Has Success Become Tacky?

By R. Z. Sheppard

AMBITION: THE SECRET PASSION by Joseph Epstein; Dutton; 312 pages; $13.95

Joseph Epstein, editor of the American Scholar and a member of North western's English department, defines ambition as the fuel of achievement. Ben Franklin was an OPEC of success in the 18th century. Pierre du Pont never ran dry; neither did John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Joseph Kennedy or Henry R. Luce. Epstein tips his mortarboard to these classic American gogetters. In a series of biographical sketches, he admires their energy and single-mindedness and the uncomplicated relish they took in pursuing knowledge, wealth and power. He understands the influences that gave their ambitions strength and direction: the Enlightenment and flowering of scientific curiosity; the Puritan ethic that placed religion in the service of profit; a vision of industrial progress that would free men from donkey work; a dream of dynasty in which rewards would be passed on to multiply through the efforts of one's sons.

These verities are now riddled with doubts, uncertainty principles and tough tax laws. Today, Epstein argues, business success is looked down on as a bit tacky. In England and America, he says, it is fashionable to think small, though not necessarily to live that way. There is now an odor of hypocrisy in the air, notes Epstein, particularly among "authors of books deploring affluence who regularly call their editors for up-to-the-minute royalty statements; Marxist professors with two Volvos in the driveways of their summer homes. Esquire, whose pages spill over with advertisements for cars, clothes, travel and other worldly treasure, runs an article on the pleasures of downward mobility."

The game for many no longer seems worth the effort; careers and families are no longer standard equipment but options. Epstein goes further: "All this suggests a people that has lost its way, its energy, its dreams--in a word, its ambition."

There are enough opinion polls and man-on-the-street interviews to affirm this generalization. The rise in T shirt aggression and bumper-sticker bravado reflects an increase in frustration and confusion. Some of the immediate reasons are no less true for having become cliches:

the demoralizations of Viet Nam and Watergate; the humiliations of being outproduced by former enemies and overcharged by a Third World cartel; the inflation that has narrowed the road to middle-class affluence.

Epstein suggests that this age of sub-compact expectations has other causes.

They include the state, which has usurped most of the capital-accumulating and distributing functions of the old industrial upper class, the decline of distinguished families like the Adamses, and a sustained attack on worldly success by novelists and intellectuals. "Antisuccess," he says, "has been perhaps the strongest strain in American literature of the past half-century. And to be against success is to put ambition itself in grave doubt."

This is unquestionably true. The difficulty arises when Epstein attempts to stretch a valid literary observation into a broad cultural thesis. Nearly all modern literatures question the aims of money and power. But so, rightly or wrongly, do mod ern unions, consumer groups and havenots. Epstein leaves the impression that Americans are stewing in ambivalence because they have read Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Budd Schulberg. Publishing sales figures would not support such an impression.

The author might argue that literary attitudes have percolated through the cul ture. But if businessmen in fiction and film are often the bad guys, more often it is the underclasses who are represented as wanton, greedy criminals.

Epstein makes many sound and commonsensical points but frequently ignores evidence that would modify sweeping statements. He says, for example, that the brainy and ambitious are no longer attracted to basic indus tries like "extracting ore and minerals from the earth, revolutionizing technology through invention and advancements in organization."

Who then are making those private fortunes in oil and gas exploration, or in computer applications that are revolutionizing organization?

The book's own arrangement creates confusions and repetitions.

Biographical sketches are sandwiched between homilies and person al reflections. Subjects are introduced, dropped and picked up elsewhere. This suggests not only the slippery nature of ambition but the state of inquiry by literary intellectuals.

Their influence has declined in the past 20 years, while the power of sociologists, economists and political scientists has ris en. The author's warmest portrait of success is revealing. It is of Wallace Stevens, a leading American poet who was also a vice president of an insurance company.

"I believe," Stevens wrote, "as unhesitatingly as I believe in anything, in the efficacy and necessity of fact meeting fact -- with a background of the ideal."

Epstein has many fine clashing ideals in his book. He needs to introduce more facts. --R. Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"Ambition and success seem simply to have departed from the American novel. In the novels of Hemingway almost no work is good work--or, much the same thing, manly work--unless it confronts danger; one is permitted to be a bullfighter, a fisherman, a soldier, and of course a novelist, but all other work is trivial. In the work of a more rounded novelist, Willa Cather ... success is admired, but only success in the past: the new men that have arisen to seize it are grubby, narrow, without vision, unlike the heroic pioneer generation with its integrity, honor, heroism. William Faulkner turned in a similar performance in [several] of his novels, whose point was often that in contemporary life only the swinish succeed, that the day of the men of character is past."

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