Better Fewer, but Better

Some books are necessary, some are wonderful, few are both. In that select group belongs Joseph Epstein’s “Snobbery: The American Version.” I would rank it with works by Alexis de Tocqueville and Thorstein Veblen, except that it is more timely than the former’s and infinitely more amusing than the latter’s. It is one of the rare books that entertain as much as they teach.

For years Epstein has labored valiantly in several venues: as editor, literature teacher, book critic and, perhaps best of all, personal essayist. The personal essay, in which one writes a thoughtful epistle to one’s fellows on a variety of subjects, is an endangered species. But those who can appreciate this intimate, reflective, civilized genre are company as fit as they are few. Epstein’s dozen or so collections of such essays have been eagerly awaited and blissfully savored by the sophisticated and whoever else felicitously chanced upon them.

With “Snobbery,” Epstein undertakes a book-length essay in a series of interconnected essays, each of two dozen chapters addressing a different type of snobbery. The amazingly alert and perceptive author pursues snobbishness from its spotlighted stages to its hidden breeding grounds and discovers striking varieties in crannies the rest of us would have overlooked.

In the chapter on gastronomic snobbery, Epstein writes, “Turns out

Nor are they limited to America. Even though the book concentrates on the American scene, it is international in scope and global in erudition. It is a tasty cake made mouthwatering by an array of raisins: pertinent or delightfully impertinent quotations culled from world literature, neither just American nor merely expectable, as from, say, Proust and Balzac, Edith Wharton and Henry James. Many come from unexpected but apt sources: Jules Renard and Giacomo Leopardi, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and George Santayana, Lord Chesterfield and Lord Berners, the Duc de Saint-Simon and Martin and Kingsley Amis. And those are just some literary ones; there are as many from the social sciences, philosophy and journalism. One senses that Epstein has read everything and either has a wizard memory or has extracted quotations from lifelong voracious reading for this all-encompassing compendium.

And crammed it is, with so many goodies that it would require the judgment of Solomon to determine what to quote and what, necessarily, to omit. Just transcribing all the passages I have underlined in my copy would yield a sizable brochure. Perhaps the best way to begin is to list the types of snobbery that rate separate chapter headings. We get “The Democratic Snob,” “Snob-Jobbery,” “O WASP, Where Is Thy Sting-a-ling,” “Class (All but) Dismissed” and “Such Good Taste.” Also snobberies based on status, wealth, showy education, pseudo-intellectualism in academia, politics, sexuality and religion, novelty, name-dropping, celebrity, “Anglo-, Franco-, and Other Odd philias,” food and drink and being with-it. And a good many lesser others.

Epstein is equally adept at incrimination and self-incrimination. On his own snobbery: “On the Outer Drive in Chicago, I am behind a car on whose back window is a decal reading ‘Illinois State University.’ My view is that one oughtn’t even to have a sticker that reads ‘All Souls, Oxford,’ but Illinois State?” On other people’s: Gore Vidal “has made a career out of hard work in the service of hauteur.... [He] doesn’t court the love of critics or anyone else. Self-love, which in him never goes unrequited, is sufficient.” Again: “People nowadays attempt to outdo one another not in the distinction of their forebears but in the purity of their suffering--my holocaust is greater than your slavery--establishing snobberies of virtue by way of victimhood.”

And again: “It used to be who you were, then it was what you did, then it was what you had, then it was whom you knew--and now it’s beginning to be how many people know you.”

Ours is the era of democratic middleman supremacy and middle-class snobbery. “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.” “The agent, the broker, the trader, the marketer, the investment banker, the all-purpose executive, the operator, the entrepreneur, the man or woman who does not provide the service or the product but helps bring it to market, usually acquiring a solid profit for him- or herself along the way--these are the figures who seem most admired ... just now.” The person, in short, who neither builds nor creates, just takes the cash and makes sure of getting “the vice presidency, the best table, the fine wine, the excellent opera tickets.”

The book is terrific on fashion snobbery. “Without a feeling of exclusiveness--the snobbish element--fashion isn’t successfully fashionable.... The trick is somehow to find a place between being fashionably stupid and stupidly unfashionable.” It is similarly acute on intellectual snobbery: “Among people ... who fancy themselves intellectuals ... snobbery runs more rampant than bacteria through the kitchen of a Tijuana slow-food restaurant.” Epstein quotes Pierre Bourdieu: “Nothing more clearly affirms one’s ‘class,’ infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.” Or tastes in sports, “the range running from hockey to polo.”

A special service Epstein offers is the debunking of snobbery’s idols. Thus, about Ralph Lauren, “who began with a line of men’s clothes that soon became what in the trade is known as lifestyle design”: His “career was built on the fantasies of a short Bronx-born Jewish boy (ne Lifshitz) of how Wasps live, or at least ought to live.” Or consider: “Susan Sontag’s message, though not always easily made out, would appear to be one of (unearned) desolation.... The only thing that appears to run really deep in her is her humorlessness.”

He is affectionately pungent about Andy Warhol and distinguishes between the snobberies of the name-dropping brothers Dunne, of whom he prefers Dominick (“Truman Capote ... without the guile”) to John Gregory for being more open about it, having “stepped beyond and above mere snobbery into very heaven.” There is Norman Mailer, “always behind his times ... still smarting under the old Wasp model of snobbery”; also Robert Lowell, whose “poem ‘My Last Afternoon With Uncle Devereux Winslow’ wouldn’t ... carry quite the same glow with the title ‘My Last Afternoon With Uncle Sammy Shapiro.’ ” Again, Walter Cronkite is “a high platitudinarian and a man with a face only a nation could love.”

Epstein is right to remind us that “asserting one’s superiority to snobbery may be snobbishness too,” that “no subject, apart possibly from podiatry, is impermeable to snobbery,” that, as La Rochefoucauld said, “our virtues are, most often, only our vices disguised” and that “anyone outside a Trappist monastery” will recognize at least some of his own snobberies in this book.

But he is no less right to warn against the “sour-grapes charge” that equates “elitist” with “snob.” “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.”

If there is a blemish--no bigger than a pimple--on this marvelous book, it is its intermittent sloppiness in matters of grammar, syntax, vocabulary and style. So we get “although I don’t go to Paris, nor play golf,” “congruent to,” “the women who comprised the heart of the set,” “by we Anglophiles,” “I had only to say this to myself than to realize ... “ and “the child is coddled, cozened, cultivated as the precious piece of property” when even the correct “cosseted” would have been redundant.

Periodically, too, there is faulty parallelism, as in travel snobs looking down on “that busload of thick-legged Germans; those gaggles of Japanese, cameras slung round their necks; best of all for deploring are one’s easily detested fellow Americans,” which last, to be parallel, should read “best of all one’s easily detested fellow Americans.” Epstein once wrote about me that I could find fault with the text of a stop sign; I would say, “Stop sign, no; Epstein, yes.”

But all must be forgiven a man wise enough to write, “The education and culture [most people] are presumably exposed to at college never lay a glove on them ... [college being a place] where they can spend four years learning that the glorious culture of fifth century BC Athens was little more than a swindle built on a slave society, that Shakespeare was a homosexual serving the interests of imperialistic England and that women have gotten a raw deal throughout history and up to twenty minutes ago.” And much more that is equally stingingly right.

Epstein, however, is no crybaby. He is perfectly content with his “modest fame but no celebrity” in a country where celebrity can be acquired by murder, quiz-show money and under-the-desk sexual acts performed with a high-level public servant and “serious fame” can be achieved only in movies and on television.

“Snobbery: The American Version” cannot, any more than anything else can, put a stop to snobbery, but it may, by making us conscious of its ridiculousness, help us control its worst excesses. Ironically, though, it may create a new, albeit minor, form of snobbery: pride in how many times you are mentioned, however unfavorably (Bill Buckley and Donald Trump twice), in this most treasurable of books.