Snobbery

by Joseph Epstein

  The first man to use the F-word on the BBC, Tynan was simultaneously left wing and in love with privilege, slashingly critical about selling out and mad about success. Successful right out of the starting gate, he allowed that his education at Oxford “gave me a superiority complex.” Socially dauntless, he seems to have had no difficulty approaching the celebrated on a basis of equality from an early age; in a characteristic gesture, he asked Katharine Hepburn, whom he had just met, to be his soon-to-arrive daughter’s godmother. She said—what the hell!—yes.

  With-it-ry was of the air Tynan breathed, and he ended, an emphysemic, both literally and figuratively out of oxygen. Sex was the division of with-it-ry that came to interest him most, and he tried to change sex from the pleasant indoor sport it can be to a full-fledged ideology that would lead to understanding the mysteries of life. Sex, revolutionary politics, an adoration of success, all this mixed together, made for a with-it cocktail that Tynan drank regularly and that no one could survive for long. He died at the age of fifty-three, having spent his last days lashed to an oxygen tank reading his subscription to the Fetishist Times in a wheelchair out on a patio in the California sun.

  Kenneth Tynan was of course English and his main theater of operations was England, though he wrote for The New Yorker and his snobbery did not include anti-Americanism. Far from it, he loved America for its cultural excitement and the glamour he found in New York and Hollywood. He was also the first of many English men and women who would be key figures in the American saga of with-it snobbery. Martin Amis, another pro-American Englishman, in a brilliant essay about the poet Philip Larkin, who was his father’s dearest friend, wrote that “Larkin is separated from us, historically, by changes in the self. For his generation, you were what you were, and that was that.” Amis goes on to say that his father, Kingsley Amis, was this way, too, but that he and members of his own generation are not. He doesn’t elaborate on the point, saying only that “there are too many forces at work on us.” Nor does he say what these forces are, but I infer that he means nowadays people live in greater fear of seeming old and out of it, and thus are willing to do a great deal to be, or at least to appear, with-it. This partly explains their regular and often drastic changes in appearance, ideas, or whatever else it takes to look still with-it.

  In the realm of with-it snobbery, those who can call the shots, telling the larger society, with the proper air of authority, what precisely is with-it and where the with-it resides, come to seem culturally important figures. In this line, no one has shown more acumen than Tina Brown, also English, a journalist with something close to a genius for spotting and promoting the with-it. This gift for unearthing the with-it for Americans may have something to do with the sad collapse of the British Empire, leaving the English with only memories of the great days, a burdensome weight of personal irony carried by their intellectuals and artists, and very little worth competing for, really, but trying to establish one’s own superiority through establishing one’s with-it-ness. English with-it-ness, owing to lingering American Anglophilia, is still highly exportable, at least to our particular colony.

  Tina Brown’s specialty as an editor has always been that of producing magazines that postulated a world of glamour. Her genius resides in her having had all but to invent this glamour, since it doesn’t, if one looks closely, appear quite to be there. She supplies the sizzle; one must look elsewhere for the steak. In her first American editorship, that of Vanity Fair, she set out a fantasy world composed of what was left of European royalty, clothing designers, big-money writers, and Hollywood actors and directors, and assigned journalists to write chiefly enthusiastic articles about these people while filling up the rest of the magazine with lovely scandal, psychobabblous explanations of the character of politicians, and stories of old American families still clinging to power. The mix made for a snobbish bouillabaisse found delicious by many. Small photographs appeared in Vanity Fair’s pages of bright young things—and a few rusty old ones—at play at various parties in Hollywood, the Hamptons, and elsewhere. Vanity Fair under Tina Brown was said not to have made much money—to have in fact lost a lot of money—but it became, as they say in the trade, “the hot book.”

  When Miss Brown shifted her base of operations to The New Yorker, she kept the fantasy alive, adding a strong element of épater le bourgeois, by printing the occasional cover meant to outrage, stories and articles and cartoons that were unshy about both choice of subject and the use of what was once thought rough language, lots of material about Hollywood and homosexuality and anything else that might cause a stir. If something more exciting came up near deadline, she was said always to be ready to rip up the magazine and rework everything required to get it in, no matter what the expense. Subscribers may often have been disappointed after reading what she printed, but felt nonetheless that they ought—had—to read it. She seemed to equate journalism with being talked about, and under her editorship the magazine was, if not more loved, surely more talked about than at any other time in its seventy-five-year history In “Under Which Lyre,” his 1946 Harvard Phi Beta Kappa poem, W. H. Auden offered as the best advice for keeping one’s perspective, “Read The New Yorker, trust in God;/And take short views.” Tina Brown put paid to the first part of that advice.

  Miss Brown’s editorship of The New Yorker was also significant for being central to the shift from the old, vaguely Anglophile, upper-middle-class-aspiring, Ivy League-centered snobbery, for which The New Yorker was in many ways the house organ, to the new with-it snobbery that we live with today. Buzz was the name of Tina Brown’s game, and, as a veritable one-woman beehive, buzz she created, week after week. Many older readers of the magazine spoke of despising what she had done to their revered New Yorker, home of E. B. White and James Thurber. She, my guess is, viewed this oldguard readership as so many out-of-it snobs, and liked to rub their noses in the less than brave new world they had had the misfortune to live on into. If they missed the old New Yorker, she gave them an issue on women—whose guest editor, Roseanne Barr, was known for being foul-mouthed—and the photograph of a work of sculpture in which the artist fashioned a number of figures of himself, forming a sodomistic daisy chain. Whoever thought that our social Mme. Defarge would be a smallish woman with an English accent.

  (Tina Brown could not repeat this odd success at her next venture, Talk. Being paid for by the Miramax film studio, the magazine was chiefly about Hollywood, designers, and kid singers. Making glamorous the current crop of actors, directors, and producers was a brutal assignment; not even the talented Miss Brown could make Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and Hugh Grant, despite their worldwide fame, seem even mildly interesting.)

  The New Yorker became the weekly bulletin board of the with-it. Kurt Andersen, who when editor of New York Magazine claimed he was out to discover the Zeitgeist of the week, was hired by Tina Brown to write about changes in the culture, or more specifically about the world of the with-it. Andersen would later write Turn of the Century, the novel in which he put much of his—how to say it?—Zeitgeistical knowledge into one literary package. Such knowledge made it possible for him to produce the following scene in which an ultra-with-it television executive describes a new television channel, the Reality Network, as

  a New Age cable channel, although New Age is a no-no. Demi, Deepak, Marianne Williamson, Mars and Venus. Mayans and the Sphinx, gyroscopes, high colonics, homeopathics, chiropractic, yoga, Enya, John Tesh, Dr. Wed, Kenny G., vitamin E, herbs, Travolta, Cruise, lifestyle, feng shui, ginseng, ginkgo, tofu, emu, psychics, ESP, E.T. et cetera, et cetera. Aromatherapy. VH1 meets Lifetime meets the PBS fund-raising specials meets those good-looking morning-show doctors meets QVC meets the Food Network. You know? And in the late-night daypart, tantric sex.

  Andersen is a walking barometer-Geiger counter-seismograph of social weather, pop treasure, and cultural tremors, able to imitate insiderishness at a high level, as when he has another character in his novel do business in Seattle and writes about
the new culture of three different cities:

  But at the moment, each of the three places—New York and L.A. and the Northwest digitalopolis—hungers for an ingredient only the other two can provide. It’s the Fred and Ginger symbiosis (class for sex) extended into a Metternichian three-way alliance. Give us publicity, and you can underwrite our IPO; you give us gravitas, we’ll give you the sheen; you supply the video, we’ll provide the stream; you give us the candy, we’ll give you the eyes; you let us meet the movie stars, we’ll invest in your studio; you advertise us, we’ll advertise you; you promote our shows, we’ll take you seriously; you take us seriously, we’ll give you a 600-megahertz set-top box. Deal; deal; deal. And we all go on Charlie Rose.

  Genuine with-it-ry calls for precisely this kind of knowingness, part of which has to do with knowing about snobbery up to the moment. Of the main character in his novel, Kurt Andersen, who would seem to be writing of himself here, writes: “He cannot abide dumb snobbery, easy snobbery, snobbery ten or twenty years behind the curve.” Yet the question intrudes: when you know all that Kurt Andersen knows, how much that is serious do you have to forgo knowing? And when you know all these things, do you really possess anything more than high-level trivia, and of a kind that is likely to change every year? Already all that talk of IPOs feels a touch archaic and will soon require a footnote explanation.

  Feeling with-it can of course bring its own pleasures. Among others, it allows a person to think that he or she is in touch with the life of his or her times. No small delight, this. As a younger writer, I used always to feel the need to keep abreast of the culture, wanting to know what songs were on the Top 40, the names of all the U.S. senators, all the sports results and statistics; I watched the television talk shows, glimpsed scores of magazines, not least the women’s fashion magazines, and read studiously the ten or twelve main intellectual journals and the New York Times. All this was done in the name of keeping up with the life of my time, of trying to stay with-it.

  I sensed myself slipping badly in the late 1960s, when the curtain dividing the young from the not-so-young fell, never again to be lifted, leaving America with two cultures: a perpetually changing youth culture—with its own music, interest in drugs, special clothes—and an adult culture that, even though demographically in the majority, seemed perpetually in retreat. Although only thirty, owing not a little to personal temperament, I found myself on the adult side of the divide. The slope I was on was not at all slippery, but gentle, affording a genial slow slide into out-of-it-ness. That this may be the natural state of men and women is suggested by the still relatively youthful F. Scott Fitzgerald, than whom in his own time no one was more with-it (or more of an upward-looking snob), and who, in the following passage from The Crack-Up, seems to be expressing a desire to be released from the endless pressure of staying with-it:

  Trying to cling to something, I liked doctors and girl children up to the age of about thirteen and well-brought-up boy children from about eight years old on. I could have peace and happiness with these few categories of people. I forgot to add that I liked old men—men over seventy, sometimes men over sixty, if their faces looked seasoned. I liked Katharine Hepburn’s face on the screen . . . and Miriam Hopkins’s face, and old friends if I only saw them once a year and could remember their ghosts.

  With-it snobbery relies wholly on style for its standard of the acceptable and on aesthetics for its sense of right and wrong. Newness, for the with-it snob, is worthiness. The new and the true are one—that is all they know and all they feel they need to know. With-it snobbery also relies on continuous youthfulness to sustain itself. Perspective of the kind that normally comes with growing older, or even growing up, is death on with-it-ry. Perspective makes plain that style, while always appealing, is much less important than honor or integrity, and that integrity requires coherence of personality, which precludes constant change of one’s personality to keep up with the spirit of the moment. The deepest style, perspective teaches, derives from living one’s life as if it were a work of art, a work that from time to time requires touching up, sometimes even serious revisions, but is essentially a unitary story always seeking—alas, not always finding—its moral. In this scheme of things, with-it-ry is entirely beside the point—of interest, finally, only to a certain kind of snob.

  Coda

  To excuse one’s own failings as being only human nature is, provided one has meant well, every writer’s first duty to himself.

  —G. C. Lichtenberg

  24

  A Grave but Localized Disease

  I SHOULD BE SURPRISED if there is anyone outside a Trappist monastery who has gone through this book who hasn’t at one point—and perhaps at several—met up with his or her own snobberies, some congruent with my own, some perhaps the reverse of mine. What ties all snobberies together is the need we all seem to have to elevate ourselves above those among whom we live—to feel an edge, however slight, over the next person. Even caring a great deal for someone does not lessen the need most of us feel to think ourselves oh just a touch better: smarter or wittier or more commonsensical or better looking or larger-hearted or subtler, better adjusted, more logical—pick any three, and add a few items of your own invention not listed here. Why can we not simply allow that another person is our superior, without qualification or stipulation, and walk away, pleased with what we have, content to be what we are, happy not to be limping. But most of us cannot.

  “Snobbery,” wrote Santayana, “haunts those who are not reconciled with themselves; evolution is the hope of the immature. You cannot be everything. Why not be what you are?” Yet how difficult to be reconciled to oneself, to be oneself and nothing more. This is especially difficult if doing so means conceding one is not extraordinary, unusual, powerful, great, and shall in fact disappear tomorrow without leaving a scratch on the earth—a being, like the vast vast majority, whose life did not finally, as the Victorians used to say, signify. Is there something in our nature that prevents us from cultivating this kind of difficult but useful objectivity about our true standing in the world?

  “There are two truths which most men will never believe,” wrote the nineteenth-century poet Giacomo Leopardi. “One, that they know nothing, and the other, that they are nothing.” Add to this that there is something about being an American that makes it particularly hard to accept that some people are born with much greater luck than others—the luck of being born to the right parents, of having the right physique, the right brain power—while others struggle against nature to make themselves something they were perhaps never intended to be. Yet struggle most of us do.

  The problem of snobbery in its contemporary manifestations lies not in some small number of pure snobs in the world, but in the multitudinous little snobberies that infect us all. Not least myself, as I have plainly demonstrated here. I am someone who glories in distinctions large and small. Invoking to myself Henry James’s advice to be a person on whom nothing is lost, I prefer to know everything about anyone I encounter: his or her ethnicity, social class, education, family background, opinions, passions, general point of view. So deeply ingrained is this in me that I cannot separate these things from the notion of taking a person for him- or herself alone. There is, in my view, no him- or herself alone. A person, I realize, is more than a list of his sociological data—his ethnicity, social class, education, and the rest—but he is that, too. And I find it difficult to ignore what the poet Zbigniew Herbert calls “the oppressive levity of appearance.”

  Leopardi, who was a hunchback, and often mocked for being so, remarked that people couldn’t seem to resist using another person’s flaws against him. “A man,” he wrote, “who has a physical or moral defect is always being given its name: il sordo, lo zoppo, il gobbo, il matto [the deaf man, the lame man, the hunchback, the madman]. . . . The reason is that this gives the speaker a sense of superiority: his self-love is flattered.” He adds that others’ doing so gives them “an inner joy and a malignant satisfaction.” I
n Naples, Leopardi was called by his fellow artists and intellectuals, all men whom time has proved much inferior to him, o ranavutollo, which means “little toad.”

  The snob operates similarly, except that he generally prefers to go for social over physical deformities. Being born in the lower middle class can be such a deformity, so in our day can be being a Christian fundamentalist, or having the wrong art on one’s walls, or living in a neighborhood that requires explanation, or having gone to Central Michigan University.

  Aldous Huxley once compared the multitude of modern snobberies to fleas on a dog, not allowing the poor things—the dog and society—to rest easy. Perhaps the best that can be said for snobbery is that, in consonance with Huxley’s metaphor, it keeps society astir, and thus always in action. Snobbery also makes life in at least one respect easier for snobs, freeing people who employ it from the need to pass individual judgments and instead at one stroke to write off entire groups, types, social classes. And despising humanity in general, allowing snobbery to blend into misanthropy, adds a piquancy to everyday snobbery. Virginia Woolf was on her way to achieving such a blend. “I begin to loathe my kind,” she wrote in her diary for January 3, 1915, “principally from looking at their faces in the tube. Really, raw red beef and silver herrings give one more pleasure to look at.”