A Good Snob Nowadays Is Hard to Find

By LANCE MORROW

It was not the Bach on the harpsichord that offended, or his way with celestial navigation, or the servants, or the phone calls from Ronald Reagan. No: his worst affront seemed to be the custom chopped-and-stretched chauffeur-driven Cadillac with the partition and the special back-seat temperature control. It was not even the fact that William F. Buckley Jr. rides around in such a car, like a Mafia don in his land yacht, that gave some reviewers eczema. It was the way that he wrote about it, with such a blithe air of entitlement. No right-wing intellectual on the go, Buckley seemed to suggest, should be asked to function without this minimal convenience, for God's sake.

Buckley's new book, Overdrive, a journal of a few days in his ridiculously overachieving life, is a funny and charming exercise. Some critics who object to Buckley's politics, however, were outraged by his lifestyle, or more accurately by the obvious pleasure with which he described it. It is all right to live that way, but one should have the grace to conceal it, or at least to sound a little guilty about it; Buckley luxuriates in his amenities a bit too much, and one hears in his prose the happy sigh of a man sinking into a hot bath. So his enemies try to dismiss him as Marie Antoinette in a pimpmobile. They portray him as, among other things, a terrible, terminal snob.

To make the accusation is to misunderstand both William F. Buckley Jr. and the nature of snobbery. Buckley is an expansive character who is almost indiscriminately democratic in the range of his friends and interests. He glows with intimidating self-assurance. The true snob sometimes has an air of pugnacious, overbearing self-satisfaction, but it is usually mere front. The snob is frequently a grand porch with no mansion attached, a Potemkin affair. The essence of snobbery is not real self-assurance but its opposite, a deep apprehension that the jungles of vulgarity are too close, that they will creep up and reclaim the soul and drag it back down into its native squalor, back to the Velveeta and the doubleknits. So the breed dresses for dinner and crooks pinkies and drinks Perrier with lime and practices sneering at all the encroaching riffraff that are really its own terrors of inadequacy. Snobbery is a grasping after little dignities, little validations and reassurances. It is a way of swanking up the self, of giving it some swag and flounce and ormolu. It is a way of asserting what one is not (not like them), what one is better than.

There was a period during the '60s and early '70s when snobbery of the classic sort seemed, superficially, at least, in some danger of disappearing into the denim egalitarianism of the time. It never could, of course. It just changed form; and the Revolution, while it lasted, enforced its own snobberies, its own political and even psychic pretensions. Today, snobbery is back in more familiar channels. A generation of high-gloss magazines (Connoisseur, Architectural Digest, House and Garden, for example) flourishes by telling Americans what the right look is. The American ideal of the Common Man seems to have got lost somewhere; the Jacksonian theme was overwhelmed by the postwar good life and all the dreamy addictions of the best brand names. The citizen came to be defined not so much by his political party as by his consumer preferences. It might be instructive to compare the style of the White House under Ronald Reagan with that of, say, Harry Truman. One imagines the snorting contempt with which Truman would have regarded the $1,000 cowboy boots and the Adolfo gowns.

Washington, in fact, is a hotbed of snobbery. It is an essentially brainless city that runs, in the shallowest way, on power and influence and office. Access to power is the magic--access to the President, or access to the people who have access to the President, or access to lunch at the White House mess, or to Ed Meese across a crowded room, or to those chunky little cufflinks with the presidential seal. But Washington is like other cities: the snobs reveal themselves by the clothes they wear and the clubs they join and the schools they send their children to and the company they keep and the houses they buy and the caterers they call.

The English, who have flirted with Beatles music and the leveling principle, have returned to their ancient heritage of snobbism. They worship their ancestors and buy The Official Shane Ranger Handbook and dream of country houses and old money. They have a look, both wistful and satirical, at the Duke of Bedford's Book of Snobs, with its indispensable advice: "A tiara is never worn in a hotel, only at parties arranged in private houses or when royal ladies are present." They think longingly of the right public school, the right regiment, the right club (Whites, if possible, or Boodles, or Pratt's, if you must). They dread the fatal slip, the moment when they might, for example, eat asparagus with knife and fork: Use your fingers, idiot!

It is probably more difficult to be a snob now than it once was. The logistical base is gone. If Buckley were one, he would have to be considered one of the last of the great Renaissance snobs, a generalist capable of insufferable expertise on everything from Spanish wines to spinnakers. But the making of such a handsomely knowledgeable, or even pseudo-knowledgeable, character requires family money and leisure of a kind not often available in the late 20th century. "A child's education," Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked, "should begin at least one hundred years before he was born." It does not take quite that much marination to make a great snob, since the secret of snobbery is mere plausibility, the appearance of knowledge and breeding. Still, in a busy world it is difficult to find the time and resources to give the laminations and high gloss, the old patina, that used to be the mark of great snobbery.

The true snob is a complex character. He is not merely a status seeker in Vance Packard's sense of the term, or a simple showoff. (Still, touches of artful swank are essential--the polo mallet cast casually onto the back seat of the car, or the real, working buttonholes on jacket sleeves that betray the Savile Row suit.) The authentic snob shows it by his attitude toward his superiors and his inferiors. Gazing upward, he apes and fawns and aspires to a gentility that is not native to him; looking down, he snubs and sniffs and sneers at those who don't share his pretensions.

Snobbery has traditionally been founded on 1) birth; 2) knowledge or pseudo knowledge, or merely self-assured ignorance, all of them amounting to the same thing in snob terms; 3) access to power, status, celebrity; 4) circumstances, such as the place one lives or even the things one does not do, such as watch television.

Anyone who thinks that birth and heritage are an immutable circumstance should send away to one of the genealogy services that will, for a fee, supply one's family tree and family crest. It is astonishing to learn from these services that most of America, back in the mists, springs from ancient royalty.

Snobbery today tends to be fragmented. The snobbery based on knowledge is particularly specialized. A person who is otherwise completely unpretending and unimpressive may do some reading and become, for example, a wine snob; he will swirl and sniff and smell the cork and send bottles back and otherwise make himself obnoxious on that one subject. Another person may take up, say, chocolate, and be able to discourse absurdly for an hour or two on the merits of Kron over Godiva. This kind of snobbery based upon a narrow but thorough trove of expertise is a bit depressing, because it reduces one of the great forms, snobbery, to the status of a mere hobby.

A larger, more interesting kind of snobbery based on knowledge is language snobbery. The tribe of such snobs seems to be increasing, even as they slog through solecisms and wail eloquently that the numbers of those who understand the English language are vanishing like the Mayas or Hittites. Droves of purists can be seen shuddering on every street corner when the word hopefully is misused. Their chairman of the board is NBC-TV's Edwin Newman, their chief executive officer the New York Times's William Safire. One author, the late Jean Stafford, had a sign on her back door threatening "humiliation" to anyone who misused hopefully in her house.

The snobbery of residence and place persists, although the price of housing makes it more complicated to bring off. Years ago, a Boston banker moved his family two blocks over on Beacon Hill, in the wrong direction from Louisburg Square. Mrs. Mark Anthony De Wolfe Howe, trying to be polite, remarked, "Oh yes, people are beginning to live there now, aren't they?"

Today, snobberies of residence and place can sometimes be achieved by the familiar flip into reverse snobbery. By the process of gentrification, certain snobs can pioneer in new territories (sections of Brooklyn, for example) and achieve a certain cachet of simultaneous egalitarianism and chic. Then too, there is what might be called the ostentatious plainstyle. In West Texas, for example, extremely wealthy ranchers, their oil wells serenely pumping dollars out of the range day and night, sometimes live in willfully ordinary ranch houses and get around in pickups.

Being a snob of any kind is some times more difficult now. In a society of high discretionary capital and instantaneous communications, the snob and recherche effects tend to be copied and even mass-produced with stunning speed. For generations, much of America's old money walked around wearing beat-up crew-neck sweaters that had been around from St. Mark's or New Haven; the khakis were always a little too short, ending just at the ankles, and there were Top-Siders without socks. And so on. Then this came to be known as the Preppie Look, and every upstart from the suburbs was marching around looking as if he were home from Princeton for the weekend. So how were the real aristocrats to proclaim themselves? By going punk? Slam-dancing at the Harvard Club? As soon as one finds something to be snobbish about, everyone else has got hold of it, and so the central charm of snobbery, the feeling of being something special, vanishes.

The very nature of capitalism militates against a stable snobbery: the capitalist seeks the widest possible market; quality chases the dollars of the mob, but when the mob buys en masse, the illusion of quality, of specialness, vanishes. With metaphysical complexity, the makers of Lacoste shirts have understood this, and are making Lacoste shirts that have no alligator on them, stroke, spectacular instance of self-supersession. In one stroke, Lacoste has taken snobbery into another dimension.

Snobbery is always preposterous but also sometimes useful. "The use of forks at table," observes the English writer Jasper Griffin, "seemed to our Tudor ancestors the height of affectation, so, the first to follow that Italian custom doubtless did so, in large part, to impress their neighbors with their sophistication. Evolution itself is a process of rising above one's origins and one's station." The writer Sebastien Chamfort located what is surely the ultimate snob, a nameless French gentleman: "A fanatical social climber, observing that all round the Palace of Versailles it stank of urine, told his tenants and servants to come and make water round his chateau."

-- By Lance Morrow This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.