Snobbery

by Joseph Epstein

  I once found myself in a mild political disagreement with a middle-aged physician. I cannot now recall the matter we argued about, but when it became apparent that, as in most political arguments, no winner was going to emerge, he said with a complacent smile, “Oh, you may be right, but all I know is that I care deeply about people.” (.Esprit de l’escalier: how I wish I’d had the good sense to reply, “I guess that leaves me with only small buildings and strip malls to care about.”) The virtucrat is dedicated to showing you that, no matter their tightness or wrongness, his or hers are morally the finer positions.

  The virtucrat takes the high ground, leaving you struggling down below on the gravel with the rabble. He cares about the earth, children, the economic condition of women, the aged, and he cares in the only way that counts, with all his heart. And the main point is that he cares a lot more than the rest of us—great-souled, large-hearted, perhaps unconscious but nonetheless very real snob that he is.

  Of course, there is a sense in which all politics is about virtue. The national conventions of the two major political parties, viewed as a game, might be called Steal the Virtue. Republicans or Democrats, each party claims to be in possession of knowledge of the good and where it might be found. The Democratic Party cares about the downtrodden and the defeated. The Republican Party wants to get back to the old verities, insisting that our straying from them is what led to the large number of downtrodden and defeated we seem nowadays to have on hand. Virtue resides with us, each party insists; we are the light and the way.

  Still, it’s not difficult to spot a virtucrat, from whichever side he comes. Whatever he may ostensibly be saying, the subtext is that he is fundamentally a superior person (“. . . all I know is that I care deeply about people”). And within every virtucrat, not having to struggle at all to get out, is, be assured, a snob. He may like to think himself a member of E. M. Forster’s little “aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky,” open to the new, hospitable to the young, caring about the underdog, a steadfast justice lover, a terrific guy really. But what especially pleases him is knowing that his opinions are finer than ours—and because of this he is rather better than you and me. This is what makes the virtucrat at heart a snob.

  Virtucrat snobs are to be found everywhere in American life, but they infest some places more than others. The generation that came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s carries a strong virtucratic strain. They tend to think of themselves as the generation that broke down the national hypocrisy of middle-class mores, got America out of the disgraceful Vietnam War, and represented the United States in its highest idealism, imbuing even the smoking of pot and easy fornication with social significance. Anti-abortion, which is to say pro-life, forces—and what a virtucratic word pro-life is—have something of the same sanctimoniousness, only coming from the other side of the political spectrum.

  Just now in our history, more virtucrats are to be found on the left than on the right. The left has always styled itself the side of the heart, leaving the right with the liver, that bile-producing organ. Conservatives and those on the right are usually willing to settle for thinking themselves correct on political issues; those on the left have always needed to feel not so much that they are correct but that they are also good. Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, sentimental, foolish, a dope; disagree with someone on the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, cold-hearted, a sellout, evil—in league with the devil, he might say, if he didn’t think religious terminology too coarse for our secular age. To this day one will hear of people who fell for Communism in a big way let off the hook because they were sincere; if one’s heart is in the right place, nothing else matters, even if one’s naive opinions made it easier for tyrants to murder millions. The main thing, once again, is that one’s heart should always be in the right place. The rest is moral small beer.

  What makes the virtucrat a snob is that not only is he smug about the righteousness of his views but he imputes bad faith to anyone who doesn’t share them. Upon this imputed bad faith he erects his own superiority. The virtucrat’s is an easy snobbery, too, in that he doesn’t have to act on his lovely opinions. He is for art, the environment, the oppressed, and against violence, hunger, war, the big corporations. What makes these opinions virtucratic instead of merely earnest is that one doesn’t have to do anything more than hold them; they are good cards in a game with no real stakes. Not that there aren’t good and bad causes in the world; there are plenty of both, of course, but the difference between the virtucrat and the men and women who take politics seriously is that, for the latter, politics is about how society ought to be organized, and it isn’t so personal, so much about making oneself feel good by setting oneself apart from the swine who aren’t as sweet-natured as oneself.

  The virtucrat was given a boost with the advent of political correctness. You can always detect him, happy chap, showing his heart is in the right place, Whether addressing a letter “Dear Gentlepersons” or writing sentences that keep an eye out for the pronoun police: “every economist knows that she has to factor in GNP,” “no construction worker feels right entering a fight for which she hasn’t union backing,” and so forth. He glows as only an alrightnik can when he shows once again his heart is in the right place when calling a waitress a “server,” or tapping out “he/she” in a report, or attending a diversity conference in which white men can get in touch with their negative identity feelings about gender, race, homosexuality, and finding other ways to show he is a real pussycat, a multicultural kind of guy. Much of this political correctness is about snobbery—about, that is, making one feel above the unenlightened.

  The victim and the virtucrat nicely meshed during the fatwa ordering that a death bounty be placed on the novelist Salman Rushdie. A Third Worlder, an artist, and now a true potential victim, Rushdie—from many accounts a difficult and unpleasant man—became a grand object of snobbery. Virtucrats among the cognoscenti slavered over him, gaining points through his genuine victimhood. One sees this highlighted in The Year of Reading Proust, by Phyllis Rose, a literary critic of some personal wealth, who was told by the novelist Robert Stone that he wanted her to give a dinner party at her Key West winter home for fifteen people, including a guest of honor whom he couldn’t just then name but who, he promised, was a figure of importance. Professor Rose holds back the name of the mystery guest—it was, of course, Salman Rushdie—till the last moment, to get the most pop from her story. But it’s not a story that edifies. Poor Professor Rose worked fiendishly hard on her dinner, acquiring all the best food, trying to put together the best mixture of people, but it turned out rather flat. Not so flat, though, that she can resist recounting it in her book, where she reveals herself a Mme. Verdurin of our time—Proust’s social-climbing hostess in Remembrance of Things Past, who is unaware of her own deep snobbery.

  If snobbery is the art of demonstrating, blatantly or subtly, one’s own moral superiority, politics offers many opportunities for doing so. One may do so through political name-dropping, a kind of snobbery by association. (“I play golf a lot with Tip O’Neill,” an old high school acquaintance of mine who has made lots of money in real estate once told me.) Or one may do so through the purity one claims for one’s political views—something that went on a great deal, often in a literally murderous way, under Communism, both in Europe and in America. Or one may insist that one’s political views, in their measured nonpartisanship, are not necessarily purer but finer than anyone else’s: here one suggests that the motives behind one’s political views are more disinterested in a way that makes everyone else’s political views seem coarse in their base mundanity. Or one may suggest that one’s political superiority derives from one’s deeper insight into the way the game is truly played.

  This last is the form Gore Vidal’s political snobbery takes. Vidal’s is different from the standard literary man’s political snobbery. He works both sides of the street—the o
ne place you will never catch him is in the middle of the road. An upper-class radical, a cynical leftist, a critic of capitalism who has made capitalism pay through the nose, deeply contemptuous of the country he professes to want to save, Vidal has it every which way. For the snobographer, his has been one of the most amusing performances of the past half century.

  Gore Vidal regularly reminds his readers of his upper-class connections—a grandfather who was a United States senator from Oklahoma, an Auchincloss stepfather shared with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis (about whom he has been comicálly contemptuous), a father who taught aviation at West Point—which is to say, of his place on the edge of the Waspocracy. Or, as Ned Rorem puts it in Lies, the most recent published installment of his diary, Vidal is always thrusting forth “his upper-crust lineage (the only dull thing about him, but which he pushes).” Vidal’s act is to play the patrician trying to save a country so dreary as scarcely to be worthy of his efforts, though against his own better judgment he continues to try. His move some years ago to Ravello, in Italy, where he appears to live in the way of the old Roman patrician class, gives a nice twist to the act. Fiercely ambitious while seeming to mock ambition, requiring vast attention while mocking the publicity culture in which he thrives, he is, as the British writer Karl Miller remarked, “a seigneur who was also a leftist,” “a left-wing lord.”

  Vidal has written about politics in plays and novels (many novels, in which the most admirable figures are remarkably like—here’s a shocker—Gore Vidal), has run for Congress, been a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, been a Joseph Alsop of the Nation and the New York Review of Books but without the anti-Communism or the need for taking responsibility for his opinions, and been a television commentator of only the loftiest views about the folly of his countrymen—that is, the rest of us, swarming below, so many navvies shuffling about with brooms in the heat of the sun. He has made a career out of hard work in the service of hauteur.

  Gore Vidal is no virtucrat. His feeling of superiority requires no mediation by trying to look sensitive in the eyes of his audience. He thinks us all one form or another of naif, simply too obtuse to see the grand swindle of politics that he views with shining and amused lucidity. His condescension is unrelieved. A reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement wrote of The Golden Age, the final novel in Vidal’s series about American history, that “having someone talk down to you for 500 pages grows tiresome.” But Vidal doesn’t court the love of critics or anyone else. Self-love, which in him never goes unrequited, is sufficient for this remarkably confident snob.

  Jonathan Swift once remarked, apropos of politics, that you cannot reason people out of something to which reason hasn’t brought them. But politics nowadays tends to be less about reason than ever; it is much more often about making us feel good at the expense of those who aren’t as kind, generous, and sensitive as we. La Rochefoucauld wrote that “our virtues are, most often, only our vices disguised,” thus formulating with perfection the character snobbery takes in politics.

  17

  Fags and Yids

  IN AN EARLIER CHAPTER, I mentioned tastemakers—designers, decorators, curators, magazine editors, movie and television producers, art, literary, and dance critics, and others—but neglected (quite on purpose) to mention that a large number of them are homosexual or Jewish, and not infrequently both. “I liked this business better,” I not long ago heard the television comedienne Brett Buder joke at a roast for the movie director Rob Reiner, “when it was run by straight Jewish men.” A fairly complicated joke, this, it turns out.

  The reason so many Jews and homosexuals (chiefly, though far from exclusively, homosexual men) have been involved in the formation of taste, and hence in the changes and twists in the character of snobbery, is that Jews and homosexuals have always felt themselves the potential—and often real—victims of snobbery, and of course much worse than snobbery. “Whom do you call a kike?” a vicious old joke runs. “The Jewish gentleman,” the answer is, “who has just left the room.” “What do you call an Irish homosexual?” a three-cushion joke asks. “An Irishman,” the answer is, “who prefers women over booze.”

  Some of the great snobs in literature are portrayed as homosexual or as Jewish. Proust’s great character the Baron de Charlus is perhaps the most notable example; Somerset Maugham’s character Elliott Templeton in The Razor’s Edge— played nicely over the top by Clifton Webb in the 1946 movie version of the novel—is another strong example, an American living in Paris who “took no interest in people apart from their social position.” Ernest Hemingway, in a touch of anti-Semitism, in The Sun Also Rises, mocks his character Robert Cohn for being both Jewish and an upward-looking snob.

  And of course Marcel Proust, himself half Jewish and fully homosexual, was the supreme portraitist of snobs, starting out in life a pure snob himself and ending as the greatest of all anatomists of snobbery. “I don’t think Proust was [a snob],” said George Painter, his biographer. “He began as a snob partly because he was a Jew and a homosexual. If he could be accepted in the place where it was most difficult to get in at all, then that would make him feel better, feel more at home in the world. When he found that [the aristocrats he encountered] had very similar failings to everybody else in his own middle classes or in the working classes of his servants, he was partly relieved, and perhaps a little disappointed. He often says how similar the bourgeois, the working classes, and the aristocracy are in their ways, except that the working classes are much kinder and more intelligent. He became an anti-snob.”

  “In the first place,” said W. H. Auden, himself a make-no-bones-about-it, very-early-out-of-the-closet homosexual, to Alan Ansen, a man recording his conversation for a slender book called Table Talk of W. H. Auden, “all homosexual acts are acts of envy.” Auden does not expand on that impressively large, provocative, and risky generalization, but it is a reminder that the toughest critics of homosexual foibles have tended to be, for a complex of reasons, homosexuals. (Just as, in some ways, the most cunning anti-Semites have been Jews.) Auden might have meant that behind every homosexual act is envy of the family, or child-making, possibilities of heterosexuals. But what he may also have meant is that homosexuals, up until recent years, have been in a potentially degraded position of extremely tenuous social insecurity. The envy Auden may have had in mind is for the comparative social ease of life for people who are not homosexuals.

  One of the best methods for allaying this insecurity on the part of homosexuals has been not to hang back but to step out in front—but carefully, not too far in front—of society, from which position one can change taste and possibly the most basic social arrangements. Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, themselves homosexual, in their book Misia, about Misia Sert, the Polish patroness who kept a salon in Paris in the early decades of the twentieth century, placed Jean Cocteau in this regard when they wrote: “Always a little behind the avant-garde but ahead of society, Cocteau in the twenties was the epitome of the advanced artist as homosexual hero.”

  The Unkage between the social insecurity of both Jews and homosexuals is perhaps nowhere better established historically than in the year 1895, when in France Captain Alfred Dreyfus was falsely charged with being a spy and sent to Devil’s Island, and when, five months later, in England, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor for homosexual offenses under the Criminal Law Amendments Act of 1885. Both trials showed, among other things, the vulnera-bdiliy of Jews and homosexuals, however well integrated into French and English society they might have thought themselves, though neither really did. The situation was not all that much better in the United States, where the Jewish Leo Frank was lynched outside Atlanta in 1915 and many states kept laws against homosexuaüty on their books until recently. Crimes against homosexuals, many brutally violent, continue to turn up.

  Some Jews were so grand—the Rothschilds, the Warburgs—that they were unsnubbable and hence outside the range of injury by snobbery or even virulent anti-Semitism: inside a snob-f
ree zone made possible by immense wealth. Others had the combination of wit and perspective—maybe the two are the same quality—to laugh it off. “Fancy calling a fellow an adventurer,” said Benjamin Disraeli, in the face of what were anti-Semitic attacks on him, “when his ancestors were probably on intimate terms with the Queen of Sheba.”

  Yet the vulnerability for both Jews and homosexuals has never been completely eliminated. “I find much more anti-Semitism among Americans than among Europeans of a corresponding class,” Auden noted. Anti-Semitism has historically taken two forms: one in which the Jews are castigated for being inferior, and another in which they are resented for being superior. Philo-Semitism, where it turns up, tends to be found among the European upper classes. “I like Jews,” the Princess Elisabeth Bibesco said, as recorded in the journal of the Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian. “I like them passionately. Not because they have had an unhappy time of it—no. I like them because they move the horizon forward.” But this view is of course exceptional. Anti-Semitism has a much fuller history than philo-Semitism, for the former, as Sebastian, who was Jewish, noted, “covers up many disappointments.”

  A friend of mine, a successful painter and Jewish, upon telling me that she had moved to Darien, Connecticut, couldn’t resist adding, half jokingly, “I guess I’m now just another Aryan from Darien.” Otto Kahn, the successful New York financier, whose assimilationist efforts caused him to be described as “the flyleaf between the Old and New Testament,” once told a friend, “You know, I used to be a Jew.” “Really?” the friend is said to have replied. “I used to be a hunchback,” making the point that, even with vast financial and social resources, it is not so easy to de-Judaize oneself.