Snobbery

by Joseph Epstein

  A few decades later, much of this time spent reading, I emerged with a broad if somewhat sketchy knowledge of Western history and culture. I learned a few things about the literature of America, England, France, and Russia, and rather less about those of Italy, Germany, and Spain. I listened to lots of classical music, went occasionally to the ballet, viewed a respectable amount of visual art, and I read a vast quantity of criticism on all these subjects, informing myself about what others had thought about them.

  Since I was fortunate enough to arrange my life so that this acquisition of knowledge became almost a full-time job, my cultural hunting and gathering were fairly widespread, though always tending toward the general, as is the way of the intellectual, who is often more interested in the ideas behind the subject than in the subject itself. How far did my culture go? To name names: in literature it ran, roughly, as deep down as Philip Guadella and Lord Berners; in music to Corelli and Reynaldo Hahn; in visual art to Caillebotte and A. M. Cassandre—with, let me admit, vast Gobi-like stretches of ignorance in between.

  Not that there need be a direct competitiveness about such things, but no matter how informed I became, there were always people who knew much more than I. Confident of my own possession of culture, I would nonetheless lapse into occasional error, sometimes late in my life. As recently as a few years ago, I was blithely pronouncing the modern Greek poet C. P. Cavafy’s last name Cav-a -fee, with the accent on the last syllable, until a friend with many foreign languages took me aside to let me know it was properly pronounced Ca-ra-fee, with the accent on the second syllable. (“The mnemonic device, Joe, is,” he said with a sweet and unsnobbish smile, “You’re the Kareem in my Cavafy.”) The other day another friend, also no snob, told me about an acquaintance of ours who recently took over a gallery-shop selling paintings, prints, and lithographs in a swank hotel and that he didn’t know how to pronounce the word genre or the name Seurat. I cringed before saluting him on the beginning of a great new career.

  In intellectual life, everyone begins as a novice. Some have the slight advantage of being brought up in bookish homes, although in America, for some reason, the most impressive intellectuals seem to have been brought up in homes where culture played almost no part; perhaps it was the absence of culture that increased their hunger for it. But turning oneself into an intellectual is all on-the-job training. From learning correct pronunciation to acquiring cultural literacy to becoming adept at playing with ideas to discovering which ideas, personages, issues are more important than others—for all these things there are no schools, no self-help booklets, only one’s own mental energies, love of the life of the mind, greed for that loose collection of knowledge that comes under the baggy-pants category known as the cultural.

  As admirable as all this sounds, how does snobbery get into the game? It gets in because American intellectuals, real and aspiring, generally feel themselves on shaky terrain. The reasons for this go back a long way. When I was at the University of Chicago, while vast quantities of names and new forms (new to me, at least) of knowledge flew in at me, one point emerged with perfect clarity: in matters intellectual and cultural, Europe was superior. Europeans had history on their side: they lived among the great monuments of art; theirs were the countries that gave birth to the towering geniuses of thought and art; they had direct historical experience of Communism and Nazism, the dark political events of the century. Orwell, Camus, Sartre, and de Beauvoir; Silone, Koestler, Arendt, and Jaspers; these were among the leading European intellectuals, and next to them American intellectuals seemed slight, yokels really.

  The philosopher Sidney Hook once told me that he didn’t think Hannah Arendt all that intelligent, but that American intellectuals were cowed by her German education (she knew, among other languages, ancient Greek) and European outlook. He may well have been correct: as improbable as it is to think of Arendt as anything other than the German intellectual she was, if one imagines her as American born, her intellectual luster immediately falls away.

  More recently, American academics have gone well over the top in their upward-looking snobbish reverence for the intellectual phenomenon known as Bloomsbury. Effete, elite, and themselves impressively snobbish in their view of the world, the more the Bloomsbury writers and artists—Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Vanessa Bell, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry—get written about by Americans, the thinner, almost to the point of disappearing, they seem. Yet academics of a certain kind never seem to tire of them.

  Much of the snobbery of American intellectuals, then, has its roots in the cultural inferiority that Americans have felt in comparison with their European counterparts. The sad irony is that the United States for some decades now, has been the main site of contemporary artistic and intellectual interest; in painting, literature, music, and film, America is where the action is. Yet American intellectuals continue to feel, somehow, inferior. And those among them who play what I think of as the European game, if they play it well, win, for their efforts at superior simulation, the world’s prizes and adulation.

  Consider through the lens of snobbery the career of Susan Sontag, whose fame is greater than her achievements and out of proportion to the amount of pleasure her essays, stories, novels, and films have given the people who have troubled to read or see them. Her prose lacks personality; it reads, as the English novelist John Wain once said, like “translator’s English—the sort of composite idiom one gets from great Continental novels one first meets in translation during adolescence.” Edmund Wilson referred to her style as “far-fetched, pretentious, esoteric.” Susan Sontag’s message, though not always easily made out, would appear to be one of (unearned) desolation, like Samuel Beckett’s but with less talent and on a higher budget. The only thing that appears to run really deep in her is her humorlessness. And yet among the enlightened classes (you will pardon my leaving the quotation marks off the word enlightened) Sontag is nearly as well known as any writer in America. What is the attraction? How to explain it?

  The explanation is to be found, I believe, in a winning combination of snobbery and self-promotion that have gone into her career. (The latter is set out in impressive detail in Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock’s Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon.) Sontag was carefully packaged by her publisher as broodingly beautiful, avant-garde, Frenchified, grimly serious. She also happened to have been a writer of perfectly acceptable radically chic views—when young, a knockout American woman who did a fairly decent impression of a European intellectual.

  Outside America, interesting to note, the Susan Sontag act never quite took flight. Her first English publisher dropped her because of low sales. She never caught on in France. And why, after all, should she have, doing as she did an imitation of a French intellectual when the French had more than enough of the real thing on hand. Her left-wing politics—very late in the day, in 1982 in fact, she recanted and came out against totalitarian Communism—would have made her a laughingstock among dissident Soviet artists and intellectuals. She wasn’t sufficiently stylish for the Italians. Only in America, where both a snobbish interest in European culture and a lingering feeling of cultural inferiority still reigned, could she have succeeded as she did. “Susan,” as Yoram Kaniuk, an Israeli writer remarked, “has used America better than anyone.”

  Susan Sontag was for many years a contributor to the New York Review of Books. If one wanted to study intellectual snobbery in America through a single institution, one could scarcely do better than peruse the contents of and contributors to that biweekly journal of politics and culture. One sensed when the journal began, in 1962, at the time of the New York newspaper strike that shut down the New York Times and its Book Review, that it had a large snobbish component. Its first contributors included W. H. Auden, Edmund Wilson, Robert Lowell, Mary McCarthy, Isaiah Berlin, and Igor Stravinsky (usually being interviewed by Robert Craft). These men and women represented not only culture at its pinnacle but culture with a cachet—the cachet here residing in their international, cosmo
politan, in good part English feel and connection. If culture can be said to have a social class, the New York Review clearly traveled upper class.

  The poet Robert Lowell, one of the founders of the New York Review, is another example of how snobbishness can work in American intellectual life. A large, disheveled man with a genuine mental illness—he was a manic-depressive who fairly regularly flipped out in horrendous ways, one of them being his stating the belief that Adolf Hider was no fool—Lowell was far from talentless and possessed real literary culture, all acquired by hard work. But much of his prestige, one couldn’t help notice, was owing to his ancestry, which was impressive as American ancestry goes and practically royalty among American intellectuals, whose own social origins tend to be middle and lower middle class. Lowell didn’t hesitate to play what I suppose we should now call the ancestor card. Life Studies, the book that made him a great figure, had a clearly upper-class accent and setting, being in good part about his family and upbringing, which was of course the world he knew. Still, his poem “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” wouldn’t, let us face it, carry quite the same glow with the title “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Sammy Shapiro.”

  Norman Mailer, in his Vietnam protest book, Armies of the Night, compared his own grubby social condition to that of Lowell’s elevated one: “What do you [Lowell] know about getting fat against your will, and turning into a clown of an arriviste baron, when you would rather be an eagle or a count, or rarest of all, some natural aristocrat [Lowell again] from these damned democratic states.” Poor Norman Mailer, always behind his times, was still smarting under the old Wasp model of snobbery.

  Writers are among the greatest of snobs, and during its great days—roughly from 1963 to 1984—they longed to write for the New York Review. If there is guilt by association, glory is available by the same route. The prospect of having one’s prose appear between an Igor Stravinsky interview and an essay by the art critic E. H. Gombrich was sufficient to cause many American academics to quiver and swoon. The Anglophilic role in the magazine was large; some issues had more English than American contributors, including intellectuals who had been made lords (among them H. R. Trevor-Roper, Noel Annan, and Solly Zuckerman); a joke went the rounds that when one of the journal’s two principal editors went to London, he was treated as if he were the Viceroy of India home on furlough. So successful was all this that the English actually devised a journal, the London Review of Books, modeled on the New York version.

  No journal was ever so successful as the New York Review among American academics. Every two weeks a fresh issue would arrive, fill up campus pigeonhole mail slots, and be brought home by university teachers eager to be instructed on what they ought to think about art, literature, music, and above all politics. The New York Review made the snobbishly brilliant connection between high culture and radical politics, making left-wing views seem integral to highbrow culture. Along with the powerhouse names—Stravinsky, Auden, Wilson, Lowell, and the rest—others scored heavily by appearing in the journal: Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Hardwick, Christopher Lasch. The left-wing iconoclastic journalist I. F. Stone made a comeback via the New York Review. None would have had quite the renown they did without their appearances in its pages. To be sure, it published many useful, brilliant, even grand things. It is perhaps the only journal of its kind in America to have run in the financial black since soon after its founding, owing to American publishers’ eagerness to place their ads in its pages. But its reputation derived from its snobbishness as much as from its intellectual dazzle.

  Academic jobs opened up at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Chicago for academics whose work appeared in the New York Review, whose intellectual validation also meant professional and even social validation. It was not a place where new talent was discovered, but publication there was the mark that a young writer—Bruce Chatwin, Julian Barnes, Robert Stone—had really arrived, after testing his mettle elsewhere. It would never attack the sacred cows that it had let loose on the lawn—Salman Rushdie, Gore Vidal, or Susan Sontag—no matter how goofily, gloriously, incredibly wrong-headed they might be.

  Although it is beginning to slip now—with no Auden, Wilson, Berlin, Stravinsky et alia on the scene—for years the New York Review remained academia’s house organ, the spiritual home of people who pretended they were all out for the powerless without ever for a moment being able to envision themselves outside that Utopia where good taste and intelligence, intellectual and social power combine. It was the journal of choice for those happy few (hundred thousand) left-leaning, right-living intellectuals, happily safe atop a cloud of nearly celestial snobbery.

  16

  The Snob in Politics

  MAN,” said Aristotle, in perhaps his most memorable phrase, “is by nature a political animal.” And so perhaps in a general sense man, and woman with him, is. But not all or even most of us are very political, at least not in modern life. Politics is about power, and while no one wishes, or can stand for long, to be or even feel absolutely without power, most of us don’t think at great length about it—about how to acquire it, how to take it from someone else, how to use it for our own benefit, how to advance our own ideas concerning how society ought to be organized, or about much else in the realm of the political. Aside from wanting those people to hold office whose views seem to us congenial or roughly congruent to our own, or appeal to our special interests or social-class tastes, politics is not the route through which we seek or expect to find happiness. Megalomaniacs apart, politics is for most of us about something very different from power. I happen to think that this something has a lot to do with snobbery.

  “Impotence and sodomy are socially O.K.,” wrote Evelyn Waugh, “but birth control is flagrantly middle class.” Now there is a sentence that gets a person’s attention. One of the things it means, of course, is that much behavior, the most private behavior, is conditioned by social class and has to do with taste. In a letter to his friend Nancy Mitford, Waugh lists a number of other things that made one, in his view, seem middle class: to decant claret, not to decant champagne, certain kinds of notepaper, saying luncheon instead of lunch, and more. Middle class is clearly not a thing that Waugh ever wished to be, once he had acquired some money and set himself up as a squire.

  In a more rigidly stratified society than America has long been, a snob, which Evelyn Waugh most assuredly was, might separate himself in one of a thousand ways, from claret to notepaper, from impotence to sodomy, most having to do with social class. In America, we have found other ways to separate ourselves, and none perhaps more insistent in recent years than through political opinions. Political opinions here sometimes tend to be worn as proudly as Savile Row suits and as subtly as a wafer-thin $5,000 Omega wristwatch with a plain brown leather band. Opinions tend to become ways of identifying a person not only politically but socially. Not to be a practicing Catholic and yet to be against abortion, for example, is to risk tossing oneself in with all those terribly dé- classé Christian fundamentalists, not to speak of the loonies who shoot up abortion clinics and other assorted antediluvians. At least it is to risk seeming so in many circles. “Style is class,” said Trotsky, “not alone in art, but above all in politics.”

  In a thin political culture, political opinions are one more way—for many people a significant way—of setting oneself apart from, and, more important, above the next person. Apart and above is, of course, where the snob wants to be. Politics in its contemporary phase is certainly one way to get him or her there. There are various political paths to this simgle goal, but all entail establishing oneself as deeply enlightened and morally superior. Politics in America, in its nonprofessional, un-smoke-filled-room aspect, sometimes seems to be about little other than establishing the fineness and ultimately the moral superiority of one’s views.

  A way to establish one’s moral superiority in recent decades has been to situate oneself firmly in one of the country’s victim groups, and there has never been a larger st
ock from which to choose than now. At one time or another these groups have included African Americans, Jews, women, homosexuals, Third World immigrants, the handicapped, and just about every ethnic group going except the poor old Wasps. As everyone knows, there’s been a bull market in victims, making them appealing candidates for jobs in government, universities, large corporations, and other institutions. For one thing, along with giving one’s life an element of drama—one is oppressed, unjustly treated, a permanent underdog, and the rest of it—to present oneself as a victim allows one to cut the ground out from others who make an appeal on the basis of their own victimhood. For another, it gives one a special moral status, so that one can live grandly without giving up one’s claim to suffering: once a victim, it turns out, always a victim. The larger point, though, is that if one carefully sets oneself up as a victim, one is in a position of moral superiority to anyone who cannot make the same claim.

  I have felt this small pleasure myself as a Jew in America. Although I’ve not suffered a jot of oppression and very little discrimination in a lucky life, I have held in reserve—never yet called upon—the historical oppression of the Jews. It gives me a small leg up over white-bread-and-mayonnaise Americans, who cannot hark back to historical troubles. It is a smug feeling, entirely unearned of course, giving one a slight moral edge over the next fellow, from which it can be easily transferred to social (or snobbish) superiority, where it seems to work very nicely.

  Yet in the realm of political snobbery even victimhood can be trumped by what passes for that set of perfect political opinions possessed by one of those persons I have come to think of as virtucrats. The virtucrat is any man or woman who is certain that his or her political views are not merely correct but deeply, morally righteous in the bargain. The virtucrat is in no doubt that virtue is on his side. What he believes to be the goodness ofhis political views fills him with a sense of his own intrinsic goodness. He is a prig, but unlike the prigs of other days, he isn’t sniffy about your private life but only your public one. The old prig was contemptuous of the drinker or of the person thought to be sexually promiscuous; the new prig, the virtucrat, will nad you for not having his opinion on Israel or the environment. He is a moral snob.