Snobbery

by Joseph Epstein

  One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gendemen, no palaces, no castles, no manors, nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class—no Epson nor Ascot!

  The absence of all these and still other things caused James to emigrate—to England but really to Europe, where he became, as T. S. Eliot once called him, “a European but of no known country.” James would later write to Mrs. William James, his sister-in-law, that he “could come back to America . . . to die—but never, never to live.” While Eliot never spelled them out, his motives in departing America for England may not have been all that different from those of Henry James: the promise of a richer culture. George Santayana, one of Eliot’s philosophy teachers at Harvard, was said to lecture not looking at his class but gazing out the window. When someone asked him what he was looking for out that window, Santayana is said to have replied, “Europe.”

  It’s not uncommon for younger nations to yearn for the richer culture of older ones—as the Romans for a long while did for that of the Greeks—nor for the older nations to look down on the younger. In his novel Money, Martin Amis has his chief character, walking the streets of New York, think: “Speaking as an Englishman, one of the pluses of New York is that it makes you feel surprisingly well-educated and upper-class. I mean, you’re bound to feel a bit brainy and blue-blooded, a bit of an exquisite, when you walk through 42nd Street or Union Square, or even Sixth Avenue—at noon, the office men, with lunchbox faces and truant eyes.” A more amusing, if wildly more oblique, treatment of this subject comes up in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, where the wife of the novel’s protagonist is attempting to fix him up with another woman so that she may carry on her own love affair without distraction:

  “. . . We must get him interested in a girl.”

  “If only we could . . . Who is there?”

  “There’s always Sybil.”

  “Darling, he’s known her all his life.”

  “Or Souki de Foucauld-Esterhazy.”

  “He isn’t his best with Americans.”

  Sometimes the upper classes of one older nation will snobbishly imitate their counterparts in another. The Russians’ aping of the French in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is but one example; any Russian caught speaking French in a Tolstoy novel is automatically a figure, if not always of ridicule, at least to be distrusted. For a spell the French looked to England for its best models of hauteur. The English upper classes are, historically, perhaps alone in not looking for models elsewhere. In their journal the Goncourt brothers note that “the wing of the chicken at a table d’hote always goes to the Englishman. He is the only person the waiter serves. Why is this? Because the Englishman does not look upon the waiter as a man, and any servant who feels he is being regarded as a human being despises the person considering him in that light.” As if in confirmation of this, Elizabeth Gaskell has an aristocratic woman in her novel Wives and Daughters say: “I never think whether a land agent is handsome or not. They do not belong to the class of people whose appearance I notice.”

  The English are more practiced in snobbery than any other people. The English also thought, Copernicus-like, that the earth revolved around them: “Continent Cut Off by Fog,” read a famous headline in an English newspaper, when of course things ought to have been put the other way round. The English had a stricter class system, and one that lasted for a longer period than any other. “You couldn’t go for a walk anywhere in Scarborough,” writes the English novelist Pat Barker in The Ghost Road, “without seeing the English class system laid out for you in its full intricate horror.” The cruel little distinctions that go along with this system are learned early—or had damn well better be learned if one is to stay socially afloat. Lord Berners, in First Childhood, the initial volume of his autobiography, notes that from earliest school days “it became necessary to exercise a nice judgment between the people to whom deference was, due, those who were to be treated on terms of equality and those who might be looked on as inferior and who could be snubbed and bullied.”

  The French, though sometimes subtler, can be even cruder in these matters, as Proust, preeminently, has shown. The great French vice is no doubt too great an emphasis on taste, and judging others on their want of it. Perhaps this was owing to the repeatedly poor showing of the French in war, but after World War One Misia Sert noted that, among the French, “the clever insult replaced the gallant compliment.” The French are of course death on anyone who uses their language badly. The English find in the use of their language measures of status and vulgarity and signs of the user’s social-class origins, all of which they are prepared to use against him. (In America today it is said that the use of standard—which is to say, correct—English is a sure indicator of social class, and increasingly of being in the upper middle class and above.) But whatever the manifold disagreements between them, the English and the French—with many distinguished exceptions—have long been able to agree on one thing: the naivete, the vulgarity, the sheer awfulness of Americans.

  Coming at things the other way round, the American picture of the perfect snob is usually someone either English or with strong Anglo-American affectations. In American movies of my youth, the snob was often played by Clifton Webb or George Sanders, with Adolphe Menjou playing the snob in a more continental version. They were pedants and cads all, highly cultivated, effete, unfeeling, ostentatious, alike in their hauteur and disdain.

  While the Anglophilic snob was mocked in popular culture, among the putatively cultivated Anglophilia was always taken seriously. In academic life, men such as Professor Barrett Wendell, of the English Department at Harvard, gave Anglophilia a bad name by suggesting that only students of English descent were suited to study English literature. Quieter, less heavily italicized ways of adopting an Anglophilic outlook than those suggested by the Clifton Webb, George Sanders, and Barrett Wendell models were available. Italo-phdes would come later. They had early representatives in Bernard Berenson and George Santayana; though both men loved Italy, they never attempted to model themselves on the Italian upper classes. The Italian spirit seems all but opposed to snobbery, except perhaps on the fashion front. Germanophilia, attractive for sexually adventurous Englishmen during the Weimar period, seemed no longer a serious possibility after Hider, although the poets W. H. Auden and Randall Jarrell were both Germanophilic in their cultural interests.

  American Anglo- and Francophiles tended to be men and women who had grander conceptions of themselves than did many of their countrymen. They thought of themselves as somehow belonging to a larger world where tradition (England) or culture (France) played a larger role than it did in the United States. Americans who married Europeans took this yearning to belong to a wider world to a much higher level, and often took on the status of half-naturalized Europeans even while remaining in this country. In my experience, most such people turn out to be just a touch contemptuous of their countrymen.

  The influence of Anglophilia is seen in many American institutions—eastern boarding schools and universities chief among them—that have been based directly on English models, both in their organization and in their architecture. Some American customs—fox hunting in full regalia in Virginia is an outlandish example—quite out-English the English. Large American cities have chapters of the institution known as Alliance Française, in which the French language is taught and French culture, in rather a force-fed way, infused; in New York one can still send one’s children
to a lycée where they will acquire something like the education originally set up by Frenchmen abroad so that their children could train for the baccalauréat. England and France don’t have or feel the need for comparable American institutions; it is difficult to imagine just what they would be like. And when the English or the French come to America to five, they do so not because they feel our culture is superior, though of late some among them may feel America more open and lively than their own countries; more likely they come for the economic opportunities offered in the United States.

  When Americans have gone to live in Europe, they have tended to do so in the hope of a richer, deeper, more cultured life. Whether they found it or not remains an unanswered question. American expatriates in the last century, including the most elegant among them—Gerald and Sara Murphy, hosts to the not really all that lost generation, come first to mind here—finally remained tourists, if close to permanent ones. American writers, with the possible exception of Gertrude Stein, left the impression that their European years constituted a kind of camping out. Bernard Berenson, who from his villa in Tuscany enjoyed perhaps the grandest twentieth-century expatriation of all, can scarcely be said to have integrated himself fully into European life, becoming if not so much a tourist then something close to a tourist stop.

  Henry James said that “it’s a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.” By this James meant that, owing to its allure for Americans of sensibility, one is always in danger of rating the quality of Europe too highly. The temptation to do so has always been there and remains in place, even though one knows that Europe has neither the political power nor the cultural resources it once possessed.

  My own taste has run more strongly to Anglo- than to Francophilia. I cannot visit either Oxford or Cambridge without a wisp of regret for never having gone to school there, even though many Americans, Bill Clinton among them, seem to have done so without either place ever having laid a cultural glove on them. The pronunciation of certain words—teerod and sheerod for tirade and charade, the mere use of whilst—fills me with a combination of envy and admiration. Certain English clothes—well-made shoes, sweaters, suits—can turn on my yearning switch. (Think Yiddish, the old motto had it, dress British.) Randolph Churchill, when asked if Harold Macmillan, then a candidate for prime minister, had the common touch, replied: “Common touch? To hell with the common touch! He’s got the uncommon touch. We want men of distinction and education.” England can still turn out people filled with impressive learning, elevated common sense, and delicate wit. Being well educated and openly distinguished has always seemed easier in England than in the United States, where either quality could be held against one, especially in public life.

  It’s the aristocratic air—social or intellectual, usually both—that Anglophiles often admire. For a good spell in America, having an English secretary was a mark of high status in corporate quarters. In American universities, an English-born academic with a good accent ought to have been able to earn an extra $20,000 or so more than an American academic of roughly the same scholarly attainments. Pathetic snobbery, all of this, of course. (When confronted by a genuinely upper-class English accent, Anglophile that I am, the old Communist in me comes out, and I think how, on balance, Oliver Cromwell was on to a good thing but really should have finished the job.)

  Tocqueville gets it dead right yet again when he notes: “Aristocracies often commit very tyrannical and inhuman actions, but they rarely entertain groveling thoughts; and they show a kind of haughty contempt of little pleasures, even while they indulge in them.” Until only recently, when English politicians, entertainers, and cultural figures began descending to imitate their Americans counterparts, the English were thought, at least by us Anglophiles, to have both a larger and more detached view of life.

  In intellectual journalism, novel writing, theater, movies, scholarship, comedy, deployment of language generally—in most of the things that I cared most about, the English for so many years did it better. I rarely acted on my Anglophilia: didn’t put on an English accent, wear heavy tweeds in summer, let my teeth go, favor gristly meat and overcooked vegetables. I long ago eschewed using such Anglicisms as “early on” and “in the event,” though I wasn’t above slipping an occasional Anglicism into my speech, saying that this “put paid to that,” or that something or other “would see me out.” I bought the odd item of English clothing, most notably thick corduroy trousers purchased in a shop on High Street in Oxford that come close to standing up on their own without aid of a hanger and that really will see me out. I occasionally published an essay or a review in one or another English magazine—Encounter, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books—which caused me to feel a pride not altogether dissimilar to that of being accepted as a member of a superior club. But my snobbishness on this count was almost entirely of an interior kind; that is, I could use it only to pump myself up into the belief I was traveling among the intellectual swells, not—to complete the full snobbish act—to make others feel a little worse because of this.

  American Francophilia is a different kettle of snails. Unlike the English, whose accomplishments in acquiring and running their empire were immensely impressive, whose sense of fair play and decency were genuine, the French are not easily admired. They have no record of bravery, unless it be that of individual French men and women—Joan of Arc, Alfred Dreyfus, Albert Camus in the Resistance—winning out against stupid and vile French governments. Not for nothing have the French had the bitterest writers, from La Rochefoucauld to Flaubert to Celine, for the French have given ample examples of humanity at its most selfish upon which these writers could formulate their dark thoughts into works of literary art.

  American Francophilia therefore takes a different turn than does American Anglophilia. For one thing, Francophilia isn’t aristocratic in nature or impulse, for one can’t really hope to imitate what is left of the French aristocracy—the de Noailles, the de Carbonnels, the de Greffulhes, the de Courcels, et alia—whose society is so exclusive, whose culture is so rarefied, whose style of living is so high as to be finally inimitable. Instead American Francophile imitations take the form of an amalgam of French peasant and upper-bourgeois life—cassoulet and the $100 botde of wine. Francophile snobbery revolves around French food, wine, and the French language, at none of which can we gringos hope to compete.

  American Francophiles can’t really win. A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of Paris, had almost no Frenchmen in it, though its author was eager above all to show how very native he had gone; Hemingway’s days were spent chiefly among fellow Americans and Englishmen. The French weren’t hospitable to Hemingway, or any other Americans. The American novelists Irwin Shaw, James Jones, Diane Johnson, and others have lived their later lives in France, but all under the protection of that greatest of cultural buffers, fairly serious wealth.

  In French Lessons, Alice Kaplan reports how American teachers of French in universities in the United States who work in departments with native speakers live in terror of making even the smallest mistake in pronunciation or grammar. This does not, of course, stop the American Franco-plulic speaker of French from looking down on the less accomplished American speaker. “French brings out the worst in all of us,” Max Beerbohm wrote, but then the mispronunciation of words, foreign or English, always excites the snob when he is in possession of the correct pronunciation.

  To live in the French way, the American Francophile thinks, is to live with sensible good taste, where sensuality is given its due, and a certain dry precision of manner is much admired. The Francophile’s fantasy would be composed of friends among the wellborn, the artistically talented, and the amusing, dining on fine fresh light food, where the chic combines with the abstract, and high expenditure with a dramatically dark outlook. Only Americans with the Francophile virus could have fallen for the philosophical emptiness that passed under the rub
ric of existentialism.

  Dazzled by what seems to him the ease of the French in the world, the casual elegance they bring to everyday living, the American Francophile fads to understand that beneath the overlay of French culture is the solid, sordid fact that every Frenchman is fundamentally in business for him- or herself, with every luxury allowed but that of altruism, if Molière, Stendhal, Balzac, Proust, and other of the more trenchant writers on the French social scene are to be believed.

  The stock American Francophile, with his baguette and beret, his Alliance Française French, his Brillat-Savarin quotations accompanying dinner, is a figure from the past, though he may occasionally still be found on backwater American college campuses. The newer edition of the American Francophile is more likely to turn up today speaking no French, toting a $4,000 Louis Vuitton bag, and happy to fork over $500 or more for a three-star lunch. Vive la France! Vive le schmuck!

  Henry James’s superstitious valuation of Europe continues well into our day, making an especial appeal to American snobs, still ordering their clothes from London, linen from Vienna, furniture from Milan, toiletries from Paris. Along with a snobbery of European consumption, there is the American snobbery of European travel. One sees this highlighted in Paul Fussell’s book Abroad, which, though ostensibly about the travel of the English between the world wars, badly tips its author’s heavy-handedly Anglophilic, clearly snobbish mitt. An American himself, Fussell posits that “travel” is over, long ago replaced by tourism, for which read: vulgar American tourists are everywhere mucking things up for elevated chaps of high sensibility such as—you’ve guessed it—Professor Fussell. Once the going was good, to adapt a title of one of Evelyn Waugh’s travel books, but now, in Fussell’s view, the good is gone and all that remains of the going is package tours, pollution, the Americanization of the once exotic, leaving only, in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s word, monoculture.