideas about the teaching of writing.

Depietro, Thomas. “A Republican Soul.” World and I 10 (March, 1995): 304-311. Chronicles Auchincloss’s life and work. Discusses his thoughts on the social and moral decline of his own class, as well as the factors that influenced Auchincloss’s popularity. Briefly reviews Gelderman’s biography.

Gelderman, Carol W. Louis Auchincloss: A Writer’s Life. New York: Crown, 1993. A compelling look at not only Auchincloss’s life but also the elite society that fostered him and was the subject of his novels. Includes a discussion of both The Rector of Justin and The Embezzler.

Parsell, David B. Louis Auchincloss. Boston: Twayne, 1988. An excellent critical overview of Auchincloss’s works. Themes are clearly delineated from novel to novel, which helps the reader to grasp the unity of Auchincloss’s work. Helpful bibliographies and an index are also included.

Tuttleton, James W. “Louis Auchincloss at Eighty.” New Criterion 16 (October, 1997): 32-36. Although Tuttleton focuses mainly on Auchincloss’s short stories, he does discuss themes that are common to all of Auchincloss’s novels. A good source of background information.