Snobbery Read online

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  How Snobbery Works

  SNOBBERY, like religion, works through hope and fear. The snob hopes to position himself securely among those whom he takes to be the best, most elegant, virtuous, fashionable, or exciting people. He also fears contamination from those he deems beneath him. Snobs who have arrived do what they can to encourage hopelessness among those who haven’t. Snobs who haven’t arrived fear rejection the way other people fear cancer—it represents death, of a social kind.

  Some snobs take special pleasure in looking down on others; some snobs dream of rising higher than they now are; and yet other snobs—reverse snobs—derive their comfort (and cold comfort it usually is) from feeling themselves outside the snobbery game altogether. The way you can tell a snob is by the energy he puts into these various operations: climbing, stopping others in mid-climb, rather too strenuously disassociating himself from the climb. The snob cares a little—and often a lot—more about these things than he or she ought.

  What the snob wants is deference, inevitably quite a bit more than he deserves. He believes that deference comes through rank, which is not an altogether false belief. The grounds for deference differ in various societies at different times, and the determinants of rank can be inconstant, shifting, changing. High birth, by which is meant distinguished ancestry, can earn one deference. So can merit or extraordinary accomplishment. (“Better to be an ancestor,” said Freud, neatly covering this point, “than to have them”) Considerable wealth, accompanied by an admired style of living, can also ring the gong for deference. Power in its differing forms almost always commands deference. High educational or cultural attainment may sometimes receive deference. Sometimes mere closeness, or even suggested closeness, to people who receive deference is sufficient to garner deference. Hence the snobbish tic of name-dropping, which implies that, through knowing the great or powerful or wealthy or famous, one is also owed deference. All these items will be taken up in the chapters that follow.

  To have other people recognize your quality is no small pleasure. The lack of deference can seem no less displeasing. I occasionally go to lunch, at his club, with a friend who is a federal judge, who is greeted by the maitre d’ and by waiters as Your Honor. This is fair enough—in fact, his job apart, he is an honorable man—but I always undergo a slight letdown at being unaddressed, feeling a bit like that bereft figure in newspapers, “man at left unidentified.”

  Deference, to be sure, can be lovely. Even unearned deference isn’t bad. I had a taste of the latter in my late twenties at an excellent Chicago steak house called The Black Angus, where I believe I was taken, mistakenly, as “connected” by the owner, who also served as maitre d’. Connected, in the Chicago of those days, meant connected to the Syndicate, or Mob, or The Boys, as the Chicago mafia was then known. Perhaps I was taken for the son or nephew of someone important. Whatever the case, when I came into the restaurant, which was fairly often (this was in the BC, or Before Cholesterol, era), I was given precedence over already waiting customers—“Right this way, Mr. Epstein”—and escorted to one of the better tables. Shocking to report, I never corrected the owner, taking him aside, straightening him out, explaining to him that I was actually nobody.

  All societies are at least partially organized along lines of deference. These lines can alter, often subtly. But deference always implies hierarchy or an ordering—sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit—by respect, which itself can bring automatic privilege. Sometimes these privileges seem just—those accorded the United States Supreme Court justices, the seeding accorded tennis players based on their previous performances—but sometimes they will seem unearned, excessive, stupid in the extreme.

  Whatever the reality of his or her social position, everyone feels entitled to respect, which can be another, softer, slightly more euphemistic word for deference. “I don’t get no respect,” the old refrain of the comedian Rodney Dangerfield, spoken in a juddering voice while pulling nervously at his necktie, is one we have all, at one time or another, uttered—or more likely muttered—to ourselves. Nearly every human being deserves respect, but the question is, how much? And who does the calculations? By one’s own reckoning, it is safe to say that a great deal of respect is owed. By the world’s reckoning, the estimate is, somehow, almost inevitably likely to be lower. Journals kept by the young tend to give off a strong whiff of depression, chiefly because the world doesn’t yet recognize the youthful journal keeper’s genius, however unproven it may be. Sometimes one feels one isn’t getting the consideration (another euphemism for deference) one deserves as a veteran, senior man or woman, someone whose mettle has been established. Awaiting a decision from an editor that takes longer than I think it ought, I find myself mumbling about the ignorance of people who don’t understand that I am much too important to be kept waiting so long. Comic stuff, true, but also, I susptect, endemic.

  Gauging one’s significance not as you but as the world reckons it is no small problem. “Whenever I think I’m famous,” the composer and critic Virgil Thomson once remarked, “I have only to go out into the world.” By which he meant that he would find plenty of evidence that the world didn’t concur. I recall, in this connection, the meeting of two distinguished intellectual figures—one a scholar of high international reputation, the other a Nobel novelist—who were joined by an administrative vice president at the university where both men then taught. After ten or fifteen minutes, the vice president departed, and the scholar said to the novelist, “Ah, me, I see that X is suffering from delusions of equality.”

  Is this a tale of snobbery or merely a devastatingly witty remark? I think the latter. First, because the remark wasn’t made in front of the person at whom it was aimed. And second, because (as I happen to know) that person is himself a considerable snob, a double snob actually, one who sucks up to his betters and looks down on those he takes to be beneath him. The context gives its own special, happy twist to the story.

  The true downward-looking snob not only feels too good about his own position in the world but is most genuinely pleased when encouraging a deep feeling of hopelessness in the upward-looking snob, who wishes to establish equality with him. The former, by making plain the disqualifying deficiency of the latter—wrong family, wrong schools, wrong connections, wrong clothes, wrong taste, wrong manners, wrong almost anything, really, will qualify—puts up a clear stop sign: swine do not pass here, and that, pal, means you.

  Most people are readier to admit to being a downward-looking than an upward-looking snob. A man who wasn’t was Chips Channon, a transplanted Chicagoan who became a minor English politician; socially well connected, he regularly gave parties for royalty from various countries during the 1930s. He made no bones about his idea of a good time being one in which he spent an evening with a king and a princess or two, or an afternoon on which a queen comes to call. At the end of one such night, he noted in his diary: “Our party then went on for some time, everyone agreeing, I think and hope, that it had been sensationally successful. They all left about 1:30, exalted and impressed, and exhausted, I crept up to bed. The atmosphere had been terrific; so many royalties, so many jewels.” Hard to be angry at a man so open about his own light-hearted (and -headed) superficiality.

  But the reason most people aren’t ready to admit to upward-looking snobbery is that it suggests envy. And envy, as Melville, in Billy Budd, writes, is “universally felt to be more shameful than even felonious crime.” The upward-looking snob is happiest when he is mingling—better, perhaps, commingling—with the people he envies, which allows him to believe, however momentarily, that he is one of them. The upward-looking snob usually also turns out to be a downward-looking snob, for the pleasure that he takes being among his betters is not fully enjoyed unless he is also able to make plain to his former circle that he has now, thank you very much, risen well above it. Both parts—acceptance from those above, rejection of those below—must be in place for the upward-looking snob to feel the full elation of his vi
ctory. To be one up, someone else must be pushed one down, and so there has always been the element of one-upmanship about snobbery. But it is not one-upmanship of the kind put into play on the golf course or tennis court, where it is meant to throw an opponent off his game. It is one-upmanship played for higher emotional stakes.

  The snob—be he upward or downward looking—needs above all to feel superior. “Nothing fortifies friendship,” wrote Balzac in Cousin Pons, “more than one of two friends thinking himself superior to the other.” Snobbery inheres in those things (wine connoisseurship, the acquisition of art) the knowledge or possession of which confers upon us—sometimes in spite of our best efforts to fight it off—a feeling of superiority. Yet, whatever one’s specialty in this line, sustaining the feeling of superiority is no easy task, for, terrible truth to tell, human beings are not naturally superior. Hence the jumpy mental state of the snob, who almost perpetually requires confirmation of a superiority that doesn’t truly exist.

  Yet the real snobbery question is whether one is taking pleasure in a thing or activity for itself or because the pleasure is that other people—most people, in fact—are for one reason or another excluded from it. The two points are not so easily separated. One is driving along the Pacific Coast Highway in a two-seater Mercedes convertible, top down, an automobile of extravagant expense and on which great craftsmanship has been expended. Is the pleasure in the car itself, or is it partly in the knowledge that few people can afford such luxury? A bit of both, my guess is, and the pleasure is likely to be heightened by the mixture.

  Neither will it do to call everything that is extravagant, elitist, highbrow, or a minority taste snobbish. Something can have all the earmarks of snobbery and turn out to be—of all things!—absolutely worth it. Some while ago I took myself to an expensive three-star restaurant in Chicago called Le Francais, which has long had a strong press, and discovered that—bad news here—it seemed worth the expense. I say bad news because if the restaurant were mediocre, I could write it off as a piece of snobbish obtuseness and never have to think about it again. Now, from time to time, I do.

  The test for snobbery is finally a quality-control test. Is the thing desired worthy on its own and not for extrinsic (usually social) reasons? Is the car—the restaurant, the school—genuinely excellent? Or is it only that the world, in its characterless ignorance, has agreed that it is excellent. If the latter, then the standard in use is a snobbish one. Nothing wrong with wanting the best; the problem—the snobbery problem—enters in making sure it really is the best one wants, and not merely something whose prestige comes from its being known as the best, a very different thing.

  A further problem is that snobbery often works. Sometimes things that had true quality—certain once elite American universities, for example—have long lost it in substance, but the world conspires to keep this from being known, for the good reason that people who have gone to them do not want to knock the pins out from under themselves. Having gone to these schools still works to gain entrée into all sorts of places that might otherwise be closed to one: jobs and clubs and other social connections. Even after a radical hysterectomy, some golden geese continue for decades to lay their eggs.

  Putting one’s own pleasures to the snobbery check can be a tiresome business. Snobs aren’t, after all, always wrong. An elegant bit of design, a particular food or drink, a line of clothing needn’t be disqualified just because it is taken up by snobs, though this is certain to deter the reverse snob. On the other hand, does enjoying one’s own exclusivity make one a snob? I recall, in the late 1970s, a friend telling me that for years she had had an interest in serious cookery and in houseplants, and now she was disappointed to see that nearly everyone had taken up these interests. She maintained the former and deserted the latter.

  Not wanting to run with the general herd, nor wanting to run with that higher herd—the herd of independent minds—does not qualify one as a snob. It makes one, I would say, a person struggling to be an individual. Being discriminating isn’t necessarily being snobbish, either. “All artists are snobs,” Diana Trilling wrote, “whatever the social group with which they make common cause, if only to the extent that they live by discriminations.” The trick is to be independent of fads, trends, passing phases, to make one’s choices and take one’s actions, think one’s thoughts as free as possible from social pressures, yet at the same time try to get the best that one’s time has to offer. Never, this, easily brought off.

  I have to inject here another form of snobbery, which I have come to think of as infuriating snobbery—infuriating, that is, if aimed at you. This is the snobbery that one is sometimes subjected to by people who don’t understand what matters to you. Beer connoisseurs—and there are such—who are amused by your ordering a Budweiser; designerclothes idiots who make plain they find your clothes crude because they carry no logos; visual-art fools who buy expensive though dubious art yet look down on you for not knowing the name of a painter from Carmel, California Vulgarity is the hubris of the snobbish. It can be excruciating to be the victim of snobbishness in a realm where one is not even mildly interested but in fact, insofar as one can get up any interest at all, rather looks down on oneself. One wants to explain to the people looking down on you that they really must get it clear that your own standards are well out of the range of their pathetic snobberies.

  Nor does having high standards make one a snob. I, for example, have long scoffed at the habit—now practically a full-blown tradition—of universities conferring honorary degrees on movie actors and television journalists. In doing so, I believe, they degrade themselves, showing that they are quite as gone on celebrity as the average reader of People or viewer of Entertainment Tonight. In giving an honorary degree to Robert Redford or Oprah Winfrey or Ted Koppel they pander to their students, turning them into another audience and turning themselves into low-grade impresarios.

  High standards generally—about workmanship in the creation of objects, about what is owed in friendship, about the quality of art, and much else—far from being snobbish, are required to maintain decency in life. When the people who value these things are called snobs, the word is usually being used in a purely sour-grapes way. “Elitist,” a politically supercharged word, is almost invariably another sour-grapes word, at least when used to denigrate people who insist on a high standard. The distinction, I believe, is that the elitist desires the best; the snob wants other people to think he has, or is associated with, the best. Delight in excellence is easily confused with snobbery by the ignorant.

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  The Democratic Snob

  WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, in his Book of Snobs, reports that “first, the World was made, then, as a matter of course, Snobs.” Yet it is not altogether certain that this is true. One hears little about snobbery before the eighteenth century, and scarcely anything at all about it then. The Snob, one would think, would be a staple figure in Restoration comedy, but not so. Neither are there any snobs in Shakespeare, Dante, Aristophanes, or the Bible. Not that there isn’t plenty of truckling to superiors, parasitism, heavy-handed flattery, back-scratching and bottom-kissing, all calculated to bring special advantages to its purveyors. Pretension, too, has never been in short supply. We see much pretension that veers on the snobbish in the plays of Molière. The painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, friend to Wordsworth, Keats, Lamb, and Hazlitt, practically swooned when in the company of the highborn. But snobbery as we know it today, snobbery meant to shore up one’s own sense of importance and to make others sorely feel their insignificance, was not yet up and running in a serious way. It took the spread of democracy to make that possible.

  The reason is that, until the nineteenth century, there was a ready acceptance of rank and social position and, accompanying this, an understanding that most people were everlastingly locked in their place. Where social rank is clearly demarcated, as it is when a nobility and a gentry are present, jockeying for position of the kind that is at the heart of snobbery tends to
play a less than strong part in daily life; nor is it quite so central in the interior dramas of men and women whose hearts are set on rising in the world.

  Snobbery thrives where society is most open. It does particularly well under democracy, even though, theoretically, it is anathema to the democratic spirit. Snobbery is, wrote the political philosopher Judith N. Shklar in Ordinary Vices, “a repudiation of every democratic value.” The social fluidity that democracy makes possible, allowing people to climb from the bottom to the top of the ladder of social class in a generation or two, provides a fine breeding ground for snobbery and gives much room to exercise condescension, haughtiness, affectation, false deference, and other egregious behavior so congenial to the snob.

  The unavoidable Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, reminds his readers that “democratic institutions most successfully develop sentiments of envy in the human heart.” He also remarks that in America he “found the democratic sentiment of envy was expressed in a thousand different ways.” In a democracy there are so many ways of rising in society: through the acquisition of money, through marriage, even through, mirabile dictu!, merit. But such is the spirit behind democracy that no one really believes that, apart from innate talent, anyone is intrinsically better than anyone else, and especially is no one better than oneself; therefore any difference in social status between one person and another is taken to constitute an injustice of a kind—and one that can be remedied and rectified by careful plans. From the early Henry James (“Daisy Miller”) to Edith Wharton (The Custom of the Country) to Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy) to F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), some of the best nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American novels are about the attempts to carry such plans to fruition. The attempt to rise in American democracy may be the primary, the central, the essential American story.