BOOK REVIEW / SHORT STORIES : Travails of the Wealthy Enliven Tawdry Tales of a Stale Upper Crust : TALES OF YESTERYEAR <i> by Louis Auchincloss</i> ; Houghton Mifflin, $21.95, 230 pages

Louis Auchincloss is an ornament of American letters, an authentic patrician who has distinguished himself both as an attorney and as an author of novels, biographies and short stories for more than half a century.

“Tales of Yesteryear,” the author’s 48th book, is vintage stuff, a collection of short stories about the hard bumps in the lives of the old-fashioned American aristocracy.

At moments, the book comes across as a kind of subdued soap opera as Auchincloss gives us sex, scandal and suicide among the upper crust--but the stories are invariably rendered in the refined, elegant, unfailingly tasteful prose for which Auchincloss is noted.

“Tales of Yesteryear” is populated with men and women whose names appear in the social register, whose standing is calculated not only by their net worth but also by the clubs to which they belong, and whose language is decorated with Latin and French phrases. They may face the same slings and arrows as the hoi polloi, but somehow they see it all so differently when they know that a trust-fund check is in the mail.

Thus, when a 42-year-old magnate seeks refuge in a nervous breakdown after he is discovered making lewd telephone calls to “the debutantes of the season,” he frets about how his kids will be treated at their private schools.

“Poor Hughie Junior and Lisa! Will they be able to bear the sneers, hidden or open, at Buckley and Chapin?” Hugh Hammersly muses. “Thank god for my money, which can seal all my doors and provide me with private guards if it comes to that. Oh horror. . . .”

And some of the pitiable rich folk in “Tales of Yesteryear” are forced to confront problems entirely unique to their stations in life. The pathetic millionaire in “The Renwick Steles” is all beat up because his wife is even richer than he is--and when, at her suggestion, he collects a few rare Greek monuments, she still manages to one-up him by setting his collection in a garden that makes the stuff look downright shabby.

“But what could you do, sir?” says Tim, described as the “faithful valet of 30 years.” “All the best ones were already in museums. . . . And certainly no Greek things anywhere have a finer setting.”

Auchincloss--or, at least, the characters he writes about--always seem to approach life and love from odd angles. In “They That Have Power to Hurt,” the story of a love affair between a minor art critic and a wealthy woman novelist who presides over an elite literary salon, what passes for intimacy is the fact that, “once admitted to her inner circle, one could relax and even indulge in an occasional bad pun.”

And on the rare occasion when a man and a woman actually do it , there’s still a highfalutin tone to the proceedings that masks a certain emotional numbness.

“Whereas she may have made love to the remembered rhythms of ‘Tristan,’ ” recalls the second-string art critic of his love affair with the lady novelist, “I enhanced my lust with images of a proud Roman dame submitting helplessly to the rape of a barbarian.”

Something of the same cold-bloodedness is found in “The Man of Good Will,” the first and longest of the eight stories collected in “Tales of Yesteryear.” Seth Middleton, a retired New York attorney, visits his grandson at college to measure the seriousness of the young man’s suicide threats; he ends up trying to persuade the troubled young man to do his duty in Vietnam--a curious technique, I must say, to rally the spirits of a suicidal youth.

Seth, we are permitted to see, is curiously aloof, even slightly numb. He prefers his club to his Wall Street law office or to the rose garden at his place on Long Island because he finds himself “more in symbiotic relationship with the small portion of human society in which his lot had been cast.”

He’s a complacent Episcopalian who is “not ashamed to own that such faith as he had might not survive the least revision of the King James version.” And he’s an especially gracious sort of lawyer who insists that “the elegances of life were as little as possible to be neglected.”

So the encounter between grandfather and grandson, which turns out to be an orgy of revelation in which the darkest family secrets are spilled in the most casual way, is somehow attenuated and hollow at the core. And when Middleton learns that his efforts were unavailing, and the grandson has taken his own life, the old bean is mildly bemused but not exactly grief-stricken: “There was a kind of macabre justice in it.”

The characters in Auchincloss’ stories are so preoccupied with good manners, good breeding and good form that I began to wonder if Auchincloss isn’t engaging in an oblique form of satire, even a kind of self-satire. And yet, if Auchincloss is a satirist at all, he is so cool and even chilly that one can never sure if he isn’t perfectly serious about the whole enterprise.

“All those silly gentlemanly standards of yours went out with gold stars and Little Lord Fauntleroy,” says the doomed grandson in “The Man of Good Will,” and I wondered if the same isn’t true of the world that Auchincloss describes so intently and even lovingly in “Tales of Yesteryear.”