When one believed more strongly in a class system than it is perhaps sensible to do today, one could think of the status struggles of the bourgeoisie against the aristocracy, of parvenus’ ceaseless banging on the gates of the upper classes, of the nouveaux riches doing their (always inadequate) best imitation of the established rich. Less and less of this now applies. One of the things that makes current-day snobbery different, and in some ways more perplexing, is that it doesn’t seem to be carried on in anything like the traditional context of social class. In snobbery, as in so much else in contemporary America, everyone is in business for him- or herself.
Under the current dispensation, where the old notions of hierarchy have broken down—in most places for better, in a few others for worse—the nature of snobbery, at least in certain key areas, has radically altered. Democratic snobbery would seem to be a contradictory notion, but as we have seen in the case of the virtucrat in politics or in political correctness as it has entered into daily life, snobbery in our day can revolve around the question of who is the least snobbish person of all and hence, yes, just a bit better than everyone else.
When I think of my own snobberies, they are directed partly toward my own class, with its rather sad insistence on its special sensitivity toward art and cultivated living, which I often find comical and worth looking down on. The members of this class, which I have throughout this book called the so-called educated or enlightened classes, believe they live their lives guided by ideas and ceaselessly enriched by culture, but of course neither is generally true. They are themselves chiefly (unconscious) snobs and conformists who congratulate themselves on what they think the superiority of their taste, the sensitivity of their opinions, the uniqueness of their point of view. A fair amount of my own snobbery has to do with my desire to separate myself from them, though why I should need to do so is itself perhaps worth questioning.
How different this sort of snobbery—mine and that of the so-called enlightened classes—from the bad old days of (capital-S) Society, when there was something called a Society page in the newspaper of every American city, and in the larger cities a book called the Social Register in which the names of those allowed to play the Society game were actually inscribed. (Socially, an old joke had it, she doesn’t register.) Society and all its subsidiary institutions—debutante balls, cotillions, charity events—have now all but disappeared, and gone with them is the once dominant Wasp culture, with its interlocking directorates made up of select prep schools and Ivy League colleges, the Episcopal Church, exclusionary city and country clubs, legal and investment firms. (All the institutions of Wasp culture continue to exist, of course, but in a vastly attenuated form.) But this is merely the first of the hierarchies that have broken down.
In the arts, the lines separating highbrow from popular culture were once boldly drawn, with many critics devoting much intellectual energy to sorting out the highbrow (James Joyce, Stravinsky, Picasso) from the middlebrow (Arthur Miller, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Andrew Wyeth) and worrying a good deal about the infusion of commerce into art. These distinctions, too, are furiously under attack, if not by now completely routed. An insistence on the purity and elevated status of the highbrow in art used to be considered one of the hallmarks of the snob in culture. But to subsist today on highbrow culture means adopting a cultural diet made up almost exclusively of the culture of the past. Highbrow culture in our day exists only in pockets, is itself almost never free from the intrusions of commerce, and—excepting perhaps only the large audiences that turn out to see super-shows at art museums (with what combination of mixed motives who can say?)—has an aging, if not already quite elderly, audience. (If you ever wish to feel young, take yourself to a chamber music concert.)
“Nobrow culture,” according to John Seabrook, is the order of the day. In Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture, Seabrook sets out to demonstrate how “during the second half of the twentieth century,” and unto our day, what he calls “the townhouse of culture” had collapsed. The agent of change here has been marketing. Once marketing had become the chief element in American life, Seabrook argues, consumption patterns began to replace social class as an organizing principle of contemporary society, a kind of with-it avant-gardism became commercially mainstream, and the old distinctions everywhere began to break down, so that today, for example, one learns that the most fiercely independent, militantly, deliberately out-of-the-mainstream rock musicians supply the music for television commercials.
“The very culture had changed,” Seabrook writes. The highbrow-lowbrow distinction has been all but done in. Commercial success, no longer presenting a reason on the artist’s part for feeling dubiety, became the most satisfying success. All hierarchies were out, excepting “the hierarchy of hotness”—all that mattered was what’s hot and what’s not, as the lifestyle magazines put it. Turning things on their head, anti-status became status. It isn’t any longer a question, as in the famous Yeats poem, of the center not holding; the center—poof!—has disappeared.
In this maelstrom of change, the snob has been sent out to a choppy sea in a frail craft, without a sad and without a compass. Not to worry, though, for snobs have a wondrous capacity for reading the wind and usually find their way to shore. In some ways a social scene controlled by market considerations is easier for the snob to crash and manipulate to his own ends than one controlled by birth or achievement. The breakdown of the old systems, social and cultural, may have made snobbery simultaneously more amorphous and more pervasive than ever before.
Early in 2001, an Englishwoman named Betty Kenward died, at the age of ninety-four. Mrs. Kenward was a society columnist, and, in the words of the Mew York Times’ s headline writer, she was a “Snobbish Chronicler.” Mrs. Kenward wrote about the upper classes for the English magazine Harpers & Queen. She purveyed no gossip but instead offered lists of people who attended important social events. She employed her own punctuation system, using commas after the names of commoners, semicolons after those of members of the royal family and other well-connected people. Those who worked in business and advertising and publishing, though they might have been in attendance at the events she covered, were never mentioned in her column. Lord Snowdon, or Antony Armstrong-Jones, as he was known before he married Princess Margaret, always remained a photographer to Mrs. Kenward, and so his name was never mentioned, except as “HRH Princess Margaret and her husband.”
An amazing performance really, and all the more amazing in that Mrs. Kenward kept it up until 1991, when she retired. The daughter of divorced parents of no great social standing, divorced from a man whose family was in the brewery business, she called gossip columnists “gutter rats” and considered journalists vulgar. “A snob and proud of it,” the obituarist for the New York Times called her. But I wonder if that is accurate. I wonder if Mrs. Kenward wasn’t instead a fantast who wanted to believe in a world—composed of upper-class elegance and honorable nobility—that no longer existed, that may never have existed, but that she wanted terribly to believe in.
Might it be that snobs, too, are finally fantasts? They see themselves living a life of ease, of elegance, of with-it-ry, of endless sunny days in which they are surrounded by the best and most exciting people, charming, beautiful, confident, all of whom take the snob at his or her own high self-appraisal. An exhilarating fantasy, or so it might seem if the reality behind it didn’t inevitably entail so much energy in the sad acts of sucking up to, and putting down of, others. Yet even if the snob attains the fantasy, it isn’t enough for him or her to have arrived; other people must be made to understand that they haven’t. And there’s the rub, the quite raw rub.
Every act of snobbery is at bottom an act of weakness. Often it is weakness striking out, showing its cruel side. Sometimes it shows this by condescension, sometimes by pretension, sometimes by unconscious vulgarity. In Pygmalion, Professor Henry Higgins tells Eliza Doolittle that the great secret about manners is not whether they are arbitrarily
good or bad, but whether one behaves the same toward everyone. This is what the snob finds it all but impossible to do. He or she cannot seem to understand that only natural distinction and genuine good-heartedness are what truly matter. Snobs cannot see through the artificialities of social rank nor through the world’s silly habit of offering prestige to many people who are utterly unworthy of it.
John O’Hara, in whose novels the cruel side of snobbery is so often chronicled, said that the true gentleman—and, of course, lady—is “sure enough of himself to find it unnecessary to be a snob.” Yet how many people have been able to divest themselves fully of snobbish feelings? (It is not clear that O’Hara ever came close.) Avarice, lust, fear, and snobbishness—are these, as Hilaire Belloc once suggested, the four powers that govern human beings? Some days it certainly seems so.
The old barrier of ancestry—our family came over on the Mayflower, that sort of nonsense—has long been knocked down, but with very little effect on snobbery. Instead of being a beneficiary of privilege, one can nowadays make quite as great a snobbish claim for him- or herself as a victim. The United States is an immensely more tolerant country today than it was even twenty-five years ago: an African American is secretary of state, a Jewish candidate has run for the vice presidency, Spanish-surnamed Americans have for years served in cabinet posts. Ethnicity is everywhere recognized as a source of pride and, rightly, no longer of shame.
Yet people nowadays attempt to outdo one another not in the distinction of their forebears but in the purity of their suffering—my holocaust is greater than your slavery—establishing snobberies of virtue by way of victimhood. High culture has for so long been under attack that people now stake out snobbish positions for themselves in their allegiance to the grossest popular culture. Snobbery, it seems, will find a way: it will seek out things to attach itself to, even if things have to be stood on their heads, or have almost to be invented.
An intelligent person of a certain age ought to be able to fight free of all forms of snobbery, if only to keep his or her mind clear for larger thoughts. Now past sixty, I do not require any new jobs, honors^ or friendships among the famous; I do not wish to wear the ribbon of the Légion d’honneur or any American equivalent thereof. Once asked by an interviewer whom I would like to be if I weren’t Joseph Epstein, my answer was Joseph Epstein, only a little smarter and a lot better looking. The grave awaits, and any notion of social climbing I might once have had is now, I believe, properly dead. So all remnants of snobbery ought to be. Yet if I no longer look up to anybody but the distinguished dead, why do I still find it necessary to look down on some people?
Why do I need to feel myself above the overdressed lawyer with the $200 haircut entering the Standard Club? Why, encountering someone at a party who tells me that Woody Allen’s Annie Hall changed her life, do I think to myself, “Poor baby”? When shown by an acquaintance a wretched new painting for which he has paid $6,000, why do I think, “One of a man’s first obligations is not to be duped, and you, friend, haven’t met it”? Why, when I learn of a colleague who is teaching Jack Kerouac, do I think about inciting his students to begin a malpractice suit against him? Why, when I read a young director of commercials say, in a newspaper interview, that the three words that describe him best are “creative, compassionate, and considerate,” do I feel the need to add that he seems to have left out “smug”? Why, when passing a woman I know who has been married to a shrink and a professor of journalism, do I say to myself, “I hope her third husband isn’t also a charlatan”?
Why do I need to continue to make such harsh, essentially snobbish judgments? They could be construed as expressions of jealousy, petulance resulting from aging, or—happy thought!—deep intolerance. Possibly they are all these things, but more likely they serve to reinforce me in my own point of view and what I take to be its clear superiority over those I feel nicely above. Pure snobbery, you might say, though I would be happier with a judgment against myself of impure snobbery. If I didn’t make these little judgments—and, out in the world, I make them all the time—I’d feel almost as if I didn’t exist, so much are they a part of my consciousness, my very being.
You will have to take my word for it when I claim that I never act on what is my downward-looking snobbery, and that in everyday actions I am not a snobbish person. It is only in my thoughts that my snobbishness lives so active a life. Yet why can’t I leave it alone, let it go, continue to make my little distinctions, social observations, but do so without feeling just a touch of corrupting snobbery when going about it?
W. H. Auden, who thought himself a Christian, claims one warm June evening in 1933 to have been sitting with three colleagues—fellow teachers at a boys’ school, two women and a man—and for the first time in his fife he “knew exactly—because thanks to the power, I was doing it—what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself.” No alcohol was involved, and no sexual interest among any of the four people. Auden recounts at that moment he “recalled with shame the many occasions on which I had been spiteful, snobbish, selfish, but the immediate joy was greater than the shame, for I knew that, so long as I was possessed by this spirit, it would be literally impossible for me deliberately to injure another human being.” The heightened feeling, he says, continued for roughly two hours, and lasted, in diminishing force, for two more days. “The memory of the experience has not prevented me from making use of others, grossly and often, but it has made it much more difficult for me to deceive myself about what I am up to when I do.”
What Auden apparently had undergone is the experience, or vision, of agape, or Christian love feast, in which one feels a purity of love for all human beings, without invidious distinction of any kind, the powerfully certain feeling that one’s fellows are worthy of the same respect, sympathy, and consideration as one pays oneself. Wholehearted love with the power of pure objectivity behind it, how glorious it must have been to undergo—and, as Auden was too honest not to add, all but impossible to maintain.
“Live and let live” remains the most sensible of mottos, and so much less demanding than the Golden Rule. Time for me to adopt it as my own. What I should prefer is to go through the rest of my life snobbery-free, looking neither up nor down but calmly off in the distance. I should like to spend the rest of my days without anger or bad feeling and with a fine social indifference, cultivating the kind of objectivity that Schopenhauer thought constituted genius.
“Snobbery,” Marcel Proust contended, “is a grave disease, but it is localized and so does not utterly corrupt the soul.” It would be good to think Proust is right about this, yet if snobbery is localized, why, despite strong efforts, can’t it be eliminated? Why does it still thrive? In an age of great social mobility, with a wider tolerance than any hitherto known in this country, when perhaps less and less can be used against a person to make him or her feel in any way socially inferior, in such an age why doesn’t snobbery simply disappear, or at least begin to show some signs of beginning to do so?
Snobbery will die on the day when none of us needs reassurance of his or her worth, when society is so well balanced as to eliminate every variety of injustice, when fairness rules, and kindness and generosity, courage and honor are all rightly revered. But until that precise day arrives—please, don’t mark your calendar just yet—snobbery appears here to stay.
A Bibliographical Note
“WHAT DO YOU have to do to be able to write a book about snobbery?” someone to whom I mentioned I was writing such a book not long ago asked. “You only have to look around you,” I replied. “That, and a little selective reading.”
This book, as it turns out, is based not so much on selective as on a lifetime’s desultory reading and the attempt, from a fairly early age, to keep my eyes open to the world into which I was born. These two highly unscientific activities constitute such research as has gone into this book.
Novels having always been central to my education, it is not surprising that I have found far and away the bes
t writers on snobbery to be the novelists: Jane Austen, Balzac, Proust, Henry James, Thackeray, Dickens, Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, and others. Some among them (Dreiser and Dickens) have felt the sting of snobbery firsthand, and were able to write about it with heart’s blood. Others (James and Powell) have brought a lordly detachment to the subject, and were able to work it from a distance for all its cruel comic potential.
Not all that many books in the category of nonfiction have been written about snobbery, but a vast number touch on the subject, and quite a few do more than touch on it—the Historical Memoirs of the Due de Saint-Simon is a stellar example—providing accounts of institutions that were at the heart of a world of snobbery now largely and unlamentedly departed. In the list that follows, I am certain to have left out a number of books from which I have profited, even though their authors are not mentioned in my own book, for which I apologize. But here, to the best of my memory, is a list of the books that have contributed to the writing of Snobbery, The American Version.
Adams, Henry, Democracy and The Education of Henry Adams
Agins, Teri, The End of Fashion
Alsop, Joseph, I’ve Seen the Best of It
Amis, Kingsley, The Biographer’s Moustache
Amis, Martin, Money and Experience
Amory, Cleveland, Who Killed Society?
Andersen, Kurt, Turn of the Century
Ansen, Alan, The Table Talk ofW. H. Auden
Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, etc.
Baltzell, E. Digby, The Protestant Establishment
Balzac, Honoré de, Lost Illusions, Cousin Bette, Old Man Goriot, Cousin Pons, etc.
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