Snobbery Read online

  Other outsiders have put deeper imaginations to the subject. The American novelists F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara, both Irishmen, offer the perspective of the boy at the candy store window who longs to get inside. Fitzgerald’s yearning to live the good Wasp life was mediated by his knowledge of the likes of Tom and Daisy Buchanan, those Wasps to the highest power and the villains of The Great Gatsby: she whose laugh had the ring of money, he who was used to breaking things up. This knowledge didn’t prevent Fitzgerald, more than a bit of a snob himself, from trying to live as Waspily as possible. In his habits, John O’Hara also lived his life on the Wasp model, and it was said of him that the towering sadness of his life, never quite surmounted, was not going to Yale.

  Richard Brookhiser, in The Way of the Wasp, a book that contends that “Wasp character is the American character,” lists among the chief Wasp qualities “success depending on industry; use giving industry its task; civic-mindedness placing obligations on success, and anti-sensuality setting limits to the enjoyment of it; conscience watching over everything.” Not a bad statement of the case, really, but Brookhiser, in this book written in 1991, wanted what we now know for certain could never be: something like a return, if not to Wasp hegemony, then to the best of Wasp qualities, for the good and bad Wasp social qualities were somehow hopelessly intertwined.

  One can now begin to see that, for better and worse, at least three things helped bring Wasp culture down. The first was that the generation of Wasp descendants who went to university in the 1960s and ’70s began to feel an uneasiness about their wealth and privileged position. One read stories about Rockefeller and other great-grandchildren of the upper class feeling guilty about their money, about not deserving it. Elite culture, which was the culture that the Wasp aimed for, was in bad odor, especially in universities, where the word elite itself became a buzz—that is, a bad—word. The Wasps, in short, began to lose their will and with it the authority necessary for leadership.

  Then there were the incursions on those essential Wasp institutions, the elite prep schools and Ivy League colleges. As Nicholas Lemann reports in The Big Test, his study of the background and effects of the SAT in American life, allowing more children to enter the elite schools on the basis of testing rather than ancestry turned these schools more and more meritocratic in their admission policies. Not completely meritocratic, to be sure, for places in these schools were now reserved for minority group members, which cut down further on former Wasp dominance. At the same time, the meritocratic standard made the mating of the Wasp with non-Wasp fellow students more frequent, and this, too, served to dilute even more the mainstream of Wasp culture.

  Recently, on the campus of Northwestern University, I was stopped by an acquaintance, a fellow teacher, a contemporary, himself a Wasp who goes about ill dressed, in ungroomed beard and jeans, and in conversation he mentioned a well-known journalist, saying that “he was my roommate at prep school.” The reference—“my roommate at prep school”—sounded suddenly quaint, foreign, oddly marginal. Coming from the bearded mouth of this man, it might almost have sounded more American, I thought at the time, if he had said, “I knew him at yeshiva.”

  Everyone interested in this changing of the guard will have his own favorite anecdote or bits of evidence to show how complete it has become. Mine is about a philosophy professor of some academic eminence named. Martha Nussbaum. Professor Nussbaum, I learned only a few years ago, was not born with the name Nussbaum, but is in fact a Wasp from the Philadelphia Main Line. Nussbaum is her long-departed first husband’s name. In an age of feminism, she, a feminist, went against the grain and kept the name Nussbaum, which allows her to sidestep her Wasp antecedents while picking up a few Jewish victimhood points. The very name Nussbaum makes the story all the more piquant to those of us old enough to recall, from“the old Fred Allen Show on radio, Mrs. Nussbaum, the character from that portion of the show known as Allen’s Alley, who was the matron of all Jewish matrons, greenhorn accent and all, a stage Jew—rather, one might say, though in a radically different way, like Martha Nussbaum.

  Finally, the changes in the nature of the economy, with the large mergers among banks, stockbrokerages, and department stores, and the unsettling effect of the new technologically based but not geographically centered business world, took the control of local businesses out of the hands of long-established Wasp dynasties. Philadelphia banks were no longer necessarily run by powerful figures who had grown up in Philadelphia; hundred-year-old department stores in Chicago were now run by national corporations in Houston or Minneapolis or who knew where else; top New York law firms were now staffed by young men and women (women—this in itself was an astonishment) who may have been from the best schools but who had no Wasp connections or antecedents whatsoever. After more than a century, the Wasp domination of major institutions had drained and was fast disappearing.

  What amazes is that they, the Wasps, seem to have surrendered with so little struggle. In Nineteen Eighty-four, George Orwell sets out four ways in which a ruling class can be dislodged: “Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle Group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern.” Orwell adds that these ways usually act in combination, but in the case of the Wasps, the fourth way, the mental attitude, seems to have been dominant. The determination, the confidence, the energy to go on had somehow dissipated.

  Perhaps the best analogy to the Wasp divestment of power is that of the British giving up their empire. Both may have felt the need to do so inevitable—and quite possibly it was inevitable—but each came away disliked, diminished, maybe even a little despised for having done so.

  What the demise of the Waspocracy did for snobbery was to unanchor it, setting it afloat if not aloft, to alight on objects other than those connected exclusively with social class. A solid upper class, which is what the Waspocracy always provided, gave direction and something like a form to snobbery. With an upper class securely in place, the snob could locate his own position in the world; without it, things seemed much shakier, not by any means eliminating snobbery as a human habit, but altering its applications in dramatic ways.

  The direction and shape that snobbery has taken in America since the close of the Wasp dominance is largely what this book is about.

  7

  Class (all but) Dismissed

  WITH THE near-total displacement of the Wasps from their position as the unequivocal American upper class, a fairly sensitive status radar is required to determine the country’s new hierarchical arrangements. It’s difficult to have an actual class system without a clearly demarcated and convincing upper class, which seems to be the condition of American social life at the moment. Hierarchical arrangements there are always, of that one may be sure; even egalitarians have a strong sense of hierarchy, with some egalitarians naturally more egalitarian than others. The pressing question for the snob, as for the snobographer, is to find out who just now is on top and how social gradations are worked out from there down. Inquiring snobs want—make that need— to know.

  Under the current disposition, le nouveau régime, what group or combination of groups constitutes the American upper class? Wealth, power, and culture have often vied for top place; and in socially static times, what is everywhere conceded to be the upper class will have a near monopoly on all three, as for so many years the Wasps did. All this is now less than clear. To illustrate how unclear, consider wealth. Now that the word millionaire has lost its luster, with really serious money apparently beginning around half a billion dollars, wealth alone is no longer sufficient to qualify one for the upper class. What’s more, many of the country’s wealthiest men—Ted Turner, George Steinbrenner, Donald Trump, Michael Milken, Bill Gates and other of the computer-made entrepreneurs—seem uninterested in qualifying: social class, (capital-S) Society, and social prestige in any form thus far known holds, insofar as one
can discern, little magic for them.

  Not only social class but the way people think about it is in a state of flux. The class struggle, that lumpish Marxist idea, seems to be long over, though every once in a while it rears up again. In The New Yorker, of all places, a man from Helena, Montana, in response to an article about servant problems, wrote that the article “filled me with paroxysms of class rage. As a forty-one-year-old working-class man who grew up poor . . . I’ve grown sick of watching people with money wring their hands and worry about the morality of hiring servants, and whether their servants love them, and how much working people deserve to be paid. Just understand that we don’t love you, and that your money is always gained by our poverty and hard work, and that there is nothing noble about hiring somebody for pennies to do what you as an able-bodied person should be doing yourself.” One doesn’t often see that kind of cold class hatred so openly expressed anymore. At the same time, our man from Montana can, I think, relax his hatred, for nothing like a servant class any longer exists in America. Instead newly arrived immigrants do such work until they gain a foothold in the economy, at which point they are replaced by the next round of immigrants.

  Karl Marx posited three social classes: landowners, capitalists, laborers. Remarking on this, the British historian David Cannadine writes that “on closer inspection, the best that could be said of Marx’s three class-conscious classes was that they were ideal types, historical abstractions that grossly oversimplified.” Landowners, after all, were large holders in capitalist concerns, and capitalists, at the first opportunity, like to set up as large-scale landowners. Social-class unity of the kind Marx needed for his model of the class struggle never really existed; all social classes contained vast intramural disagreements. “Since Marx’s time,” Cannadine writes, “old occupational groups have expanded, and new occupational groups have come into being that do not easily fit into his three-level model: rentiers, managers, professionals, domestic servants, and the whole of the lower middle classes.”

  From nobility to peasantry, there have through modern times been subtle gradations within every social class. Such items as ancestry, income, education, taste, style of living, and much else went to form one’s social class. There has always been the additional complication that your own view of your social-class standing is often quite different from the next person’s view of your social-class standing. Complicating things further, people tend to describe social class from the perspective of their own social-class standing, or what they perceive that standing to be.

  One might hate all distinctions based on social class, but even the largest-hearted of people find themselves playing the class game. John Keats, who was surely a member of that best of all minority classes, the genuinely goodhearted, could not help but worry that his brother George, when he went off to America to seek his fortune, not descend to working at “trade,” which is to say waiting on other people. For a long while in Europe the idea of working at trade was the great social curse. “The daughters of the iron monger refuse to mix with the daughters of the woman who owns the pastry shop,” wrote Jules Renard in his Journal, apropos of the early-twentieth-century French village in which he lived. “Iron is more noble than pastry; and besides, they are never seen working in the store!”

  So class saturated is our equipment for social observation that it is difficult not to put people into social classes. Something is “classy,” people say, or they describe an object or an act as having “class,” or they refer admiringly to “a class act.” And yet R. H. Tawney, the English historian, was right when he said that “the word ‘class’ is fraught with unpleasing associations, so that to linger upon it is apt to be interpreted as the symptom of a perverted mind and a jaundiced spirit.”

  Social class, like bumps in phrenology, was once associated with characterological qualities. “At one time,” Proust has his great character the Baron de Charlus say, “the word aristocrat meant the best people, in intellect and in heart.” It also implied a certain stylish effrontery: Winston Churchill, having neglected to pay his tab at Wilton’s, a famously excellent London restaurant, for fully eighteen months, was politely confronted by the manager, who suggested that perhaps his secretary had overlooked the bill. “Good heavens, Marks,” replied Churchill, “didn’t know you were hard up.” Flaubert’s distaste—fury is perhaps closer to it—was reserved chiefly for the middle classes, the petite bourgeoisie especially, judging them always guilty until proven innocent. In America, Sinclair Lewis heaped many choice coals on this particular fire. The working class, the so-called lower orders, received a boost from Dickens, for in any Dickens novel, someone from the working class is likely to be the repository of all loyalty, kindness, goodheartedness, and no-frills wisdom. All this is very close to nonsense, of course, for creeps and saints are to be found in every social class and exist across all class lines. Louis Kronenberg reports that W. H. Auden surmounted all this by seldom wasting time dissecting or passing judgment on people: “someone, to him, was either a gent or not a gent—this a judgment in terms of character, not class.” The finest word of all on the subject, I believe, is that given to Madame Grandoni, in Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima, who, after saying she has no use for the People in the abstract, adds, “An honorable nature, of any class, I always respect.”

  The novelists, as usual, are our keenest sociologists. And in the twentieth century through today the best novelists on questions of class have doubtless been the English. Anthony Powell’s novels featured the English in their immense variety, which included higher civil servants, Oxbridge academics, minor aristocrats, people who drift into journalism, bohemians living on who knows what income. Kingsley Amis was excellent on the English social classes at their lower range, and in Stanley and the Women has a character remark that he is “lower middle class, not working class. Very important distinction. My old dad got really wild if you said he was working class. Worse than calling him a Jew.” In John Lanchester’s novel Mr. Phillips, Lanchester says of the English that they have in their brains “a top-of-the-range on-board computer calculating the exact geographical and social locations of the speaker every time someone opens their mouth.”

  When he was alive, George Orwell was much taken up with social class; he used regularly to refer to the “class racket,” and once declared Britain “the most class-ridden country under the sun.” Although no Marxist, his was generally the class-struggle view of society, with sentimental socialist overtones. In Nineteen Eighty-four, he set out three groups, the High, the Middle, and the Low. “The aim of the High is to remain where they are,” he wrote. “The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim . . . is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.” He also set out “a new aristocracy,” which included “professors, publicists, and journalists.”

  Things are now, and probably always have been, much more complicated than that, in England and in America. Peregrine Worsthorne, an English journalist with upper-class pretensions, has said that “the class system has changed out of all recognition in my lifetime.” The decades of the 1960s and ’70s had a good deal to do with this. “The working class,” Jilly Cooper, another English journalist, wrote, “became beautiful and everyone from Princess Anne downwards spat the plums out of their mouths, embraced the flat ‘a’ and talked with a working class accent.” The Beatles may have contributed a lot to this. And then along came the Rolling Stones, whom Tom Wolfe once described as like the Beatles, “only more lower-class deformed.”

  In England, there is even controversy about the importance of class distinctions. “What is peculiar in Britain is not the reality of the class system,” Stein Ringen, the Oxford professor of sociology and social policy, writes, “but class psychology: the preoccupation with class, the belief in class, and the symbols of class in manners, dress, and language.” Is social class, as Professor Ringen’s comment would seem to suggest, like sex for some peop
le, mostly in the head?

  Class distinctions exist, no one argues otherwise, but what seems to have changed is the widening of class opportunities. In a prosperous economy such as America has enjoyed for the past quarter century, nearly all possibilities are open to the talented, the industrious, those who possess desire, ability, and will power in the right combination. As early as the days of the founding of the country, Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, referred to her fellow citizens as “the mobility,” a prescient phrase, for social mobility has been one of the preponderant themes in American life.

  Confronted with the fact of social class, and once one has sufficient social consciousness to determine one’s own, some people struggle to rise into the next higher social class (and then the next and the next); some are content where they are; some remain where they are yet complain about all the obstacles set in their way. “The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges,” Clive James writes, “but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivation.” I’m far from certain either end of that sentence is true. One has to be a great ninny not to be aware of one’s privileges; and deprivation, stinging though it surely is, does not—need not—seem so permanent as once it did, and thus is not so convincingly channeled into class resentment as once it might have been.