The American is nomadic in religion, in ideas, in morals.
—J.R. Lowell, Fireside Travels
The greatest crimes are caused by surfeit, not by want. Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold.
—Aristotle, Politics
The rich are like ravening wolves, who, having once tasted human flesh, henceforth desire and devour only men.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Foreign or leftist observers often make the mistake of thinking the Americans a materialist people. British socialists like to remark on the gaudiness of American taste and the bulk of the nation’s trash. The Soviet press presents a caricature of the United States as a nineteenth-century plutocrat—an obese gentleman in waistcoat and top hat devouring the fruits of honest labor as if these were truffles in the mouth of a pig. Variations on the same ideograph occasionally appear in the campaign literature of the Democratic Party as well as in the editorial columns of The Nation, Mother Jones, The Progressive and any other journal virtuous enough to ally itself with the victims of the interests.
The emphasis on greed misses the point. As Henry Adams noticed, Americans don’t take much pleasure in material things. If we did, New York would more nearly resemble Paris, and the food in the better restaurants might at least be as artfully produced as the menu. Instead of being crowded into dirty and congested streets, the expensive real estate would lie along the rivers. Most American cities show to their best advantage when seen from a height or a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction. A television commercial is an artifact far more subtly made than the product it advertises; of the people who buy jogging shoes, 70 percent don’t jog. The thing consumed isn’t as important as what the act of consumption represents; it is the existential correlative that matters, the demonstration of what Thorstein Veblen called “pecuniary decency” and the proof of belonging to what John Calvin called “the company of the elect.”
The American dream at any given moment accommodates itself to the spendthrift presence of two kinds of people living well beyond their means—the parvenu rich rising to the surface of their ambitions and the ci-devant rich sinking into oblivion. (Donald Trump represents the former constituency, George Amory the latter.) Both social orders within the equestrian class believe they deserve a good deal more than they possess, and neither order ever has enough money to sustain its definitions of self. The arrivistes spend in anticipation of Christmases yet to come; the departing notables spend to preserve the remembrance of Christmases past. Both sets of expenditure have less to do with physical necessity (food, clothing, shelter) than with the desired states of metaphysical well-being. It doesn’t matter so much whether we like the taste of the creamed spinach at Mortimer’s or the glazed turnips at the Bistro Garden, or even that we can be seen to pay $50 for a wilted salad and a bottle of overpriced wine, but rather that we can be assured, at least for the time being, that we enjoy the dignity of a name.
Unlike Europeans, Americans recognize themselves as pilgrims obliged to make and remake their lives with whatever materials come to hand. All status is temporary, all states of being conditional. It is the frenzied buying in the markets of self-esteem that distinguishes the American from the foreign rich. Knowing more or less who they are, the equestrian classes in England and France don’t feel obliged to purchase the patents of their existence. On the grounds of an old and stately British house it is the old and stately duke who is likely to be seen wandering among the rosebushes in a seedy hunting jacket. He might be pitiably short of cash, but it doesn’t occur to him to sell his land in order to present an opulent figure in London. A Frenchman can afford to be interested in a truffle rather than in what the truffle means.
A few among the American rich also affect shabby clothes and secondhand cars, but they do so because of their deference to money, not as an expression of their disdain. Being quite sure that money possesses supernatural powers (i.e., to bestow or rescind the freedom of movement), they don’t wish to try its patience or insult its magnificence. Too prideful a display of worldly goods might excite the fevers of envy and subject them to the sufferings of Job.
What Tocqueville noticed as the peculiarly American dread of “sinking in the world” accounts for the seemingly irrational spending that prompts so many people to buy proofs of a salvation they cannot afford.31 Maybe the weight of their acquisitions will prevent them from drifting off into the void, or relieve them of their anxiety, or buoy them up against their fear of losing definition in the world.
The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business. The feasts of consumption sustain the economy, keep up the volume in the stock markets, employ the unemployable, excite the fevers of speculation and stimulate the passion for political and sexual novelty. It isn’t too much to say (as some of Reagan’s apologists for supply-side economics have indeed said) that the safety of the free world depends on the size and violence of the American appetite. Deny the American public the chance to display its patriotic duty to consume the best of everything and within a matter of weeks the Communist host would stand at the gates of Paris.32
Whenever the economy runs into sufficiently serious trouble, the advice from New York and Washington shows a remarkable degree of bipartisan consent. Whether advanced by economists or politicians, by merchants, newspaper editors or corporate grandees, the pitch runs as follows:
The advertising business plays with ingenious skill on the themes of perpetual discontent that haunt the citizens of an egalitarian society. When everything is more or less the same, and when everybody can compete on the same footing for the same inventories of reward, then the slightest variation of result produces a sickness of heart. The collections of goods and services testify not only to social status but also to an individual’s worth as a human being. Small and shabby collections belong to small and shabby souls. The more equal people become, the more relentless their desire for inequality.33 “The Americans,” Tocqueville remarked in the 1840s, “clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and lose grip as they hurry after some new delight.”
Our desperate haste has become more pronounced as the events of the twentieth century, its wars and dehumanizing bureaucracies as well as its invention of the atomic bomb, have conspired to remind us of our stature as dwarfs. To the extent that people feel themselves small they seek to enlarge themselves not only through the construction of immense organizations but also by their capacity as consumers. The motto on the T-shirt says “The man who dies with the most things wins,” and the markets do what they can to sponsor the race. In the nineteenth century even a rich man could buy relatively few things with which to shore up the architecture of his identity. He could distribute his inheritance on gambling, women, furniture and horses. For his other amusements he had recourse to little else except his ambition and largeness of mind. The educated aristocracy compiled volumes of commentary on butterflies and the roads in Abyssinia; it assembled libraries and commissioned works of art from Beethoven and Ingres; Tolstoy, himself a nobleman and owner of a thousand serfs, conceived of dramas on a scale commensurate with his lands and estates.
But the equestrian classes of the twentieth century, at least those with which I’m familiar in the United States, squander their talents on the arts of higher shopping. The principle of amassment unites the undermotivated rich with an undermotivated culture.
The most recent figures show that Americans now retain only 4.6 percent of their income as savings, the lowest percentage since the government began keeping records in 1959, and one that compares unfavorably with the Japanese, who retain 17.2 percent, with the West Germans, 12.9 percent, and even with the British, 11.7 percent. The banks serve the function of shills in Las Vegas casinos, hustling gold-plated instruments of short-term debt and setting up speculators with the funds necessary to make a play for an oil company or an airline. The stock market rises and falls on rumors of inside trading, and the states operate numbers rackets that compete with the gambling games run by newspapers.
Unlike their forebears in the late nineteenth century, the current heroes of finance display a talent for consumption but not production. The magnates of the Gilded Age—men like J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Edward Harriman or James J. Hill—at least took the trouble to build railroads or steel mills. No matter how conspicuous their horses or their townhouses, their labors added to the sum of the nation’s energy and wealth. The modern nabob is a parasite, and more often than not his story is the story of a stomach. Financiers on the order of Ivan Boesky, Carl Icahn or T. Boone Pickens begin by identifying a company that holds assets worth a good deal more than its purchase price. They then borrow the money to buy the property, but instead of trying to preserve it, they reduce its various productive organs to liquid forms of cash and tax manipulation. The process is not dissimilar to flensing, boiling and trying out the carcass of a sperm whale. Occasionally the acquisitors keep one or another of the parts of the deceased enterprise (an insurance company, say, or a television station), but they do so for reasons of vanity—because somebody else’s wife wants to broadcast the six o’clock news or transform a railroad station into a restaurant.
The predators repay their loans with the money distilled from the liquidation of assets; they also pay off the company executives who expedited the sale, ushering them safely off the premises with goodbye presents (i.e., “golden parachutes”) often worth $10 million to $20 million. After subtracting these tax-deductible “opportunity costs,” the acquisitors divide the remainder of the spoils and issue a press release about the great blessing they have bestowed upon the stockholders and the American people. Their deals, however, almost invariably result in the contraction rather than the expansion of wealth. The earnings of the new company service its debt to the past instead of its development into the future.
People who don’t know what else to do collect things—not only objects but also the proofs of experience and emblems of status. Those who would set themselves apart from their neighbors remain perennial students of the self. The more intensely they feel their lack of presence, the more eagerly they buy tokens of personality—gold-plated golf clubs, CBS, cuff links heavily ornamented with initials, designer jeans and designer chocolate, TWA or Revlon, automobiles “especially crafted for Roger J. Straus.”34 Instead of asking “Who are they?” or “What is this?” they ask, much to the delight of psychoanalysts, dance instructors, cosmeticians, Wall Street arbitrageurs and dealers in Hindu religion, “Who am I?” The market welcomes them as a golden horde, defining them as a collective of zip codes and demographic profiles to which it makes the ceaseless promise of escape into a better world. If only the customer will follow the instructions on the label, then maybe he will discover his true self on Face the Nation or in a bottle of Brut cologne.
The acts of consumption define the spirit of the age, and it would need a library of many volumes to catalogue the texts of extravagance. The more expensive fashion designers, among them Giorgio Armani, provide “mini-couture” for children under the age of ten; in Los Angeles it is possible to rent a stretch limousine equipped with hot tub and helicopter pad; the “nouvelle society” in Dallas and Chicago, as well as in New York and Washington, teaches its children the refinements of dressage and tells itself, in the words of one of its most impressionable ladies, “We’re right now in our glory. We’re at the peak of the Renaissance.”
The reader surely can tell his or her own cautionary tales, and if I report a few observations from Manhattan, I do so merely to indicate the range of our current obsessions and not to cast any slight on the arts of opulence as practiced in Houston or Miami. On an otherwise ordinary Wednesday last November I received three communiqués from the markets in luxury, all of them tending to suggest that the feasts of consumption answer the appetites of the soul rather than the needs of the flesh.
The morning mail brought a postcard from a Madison Avenue butcher soliciting patronage from a clientele presumably grown bored and listless on a surfeit of steak, roast beef and rack of lamb. The butcher had gone to the trouble of acquiring more exotic commodities and was happy to announce he now could provide choice cuts of antelope, eland, mountain sheep, bear, elk, moose, beaver, hippopotamus, nilgai, cape buffalo, lion, opposum, chamois, llama, raccoon and yak. Being a man of delicacy and taste, the butcher passed over the cost of these items, but it is probably safe to assume that all would be expensive and that the prices would move upward in relation to the animal’s rank on the Sierra Club’s list of endangered species. In the event that none of these meats excited the curiosity of his patrons, the butcher was thoughtful enough to say he would gladly send his agent in search of any other beast anybody might have in view.35
Later in the morning, at breakfast in a coffee shop on the ground floor of the Pan Am building, I fell into conversation with a pilot who flew chartered jets for corporate grandees wishing to avoid the humiliation of traveling on common carriers. He had landed a few hours earlier at LaGuardia with one passenger on a plane configured to transport sixteen executives in elaborate comfort. His solitary passenger, an anxious gentleman who never removed his hat, had made the round trip to Los Angeles within the span of eighteen hours. While the plan was being refueled, the anxious gentleman hurried away in a limousine to Frederick’s of Hollywood, a store that deals in the flashy sort of lingerie seen in the back pages of movie magazines. When he returned three hours later, looking like Santa Claus with a stack of packages that had cost him $6,000, the plane promptly took off for New York. (“If I had known he was into that kind of thing,” the pilot said, “I would have worn my uniform.”) It cost $25,000 to charter the plane for the passage to California, and the bill was sent to the corporation that regarded the passenger as a very important fellow. The pilot said most of the corporations that chartered planes did so not for reasons of convenience but for reasons having to do with somebody’s vanity. He assumed that the corporation would pay for the lingerie, as well as the landing fees, but he was curious about the category under which it would list the expense.
At lunch I listened to a lawyer who for some months had been disbursing funds for the work of interior reconstruction in a large apartment overlooking Central Park. His client, a woman distracted by her ambition to become acquainted with “the best people,” had already spent nearly $2 million, at least half of which had been allocated to the marble surfacing of the walls and floors. On first being shown the effect of the foyer, the woman pronounced it too cheap, too insufficient, too exposed to the condescension of the guests whom she expected to astonish at dinner. “They’ll think I’m tacky,” she had said. “They’ll know I only spent $100,000 for the marble.”
In order to make a bath and dressing room large enough to accommodate her self-esteem, her contractor had broken through three walls and joined what were once two bedrooms into a space that could bear decoration in the manner of Imperial Rome. Still the result was somehow too small. That morning she had instructed the architect to supply additional mirrors and to install an icebox in the wall next to the tub. “She needs the icebox to chill the cologne,” the lawyer said. “She said that there’s nothing so unpleasant as to step out of a bath on a warm day and have to wear tepid cologne.”
At a dinner later that same week I encountered an NBC correspondent known for the purity of her political judgments who complained about the “obscene” and “outrageous” cost of Nancy Reagan’s clothes. She had read in a gossip column that Mrs. Reagan had bought an evening dress for $8,000, and she was moved to make indignant references to Marie Antoinette. Her polemic seemed as fragile as her shoes. Being herself a woman of extremely modest attainments, she earned well over $150,000 a year for reading news bulletins on a teleprompter in a vocabulary configured to the understanding of a six-year-old child. It had never occurred to her that the cost of NBC’s nightly news programming, most of it as subtle as the souvenirs sold in amusement parks, certainly exceeded what Marie Antoinette spent in six months for jewelry. In the summer of 1984 the national media sent 14,000 representatives to the Democratic convention in San Francisco (outnumbering the politicos by a ratio of three to one), and the sum of their travel and entertainment expenses over a period of four days would have paid Louis XIV’s costs for the construction of Versailles.
Americans tend to prefer the uses of power to the uses of freedom. The heirs to the great fortune that fell to the nation’s lot in 1945 assumed they had inherited not only the goods and chattels of the earth but also the spoils of intellect accumulated over centuries in the vaults of Western civilization. They wished to consume the products of the artistic imagination (somewhat comparable in the general conception to a vineyard in Bordeaux), but they had neither the patience nor the need to experience art. The study of literature, like that of any other art, offers as its reward freedom of mind and spaciousness of thought. Neither of these possessions makes much of a show in the world, and for the most part they are thought to be superfluous.
But even a society abandoned to an infantile delight in money needs something it can call by the name of culture. Books still furnish a room, and people excited by power like to go to opening nights, to wear pretty clothes and be marked present in a crowd of celebrities. The characters in the popular television dramas, like those in best-selling works of fiction and nonfiction, achieve their identities by virtue of their association with expensive merchandise. Novels by writers on the order of Judith Krantz or Danielle Steel or Dominick Dunne read like catalogues from Neiman Marcus. Nobody goes anywhere without drinking from a glass of Roederer Cristal, wearing a Cartier watch or picking up a Mont Blanc pen to write a check for the odd $2 million or $3 million while sitting at a table by William Kent in a suite at Claridge’s.36
In nineteenth century France the newly enriched bourgeoisie crowded into restaurants invented for their amazement, and there, complacent under the chandeliers, they professed themselves astounded by the sauces of Escoffier. They took the food extremely seriously, not daring to express a naïve opinion for fear of making an atrocious blunder in the presence of waiters. The same air of uncertainty characterizes the nouveaux littéraires ennobled in the hundreds of thousands by university degrees in the past thirty years, solemnly consuming the rôti de Styron, the mousse au Sontag and the prix fixe offered by the Book of the Month Club. Rather than be proved ridiculous by what critics might say in The New York Times, the clientele makes itself sick on fantasy and nihilism in cream.
The pretext for an operatic or theatrical occasion (a kind of setting wealth to music) matters less than its exclusivity and expense. At the opening of its season in the autumn of 1985 the Metropolitan Opera staged what by all accounts was a truly dreadful performance of Tosca. Even the critic from the Times, defying the rules of decorum and risking the wrath of his editors, couldn’t help noticing that Luciano Pavarotti’s singing was poor, the production “heavy-handed” and “grandiose,” the effect “lifeless” and “embarrassing.” The paper’s social pages, however, carried exuberant reports of the evening’s spectacular success. About 750 notables, among them William F. Buckley, Jr., Helen Gurley Brown and Oscar de la Renta, paid $1,000 for a dinner lit with candles on the grand tier. Chanel arranged a fashion show and used the occasion to introduce its new perfume, Coco. Musicians in costume played trumpet fanfares for the arriving guests; the staircases had been tastefully decorated with actors dressed as Swiss Guards. Estée Lauder pronounced the opera “great.”
In a rich man’s culture, art is what sells and its price determines its worth. If the diamond bought at Tiffany’s sparkles more brilliantly than a diamond of equal weight and size bought for $758 on West Forty-seventh Street, then even bad novels by Joseph Heller or E.L. Doctorow become masterpieces by virtue of the prices paid for the paperback and movie rights. Once an author or an artist has demonstrated his or her ability to earn money, he or she acquires, as if by court order, a reputation for genius. Under such a dispensation critics become indistinguishable from headwaiters or department store floorwalkers. They provide ready-made opinions and direct the customers to the newest lines of merchandise.
A prominent editor of The New York Times involved with the supervision of the paper’s cultural pretensions supposedly once stated the commanding principle with a concision superior to that of my Hotchkiss English master. Explaining the protocols of wealth to a newly arrived subeditor, the editor is purported to have said, “A good author is a rich author, and a rich author is a good author.” The maxim is possibly apocryphal, but its point is proved in the bias of the paper’s cultural reporting.37
Twenty-five years ago a writer who wished to present himself as a serious or important artist was obliged to strike the pose of an outcast. The cultural convention of the period insisted on the image of the writer (or painter, sculptor or playwright) as a man against the system. Condemned because of his truth telling to stand outside the palace walls, the writer was presumed to have forsworn the corruptions of Mammon in order to receive the certificate of genius. The critics looked more kindly on a writer’s work if they could imagine him subsisting poetically in an attic, warming himself at the meager fires of a moral and aesthetic principle, directing a fierce guerrilla campaign against the overstuffed complacency of the bourgeoisie.
No more. The romance of the artist as an impoverished seer no longer commands belief. Under the new cultural dispensation, poverty is merely poverty, and behavior once attributed to the vagary of genius has come to be seen as being both boorish and subversive. The phrase “a poor artist” stands revealed as a contradiction in terms. If the artist were any good (i.e., “a real artist” and not a charlatan) he would meet that editor’s criterion of being rich. If he isn’t rich he has failed the examination of the market and deserves no sympathy. The bias explains why the literary press so seldom prints unpleasant reviews of well-publicized books. An angry review constitutes an attack not only on a writer or a work but also on money itself, which, of course, is blasphemy.
Although well known as an artist, the late Andy Warhol perhaps deserved to be better known as a businessman. He arrived in New York in 1949, son of an impoverished Pennsylvania coal miner, and within a remarkably short time established himself as the court painter to a plutocracy that didn’t care to make distinctions between art and fashion. On his death in 1987 Warhol left an estate estimated at $15 million; he had become publisher of a successful magazine filled with successful gossip, the owner of precious Manhattan real estate and a corporate entity capable of leasing its name and likeness to, among other institutions, Sony, Braniff Airlines, Barney’s and the rums of Puerto Rico. Invited to pose for a flattering portrait in the pages of Manhattan, Inc. (in October 1984), Warhol told the interviewer how he had happened to come upon the subject of his art: “I asked 10 or 15 people for suggestions . . . finally one lady friend of mine asked me the right question, ‘Well, what do you love most?’ That’s how I started painting money.”38
On reading the criticism in the Times, or in almost any other established catalogue of taste, I think of Mrs. Eddie Gilbert, who, during the bull markets of the 1960s, was married to a Wall Street financier said to be the equal of Maecenas or Bernard Baruch. Like his counterparts in the middle 1980s, Gilbert welcomed the flattering attention of the press. At the zenith of his notoriety in 1965 (about a year before he escaped to Brazil to avoid arrest on charges of stock fraud) Gilbert invited a few hundred well-advertised people, none of whom he knew, to a dance in his new apartment on Fifth Avenue. On the advice of their press agents, who also supplied the guest lists, the arriviste capitalists in those days believed that dances at home were more dignified than dances in nightclubs or hotels. Gilbert also wished to display his wife, Rhoda, to her best advantage, and he had gone to considerable trouble and expense to embellish her with a suitable sheen of manner. Rhoda, unfortunately, had been born and educated in the Bronx. Within a week of his marriage Gilbert sent his wife to finishing school. He paid for French lessons and studies in elocution; he encouraged her to follow the fashion and learn table arrangement. None of it achieved the intended effect. The speech lessons failed to soften the edge of Rhoda’s voice; she knew the wrong gossip about the wrong people, and she never learned how to make polite conversation with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., or Marietta Tree. Her lack of an instinct for clothes forced her to depend on magazine advertisements. Occasionally tearing a page out of Vogue, she would carry it into a department store and ask a salesgirl to furnish her with everything in the photograph—the dress, the jewelry, the shoes, the Dalmatian.
On the evening of her husband’s dance Rhoda took it upon herself to show off the rooms of the apartment to those guests who had come to admire Gilbert’s net worth. With a woman she clearly didn’t know, Rhoda adopted a manner she presumably had seen in a Katharine Hepburn movie. As they entered the library, Rhoda, standing in the doorway, said, with large and theatrical gesture, “And this, of course, is the library.” Her guest returned the remark by making a comment about the books. The furniture in her own apartment had been assembled by the decorator who also had advised Rhoda, and the woman recognized the device of buying the works of standard authors in sets of colored leather.
“Oh yes,” she said. “Those green ones there. Isn’t that Thackeray?”
“No,” said Rhoda. “Thackeray is always blue.”39
The remark sums up the aesthetics of New York’s cultural establishment. Rhoda, of course, intended nothing ironic by her observation. Like the producers of the evening news, she had as much sense of humor as a bank statement. She might not know Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., or Marietta Tree, but she knew what she had paid for, and she knew what things cost. She acquired her opinions at retail prices, and she asked nothing more of them except that they conform to the current fashion. Neither does Dan Rather.
Once having acquired the correct opinions, it is relatively easy to acquire a commensurate social rank. The innumerable journals devoted to the celebration of expensive people estimate that anybody bent on important social climbing in New York must allot at least $150,000 a year (for clothes, dinner parties, tickets to charity balls, etc.) to the cost of the ascent. William Norwich, a gossip columnist for the New York Daily News, established a point system in early 1985 under the heading a touch of crass—250 points for knowing Paloma Picasso or Christine Biddle; 125 points for knowing Susan de Menil or John Kennedy, Jr.; additional points for living at 1020 Fifth Avenue, owning a Chinese Shar-pei, belonging to the Brook Club.40
Although I can appreciate the distaste of older and quieter money for its new and louder companions, I cannot see that the objection has much to do with the lowering of taste or moral standards. Social rank has always been one of the pricier commodities sold in the great American department store, and the ceasless revision of what constitutes society gives rise to the great American comedy that has been playing continuous performances since the beginning of the Republic. As one generation of parvenu rich acquires the means to buy the patents of nobility, it looks down upon the next generation of arrivistes as clubfooted upstarts. An air of condescension comes with the country house and the charge account at Tiffany’s. Because “society” in the United States rests utterly and entirely upon money, the comedy is always the same, deriving its humor as much from the slapstick repetitions as from the dialogue.41
In the first chapter of Who Killed Society? Cleveland Amory arranges a chorus of elegiac voices reaching backward in time, all complaining about the corruption of taste and the loss of a golden age. He begins with Emily Post, saying, in 1950, that “in the general picture of this modern day, the smart and the near-smart, the distinguished and the merely conspicuous, the real and the sham, and the unknown general public are all mixed up together. The walls that used to enclose the world that was fashionable are all down . . . There is nowhere to go.” Through a series of similar laments, from arbiters as melancholy and well-placed as Frank Crowninshield (1945), Elsie de Wolfe (1935), Mrs. Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte (1929) and Henry James (1906), Amory eventually comes to George Templeton Strong, writing to his diary in 1864:
How New York has fallen off during the last 40 years! Its intellect and culture have been diluted and swamped by a great flood tide of material wealth . . . men whose bank accounts are all they can rely on for social position and influence. As for their ladies—not a few who were driven in the most sumptuous turnouts, with liveried servants—[they] looked as if they might have been cooks or chambermaids a very few years ago.
Further on, Amory quotes John Adams, proper Bostonian and second president of the United States, remarking on the boorishness of New York while on his way to the Continental Congress in the autumn of 1774:
With all the opulence and splendor of this city, there is very little good breeding to be found. We have been treated with assiduous respect, but I have not seen one real gentleman, one well-bred man, since I came to town.
The playing out of the social comedy turns on the humorous confusions between the attitudes characteristic of “old” and “new” money. Old money quite naturally prefers to construe its privileges as matters of divine right, as proofs of a just, safe, happy and well-ordered universe. The distinctions between the two classes of money give rise to the momentous questions posed in the nation’s gossip columns. In precisely what tone of voice does money speak, and to whom? What attitudes does it strike and what clothes does it wear? In the presence of what kind of money is it proper to take off one’s hat? When, after being introduced to what other kind of money, is it polite to take off one’s dress?
The differences between old and new money sometimes become blurred in breathless transmissions from the fashion press, but the reader will be on safe ground if he or she can remember the fourteen cardinal points at which the two sensibilities diverge. As follows:
Old money is niggardly and defensive, as besieged as a train of covered wagons drawn together in a circle. The surrounding desert every day becomes increasingly expensive and difficult to understand. The slums get nearer, and foreign governments acquire more impressive collections of bombs.
Feeling a need for higher resolution, preferably in prime time, new money inclines toward louder colors and brighter magnitudes of movement and noise.
New money, all too familiar with those weaknesses and fears, seeks to put as much distance as possible between itself and the small-time sorrows of economy class.
The new rich recognize each other by comparing possessions, like children matching Christmas presents or exchanging bubble-gum portraits of ballplayers. Thus they must specify the exact length of the motorboat, the engine capacities of the foreign cars, the name of the cabinetmaker who made the dining room chairs.
New money knows that it would have written better plays if it always had lived in the south of France.
More recently excused from using the backstairs and the freight elevator, new money cannot avoid treating servants as equals. New money shouts, makes scenes and haggles over wages. The cook is still real.
New money replicates the rooms shown in Architectural Digest and the pets seen in Vogue.
Old money disagrees. “I mean, after all, what’s the point in having a club?”
New money insists on a table near the band. At a charity ball they judge the evening a success in proportion to the number and quality of celebrities on the dance floor.
To the new money the columns are as serious as the stock market reports.
Having seen more than enough of real people, new money takes three floors at the Gritti Palace.
New money associates the idea of the good with an idea of power. Thus the wish to look convincing while on a dais at the Waldorf, preferably seated next to Barbra Streisand or Ed Meese.
Besieged by the incessant din of exhortation—to buy, to spend, to feed—it becomes increasingly difficult for people to carry in their minds nobler conceptions of themselves than those offered for sale in the show windows of the id. To the extent that people come to think of themselves as objects, their appetites become more unnatural, their definition of “consumable goods and services” more catholic. The personal notices in the intellectual journals begin to read like offerings from specialty food stores. The following announcement, published with a box number in The New York Review of Books, strikes what has become the preferred tone:
AM I BEAUTIFUL? Some people say so. WASP brunette, 5’8”, Ivy-educated, professional success, graceful, competent, serene, non-smoker, non-bitch, nicely proportioned in body and mind. Too intelligent and alive to be happy with a loser or a numbskull. If you’re a civilized, solvent, emotionally available, spiritual, epicurean man over 40, who loves his work and himself, seeking multi-dimensional companionship with grown-up woman, please write.
The other notices on the page set the same kind of uncompromising standards (“trim,” “intelligent,” “caring,” “fond of fall walks and classical music,” “sense of humor,” “rich”) as those set by the buyers for Saks Fifth Avenue.
Under the terms of a success that entails the minting of the human personality into the coin of celebrity, the bargain has a Faustian component. Wittingly or unwittingly, the chosen individual becomes available to the public feast. The celebrity receives the gifts of wealth and applause; in return the gossip columnists and writers of high-minded editorials can do what they like with the carcass of his or her humanity. Over years of living in New York I gradually came to dread the vanguard of the golden horde (known to the press as “the jet set” and “the beautiful people”) who inevitably showed up on opening nights, at benefits and charity balls, at the exquisite little dinners for Katharine Graham or Swifty Lazar.42 They were the people who had to know everybody and go everywhere, their eyes glittering with the stare of the hunter and the hunted. So urgent was their hunger, so desperate their fear of the void, that it was pointless to speak to them of a feeling or an idea. With a single trite phrase they could leach the meaning out of a book, a love affair, a death in the family. They seized upon the artifacts of the human intelligence as if they were tasting the shrimp, turning the thing briefly on the tongue of money or publicity. Most of the time they couldn’t remember what it was that they were seeing or eating. Last year’s play is like this year’s play because what matters is not the meaning of the play but its value as a comestible. The same people make the same round of the same parties not with the hope of human discovery but with the hunger of wolves.
Toward the end of the 1960s, in a dream that still comes vividly to mind, I discovered myself in the gallery of a museum much like the Museum of Modern Art. In the midst of an enormous empty space the entire repertory company had assembled for what clearly was an important event. Dressed in evening clothes, the beau monde talked to itself in its customary way, filling the silence with urgent gossip and grazing disinterestedly on the elaborate hors d’oeuvres being handed around on silver trays. Three of the four walls served as giant movie screens, each of them showing a sequence of full-length films; the fourth wall opened through an arch into what looked like a dark closet.
Early in the dream it became clear that the guests could wander in and out of the films at will. The films were in various genres: Hollywood epics, pornography, foreign films, historical dramas, situation comedies. Once within the world of the film the guests acquired appropriate roles, costumes and lines of dialogue. They could stay as long as they liked, playing courtiers in Elizabethan England, gangsters in the Havana of the 1940s, cowboys or Indians on the old American frontier, James Bond or the heroine in The Devil in Miss Jones. Between appearances they could return to the party and pick up the lines of meaningless talk, remarking on the weather in Calais or Fort Laramie.
In the middle passages of the dream I understood that these excursions weren’t merely idle. Everybody at the party was playing a macabre game. All the guests were looking for an answer to a question that never had been asked. They were allowed only one chance to whisper the answer into the ear of the master of the revels, a man dressed in a ballet dancer’s black sweater and tights. If they were wrong, the penalty was severe—just how severe gradually becoming clear as the ranks of the celebrated host began to thin.
The arch opening through the fourth wall led into a surgical amphitheater where gaily costumed catering staff stripped the flesh from those guests who had failed the quiz. The victims were strung up on bars covered in red velvet. Their remains, cut into modish squares and triangles, were served, on toast or encroûté, to the surviving guests. What was terrifying about the dream was the insouciance of the ladies and gentlemen who continued to eat. They pretended not to notice that anything was amiss. Their talk was as bright and as empty as before, as if their absent friends had simply gone on to another party. For several months after waking from the dream I could still see in my mind’s eye three well-known New York hostesses conversing about the season’s new literary masterpiece while delicately choosing an hors d’oeuvre from a tray decorated with the flesh of the author in whom they professed to notice the stirrings of genius.
The restlessness of the American experience lends to money a greater power than it enjoys in less mobile societies. Not that money doesn’t occupy a high place in England, India or the Soviet Union, but in those less liquid climates it doesn’t work quite so many wonders and transformations. In the United States we are all parvenus, all seeking to become somebody else, and money pays the passage not only from one town to the next but also from one social class to another and from one incarnation of the self to something a little more in keeping with the season’s fashion. The American ideal exists as a concept in motion, as a fugitive and ill-defined hope glimmering on a horizon. No coalition, no industry, no source of wealth lasts much longer than a generation and nobody dies in the country in which he was born.43
Across the span of an American life the landscape changes as suddenly as the truths voted in and out of office. Towns disappear as if they were circus tents. So do names, neighborhoods, baseball teams, stock market booms, political alliances, economic theories, celebrities and new fortunes. Men start out in one place and end up in another, never quite knowing how they got there or why, perpetually expecting the unexpected, drifting across the plains with the tumbleweed until they run up against a business opportunity, a woman or a jail. Against the transience of things, wealth seems to offer the last best hope not only of democracy but also of grace. What else but money guarantees a man’s safety and existence? His place in the world? His identity? What else but money, radiant and godlike, can ward off the pursuing shadows of death and time?
The illusion of perpetual journey appeals to the restlessness of the American spirit, and the metaphor of a browsing horde coincides with the nomadic impulse that has been one of the dominant characteristics of American life and society since the seventeenth century. The American tends to believe that movement, in and of itself, means something, and the United States remains an immigrant nation, still largely populated by people not yet convinced that settlement is desirable or necessary. About 20 percent of the population shifts its household or habitation in a given year. The poor come north in search of employment or government largesse; the rich go south in search of easier taxes and eternal youth. Farm children drift into the cities in hope of finding fame or fortune; city children trek into the countryside in search of nature and philosophy.44
Even within the supposedly stable structures of American institutions (corporations, the Army, media, universities) the interior movement is as restless as water. Promotions fail to accrue to the accounts of people who stay too long in one place, who exhibit the virtues of patience and loyalty. Money attaches itself to velocity, to the changing of occupations or employers at least once every six or seven years. Accomplished bureaucrats travel back and forth between business, government and the media. The airlines depend not only on the salesmen en route to conventions but also on the wandering magi who come and go between conferences about the national debt or the future of the Democratic Party. The country swarms with the tribes of itinerant journalists, with strolling actors, baseball players and military officers, with people forever keeping their “options open,” conceiving of democracy as a pastoral browsing.
In the popular culture the romantic idealization of the nomad appears in the character of the cowboy or private detective who has neither wife, children, friends nor obligations to the state. The archetypal man on horseback (sometimes taking the persona of John Wayne, at other times the persona of Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, Erica Jong or Ronald Reagan) rides into a dusty town and discovers evil in even the crudest manifestations of social organization. The villains inevitably belong to “the system” (i.e., the same system opposed by all aspiring politicians), which, as everybody knows, is corrupt. On foot or on horseback, by helicopter or automobile, the hero pursues his quarry through a Mexican desert or urban slum. No matter what the plot or set decoration (The A-Team, Terminator, Miami Vice, the James Bond and Clint Eastwood movies, Star Wars, Beverly Hills Cop), all the stories take place in a moral wilderness that resembles the ruin of Beirut. The brutalization of the nation’s theatrical imagination over the last thirty years has reduced the media to the telling and retelling of a Bedouin’s tale. Whether cast as detective or CIA agent, the wandering hero finds solace in violence, and his story always ends with a killing; it’s the only plot he knows.
The rich American bedouin (i.e., the equestrian classes supported by the aerodynamics of money) live not so much in a world of thought and imagination as in the world of fantastic dreams, a golden horde traveling on golden credit cards in search of the soul’s pasturage. Absolute truth, like the city of El Dorado, shines in the eternal sunlight just beyond the next range of abstractions. In New York or Los Angeles, as well as in Omaha or Cheyenne, it is impossible to avoid the man who passed through Freud on his way to Castenada and Zen and who, even now, is getting together his belongings for the journey into Dr. Buscaglia’s Utopian empire. Such people speak of ideas and religions as if they were places on a map. They comprise the mass market for manuals of self-improvement, as if the self were a tent on which they could make constant additions and repairs. A man gives up his profession, quits his wife and apartment, and moves ten blocks south to begin anew, in a new suit and with a new address. It is easier to tell the same stories to different people than to think of a new story to tell.
If he can afford the price of the ticket, the nomad comes and goes with the seasons of his desire. He has neither the time nor the inclination to think very much about the people standing by the wayside. The settled townsman makes art, science and law; of necessity he must understand something other than himself. The nomad merely gathers together his tent, his music and his animals, and wanders over the mountain in search of next year’s greening of America.
Transported from place to place at high speeds, suspended in a state of dynamic passivity, the American equestrian classes devote themselves to questions of technique and the relief of boredom. They can concentrate their attention on the logistics of going to Pasadena for the Rose Bowl or to Japan for the cherry blossoms, on the ceaseless repetition of gossip and description of scene. But when, after prodigious labor, they find themselves on the fifty-yard line or standing under the trees in Kyoto, they can think of nothing to say. They have no idea of what any of it means, only that it is there and somehow very, very important, or very, very glamorous or very, very sad.
So much of what constitutes American society has a tentative and makeshift character, as if it had been put together for a season and was meant to be consumed at the point of sale. The presidential candidate traveling thousands of miles in pursuit of office presents himself to the American imagination as a romantic figure somehow reminiscent of a medieval knight-errant. The immense labor and hectic movement of the campaign excites sympathetic interest. But the administration of the public trust—unless discovered to be corrupt and therefore allied to banditry—inspires boredom. Within a year of a Senate or mayoral election hardly anybody can remember the name of the candidate who lost. The society devours its past and melts down its history into the commercial alloys of docudrama.
Americans can outfit expeditions—to Vietnam, California or the moon—but we haven’t much talent for settlement, and we lack a sense of history. An author counts himself lucky if the subject of his book stays in the public mind long enough to attract even passing notice during its first week in the stores. Among all our celebrities we reserve our fondest affection for sports heroes because these are the most perishable, the most easily and quickly digested, names that can be left under the seats with the empty popcorn box.
If American cities have the feeling of nomad camps, littered with debris and inhabited, temporarily, by people on their way to someplace else, it is because we conceive of our cities as arenas or gymnasiums. It doesn’t matter what the place looks like as long as the goalposts have been set at the proper height and angle. The pilgrims come to perform heroic feats of the imagination, to compete in the social and economic equivalents of the Olympic Games.
Our delight in all things transcendental gives the lie to our reputation as crass materialists. We would rather believe in what isn’t there, and we imagine that material acquisitions serve as tickets of admission to the desired states of immateriality. The United States is a nation of dreamers, captivated by the romance of metaphor. American painting depends on theories that explain the absence of paint. The successful pornographic magazines—Playboy, Penthouse et al.—publish literary essays that nobody bothers to read, the texts appearing as symbols of an imaginary conversation. The television image, itself a metaphor, goes forth to an invisible audience. Ideologues of all persuasions carry on fierce discussions of social justice while blithely stepping over beggars lying in the street. Like the government in Washington, the economy floats on the market in abstraction—on the credulity of people willing to pay, and pay handsomely, for a domino theory, a body count, a stock market tip, or any other paper moon on which to hang the images of their desire.
The transcendental bias of the American mind can turn the whole world into metaphor. Entire vocabularies of symbolic jargon—academic, bureaucratic, literary, scientific—describe entire kingdoms of nonexistent thought. The eloquent theories of politicians and professors of sociology seldom withstand the judgment of practical result because, more often than not, they are meant to be appreciated as tropes. The politicians seldom see the things their laws describe. They talk about housing and federal health insurance, about poverty and schools and public transportation, but they don’t ride the subways or wait in line for food stamps. Like the view of New York City from a helicopter, the idea of racial equality is beautiful when perceived from a height or a distance. But if somebody is fool enough to interpret it in a literal-minded way, mistaking the deed for the word—well, then, obviously somebody is going to get hurt. When New York Times columnist Tom Wicker some years ago spoke encouragingly to the prisoners at Attica about the “inequities of the system,” he offered them a metaphor instead of information. He presented himself as a critic of the established order, but the inmates, judging by appearances and Wicker’s obvious connections and influence, thought that he spoke on behalf of the established order. A number of prisoners died because they took him at his word. Nobody told them that journalism is a form of fiction.
The most celebrated American writers, among them Henry Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and F. Scott Fitzgerald, seek communion with the unknowable and lose themselves in what Irving Howe once described as “the sacred emptiness of space.” Alone in the void each man becomes both performer and pioneer, inventing his spirit as he clears the wilderness of his mortality. The modern school of writing follows the tradition into the thinner atmospheres of surrealism. In the novels of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon, the narrative exists only to be discarded. Like a first-stage rocket it boosts the author’s circus of ideas into the metaphor of space. Except in a figurative way, as representatives of abstraction, the people in the novels possess neither meaning nor substance.
Who else is the American hero if not a wandering pilgrim who goes forth on a perpetual quest? Melville sends Ahab across the world’s oceans in search of a fabulous beast, and Thoreau follows the unicorn of his conscience into the silence of the Maine woods. They establish the antipodes of American letters. Mark Twain sends Tom Sawyer floating down the Mississippi. Henry James and Ezra Pound travel backward in time, to Europe as well as to the personae of lost civilizations; Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald go in search of the perfect sexual encounter, the perfect phrase, the perfect kill.