Where the Elite Don't Meet

By R.Z. Sheppard

CLASS: A GUIDE THROUGH THE AMERICAN STATUS SYSTEM by Paul Fussell; Summit; 202 pages; $13.95

In the '50s, books like Russell Lynes' The Tastemakers and Vance Packard's The Status Seekers were read by apprehensive Americans eager to appear just a little classier than they were. Their expectations implied that class was a matter not of birth and inheritance but of accomplishment and style. As a system, class belonged to a Europe of social barriers and humiliations that no American would stand for.

Or so it was believed. Paul Fussell, 59, a Pasadena-born Anglophile and former professor of English at Rutgers, asserts that there are nine rigid castes in the U.S. They range from the out-of-sight rich living off capital in grand seclusion, to the destitute, who are also well hidden. In between are various levels of uppers, middles and "proles," Shaw's and Orwell's abbreviation of proletariat, now Fussell's gleefully derogatory term for blue-collar workers.

The author of the much honored The Great War and Modern Memory is not out to win votes. His aim is to offend, mainly the middle class, and to decry the decline of culture and taste. He succeeds, with considerable wit and a fine malice, but it is hard to take him seriously. Having revealed the stratagems and pretensions of everyone able and willing to read his book, Fussell emerges as an upscale bohemian. His ideal social category is the "X" class, a cosmopolitan elite who speak several languages, drink excellent cheap wine, never have to be at work on time and whistle Beethoven quartets.

Fussell commits some glaring acts of omission as well. The special status of political leaders, heads of corporation, celebrities and the most successful criminals is ignored. He begs off discussing religion as a class indicator and totally neglects race, the great divisor.

But cutting prose and a cranky confidence make Fussell a formidable exploiter of status anxiety. Imagine how many college stickers will quietly disappear from the family cars after uneasy readers learn that a seemingly harmless practice is an advertisement of insecurity and prestige by association. The news that better sorts wear only navy blue and gray should seal the musty fate of millions of brown suits, and dinner-party hostesses may never get another compliment after the pronouncement that upper classes find praise rude, "possessions there being of course beautiful, expensive and impressive, without question."

When Fussell is not dreaming of his happy band of Xs, he seems most at home in the upper-middle class. From this vantage he decodes its symbols and looks down at variations in the lower stratas. Driveways, of all things, strike him with deep significance. Curved is preferred over straight because more land is used, suggesting that the owner has plenty to spare. Gravel, particularly if it is beige, surpasses asphalt because it is more difficult to maintain.

Prestige attached to garages re mains unsettled, but the family car had better not be a Mercedes, Rolls or Cadillac. Fussell assures us that the best upper-middles drive plain American models that are permanently dulled by a barely perceptible layer of dirt. Jeeps, he says, suggest that one of your residences is in a place so unpublic that the roads to it are not even paved, "indeed are hardly passable by your ordinary vulgar automobile."

The living room is such an important measure of rank that Fussell gives anxious readers a quiz. A class quotient of sorts is determined from a list of 60 items of furnishing and decor. For example, parquet floors, original paintings by noted artists and copies of the New York Review of Books raise one's CQ; vinyl floors, "collectibles" and a motorcycle on the hearth lower the score.

Status trappings are available to anyone with a credit rating that will ensure a flood of the tonier mail-order catalogues. What cannot be bought easily is a change in language habits. Accent is not an issue for Fussell; the middle-class weakness for euphemism is. To say "people with alcohol problems" for drunks, "bathroom" for toilet, "sweet and pungent" for sweet and sour marks the reader irredeemably. An other of Fussell's dead giveaways is the use of long words for short ones. His newly rich might say, "Send around the limousine and chauffeur," while the old money up the block would ask for a car and driver.

The source of these awakenings is "Speak, That I May See Thee," the book's most coherent and useful chapter, which is less costly to take to heart than putting a curve in the driveway. The author has a passionate appreciation for the value of precise English that goes beyond his interest in caste systems. Elsewhere, however, he is carried away by loose sociology and a bleak determinism that has always been unpopular in America. Many of his perceptions point toward uncomfortable truths; only the hopelessly inattentive would deny the existence of hierarchies and elites. But until Fussell can draw his Xs more convincingly, it is best to read Class as a graduate text after The Official Preppy Handbook.

-- R.Z. Sheppard This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.