“Epstein gives a complete history of snobbery in America.
But did we really need this much information? Epstein divides the book into two
parts, history of snobbery and most common snob objects,ie, colleges, clubs,
children's acheivements, etc. This is a good book for self-evaluating your
tendancies of snobbery as he hits so many different subjects. Viewed from this
self-analysis theme, this book is worth the read. But generally, the book
drones on as the author attempts to fill the standard page quota of about 250
pages.
Although I may not have needed it, I did learn a good
history of snobbery particularly as it relates to the continent. I also learned
Epstein's well-stated theory that the WASP culture of snobbery was
substantially reduced in the 60s with the growing counter-culture. In the
second section he overlayed American snob tendancies particularly in clothing,
clubs and education. In many respects, I agree with him completely.
This would be a difficult subject to tackle and Epstein at
least admits some of his snob tendancies very early. I think this book
demonstrates that everyone has some snob tendancies. But the book could be more
concise and eventually the reader may tire of the information learned but
stretched to fill space.”
Rick Spell
Snobs: They're Made, Not Born
By EMILY EAKINJUNE 8, 2002
Joseph Epstein drives a Jaguar S-Type. His son went to
Stanford. He has hobnobbed with Saul Bellow and shared meals with five other
Nobel laureates (three in economics, two in physics). He's been to a Chicago
Bulls game with Gene Siskel ($350 front-row seats), exchanged greetings with
Oprah Winfrey and had Lynne Cheney to his apartment for supper. He's on
friendly terms with one of Monica Lewinsky's lawyers and receives the
occasional note from former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Oh, and he wants you to know that on a recent visit to New
York City, he was put up at the Plaza.
Impressed? Mr. Epstein certainly hopes so. An essayist,
author and former editor of The American Scholar, he is also, by his own
bashful admission, a snob. Those celebrity names and status brands glinting
from the pages of his new book like Swarovski crystals on an Armani gown are
just his way of letting you know that he is a person of superior taste and
social standing. And since the book is ''Snobbery: the American Version''
(Houghton Mifflin), they're also intended to encourage reader confidence that
Mr. Epstein is just the man to tackle an affliction apparently as slippery as
it is ubiquitous.
Everyone knows a snob when he sees one, he notes. But there
is considerably less agreement about exactly what makes one a snob. Virginia
Woolf, who confessed to uppity impulses -- like keeping letters from her titled
friends in conspicuous view -- in her 1936 essay ''Am I a Snob?,'' claimed that
''the essence of snobbery is that you wish to impress other people.''
Marcel Proust, a famous snob from a country generally
thought to be teeming with them, defined snobbery as ''admiration of something
in other people unconnected with their personality.'' He also called it ''the
greatest sterilizer of inspiration, the greatest deadener of originality, the
greatest destroyer of talent.'' Perhaps, Mr. Epstein suggests, the philosopher
George Santayana put it best when he said that to call someone a snob ''is a
very vague description but a very clear insult.''
Lexicographers can provide no further help. The origins of
the word snob are a total mystery, though Mr. Epstein comes up with four
intriguing theories: 1) it is derived from a Scandinavian term for dolt or
charlatan 2) it comes from an abbreviation of the Latin sine nobilitate,
supposedly used to distinguish commoners from bona fide nobles on official
lists 3) it is an antonym for the word nob, British slang for a person of
genuine wealth and stature or 4) it is derived from French peasants' elision of
the phrase ''c'est noble,'' meaning ''it's noble.''
But whatever its roots, scholars generally agree that before
the 19th century, the word snob simply did not exist. And in Mr. Epstein's
view, this makes sense. Snobbery, he contends, is a peculiarly modern disease:
a byproduct of democracy. ''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,'' he writes, ''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.''
In the past, he argues, such behavior was pointless -- and
little indulged in. Who was going to mistake a scullery maid's daughter for a
lady, no matter how skillful her piano playing or fluent her Latin? Your place
in the rigid social order was fixed at birth. And this, Mr. Epstein says,
explains why Shakespeare, Dante, Aristophanes and the Bible are basically
snob-free: ''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.''
By 1848, however, when the English novelist William
Makepeace Thackeray wrote his ''Book of Snobs'' -- the first major literary use
of the term -- they were apparently everywhere. Thackeray's comprehensive
treatment includes chapters on every possible strain: royal snobs, city snobs,
country snobs, military snobs, literary snobs, club snobs and ''dining-out''
snobs. ''It is impossible for any Briton, perhaps, not to be a Snob in some
degree,'' he remarks at one point.
According to Mr. Epstein's theory, such an explosion of
snobbery was only to be expected. By 1848, a large and prosperous commercial
class was wreaking havoc on England's old caste system.
But no place, he insists, proved a more ideal incubator of
snobbery than the United States. Living in a country with few built-in class
distinctions, Americans turned to snobbery as compensation, a means of
clarifying what the Constitution failed to: just who was better than whom.
(Alexis de Toqueville, who saw this phenomenon up close, wrote that ''democratic
institutions most successfully develop sentiments of envy in the human
heart.'')
Nor did it hurt that America was predominantly middle class.
''Vague and wide-ranging though the term middle class may be,'' Mr. Epstein
writes, ''it does render anyone who is part of this class capable of, if not
intrinsically susceptible to, snobbery in both directions. To be middle class
positions one nicely to be both an upward- and a downward-looking snob, full,
simultaneously, of aspiration to rise to the position of those above and of
disdain for those below.''
Mr. Epstein traces snobbery's fickle path through American
history, noting the changing status of brand names, people and objects -- from
neighborhoods and cities to music, beverages, colleges and dogs. (King Charles
spaniels and golden retrievers are out; half-Labs are the new status symbol.)
Along the way, he finds a dizzying array of new snobbisms,
including ''reverse snobbery,'' which amounts to asserting your superiority
over other snobs by embracing what they disdain and disdaining what they
embrace. Calling ''The Simpsons'' high art and The New Yorker a middle-brow rag
is the sort of thing Mr. Epstein has in mind. (His own reverse snobbism is
mostly limited to expressing a strong aversion to the work of Susan Sontag, a
writer generally held in high esteem by the literary establishment.)
If Mr. Epstein is right, as social barriers fall away and
more Americans of diverse backgrounds join the middle class, the nation's
snobbery quotient is likely only to grow. But perhaps that's not such a bad
thing. If snobbery flourishes where freedom and social mobility are great,
maybe it's less a symptom of disease than a sign of health.
Condescension, or by Another Name,
Snobbery
By ALAN RIDINGAUG. 21, 2002
SNOBBERY
The American Version
By Joseph Epstein
274 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $25.
The great thing about snobbery is that there is a snob
pecking order. Since it is all about looking up and looking down at people,
snobs are quick to decide who merits disdain and who deserves esteem. For
instance, driving an expensive and ostentatious car is snobbery to some, plain
bad taste to others. Private snobbery, in contrast, requires a sophisticated
audience: there is no point in dropping the name of an eminent philosopher if
no one has heard of him. Then, more subtle still, there is reverse snobbery,
like doggedly ignoring fashion. But whether crass or disguised, Joseph Epstein
argues in his new book, ''Snobbery: The American Version,'' just about
everything we say or do to assert our identity can be gauged as snobbery.
Unsurprisingly, then, as part of his dissection of American
snobbery, Mr. Epstein engages in an extended mea culpa of his own peccadillos.
Now a lecturer at Northwestern University, he caught the snobbery bug more than
four decades ago when, as a student at the University of Chicago, he learned
that the only worthwhile careers were artist, scientist, statesman or teacher
of any of these three. ''Henceforth the snobbish system under which I would
operate would be artistic, intellectual, cultural,'' he writes. In time,
though, he broadened out: today he confesses to owning a classy fountain pen
and good clothes, to driving a Jaguar and to feeling pleased with himself when
his son was admitted to Stanford.
Is this snobbery? Can exhibitionism, boastfulness, pride,
political correctness, name dropping, rudeness and one-upmanship all be
attributed to snobbery? ''The essence of snobbery is that you wish to impress
other people,'' offered Virginia Woolf, herself no mean expert on the subject.
Mr. Epstein goes further. ''The essence of snobbery, I
should say, is arranging to make yourself feel superior at the expense of other
people.'' So all is well. By his own definition, Mr. Epstein is a harmless snob
because ''in everyday actions I am not a snobbish person.'' He explains, ''It
is only in my thoughts that my snobbishness lives so active a life.'' But can
one be a snob if nobody notices, if nobody is offended? Perhaps Mr. Epstein
should be acquitted, so he can get on with his story.
The real problem, in his view, is that snobbery has become
enormously complex and time consuming. In the old days, by which Mr. Epstein
means before the 1960's, snobbery was perpetuated by a class system, itself
reinforced by association with the right neighborhood, school, college, club or
profession. ''The minimal but unrelenting qualification was to be white,
Anglo-Saxon in heritage and Protestant in religion,'' he notes. True, up to a
point. If endowed with wealth, breeding and position, many Wasps probably did
look down on the rest of America. But did that automatically make them snobs?
Elsewhere Mr. Epstein suggests snobbery is a sign of weakness. One
characteristic of a ruling class is its presumption of its right to rule.
In any event Mr. Epstein's point is that there was less
snobbery in what was known as Society than there is in today's more open and
egalitarian society. ''What the demise of 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,'' he writes. Thus, traditionally
admired professions -- medicine, law, clergy, engineering -- have lost their
cachet, while architects, chefs, artists, television anchors and above all
actors enjoy celebrity.
Graduates from top colleges are now drawn to mass
entertainment, Mr. Epstein observes with disapproval, ''even if it entails
heartbreaking compromise, turning out meretricious work and sucking up to some
clearly loathsome characters.'' (Voilà! A good example of intellectual
snobbery.)
Still, a far larger field for snobbery has opened up in the
world of taste. In the old days you were raised with good taste. Now taste can
be bought in the form of clothes, furnishings, library, cuisine, wine cellar
and the like, yet not everyone learns how to use it properly. ''For the snob,
this fear of ridicule -- or if the snob has the social whip hand, the delight
in inflicting ridicule -- is uppermost in questions of taste,'' Mr. Epstein warns.
Getting taste right, though, brings the reward of status. ''Status is not in
the possession of its holder but in that of the beholder,'' he explains. To win
the accolade, you need a knack for following the taste du jour without seeming
to try too hard. It is a perilous game, though, because taste is defined by
others.
Here Mr. Epstein offers a bizarre theory. ''The reason so
many Jews and homosexuals (chiefly, though far from exclusively, homosexual
men) have been involved in the formation of taste, and hence in the changes and
twists in the character of snobbery, is that Jews and homosexuals have always
felt themselves the potential -- and often real -- victims of snobbery, and of
course much worse than snobbery,'' Mr. Epstein claims. Whether or not this
reasoning is valid, it is certainly true that many Jews and homosexuals are now
at the center of the American taste industry. And in that sense, while they may
still be targets of snobbery, they are now also well placed to hand it out.
A lingering problem with this book, however, is that Mr.
Epstein has chosen to view all social intercourse through the prism of
snobbery. Surely not everyone is enslaved to humiliating or being humiliated.
Surely a snob is both entertaining and offensive precisely because he or she
stands out in the crowd. Still, striking closer to his own academic and
literary habitat, Mr. Epstein makes a good case that much American intellectual
snobbery ''has its roots in the cultural inferiority that Americans have felt
in comparison with their European counterparts.'' He then pronounces himself an
Anglophile. ''Being well educated and openly distinguished has always seemed
easier in England than in the United States, where either quality could be held
against one, especially in public life,'' he writes.
Finally, having concluded that snobbery is an intrinsic part
of the American way of life as well as of his own, Mr. Epstein feels a need to
condemn it. He quotes Marcel Proust as writing that ''snobbery is a grave
disease, but it is localized and so does not utterly corrupt the soul.'' Mr.
Epstein cannot agree. He prefers to imagine a day when all injustice is
eliminated, ''when fairness rules, and kindness and generosity, courage and
honor are rightly revered.'' In other words, he concedes with regret, snobbery
is here to stay.
Self-Satisfaction Guaranteed
By MARTHA BAYLES JULY 14, 2002
SNOBBERY
The American Version.
By Joseph Epstein.
274 pp. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company. $25.
WHATEVER happened to the WASP? Or, to paraphrase Joseph
Epstein, whatever happened to the ''Waspocracy'' that dominated America's elite
institutions between the Gilded Age of the 1880's and the upheavals of the
1960's? According to Epstein, ''the demise of the Waspocracy'' was brought
about by ''guilt'' and ''uneasiness'' among the generation that came of age
during the Vietnam War; by ''incursions'' by other ethnic groups into such
''essential WASP institutions'' as ''elite prep schools and Ivy League colleges'';
and by ''the unsettling effect of the new technologically based but not
geographically centered business world.''
The next question is: whatever happened to snobbery? Did it
go the way of the WASP? Epstein's contrarian reply is no: in a society more
ostensibly egalitarian than ever, snobbery has not only survived, it has
proliferated and intensified. The goal of every snob, after all, is ''to gain
and maintain a place from which to look down on all but a handful of his
countrymen.'' So when ''ready for the great social climb'' but faced with ''a
peak that keeps changing and disappearing,'' the snob just tries harder.
To a sociologist the idea is obvious: confusion about status
indicators increases status anxiety. But to Epstein the same insight is an
occasion for entertaining variations. For example, his discussion on
name-dropping both engages in the practice -- ''I had a whitefish dedicated to
me and Pierre Boulez'' -- and skewers it: ''Would I tell this story anyway,
even if it didn't involve an excellent name, which, through this flimsy
association, makes me look good?''
Equally diverting is Epstein's treatment of snobbery about
material pleasures. Regarding food, he writes that ''good food is one of the
world's great blessings, but, as with sex, one of the quickest ways to take the
edge off it i
to talk about it too much.'' Regarding clothes, he warns
that even the best-dressed snob will inevitably be one-upped by a colleague
''wearing a bespoke English suit, a wafer-thin Patek Philippe watch and Italian
shoes made from, let us say, the foreskins of Norwegian rams.''
Admitting that the solid, relatively scalable peak of
Society has been supplanted by the slippery alp of Celebrity, Epstein defers to
the expert, citing Andy Warhol's unrealized intention ''of opening a store that
sold the used underwear of the famous -- $10 a pair of washed, $25 if not.
Today those prices seem way too low, though the difference . . . seems just
about right.''
Beyond these funny bits, Epstein has a serious purpose: to
flesh out a definition of post-WASP snobbery through a candid examination of,
among other things, his own experience. This isn't a memoir (he would scoff at
the thought), but it is a personal essay, and as such, its success rides
heavily on the author's fine-tuned sensibility. Unfortunately, snobbery is not
a topic about which Epstein seems entirely candid or fine-tuned.
By his definition, the snob ''hopes to position himself
securely among those whom he takes to be the best, most elegant, virtuous,
fashionable or exciting people.'' One is tempted to ask, what's wrong with
that? Subtract the word ''snob'' and this seems a worthy goal for anyone,
including Epstein, who freely confesses his yearning to associate with ''people
who exhibit style, but style with the strong suggestion of substance,'' like
''Noël Coward, Audrey Hepburn, George Balanchine, Marcello Mastroianni,
Vladimir Nabokov, George Marshall, Edmund Wilson (when sober), Billy Wilder.''
Likewise, Epstein defines the snob as someone who ''fears
contamination from those he deems beneath him.'' Maybe so. But again, if this
is snobbery, then perhaps the author should refrain from griping that ''the
first-class section of commercial jets, though comfortable on long trips,
seems, as you may have noticed, nowadays filled by people who do not themselves
seem very first-class.''
If these examples suggest a blind spot toward his own petty
snobbery, Epstein appears equally blinkered toward judgments that, by his
lights, are not snobbish at all. On the one hand, he declares that ''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.'' On the other, he
often accuses himself of snobbery when merely applying high standards.
For instance, Epstein recalls that during his Army days,
''the officer class did not seem to me to earn its privileges. (Only a handful
of sergeants, most of them black, impressed me as truly able men.)'' One
accepts this as a fair (and un-snobbish) judgment until, in the next breath,
Epstein qualifies it as ''the snob in me reacting.''
Epstein also accuses himself of snobbery when disdaining
social types who by his own account deserve disdain: ''the overdressed lawyer
with the $200 haircut entering the Standard Club''; the party guest ''who tells
me that Woody Allen's 'Annie Hall' changed her life''; the ''young director of
commercials'' who tells a newspaper that ''the three words that describe him
best are 'creative, compassionate and considerate.' ''
Epstein's self-scrutiny wavers most when trained on the
''intellectual snobbery'' he acquired as an undergraduate at the University of
Chicago. Again, why call this snobbery when, as he clearly states, it was
''based on something real -- knowledge, brilliance, erudition''?
At the same time, Epstein partakes of a particularly stale
form of intellectual snobbery when complaining about bright Ivy League
graduates ''working in the movies or television'' rather than ''going to
superior law schools'' or ''getting a well-paid job in a corporation.'' He
regrets that talented young people should find ''in the business of mass
entertainment . . . the greatest gloire . . . even if it entails heartbreaking
compromise, turning out meretricious work and sucking up to some clearly
loathsome characters.''
Is Epstein suggesting that compromises, meretricious works
and loathsome characters cannot be found in law schools, corporations or (for
that matter) great universities? Does he believe that nothing worthwhile can be
accomplished in ''mass entertainment''? It's strange to hear this prejudice
from a critic who understands so well where it comes from. Writing about the
''intellectuals around Partisan Review and Commentary in the 1940's and 50's,''
Epstein notes that for them, the messy business of making aesthetic judgments
was greatly simplified by the rule articulated by Irving Howe: ''Stalinists
were middlebrow, the Trotskyists were highbrow.''
Epstein's assessment of popular culture does not always
consist of snobbery (the Trotskyist version). More often it parallels his
assessment of American culture in general. He admits to sharing a certain
European disdain toward both. But he quickly adds that when Europeans carry on
''about the lack of refinement and culture of Americans . . . I find myself
wanting to defend American culture to the last animal-fat-saturated fast-food
French fry.''
IT'S too bad Epstein cannot find firmer ground between
European-style snobbery and Big Mac-style reverse snobbery. After all, he opens
this book with a heartfelt tribute to the music of Fats Waller. Surely a man
with such good taste knows that despite its vulgarity, sentimentality and high
caloric content, American culture has produced and still produces many
unsaturated wonders worth defending on non-snobbish grounds.
Some of Epstein's lapses bear the scars of an old campaigner
against political correctness. When discussing ''virtucrats'' in politics, he
asserts without irony that these exist mostly on the left: ''Disagree with
someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, sentimental,
foolish, a dope; disagree with someone on the left and he is more likely to
think you selfish, coldhearted, a sellout, evil.'' One wonders where Epstein
spent the late 1990's.
But enough carping. It's hard to criticize a writer who can
make you laugh out loud on every third page, and who constantly debunks
himself. Describing the snob as one who ''desires prestige and . . . status in
and for themselves'' and not as ''an accouterment of solid accomplishment,''
Epstein endearingly confesses to harboring precisely such desires. Thus he
good-humoredly+escapes the trap so aptly described by Cicero: ''Why, upon the
very books in which they bid us scorn ambition philosophers inscribe their
names.''
 |
| William F. Buckley Jr., in his review of Snobbery: The American Version, called Epstein "perhaps the wittiest writer (working in his genre) alive, the funniest since Randall Jarrell." A writer for The Forward called him "perhaps the smartest American alive who also writes well." |
Epstein was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1937. He graduated
from Senn High School and attended the University of Illinois at
Urbana–Champaign.He received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago
and served in the U.S. Army from 1958 to 1960. From 1972 to 2002, he was a
lecturer in English and Writing at Northwestern University and is an Emeritus
Lecturer of English there.
From 1974 to 1998 he served as editor of The American
Scholar and wrote for it under the pseudonym Aristides. He edited The Best
American Essays (1993), the Norton Book of Personal Essays (1997), and Literary
Genius: 25 Classic Writers Who Define English & American Literature (2007).
His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Commentary, Harper's, The New Criterion,
The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Wall
Street Journal, and The Weekly Standard. His short stories were included in The
Best American Short Stories 2007 and The Best American Short Stories 2009. In
2003, he was awarded a National Humanities Medal by the National Endowment for
the Humanities.
Epstein's removal as editor of The American Scholar in 1998
(following a 1996 vote of the Phi Beta Kappa senate) was controversial. Epstein
later said that he was fired "for being insufficiently correct
politically". Some within Phi Beta Kappa attributed the senate's decision
to a desire to attract a younger readership for the journal.
Epstein's essay "Who Killed Poetry?", published in
Commentary in 1988, generated discussion in the literary community decades
after its publication.
In September 1970, Harper's Magazine published an article by
Epstein called "Homo/Hetero: The Struggle for Sexual Identity" that
was criticized for its perceived homophobia. Epstein wrote that he considered
homosexuality "a curse, in a literal sense" and that his sons could do
nothing to make him sadder than "if any of them were to become
homosexual." Gay activists characterized the essay as portraying every gay
man the author met, or fantasized about meeting, as predatory, sex-obsessed,
and a threat to civilization.In the essay, he says that, if possible, "I
would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth", a statement that was
interpreted by gay writer and editor Merle Miller as a call to genocide. A
sit-in took place at Harper's by members of the Gay Activists Alliance.
In 2015 Epstein wrote an article for The Weekly Standard in
which he mentioned the Harper's article from 1970. He wrote, "I am pleased
the tolerance for homosexuality has widened in America and elsewhere, that in
some respects my own aesthetic sensibility favors much homosexual artistic
production... My only hope now is that, on my gravestone, the words Noted
Homophobe aren’t carved."
William F. Buckley Jr., in his review of Snobbery: The
American Version, called Epstein "perhaps the wittiest writer (working in
his genre) alive, the funniest since Randall Jarrell." A writer for The
Forward called him "perhaps the smartest American alive who also writes
well."
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