THERE ARE TWO things that one does not talk about in England, if one is anyone at all; and these two things are sex and class. They exist, most people agree, and people have them; and that’s all there is to it. There is certainly no point in making a fuss about either. The less said, the better.
Of the two, it is probably rather worse to talk about class; girls have been known to give little high-pitched screams when it is mentioned—and while a discussion about How to Have Sex in a Sexless Society might lose us a strait-laced friend or two, one on How to Have Class in a Classless Society can keep one permanently in social obloquy. When Mr Christopher Mayhew discussed the subject on television, friends looked at him narrowly and people cut him in the street; when a distinguished English sociologist was invited to lecture on the subject in America, he began his speech with ‘this is a distasteful subject, and I wish I didn’t have to talk about it’.
But, although it is not a subject for conversation (‘It’s all in your mind,’ said one nice little girl when I attempted to explain to her that there was a class system in England, and she rode off down the road on her pony, while I waited for the bus) and although the whole U and non-U business was completely non-U and in rather doubtful taste, every real Englishman knows deep down that class is much more important than sex. All that needs to be said about sex is this: that if Freud had not mentioned it, nobody would have found it the slightest bit interesting, and as for Freud’s view that the sexual is the fundamental human drive, well, this may be true of some races one can think of but it is certainly not true of the English. Every Englishman knows that the fundamental human drive is keeping yourself to yourself—which is quite the opposite.
Sex is something that anyone can have, anywhere in the world, but class, real class, you can get only in England. Moreover, sex is strictly a night-time activity, while class goes on all the time. Above all, you can, as our novelists have discovered, bring class into sex—but it is impossible to reverse the process. Thus, quite typically, we observe the Englishman substituting an artificial for a real distinction. Having class is, of course, the art of believing in the artificial as something real and fundamental, and since artificial distinctions are so much harder to maintain than real ones, this constitutes a real challenge to the national mind. It is the capacity to face challenges of this order that has made the English what they are today.
If people nowadays are starting to talk about class rather more than they used to, this is for the very obvious reason that, as a thing diminishes, discussion of it increases. The Education Act of 1944 has put us all on our toes about class. There was a time, a none-too-distant time at that, when every Englishman had a kind of personal radar which enabled him to perceive to what class he and his interlocutors belonged. It had to do with one’s accent, one’s clothes, the people one knew, the place where one lived. One knew, then, whether to defer, or be superior. Snobbery was the thing which kept the wheels oiled. Snobbery presupposed a clear-cut order; the snob flattered the system by imitating the manners of those immediately above him in the scale. It was a disease of the insecure, of those whose pretensions exceeded their rank; and it meant that they sought to pass above it. Snobs were never people who acted toward one in a superior fashion and were superior; they were those who did this and were not.
Thus snobbery was a largely middle-class affair; the middle class were the people who sought to extend their rank as their income extended itself. If you were at the bottom you were apt to stay there; and if you were at the top, you were the Joneses, and had no one to keep up with. In those days, class went, roughly speaking, with wealth and power; and one pursued all three together. But in the middle stages one found that as soon as one caught up with one lot of Joneses there were another lot just around the corner. You just had to keep on, remembering that the difference between a peerage and the bankruptcy court was a hair’s breadth. The middle classes read books of etiquette to see how decent people behaved; the middle classes were genteel because they were afraid; the middle class spoke of Having Manners; the middle class were careful of their grammar (bad grammar is proper for the lower class, because they know no better, and the upper class, because they do and everyone knows that they do, even if they don’t). Meanwhile, the upper classes, rightly perceiving that something is exclusive only as long as other people want to get in, and think perhaps they can, maintained their exclusiveness by assimilating a few upward strivers from time to time. But these were the good old days; nowadays there is room at the top simply because so few people want to be there.
After all, remember, a social climber is a person whose climbing is visible; and today one can’t see them any more. Things have changed; England is in flux; no one behaves the way one expects them to any more. One has only to glance at the magazines formerly directed to persons of rank. Only the other day I observed in one of those glossy magazines, where everyone is photographed on horseback, that in a series describing the houses of the best people, with photographs of the hole where the Victorian wing was before it was torn down, there was an account of a visit to the home of Bessie Braddock—with photographs, as glossy as ever, of her darning her husband’s underpants and so on. One thought of all those nice people reading it, and how they must have felt.
The fact is, of course, that you can’t docket people any more. Fools blame the Labour Party, but of course the Labour Party is just as fond of class as everyone else. They are just as keen to preserve the old working class, with its fine old cultural heritage of making rhubarb wine and fetching its gin from the jug and bottle, and all those other splendid Richard Hoggarty things it always did before television, as the other party is to make it as sunny as it was before 1914, when the people in the first-class carriages really were first class.* The Conservative Party may have its Edwardian wilderness; the Labour Party has its William Morris wilderness.
No, the classless society is sneaking up on us unawares, and coming from a very different source, which is called mass-culture. There was a time when there was one kind of marmalade for the upper class, and one for the middle and one for the lower class. But the old-fashioned high-class goods—marmalades that cost a shilling more because all the oranges came from the north side of the hill—for the carriage trade are disappearing, and the magazines and newspapers that were divided by class boundaries are simply not any more—there are people who read The Lady, and are not (and what is worse, don’t even want to be); while ladies often read Woman. Vogue is not what Vogue is in. Indeed, as the advertisements for The Times admit, anyone can be a top person now, simply by subscribing to that paper; one doesn’t even have to read it—only carry it. I can remember the days when shops were run by people who knew at once how much deference to give; now you can go into shops where the only people there are store detectives in disguise.
In short, the simple means one once had of telling—or displaying—class are fading, and one even comes across people who stare at you blankly and simply don’t know. The young are the ones who carry the burden, of course; the country is swarming with the socially mobile young, who don’t know what class they belong to, and hardly know which sex. We can all of us remember how easy it all was in the old days. In the face of this situation, where everyone is mobile and there is room at the top, provided you can find where the top is, even the old-fashioned standby of accent ceases to be the key. We have reached the stage of cultural hodge-podge where all accents, and all classes, seem accessible. In such a situation, guidance is needed. A new organization (Room-at-the-Top, Limited) is being formed, designed to help persons uncertain of their place in the world to conform to the values of the environment in which they choose to live (problems like when to wear check shirts, desert boots, etc., are being studied and the results tabulated). In the meantime, some interim advice on How to Have Class in a Classless Society, and which class to have, is sure to be helpful. Remember, class can be fun—or hell.
Although America is known, quite properly, as a democratic country, one cannot help noticing among Americans a somewhat undemocratic fascination with the English upper classes. Ever since the days, towards the end of the last century, when the American demi-monde was deluged with persons from England who claimed to be of blue blood, seeking to marry American girls who claimed to be heiresses, Americans have been disposed to show a special fondness for the British aristocrat; a glance at the advertisement columns of the New Yorker will make the point quite clear. In those halcyon days, the American press even went so far as to publish lists of eligible heiresses, with the amount of their fortunes, for the aid of these visitors; and trading a dowry for a title became one of the staples of Anglo-American commercial activity. Frequently the parties had neither and the result was, more or less, a draw.
Indeed, one rather suspects that Americans think more of the English aristocracy than the English do themselves. This is understandable. People feel about class systems the way they do about marriage; those who are out want to get in, and those who are in want to get out. The English are on the inside of the class system and the Americans are not; they have the advantage of feeling that they are all natural aristocrats, who, if they wished, would enter in at the top rung of any European class structure. The difference actually is that the English have a class system and everybody knows about it; whereas the Americans have a class system but nobody knows about it. Every Englishman has class, because you have to live somewhere, talk some way, wear something and marry someone. People know at once. This takes the work out of class.
Americans have class but they have it in secret. This is what Mr Vance Packard overlooks when he tells us that American society is class-ridden. The American class system is called Fraternities, the Country Club, the Episcopalian church, or whatever; and instead of being administered by the Queen it is administered by sociologists. To change your class in America all you need in most cases is more INFORMATION. More money as well, at times; but especially more information. In America there is confusion; there are classes and you can choose. This means that class is very hard work.
Let me put the difference in this way. In England there developed a parlour game called U and non-U (U standing for upper class), to be played by non-U people. Certain manners and life-styles were defined as U, and non-U people, with all of that worthy snobbery on which any successful class system is based, had to imitate the U manners, the winners (usually Trades Union leaders) being awarded life-peerages, which are of little use to anyone. It didn’t make them U, of course, because the U people know one another intimately and watch who is born very carefully indeed; but it did help to stimulate that striving for the top on which esteem for the aristocracy depends, a striving which has been waning sadly in recent years. The equivalent American game is In and Out, and the thing is local; the big wheels of Harvard are the squares of Venice, California, and in some quarters it is In to be Out and Out to be In. If you don’t like the class system in America, or in your set, you can start one of your own. The latest class system is called the Beat Generation, and the rules for entry are very, very strict indeed. The only necessity is that some people should be included and others left out; and as soon as those who are out want to get in, a class system forms. In some American sets it is in to be a WASP (which means, of course, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) and in others you have to be a white negro in order to gain entry.
Americans obtain class by information. The English find it difficult to change class because they don’t know what the manners of the other classes are. Americans, on the other hand, can be anything they wish; all cultures and manners are at their disposal, and they can pick one. What they do, usually, is to hide at the centre of normalcy—at the centre of statistics, sociological curves, Kinsey reports. This is why, in America, the communications industry, and sociology, are so important. Take for example the matter of face cloths, which are always provided, at all class levels, for guests—because the magazines say you should … say that it is normal. In a recent issue of an American magazine named McCall’s, famed for its gospel of togetherness (‘The family that prays together stays together’), an article called ‘Are Your Habits Normal?’ explained to American conformists to what they had to conform. Anyone who has read modern American novels will be under the impression that Americans spend much of their time enjoying nude bathing parties (while Erskine Caldwell hides in the bushes with a tape recorder) but we now learn that out of 100 million American adults only 32 million men and 10 million women have gone swimming in the nude. Thus nude bathing is not normal, a whole 8 million away from being normal. It is also abnormal to strike one’s husband under provocation (only one woman in five has ever done it); moreover, to be normal, you have to eat three-quarters of a ton of food annually, have foot trouble, swallow about once a minute, sigh every three of four minutes, and spend eleven to fourteen per cent of your waking hours in darkness, because you’re blinking. The point of such surveys is that those who don’t already, will.
The people who administer the Pursuit of Normalcy are the sociologists. Sociologists are, of course, people who use the same material as novelists, but do a random sample first. There are times when, looking first at little children and then at sociologists, one feels that sociology is the only true innocence; then, looking first at the world and then at sociology, one feels that it is the only true depravity. There was a time before sociology, when society used to be itself, and not know about it. The numbers of men in upper income groups marrying women in upper income groups had more than random significance, but few realized it; that was life. There was a time when there was class and nobody knew that class was what it was, or that things could be otherwise, or that you could talk about it. Even in these days it still seems hard for sociologists to admit that there was once a whole world with no sociologists in it, yet full of sociological things, elaborately patterned societies that must have organized themselves. In England we have never taken sociology too seriously, presumably on the grounds that one does not start taking the ’plane to pieces before it leaves the ground; but things may well be changing.
The other curious thing about sociology is that, unlike all other academic disciplines, it is always right. Sociologists can never hurt themselves. This is called Being the Joneses; they are the ones with whom everyone else keeps up. They are, to themselves, an aristocracy; whatever they do is always U because they can always explain it. However they furnish their houses, it is a symbol of something.
The best illustration I can think of is folk music. It is all right to love folk music if you are not folk, stuck with it as your culture; by coming around full circle, by going away from your roots and then looking back on them at a distance with a sociological interest, you can like it again. The same is true of hand-woven tweeds, old cars, Victorian bric-à-brac. Given sufficient distance from their original use, these things become cultural objects to be used again. This view of them is sociological (it is the view often held in the Labour Party about working-class culture). When we are all sufficiently déclassé and far enough from our roots to be objective about things, we will all become sociologists. The consequence of being de-culturalized is to be able to have all cultures, without being completely involved in any one. This is the ultimate sociological view. This is how to have class in a classless society. Thus it is fine to possess horse brasses so long as no one thinks that you’re a carter. It is splendid to have a working-class accent if you work in a university, and it is grand to wear tattered clothes if you are a lord.
This is the simple answer to the quandary of declining class in England. You can have the manners of any group so long as you do it sociologically. Let us look at an example. A follower came to Room-at-the-Top Limited with a quandary; he had acquaintance of all class levels and was not, in fact, sure what class he himself belonged to. He was about to marry, buy a house and a car; but he did not want to be committed to a particular class level. We advised him as follows: marry a foreigner (an American was our suggestion), buy one of those German cars with the engine at the back, which (because of import duty) cost more than they should; and live in a cottage furnished with Victoriana. All of these suggestions were hostile. That is to say, none of the goods could be priced, and none had any specific class associations. Moreover, since he spent more on the car than he could afford, and less on his furniture, people were hard put to classify him. He prospered financially, retains the same car, house and wife, and spends entirely on non-essentials—unnecessary visits to America (which can be explained, to those of his friends who would dislike him if they felt he were rich, as ‘business’), expensive wines (which can be described as ‘cheap’ to those who don’t know) and so on. He has desocialized himself completely, the ultimate sociological aim. Nobody knows who he is and that, in England, is quite something.
The important thing to remember about English life is that all situations are (at least potentially) class situations. Everyone has his place, and can be put in it. The English do not have friends, but superiors, inferiors, and equals. Without this orientation, one is either naive, or an American. Americans are endlessly amused by the fact that English people talk to one another about the weather, when they talk at all; in fact, there is a sound reason for this (beside custom, which is a sound enough reason for anyone), and that is that weather is one of the few (discussable) experiences common to all classes. In addition, by talking about the weather, one can learn quickly the accent of the other person and decide whether one wants to have a conversation at all. And while most American novels are about the American experience, and what it’s like not to know who you are, and how it feels to have sex (or hit somebody—which is, for Americans, much the same thing), most English novels are about the experience of a particular social stratum, and what it’s like to know too well who you are, and how it feels to have class. If Americans are constantly seeking to find identity, the English are only too keen to lose it. One of the discoveries of the modern novel has been that there are, in England, people who change their shirts every day—that’s what all the new novels seem to be about. It is, of course, a class discovery, and from it you may learn that authors, as a group, are changing; at one time authors were upper middle class, and dedicated their books to so-and-so, in whose garden this book was written, and they would never have dreamed of writing of people who changed their shirts every day, because they assumed, naturally, that everybody did.
Whenever two Englishmen meet, on a desert island or in the heart of America, they set up a pecking order to see who defers to whom. Notice the word ‘Whoops!’ It is a significant cry. All over the world, in hotel lounges and in the dining rooms of ocean liners, you will meet dear old English ladies, laden with knitting, and you will come through a door one way as she is coming through it the other; and she will cry, not ‘Sorry!’, but ‘Whoops!’ This has the function of delaying apologies until the class orientations of the situation are apparent, when the inferior person, whether responsible for the situation or not, will then say ‘Sorry!’ There are old ladies from Dower Houses who can go through life without ever having to feel guilty about having done anything. These are persons of quality, and the thing about quality is that if you have it, all mistakes are other people’s. Even when finances are low, respect remains; there are always the respectful middle-class nurse-type women who know gentlefolk when they see them (the sort who say: ‘I nursed Lady X to the finish; she had a beautiful end’; and ‘Were you at Oxford? My favourite university!’). Persons who think that monarchy is without influence should be aware of the effect that it has on such persons, the salt of the earth, who know the family trees of all the nobility and spend much of their time commenting on how like her grandfather the young duchess of this or that is. Remember Jane Austen’s condemnation of her character, Frank Churchill: ‘His indifference to a confusion of rank bordered too much on inelegance of mind.’
The fact remains that quality is not to be had by all of us. It is not even proper, always, to aim for it. There are few classes nowadays that you cannot get into by your own efforts, but the quality is one of them (the working class, likewise a cabal, is the other). You may be knighted, but it is your grandson who will be quality; one generation cannot accomplish the task, and for this reason we are inclined to recommend to most people that they set their sights lower.
Our advice to persons intent on choosing a class is: decide what class to be, and stick to it. Do not aim too high too soon. Nowadays, more than ever, you can choose; but choose carefully. It is so easy to get out of your depth in these things. Never drop names or hold values that you cannot substantiate. This looks like snobbery, and while snobbery is flattering for others it is demeaning to you. After all, every class is, in its different way, rewarding. There are certain environments in which there is real cachet in being working class and sticking to it. Some of these can be briefly listed.
Universities, pigeon-fancying, libraries, horse-racing, BBC Light Programme, novel-writing, railway station announcing, The Times, the Conservative Party.
In the following environments, on the other hand, it is better to be upper class:
Universities, pigeon-fancying, libraries, horse-riding, BBC Light Programme, novel-writing, railway station announcing, the Daily Mirror, the Labour Party.
There is, it has to be admitted, little kudos in claiming that one is middle class nowadays, especially if one actually belongs to it, which, of course, most of us do. If one cannot actually claim powerful aristocratic connections, we recommend the traditional custom of devaluing one’s parents, and making them appear to be of working-class background; there is plenty of contemporary reading matter available to assist you in this perfectly harmless pretence. It has the advantage of making it clear how hard you have worked to get where you are, while at the same time giving evidence of the fact that you do not really belong there. The important thing to remember is that, while the British have always admired both the honest working man and the eccentric Milord, they have never admired what lies in between. The word ‘bourgeois’ is one of the most unpleasant of insults, regularly applied by writers, artists and politicians from middle-class backgrounds (like, for example, that exemplary bourgeois Karl Marx) to other people from middle-class backgrounds. Much of English literature is based on the assumption that the middle classes like to read books accusing them of being stuffy, money-making, self-engrossed and poor in spirit; and this has always proved to be true. There is just a very slight possibility that the middle classes may be coming back, now that the sociologists are showing signs of turning their attention in this direction. Thus, fresh from their study of real, honest back-to-back Bethnal Green, Peter Wilmott and Michael Young have lately been wandering the well-knapped lawns of Woodford. Naturally there was the first aversion to overcome (‘East End children do not trot their ponies along forest paths wearing hunting caps, East End houses do not have stone gnomes in their backyards’), but there comes a moment when Wilmott seems to soften a little, Young to grow somewhat more gentle. Perhaps it was the absence of violence, the presence of neatness and cleanliness; perhaps it was that the British still respect the underdog when they see him; but there is more than a hint or two in their book that, amid the horrors, a gleam or two of decency shines.
Still, a note of suspicion remains in order. When we think of the middle classes today, we are no longer thinking of, for example, those middle-aged ladies who toured the nineteenth-century world collecting flowers and plants to bring home to their English gardens, and who appeared round every pyramid and temple from Egypt to the Far East, speaking English very loudly so that the foreigners could understand it. Now the middle classes are the universal Joneses, endlessly keeping up with themselves. You can see them on their patios in their sun-loungers drinking drinks with ice in, or sitting in red sports cars with foulard scarves tucked in the necks of their open shirts, before returning to their modernized cottage in the Kentish village where the thatched shop specializes in antiques. In their living room, the Danish furniture gleams as he works the Sodastream while she prepares the lasagne and courgettes. The new middle class is the slightly-better-than-average viewer, the just-above-typical housewife, the up-market consumer; all you need is a red setter and a Volvo, and you are as good as there.
There is one further group membership of which is well worth considering; we will in fact be returning to them later. These are the outsiders—those persons who see themselves as being quite outside the entire British class structure, living in radical rebellion and alienation. It is often very hard to distinguish them from the groups mentioned last, as they usually eat their lasagne and courgettes and strip their pine furniture in very much the same sort of way. In fact what distinguishes them is that, when you talk to them, you will discover that they describe themselves as writers, or painters or artists; this does not mean that they, write, paint, or art, but that they like that sort of life, with its bohemian associations, its aura of virtuous poverty and vague sexual impropriety. Frequently assisted by private incomes, governmental largesse or a working spouse, they profess an air of social suffering while actually being able to afford not to work, as most of us cannot. Naturally they are not particularly admired by those who do possess one sort of niche or another in the social mechanism, and this may put you off the life. However, there is quite a lot to be said for being socially mobile in this way for a while, because a period like this—a couple of years weaving rugs, for example—is an ideal way of obscuring one’s actual class origins, and finally one can fit into life wherever one pleases—when, that is, one comes to one’s senses at last. It is not at all a bad way of doing things, because the outsider is always a useful source of disquiet, and in any case it is a classic way of the world that the sceptic and the critic is always finally given a seat on the committee, if only to shut him up.
The real, professional subterranean has begun his trade early in life; if he has had a proper start his name and existence will not have been registered at birth and the army and the government will have no papers to prove that he exists, however much they may suspect it. This demands a quality of foresight among parents unfortunately wanting in our day and age. If one has friends or parents, one is damned from the start; one has at least to run away to another town and begin under a new name—a procedure fraught with difficulties in these days when one has national health cards, and income tax histories. Wives can be rebelled against, as Mr Osborne has shown us, particularly if they are inoffensive and dulled middle-class women. But this demands an initial alienation which is, alas, not too easily come by nowadays.
Don’t feel, however, that we are putting difficulties in your way. By spending the night out on Hampstead Heath, a couple of sleeping bags down from Colin Wilson, by stealing other people’s cigarettes, kicking over their dustbins and burning their bedsheets, one can do something, however little, to protest against the growing conformity of modern life. The only problem is anti-conformity conformity; bohemianism is now as fashionable a way of life as any other. Room-at-the-Top Limited has a theory going called the conformity of nonconformity, which alleges that one has only to chart out a weltanschauung of protest for the larger part of society to take it up. Outsiders are inside before they know what’s happening to them; protest is so fashionable that everyone is doing it. The only real way to protest is to buy a thornproof suit and hide among the middle classes. You have only to go into any London espresso bar to discover that it is full of bank clerks from the suburbs, protesting for the evening by drinking real coffee and mentioning the word Nietzsche. Apparently, from their dress and manner, in dedicated conversations about stealing marbles to roll under the feet of policemen’s horses, they are, in fact, worrying about how to meet the payments on their vacuum cleaners.
Moreover, outsiders overlook one thing. If one has no class one is condemned by the company that one keeps; one is condemned by default. Persons going up to Oxbridge are advised always to make no friends for the first term, in case they get mixed up with the wrong people. Once you acquire friends, or a wife, you are done for. Friend Orsler encountered an interesting example of this the other day. ‘I’ve heard so much about you,’ cried a woman, brightly, claiming acquaintance at a party. ‘Oh!’ asked Orsler. ‘Who from?’ ‘From Mrs Higgins,’ said the woman. ‘Oh, yes,’ said Orsler, inadvisedly, forgetting to be wary, as one always must be, ‘she’s a great friend of ours.’ ‘I see,’ said the woman, in cooler tones. ‘She comes in and does for us twice a week.’ This is the pecking order; this is how class works. If you must have acquaintances, never speak of them in other company unless speaking of them confers merit—merit without ostentation.
It is often assumed by the liberal-minded that as wealth declines the English class structure will fade away and the man of quality will disappear for good. But persons of quality are already facing up to the basic question—how does one maintain one’s class in a classless society? Since in a classless society money and class do not necessarily coincide (indeed, it is a long time since they did, so that as wealth increased, class, to save its face, became something that you could not buy but had to mature over generations; and you cannot purchase time) the need is for new markers that are not associated with wealth—for, indeed, such things as the new post-Veblenism.
Maintaining one’s class in a classless society, if one already has it, is by no means as hardy a proposition as it might appear. Things were worse in the old days when, because there were so many classes about, one might always, in an inadvertent moment, falter in one’s presentation of oneself, and so slip down the imperceptible but shiny slope into a lower class position. Nowadays one is so much better off, since the government have provided, so to speak, a minimum class level below which none shall be allowed to fall, and this minimum is a sort of rebounding board for all who are aware of the prerequisites and requirements of class. Thus, if they slip, they can, in our anonymous and mobile society, spring back again—chastened by the experience and strengthened in their resolve to put up a better show next time.
After the American social commentator Mr Thorstein Veblen noted that the leisured classes tended to display what he called their ‘pecuniary eminence’ by what he also called ‘conspicuous consumption’ (that is by overt and unnecessary display, such as white shirts and liveries for footmen), English gentlemen looked on the spectacle with disgust. They wondered how persons could be so vulgar. Americans, only, could confuse money with class, to begin with. And one does not (they felt) need to show that one is a gentleman by overt display; it shows itself, surely. A gentleman either is, or is not. And one does not show it by display but by lack of it. It is only the socially uneasy—the nouveau riche, and Americans—who need such trumpery, for a gentleman may live in a hovel but everyone knows from his cultivation (centuries of training) and his manners (centuries of personal relationships, an important point because, up to the nineteenth century, only the upper classes had personal relationships) and his accent (centuries of pronouncing things) that he was a gentleman. In any case, a gentleman does not boast; if there is anything to be boasted about someone else will always do it for one. Actually Veblen had noted this too, observing that the leisured classes demonstrated their leisure by indulgence in useless pursuits (personal relationships, scholarship, etc.), but gentlemen didn’t read that far, because, as every gentleman knows, one buys books to have them bound, not to read them.
However, there herewith developed a new ostentatious modesty or conspicuous inconsumption. Everyone has heard of inconspicuous consumption, where your clothes cost five times as much as everyone else’s but looked the same, so that only the cognoscenti knew—but this was conspicuous inconsumption, and it came at a very fortunate time, a time when the upper classes were faced with the old middle-class problem of making ends meet. It was partly in answer to the problem where the gentleman needs to be distinguished from those who can afford to be gentlemen but are not, while gentlemen cannot afford to be gentlemen but are, that the new conspicuous inconsumption came into being. The subtlety involved here is that people should be able, by various means, to ascertain that a gentleman could afford to do these other things should he so wish, but that he is too distinguished to want to. If you, or I, were to expose ourselves in public (without having first established status in some way) wearing an old Harris tweed suit with loose threads and smelling of dog and sweat, and with holes in our socks and with flies undone, we would be poorly received; but any old peer may do this providing that he establish that he is a real gentleman by a fish-fly in the hat and a scattering of lead shot in the interstices of the fabric.
As this is an age of participation, and possessions are common to all classes, goods of any sort now serve little conspicuous consumption purpose. All over the American south there are dirty, untoileted shanty towns where the hovels are built of tar paper and are lived in by negroes. Outside stands a Cadillac, and the Cadillac is losing its high class association because it is a negro’s car. The like process has taken place here. ‘Ping,’ goes the doorbell in high-class shops (Est. 1738, Pedigree Stock) as the gentleman goes in to order a dozen pairs of socks, and complain about people who wear belts instead of braces. But class goods are going out, except among the nouveau riche, and this type of shop is being pushed out by the chain store. Modom shops are still preferable, of course, but you pay 75 per cent more for the modom—and since it’s not people of class who have money, off to C. and A. Modes or M. and S. (only the middle class mean Marshall and Snelgrove when they say M. and S.; the upper crust mean, of course, Marks and Spencer). The upper stratum has simply stopped setting the fashion; taste is now made by specialists. It is an industry. The newest fashion is to be unfashionable. The simple art is to buy things that are either fantastically expensive or fantastically cheap. It is the middle range one has to steer clear of Fashion setting and novelties mark a fellow down; if you want to set fashions, simply be yourself. Someone will follow.
The new inconspicuous consumption is a fashion designed to give the impression that one is simply not bothering. The idea that is conveyed is that one is spending all one’s money on significant things—on intangibles. One lives in the kind of house in which (at first sight) no one can live. ‘Where’s the furniture?’ people are tempted to ask as they enter. Sitting on the floor can be fun, after all. Bare woodwork, with a termite or two, and open brickwork, are in vogue. This is called au naturel; a better name would be outdoor living, indoors. Remember, the more you possess, the more quickly your room dates. And it is fashionable to appear underprivileged. Have, therefore, bookcases made from planks and bricks. Table lamps made from beer bottles. A hi-fi with all the wires showing, and trailing all over the house, so that people trip as they enter the door. Pictures are dating, and fads change so quickly; better to have wall posters, begged from Cooks, with messages like SEE FRANCE BY GERMAN RAILWAYS. If a car, an old crock that looks as though it was built to be pulled by a horse. Above all, cacti (remember, succulents are a form of puritanism, and suggest spiritual austerity, the mood you are trying to convey). The impression given by all this is that you have contracted out of the business of being fashionable and are leaving it to the canaille; and no one will blame you if you live elsewhere and use this establishment simply in order to entertain guests.
It is to be observed that gentlefolk to the Manor born have their own way of life now. Thus the author was on board a vessel, in the tourist class, with a dowager lady of quality, Lady X. A remarkable eccentric, who spent the voyage doing the stations of the cross in the bows and stern of the vessel in high gales, she still maintained status without income. When she was not bombarding her landlord with letters begging him to allow her to live rent-free in her dwelling, she spent her time being incompetent and needing help. Everyone had tasks which she designated to them—woolwinding, cleaning her shoes, fetching her broth. Parts of the ship unavailable to others were open to her. When forms were to be filled in she had no knowledge of how to fill them; there were, she was aware, people who did know, and they did them. It was her custom to remark, as she sat in the lounge painting water colours of flower gardens in Dorset, her face blue with the paint she had transferred to it, ‘We’re all charladies now. I spend all my time in my apron.’ No doubt she did, but there is equally no doubt that she was so incompetent that someone else did the actual charring, as a favour. I was thinking of her when I remarked at a lecture in America that the upper classes have no money but live as if they had. Afterwards a member of the audience told me the story of meeting, on a ship, an upper-class lady who had to travel tourist, and whom she and other Americans regularly smuggled up into the first-class for dinner. She then asked me how such people lived. They lived, I explained, by being permanently smuggled up into the first-class for dinner.
There was a time, after all, when there were only two real classes—Really Top Drawer, and A Bit Frayed at the Heels. Now that the two are one, the gentleman is really put on his mettle. Suffice it to say that he is responding with true noblesse.
* Nowadays, of course, the social function of the first-class carriage has quite gone; once all the people one detested were separated from one—they were, according to one’s point of view, all in the third-, or in the first-class carriages.