Snobbery

by Joseph Epstein

  For the snob, this fear of ridicule—or if the snob has the social whip hand, the delight in inflicting ridicule—is uppermost in questions of taste. Taste can be contentious. In many realms where taste seems significant, some people have inherently better equipment for making judgments, for demonstrating more intelligent preferences, than others: a stronger sense of color, a better feeling for design, a more sensitive palate. (In Cousin Bette, Balzac writes of the apartment of M. and Mme. Marneffe: “Yet there was no art or distinction in the furnishing, nothing of the effect which good taste achieves by intelligent selection of possessions.”) But taste can also be composed of a fusion of assumptions, predilections, and simple prejudices. It can also be eclectic, a hotchpotch of borrowed bits from yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

  Sometimes this fusion powerfully coheres to result in large, almost philosophical swings in taste, such as that in the early nineteenth century that brought about the change from Classicism to Romanticism, both in the arts and in human personality. Although not nearly so volatile as fashion, taste can sometimes take quick and radical turns. One year what is thought the best taste will be on the side of experiment and originality; two years later it will be on that of conservation and tradition. It is of course always easier to make out the taste of ages other than one’s own. To ask what is the reigning taste of our age is to become acquainted with the difficulty of the exercise.

  “Each to his own taste” is another of the towering clichés on the subject, but one usually says it confident that one’s own taste is superior to the persons who, or the disagreements that, occasioned the remark. For a long while now taste has been more than an individual matter. It has become a social phenomenon. One’s taste more than likely will betray one’s social class, personal aspirations, conception of oneself. One’s tastes—in food, in clothes, in culture, in politics and opinionation, in nearly everything—have become items upon which the world stands ready to judge one, and, as like as not, damn harshly. In some circles, to speak well of, say, Whittaker Chambers, Andrew Wyeth, Wayne Newton, nuclear power, or processed cheese, or even to commit a grammatical solecism, is considered a grave social lapse. “She is the kind of person,” I once heard a woman say with deadly disdain about another woman, “who regularly misuses the word hopefully.”

  People began to be judged by their taste a long time ago. The Due de Saint-Simon does it regularly in his memoirs of life at the court of Louis XIV at Versailles, and others must have done so well before him. Baldassare Castiglione, in The Book of the Courtier (1538), set out ideal behavior for Renaissance ladies and gendemen, any breach of which would have constituted a lapse in taste. When H. W. Fowler’s book Modern English Usage (1926) was first published, it sold fifty-five thousand copies in the United States, so worried were Americans about making errors in grammar, usage, and pronunciation, all once considered lapses in taste. Emily Post’s Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home (1922) was for years a strong seller whose message was that no false steps could be permitted in the respectable middle class, where life was a minefield of potential faux pas. Today we have the more sensible and wittier Miss Manners, but the need for someone to set up as an authority, even in our vastly more informal time, has not yet ceased.

  Perhaps the only thing more chilling than too great an awareness of possible lapses in taste is a total unawareness of them. One of the socially saddest, even frightening scenes in American literature is that in William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, in which Lapham, a self-made man, decent enough and honest in his own way, disgraces himself when dining with the parents of his future son-in-law, who come from a family of considerably higher social rank than he. Lapham’s discomfort is neatly built up by Howells, and it begins with his unfamiliarity with the most obvious details of the meal that is set before him: “It was not an elaborate dinner; but Lapham was used to having everything on the table at once, and this succession of dishes bewildered him; he was afraid perhaps he was eating too much. He now no longer made any pretense of not drinking his wine, for he was thirsty, and there was no water, and he hated to ask for any.”

  Meanwhile, Lapham has drunk too much, and now, alone with the men over brandy and cigars, he gases away confidently about things no one at table cares to hear about (his relatives, his employees, his business acumen). His confidence builds, and he begins to believe he is the equal, as he puts it to himself, “to their society, or to the society of any one else.” He is, in fact, their equal, but he doesn’t know how the game is played. He goes home flushed with the belief that he has scored heavily, that “it was a great time; it was a triumph.” If one has any heart at all, one’s flesh crawls at poor, socially benighted Lapham, who has, in the realm of taste, committed the sad sin of having gone too far, way, way too far.

  Taste is often about knowing how not to go too far, lest one expose oneself to the withering put-down or otherwise be exposed to the cold eye of snobbery. “Being tactful in audacity,” said Cocteau, “is knowing how far one can go too far.” But Cocteau was a professional avant-gardist whose job was precisely about going far enough. For almost everyone else it will not do, for example, to appear to be spending too much time thinking about taste. Nor will it do not to seem to give too much thought to it. Even the freest spirits have feared being caught on the barbed wire of taste. Lady Diana Cooper, who as a young woman was counted among that smartest of smart sets in pre-World War One England known as the Corrupt Coterie, readily took morphia but refused to drink either whiskey or gin. “To reduce oneself to a stupor with morphia was risky, perhaps immoral,” writes Philip Ziegler, Lady Diana’s biographer, “but to drink a whiskey and soda would have been common—a far worse offense.” An offense, in other words, against that arbitrary construct known as proper taste.

  Some people believe that one comes into the world with one’s own natural faculty of taste, but that this is deflected by one’s education, social class, and fear of seeming outré and finally twisted into some proximation of the standard taste of one’s day. Strong character is required to assert one’s true taste. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein makes a distinction between taste and originality. “Taste,” he writes, “can be charming but not gripping.” Taste, in his view, “is refinement of sensitivity: but sensitivity does not do anything, it is purely receptive.” He believed that “a great creator has no need of taste; his child is born into the world fully formed.” (Shakespeare, when you think about it, was weak in the line of taste—thank God.) Taste refines and polishes, but creates nothing. Wittgenstein’s own fear was that, as a thinker, he himself had taste merely.

  But most of us are not Wittgenstein’s “great creator,” and instead struggle to acquire such good taste as we can through education and experience. Except for that infinitesimally small group of persons with unerringly true taste—with perfect manners, easy elegance of dress, an eye for the beautiful in nature and art, a penetrating instinct for judgment of people, and an independent spirit that accepts only those opinions learned in one’s own heart—except for this small, possibly nonexistent group, most of us, however we might pride ourselves on our acquisitions in this realm, suffer at least a slight worry lest in one or another important division of life our taste will be found wanting.

  If the possession of taste does not imply the possession of originality, neither does it usually imply the possession of moral worth. Taste can be a curiously amoral faculty. One can have the most exquisite taste and yet in every other wise be the dreariest of creeps. And of course one can have no taste at all and be wondrously good-hearted. The snob’s error is to put good taste before a good heart—to put good taste before almost everything else. Clearly a fine thing to have, good taste can lend harmony, elegance, and graciousness to one’s life. Yet to pride oneself on one’s good taste is not only the beginning of snobbery; it is also unseemly and, in and of itself, a piece of certifiably bad taste.

  In a mobile, some would say positively jittery society where one can
rise up and fall down so quickly, the display of good taste can be decisive either to reach one’s social aspirations or to hold on to one’s place. Money can be important—no one, it has been said, has ever been kicked out of (capital-S) Society for having too much of it—but without a show of what passes for acceptable taste, no rise can be successfully negotiated, and in an earlier day specialists in the realm of good taste were hired by the newly rich to take the rough edges off them so that they could make an easier entry into Society.

  When taste changes speedily, one usually finds, in the conduct and accouterments of that small band of select persons whom the rest of society has somehow or other decided to admire, clues to what passes for good taste. At different times these select persons have traveled under different banners: the Four Hundred, Café Society, the Smart Set, the Jet Set, the Beautiful People, all of whom appear to be in possession of a magical combination of wealth, power, glamour, elegance, freedom. Admired or envied or secretly despised, in the realm of taste they lead, and the rest of the populace that can afford to follows as best it can. What makes it somewhat confusing is that at different times the social atmosphere can give off very different signals: tradition-bound conformity in one period, an air of boundless liberation in another, will be the hallmark of superior taste. One needs an inner radar system in good repair to interpret the reverberations of this accurately.

  Unless one decides not to care in the least about what passes for the good taste of one’s age, and decides instead that good taste really is good sense, which means that in friendship, it is represented by tact, generosity, and above all kindness; in possessions, by comfort, elegance, utility, and solidity; in art, by beauty, harmony, and originality; in culture generally, by a discriminating tolerance for tastes at odds with one’s own. This is very different from that taste which is determined by being around people thought tasteful, taking pleasure in cutting oneself away from the mass by the criterion of ostensible good taste, and being supremely confident in judging—and thereby putting down—others by the standard of what one takes to be one’s own exquisite taste. All of which is, of course, the way of the snob.

  9

  In the Snob-Free Zone

  IS THERE a snob-free zone, a place where one is outside all snobbish concerns, neither wanting to get in anywhere one isn’t nor needing to keep anyone else out, for fear that one’s own position will somehow seem eroded or otherwise devalued? A very small island of the favored of the gods, clearly, this snob-free zone, but how does one get there?

  To be wellborn is a start. To be blessed with ample talent cannot hurt. To have been fortunate in one’s professional, marital, or personal life will provide a genuine boost. To have won the lottery on an $80 million payoff week would be a serious help. And the easiest way into this zone may be not to care at all, to feel no aspiration, envy, resentment, anger at social arrangements, to live contentedly within oneself and be shut of the whole damn social racket. Yet this last, the cultivation of sublime indifference, may not be the easiest but the toughest way of all into the snob-free zone.

  Let me attempt to draw the portrait of a man (one could do something similar for a woman) who might have a chance for a life in the snob-free zone. I would begin by placing him on the lower edge of the old upper class. The poet Robert Lowell seems to have been in this condition, a Lowell but not one of the inner circle of Lowells—those Lowells who spoke only to Cabots, and of course we all know the only grand party to whom the Cabots spoke. I imagine him, then, to have upper-class family connections, but not be quite of the upper class, lest he seem to share too completely in that class’s dreariness and likely snobbery. He should be slightly of the upper class, in other words, but not enough to be tainted by it.

  His schooling ought to be mixed, public and private. All private might make him seem too privileged, too lucky. A taste of public schools—perhaps through grade school—would show him not to have existed exclusively in cushy surroundings; it wouldn’t do to make him look as if he’s had too easy a ride. Having gone to public school, too, will give him a democratic touch—in a democracy, not a bad thing to have. (Paul McCartney and his wife sent their daughters to public—in the American sense of the word—schools, which could be interpreted as a brilliantly snobbish move.) He will have been a respectably good student, but not a great, an off-the-boards astonishing one.

  I would have him go to Andover or Groton, thence to Harvard or Princeton, and put in a year at Oxford or Cambridge, the last to Anglicize, cosmopolitanize, and polish him a bit. I don’t believe any of these places is so wonderfid, please understand, but the world seems to believe they are, so if our man is to enter the snob-free zone, he must do so in terms the world recognizes. Besides, having gone through such institutions, he will come to understand that the world, in its estimates, is often stupid, and never more in recent years, when everything has begun to break down, especially in education. Having gone to what are thought very good schools, he will have taken their measure and never have to think—yearningly, in part snobbishly—as so many people seem to do, how different his life would have been had he only taken thought to have gone to better schools. Unlike, say, poor Jay Gatsby, he will not have to falsify an educational résumé.

  He’ll require money. “A man may be despised,” says Balzac, “but not his money.” Our man doesn’t have to be a billionaire, but he ought to have enough to take him out of the financial wars, so he need never do anything despicable for reasons of money alone. Being in possession of serious money—“holding,” as they used to say at the racetrack—will give him freedom in other ways, not least by cutting down on his longing, which in turn reduces his susceptibility to material snobberies of various kinds, from cars to summer houses.

  He will have earned his own money. At . . . what? Something for which he has an inherent skill, or a craft he learned by sedulous application of his talents: he could be an artist of some sort, possibly an architect, or maybe he has begun a business, manufacturing or selling something useful and well made. His work gives him pleasure and no cause to believe his days misspent.

  His wife, unlike him, is Jewish, a pediatrician perhaps, also happy in her work, physically attractive, a respectable money earner, kindly, large-hearted. They have two children, a son and a daughter, good enough at school, with no known hang-ups or other problems or disabilities.

  The family is never put to any of the tests of snobbery. They are never excluded, everywhere thought to be winning and always wanted; and, because so confident are they of their own quality, they have no thought of excluding anyone else. Such clubs as they join—a tennis and swimming club, for their daughter is an ardent tennis player, their son a swimmer of promise—are joined for their utility and pleasantness alone. Status is never a first, nor even a last, consideration. Such judgments as they make about persons, places, and pleasures are made on the basis of intrinsic and therefore genuine merit, never on that of being the right social, professional, or political move. Happy family, I would say, lucky family. Let us hope there are a few such in America, while remaining free to doubt it.

  Yet perhaps this is all wrong, and the person who is in the snob-free zone is more likely to be a half-black, half-Hispanic man in dreadlocks who is young, bisexual, and a painter of terrifying pictures of childhood abuse, from which he is known to have suffered but for which he is everywhere vaunted.

  I can think of a man who lived in a snob-free zone in whom snobbishness, though never justifiable, might have been understandable. He happens to have been a cousin of mine whose name was Sherwin Rosen and who was an economist at the University of Chicago. He was. supposed to have been in line for the Nobel Prize in economics before he died, of lung cancer, in 2001, in his sixty-third year.

  At his memorial service and at a dinner afterward, I was impressed not only by the range of people who spoke on my cousin’s behalf but by their varying personal styles. None seemed particularly elegant, handsome, suave. Neither, for that matter, was my cousin. He w
as instead immensely winning without any of these qualities, and in part because he didn’t seem to care about status at all. He enjoyed owning sporty cars—a white Audi sports coupe was his last—and drinking good wine and listening to classical pianists and playing jazz piano himself, but he made no fuss about these things. He made no fuss about anything, in fact, except economics. He judged his colleagues by their skill at their discipline, and, apart from their characters, nothing else. My guess is that he judged himself by the same criterion.

  He once told me that he was offered something called an Albert Schweitzer professorship in New York, which would have almost doubled his salary, but he said that, even though he could have used the money, he couldn’t accept it. He couldn’t because he needed the bruising intellectual combat that his colleagues at the University of Chicago Department of Economics gave one another. It wasn’t pleasant, but, he felt, he needed it. When one of his best students did not land a job in one of the better-regarded universities, he told the student that it was a good thing, for it would take him outside all the worry about prestige and throw him back on his talent as an economist, which, if his devotion was such as to bring out his potential, would in the end result in his being made offers by better schools. Which, the student said, is exactly what happened.

  My cousin Sherwin’s way into the snob-free zone was simple enough: care only about one’s work, judge people only by their skill at their own work, and permit nothing else outside one’s work to signify in any serious way. View the rest of the world as a more or less amusing carnival at which one happens to have earned—through, of course, one’s work—a good seat. Judge all things by their intrinsic quality, and consider status a waste of time. One of the reasons I liked him so much is that he brought all this off without any contortion of his essentially kind character.