Crashing the Gates/Summer Light/Our Kind of People

...when he wrote Sincerely Willis Wayde, what was being substituted for the old establishment: Willis Wayde is the modern corporate top executive, unfettered by tradition, ancestor worship, art, literature, religion, or reflection on anything other than his and his company's bottom line...

...The first of these points could best have been made statistically...

...Neither of the other two books under review explicitly addresses this question of what has gone wrong, but both of them wrestle with it...

...The presence of Wasps was preponderant but not exclusive...

...Thirty years ago I tried to show that The Late George Apley, Marquand's first great success as a serious novelist, was not primarily a satire but a picture of a golden age and of, in Edmund Burke's phrase, an unbought grace of life.' Marquand anticipated already in 1955, 'Franz M. ,Oppenheimer, "Lament For Unbought Grace: The Novels of John P. Marquand" (The Antioch Review, January 1959...

...Yet every day the morning newspapers and the evening news must make us aware that whatever conformity may now be imposed on those on the top, or on the way to it, it is not a conformity with the kind of values that keep people out of jail...

...Yardley's comments about his father's entering the ministry are only one of many open or veiled attacks against his parents' way of life and hierarchy of values...

...The son mostly knows what he dislikes, but what he likes—including Cardinal Newman's marvelous collect "0 Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen . . ." said at his parents' funerals and which "in time" will be said "for the four children whom they brought into the world"--remains through all his bitterness a reflection of his parents' values...

...The house had been built in 1892...

...This double failure prevents him from posing the important questions raised by the social changes he has catalogued...

...Thus Christopher corrects the common assumption that until twenty-five years ago non-Wasps were barred from the American establishment...

...through fog at the start, through choppy waves at the end...

...19.95 OUR KIND OF PEOPLE: THE STORY OF AN AMERICAN FAMILY Jonathan Yardley/Weidenfeld & Nicolson/336 pp...

...Jonathan Yardley's title Our Kind of People--a phrase that also appears in Christopher's book—is used ironically in attacking the snobbery of his parents...

...Be that as it may, Jonathan Yardley, the self-painted rebel against the snobbery and ancestor-worship of his father, cannot let go of his ancestors and tells us far more about the Yardleys, the Gregorys, the Thornes, the Ingersolls, the MacNeills, and the Woolseys than most readers of his book will want to know...

...Yet neither Yardley, nor the writer of a recent article on Marquand in Commentary, recognizes that Marquand was not primarily a satirist of upper-class Wasps, but a social critic who, unlike Yardley or Christopher, did not let the weaknesses of his Wasp heroes blind him to the far greater ones of those taking their place...

...Otherwise he proceeds by amassing, seemingly at random, anecdotes, names, and thumbnail biographies to demonstrate that the higher echelons of politics, business, commerce, finance, the law, the great foundations, the universities, the New York Council on Foreign Relations, the media, show business, publishing and.writing, the Foreign Service, the clubs, and the military, all now comprise a fascinating mixture of all sorts and conditions of ethnicity...

...B. Yeats ("A Prayer for My Daughter") T he most useful part of Robert 1 Christopher's book is the demonstration in its very beginning that Wasps never were exclusively what they were supposed to be: white Anglo-Saxon Protestants...

...As a conventionalliberal, he takes it for granted that those changes, amounting to the disappearance of a traditional upper class, are all to the good...

...19.95 SUMMER LIGHT Roxana Robinson/Viking/200 pp...

...You can go only so far in the training of young people without it...

...happiest when she works with her grandmother in her beautiful garden...

...The novel's heroin, Laura, is a young woman in her twenties of Eastern seaboard upper-class Wasp stock...

...Jonathan Yardley gives us traces of those wonderful qualities of his father, but they are lost in a welter of negative observations and judgments purporting to look behind the mask, and he sees motives, mostly base, that only God, and certainly not a son, can discern with certainty...

...The novel starts and ends with a perilous boat ride...

...a frequent contributor, is a Washington lawyer...

...Laura "wanted to possess something the way Granny did...

...Moreover, it would have been inconceivable for the trustees to dismiss Bill Yardley for having failed to comply with what at most was a casual understanding...

...But just as he fails to describe, to say nothing of analyze, the values of the old Wasp establishments he keeps talking about, so he fails to tell us anything meaningful about the new common culture...

...46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990...

...She wanted to look over it, as Granny did, with an air of calm dominion...

...Christopher does touch on one important development, the growth of a new conformity, a common culture, within the various establishments...

...We have known, since Kretschmer, that all human actions spring from a bundle of motives, of which the ethically most acceptable are the most conscious but the least dynamic, whereas those linked to basic human drives are the most dynamic but the least conscious...

...What held her back was the fear that she would fail at this one too...

...The author leaves no doubt about the roots of Granny's air of calm dominion: they were in the world from which Laura's father "had deliberately removed himself . . . 'a town house on East 88th Street, Chapin, and coming-out parties.' " Laura "wondered if her grandmother minded that Laura's father had abandoned her serene and self-contained ship...

...He converted to Quakerism, and from investment banking with Morgan Stanley to editing a small-town newspaper in Maryland...

...He falls overboard...

...But if the, beginning of this marriage was casual, its end was even more so...

...It was hardly necessary for that snide purpose to give us two pages of biography of the noble baron from his birth at Southwark, England, in 1588 to his 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990 death in Jamestown, Virginia, as "the largest landowner in Virginia" in 1627...

...she has one in retaliation, they have a little boy, Sammy, and one day, without having had a spat, Laura walks out...

...she wanted to possess all the knowledge and the labor and the sights and smells of a garden...

...Whether that marriage, should it occur, will give Sammy the sense of place, of certainty that his mother wishes for him must remain doubtful...

...He does this even when he introduces a very remote ancestor, Sir George Temperance, with the only apparent purpose of criticizing the use his father, after arriving in Virginia as headmaster of Chatham Hall, made of that seventeenth-century governor of Virginia as a "ticket to the great mansions of the Tidewater—which soon enough he began pronouncing Tand-woe-tuh'—and as authentication of his own standing among the First Families of Virginia...

...If he was an anti-Semite, as his son alleges, he certainly was a superb actor in hiding that failing from the Oppenheimers...

...Before Willis Wayde Marquand had described in Point of No Return how even in the then still tradition-bound and Wasp environment of a staid New York bank the gross commercialism of newer men unsettled the even tenor of an upper-class Wasp's life...

...Instead, however, Christopher gives a few select statistical data only about another phenomenon, also known to all, namely the high rate of intermarriage among white American ethnic groups...

...ment, the Dillons, Drexels, and Bullitts, were perceived as- Wasps...

...1940), and in the Washington of the New Deal, in F's Daughter...

...Even though "he was informed [when being interviewed for the headmastership of Chatham Hall] that preference would be given to a candidate who was an Episcopal minister," and "he promptly let it be known that he was prepared to assume the cloth," it is equally true that "no records exist as to whether entering the ministry was a specific condition of his employment by Chatham Hall," and that he embarked on the arduous course of theological study required for ordination after he had become headmaster...

...There is an implication, though no certainty, that after this crisis, and an earlier one provoked by Laura's having invited her ex-husband to spend a weekend in the house by the sea, Laura and Ward will marry...

...From these and many other illustrations Christopher concludes that there is "only one infallible standard" for determining who is a Wasp: "If you behave like a Wasp and are so regarded by others," you are one...

...16.95 Franz M. Oppenheimer How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born...

...Yet her masterful novel expresses a search for the kind of serenity her Granny possessed, and for which we have not yet found an equivalent after crashing the gates...

...Big-windowed, high-ceilinged and large, it presumed an endless supply of servants and fuel .. . Things had not been changed for decades...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990 45 One might say she married, at twenty, in a fit of absentmindedness...

...Later, when for twelve years I was a trustee of this school, I came to appreciate the legacy Bill Yardley had left: at a time when most first-rate American boarding schools indulged in extremes of intellectual snobbery and thereby made all but the most intellectually brilliant students feel inferior, Chatham Hall managed—as it continues to do—to combine a commitment to intellectual excellence with an appreciation of other human qualities, which makes for a happy climate in which all can grow...

...Sammy has refused to put on his life jacket in resentment of the man his mother lives with...

...Thus, it may well be, as Yardley tells us, that professional ambition was instrumental in his father's decision at the age of thirty-six to become an Episcopal priest...

...Yet unlike Robert Christopher, Jonathan Yardley does not blithely assume that there is a new and better substitute for the kind of elite to which his father belonged...

...Characteristic of this "non-judgmental" attitude is his apparent assumption that what was once known as "cafe society," the kind of people described in The Bonfire of the Vanities, living in 34-room Park Avenue duplexes with "Rubens in the drawing room, Renoir in the bath," and counting among them a "queen of nouvelle society," is just as good an upper class as any other...

...It did not occur to her that she could say no . . . she didn't want to sound prudish...

...When her lease is up, she moves in, equally casually, with another man, Ward, a successful lawyer, the son of a Jewish furrier in Chicago, and a Unitarian mother from western Massachusetts—a background right out of "The DeWASPing of America's Power Elite...

...Having made this important point, Christopher proceeds to persuade the reader of something that anybody literate enough to open his book has known for years, that Wasps, ethnically defined, no longer dominate anything, that the code of values, customs, dress, and prohibitions of the old American upper class no longer circumscribes our present rulers, and that belonging to an ethnic group does not automatically make one a Democrat or a Republican...

...The sexual revolution swirled around them like guerrilla warfare, libidinal attacks in the streets, the subways, the singles bars...

...his mother jumps in after him, manages to find and rescue him, and she and Ward succeed in restoring Sammy's breathing...

...The evidence is convincing that Yardley is just as proud of his Wasp and upper-class ancestors as his father Bill was, but he has been too much exposed to liberal brainwashing to express that pride except by indirection...

...That is the comment of a son who has not yet come to terms with his father having been human and whose actions, however noble, are the result of many motives...

...Bill Yardley hadother and nobler motives for entering the ministry: "There comes a point in the life of a schoolman when the discipline and authority of the Church as well as its spiritual guidance and security stand like a rock in a chaotic world...

...Yet what better reasons would there have been than "Nat's beguiling honesty, . . . the fact that he loved her . . . and that he made her laugh...

...Roxana Robinson's first novel, Summer Light, is a case in point...

...A positive note—but still an ambiguous one...

...Only people who read telephone books and Who's- Who in America for pleasure will be able to plow through Crashing the Gates without groaning...

...In truth these issues are better dealt with, now as then, by novelists, rather than family chroniclers or pop or other sociologists...

...T t is therefore no accident that Yardley, the Washington Post's literary critic, dwells at some length on his parents' love of the novels of John P. Marquand, an author to whom he has also devoted two of his recent columns...

...He has some casual, non-emotional affairs...

...The novel's action takes place during 1 one month of July, for which Ward had rented a rambling house by the sea in Maine that he and Laura share with Laura's sister and brother-in-law and their two daughters...

...When Richard Hay Whitney went to jail for having mishandled trust funds in 1938, that one man's lapse then created more of a sensation than a score of misdeeds in high places today...

...I met Bill Yardley during the last year of his headmastership of Chatham Hall in southern Virginia, when making the rounds of boarding schools with my daughter...

...They also reflect "the collapse of Wasp self-confidence," a generic and not only an individual weakness...

...It was shingle, with white trim, and two round towers at the ends, each with a round window...

...It seems preposterous to interpret this cri de coeur, as Jonathan Yardley does, as "the words not of a man who had heard his call, but of one who wanted a job so badly that he was ready to change his life in order to obtain it...

...In short, Marquand tackled the ambiguities of Jonathan Yardley and the certainties of Robert Christopher forty years ago...

...She lives with the knowledge that the house in Bar Harbor has burned down, shortly after Granny's death...

...It was the triumph of principle over greed, and it had placed the whole family on a dais of pious superiority...

...They both document something that Christopher refers to, with a quote from Norman Podhoretz, as "the collapse of Wasp self-confidence...

...The Drexels of Philadelphia "were originally Austrian Catholics," the Mellons were Irish, Pershing and Hoover came from German families named Pfoerchin and Huever, Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts descended from a colonial governor of Massachusetts named James Sullivan, William C. Bullitt had among his ancestors one Haym Solomon, and, to put an arbitrary end to this litany, C. Douglas Dillon's paternal grandfather was Sam Lupowski, the son of a Polish Jew and a French woman born Dillon...

...a reality obscured because non-Wasps of the old establishFranz M. Oppenheimer...

...What she wanted for Sammy was a sense of place, of certainty...

...In short, Christopher recognizes that the appellation "Wasp," which he says had not appeared in print before 1962, usually refers not to ethnicity but to social class: to an upper class that was intact until the end of the 1950s and that, in the words of Roxana Robinson, was a "network of intricate bloodlines and familiarity that stretched from Bar Harbor to Hobe Sound...

...Her father had rebelled against status, but not against puritan principles...

...We enrolled our daughter in Chatham Hall because we were impressed by Bill Yardley's stature, sense of humor, kindliness, and educational philosophy...

...Her parents' "lives had been governed by deliberate frugality, proof of their state of grace...

...Laura rebels against the puritanical Quakerism of her parents, moves to New York after local high school and boarding school, becomes a photographer, and marries...

...But Yardley's ambivalence appears right in his book's subtitle "The Story of an American Family," which can be read as meaning the story of his family through many generations, or merely the biography of his father and, to a lesser extent, his mother (which is probably the meaning Yardley had intended...

...It is only during that few weeks' stay that we find Laura happy...

...These attacks are so pervasive that filial disappointment is unlikely to have been their only cause...

...But was ambition the only motive...

...Moreover, Marquand's novels trace the "collapse of Wasp self-confidence" from the certainties of George Apley in the Boston of the beginning of this century, to the self-doubts and weaknesses of the generation of Apley's children, for instance, in New York of the 1920s and '30s, that of H. M Pulham Esq...

...All mod cons, twenty-four-hour doorman, great sex.' . . . It was a great relief...

...Ward had said, 'Move in with me...

...This method quickly becomes wearisome...

...What a strange way to achieve this—particularly when Laura refuses to marry Ward...

...A sense of place, of certainty, and of upper-class Wasp self-confidence is vividly recalled in a flashback to the 16-year-old Laura's stay with her grandmother at her house in Bar Harbor...

...Roxana Robinson does not seem to wish for a return to that ship anymore than Robert Christopher or Jonathan Yardley...