Prestige in the form of status attaches to universities, teams, clubs, restaurants, the law, ancestry, religion, culture, and the state. Sometimes the award of prestige is plain and unarguable: the prestige that goes to superior courage or strength or intelligence, or talent or beauty. Sometimes it is somewhat mystical and highly arguable: the prestige conferred through heredity, or by fame or money, or through association with or imitation of other holders of prestige. When the reasons for prestige cannot be explained by logic, ethics, or aesthetics, it becomes unstable, shaky.
No complex society has ever done without prestige; in such societies, prestige splinters off into manifold forms of status. The social hope bound up in prestige is that striving to attain it will bring out the best in the society’s men and women, driving them to higher and higher achievement. Then there is the hope that the attainment of prestige will itself make its possessors better. In the United States, the prestige of the presidency, the Congress, and the Supreme Court is habitually spoken of in connection with the hope that some of this prestige will, for reasons not quite explicable, rub off and improve the men and women who become associated with these institutions. But even where prestige has no uplifting function, it seems to find a place, as if fulfilling a human need. Rank according to prestige is said to obtain even in prisons, with men who have attempted big money crimes ranked at the top and child molesters at the very bottom.
A society can perhaps become too prestige laden, and also too respectful of prestige. The latter might well render its members too respectable, too uncritical, too cowed for the health of the society. A society with too few sources of prestige, on the other hand, is likely to have a paucity of strong traditions, causing it to float sadly adrift, with no greater goal than its members’ individual betterment. When prestige is badly used—consider again how negligible honorary degrees have come to seem, after decades of being handed out to unserious people—it evaporates, and fairly quickly.
Ideally, that society would seem best ordered in which prestige most closely approximates merit. Of such societies where the distance between the two had been very close, only two come to mind: Athens in the fifth century B.C. and England in the middle and latter half of the nineteenth century. In those places during those times, the best people—the most capable, the most responsible, the most meritorious—had for the most part risen to the top. Yet even here, such is the uncertain nature of prestige, close inspection would doubtless discover a good deal of prestige wrongly placed.
Perhaps it is best that the distance between prestige and merit never close completely, that the two never become congruent. If it did, prestige would go only to the brave, the smart, and the beautiful. People who were born ungifted, un-beautiful, unlucky—that, I’m afraid, includes most of us—would have no opportunity to share in prestige. A properly arranged society is one that is somehow able to parcel out prestige, top and bottom, without depleting it and yet without making it so widespread as to lose its allure. From positions high in government to poet laureateships to bowling trophies, a complex society will find numerous ways to make prestige seem both available and laudably valid.
While it is a common occurrence to find, as Henry James once remarked, “imbeciles in very great places, people of sense in small,” it nonetheless will not do, if prestige is to maintain some semblance of gravity, to have too many imbeciles in great places. If societies must have elites, establishments, hierarchies—and no known societies of any complexity have ever been without them—it is best that there be some substance to them. But whether there is substance or not, the machinery of prestige grinds on.
In fashion, in medicine, in art, Proust noted, there must be new names—by which he meant, of course, names to which prestige will attach—whether their bearers altogether deserve it or not. Literary prizes must be awarded whether books good enough to deserve them have been written or not; honorary degrees must be conferred whether there are people who deserve them or not; high government officials must be chosen and elected whether they are up to their jobs or not. Only every time a bad book wins a prize, an oaf is honored by a university, a mediocrity or worse serves in high office, prestige leaks away, never to return quite in full.
Prestige can disappear quickly. Four or five bad years and a reputable publishing house can lose its cachet. A decade of hiring inadequate professors and the same thing can happen to a good university or academic department. Three or four poor secretaries of state and the office seems depleted of gravitas. A wayward generation or two and a family with a long history of distinction is done in. Despite the (slightly twisted) pleasure that some take in the spectacle of the mighty fallen, the loss of prestige, when the prestige was solidly earned, is one of the sad events in the human drama.
Seeking deference, the snob believes it can be acquired through prestige. In the algebra of the snobbish mind, prestige equals deference. He reverences prestige, but he gets it wrong. He keenly senses its allure, yet the magic of it drives him a little mad. He hovers around prestige, and when any comes his way, he wallows in it. He knows prestige, knows its power. He can usually be counted on to know who or what has prestige, and to a fairly precise degree.
But the snob desires prestige and with it status in and for themselves. There is nothing he won’t do to acquire them, and he doesn’t want to hear any damn nonsense about merit, either. Still, though the snob knows everything about and surrounding and connected with prestige and status, his misunderstanding of both remains fundamental. What he fails to comprehend is that neither can be obtained, at least not successfully, as an end in itself. Prestige accompanies high achievement, is an accouterment of solid accomplishment. At the banquet of life, status is a side dish, never a main course. Prestige and status come by the way; they are not, in themselves, the way. So eager to be among the major players, the inner circle, the upper crust, the snob doesn’t get it. He also doesn’t understand that one of the best means of acquiring prestige and carrying status is not to give a damn about them, for the paradox of prestige and status is that the more one hungers for them, the more one is willing to do for them, the more elusive they become.
PART TWO
Everything painful and sobering in what psychoanalytic genius and religious genius have discovered about man revolves around the terror of admitting what one is doing to earn one’s self-esteem.
—Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
11
To You, I Give My Heart, Invidia
THINGS—purchasable, visible, palpable things—ain’t bad. I make this very obvious statement because I was educated to think that things really are pretty bad, that they are trivial, encumbering, ultimately corrupting. Although I grew up in a home where things were valued—not things I would later myself much value, as my tastes became, presumably, educated—it was at university that I first heard things attacked through the use of the word materialism, the scourge word for anyone interested in possessions. Materialism turns out to have all sorts of complicated meanings—in philosophy, in Marxism—but the rather coarse meaning it had when I first came across it was purely pejorative. To be a materialist was to be seduced by the world’s goods. What was wrong with the world’s goods was that they took one’s mind off such lofty things as art, ideas, the good life. “Gaudy things enough to tempt ye,” runs an old verse by John Banks, “Showy outsides, insides empty.”
The secular hero of anti-materialism is Socrates, in many ways the most admirable man in human history. In his book on Alcibiades, E. F. Benson writes that Socrates “seems to have attained without effort that complete independence of material joys and pleasures at which the ascetic arrives only after years of discipline and struggling self-denial; to Socrates such indifference was natural.” All such joys—including those of the flesh—were thought to be a drag on the spirit. The worthy spirit was interested in higher matters, in mind and meaning, in glimpsing truth, though Socrates’s act—tighter than Noël Coward’s at Las Vegas—was always to deny he had any spe
cial purchase on the truth. He was merely a bald, ugly man in a tattered cloak, come into the agora each day to investigate the pathetic suppositions of those who claimed to know the truth. Among the suppositions he was most easily able to rout was that material possessions could bring one the least scintilla of happiness. Happiness was available only with the acquisition of truth, itself the sole possession worth having.
Socrates was right: ultimately, of course, possessions cannot bring sustained happiness. But houses, cars, artworks, elegant clothes can nonetheless be amiable distractions until such time as one figures out how to attain the real thing, genuine happiness. And for those not in contention ever to receive happiness via truth at the Socratic level, they offer some of the best entertainments the earth has to offer. For those of us not operating on the Socratic heights, things can bring (forgive, please, the rhyming) that ting-a-ling that little else can bring. And even for those with pretensions to operating on the Socratic heights, possessions can rank high among life’s pleasures. One thinks here of Allan Bloom, the University of Chicago Neo-Platonist who filled an apartment with Baccarat and Lalique, wore Charvet and Lanvin duds, paid out tens of thousands of dollars for stereo equipment, and who, when living in Toronto, was only half jokingly said to have single-handedly kept the local Georg Jensen shop in business.
I try to remember when I first recognized that the world contained superior goods and that I didn’t possess them. I half suspect this sad knowledge came with leather. As a kid on the playground, I did not have one of the best baseball gloves, all of which were then, and apparently still are, made by a firm called Rawlings. I had a decent glove, mind you, but not a Rawlings, and I also sensed that I probably could not persuade my father to spring for the extra money, perhaps ten dollars more, that a Rawlings glove cost—at least, so unlikely did I think my chances of succeeding, I never tried.
When I went off to college, I didn’t have wretched luggage, but I began to run into people who had much better luggage than I. They had tan suitcases, smooth or grainy, often monogrammed (lest they forget their names?), with strong zippers and good locks, a pliant but solid feel. Such luggage hinted at good things within: soft fabrics beautifully tailored, swell colors, stylish clothes. I have read The Catcher in the Rye only once, in my freshman year at university—on the train down, in fact—but in my dim recollection of the book I remember a scene that had to do with luggage. I now discover that I misremembered it, thinking that Holden Caulfield, the book’s hero, had poor luggage and that his cheesy roommate Stadlater had splendid luggage. But on rechecking I find J. D. Salinger gave Holden good luggage. (Could he not bear to send the kid off to school without those excellent Gladstone bags?) At another prep school, an earlier roommate of Holden’s envies it, hiding his own ragtag luggage under the bed and claiming to people visiting the room that Holden’s bags are really his.
When a graduate student named Irving Singer visited the by then aged George Santayana at the Hospital of the Blue Nuns in Rome, he noticed “two travel-weary suitcases under a table.” Santayana, having detected his noticing them, remarked: “I know they’re old and battered, but they’ve been all over Europe with me.” Singer writes: “His caring about this diminished slightly my admiration.” Odd, but it raises mine. To think that the elderly philosopher, who had perhaps thought more subtly about the large questions than any man of his generation, was still concerned that pathetic luggage might show him to be a man unmindful of the small things in life strikes me as impressive. I would myself expect Santayana to have old but distinguished suitcases. So, my guess is, did George Santayana.
I have never seen the luggage of Gerald and Sara Murphy, friends of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Hemingway, Picasso, Diaghilev, and others, American denizens of Paris and the French Riviera, charming hosts of Villa America at Antibes, but it must have been terrific. How could it have been otherwise, since Gerald Murphy’s father owned Mark Cross, the high-line leather-goods company, selling everything from steamer trunks to key cases! Gerald Murphy’s often quoted saying that “living well is the best revenge,” by which he meant revenge against the fates, who (as you may have noticed) do not make a common practice of giving us precisely the lives we want. This proved to be so even for this rich and beautiful couple, who in later life were supplied with more than enough trouble to compensate for their early advantages.
Mark Cross is now out of business, but I can recall passing its shop in Manhattan when I was young, taking in its unmistakable feel and smell of deep tanned. leather; it was pure swank, and then seemed awfully expensive. I now regret that I never went into minor hock to buy something there (a wallet perhaps, or a key case), but I never took the plunge. Living as life then forced me to do—responsible at the age of twenty-six for a wife and four offspring—provided no revenge at all.
Not much later, in Chicago, I became enamored of a cigarette lighter, a gold, pebbly-grained Dunhill that sold for $45, at a time when $45 represented close to half a week’s salary. I was then a professional smoker, a two-pack-a-day man, punctuating everything in my life with a cigarette. I would take myself to Dunhill’s, three or so blocks away from the office where I worked; inside, lifting the lighter, turning it over in my hand, I felt its texture, its heft. Flick it open and a spirited flame leapt before one’s eyes. I must have thought about that lighter for the better part of two weeks—thought more about it than I did about world events, my family, my work, even my brilliant future. Enough, I thought, buy the freakin’ lighter and get on with your life, friend.
And so I did. The fighter gave great pleasure. Every time I reached into my pocket to light a cigarette, I felt a minuscule but real jolt at the thought of my owning such a lighter, a small thing but the best and most elegant of its kind. I don’t believe I looked down my nose at poor devils forced to use Zippos and other coarser instruments, not to speak of paper matches. But I felt a certain contentment knowing that in one department of life, the lighting of my cigarettes, I had achieved the untoppable sublime. Forgive me—do not turn away from me as irretrievably lightweight—if I say that, in some inexplicable way, this gave me a limited but quite genuine happiness.
After a year or so—try to hold back your tears here—I lost the lighter. But the pleasure its possession conferred determined me henceforth to be extravagant, in a selective way, in minor things. I could not and cannot now afford the grand things: the second home in Tuscany, the small but perfect Matisse over the fireplace, the $2,000 suit. But I have bought the $300 fountain pen, the occasional $70 bow tie, the cashmere jacket. A little voice within says “let ‘er rip,” and I do. Piker stuff to some, I realize, but the element of petty extravagance somehow lights my fire even now.
Why such things do so has its snobbish pertinence. Take the matter of clothes, an item that, beyond providing cover and warmth, oughtn’t to matter in the least. Of course there are clothes many of us wouldn’t be caught dead in, but if this is so, why oughtn’t there be clothes we should most wish to be caught alive in? When I was in my last year at the University of Chicago—a place where no one seemed to care how one dressed—I discovered and bought a raincoat at the Wabash Avenue shop of Abercrombie & Fitch, which in those days could easily have outfitted one for a full-blown safari. It was an unlined single-breasted raincoat of a perfect tan, with a collar that fell just right and perfect tortoise buttons. The coat only seemed to get better the longer I wore it: it broke in beautifully, like a fine baseball glove, or a wallet, or a good husband. Its brand name was Macintosh, which is, I later came to realize, also the generic English name for a raincoat. It was more expensive than the general run of such coats, but not gready so. I loved that coat. I felt I looked marvelous in that coat. ("Dahling, you look mahvalous, simply mahvalous.") The coat made me feel confident, which is merely another way of saying at home in the world. When it wore out, I tried to buy another, but the company had either ceased importing to America or had gone out of business. I never found another nearly as pleasi
ng. Had I been able to acquire more Macintosh raincoats, I would today, I feel certain, be a distinguished United States senator (retired).
Complications can result if the thing or things you love become widespread, and through popularity lose their cachet. I liked to think that I had a special interest in design, in and for itself. But I see the subject of design is all over the New York Times and other newspapers, shops going by the name Good Design now exist, and my interest begins, just slightly, to wane. I was reminded not long ago by my son that, when I took him, as a boy of eleven, to buy a winter coat, the salesman took a coat off a rack and announced that here was a very popular coat this season. (“Nobody goes there anymore,” Yogi Berra once remarked of a restaurant. “It’s too crowded.”) My response, my son reminded me, was that if it was popular we’d rather not see it. Snobbery—or, as in this case, reverse snobbery—never sleeps.
Things not only (rather obviously) have their allure, but (perhaps less obviously) they can suggest power and even be aphrodisiacal. “George always notices the aroma of Harold Mose,” writes Kurt Andersen of a wealthy television producer, in his novel Turn of the Century. “Why hasn’t Ralph Lauren bottled this fragrance? (Maybe he has.) It must be the daily haircut plus fresh flowers plus cashmere plus BMW leather plus the executive-jet oxygen mix plus a dash of citrus. That is, Mose smells delicious. He smells rich.” That “dash of citrus” is a nice touch, but the fact is that I know that smell—it is the smell of serious money taking time out for superior grooming—and Andersen has it right.
There is scarcely any object, once turned into a commodity, that does not have its snobbish possibilities. Consider the wristwatch. Once a utilitarian object, an advance over the pocket or pin watch, the wristwatch has now become chiefly a piece of jewelry. The number of watchmaking companies is almost beyond counting; the various models, the range of prices, the sheer glut of watches are an amazement. Who needs, wants, wears all these watches? “Charlize Theron, Chloé Sevigny, and Courtney Love,” reports Talk magazine, “have all been spotted sporting the new $4,000 Bulgari chronograph—which means you have about a minute left to get in on the trend.” (Oops, too late!)
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