The other healthful food eaters, in which category I too often find myself, are those who are a bit—how to say it?—shy of death, sometimes also known as the Ugly Customer, or the Ruffian on the Stairs, and would like to postpone meeting the fellow for as long as possible, preferably forever. We are careful about cholesterol, calories, sodium; we dine with the single criterion that anything that tastes especially good surely cannot be good for us. We are a pain in the neck and in tenderer lower parts, to ourselves, our hosts, our waiters in restaurants. Our snobbery consists of our thinking ourselves, however much we grumble about so many good things being off limits to us, a lot smarter than people who eat what they like and in the quantities they like.
A social-class phenomenon this healthful eating turns out to be, for the adults who do eat what they like and in the quantities they want are almost always of—hmm, harummph— the lower orders. We see them in McDonald’s or Taco Bell, or in small, usually Greek-owned luncheonettes, scarfing up one or another sort of flavorful yet one expects deadly dish: hamburgers or bacon and fried eggs or hot dogs—those cartridges, as Mencken called them, composed “of all the sweeping from the abattoir floor”—and vast quantities of french fries, washed down with tankards of beer or cola. Happy wretches, they remind one of no people so much as the Epsilons in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: gross, misshapen, deliberately underbred to do society’s drone work, and deprived of all insight into the reasons for their own being. They shall die early, we think, the cause of death being lower-class ignorance, poor creatures. Distinctly not People Like Us.
Nor do you find the American Epsilons drinking much wine, unless it be out of gallon-sized bottles. Throughout the 1960s not many Americans drank lots of wine. Americans knew about chianti, whose empty bottles were so useful for the insertion of candles for that bohemian touch in a college room; champagne—a bit of the bubbly—was there for New Year’s Eve; and Jews on holidays drank the thick, sweetish Mogen David wine.
America was a booze- and beer-drinking nation. Odd that this should have been so, for we have also been a middle-class nation, and the middle class is nothing if not moderate, and wine is, as Robert Parker, the editor of the Wine Advocate, rightly says, “the moderate drink,” leaving one neither bloated nor befoozled, unless one drinks it in large quantities. The increase in the American consumption of wine is owing in part to the Europeanizing of American culture and in part to the growth of good homegrown wines. Another part, alas, is owing to snobbery.
By the 1980s, wine among the middle class no longer seemed very foreign. But the historical Europeanness of wine drinking made it a pushover for the snobs—and an even greater pushover for European vintners and restaurateurs directing the traffic in American snobbery. Americans, the feeling was, did not grow up drinking wine; it was not part of their culture, as it was for Europeans, so they could never claim anything like real authority in this line. This was a serious disadvantage in a field, that of oenology, that required gurus, or people with real authority, to be guiding one’s choices.
Knowing wines is no dilettantish activity. I long ago made the decision not to know them, at least not in any serious way. I have a friend named Max Ponder, a former All-State high school football player and Big Ten wrestler and among the least pretentious people I’ve ever met, who really knows wines. He offered to teach me, but, sensing the complication entailed—all those appellations, those obscure grapes, the various shoulder-shapes of bottles—I decided I’d sooner spend the time failing to learn another foreign language, and dropped out.
That wine drinking is rich material even for the oenologically ignorant snobographer is self-evident. In the realm of consumption generally, snobbery sets in as soon as one has essentially the same object offered at many different prices. Snobbery becomes richer still in wine, where one must trust one’s sense of taste or the delicacy of one’s palate, which can vary immensely from person to person. Snob territory, in other words, par excellence.
Because of wine drinking’s origins in European culture, Americans who know a few things about wine tend to take snobbish pride in their knowledge. (Though not, of course, so much so as the French; in Cousin Pons, Balzac says of one of his characters, “Being German, she relished the different kinds of vinegar which in Germany are commonly called Rhenish wines.”) Wine talk has for long been comic in its reliance on metaphors to describe tastes and smells: “a promiscuous little wine but ultimately responsible, with a bouquet that partakes of the combined taste of peaches and olives wrapped in cedar.” What the use of such, insane language means is that physical taste is an area of great uncertainty, providing fertile ground upon which the false authority, or simple con man, likes to trod.
Apparently very few of even the best wines cost more than $10 per botde to produce. But that doesn’t deter people in the business from selling some of it for hundreds of dollars a botde. Pierre-Antoine Rovani, who works with Robert Parker, was recently quoted in the Atlantic Monthly as saying that one can sell even bad wine for an enormous price “if the botde says ‘Grand Cru,’ or ‘Premier Grand Cru,’ or ‘Pomerol,’ or, you know, if there’s a word on there that some rich guy recognizes.” Such stuff can be sold, he added, “in small quantities in a place like New York, where there are lots of idiots.” Later in the same article, Rovani says: “I know collectors with forty thousand bottles who if you poured them a glass of Gallo Hearty Burgundy wouldn’t know the difference. I know collectors who, believe me, if you mixed Kool-Aid into cheap Chilean merlot, they’d taste it and say, ‘Well, yeah. . . .’”
To be sure, there are men and women who really know and love good wine. But not all of them are wine collectors. Rovani goes on to report that the people—most of them men—who buy recent vintages for $600 to $1,000 a botde are collecting trophies, the way they might buy an ostentatious boat or a hot sports car or acquire a young wife. Owing to such characters, and many others at a slightly lower level of idiocy, wines have increased greatly in price in recent decades. I have a friend, far from being a rich man but a collector since his twenties, whose wine not long ago became too expensive for him to drink. He wound up donating it to his city’s symphony orchestra and deducting it from his taxes at current prices, which allowed him to take his family on two extended European vacations. (The symphony auctioned off the wine.) Who, one wonders, bought it? People, one assumes, who have no difficulty drinking a botde of wine that costs anywhere from $100 to $500 a bottle.
I’ve drunk enough wine to know that some wines are a lot better than others. I’ve never been at a table where people—young investment bankers, commodities market men after a killing in pork bellies, lawyers having settled a large case in their favor, manic-depressives on an upward swing—guzzled wine for which they were paying $300 or $400 a botde. Such people must feel themselves flying so high as to imagine themselves on another planet. As they pull the cork on that third botde, I suppose it wouldn’t do to break the mood by telling them that their pleasure is, at its piggish heart, merely another trivially snobbish one. Salut!
23
The Art of With-It-ry
Spin, stir, crackle, sizzle, and buzz,
How quickly the Land of Oz turns to Was.
—Anonymous
IN JUNE OF 1911, Sara (not yet Murphy) Wiborg wrote to her future husband, Gerald Murphy, apropos of Gerald’s brother, Fred, who did not make Skull & Bones, that most exclusive of Yale’s secret societies: “There is nothing in this world so ghastly as to feel ‘out of it.’” Sara twice underlined “nothing.” About herself she needn’t have worried, for during their fling as the most charming of all American expatriates, no one was less out of it, no one more splendidly with it, than the Murphys, beautiful, rich, artistic, friends with everyone who really mattered, always not merely up to the moment but usually a good furlong or two ahead of it.
The fear of being out of it, referred to by Sara Wiborg Murphy as “ghastly,” is felt by many as a genuine terror. Behind the terror is a fear of growing
old, or seeming to be used up, or on the way out. This used not in itself to be a crime, though in the United States, a country where youthfulness has always been vaunted, it has come to seem a sad, if not deplorable, condition. To be out of it is evidence of one’s becoming a back number, a fogy, superfluous, superannuated, beside the point, distinctly not in the game, no longer on the attack, a player, a part of the life of one’s time—in the view of many, snobs prominent among them, to be out of it is a form of slow but real death.
Yet what precisely is the It in the phrases “out of it” and “with-it”? Not easily pinned down, for the thing is changing all the time, this It. To reel off some synonyms, It is the action, what’s happening, the buzz, the stir, the sizzle, all the things in which the cognoscenti are, at this very moment, most keenly interested. These people, too, change faster than the pitchers in a major league bullpen. One year they have the names Slim Keith, Jerome Zipkin, Babe Paley, Ahmet and Mica Ertegun; a few years later they are called Sonny Mehta, Julian Schnabel, Cindy Sherman, Tom Ford, and Barry Diller; and a few years further on, fresh names, like fresh plates in a Chinese restaurant, shall be brought on. Vanity Fair not long ago ran lists of regular well-known patrons of New York’s Four Seasons restaurant in 1979 and 1999, and so many of the once powerful names of ’79 are now off the screen, dropped from the charts, gone with the wind of with-it-ry. But the particular names don’t really matter; what matters is that there are always such names and that one must know them, go to the places they go, where one might with luck encounter them. With great good luck, one might perhaps become one of them, and find oneself with-it at last and well out front on the envy curve, doing a little touchdown dance—free at last!—in the snob-free zone.
The It is also the going thing, the hot thing, above all the Now thing as represented by the right restaurants, magazines, movies, designers, dance groups, singers, writers, photographers, psychotherapists, painters, and billionaires around whom people urgently interested in being up to the moment swarm. They are the people whose photographs or names one sees over and over in Vanity Fair, Talk, W, Rolling Stone, Vogue, Details, the New York Observer, and other periodicals that set out to be the chroniclers of the fives of the with-it. After the opening of a show of her photographs—which sold for $30,000 a shot—Cindy Sherman gave a party at Mr. Chow’s restaurant in Los Angeles; in attendance were Robin Williams, Jacqueline Bisset, David Hockney, LL Cool J, Chloë Sevigny, Cheryl Tiegs, Eli Broad, Mike Leigh, Elle Macpherson, Steve Martin. As a guest list for the with-it, this is fairly good—for the moment. As for the next moment, who can say?
Some people seem to be as naturally with-it as others are as naturally out of it. Some feel themselves quite happily, even fortunately, out of it; others acquire the spiritual equivalent of a hernia trying to get or stay with it. Snobs in this realm are of two kinds: those who struggle hard to be with-it and those who are altogether too pleased to find themselves already there.
With-it-ry represents, of course, the higher—perhaps the highest—conformity. To stay ahead of the pack, as the with-it snob desires above all to do, is to find oneself in formation with a smaller pack, sometimes known as the herd of independent minds. “To have a horror of the bourgeois,” notes Jules Renard in his journal, “is bourgeois.” To worry about falling out of it probably means that one has already done so; to desire to be with-it probably means that one really isn’t, with the distinct likelihood that one never will be.
The expenses—the outlay of cash—of being with-it are never low. One cannot hope to achieve with-it-ry in contemporary America on an income of less than six figures, probably the middle to high six figures. Consider real estate. Can one claim to be anywhere near with-it and live in, say, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, or Hilsa? With-it American cities today include Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland (Oregon), Seattle, New Orleans, Key West, Santa Fe, Princeton, Jackson Hole, maybe Austin, and above all and primarily New York; abroad, with-it cities include London, Rome, Florence, Tangier, and Paris. This list of OK places recalls Robert Mitchum’s response when asked how he found jail, after he had done six months in a Los Angeles County prison for being in possession of marijuana: “It was like Palm Springs,” he said, “but without the riffraff.”
New York and Paris over the past thirty or so years have vied with each other for being the with-it capital of the world, with London enjoying a brief run in the late 1960s, during what might be called the Age of the Beatles, but tradition, not with-it-ry, has always been London’s strength. “Vogues, fashions, crazes,” these, Balzac affirmed, found their proper atmosphere in Paris, where “great achievements are so harshly received and trivial ones welcomed with such disdainful indulgence” and where “ideas tread on one another’s heels like travelers filing into a hostelry.” But New York, in this realm, has long been coming up fast on the outside.
Within the with-it cities one then has to find the right neighborhoods in which to live, those SoHos, NoHos, Tri-BeCas, none of which comes cheap. Moving on to wardrobe, one has to hit this just right, too: wear that $200 Prada T-shirt, the right jeans, jacket, shoes, eyeglass frames. Probably best also not to walk around with too droopy—that is to say, too old—a face, for which, in cosmetic surgery, remedies, also not cheap, are at hand.
Without going much further, one can readily see that a high expenditure of time and energy is required to stay with-it. Entailed is a race, more like a chase, to keep up with the young. Richard E. Grant, in his journal, refers to “middle-aged trendism” in which “desperadoes attempt to be-bop themselves into frillier fashions, tighter pants and nightshade red or black hairdyes, the haunted look of’last call at the singles bar’ furrowing up a pack of brows. Please, God, when my turn swifts up, do NOT let me fit a rug to my balding cranium or wrench some designer jeans around my sagging ‘cheeks.’ Remember this wisdom.”
A losing race, then, that of keeping up with the young, for even the young, getting older, eventually have to drop out of it. They’re a transient class, the young, permanent only in the sense that they are always different but always the same, and rather like the avant-garde in this respect. “Everything changes,” said Paul Valéry, “but the avant-garde.”
The avant-garde, more precisely the myth of the avant-garde, provides the blueprint for with-it-ry. With-it-ry always assumes there is further yet to go in the development of new forms, styles, behavior, and the with-it snob must be in on them—present, with luck, at the creation, or if not then, soon thereafter. “That was so twenty minutes ago,” a British comedienne used to say, but by now she is herself doubtless more than half an hour ago—or, in another with-it phrase, “so over.”
The with-it act as if always advancing, perched at the edge, where boundaries morph and everyone is reaching for the white-hot center, taking the next nihilistic plunge. Being with-it, for those wishing to play the game, can be exhilarating, exciting, sexy. But the new—or not so new—twist is the disappearance of the philistine, which gave the old avant-gardian his happiest reason for being. “The philistinism of our day,” Lionel Trilling wrote as long ago as 1961, “is likely to manifest itself in ready acceptance rather than in stubborn resistance.”
To live the with-it life requires immense knowingness. Nothing can kill you quicker in the with-it world than owning up to improper beliefs. People who live on the with-it standard believe that life is about change, constant change, and that the best change is in the direction of deeper, ever more radical discovery, through (once) psychotherapy, (then) drugs, (then) sexual liberation, (then) consumption, (then) wait for it, whatever it’s going to be, don’t worry, it will arrive soon enough.
Lives lived on the with-it standard have a volatile quality and always have had, for the with-it, a historical phenomenon, have always been with us. In his journal, Mihail Sebastian, in the early 1940s, writes about the family of Antoine Bibescu (Bibescu was earlier a friend of Proust’s), with their “declared liking for something that one day suddenly disappears without
trace and makes way for some new craze.” Captivating and charming though they could be, there is finally an insubstantial quality to the Bibescus, and anyone else in their condition; certainly, one senses, one would be foolish to count on such people in a crisis.
I had a friend who made a career out of his with-it-ness. He wrote books about popular-culture figures—Lenny Bruce, Elvis Presley, John Lennon—in a hopped-up style, freighted with much psychoanalytic interpretation. He lived in New York, and, because sometimes a few years would go by between our seeing each other, sighting him afresh was always an adventure. For one thing, I couldn’t be sure what he might be wearing, how he was cutting his hair, what new hip phrases dominated his vocabulary. Did he, in good with-it snob fashion, look down on me, still wearing the same kind of clothes, using the same language, breaking no barriers, hopelessly yet contentedly out of it? I never sensed that he did, though I could of course be wrong. He died in his late sixties. Had he lived, he would doubtless have had to end his days in a gray ponytail and write books about grunge, gangsta rap, and the rest of it. Got out, maybe, just in time.
A more spectacular with-it career than my friend’s was that of Kenneth Tynan, a more talented but in the end perhaps not much happier man. Tynan had been easily the best drama critic of the past fifty years, one of the main forces behind England’s National Theatre, and the chief force behind the musical revue Oh! Calcutta! He began life as a fan and ended it as a snob, and was, at least in his forthright snobbery, uncomplicated. (“Last year,” he wrote to friends, “met Cary Grant. Top that.”) Michelangelo Antonioni claimed he got the idea for his movie Blowup, about swinging London in the 1960s, from a party he went to at the apartment of Ken Tynan and his first wife. Impossible to have one’s with-it-ness more highly endorsed than that.
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