Watches used to be sold on the basis of accuracy, but now, with quartz movements, even the least expensive watches keep perfectly good time, and so that game is up. One wears the watch one does today because one likes its design; it has been given to one and thus has sentimental value; one wishes to show one can afford an expensive piece of jewelry. Patek Philippe, as of 1997, sold a watch in a limited edition for $44,500; presumably, the demand for it was such that it had to be put on back order. Safe to say that something very different from telling time is entailed in owning that watch.
“Your watch says a lot about you,” a magazine ad for wristwatches not long ago stated. A great many things, evidently, among them how status-conscious, socially anxious, and finally foolish you are to spend the amount you did on an object that long ago passed beyond merely telling time. “The wristwatch remains the most powerfully symbolic accessory in a man’s wardrobe,” a journalist notes in the magazine GQ, and then goes on to quote a vice president from the watch dealer Tourneau: “A watch represents who we are in a society with fewer and fewer ways to distinguish ourselves. When you’re in front of a maitre d’ at a fine restaurant, he doesn’t know what kind of car you drove up in, but he can see your watch.” Can this be so? Is the maitre d’, fiendishly clever fellow, really checking wrists? In my case, I have to wonder, will my André Knokovsky get me one of the better tables or put me just outside the kitchen?
Horses, coaches, and now cars have always held their snobbish cachet, serving as means of setting oneself above the next person. I was once in the garage of an expensive condominium apartment building in Hyde Park, the neighborhood of the University of Chicago, where every car seemed dull, some barely above the tired old cars known as beaters. When I queried the man who lived there why this was so, he answered, with a knowing smile, “Academic motors.” Nice cars in such a setting would be thought more than a little vulgar. A university teacher is supposed to be beyond such things.
An acquaintance told me that he long aspired to own a Bentley, the understated version of the Rolls-Royce, but was discouraged when he learned that Averell Harriman was driven about in a ten-year-old Chevy with no heater (but, he added, with a mink lap robe in the back seat). The Bentley, however, strikes me as the wrong way to go. Better, in my current view, to adopt the go-for-it spirit of john O’Hara. He told himself that, if he won the Nobel Prize, he would buy himself a Rolls-Royce, but then decided, since it was becoming clear he wasn’t going to get the Nobel, he might as well have the Rolls as a consolation prize. By phone he ordered a green Silver Cloud III with his initials painted on the door. “None of your shy, thumb-sucking Bentley radiators for me,” he noted. “I got that broad in her nightgown on my radiator and them two R’s, which don’t mean rock ‘n’ roll.”
From the time of Versailles, when many rewards were to be, had for living in close proximity to the court of the Sun King, a good address has always given off a snobbish ping: Mayfair, London Wl; the Faubourg Saint-Germain; upper Park Avenue; Brentwood. A few years ago someone paid $25 million for a penthouse in the Hotel Pierre in New York; I take it that person didn’t do so purely for either the view or the eat-in kitchen. “Money,” Balzac writes, “never misses the slightest Occasion to demonstrate its stupidity.” The right location in the Hamptons, Malibu, Georgetown, Princeton, the 900 block on Lake Shore Drive, the Back Bay, or Russian Hill will jack up real estate prices manyfold. “We find things beautiful,” wrote Thorstein Veblen, “somewhat in proportion as they are costly.” Perhaps nowhere more so than in connection with real estate, so much of which isn’t intrinsically beautiful at all. Snobbery, Santayana writes in his one novel, The Last Puritan, is “love of a nicer prospect than one’s own.”
The other side of this is a desire to have things just a bit better than one’s friends and neighbors. Robert H. Frank, an economist who wrote a book titled Luxury Fever, reports that most Americans would rather have a salary of $100,000 a year if others were earning $85,000 than have a salary of $110,000 a year if others were earning $200,000. We would, in other words, settle for less if we could be sure that others had still less than we. The point is nicely underscored, as Frank notes, by H. L. Mencken’s definition of a wealthy man as the fellow who earns $100 a year more than his wife’s sister’s husband. Wealth, then, is not merely comparative, but the element of comparison can be crucial, especially to the snob.
Allowing for the exception only of extraordinary views—of mountain or water—the best places to live have traditionally been those where the best and brightest people live. In recent times (what are taken to be) the best and brightest people are often highly mobile, especially if one adds to the mix the youngest best and brightest, who move on to new neighborhoods faster than you can say TriBeCa. Allowing for differing temperaments, what one generally wants in the neighborhood in which one lives is safety, convenience, and pleasantness (if available), but many people are willing to forgo all of this to live in a place that gives them a sense that they are where the action is. Sorry to have to report psychological inflation in the realm of real estate. Pamela Fiori, editor in chief of Town & Country, reports: “If one is to be considered affluent, it is not enough anymore to own a house—even a big comfortable house with all the prerequisite contents. It is the second (or if you’re lucky, the third) home that is now the symbol of success.”
In the 1970s, Jason Epstein, a vice president at the publishing firm of Random House, wrote an article in the New York Review of Books in which he said that to live in Manhattan, one required an income of about $50,000 a year, which would perhaps be equivalent to $200,000 today. “It is possible to manage on less, perhaps on as little as half as much by living on the West Side,” he wrote, “doing without this or that and thinking more or less always about getting by. But to fall below this level is to become not a citizen but a victim. . . . In New York there are few respectable or comfortable ways of being poor or even middle class. To be without money in New York is usually to be without honor.” Deeply snobbish though that passage is, it contains an uncomfortably high quotient of truth.
The East Side of Manhattan has traditionally been a place where the action is, but such places have a way of shifting around; and where the action is usually turns out to be where the richest, cleverest, most with-it, winning people happen to be. I have myself on occasion felt the longing to live in such places, but never have been able to do so. I have been either too poor or (now) too happily settled to live in the vicinity of the Sun Kings of my day. Instead of an exciting or inherently elegant neighborhood, I have chosen a pleasant and convenient one. In Evanston, just outside Chicago, I live two blocks from my office, a block from a swell public library, across the street from a supermarket, and within a hundred yards of seven restaurants and my barber, with two major bookstores just up the street. This great soak in convenience has dulled the excitement of a fashionable address for me. The only real estate I can today be said to long for I cannot afford to acquire: a splendid view of a body of water.
Of ample objects in the realm of things, now that prosperity has become so widespread, all that is left to excite the passion of the snob is ownership of waterfront property, works of visual art by famous artists, and private airplanes. The first-class section of commercial jets, though comfortable on long trips, seems, as you may have noticed, nowadays filled by people who do not themselves seem very first class. This is doubtless owing to frequent-flier programs that make first-class seats available to people who are always aloft on business: salesmen, middle managers, et cetera. Another snobbish possibility thus bites the dust.
Servants might once have been on this list, but the class system has changed, so that servants, were they to be available, which they mostly are not, provide as much complication as they do pleasure. Hence the delight people took in the simple loyalty of the servants portrayed on the PBS series Upstairs, Downstairs, showing that no nostalgia runs deeper than that for something one has never known and now cannot obtain.
Since waterfront property, costly artworks, and private planes are things only the very wealthy can buy, snobs must latch on to small advantages wherever they find them. Not that there is a paucity of things the possession of which doesn’t permit one, properly positioned, to lord it over others. A friend who not long ago wanted to buy a croquet set learned, when visiting the International Croquet Association, that it refers to any croquet set under $300 as “a children’s set.”
The snobbery of things is seen at its highest power iii certain shops in New York, Paris, Milan, and Los Angeles where extravagance itself seems to weigh in as an element in the game. In an article about a young woman and man involved in insider stock trading, the man, when caught, suggested that the young woman, though she suffered gready, wasn’t entirely innocent, and said that she enjoyed the style of living he called “Prada and two dogs.” Prada is the shop where you might find a simple leather belt that costs $500 or a handbag for $5,000. Prada customers, working in movies or television, advertising or art galleries, the fashion or cosmetics business, think of themselves as a self-appointed cognoscenti and are ready to pay heavily for continuing to be able to do so.
Here we enter the snobbery of pure expenditure: the ownership of a Gulfstream V private jet for $41 million; a Rolls-Royce Corniche for $359,900; “the” Hermès Kelly Bag, between $3,200 and $8,000; and a prix fixe blowfish dinner at Ginza Sushi-ko in Beverly Hills for $250. “After seeing what the bourgeois crave,” wrote Jules Renard, “I feel myself capable of doing without everything.”
The “Prada and two dogs” remark is a reminder that dog ownership has long been an item with the smudgy fingerprints of snobbery all over it. Ten or so years ago, King Charles spaniels seemed the breed of choice for the dog owner with a social eye: Ronald and Nancy Reagan owned them, and so did William and Pat Buckley. Not long after, King Charles spaniels were replaced by golden retrievers. I knew a man, a fellow teacher at Northwestern University, much given to the nuances of snobbery in his dress, manner, and spirit, who owned not one but two golden retrievers. I was only barely able to resist examining the chests of these amiable beasts to see if they didn’t bear the logo of Ralph Lauren. Now I sense that there is yet another shift, away from pure breeds toward mutts, half Lab, half you pick it.
If croquet sets and dogs have their separate snobbery systems, so then of course does rose-growing, bowling, and tattoo-wearing. A friend who once edited the London Times Literary Supplement told me that he discovered that every scholarly subject, no matter how minor, had its political divisions; in fact, the narrower the subject, the more intense the politics. Something similar can be said about objects and snobbery. Perhaps the best wisdom on the subject of possessions belongs to Montaigne, who wrote: “I attach too little value to things I possess, just because I possess them.” Very smart. I would only add that such evidence as we have suggests that Montaigne, a nobleman, possessed, in his day, nothing but the best. Easy, then, for him to say.
12
A Son at Tufts, a Daughter at Taffeta
A TOUCH UNNATURAL though the transition from possessions to children may seem, children, in a fundamental way, can be a person’s proudest possession (but it is far from clear, in our day of nervous child-rearing, who, between parents and children, possesses whom). I hope it doesn’t appear outlandish to suggest that children are used in the game of snobbery, because they are so used, and fairly frequently.
Apart from the modest project of continuing the human race, aristocrats historically had children to perpetuate their line, while the lower orders had them as a source of labor, mainly agricultural labor. Although they could prove useful in various ways, from making strategic alliances through marriage to caring for one in one’s old age, children were under the obligation to be dutiful and, at a minimum, not dishonor their family. With the rise of the middle classes and the shift from primarily rural to almost wholly urban economies, the relation between parents and children altered decisively.
Pride in children is of long standing. The Yiddish word kvell, meaning to beam with pride and pleasure, is used most often in connection with the achievements of one’s children. Another Yiddishism, yiches, meaning family pride or prestige, is also frequently invoked in connection with children. Finally, there is “family egotism,” a term I first saw used in Tolstoy for which there is, so far as I know, no Yiddish word but for which there ought to be. Family egotism means not particularly caring if the rest of the world goes to hell so long as all is well with our little Kevin.
None of this will come as startling news, but in recent decades the phenomenon of investing pride in children seems to have been heightened, with children taking a larger and larger place in the psychic economy of the middle and upper middle classes. Among these classes, a vast amount of care is lavished on raising children. At times it seems our entire culture is arranged to see to the needs of children: preschools, private schools, lessons of various sorts, therapies, tests to diagnose learning disabilities, medicines to make up for little mental jiggeroos, parental attention of a kind no previous generation of children, in any land at any time, has ever had bestowed upon it.
Underlying this is a new assumption about child-rearing and human nature that holds that the right combination of genetic makeup and environmental control will produce hugely successful—happy, achieving, creative, sweet—children. As evidence of how much we believe in this, there now exists a vast body of prescriptives about treating the infant in the womb, running from not drinking wine when pregnant to playing Mozart pre- and post-delivery and through the toddler years. From conception till well after college, the child is coddled, cozened, cultivated as the precious piece of property he or she is. In an article titled “The Organization Kid,” David Brooks, apropos of this intense concentration on correct upbringing, writes: “Your child is the most important extra-credit arts project you will ever undertake.”
And a lot is riding, not only for the child but for you as a parent, on how he or she turns out. If you doubt this, ask yourself who in the current age is likely to be thought the greater success: the man or woman who has impressive achievements in science, public life, art, business, or athletics, or the man or woman who has been thought to have had a significant influence in raising two or three swell children? Not only are most people likely to choose the latter, but one can go a step further to say that, should it become known that the former has less than successful or otherwise troubled children, his achievement is likely to be thought not worth the effort. (Example: President Ronald Reagan is said to be currently much beloved by Americans, but the oddity of his by now long grown-up children casts a slight doubt on him as, in his time, a less than successful father.)
Parents who have had a university education, have advanced tastes, and feel the pull of futurity in their aspirations know that their children are up against a new order if they are to succeed. This new order goes by the name of the meritocratic elite, and it is restricted to those who make it not on family connections but on sheer merit and includes those young people admitted to the best schools, thence to the best jobs, thence (the assumption is) to the best lives. A good deal is felt to be at stake, and parents, rightly or wrongly, no longer believe, as once they did, that they need only provide food, shelter, education, and a model of responsibility for their kids and let it go at that.
With so much psychic energy invested in children, snobbery could scarcely be precluded. The clue that there is a snobbish element is first found in the naming of children. Let’s begin with Scott. Anyone who names a child Scott is, I suspect, operating on a (perhaps unconscious) snobbish impulse. Nine times out of ten, perhaps more, Scott is a borrowing from F. Scott Fitzgerald. As such, the first name Scott speaks to a yearning for elegance on the part of the parents who gave their sons that name. Nicole, another name Fitzgerald put into the snob hopper, through the female heroine of his novel Tender Is the Night, speaks to the same yearning, and so more recently does the name Jordan for girls. Gifted in many ways,
Fitzgerald was not least so in his ability to make a certain kind of life, lived stylishly and amid great wealth, seem the best of all lives. Nick Carraway may have been the narrator of The Great Gatsby, but the arriviste Jay Gatz probably comes closer than anyone in the novel, or in all of Fitzgerald’s work, to expressing the author’s own deep desire for the elegant life. Fitzgerald was marvelous at understanding that desire, as only a man on the outside of things could be.
But let us not stop at Scott and Nicole. Think of all the names now out there, all those Brittanys and Tiffanys and Kimberlys, Whitneys and Tylers and Hunters, Saharas and Savannahs and Sierras, Camerons and Caitlins and Catesbys. In Nora Ephron’s novel Heartburn, the chief male character claims to have dated the first Jewish Kimberly. Many Jewish Kimberlys in the world now, and not a few Kellys, Marins, Alisons. (The 1960s gave us such flower-child names as Moonbeam, Jagger, and, in one case I’ve heard of, Irony.) In his novel Turn of the Century, Kurt Andersen notes a family that named its son Max “twenty months behind the curve.” Andersen offers the following paragraph on the naming of children among the parents of his generation:
George has been amazed to discover that there were two Griffins in Max’s class this year. . . . But Griffin is precisely the kind of name that’s in vogue among parents who send their children to nonreligious private schools called St. Andrews, who buy forty-dollar-a-gallon Martha Stewart paint and fifty-dollar doll-size American Girl butter churns made of solid chestnut. One of Max’s classmates is named Huck—not Huckleberry, Huck—and in Lulu’s class there is a Truman, a Chester, a Sawyer, three Benjamins, two Coopers, a Walker, a Hunter (Hunter Liu), as well as multiple Amandas, Lucys, and Hopes, and even a Gwyneth.
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