Not Our Kind, Dear. - 'Snobbery: The American Version' - book review

Snobbery: The American Version, by Joseph Epstein (Houghton Mifflin, 274 pp., $25)

They are thorough chaps, the staff at National Review. Before they sent me this book for review, they telephoned, asked if I might be interested, and sent me details so I could decide. I did not need details. Who would not want to review a book on snobbery? I even got quite excited waiting for it to arrive. At last we would have a full- length defense of snobbery. That's obviously what it would be, and about time too. Why obviously a defense? For the same reason that a book on racism, xenophobia, class hatred, and cruelty to small animals and children would obviously have to be a defense of them. All right, I shouldn't have put it quite like that. Try some quotation marks: What needs defending is "xenophobia" and the others, that is, what passes today for xenophobia; that defense would be great fun to read. Xenophobia, racism, and cruelty to kittens are bad things. So what modern liberal society does is use these words to describe behavior it dislikes, but which is not xenophobic, etc. So patriotism gets put down as xenophobia. The traditional disciplining of savage young children to make them civilized adults is put down as child cruelty, and a sensitive attachment to the interests and lifestyles of one's family, friends, and community is called class hatred.

Much of what is denounced as snobbery today is simply a thoroughly commendable attachment to elitism, to high standards, and a concomitant rejection or ridicule of low standards together with an equally commendable refined and precise distinction of the social manners that go with them. What Snobbery would surely do then would be to take modern illustrations of "snobbery" and show them to be no such thing. That is not what Joseph Epstein does. Now, there is no reason why Epstein should write the book that ought to be written about "snobbery" -- except that what he has written in its stead is neither right nor amusing.

Some of what he thinks is snobbery is not. Thus he quotes V. S. Naipaul: "The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid and common people, and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and the common." This is not mere snobbery; in fact, I don't think it's snobbish at all. Naipaul regrets it as a melancholy fact; he doesn't revel in it or use it to advance himself. And what he asserts is no more than the commendable elitism mentioned above, a care for quality. Epstein is wrong about it. He is also wrong to declare that Evelyn Waugh was a snob; wrong in the sense that there is much more to say about Waugh and that these other things -- his wit, his social perceptiveness, his genius for characters -- were inextricably tied up with what Epstein calls snobbery. He tells a story about Alfred Knopf's brother, who knew Knopf's fondness for good wine, served him an expensive bottle, failed to get a reaction, asked him what he thought of it, and received the reply, "How can I tell, drinking it out of these glasses?" He is wrong to call this snobbery. It is very clever and funny. It is a neat, gentle, social put-down and it contains quite as much of the truth as befits a dinner conversation (glasses do matter). He cites, as an instance of food snobbery, guests' later describing the serving of iceberg lettuce at a dinner as equivalent to a serious grammatical mistake. It is, of course, much more serious than that. Iceberg lettuce has no pleasant taste and is full of water. Olive oil will not stick to it. To serve it to one's guests is tasteless and downright inhospitable.

Epstein is wrong too about alleged instances of snobbery that belong to a social milieu he doesn't understand. He cites more than one instance of aristocrats' not noticing servants and behaving as if they were not there. But if one's life is full of servants, that is indeed the only way to behave to them, at least most of the time. Anything else would turn daily life into a performance before an audience and leave no privacy at all.

It might be better if I, an Englishman, did not comment on many of Epstein's alleged instances of snobbery in American life: He covers the WASP culture, Ivy League colleges, the Social Register, the academy, and politics. But he has a whole chapter on food and gets that mostly wrong too. He favors old-fashioned, plain, decent American cooking and sneers at sea urchins and andouillette sausage. The French who know about such things prize andouillettes. Both they and the Japanese prize sea urchins. They are quite right to do so. Why should affluent Americans have to refuse them in favor of a baked potato and iceberg lettuce? And it is not snobbish to talk of a restaurant's serving "a fairly reliable risotto." Risotto takes some 20 minutes to cook and cannot be kept hot. Imagine trying to cook it for dozens of customers arriving at different times, or finishing their preceding course at unexpected times. That's why most restaurant risottos are unreliable and the best are only "fairly reliable."

Some of his contempt for silly food behavior is justified. But in most of these cases the behavior is silly, ignorant, tasteless, or merely fashionable as much as snobbish. Sometimes he does describe genuine snobbery as, for instance, in a chapter on name dropping. But here there is a different problem. Genuine snobbery is not good behavior. But it is not excitingly bad. It is dull. So the anecdotes about it are dull too. Snobbery is often described as cruel and Epstein seems to accept this too. But it is not very cruel. What a feeble society we have become when we consider the odd snobbish remark a noteworthy act of cruelty. These remarks are made to and about adults. These adults can and do get their own back by making equally "cruel" remarks either to the snob or behind his back. And that is why snobbery is so harmless even when it is about races and sexes. Both sides can play.

As, indeed, can Epstein: He says that the French, apart from odd individuals, have "no record of bravery." The great Duke of Wellington, who was a past master at what now passes for snobbery, would never have said such a preposterous thing and would not have defeated Napoleon, his brave marshals, and his courageous troops if he had thought it. Epstein claims as a "solid, sordid fact" that "every Frenchman is fundamentally in business for himself." That's not true, and -- even more important -- it's not funny or well-phrased. What a missed opportunity Snobbery is.

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