Snobbery

by Joseph Epstein

  Now in my seventh decade, am I, at last, anywhere near the snob-free zone? I think it fair to say that I haven’t much interest in the social climb. When I think of people for whose company I yearn, I find the majority of them no longer alive. I have a weakness—a snobbish weakness?—for people who exhibit style, but style with the strong suggestion of substance behind it. From the previous generation, I should have liked to have known Noël Coward, Audrey Hepburn, George Balanchine, Marcello Mastroianni, Vladimir Nabokov, George Marshall, Edmund Wilson (when sober), Billy Wilder, of whom only the last is alive. Of people still in full career, I find that, among public figures, I admire Pierre Boulez, whom I met once and found both haimish and winning; Mikhail Baryshnikov, who surmounted the obstacles of being born to wretched parents in a miserable country to go on to become a prominent artist with a selfless devotion to his art; and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who seems to me not only the most talented person in political life but the only one with whom I’d care to sit down to lunch.

  On the other side—people with whom I wouldn’t care to sit down to lunch—I include almost all current university presidents, present members of the U.S. Senate and Congress, most contemporary writers and painters, actors, athletes, and anyone vaguely known as a socialite. I came upon twenty-one men and women whom Absolut Vodka featured in an ad in a recent issue of Vanity Fair, all photographed by Annie Leibovitz, ranging in age from the architect Philip Johnson to the choreographer Mark Morris, and including Salman Rushdie, Gore Vidal, Spike Lee, Helmut Newton, Sarah Jessica Parker, and other of the usual suspects. They were in this ad because they were supposed to be avant-garde, hip, fascinating; add accomplished, revered, successful. And yet I find I do not long to meet any of them. (My guess is that they can do nicely, thank you, without meeting me, but that is another matter.) I feel about them as the Jews of Russia once felt about the tsars: they should live and be well, but not too close to me.

  Does my fist of people I’d wished I had known suggest its own snobbery? Possibly. I prefer to think that I have a bias toward people whose stylishness is informed by an unpredictable but subtle point of view, fine tact, and generosity of spirit. In this line, I have always admired a man named Walter Berry, who was the head of the United States Chamber of Commerce in Paris and who shows up in the biographies of such people as Edith Wharton, Marcel Proust, and Bernard Berenson. Edith Wharton conceded that she ought to have married Walter Berry: “He had been to me in turn all that one human being can be to another, in love, in friendship, in understanding.” She arranged to be buried near him in the same cemetery in Versailles. Proust immediately recognized him as a man of quality, and Berry once wrote to Proust telling him that, when asked if he had read Proust’s novels, he always replied: “Yes, but they have a grave defect: they are so short.”

  Not yearning to go socially any higher than I am now—content, that is, with the friends I have—I am, in this regard at least, in the snob-free zone. Not so, alas, in other regards. Much as I like to think myself the democrat, I find myself doing a certain amount of snobbish looking down on, in Lyndon Johnson’s all too mortal phrase, “mah felluh Amurikuns.” On the Outer Drive in Chicago, I am behind a car on whose back window is a decal reading “Illinois State University.” My view is that one oughtn’t even to have a sticker that reads “All Souls, Oxford,” but Illinois State? Of course the thought is a perfectly snobbish one. The guy driving the car is pleased to have gone to Illinois State; maybe he, or his son or daughter, is the first person in the family to have gone to college; possibly he completed his studies at great financial sacrifice. Still, I almost reflexively look down on that decal.

  I do not look down on any of the current American pariahs: cigarette smokers, the overweight, the aged, the un-healthfid food eaters. I rather cherish some among them and feel sorry for others. But I do look down on certain selected people, preferably, it’s true, from a distance and until now unbeknownst to them; yet look down I do, usually with an uncomplicated feeling of satisfaction.

  I am at a concert at the Ravinia Summer Music Festival, in Highland Park, on the North Shore outside Chicago. It is a Pops concert, with Eric Kunzel leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and a group, made up of six Englishmen, calling itself the King’s Singers, since all were once at King’s College, Cambridge. Normally, I shouldn’t have gone to this kind of concert, but I had to miss another concert date, and in the exchange of tickets this was all that was open to me. I didn’t think much of it. Listening to the great Chicago Symphony play the movie and television music of Henry Mancini felt to me like getting into a Rolls-Royce to drive around the block to take out the garbage. The King’s Singers weren’t much, either. Why, I wonder, am I here?

  Bored, I look at the audience of which I am a part in the Ravinia pavilion. It is an older crowd, lots of comb-over hairdos among the men, a fair share of blue rinse among the women. Very suburban, I think: thick-calved younger women, men wearing pastel-colored clothes. They seem happy hearing this stuff, the musical equivalent of chewing gum, which left my mind wandering. The bloody snobbish truth is, I prefer not to think myself part of this crowd. I think myself, if you want to know, much better—intellectually superior, musically more sophisticated, even though I haven’t any musical training whatsoever and cannot follow a score.

  In part these feelings were justified: the music was terribly thin, leaving no residue, better listened to, if at all, while driving across town on an errand. But why did I have to establish my superiority to my (mildly) detested fellow listeners, even if only in my own mind. Why not simply note them and think about other things? Because, alas, the snob cannot bear to think himself a nobody, even in his own mind, and he certainly doesn’t want to think himself included in an audience of what he sees as dull people, who have, as W. H. Auden once said to Nicholas Nabokov about a bureaucratic group in the U.S. Army, the “wrong ideas about everything and belong to that group of people neither you nor I can possibly like or condone.” And rather than sit back and enjoy this concert, unmemorable as it was, I had to make plain, if only to myself, that I am a much more serious person than these people sitting around me, and serious in a way that deserves recognition, even if (again) only to myself.

  Why do those thoughts play in my head at all? Why did I need to assert my superiority, even to myself, when no one was contesting it? Why cannot I, even so late in the day, grow into one of those admirable fellows—reasonable, tolerant, generous-spirited, honorable—that Jefferson called “natural aristocrats” and that a liberal arts education is supposed to form but almost never does?

  Strange. And ridiculous. Snob-free zone? Haven’t myself yet arrived anywhere close. Perhaps in the next life. Or possibly the one after that.

  10

  The High, Fine Nuttiness of Status

  ASNOB, in one common definition, is anyone who thinks himself superior in a way that demands recognition. Samuel Johnson, speaking to the potential snob in us all, wrote: “There lurks, perhaps, in every human heart a desire of distinction, which inclines every man to hope, and then to believe, that nature has given himself something peculiar to himself.” But how to gain the recognition mentioned in my first sentence, how to establish one’s distinction mentioned in Johnson’s? Each presents a problem the solution to which often comes under the heading of status.

  Does one pronounce the word stay-tus or stat-us, and does either pronunciation suggest something about one’s own (however pronounced) status? Unclear, but what is clear is that power and wealth often confer status, yet status is different from either power or wealth standing alone. Status is not in the possession of its holder but in that of its beholder. You cannot confer status on yourself; you are forced to look to others—equals, people above you, often people below—to confer it upon you. The trick for the seeker of status is to surround himself with visible evidence of his rank, or worth, or reasons for being highly regarded, so that he doesn’t always—doesn’t ever, really—have to announce it.

  Stat
us used inextricably to be lashed to class. One of status’s chief functions formerly was to make plain—sometimes quietly, sometimes quite blatantly—a person’s social class. In the bad old days of the Soviet Union, the world’s most brutal attempt at imposing a classless society, many jobs entailed wearing uniforms that unmistakably indicated the standing of the persons who wore them. The social clarity this conveyed must have been something of a relief, removing all guesswork from social observation, rather like the colored belts worn in karate. Would something similar in social life—red belts worn by people with an annual income of more than $50,000, purple belts for more than $100,000, brown belts for more than $250,000, black belts for more than $500,000, suspenders for more than $1 million—be an aid and great convenience?

  Or do we already have all the guidance we need in the clothes people wear, the houses they live in, the cars they drive, the subjects they choose to talk about and the selection of language they have at their disposal to do so? Is my man from the previous chapter with his Illinois State University decal all that different from the man wearing his Princeton tie? Both are advertising, and what they are advertising is their social class. The other night, coming out of a restaurant, I noted a man leaving his Jaguar with the valet parking attendant; the woman with him was twenty or so years younger than he. He looked to be in good shape—a heavy-workout man, no doubt—was wearing black shirt and trousers, the big wristwatch. He was advertising, too, advertising that he is a man with heavy money.

  But these are easy cases. Nowadays the advertising is more subtle, complex, difficult to distinguish. Status calls are more complicated because many Americans prefer to play interesting games with their status. They wish, in part, not to come on too strong with it; at the same time, as with the ads for the American Express card, they aren’t quite prepared to leave home without it. As status is lashed to social class at one end, so at the other is it lashed to fashion. One reads the now more than forty-year-old bestseller The Status Seekers by Vance Packard and notes how drastically the symbols of status have changed. In the time of Packard’s book, having an air conditioner visible from outside one’s house was thought to be a strong statement of one’s arrival in the upper reaches of the middle class, and a television antenna on one’s roof did something similar for the lower middle class. Closer to our day, William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote about having his limousine specially lengthened, which must have seemed a grand thing in its time; but today the height of vulgarity, surely, is arriving in a stretch limo.

  At the upper reaches, status may consist of not being presented with a check at an expensive restaurant because it keeps a running tab for you, or of a woman’s wearing short sleeves in public in winter, thereby quietly showing that a warm chauffeur-driven car awaits her. (Malcolm Muggeridge once said that you never want a job that provides a car and chauffeur; when the job ends, you’ll miss the convenience sorely.) The only thing not now marked by status, near as one can make out, is the form of one’s demise: the card one draws here—easy or painful death—seems to have nothing to do with one’s status in life.

  Exerting status is another matter. “This is Gene Siskel.” I was sitting in the syndicated movie reviewer’s Volvo station wagon when I heard him say, car phone pressed to his ear, “Have you a table for four?” Note the use of the name up front, before the request. The hour was late and the restaurant about to close, but apologies were extended and so was a not very heartfelt promise on Siskel’s part that he would try the restaurant again. A nice reversal on this is the story told of Ira Gershwin and his wife and another couple about to go out to dinner at a fashionable Manhattan restaurant. Gershwin offered to call for a table. He returned to say none was available. “Let me try,” said the other man. He returned to announce that they indeed had a table available at eight o’clock. Everyone wanted to know how he was able to accomplish this. “Simple,” he said, “I told them I was Ira Gershwin.”

  People in America must exist who are utterly oblivious of their status, but I’m not sure that I have ever met one above the age of twenty-one. Contented with one’s life, confident of one’s success, one nonetheless cannot help notice that this phone call has not been returned, that e-mail went unanswered, the long letter filled with requests found no response. Whatever all this means, it cannot redound to certainty about one’s own standing.

  Major shifts in the status of people, and things have been a regular part of the proceedings in America for the past thirty years or more. Fur coats, once a symbol of female glamour and luxe, became almost a political liability in the 1990s. The tweedy, Waspy male professor became nearly an alien presence in a university culture that preferred victims. Journalists, riding high during the Watergate era, saw a precipitate drop in their status by the late 1980s, when they once again came to seem camp followers, paid voyeurs, and slightly crummy. In Washington during the Reagan and then again during the Clinton administration, movie stars seemed to rise in status over lawyers and various rainmakers and power players.

  In an ad for a special issue on status of the New York Times Magazine (November 15, 1998), five editors of the Hearst magazines division are quoted saying something stupid on the subject of jeans, the most piquantly silly of which runs: “I think jeans connote a new kind of status. When you wear them, you demonstrate that you have enough power to dress comfortably. It means you have the power to relax.” I shouldn’t have thought to read the deeper meaning of jeans this way—especially as a man who has not owned jeans for forty years and doesn’t plan to acquire any between now and the grave—but then status tends to bring out the nuttiness in people.

  Sometimes such things can be explained, sometimes not. The sociologist Alan Wolfe writes: “Revolutions in status give us all the excitement of rapid social change with little of the accompanying turmoil. . . . Status transformations have their victims and their costs, but if there is going to be rapid change, then let it be over symbols. No one knows who will be in America’s status elite tomorrow. But we do know that just as we will have the rich and the poor and the powerful and the powerless, some will have more status than others.” In our day, radical status shifts may have as much to do with making the world go round as money and sex.

  While status can be sexy, it isn’t always, or even usually, about money. A status system isn’t a money system, as witness such status phenomena, mentioned earlier, as working-class chic. At a baseball game in Chicago, I pointed out to a friend from Los Angeles two large, bulky young men seated two rows ahead of us, remarking that such physical types either wouldn’t be permitted in southern California or, perceiving how inelegant they were, would see the immediate necessity for taking their lives. My friend disagreed, saying I was missing something new on the contemporary scene: the human equivalent of the sport-utility vehicle. Men who were oversized and meant to seem menacing, like the SUV itself, represented a new California style. Thus can status, apparently, even alter body shape, or at least the way we are supposed to view it.

  If all this makes the world seem goofy, it makes it goofiest of all for the snob, who often has to run fast just to stay in place—that is, if he or she wishes to stay in the game, the game being to get to, or at least somewhere near, the top of whatever social set is the object of his or her desire. But the difficulty with status is that it can make snobs of us all, for it is difficult wholly to ignore it, especially when, as now, status is no longer something one is born to yet isn’t necessarily tied to one’s achievements either.

  Status is of course tied to prestige, itself a vague, airy, insubstantial thing, but crucial in the arrangements of any society. Prestige is, in Webster’s words, “l: standing or estimation in the eyes of people: weight or credit in general opinion. 2: commanding position in men’s minds: ascendancy.” It also happens to be that thing the snob most reveres, wants, and almost always gets wrong. The snob requires prestige, cannot get along without it, thinks possession of it will eliminate his greatest of all fears—that of being nobody.

&
nbsp; Such is the magic inhering in prestige that it can be aphrodisiacal: it is possible for a woman to persuade herself that she loves a man when it is only his prestige she loves. (From Samuel Johnson to Proust, social observers of some trenchancy have noted that it is difficult to find an ugly duchess.) Everyone who encountered him remarked on Louis XIV’s grand manner of speaking, of walking, of gesture. He carried himself as prestige incarnate. A veteran officer in the French army of the time, finding himself atremble during an audience with Louis XIV, said: “Sire, I hope your Majesty will believe that I do not tremble thus before your enemies.” In the hall outside the Rothschild offices in nineteenth-century Paris, it was claimed that a man took off his hat when the Baron de Rothschild’s chamber pot went past. Prestige can have that kind of effect on people.

  For prestige to have potency certain conditions must attend it. Possessors of prestige must live at a remove from the masses: access to prestige must not be made easy. Nor ought prestige to be too thinly spread through the population: the greater the numbers who share in it, the more it becomes attenuated, dissipated, diminished. Exclusion is part of its cruel magic. Any social circle, club, or university that allows everyone entry cannot hope to maintain its prestige. Here one sees status, prestige, and snobbery all lashed together.

  Although real enough, prestige is not quite rational. Even the word is slightly insecure. Thomas Carlyle called it “a newspaper word,” and, though it has made its way into the language, there are people today—language snobs?—who refuse to accept the word prestigious, with its suggestion of magic, sleight of hand, prestidigitation. H. W. Fowler, in his Modern English Usage, remarks that the word prestige formerly meant illusion or imposture. Wilson Follett, in Modern American Usage, preferred such words as reputable, renowned, famous, illustrious, excellent, meritorious, notable, respectable, praiseworthy, admirable, and glorious.