I was also taken to the Covenant Club, a Jewish city club, by friends whose parents belonged. We played basketball or handball in the gym, swam, took the steam, had a swell steak sandwich in the men’s grill. The most notable, and just slightly notorious, member of the Covenant Club was Sid Luckman, the quarterback of the Chicago Bears in the forties and early fifties, who would pocket himself away with a few rough-looking pals for what one assumed were high-stakes gin rummy games.
Although I didn’t then understand the force of this distinction, the Covenant Club’s membership was composed of Jews of Eastern European background, which are my own origins. Another city club, the Standard Club, only a few blocks away on Plymouth Court, was in those days made up chiefly of Jews of German background, who held themselves as grander than their Eastern European coreligionists. If the former thought the latter coarse, the latter thought the former stuffed shirts. (In Yiddish, a German Jew is known as a yekke, which means jacket, and derives from the stiffness of the German Jews in never taking off their suit coats. An old joke asks what is the difference between a virgin and a yekke, to which the answer is “A yekke remains a yekke.”) There were also German-Jewish country clubs, such as the Lakeshore, whose golf course was laid out by Frederick Law Olmstead, designer of Central Park in New York.
(A digression here on the snobberies among and between ethnic groups, some of them historical. I recall in the early 1960s coming upon a copy of Jet, the African-American magazine, that someone had left in the seat next to me in the IRT subway whose cover story was “New York’s Puerto Rican Problem.” I was once going to rent a house from its Greek owner in Babylon, on Long Island, who, when picking me up, asked if I was Jewish. When I said I was, he averred: “Before we begin, Mr. Epstein, I think you should know that it takes four Syrians, three Italians, and two Jews to cheat a Greek.” Ethnic groups, I have sometimes thought, are merely the largest clubs of all.)
I had no friends whose parents were members of the Standard Club, and my distant sense of its membership in those days was of small, stern-faced men—Jewish bankers, lawyers, and investment counselors playing with big numbers—in dark gray suits and neckties with quiet patterns who were not so much proud of as resigned to making the best of being Jewish, though among other requirements for membership was the extent—it was assumed to be high—of one’s giving to Jewish charities. Members of the old Standard Club prided themselves on their solidity, and were probably correct to do so.
If the Covenant Club excluded by money—the initiation fee and dues were not small—the Standard Club excluded by both money and ancestry. Some might see a harsh justice in the fact that in those days the respected members of the Standard Club couldn’t get into the Chicago Club, the Illinois Athletic Club, and other city and country clubs from which all Jews were relentlessly restricted.
Which recalls the story about the two successful New Yorkers from the garment district, Lou Shapiro and Irv Rabinowitz, standing in front of the Union League Club on East 37th Street. When Shapiro asks Rabinowitz what the building is they are standing in front of, and is told that it is a club, Shapiro says, “Great. Think I’ll join. I could use a shvitz and some herring after a day on Seventh Avenue.” When Rabinowitz tells him that he has no chance to get in, a Jew hasn’t been a member of the Union League Club since its founding, Shapiro, stirred by the dare in his friend’s voice, bets him $100,000 that in three years he will gain membership. Rabinowitz ups the stakes to a quarter of a million. Shapiro proceeds to have a total makeover: undergoing plastic surgery, changing his name, taking voice lessons to alter his accent, inventing a new résumé. With thirty days to go, beautifully tanned, in a Savile Row suit, Lou Shapiro walks into the office of the executive secretary of the Union League Club and announces that he would like to apply for membership. The secretary, looking him over approvingly, informs him that he need answer only a few questions on the application, which he himself would be delighted to fill out for him.
“Name?”
“Townsend Birmingham Baxter,” says Shapiro, brandishing his newly changed moniker in his newly acquired mid-Atlantic accent.
“Schools attended?”
“Groton. Yale. Balliol, the latter as a Rhodes scholar.”
“Law firm that handles your legal business?”
“Sullivan and Cromwell.”
“Financial firm?”
“J. P. Morgan.”
“This is all excellent. Only one more question. Religion?”
“Ah,” says the former Lou Shapiro, “goy, of course.”
In a real-life variant of this joke, Sol M. Linowitz, the former chairman of the Xerox Corporation and ambassador to the Organization of American States, used to take me to an elegant club in Washington called the F Street Club. Understated, out of the way, it had a dignified maitre d’ and pleasant Irish waitresses. No menu was presented; a single dish was served to all, but the food was always delicious. Often we had a room to ourselves, in which we traded one Jewish joke after another. The one I just told may have stimulated Sol Linowitz to tell me that when Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker put him up for the F Street Club, informing him that it was a place where one could have a lunch meeting where privacy was guaranteed, he, Sol Linowitz, checking the membership list, noted that his was the only Jewish name on it. He went forthwith to report this to the club’s manager, saying that this felt awkward; it made him feel, don’t you know, as if he might be something like a token, don’t you see. No more was said. Within a few months, other Jewish names appeared on the membership list. Nicely handled all around, I’d say.
In my youth, as it does today, the Standard Club had the best kitchen in the city of Chicago. The club hasn’t been able to maintain its German-Jewish exclusivity, for the yekke line has long since been broken by intermarriage—to Eastern European Jews, chiefly, though not to them alone. One goes into the place now and encounters brash lawyers, commodities traders, real estate operators with expensive haircuts, gaudy wristwatches, and overpriced designer clothes, and women with money but no interesting secrets of the kind once held by the wives whose husbands had been members there. Except for its food and possible convenience—if one has an office nearby, say—there is no compelling reason to join, and I am told that, with more and more people living in the suburbs, the Standard Club worries about its membership dropping precipitously.
Ten or so years ago I was asked to speak to a dinner club in Chicago called the Wayfarers, whose members constituted the city’s cultural and educational establishment: presidents of local universities, the chairman of the PBS station, local publishers, successful architects, foundation executives, a small selection of presentable academics, a few cultivated physicians and businessmen—an attempt, in short, to approximate in Chicago something akin to the Boston Brahmin tradition. The Wayfarers met one Tuesday a month (excluding the summer months) at the old Chicago Club to have a few drinks, eat a decent dinner always beginning with oyster chowder, and hear a talk not to exceed half an hour on a subject of cultural or civic interest. The annual cost was $250, which paid for a year’s dinners.
After my talk, I was invited to become a member of the Wayfarers. Why not, I thought, membership would get me out a bit more, perhaps give me a better sense of the city in which I live. The club had a number of members for whom I had genuine regard. I joined. I attended meetings. I met a few impressive people, including a physician named Henry Betts, who was the head of the Rehabditation Institute of Chicago, which treats patients who have been in terrible accidents or who have intractable physical disabilities.
One evening at dinner, Dr. Betts introduced our table to two young physicians training under him at the institute whose names I didn’t catch. In the interlude between dinner and that evening’s talk, he sent one of these young men with a $10 bill down to get him a cigar. When the young man returned, with a Macanudo cigar, Betts said, “Thank you, Willie, but didn’t you forget my change?” As the young man dug into his pocket, I came out of my daze to rea
lize that this Willie was William Kennedy Smith, who had been prosecuted for alleged rape in Florida and whose Kennedyness obviously didn’t phase Henry Betts. Good man, Dr. Betts—the kind of man I’d invite to join my club, if I had one, any day.
But I would have needed at least one incident of this kind each month to keep my interest in the Wayfarers even marginally engaged. Dutifully, I went to the club’s meetings for a few years. I even put up a friend, a brilliant jurist, for membership. I drove to meetings with a man named Raymond Mack, a sociologist who had been the provost of Northwestern and whose company I much enjoyed. Moments occurred when I felt a touch of that snobbish satisfaction that membership in even mildly distinguished groups can bring. Rank has its privileges, and I suppose I am still sometimes pleased that others assume I have middling rank and thus deserve minor privileges.
The problem, though, was that among the Wayfarers I found myself bored a very dark navy blue. The talks, I understood, were meant to be a bit dull, but most of them pushed the envelope into the thin air of dullness where one gasped for mental oxygen. The best parts of the evening for me tended to be the drives up and back with Ray Mack. Whenever I missed a meeting I felt relieved, like taking off a raccoon coat in August. After three years, I resigned, and it hasn’t since occurred to me to regret it.
I have to conclude that I am unclubbable. Unlike John O’Hara, who kept embossed seals of his various clubs on his gold cigarette case, I apparently take no continuing pleasure in clubs nor any real satisfaction in the thought that I have been asked to join a few of them. Might this be because my snobbery is of a different order than that which membership in even moderately exclusive clubs stimulates? Might it be that, unlike Groucho, I am convinced that I am too clever to take the pretensions of any club altogether seriously? No, my snobbery is of a different kind, the kind I think of as intellectual snobbery.
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Intellectual Snobbery, or The (Million or So) Happy Few
SNOBBERY has traditionally been founded on birth, access to power, fame, in some quarters wealth, and (on occasion) knowledge. But if knowledge doesn’t register on the snobbery scale for everyone, among people in what one might think of as the knowledge business—among people, that is, who fancy themselves, in the loosest sense of the term, intellectuals—snobbery runs more rampant than bacteria through the kitchen of a Tijuana slow-food restaurant.
Nobody is born an intellectual, or with intellectual interests, or even with much in the way of a natural propensity for those things of the mind that most excite people who think themselves intellectuals: ideas, art, and culture. A high intelligence quotient may help, but it isn’t an absolute requirement; many people with stratospheric IQs—among them people doing high-level science—have little interest in things that absorb the thoughts of intellectuals. Intellectual interests have to be learned, acquired, cultivated. They are in some sense artificial, a construct of a sort, and chiefly the work of previous intellectuals.
An intellectual is a man or woman for whom ideas have a reality that they do, not possess for most people, and these ideas are central to the existence of the intellectual. Because of this extraordinary investment in ideas, the intellectual is occasionally admired for a certain purity of motivation, but he or she is just as often thought of as unreal, out of it, often a comical, sometimes a dangerous character. Historically, the intellectual has been guilty of all these things.
Intellectuality is the quality of being able to talk about ideas—political, historical, artistic ideas—in a confident, coherent, or (best of all) dazzling way. If not everyone admires intellectuals, intellectuality tends to garner praise, especially from the social classes that think themselves educated or enlightened, among whom I include most but far from all members of the vast army of Ph.D.s now roaming the universities.
Whenever intellectuality is on display, an air of edginess, contention, one-upmanship, put-down, or general nervousness I won’t say pervades but usually hovers over the proceedings. All this provides fertile ground for snobbery. Most intellectuals I have known have had at least a tincture of snobbery; it seems almost to come with the job. Sometimes the snobbery is intramural, or among other intellectuals exclusively; sometimes it looks down on all who make no claim to intellectuality; and sometimes much more than a tincture is entailed: “The melancholy thing about the world,” wrote V. S. Naipaul, an authentic intellectual, “is that it is full of stupid and common people, and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and the common.” Sometimes, as I say, much more than a tincture.
In certain pockets of intellectual life, traditional snobbery crops up in high relief. In American publishing there has always been a strong strain of traditional snobbery. Publishing is a business that attracts people with a disdain for business and a yearning for culture. Book editors tend to be paid low but lunch high, taking agents and authors to expensive restaurants. Some of the most impressive restaurant snobbery I’ve seen has been at lunches to which I have been taken by editors, including one at which an editor asked the maitre d’ at a French restaurant why, oh why, did they leave the cheese out of refrigeration for so long?
The tradition of snobbery among those in publishing perhaps begins with the oenological pretensions of Alfred Knopf, founder of the firm of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. The story is told that Knopf’s brother, being well aware of these pretensions, invited Alfred over for dinner and laid in an expensive botde of wine. When Knopf faded to react to the wine, his brother asked him what he thought of it. “How can I tell,” Knopf is supposed to have replied, “drinking it out of these glasses.” I once heard Clifton Fadiman, a longtime judge of the Book-of-the-Month Club, say with a sigh that all that remained of interest in life for him were a “few wines and certain cheeses.” He was sixty-three at the time and had thirty years yet to live; let us hope that those wines and those cheeses were available in sufficient supply to see him off the planet. Michael Korda, of Simon & Schuster, who likes to be photographed in jodhpurs, wrote a book called Power! How to Get It, How to Use It, whose impulse seems to have been how to encourage a feeling of hopelessness in others and make snobbery work for one’s profit in a corporate setting. (His uncle, Alexander Korda, the movie director and producer, was known in London as a snob of the highest power.) Jason Epstein, for years a vice president at Random Hoiise, states in a recent memoir that he doesn’t keep a paperback in the house, and has elsewhere reported on his pleasure in buying rare Chinese herbs for his gourmet cooking and acquiring only the best culinary equipment.
In academic life, snobbery is stronger in some places than others. In. her novel The Mind-Body Problem, Rebecca Goldstein posits the notion that the further an academic’s subject is from the truth, the more snobbish he or she is likely to be. In this amusing scheme, mathematicians and physicists care least about clothes, wine, food, and other such potentially snobbish refinements, while people in English, history, and modern language departments, whose subjects put them so much further from the solid ground of unarguable truths, care a great deal, since their reputation for being cultivated is really all they have going for them. Quite nuts, or so it might seem, if lots of evidence didn’t support it.
The snobbery of intellectuals may be owing to the uncertainty behind the mask of authoritativeness intellectuals feel the need to wear. Snobbery also insinuates itself in intellectual life in ways far from purely intellectual. The novelist Jean Stafford once remarked that “the greatest snobs in the world are bright New York literary Jews,” by which she meant the crowd of intellectuals around Partisan Review and Commentary in the 1940s and ’50s, almost all of whom, born to immigrant parents, came from insecure social positions and were thus perhaps more susceptible to snobbery than most people.
But then a general nervousness has always been present in America when it comes to intellectual attainments. With the large increase of Americans attending colleges and universities after World War Two, anyone who had been to college was almost required to show an interest in culture, w
hich meant in novels, painting, plays, serious music. (Pierre Bourdieu has written that “nothing more clearly affirms one’s ‘class,’ infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.” He also notes that one’s taste in sports tends to identify one, the range running from hockey to polo.) Russell Lynes, an editor at Harper’s Magazine in the 1950s, wrote what was to be an essay that divided people on the basis of their tastes in culture into highbrows, middlebrows, and lowbrows.
All this would change toward the end of the century, but when I was coming into intellectual consciousness, the highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow distinctions were important, even crucial. There wasn’t much room for negotiation, either. To be called a middlebrow was to be more roundly condemned than to be called a lowbrow, though highbrow, like first class, was the only way to go. Real as they were, and remain, these distinctions nonetheless inevitably bring snobbery in their trail. Even among political radicals, these cultural markers had their snobbish currency. “Stalinists were middlebrow, the Trotskyists were highbrow,” Irving Howe, himself a Trotskyist in the 1930s, remarks in the film Arguing the World. “We prided ourselves on reading Joyce and Thomas Mann and Proust . . . whereas they were reading palookas like Howard Fast.” Which only goes to show that, even among Communists and socialists, room was found, in the domain of the intellect, for snobbery.
I cannot be certain when, precisely, I determined to become an intellectual. But the notion first took hold at the University of Chicago, where the intellectual life was made to seem tantamount to the good life. In my desire to present myself to the world as an intellectual, I labored under a little technical difficulty: I didn’t know anything. The great benefit to me of the University of Chicago in this endeavor was that it provided many important clues about where to go to learn a few essential things, which, forthwith, I set out to do.
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