Snobbery Read online

  This lasted for several years, certainly till my thirties. I feel touches of it invade my thinking even today, when I sense my superiority click in as some friend or relative expresses admiration for a book or movie or play I think beneath seriousness. What is operating here is the snobbery of opinion, or, more precisely, of correct opinion. Someone tells me that he thinks, say, Death of a Salesman is a great play, and my mind goes—click—foolish opinion, betraying a want of intellectual subtlety, a crudity of sensibility. (My view of that play has come to be close to that of the salesman who, leaving the theater after the play, is supposed to have said to his friend, “That New England territory was never any goddamn good.”) A person who is not a snob is content merely to think a wrong opinion mistaken and let it go at that; it surely doesn’t speak to the character or anything else essential about the person who has expressed it. For the snob, a wrong opinion is usually more than stupid; it’s an utter disqualification.

  The tricky part of judging snobbery, in oneself or others, is in determining the intrinsic value of a thing, or act, or person and the value that society assigns that thing, or act, or person. Behind all acts of snobbery is, somehow or other, a false or irrelevant valuation. I drive a Jaguar S-type; it is a fairly expensive car—costing roughly $45,000—and has, I recognize, some snobbish cachet. But it is also a very reliable and comfortable and handsomely designed car, a pleasure to drive. I bought it, I like to believe, for its inherent quality and not for what other people think of it. Yet sometimes I feel myself unduly pleased with this car. It is not as vulgar as a Mercedes, I have concluded; it has none of the gaudiness of a Cadillac or the parvenu feeling of a Lexus. These are, of course, purely snobbish notions. The only questions that probably need to be asked of a car are: Does it do well what I want it to do and is it worth its price? But cars have long since passed the stage of being merely vehicles of utility and entered the murky realm of status.

  Because I wanted to divest myself of the silly realm of cars and status, I used to make it a point to drive dull cars: Chevys and mid-sized Oldsmobiles. A case, this, clearly, of reverse snobbery: the chief mechanism in reverse snobbery is to find out which way that snobs are headed and then turn oneself in the opposite direction. Reverse snobbery—about which more later in this book—may be more difficult to shuck off them actual snobbery, for it proceeds in part from a distaste for snobs and snobbishness, but also in part from a wish to assert one’s superiority to snobbery generally, which itself can seem suspiciously like a snobbish act.

  I have, for example, a little thing about San Francisco, which, despite all the virtues of its climate and topography, is one of the great centers of snobbery in America. The boosters of the city, who seem to include everyone who lives there, imply by their manner that they above all their countrymen have found the secret of good living, and, with their insistence on their good taste in daily life, San Franciscans can be richly, profoundly off-putting. I find myself sufficiently put off by them to have come to think of their extolling of their own city as unbearable Bayarrea.

  I have found that certain fads in dining, clothes, travel, hotels, neighborhoods, artworks, and other items and subjects that bring out the snob in people bring out the reverse snob in me. Sometimes all it takes for me to drop an enthusiasm is the knowledge that someone I think commonplace has picked it up. Twenty-five or so years ago I thought Humphrey Bogart a swell actor; the Bogart cult killed it for me. I mock—though never to their faces—people I know who buy what I think crappy modern art, pretending to enjoy it and hoping it will increase in value. If lots of what I take to be indiscriminate, and therefore nondiscriminating, people take something up, I can almost always be relied upon to put it down, at least in my mind.

  Yet I continue to feel that snobbish sense of false superiority when, say, I stay in an expensive hotel, as I did recently in a suite at the Plaza in New York (at someone else’s expense, let me quickly add), though a small superior hotel will set my snob glands flowing even more profusely. Wearing good clothes can also elevate my spirits. I’ve not any food snobbery, I believe, and I have also managed to evade wine snobbery altogether, and think that spending more than thirty dollars for a bottle of wine an almost immoral act. But I am a sucker for the small fine things that a not really wealthy person can acquire: fine stationery, a splendid fountain pen, an elegant raincoat. I don’t own an expensive watch, chiefly because I’m not much for jewelry, and spending a thousand dollars or more for a wristwatch is not my notion of a good time, but I am not opposed to buying a knockoff of a Carrier tank watch or of a Bvlgari watch on the streets of New York or Washington, D.C., for fifteen or twenty-five dollars. (“An André Knokovsky,” I say, if anyone asks what kind of watch I’m wearing.) Snobbery, I know, still courses through my bloodstream.

  It’s time it be flushed out. My eldest son not long ago reminded me that, when he was applying for admission to college, I gave him the following advice: “I want you to go to one of the country’s best schools, at any rate as the world reckons these things. What you will discover when you get there is that it’s not all that good, which is fair enough. But having gone there, you will at least not have to spend any further portion of your life in a condition of yearning, thinking to yourself, Ah, if only I had gone to one of the better schools, how much grander my fate would have been.” My son, a good student, went to Stanford, and he says that things have worked out just as I had prophesied.

  But, pathetic truth to confess, I am also a little pleased that my son went to Stanford, for nothing better, I fear, than snobbish reasons. I am too often a little pleased with myself on other snobbish fronts. Allow me to present a few candid snapshots. Here I am giving a lecture at an English university—how nice! Here I am being praised in print by a writer I have long admired in a magazine of high status—splendido! Here I am being paid obeisance by the wealthy—and, lo, the world seems a just and good place!

  Time to grow out of such thoughts. Time to extrude all such snobbish feelings. Time to see the world, as the philosophers put it, as in itself it really is, which snobbery, even in small doses, makes it all but impossible to do.

  2

  What Is a Snob?

  IN THE BEGINNING was not the Word. The Thompson gazelle, that elegant beast, existed well before either Thompson or the word gazelle. So it has been with snobs and snobbery: the phenomena existed long before the words arose to describe them. When the word snob was first used and what its true origins might be are both in the flux of controversy. “The etymology of the word snob,” Margaret Moore Goodell wrote in a 1939 study of Thackeray, Meredith, and Proust, “has not found a universally accepted explanation, although a great deal of ingenuity has been expended in searching for one.” At a minimum, one can say that to call someone a snob, as the philosopher George Santayana once put it, “is a very vague description but a very clear insult.”

  Four notions of origin predominate. In the first, the word snob is thought to be Scandinavian and carries the meaning of “a dolt, idiot, with the notion of impostor or charlatan, a boaster.” In the second, the word is thought to derive from an abbreviation of the Latin sine-nobilate, or “s.nob,” which, as Professor Goodell remarked, “is supposed to have been appended to the names of commoners as opposed to noblemen in certain official lists, especially at the universities.” A third notion has it that snob derives from its antonymic relation to the word nob: nobs were people with genuine position and power; snobs, having neither, were people who urgently sought both. A fourth speculation is that the word derives from the elision of French peasants in pronouncing the phrase c’est noble, referring to that which is of the upper class. Snob could also possibly derive from snub, though it might just as easily have been the other way around. Etymology, though complicated enough, isn’t crucial.

  Nor is an absolutely lucid definition easily established. The word snob has taken on slightly different connotations in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the United States. The French, for example, had
a fairly extensive vocabulary for describing the epiphenomena of snobbery—including the words parvenu, arriviste, nouveau riche—well before they took up snob and formed snobisme from it. A writer named Emile Faguet, in 1907, speculated that his countrymen liked the word’s “impertinence monosyllabique or single-syllable sauciness, which it certainly has. The 1907 Petit Larousse defined snobisme as “an artificial and foolish admiration for all that is in fashion,” which suggests that in France snobbery seems to have had more to do with absorption in fashion than the yearning for rank, with the chic rather than the socially enviable.

  In the United States the word snob has taken on its own special twist. In a country still in the making, it had been a bit tricky, especially at first, to imitate the higher social ranks when it was not always clear which these might be. After all, almost all riches had to be nouveaux, everyone was an arriviste, and everybody could count himself parvenu. In its early decades, nearly the entire United States was engaged in one vast social climb. To be in on the climb, though, was never the social crime here that it was deemed in Europe. The crime in America was less in wanting social rank than in claiming it. The snobs in America have more often than not been those who have chosen to look down their noses at their countrymen. In the United States, contempt for social inferiors more than anything else marked the snob.

  By way of preliminary definition: a snob is someone who practices, lives by, exults in the system of distinctions, discriminations, and social distractions that make up the field of play for snobbery. “The essence of snobbery is that you wish to impress other people.” So wrote Virginia Woolf, who allowed that she was herself a snob. But that definition is not only too slack but much too generous. (The world does contain, after all, a small number of people whom it is worthwhile to impress.) The essence of snobbery, I should say, is arranging to make yourself feel superior at the expense of other people. Which is a different, really a much more wicked, little proposition.

  And while we’re at it, be warned against people who too readily admit to being snobs, as Virginia Woolf does in her essay “Am I a Snob?” They probably are snobs, but often in ways rather uglier than they are willing to admit, because much more shameful than they are likely to confess. While owning up to her weakness for people with titles, Woolf neglects to mention her nagging anti-Semitism—more than nagging, certainly, if one is a Jewish reader—even though she was married to Leonard Woolf, who was himself Jewish. Thus of her meeting with Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford political philosopher, she wrote to a friend, describing a dinner at Oxford: “There was Isaiah Berlin, a Portuguese Jew by the look of him [he was, in fact, from Riga], Oxford’s leading light; a communist, I think, a fire-eater.” She could also use snobbery as a weapon in literary rivalry, snobbishly referring to James Joyce, a writer greatly superior to her, as “underbred.”

  Snobbery often entails taking a petty, superficial, or irrelevant distinction and, so to say, running with it. It is sitting in your BMW 740i and feeling quietly, assuredly better than the poor vulgarian (as you cannot help judging him) who pulls up next to you at the stoplight in his garish Cadillac. It is the calm pleasure with which you greet the news that the son of the woman you have just been introduced to is majoring in photojournalism at Arizona State University while your own daughter is studying art history at Harvard. It is the delight you feel when an associate at your law firm walks into your office wearing an ill-tailored Italian suit that costs three times your own better-fitting traditional clothes. In such comforts, and many more minuscule and subtler ones, does the snob find paradise.

  Paradise, however, figures always to be temporary, because the snob resides in a world of relentless one-upmanship, even though, unbeknownst to him, he may be the only one playing the game. He can almost be certain that one day, at another stoplight, a Bentley will pull up next to his pathetic BMW; that he will be introduced to a woman whose son is studying classics at Oxford; and another colleague will enter his office wearing a bespoke English suit, a wafer-thin Patek Philippe watch, and Italian shoes made from, let us say, the foreskins of Norwegian rams. In such minor discomforts does the snob find his or her hell.

  So little does it take to lift a snob’s spirits, and so little, too, to send him or her plunging, that the life of a snob is likely to be fairly jumpy. The snob can have only one standard, that of comparison. And comparison inevitably implies competition, rivalry, almost full-time invidiousness. The snob is always positioning himself. He needs to know that he is in a better position than the next person. The true snob can know no lengthy contentment. If he doesn’t feel his own superiority, he is likely to feel an aching sense of inferiority, or of at least not being in the position he wants to be in.

  Snobs divide into those whose snobbery consists of looking down on others and those whose snobbery consists of looking up to, and being ready to abase themselves before, their supposed betters. The upward-looking snob feels envy more acutely than ordinary people. One can of course be both kinds of snob simultaneously: an all-round snob looks both up and down, also over his shoulder and to both sides of him, as befits a person making a steep climb or even someone standing at the top of a precipice. He, the snob, is happiest when he feels himself gaining ground on his superiors and putting more ground between himself and those whom he takes for his inferiors, with whom he never wants to be confused. No easy job, that of the snob; the pay is entirely psychic and the hours are endless.

  “Life,” wrote William Hazlitt, “is a struggle to be what we are not and to do what we cannot.” If Hazlitt is to be believed, we are, as he goes on to say, “very much what others think of us.” At the heart of snobbery is the snob’s hope that others will take him at his own (doubtless) extravagant self-valuation. It is his high if shaky opinion of himself that he needs to have confirmed, and at frequent intervals. Since the world often does not concur in this valuation, the snob is usually left feeling raw, resentful, agitated.

  There is something deeply antisocial about the snob. He is, in a profound sense, in business for himself. Hugh Kingsmill, in a book on D. H. Lawrence, wrote: “Snobbishness is the assertion of the will in social relations as lust is in the sexual. [Snobbishness] is the desire for what divides men and the inability to value what unites them.” Like the poor guy without rhythm in the old Louis Armstrong song, the snob can be the loneliest man in town.

  The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines snob as a “person with exaggerated respect for social position or wealth and a disposition to be ashamed of socially inferior connections; behaves with servility to social superiors, and judges of merit by externals; person despising those whose attainments or tastes he considers inferior to his own.” Marcel Proust, in his early life a great snob and later a great—the very greatest—connoisseur and critic of snobs, asserted that snobbery “is admiration of something in other people unconnected with their personality”—by which he meant things extrinsic to them. (Proust also called snobbery, in his essay “On Reading Ruskin,” “the greatest sterilizer of inspiration, the greatest deadener of originality, the greatest destroyer of talent.” When he said this, he was still unable to begin his great novel, and so the remark is probably best read as a wholly autobiographical, self-accusatory utterance. The shedding of his own snobbery made it possible for Proust to write The Remembrance of Things Past.) The snob measures himself and others by extraneous things: ancestry, wealth, power, social connections, possession of glittering or elegant objects—with everything that is connected with status in the world, or with that portion of it that vibrates alluringly for him.

  I have chiefly been using masculine pronouns in this chapter, but it is far from clear which of the sexes provides the greater number of snobs. Only a guess is possible here, and my own would be that snobbery, like bad judgment, is evenly divided between men and women, although the world’s most famous snobs—the Duc de Saint-Simon, Lord Chesterfield, the Comte Robert de Montesquiou—have been men. Nothing exclusively feminine about snobbery, but it does so
metimes suggest, in the full pejorative sense, the effeminate. The emotions, the values, the gambits of snobbery seem, in their indirectness, less than virile. Generally the most infuriating snobs I have encountered happen to have been men, though the single most tiresome snob I know is a woman. So there we are. Best perhaps to conclude that in snobbery at least, men and women have reached something like perfect equality.

  “I have never met a snob who was not also a liar,” writes Paul Theroux, “and that was what was wrong with snobbery.” This quotation becomes all the more interesting when one considers that Theroux, especially in his travel writings, has often been thought a considerable snob. (Can it be that Theroux is himself lying in saying he has never met a truthful snob? This is a bit like the paradox presented by the Cretan who announced that all Cretans are liars.) Perhaps a greater sin inherent in snobbery is that it purports always to be above vulgarity, while it is in fact a central branch of vulgarity. The novelist Anthony Burgess once referred to another writer’s “ill-bred snobbery,” but that may well be a tautology, for all snobbery is, in some sense, ill bred—in the sense that everything is ill bred that does not seem to have behind it kindness, generosity, and a good heart.

  For a beginning or working definition, then, I take the snob to be someone out to impress his betters or depress those he takes to be his inferiors, and sometimes both; someone with an exaggerated respect for social position, wealth, and all the accouterments of status; someone who accepts what he reckons to be the world’s valuation on people and things, and acts—sometimes cruelly, sometimes ridiculously—on that reckoning; someone, finally, whose pride and accomplishment never come from within but always await the approving judgment of others. People not content with their place in the world, not reconciled with themselves, are especially susceptible to snobbery. The problem here is that at one time or another, and in varying degrees, this may well include us all.