Snobbery

by Joseph Epstein

  Some homosexuals have been, or at least felt themselves, in a position of unassailability comparable to that of very grand Jews. These have been homosexual artists, chiefly, especially those who positioned themselves as above and beyond and thus invulnerable to society in its drab quotidian social concerns. Yet despite all the outward changes in attitudes in American life toward homosexuality, despite all the new enlightenment and heightened tolerance, when it comes to the crunch a person’s homosexuality may still be used like a lash against him, even by people who happily go about wearing red ribbons on their lapels in support of the fight against AIDS.

  To the best of my knowledge, I have never been held back for being Jewish, but I shouldn’t be shocked to learn that, a time or two, I myself may have been the gentleman who just left the room. Much of my Jewish education—apart from the three years of sketchy training in Hebrew in preparation for my bar mitzvah—was in the form of my father’s regular warnings about the always lurking prospects for anti-Semitism, especially for someone carrying a last name like Epstein. Growing up in a part of Chicago and going to public schools where Jews were roughly half the population, I never sensed any strong animus against myself as a Jew. The first time I felt uneasy was when, as a boy, I began playing tournament tennis in and around Chicago. Tennis was mainly a country club sport in the early 1950s, and the clubs where tournaments were played were usually restricted. This was the first time I had stepped out of my predominantly Jewish world in any significant way. In tournaments, I suddenly ran up against kids named Vandy Christie and Gaylord Messick. When asked one spring by my high school tennis coach to be a ball boy for a tennis exhibition at the Saddle and Cycle Club in Chicago—also restricted—I agreed. The players that afternoon were Bill Talbert, Tony Trabert, Hamilton Richardson, and Antonio Palafox, who played for the Mexican Davis Cup team. From that afternoon, I remember what seemed to me the easy generosity of spirit of Bill Talbert, the good nature of Palafox, the intensity of Trabert, but a certain edge to Hamilton Richardson. I am perhaps doing him an injustice as I write about this now, but I sensed that I had to be wary of this man, who set my Jewish radar atwitter. Nothing untoward happened, but I recall feeling a palpable relief that I had gotten through the afternoon without Richardson—Ham, as the other players called him—yelling at me, complaining about me, somehow or other humiliating me. Pure paranoia, no doubt, but there it was, a case of Jewish nervousness I had not hitherto felt and hoped not to have to feel ever again.

  In the realm of snobbery, then, Jews and homosexuals tend to be more alert to the snubs, or even the potential for snubs, that can be rendered them in the wider society in which they operate. The more delicately attuned among them, if they have strong and sensitive social antennae, tend to get out in front of the loop and sometimes to lead it. Others hang back, too cautious to engage the world in a fully open way. But real social security may finally not be available to either.

  As for feeling socially secure, one day I found myself sitting in a concert hall in Jerusalem, awaiting a performance of Shlomo Mintz and the Israel Chamber Orchestra, thinking that it may well be that everyone in this hall is Jewish. I had only to say this to myself than to realize that, for strange reasons, I prefer to be part of a minority. I liked my status as a Jew in the United States. Being part of a small though active minority, I felt that I had an interesting angle on the larger society of which I was a part. And more and more a secure part: thirty years ago, for example, it would have been unlikely for a Jew to have attempted a book on the subject of snobbery, except possibly from the standpoint of being a victim of it. You’ve come a long way, Izzy.

  Truman Capote, who in some ways, mutatis mutandis, may have been the American Cocteau, had for a number of years been running with what passed for the smart set in Manhattan, becoming especially close to the women who comprised the heart of the set: Babe Paley, Nan Kemper, Slim Keith, and others. Then Capote made what turned out to be a (socially) fatal mistake by publishing, in Esquire, “La Côte Basque, 1968,” a chapter of a book he planned to call Answered Prayers. The mistake was that he exposed in print many of the dirty secrets, little and large, of these women and their husbands. With that single stroke, Capote was permanently banished from the friendship of all of them. Perhaps rightly, he was viewed as a betrayer, though he always claimed not to understand how this could be. When one among them, Princess Lee Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, was queried by the gossip columnist Liz Smith about a dustup in print between Capote and Gore Vidal, she remarked for publication that she was “tired of Truman riding my coattails to fame. And, Liz,” she added, “what difference does it make? They’re just a couple of fags.”

  Not, to be sure, that homosexuals and Jews don’t have impressive snobberies of their own—as, doubtless, do African Americans, Romanians, and prisoners on death row. In his memoir, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, John Richardson speaks of la haute pédérastie, a phrase that speaks to hierarchies within homosexual life. In America, Jews live on the ample ground between worry about being found inferior and absolute certainty of their superiority. The Hebrew word goy is used to mean stranger, but it also conveys the notion of barbarian, in the sense in which the Greeks of the fifth century used the latter word: a stranger and someone whose ways are not only not ours but inferior to ours. In Yiddish, goyishe kop, meaning Gentile-brains, is no compliment. Doubtless homosexuals, so many of whom specialize in irony, have similar intramural put-downs—“straight-thinking,” if not already in use, might serve as one among them.

  In doing this, Jews and homosexuals are only doing what has for so long been done to them. No one in recent times has captured this point better than the novelist Dan Jacobson, in an essay on his boyhood as a Jew in the town of Kimberley in South Africa:

  Of course, not even the most self-hating Jew believes that all Gentiles lead happy and unproblematic lives or that he would himself do likewise if only he were released from servitude to his Jewishness. But anyone who has been the object of racial hatred knows that it is so wounding to its victim—more wounding than personal abuse directed against him as an individual—precisely because it denies his individuality. To every member of the spurned race it says: to me you will never be a person with a life and interests of your own, but always a representative of a species. Whatever you do will reveal only your speciesdom; and if you try to escape from it, that too will reveal the species you belong to.

  Much snobbery is about denying the next person his individuality, or, when allowing it, permitting it only inferior standing.

  Because of this background, Jews and homosexuals are not of the stuff out of which social establishments are best made. Owing to their not (for the most part) having children, homosexuals lack the sense of futurity, the sense of passing things on to the next generation, that society requires to continue. Owing to historical memory, most Jews, including those with a genuine taste for social climbing, tend to feel more than a little uneasy thinking of themselves fully part of society. “Jews are the only people,” Milton Himmelfarb wrote many years ago, “who live like Republicans and vote like Puerto Ricans.” By this amusing remark Himmelfarb meant that because of the experience, or even the fear, of anti-Semitism, Jewish identification with those who feel themselves oppressed remains strong—as it does today when anti-Semitism seems happily in abeyance. A true patrician class doesn’t worry overmuch—or at all, really—about such things as the oppressed.

  At the same time, when all this social prejudice visited upon Jews and homosexuals in America hasn’t caused major tragedy of the sort the Nazis brought about, it has made for wild social comedy. “Let’s face it, sweetheart,” says the character Mel Brooks plays in the movie To Be or Not to Be, apropos of Hider’s race laws at the German invasion of Poland, “without Jews, fags, and gypsies, there is no theater.” Exclude the gypsies, and the theater might also be taken as a larger metaphor for contemporary American society in its more sophisticated aspects.

  For today Jews a
nd homosexuals, far from everywhere being excluded from American society, seem at the dead center of it. Town & Country, once the exclusive preserve of Wasps, in its Weddings section now regularly shows wedding photographs of Mr. and Mrs. Jordan Michael Klein, Mr. and Mrs. Scott Michael Weinberg, and Mr. and Mrs. Joshua Bloch Rubin. In an article in Talk magazine about the want of interest in older notions of Society on the part of the new Silicon Valley super-rich, among the “old-line” names cited are those of Zuckerman, Bloomberg, Tisch, Perelman, Gutfreund, Kravis, and Steinberg, Yiddles all. Until the retirement from the presidency of Harvard of Ned Rudenstine, the presidents of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were all Jews, and, significantly, quite as undistinguished as other university presidents of our day. Jews have generally made something like a long march through American cultural institutions: academia, journalism, publishing.

  The infusion of homosexuals into society is seen most obviously in the prominence now accorded clothing designers, few of whom are in the least equivocal about their homosexuality: Valentino, Armani, St. Laurent, Calvin Klein, and others. (The journalist and former movie producer Dominick Dunne noted an earlier phase of this with the advent of hairdressers as significant players in Hollywood society.) Once perhaps thought of as dressmakers and tailors, and as such just a tad above servants, the designers, along with running hugely prosperous businesses, are now considered major tastemakers. The rich once told them how they wished to dress; things are quite the reverse now, and it is the designers who instruct the rich on how they shall be dressed. Clothing designers are among the great figures of the age, vaunted in the pages of Vanity Fair, Talk, The New Yorker, Town & Country, People, and the New York Times.

  But it is not the wealthy designers and notable hairdressers alone who have broken through the old barrier, but homosexual artists, curators, performers, and others who have a vast deal to do with setting tastes for the larger culture. In America, what has traditionally passed for (capital-S) Society has tended to be controlled by women. Returning to lecture in the States in 1904, Henry James noted that his audience was composed preponderantly of women. He went on to write that women were the cultural representatives of their husbands, who were “seamed all over with the scars of the marketplace,” while they, the wives, attended concerts, galleries, lectures, imbibing culture in heady draughts. This tends still to be so, and the professional tastemakers make their appeal most successfully to women of social and cultural aspiration, which has given them, the tastemakers, not only a front-row seat at the show but an unusually strong hand in directing the show.

  The barbarians (for which read: Jews and homosexuals) are no longer at the gates; they are eating canapés and drinking champagne in what used to be called the drawing room. In any accurate chronicle of what passes for Society in our day, Jews and homosexuals, in Virginia Woolf’s coarse trope, swarm. Proust, had he seen what lay ahead, would not have been astonished. Prescient fellow, he wrote, in The Captive: “The day may come when dressmakers will move in society—nor should I find it at all shocking.” Whether he would also have been delighted is more difficult to know. The social scene and situation seems so much more fluid now than in his day. Yet Proust also knew that “snobbishness, in changing its objects, does not change its accent.”

  18

  The Same New Thing

  THE NEXT NEW THING” is a phrase currently going the rounds, which, along with suggesting the promise of further innovation also suggests the ephemerality, the imminent passing, of whatever is now in fashion: in clothes, in children’s and adult toys, in large-scale commercial ideas. Don’t go away, the next new thing implies, because a newer thing is on its way. I myself prefer “the same new thing,” which has more economy, and suggests the notion of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. “The same new thing,” in fact, aptly serves as an all-purpose gloss on the history of fashion.

  Fashion implies transience, but transience regularized, almost as regularized as meter in verse. A mistake, though, to conclude that because fashion is transient it is also trivial. Fashion speaks to two widely different but apparently not contradictory human impulses: the first toward being in, with, and part of things; the second toward being distinctive, apart, and above things. When it succeeds, fashion allows one to feel both with-it and above it—with the right people and above the rabble—the heavenly condition to which the snob aspires, though perhaps not the snob alone.

  “Thus fashion lives,” wrote William Hazlitt, “only in a perpetual round of giddy innovation and restless vanity.” He added that fashion is “one of the most slight and insignificant of things.” The temptation to moralize about fashion, with its sad ostentation and shoddy egotism, is difficult to resist. “You cannot be both fashionable and first-rate,” wrote Logan Pearsall Smith, who himself tended to be closer to the former than the latter. “The best dressed of every age,” a handbook of 1859 called The Habits of Good Society noted, “have always been the worst men and women.” Dreary to be caught up in fashion, little doubt about it. And yet . . . and yet . . .

  Exhibit A: My old Burberry. I owned a tan, single-breasted Burberry raincoat, in good condition. One day I put it on and discovered that it was no longer, well, quite right. I hadn’t outgrown it, but suddenly this excellent coat—not inexpensive when I bought it four or five years before—seemed a bit tight, skimpy, slightly yet definitely inadequate. I hadn’t changed—grown no heavier, surely no taller—but fashion had, and raincoats, including newer Burberry raincoats, had grown longer and fuller, giving the look and feel of greater amplitude. My old raincoat felt somehow off, wrong, and because of this—you’ll have to take my word on it—uncomfortable. Not long afterward I bought another raincoat, not a Burberry this time around but an Aquascutum. Does this make me a slave to fashion? Probably.

  The modish, the voguish, the au courant, these are not among the things that serious people ought to take seriously. Panting devotion to fashion is in itself deeply vulgar. Yet if not entirely hostage to fashion, most people do go along with it, or at least don’t wish to be caught too far behind it. Certainly not many of us wish, except perhaps deliberately, to outrage decorum: to show up for an IRS audit in a bikini, or at a Lake Forest wedding in a bowling shirt (though the latter, come to think of it, might nowadays work just fine). It is fashion that, in a rough way, establishes decorum. In my own dress and manner, I would like to think myself existing in a permanent state of ironic conformity to the decorum of the day. But I sometimes wonder if the conformity isn’t much greater than the irony.

  “It is the bourgeoisie, the respectable people,” wrote James Laver, the English historian of fashion, “who decide what a fashion shall be, though they very rarely inaugurate it.” Proust refines this point when he writes that “in society (and this social phenomenon is merely a particular case of a much more general psychological law) novelties, whether blameworthy or not, excite horror only so long as they have not been assimilated and enveloped by reassuring elements.” Closer to our time, the novelist Harold Brodkey wrote: “We want to be dressed, and we want others to be dressed somewhat similarly, partly for the democracy of it, and partly so that we are speaking a halfway common language—so that we are not isolated inside our own heads, trapped in the babble of madness or in fears of obesity or whatever, but are part of a dialogue about acceptable or exciting appearances.”

  Common enough though fashion is, no one has formulated a truly useful definition of it. The English novelist Frederic Raphael has written that “fashion is a way of redressing the invariable in an air of novelty.” Neatly put, but not quite, I fear, a bull’s-eye. Kennedy Fraser, who wrote well about fashion for The Mew Yorker for more than a decade, remarked that she still hadn’t found a definition of fashion she would enjoy defending. Teri Agins, who covered fashion for the Wall Street Journal, has written that “by definition,” fashion “is ephemeral and elusive, a target that keeps moving.”

  Academics, those most unfashionable of people, have now got hold of fashio
n as a subject. A quarterly, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, professes to provide an “interdisciplinary forum for the rigorous analysis of cultural phenomena ranging from footbinding to fashion advertising.” It has opened its pages to semioticians, gender theorists, social historians, feminists on political fire. Articles in its pages not infrequently attempt to show that fashion is associated with “social construction of identity” and the reactions to the political and social changes of the day, in all their subtle nuances. How like the very reverse of amusing all this sounds!

  Easier to say what fashion is associated with than what it actually is. Fashion is bound to custom, style, changes in taste; it has to do with emulation and, often but not always, with social class. It hasn’t, to do with clothes alone, of course, since there are also fashions in furniture, food, music, literature, and ideas. Although fashion can feed off the past and feel itself (usually falsely) of the future, it really lives only in the Now. The problem with my not so old Burberry was that—sigh—it was more than a touch too Then.

  Not everyone strives to be fashionable. I don’t, and I believe I succeed. But like most people, I tend to fall in with it and don’t wish to expend the energy required to be determinedly unfashionable. Nor is it altogether clear that fighting fashion is a strong key to individuality. Georg Simmel, the trenchant German sociologist, has suggested that the individual who takes a stand against fashion may do so out of personal weakness, fearful that “he will be unable to maintain his individuality if he adopts the forms, the tastes, and the customs of the general public.”