Gossip (36 page)

Here I ought to underscore that my being Jewish may well have increased my sensitivity to the realm of snobbery. Although an agnostic in religion, my father was keen on sniffing out anti-Semitism, having lived with a great deal of it among the Québécois in Montreal when he was a boy and then through the nightmare that Hitler created during World War Two. One ofhis few repeated and heavily emphasized lessons to me was to be on the qui vive for anti-Semitism, which could crop up anywhere. "People might hate you," he said, "for no better reason than your name. Be careful. Stay on the alert." Anti-Semitism may itself be the first and perhaps the longest lasting and most virulent form of snobbery, though when stepped up to the level of pogroms, not to say genocide, it becomes, like racism, something much greater than mere snobbery.

Given all this, I never found myself much upset by the religious segregation practiced in the Middle West in the years I grew up there. That Jews were not wanted in Gentile fraternities at the University of Illinois was not in the least troubling to me. Jewish snobbishness of its own, reinforced by Jewish chauvinism, doubdess kicked in (who needs them!), but I never felt it a serious social deprivation not to be able to join' any fraternity or country club, or even live in certain then
Judenrein,
or restricted, neighborhoods or suburbs in and around Chicago, of which there were quite a few.

I soon became bored by this fraternity and what seemed to me its rather pathetic social aspirations. Chief among these was the hope of joining forces with a high-status Gentile sorority in a musical-comedy sketch called Stunt Show. I was, in fact, about to change radically the status system under which I operated, then and forever. After a year at the University of Illinois, I applied to and was accepted at the University of Chicago, which turned out to be an entirely different ketde of caviar.

Mike Nichols, the movie director and former comedian, who was at the University of Chicago roughly four years before I went there—pity he didn't attend later, so that I might have known him and thus dropped his name, a good one, at this point—Mike Nichols has said, "Everyone at the University of Chicago was neurotic, weird, strange—it was paradise." I'm not so sure about the paradise part, but about the neurotic, weird, and strange no argument is possible. One of the most astonishing things of all was that life at Chicago was not founded on status—which is also to say, on snobbery—at least not as I had been hitherto accustomed to it. People were not ranked by physical beauty, or athletic skill, or wealth, or family connections. None of these things seemed to matter. All that did was intelligence—or, more precisely, intellectuality, which I would define as the ability to deal in a sophisticated way with the issues, questions, and problems presented by art, science, politics, and things of the mind generally. Since my own intellectual quality was then of a low order, my status as a student at the University of Chicago was commensurately low. Hiding my ignorance as best I could, I looked on, fascinated. Here was a new game, and one I felt, if then still somewhat inchoately, I wanted to play.

The University of Chicago, I was to discover, had its own built-in status system. No one announced what it was, but anyone at all attentive couldn't fail to note that in this system only four kinds of work in life had any standing. These were: to be an artist; to be a scientist (and not some dopey physician, treating people for flu or urological problems—only a research physician qualified); to be a statesman (of which there were none then extant); or—and here was the loophole—to be a teacher of potential artists, scientists, and statesmen. To be anything else, no matter how great one's financial or professional success, was to be rabble, just another commoner, a natural slave (in Aristotle's term), out there struggling under the blazing sun with the only shade available that provided by Plato's cave for the uninitiated ignorant.

Henceforth the snobbish system under which I would operate would be ardstic, intellectual, cultural. Had I gone to Harvard, Princeton, or Yale (unlikely, since the latter two schools in those days had strict quotas against Jews, and, besides, my mediocre grades would not have qualified me for entrance), I might have adopted snobbery of a social kind, though, so barren of social distinction was the family I grew up in, this would not have been easy to bring off without extraordinarily thin pretensions. Meanwhile, artistic, intellectual, and cultural snobbery gave me quite enough to do. I began to think of myself as an intellectual and a highbrow, interested in art only in its exalted forms. As a would-be intellectual, I found myself comfortably contemptuous of the middle class (even though it was the class from which I happily derived), its values and general style of living. As someone with declared cultural interests, I tended to look down on businessmen, on philistinism, on anyone, really, who thought there were more important things in life than art and ideas. Other people might achieve success in life—I would seek
significance.

Of course, for the most part I kept these snobbish notions to myself. I believe—at least I hope—I never came across as preposterous as I assuredly was in the inner drama I was then living. Still, deep down (deep down, that is, for a shallow young person) I tended to forgo the more innocent affectations by which people hope to establish superiority—through possessions, through memberships in clubs and groups, through socially favorable marriages—in favor of a heavy freight of artiness and intellectuality.

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 subdety, 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 ofjudging 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 than 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 sufficiendy 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 recendy 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 Knokov-sky," 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'sèe 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.

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