The Purple Decades - a Reader

by Tom Wolfe

  —he has had a couple of highballs. Highballs! That is what they call whisky-and-sodas. And now he is exhilarated with the absolute baldness of putting on his glistening ceramic grin and introducing all of these faces to George by their first names, good old George, cleaned-and-pressed old George, big-blucher-shoed old George, popped-out-of-the-Fabrilex-mold old George—the delicious baldness of it!—

  Karl! Have you met George? Alec! Have you met George? John! Have you met George? George, predictably, has a super-ingratiating and deferential grin on his face, shaking hands, pumping away, even with people who don’t put their hands out at first—Mark! shake hands with George, he wants to say—and as George shakes hands he always lowers his head slightly and grins in panic and looks up from under his eyebrows, deferentially, this kind of unconscious deference because he … is meeting Englishmen …

  Still! Why should George give a damn? He can throw away points like this right and left. That’s the way Americans are. They can make the wrong gesture, make the most horrible malapropisms, use so many wrong forks it drives the waiter up the wall; demonstrate themselves to be, palpably, social hydrocephalics, total casualties of gaucherie and humiliation—and yet afterwards they don’t give a damn. They are right back the next morning as if nothing had happened, smashing on, good-humored, hard-grabbing, winning, taking, clutching. George can scrape and bobble his eyeballs under his eyebrows all day and he will still make his £20,000 a year and buy and sell every bastard in this room—

  Nicholas! Have you met George?

  Harold! Have you met George?

  Freddie! Have you met George?

  “Pe-t-e-r …”

  … Oh Christ … the second syllable of the name just dribbles off his lips.

  With Peter—suddenly he can’t go through with it. He can’t do the first name thing with Peter, he can’t hail him over and introduce him to this American—Peter!—George!—as if of course they’re pals, pals. Peter? A pal? Peter is on precisely his level in the hierarchy of the firm, the same age, 33, yet … in another hierarchy—class, to call it by its right name—

  Peter’s fine yet languid face, his casual yet inviolate wavy thatchy hair—that old, ancient thing, class, now has him and he can’t introduce Peter by his first name. It is as if into the room has burst the policeman, the arresting officer, from … that world, the entire world of nannies, cottages ornées in Devonshire, honeysuckle iron balustrades, sailor suits, hoops and sticks, lolly Eton collars, deb parties, introductions to rich old men, clubs, cliques, horn-handled cigar cutters—in short, the ancient, ineradicable anxiety of class in England—and he knows already the look of patient, tolerant disgust that will begin to slide over Peter’s face within the next half second as he looks at him and his American friends and his ceramic grin and his euphoria and his highballs. In that instant, confronted by the power of the future on the one hand—George’s eyeballs begin to bobble under the eyebrows—and the power of the past on the other—Peter’s lips begin to curdle—he realizes what has happened to himself. He has become a Mid-Atlantic Man.

  He meets them all the time in London now. They are Englishmen who have reversed the usual process and … gone American. The usual process has been that Americans have gone to England and … gone English. Woodrow Wilson appoints Walter Hines Page ambassador to the Court of St. James’s and tells him: “Just one word of advice, don’t become an Englishman.” Page says, “Sure, O.K.,” but, of course, he does, he becomes so much an Englishman he can’t see straight. The usual pattern is, he begins using his knife and fork Continental style, holding the fork in the left hand. He goes to a tailor who puts that nice English belly into the lapels of his coat and builds up suits made of marvelous and arcane layers and layers of worsted, welts, darts, pleats, double-stitches, linings, buttons, pockets, incredible numbers of pockets, and so many buttons to button and unbutton, and he combs his hair into wings over the ears, and he puts a certain nice drag in his voice and learns to walk like he is recovering from a broken back. But one knows about all that. The American has always gone English in order to endow himself with the mystique of the English upper classes. The Englishman today goes American, becomes a Mid-Atlantic Man, to achieve the opposite. He wants to get out from under the domination of the English upper classes by … going classless. And he goes classless by taking on the style of life, or part of the style of life, of a foreigner who cannot be fitted into the English class system, the modern, successful, powerful American.

  The most obvious example of the Mid-Atlantic Man is the young English show-business figure, a singer, musician, manager, producer, impresario, who goes American in a big way. A singer, for example, sings American rhythm and blues songs, in an American accent, becomes a … pal of American entertainers, studs his conversation with American slang, like, I mean you know, man, that’s where it’s at, baby, and, finally, begins to talk with an American accent in an attempt to remove the curse of a working-class accent. But the typical Mid-Atlantic Man is middle class and works in one of the newer industries, advertising, public relations, chemical engineering, consulting for this and that, television, credit cards, agentry, industrial design, commercial art, motion pictures, the whole world of brokerage, persuasion, savantry and shows that has grown up beyond the ancient divisions of landowning, moneylending and the production of dry goods.

  He is vaguely aware—he may try to keep it out of his mind—that his background is irrevocably middle class and that everybody in England is immediately aware of it and that this has held him back. This may even be why he has gravitated into one of the newer fields, but still the ancient drag of class in England drags him, drags him, drags him … .

  They happen to be watching television one night and some perfectly urbane and polished person like Kenneth Allsop comes on the screen and after three or four sentences somebody has to observe, poor Kenneth Allsop, listen to the way he says practically, he will never get the Midlands out of his voice, he breaks it all up, into practi-cally … and he laughs, but grimly, because he knows there must be at least fifty things like that to mark him as hopelessly middle class and he has none of Allsop’s fame to take the curse off.

  He first began to understand all this as far back as his first month at Cambridge. Cambridge!—which was supposed to turn him into one of those inviolate, superior persons who rule England and destiny. Cambridge was going to be a kind of finishing school. His parents had a very definite idea of it that way, a picture of him serving sherry to some smart friends in his chambers, wearing a jacket that seems to have worn and mellowed like a 90-year-old Persian rug. Even he himself had a vague notion of how Cambridge was going to transform him from a bright and mousy comprehensive schoolboy into one of those young men with spread collars and pale silk ties who just … assumes he is in control, at restaurants, in clubs, at parties, with women, in careers, in life, on rural weekends, and thereby is.

  And then the very first month this thing happened with the Pitt Club and the Cambridge scarf. His first move on the road to having smart people over to his chambers for sherry, and Cuban tobacco—Cuban tobacco was also included in this vision—was to buy a Cambridge scarf, a nice long thing with confident colors that would wrap around the neck and the lower tip of his chin and flow in the wind. So he would put on his scarf and amble around the streets, by the colleges, peeking in at the Indian restaurants, which always seemed to be closed, and thinking, Well, here I am, a Cambridge man.

  One day he came upon this place and a glow came from inside, red as wine, brown as boots, smart people, sherry-sherry, and so he stepped inside—and suddenly a lot of white faces turned his way, like a universe erupting with eggs Benedict, faces in the foyer, faces from the dining tables farther in. A porter with chipped-beef jowls stepped up and looked him up and down once, dubious as hell, and said:

  “Are you a member, sir?”

  Such a voice! It was obvious that he knew immediately that he was not a member and the question was merely, witheringly, rhetorical a
nd really said, Why does a hopeless little nit like you insist on wandering in where you don’t belong, and all the eggs Benedict faces turned toward him were an echo of the same thing. They all knew immediately! And it was as if their eyes had fastened immediately upon his jugular vein—no!—upon the Cambridge scarf.

  He mumbled and turned his head … there in the ancient woody brown of the place was a long coat rack, and hanging on it was every kind of undergraduate garment a right mind could think of, greatcoats, riding macs, cloaks, capes, gowns, mantles, even ponchos, mufflers, checked mufflers, Danish mufflers, camel-tan mufflers, ratty old aunt-knitty mufflers—everything and anything in the whole woofy English goddamn universe of cotton, wool, rubber and leather … except for a Cambridge scarf. This place turned out to be the Pitt Club, watering trough of the incomparables, the Cambridge elite. Wearing a Cambridge scarf in here was far, far worse than having no insignia at all. In a complex Cambridge hierarchy of colleges and clubs—if all one had was an insignia that said merely that one had been admitted to the university—that was as much as saying, well, he’s here and that’s all one can say about him, other than that he is a hopeless fool.

  He did not throw the Cambridge scarf away, strangely enough. He folded it up into a square and tucked it way back in the bottom of his bottom drawer, along with the family Bible his grandfather had given him. From that day on he was possessed by the feeling that there were two worlds, the eggs Benedict faces and his, and never, in four years, did he invite a single smart person over for sherry. Or for Cuban tobacco. He smoked English cigarettes that stained his teeth.

  Even years later, in fact, he held no tremendous hopes for the advertising business until one day he was in New York—one day!—with all Mid-Atlantic Men it seems to start one day in New York.

  Practically always they have started flying to New York more and more on business. He started flying over on the Fabrilex account. Fabrilex was going to run a big campaign in England. So he began flying to New York and getting gradually into the New York advertising life, which turned out to be a strangely … stimulating—all Mid-Atlantic Men come back with that word for New York, stimulating … strangely stimulating aura of sheer money, drive, conniving, hard work, self-indulgence, glamour, childishness, cynicism.

  Beginning with the reception room of the———Agency. It was decorated with the most incredible black leather sofas, quilted and stuffed to the gullet, with the leather gushing and heaving over the edge of the arms, the back and everywhere. There was wall-to-wall carpet, not like a Wilton but so thick one could break one’s ankle in it, and quite vermilion, to go with the vermilion walls and all sorts of inexplicable polished brass objects set in niches, candelabra, busts, pastille-burners, vases, etc., and a receptionist who seemed to be made of polished Fabrilex topped with spun brass back-combed hair. She didn’t sit at a desk but at a delicate secretaire faced with exotic wood veneers, tulipwood, satinwood, harewood. She also operated a switchboard, which was made to look, however, like the keyboard of a harpsichord. There was one large painting, apparently by the last painter in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to copy Franz Kline. Three different members of the firm, Americans, told him the reception room looked like “a San Francisco whorehouse.” Three of them used that same simile, a San Francisco whorehouse. This was not said in derision, however. They thought it was crazy but they were proud of it. New York!

  One of them told him the reception room looked like a San Francisco whorehouse while having his shoes shined at his desk in his office. They were both sitting there talking, the usual, except that a Negro, about 50, was squatted down over a portable shoeshine stand shining the American’s shoes. But he kept right on talking about the San Francisco whorehouse and Fabrilex as if all he had done was turn on an air-conditioner. He also had an “executive telephone.” This was some sort of amplified microphone and speaker connected to the telephone, so that he didn’t have to actually pick up a telephone, none of that smalltime stuff. All he had to do was talk in the general direction of the desk. But of course! The delicious … baldness of it! Who gives a damn about subtlety? Just win, like, that’s the name of the game, and the———Agency had £70 million in accounts last year.

  They always took him to lunch at places like the Four Seasons, and if it came to £ 16 for four people, for lunch, that was nothing. There are expensive places where businessmen eat lunch in London, but they always have some kind of coy atmosphere, trattorias, chez this or that, or old places with swiney, pebbly English surnames, Craw’s, Grouse’s, Scob’s, Clot’s. But the Four Seasons! The place practically exudes an air-conditioned sweat of pure huge expensive-account … money. Everybody sits there in this huge bald smooth-slab Mies-van-der-Rohe-style black-onyx executive suite atmosphere taking massive infusions of exotic American cocktails, Margaritas, Gibsons, Bloody Marys, Rob Roys, Screwdrivers, Pisco Sours, and French wines and French brandies, while the blood vessels dilate and the ego dilates and Leonard Lyons, the columnist, comes in to look around and see who is there, and everyone watches these ingenious copper-chain curtains rippling over the plate glass, rippling up, up, it is an optical illusion but it looks like they are rippling, rippling, rippling, rippling up this cliff of plate glass like a waterfall gone into reverse.

  And some guy at the table is letting everybody in on this deliciously child-cynical American secret, namely, that a lot of the cigarette advertising currently is based on motivational research into people’s reactions to the cancer scare. For example, the ones that always show blue grass and blue streams and blond, blue-eyed young people with picnic baskets, and gallons of prime-of-life hormones gushing through their Diet-Rite loins, are actually aimed at hypochondriacs who need constant reassurance that they aren’t dying of cancer. On the other hand, the ones that say “I’d rather fight than switch” really mean “I’d rather get cancer than give up smoking”—New York!—the copper curtains ripple up … .

  One interesting, rather nice thing he notices, however, is that they are tremendously anxious to please him. They are apparently impressed by him, even though he comes there very much as the beggar. They are the parent firm. Whatever they say about the Fabrilex campaign in England goes, in the long run. If they want to aim it at hypochondriac masochists who fear cancer of the skin, then that’s it. Yet they treat him as a partner, no, as slightly superior. Then he gets it. It is because he is English. They keep staring at his suit, which is from Huntsman and has 12-inch side vents. They watch his table manners and then … glorious! imitate him. Old George! He used to say to waiters, “Would you please bring some water” or whatever it was, whereas he always said, “Could you bring the cheese now, please?” or whatever it was—the thing is, the Americans say would, which implies that the waiter is doing one a favor by granting this wish, whereas the Englishman—class!—says could, which assumes that since the waiter is a servant, he will if he can.

  And old George got that distinction right off! That’s it with these Americans. They’re incurable children, they’re incurable nouveaux, they spell finesse with a ph to give it more tone—but they sense the status distinctions. And so by the second time old George is saying “Could you bring me some water, do you think?” and running do-you-think together into an upper-class blur over the top of his sopping glottis just … like a real Englishman.

  So all of a sudden he began to sense that he had it both ways. He had the American thing and the English thing. They emerge from the Four Seasons, out on to 52nd Street—kheew!—the sun blasts them in the eyes and there it is, wild, childish, bald, overpowering Park Avenue in the Fifties, huge cliffs of plate glass and steel frames, like a mountain of telephone booths. Hundreds of, jaysus, millions of dollars’ worth of shimmering junk, with so many sheets of plate glass the buildings all reflect each other in marine greens and blues, like a 25-cent postcard from Sarasota, Florida—not a good building in the lot, but, jaysus, the sheer incredible yah!—we’ve-got-it money and power it represents. The Rome of the twentieth century—and beca
use wealth and power are here, everything else follows, and it is useless for old England to continue to harp on form, because it is all based on the wealth and power England had 150 years ago. The platter of the world’s goodie sweets tilts … to New York, girls, for one thing, all these young lithe girls with flamingo legs come pouring into New York and come popping up out of the armpit-steaming sewer tunnels of the New York subways, out of those screeching sewers, dressed to the eyeballs, lathed, polished, linked, lacquered, coiffed with spun brass.

  Ah, and they loved Englishmen, too. He found a brass-topped beauty and he will never forget following her up the stairs to her flat that first night. The front door was worn and rickety but heavy and had an air hinge on it that made it close and lock immediately, automatically—against those ravenous, adrenal New York animals out there; even New York’s criminals are more animal, basic savage, Roman, criminal —he never remembered a block of flats in London with an air hinge on the front door—and he followed her up the stairs, a few steps behind her, and watched the muscles in her calves contract and the hamstring ligaments spring out at the backs of her knees, oh young taut healthy New York girl flamingo legs, and it was all so … tender and brave.

  Precisely! Her walk-up flat was so essentially dreary, way over in the East Eighties, an upper floor of somebody’s old townhouse that had been cut up and jerry-built into flats just slightly better than a bed-sitter, with the bedroom about the size of a good healthy wardrobe closet and a so-called Pullman kitchen in the living room, some fiercely, meanly efficient uni-unit, a little sink, refrigerator and stove all welded together behind shutters at one end, and a bathroom with no window, just some sort of air duct in there with the slits grimed and hanging, booga, with some sort of gray compost of lint, sludge, carbon particles and noxious gases. And the toilet barely worked, just a lazy spiral current of water down the hole after one pulled down that stubby little handle they have. The floor tilted slightly, but—brave and tender!