Money is human happiness in abstracto; consequently he who is no longer capable of happiness in concreto sets his whole heart on money.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
What I want to see above all is that this remains a country where someone can always get rich.
—Ronald Reagan
At Yale University in the middle 1950s the man whom I prefer to call George Amory I knew chiefly by virtue of his reputation for wrecking automobiles. He was heir to what was said to be a large Long Island fortune, and I remember him as a blond and handsome tennis player embodying the ideal of insouciant elegance seen in a tailor’s window. During the whole of our senior year I doubt I spoke to Amory more than once or twice; we would likely have seen one another in a crowd, probably at a fraternity beer party, and I assume we exchanged what we thought were witty observations about the differences between the girls from Vassar and Smith. At random intervals during the 1960s and 1970s I heard rumors of Amory’s exploits in the stock market and the south of France, but I hadn’t seen him for almost thirty years when, shortly after President Reagan’s second inaugural in the winter of 1985, I ran across him in the bar of the Plaza Hotel. He seemed somehow smaller than I remembered, not as blond or as careless. Ordinarily we would have nodded at one another without a word of recognition, and I remember being alarmed when Amory carried his drink to my table and abruptly began to recite what he apparently regarded as the epic poem of his economic defeat. Presumably he chose me as his confessor because we scarcely knew each other, much less belonged to the same social circles. I wasn’t apt to repeat what I heard to anybody whom he thought important enough to matter.
“I’m nothing,” he said. “You understand that, nothing. I earn $250,000 a year, but it’s nothing, and I’m nobody.”
Amory at Yale had assumed that the world would entertain him as its guest. He had little reason to think otherwise. Together with his grandmother’s collection of impressionist paintings and the houses in Southampton and Maine, he looked forward to inheriting a substantial income. Certainly it never had occurred to him that he might be obliged to suffer the indignity of balancing his checkbook or looking at a bill.
Things hadn’t turned out the way he had expected, and in the bar of the Plaza he looked at me with a dazed expression, as if he couldn’t believe that he had lost the match. He had three children, but his wife was without substantial means of her own, and somehow he failed to generate enough money to carry him from one week to the next. He explained that most of the paintings had been sold, that he had been forced to rent the house in Southampton for $40,000 during the season, and that the property in Maine had been stolen from him by his sister. He had been busy in the bar making lists of those expenses he deemed inescapable. Handing me a sheet of legal foolscap, he said:
You figure it out. I can’t afford to go to a museum, much less to the theater. I’m lucky if I can take Stephanie to dinner once every six months.
His list of disbursements appears as he gave it to me, the numbers figured on an annual basis in 1985 dollars and annotated to reflect the narrowness of the margin on which Amory was trying to keep up a decent appearance:
Maintenance of a cooperative apartment on Park Avenue: $20,4001
Maintenance of the house in Southampton: $10,000
Private school tuitions (one college, one prep school, one grammar school): $30,000
Groceries: $12,0002
Interest on a $200,000 loan adjusted to the prime rate: $30,000
Telephone, household repairs and electricity: $12,000
A full-time maid and a part-time laundress: $25,000
Insurance (on art objects, the apartment and his life): $8,000
Lawyers and accountants: $5,000
Club dues and bills: $5,0003
Pharmacy (cosmetics, medicine, notions): $5,000
Doctors (primarily for the children): $4,000
Charitable donations: $6,0004
Clothes for his wife: $5,0005
Clothes for his children: $7,000
Cash expenditures (taxis, newspapers, coffee shops, balloons, etc.): $8,000
Maintenance of children’s expectations (stereo sets, computers, allowances, dancing school, books, winter vacations): $30,000
Maintenance of his own expectations: $3,000
Taxes (city, state, federal): $75,000
Total: $300,400
It was no use trying to play the part of a niggling accountant or to suggest it might be possible to lead a presentable life on less than $250,000 a year. Amory was too desperate to fix his attention on small sums. When I remarked that he might cut back on his children’s expectations he said these were necessary to allow his children to compete with their peers, to give them a sense of their proper place in the world. In answer to a question about club bills and charitable donations, Amory pointed out that he allocated nothing for luxury or pleasure, no money for dinner parties, paintings, furniture, for a mistress, psychiatrists, even for a week in Europe.6
“As it is,” he said, “I live like an animal. I eat tuna fish out of cans and hope that when the phone rings it isn’t somebody dunning me for a bill.”
Not knowing what else to do, Amory had resolved to leave New York, maybe for Old Westbury or Westport, “someplace unimportant,” he said, where he could afford “to stay in the game.” He couldn’t do for his children what his parents had done for him, and his feeling of failure showed in his eyes. He had the look of a man who was being followed by the police.
Seen from a safe distance, Amory’s despair seems comic or grotesque, the stuff of dreaming idiocy that Neil Simon could turn into a commercial farce or The New York Times editorial page into an occasion for moral outrage. If the average American family of four earns an annual income of $18,000, by what ludicrous arithmetic could a man of Amory’s means have the effrontery to feel deprived?
It is a question that on a number of occasions in my life I could as easily have asked myself. Like Amory, I was born into the ranks of the equestrian class and educated to the protocols of wealth at prep school and college.7 Given the circumstances of my childhood in San Francisco, I don’t know how I could have avoided an early acquaintance with the pathologies of wealth. The Lapham family enjoyed the advantages of social eminence in a city that cared about little else, and most of its members consoled themselves with the telling and retelling of tales about the mythical riches of my great-grandfather. He died the year I was born, by all accounts a very severe but subtle gentleman who had been one of the partners in the founding of the Texas Oil Company. It was said that he translated poetry from the ancient Greek, played both organ and cello, collected shipping companies and oriental jade, and at one point in his life considered the possibility of buying the Monterey Peninsula. That he didn’t do so—deciding to acquire instead a less dramatic but more convenient estate in Connecticut—was a source of vast disappointment to his descendants. As a child I occasionally accompanied my elders around the golf courses at Pebble Beach and Cypress Point, and by listening to their conversation gathered that I had been swindled out of a proprietary view of the Pacific Ocean.
In 1942, during the first autumn of the Second World War, my grandfather was elected mayor of San Francisco. I often rode in municipal limousines, either to Kezar Stadium for the New Year’s Day football game or to the Presidio for military ceremonies among returning generals. Somewhere on the journey through streets I remember as always crowded, I confused pretensions of family with imperatives of public interest. I came to imagine that I was born to ride in triumph and that others, apparently less fortunate and more numerous, were born to stand smiling in the streets and wave their hats.
My self-preoccupation was consistent with the ethos of a city given to believing its own press notices. The citizens of San Francisco dote on a romantic image of themselves, and their provincial narcissism would be difficult to exaggerate. The circumference of the civic interest extends no more than a hundred miles in three directions, as far as Sonoma County on the north, to Monterey on the south and to Yosemite in the east. In a westerly direction the zone of significance doesn’t reach beyond the Golden Gate Bridge. We lived in a fashionable quarter of the city, surrounded by spacious houses belonging to people in similar circumstances, and I attended a private school that nurtured social rather than intellectual ambitions. Everybody went to the same dancing classes, and none of us had any sense of other voices in other parts of town.
The accident of being born into the American equestrian class has obvious advantages, but it also has disadvantages not so obvious. Children encouraged to believe themselves either beautiful or rich assume that nothing further will be required of them, and they revert to the condition of aquatic plants drifting in the shallows. The lack of oxygen makes them giddy with ruinous fantasy.8 Together with my classmates and peers, I was given to understand that it was sufficient accomplishment merely to have been born. Not that anybody ever said precisely that in so many words, but the assumption was plain enough, and I could confirm it by observing the mechanics of the local society. A man might become a drunkard, a concert pianist or an owner of companies, but none of these occupations would have an important bearing on his social rank. If he could pay the club dues, if he could present himself at dinner dressed in the correct clothes for whatever the season of the year, if he could retain the minimum good sense necessary to stay out of jail, then he could command the homage of headwaiters. Headwaiters represented the world’s opinion, and their smiling respect confirmed a man in his definition of himself. That definition would be accepted at par value by everyone whom one knew or would be likely to know. A man’s morals or achievements would be admired as if they were lawn decorations, with the same cries of mindless approbation that society women bestow on poets and dogs. The gentleman’s inadequacies, whether a tendency toward confused sadism or a habit of cheating customers on the stock exchange, could be excused as unfortunate lapses of judgment or taste. What was important was the appearance of things, and if these could be decently maintained, a man could look forward to a sequence of pleasant invitations. He would be entitled to a view from the box seats.
From the box seats, the world arranges itself into a decorous entertainment conveniently staged for the benefit of the people who can afford the price of admission. The point of view assumes that Australians will play tennis, that Italians will sing or kill one another in Brooklyn, that blacks will dance or riot (always at a seemly distance), and that holders of a season subscription will live happily ever after, or, if they are very rich, forever.
The comfortable assurance of this point of view implies a corollary refusal to see anything that doesn’t appear on the program. Nobody could imagine that they might be dislodged by social upheaval, of no matter what force and velocity, and it was taken for granted that the embarrassments of sex and death would be transformed into the lyrics of a Cole Porter song. The Oedipal drama took place only on stage, in roadshow companies sent out from the darkness of New York, or possibly in certain poor neighborhoods in the Mission District. All manifestations of intelligence remained suspect, as if they were contraband for which a man could be arrested if they were found in his possession. Later in life, if he discovered that he needed the commodity for the conduct of his business, he could hire a Jew.
Similar attitudes of invulnerable privilege were characteristic not only of the students at the Hotchkiss School and Yale University but also of most of the people whom I later came to know in the expensive American professions. Within the labyrinths of the big-time media, in the corridors of Washington law firms and Wall Street brokerage houses, within the honeycombs of most institutions large enough and rich enough to afford their own hermetic models of reality (e.g., the State Department, the Mobil Oil Corporation, Time Inc.), I found myself in the familiar atmospheres of reverie and dream.
Neither at Hotchkiss nor at Yale did I come across many people who placed their trust in anything other than the authority of wealth. The members of the faculty at both institutions often made fine-sounding speeches about the wonders of the liberal arts—as if they (the liberal arts, not the members of the faculty) were a suite of virgins set upon by Philistine dogs—but the systems of value that governed the workings of the schools were plainly those that prevailed in the better neighborhoods of San Francisco.9
Hotchkiss received the majority of its students from the affluent middle class residents in New York City, Connecticut and Long Island. Given the plausible expectations of inheritance among these young men, it was hardly surprising that few of them felt obliged to learn much more than the elementary geography of the civilization in which they would happen to be spending the income. They assumed, as did the faculty, that the mere fact of being present ratified their admission to the ranks of “the best people.” A prep school education in the autumn of 1948 was something that one couldn’t afford to do without (like dancing school or swimming lessons), but it was not something that deserved much thought or attention. It was a necessary ornament, perhaps, but not the equal of a good shotgun or a trust fund yielding $300,000 a year. Ambition, like leather jackets, was best left to the poor. Everybody who mattered already had arrived at all the places that mattered, and anybody who seemed to be in too much of a hurry to get somewhere else (presumably somewhere he or she didn’t belong) must be considered a person of doubtful character or criminal intent. Why would anybody want to strive for anything if all the really important prizes had been handed out in the maternity ward at New York Hospital?10 Scholarship students might be forgiven the wish to become secretary of state or chief justice of the United States, but the heirs of affluence didn’t need to think beyond the horizon of their amusements. What was necessary would be given to them; for what they desired over and above those necessities they would pay, grudgingly, the going price.11
The faculty did its best to apply a veneer of cultural polish, to impart a sense that somehow it was important to learn at least a few polite phrases of Latin or Greek. Nobody stated the operative principles more succinctly than an English master whom I accompanied on a walk through the countryside in the autumn of my sophomore year. The walk was compulsory, the result of an offense against the rules. The few of us who followed the master across stubbled fields listened with a degree of attentiveness appropriate to the magnitude of our transgressions. I must have been in fairly bad trouble at the time because I can remember the master’s reflections on education with unusual clarity. He was a large and untidy man, notable for his constant puffing on a pipe and the holes in the elbows of his tweed jacket. He spoke slowly and obscurely, the words sometimes garbled by the pipe. His thought revealed itself in cryptic episodes, apparently taking him by surprise. He would interrupt himself just as abruptly, subsiding for no discernible reason into a diffident silence that continued for another two or three miles. As follows:
What we are trying to do here, gentlemen, is to give you an idea of the whole man . . . character, you see, character is what we are interested in. The rest is not very important. Politics and business, I suppose, must get done somehow, and I don’t mean to say anything against commerce, of course, but none of it has anything to do with character, you see, with the idea of a gentleman.
Or again, some miles down the road at the edge of a stream in which the first skein of ice had formed:
You are heirs to a great tradition, the magnificent edifice of Western civilization. It’s a rich heritage, gentlemen, and we are trying to teach you to find your way around its corridors, its labyrinthine corridors, I might say.
Or lastly, two hours later, while walking up the hill to the gymnasium, with hearty and reassuring laughter.
Never read so much that you wear yourselves out in study. Remember the whole man. No poem can take the place of a tramp through the woods in winter. Know the difference between different orders of things. Most of you have been given a great deal and will be given a great deal more. I think you should learn to respond with informed gratitude.
The guarantee of privilege extended to everybody at Hotchkiss, even to the molelike grinds who hoped only to serve the system that temporarily made fun of their accents and their shoes. Nobody seriously questioned the legitimacy of the regime; nor could anybody conceive of an alternative hierarchy of ideas. A small and dissident minority counted among its members several of the most intelligent boys in school, but they were content to make common cause with the social majority in the elaboration of the manner defined as “casual.” The motives of the two factions didn’t quite coincide—there is a difference between the ennui of people who own things and the ennui of people who fear the owners—but they shared an equivalent egoism. To be casual at prep school was everything—a manner that implied fluidity, grace, ease, absence of commitment, urbanity, lack of sentiment, indifference to the rules and courage under circumstances always ironic. The style discouraged enthusiasm on the ground that it exposed a person to the risk of failure. Anybody investing time or effort in anything took the appalling risk that the market in his enterprise (i.e., himself) might collapse. Jazz musicians defined the attitude as “cool,” and variations of the style later appeared in the 1960s under the rubric of the counterculture. But just as I never met a hippie whom I could have described as a revolutionary, so also I never met a social critic—especially the more eminent among them—whose complaint had more to do with substance than with gesture.
At Yale University in the 1950s the expression of “informed gratitude” meant having the good manners to learn the difference between a Beethoven sonata and a logarithm table. Whitney Griswold, then president of the university, welcomed the members of the freshman class to Woolsey Hall and reminded us in his introductory remarks of the many feats performed on our behalf by the venerable sages whose busts could be seen resting on pedestals along the walls. Griswold’s discussion of “the well-rounded man” reiterated the word of advice offered by the Hotchkiss English master. Western civilization had apparently been acquired at some cost, and the class of 1956 had an obligation to maintain it in a decent state of repair.
As an intellectual proposition Yale proved to be a matter of filling out forms. Over a term of four years the representative celebrities of the human soul (Plato, Montaigne, Goethe et al.) put in guest appearances on the academic talk show, and the audience was expected to welcome them with rounds of appreciative applause. Like producers holding up cue cards, the faculty identified those truths deserving of the adjective “great.” The students who received the best marks were those who could think of the most flattering explanations for the greatness of the great figures and the great truths.
A few professors made a self-conscious point of taking testimony on all sides of an argument, earnestly considering (pipe thoughtfully in mouth, head inclined diffidently forward and to the left) even the most preposterous hypothesis and keeping an always-open mind to the chance of “meaningful dialogue.” At the end of the hour or semester, of course, the questions had to be answered in the manner recommended at the beginning. Failure to conform to presiding truths resulted in second-rate grades and a reputation for being either arrogant or odd.
Before the winter of freshman year the students understood that the politics of a Yale education would have little to do with the university’s statements of ennobling purpose. A Yale education was a means of acquiring a cash value. Whatever the faculty said or didn’t say, what was important was the diploma, the ticket of admission to Wall Street, the professions, the safe havens of big money. As an undergraduate I thought this discovery profound; it had a cynical glint to it, in keeping with the novels of Albert Camus and the plays of Bertolt Brecht then in vogue among the apprentice intellectuals who frequented the United Restaurant on Chapel Street. The diner stayed open all night, and one morning at about 3 a.m. I remember telling the cognoscenti about an English professor who had marked one of my papers with an F because I had proposed an unauthorized view of a seventeenth-century poet. In the margin of the paper the professor had written: “I don’t care what you think, I’m only interested in knowing that you know what I think.” The message pretty much defined the thesis of a Yale education at the time, and the professor was, of course, right. Schools serve the social order and, quite properly, promote the habits of mind necessary to the maintenance of that order.
The education offered at Yale (as at Harvard, Princeton or the University of Michigan) bears comparison to the commercial procedure for stunting caterpillars prior to their moment of transformation into butterflies. Silkworms can be made useful, but butterflies blow around in the wind and do nothing to add to the profits of the corporation or the power of the state. Brilliance of mind is all well and good if it leads to some visible improvement (preferably technological) or if it can be translated into a redeeming sum of cash. Otherwise, like the Soviet embassy, it is to be placed under surveillance.12
At Yale I was introduced to the perennial American debate that might well be entitled, “What are the humanities, and why do they mean anything to us here in the last decades of the twentieth century?” The debate has been going on for at least thirty years, becoming more agitated and abstract as it steadily loses meaning. Nobody wants to say, at least not for publication, that we live in a society that cares as much about the humanities as it does about the color of rain in Tashkent. The study of the liberal arts is one of those appearances that must be kept up, like a belief in the rule of law and a devout observance offered to the doctrines of free enterprise and equal opportunity. By advocating the tepid ideals of “the graceful amateur” and “the well-rounded man,” the universities make of humanism a pious and wax-faced thing. Works of art and literature become ornaments preserved, like bank notes or trust funds, in the vaults of an intellectual museum. The society doesn’t expect its “best people” (i.e., the Hotchkiss students who grow up to become investment bankers and corporation presidents) to have read William Shakespeare or Dante. Nor does anyone imagine that the secretary of state will know much more history than the rudiments of chronology expounded in a sixth-grade synopsis. If it becomes necessary to display the finery of learning, the corporation can hire a speechwriter or send its chairman to the intellectual haberdashers at the Aspen Institute. Education is a commodity, like Pepsi-Cola or alligator shoes, and freedom is a privilege fully available only to those who can afford it.13
The lessons learned at school were confirmed by my experience at different elevations in the choir lofts of the media. After leaving Yale I first found work as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, a Hearst newspaper known for the artful sensationalism of its headlines. From the Examiner I went to the New York Herald-Tribune in 1960 and then to various magazines, among them Life, The Saturday Evening Post and Harper’s.
Before I was twenty I thought the pathologies of wealth were confined to relatively small numbers of people preserved in the aspic of a specific social class. By the time I was thirty I understood that much of what could be said about the children of the rich could also be said about the nation as a whole and about a society that comforts itself with dreams of power, innocence and grace.
The United States came so suddenly into its inheritance that the fortune bears more of a resemblance to a family estate than to the wealth of a nation accumulated over centuries. It is no more than eighty-nine years from the closing of the frontier to the walk on the moon—the same span of time that measures the building of Chartres Cathedral and the period between John D. Rockefeller’s entry into business and his death amid incalculable riches.
During the first half of the twentieth century the European powers twice attempted suicide, and at the end of the Second World War what was left of Western Civilization passed into the American account. The war prompted the country to invent a miraculous economic machine that seemed to grant as many wishes as were asked of it. The continental United States escaped the scourge of battle, and it was easy enough for Americans to imagine that they had been singularly favored by God. In 1945, as in the seventeenth century when the founders of the Puritan enterprises accepted into their hands the blessings of a bountiful wilderness, the United States once again seemed to have received the mandate of Heaven. No wonder Americans believed themselves heirs apparent—not only of the classical and Christian past but also of the earth and all of its creation. As the inheritors became increasingly profligate (witness over the last forty years the steadily rising levels of inflation, consumption and debt), so also the presumptions of entitlement were extended throughout the whole of the society. Habits of extravagance once plausible only among the happy few became as commonplace among the sons of immigrant peddlers as among the daughters of the haute bourgeoisie. At the same time and for the same prices the rich and the not-so-rich collected speedboats, amphetamines, second houses or mortgages, and assurances (from professors of creative writing) that they could write novels no less great than those of Melville and James.
The feeling of amplitude was sustained by the miracle of reawakened consumer markets, and as larger numbers of people acquired the emblems of wealth, so also they acquired the attitudes of mind appropriate to the worship and defense of that wealth.14
Why else had the war been won if not for the enjoyment of the heirs? Why else had the immigrant fathers made so many sacrifices (during the Depression as well as at Anzio and Guadalcanal) if their sons and daughters couldn’t become whatever they wished to become—poets and statesmen as well as talk-show personalities and owners of subsidiary rights? What else does it mean to be an heir or heiress if he or she cannot have anything that it occurs to them to want?
In 1905 Edith Wharton published The House of Mirth, a novel in which the heroine, a young and beautiful woman named Lily Bart, drifts like a precious ornament on the bright surface of the frivolous, albeit brutal, society summoned into existence by the riches of Twain’s Gilded Age. Wharton intended a bitter satire on the self-preoccupation of an ignorant plutocracy. Her heroine declines to sell herself as a commodity, and the novel shows her being inexorably forced out of the soft, well-lighted atmospheres of luxury, “the only climate in which she could breathe,” into the deserts of poverty. She cannot live in a world without carriages, engraved invitations, new clothes and the round of frivolous amusements to which she had become accustomed; unable to eat from broken china in a squalid part of town, she prefers to die rather than suffer the “humiliation of dinginess.”
The House of Mirth addresses itself to what in 1905 was an irrelevantly small circle of people entranced by their reflections in a tradesman’s mirror. In the seventy-odd years since Wharton published the novel the small circle has become considerably larger, and the corollary deformations of character show up in all ranks of American society, among all kinds of people caught up in the perpetual buying of their self-esteem.
The pathologies of wealth usually afflict the inheritors, not the founders, of fortunes, but by 1982 the United States supported a rentier class of sizable dimensions. In that year, for the first time in the nation’s history, the money that the American people earned from capital (i.e., from rents, dividends and interest) equaled the amount earned in wages. In 1859 the country boasted the presence of only three millionaires—John Jacob Astor, William Vanderbilt and Augustus Belmont. In 1982, it entertained (by the estimate of M Magazine) at least 1.3 million millionaires, not counting the innumerable peers of the same financial realm who fail to pay taxes adjusted to their incomes or who derive their wealth from the criminal trades. The demographers at M further assume that 70,000 citizens possess assets worth upwards of $10 million and that another 20,000 citizens (the happiest few) hold assets worth upwards of $20 million. The real estate agents on Manhattan’s Upper East Side define a millionaire not as an individual who owns assets worth $1 million but as one who earns $1 million a year. To the extent that the United States as a whole has adopted the persona of the rich kid, the widespread presumptions of divine grace and eternal credit have become as characteristic of American democracy playing with the toys of art and government as of the spendthrift and still prodigal sons squandering the available patrimony.
Some weeks after Amory had gone not to Westport but to New Rochelle, I listened to a variation on his lament from a television producer’s wife who no longer could go confidently into department stores. Her husband granted her an allowance of $75,000 a year for clothes and jewelry, but the money wasn’t enough, not nearly enough, to maintain her sense of well-being. Unlike Amory, she had been born poor, in a middle-class suburb of Philadelphia, the daughter of a bank examiner. But she had attended Radcliffe on a scholarship in the early 1960s, and together with almost everybody else in her generation she had come to think herself deserving of everything in the world’s gift—success, beauty, happiness, fame. The illusion of unlimited means had done the usual damage.
Having been married for some years to the producer, who was successful and often in California, the woman who once had wanted to be a poet had learned to weigh the meaning of her life against the prices paid for clothes, furniture and real estate. She had been unlucky in her assignment of milieu. The producer did business with people who could afford to spend $80,000 for a weekend in Deauville. His wife had learned to value the deference of sales clerks and hotel managers. If somebody else’s wife owned a more expensive house in East Hampton, then somebody else’s wife obviously had made a better deal with Providence. She no longer could bear to look in department store windows, and if she found herself walking on Fifth Avenue she took care to cross to the opposite side of the street before passing Bergdorf Goodman. Her wariness proceeded from a feeling of humiliation. If she wasn’t rich enough to buy whatever she wished to buy, then clearly she was still poor, and what was the point of having any of it? Because she was poor, she was worthless, not fit to be seen in the company of dresses priced at $15,000 or diamond earrings marked down to $33,000 the pair.
In the arenas of academic or philanthropic affairs the complaint has a more decorous and muffled sound. I once heard the correct tone expressed at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York by a company of prominent scholars and journalists assembled to address the question of energy policy. The discussants had been invited because of their nominally earnest concern about the global distribution of heat and light. Both commodities at the time seemed to be going in disproportionate amounts to the rich and developed nations of the world. It was hoped that the study group might formulate an ethics of energy consumption whereby the less fortunate members of the international polity could find a place closer to the fire. The gentlemen talked in high-sounding abstractions for the whole of a morning and the better part of an afternoon. They worried about the shadow of famine falling across the map of the Third World; they counted the number of people dying of exposure in deserts that none of them had seen. At the end of the day the study director, an admirably complacent professor from Princeton, asked for specific suggestions. He reminded his guests that the foundation had allocated $250,000 for a five-year assessment of the dilemma, and he wanted to know what was the next step toward implementation. For about an hour various members of the group dutifully examined the question but failed to come forward with an idea that everybody hadn’t already read in Newsweek. At last the delegate from Harvard, sharing George Amory’s contempt for the meagerness of $250,000, said the sum was so small that it inhibited the surge of imagination.
“Who can do anything with $250,000?” he said. “The thing to do is to leverage it. Anybody with the right connections in the charity business ought to be able to run it up to $1.5 million before the end of the year. If we had $1.5 million, I’m sure we could come up with an idea.”
Everybody applauded this initiative, and the seminar adjourned with the resolution to reconvene when the foundation had raised more cash.
The emphasis on what Wharton would have called “the external finish of life,” extends across the whole of the social spectrum and accounts for much of the spending in the public as well as the private sectors of superfluous display. Early in 1985, writing in The New York Times Magazine, Claude Brown, a student of the Harlem milieu and author of Man-Child in the Promised Land, recounted a conversation with a teenage boy convicted of murder who explained that he had wanted “to be somebody,” to be able to “rock” (i.e., to wear) a different pair of designer jeans at least twice a week. “Man, it’s a bring-down,” the boy said, “to wear the same pants and the same shirt to school three or four times a week when everybody else is showin fly.” The same spring The Washingtonian published a lead article entitled “Going Broke on $100,000 a Year,” in which it was explained that a good many young and ambitious couples in Washington had been ruined by their taste for splendor. By way of illustration the magazine reprinted a number of household budgets as hopelessly out of balance as George Amory’s.15
Two years later, in the spring of 1987, The New York Times raised, by 200 percent, the cost of pecuniary decency. On the front page of its Sunday Business Section, under the title “Feeling Poor on $600,000 a Year,” a correspondent described the misery of the Wall Street novices “just buying their first $1 million co-ops” and beginning to feel intimations of immortality. The paper relied on the authority of Richard Zorn, an investment banker who retained the vestiges of a social and historical perspective.
“They can ape the styles of the rich and famous,” Zorn said. “They earn $600,000 and spend $400,000 out-of-pocket. There’s the house in Southampton and the nanny and entertaining and art and the wardrobe. But when the Joneses they are keeping up with are the Basses, it comes to the executive jet and the yachts and the sapphires and the million dollar paintings, and it’s all over. What it means is that $10 million in liquid capital is not rich.”
Talking to the same point, another banker cited in the same dispatch said, “I never knew how poor I was until I had a little money.”
The federal government spends a large percentage of its income on the preservation of illusions no less foolish than Lily Bart’s. Variations on the theme of dingy humiliation (scored for orchestra and brass band instead of solo flute) echo through the mournful statements of Caspar Weinberger, former secretary of defense, who wished to enjoy the privilege of conducting simultaneous wars, some nuclear and others merely conventional, on five continents and seven oceans. For this luxury that he perceived as necessity Weinberger asked that the trifling sum of $300 million a day be paid for five years into the Pentagon’s account. Let Congress withhold any part of this allowance, and Weinberger would weep for the loss of Western civilization.16
Much the same tone of voice appears in the explanations of U.S. senators who say they cannot possibly keep up what they regard as a decent appearance on a miserable salary of $89,000 a year. Being accustomed to approving sumptuous military budgets and spending $2,453 for circuit breakers that cost $3 in less-refined parts of town, the senators ask their sympathetic retainers in the press how they can be expected to maintain at least two residences and attend, suitably dressed, all the civic occasions to which they owe the favor of their presence. Who will deliver them from the humiliation of having to give lectures in dingy halls? Of dodging like beggars for the coins of campaign contribution?
Ask an American what money means, and nine times in ten he or she will say it is synonymous with freedom, that it opens the doors of feeling and experience, that citizens with enough money can play at being gods and do anything they wish—drive fast cars, charter four-masted sailing vessels, join a peasant rebellion, produce movies, endow museums, campaign for political office, hire an Indian sage, toy with the conglomeration of companies and drink the wine of orgy. No matter what their income, a depressing number of Americans believe that if only they had twice as much, they would inherit the estate of happiness promised them by the Declaration of Independence.
At random intervals over a period of thirty years I have conducted a good many impromptu interviews on this question, asking people of various means to name the combination of numbers that would unlock the vault of paradise. I have put the question to investment bankers and to poets supposedly content with metaphors. The doubling principle holds as firm as the price of emeralds. The man who receives $15,000 a year is sure that he can relieve his sorrow if he had $30,000 a year. The woman with $1 million a year knows that all would be well if she had $2 million a year.
All respondents say that if only they could accumulate fortunes of sufficient size and velocity, then they would ascend into the empyrean reflected in the best advertisements; if only they could quit the jobs they loathe, quit pandering to the whim of the company chairman (or union boss, or managing editor, or director of sales); if only they didn’t have to keep up appearances, to say what they didn’t mean, to lie to themselves and their children; if only they didn’t feel so small in the presence of money, then surely they would be free—free of their habitual melancholy, free to act and have, free to rise, like a space vehicle fired straight up from Cape Kennedy, into the thin and intoxicating atmosphere of gratified desire.
It is precisely this belief that crowds them into the corners of envy and rage. Imagining that they can be transformed into gods, they find themselves changed into dwarfs. The United States provides life-support systems for the richest and most expensively educated bourgeoisie in the known history of the world, and yet, despite God knows how many opportunities and no matter how elaborate the communication systems or how often everybody goes to Europe, the equestrian classes remain dissatisfied.
Nobody ever has enough. It is characteristic of the rich, whether the rich man or the rich nation, to think that they never have enough of anything. Not enough love, time, houses, tennis balls, orgasms, dinner invitations, designer clothes, nuclear weapons or appearances on The Tonight Show. This has been the urgent news brought to a sympathetic public for the past twenty years by the chorus of sensitive novelists, Norman Mailer as well as Ann Beattie, who publish the continuous chronicle of disappointment. Given the outward circumstances of their lives, their unhappiness sometimes approaches the margin of parody. There they sit, the wonders of the Western world, surrounded by all the toys available to the customer with a credit card, mourning the loss of innocence, the limits of feminism and the death of bumblebees.
Seeking the invisible through the imagery of the visible, the Americans never can get quite all the way to the end of the American dream. Even if we achieve what the world is pleased to acknowledge as success, we discover that the seizing of it fails to satisfy the hunger of spiritual expectation, which is why we so often feel oppressed by the vague melancholy that echoes like a sad blues through the back rooms of so many American stories. The poor little rich girl and the unhappy movie idol, like J. Gatsby, George Amory and the makers of the nation’s foreign policy, compose variations on the same lament. Yes, we have everything anybody can buy in the department store of the free world: the Ferrari, the third husband, the F-16, the villa at Cap d’Antibes, the indoor tennis court, the Jacuzzi and the Strategic Defense Initiative. But no, it isn’t enough. We aren’t happy. Somehow we deserve more.
As portrayed in Ken Auletta’s book Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman, the partners in the firm could neither restrain nor appease their appetites for cash. They earned salaries of between $500,000 and $2 million a year, but for reasons that would have been self-evident to George Amory, nothing was ever enough, and everybody always needed more. “Greed was the word that hovered over the troubled partnership . . . Traders said the bankers were greedy because they were privately angling to sell the firm. Bankers said the traders were greedy to steal their shares and take such fat bonuses.” Joan Ganz Cooney, the founder of Children’s Television Workshop and the wife of Pete Peterson, one of the principal Lehman partners, explained to Auletta that her husband wanted to sell the firm so “we’d have no money worries.” At the time her husband was receiving the equivalent of $5 million a year after taxes—a sum too small to suppress the feelings of anxiety and panic.17
Innumerable books by the sons and daughters of the rich remark on a comparable state of deprivation. Gloria Vanderbilt in her autobiography (Once Upon a Time, published in 1985) describes her childhood as a vacuum, empty of love or the merest sound of human recognition, as if she were “suspended in a bubble.” Sallie Bingham, the reluctant heiress who in 1986 provoked the sale of her family’s monopoly interest in the Louisville Courier Journal, speaks of being brought up in circumstances similar to those of a political prisoner. She was taught “never to ask the price of anything,” but in return for this privilege she was obliged to maintain an attitude of decorous silence—never expressing her thoughts, never presuming to impose “undue stress or criticism” on the men in her family. The historian John A. Garraty noted in his study of The New Commonwealth that the unprecedented wealth and comfort of the alte nineteenth century in America resulted, paradoxically, in rising levels of exhaustion, anxiety and corruption. He went on to say that “the burgeoning cities of the land expanded the opportunities and fired the imaginations of their inhabitants, yet seemed at the same time to narrow their horizons and reduce them to ciphers.”
At college I was struck by the way in which heirs to even modest fortunes fitted their lives into small spaces. They had the resources to travel extensively, to underwrite the acts of the imagination (their own or those of others), to make the acquaintance of their own minds. Instead, they fixed their attention on the tiny distinctions between shirts bought at Tripler’s and shirts bought at J. Press, between the inflections of voices in Greenwich, Connecticut, and the inflections of voices twenty miles north in Armonk. Their preoccupations were those of department store clerks or the editors of New York magazine.
Amory, in his senior year, shared a suite of rooms with a prep-school friend, a boy named Wainwright who barely could muster the energy to go to class. The boy had a talent for painting, but his parents had made a mockery of his ambition to study art, and he had learned at St. Paul’s to suppress any sudden or suspicious movement of his imagination. He sometimes thought he would like to travel, maybe to India or Greece. But then he thought of the heat and the flies and what he called “the funny-looking people speaking funny-looking languages,” and he decided he was better off seeing the world through the eye of an air-conditioned movie theater on Crown Street. His passivity anticipated the passivity of a subsequent generation brought up to sit in front of television screens, and his xenophobia was not too different from that of the foreign policy establishment that thought it could buy off its fear of Communism by staging a war in what it believed to be the air-conditioned movie theater of Vietnam.
Although I have no memory of a specific incident, I know that before I was eight I had begun to suspect that something was wrong with the local presumptions of grace. It was as if a magician at a child’s birthday party had made a mistake with the rabbit, thus leaving at least one member of the audience with the awkward suspicion that what was being advertised as paradise might bear a closer resemblance to jail. Possibly it was something about the people waving their hats (not all of whom seemed to be smiling), or perhaps it was a remark overheard in a basement, or a chance encounter with one of Charles Dickens’s novels. In San Francisco I had been brought up among people who owned most of what was worth owning in the city. At Yale I had been educated among heirs to certain affluence. In New York, Los Angeles and Washington I had met many of the people believed to have won all the bets—and yet, despite their ease of manner, hardly anybody seemed to take much pleasure in his or her property. What impressed me was their chronic disappointment and their diminished range of thought and sensibility.
Edith Wharton describes the asylum of wealth as a gilded cage, sumptuous in its decor but stupefying in its vacuity.18 Lily Bart at least had the wit to know that by making money an end in itself she would be required to give up all but the enameled surface of her humanity. She would become a fly embalmed in amber, meant to be stared at, like celebrities in tomorrow’s papers, by the crowd pressing its collective face against the windows of a Fifth Avenue jeweler.
Unlike widespread poverty, widespread affluence is something new under the sun, and the criminologists recently have begun to discover what was obvious to both Honoré de Balzac and Talleyrand—that is, that the relation between “subjective dissatisfaction and objective deprivation” is a good deal more complicated than anybody at Harvard previously had thought. Apparently it is not poverty that causes crime, but rather the resentment of poverty. This latter condition is as likely to embitter the “subjectively deprived” in a rich society as the “objectively deprived” in a poor society.19
In New York the masks of opulence conceal a genuinely terrifying listlessness of spirit. The equestrian classes promenade through the mirrored galleries of the media, their least movements accompanied by a ceaseless murmuring of praise in the fashion magazines as well as in The New York Times. Behind the screens of publicity, the mode of feeling is as trivial and cruel as the equivalent modes of feeling prevalent in the ranks of Edith Wharton’s plutocracy or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s troupe of dancers in the Jazz Age.