Lewis Lapham's Money and Class in America and Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities
Carpenter, Luther
MONEY AND CLASS IN AMERICA: NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS ON OUR CIVIL RELIGION, by Lewis H. Lapham. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988. 243 pp. $18.95. THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES, by Tom...
...They don't manage real things or people...
...His company drops him...
...All they want to do is to go on making money...
...or leave it and be damned...
...It earns the respect of the cops...
...659 pp...
...intellectual history is littered with pleas like Lapham's...
...Nor do Lapham and Wolfe exhort the wealthy to perform a service for society, to become competent at ruling...
...The problem is whether "masculinity" is atrophying in the world of finance...
...THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES, by Tom Wolfe...
...At the end, Sherman slugs the poverty pimp's assistant...
...Whatever one thinks of the Tawana Brawley case, Alton Maddox and Al Sharpton haven't gotten their way...
...Lapham's equestrians aren't really horsemen, but "those who can afford to ride rather than walk and who can buy any or all of the baubles that constitute the proofs of social status...
...Two very agitated authors offer to guide us to the truth...
...they don't produce or create...
...or the Gaullist argument for a welfare state to integrate the workers into the nation and get them to work for its advancement...
...Robert Parker's early "Spenser" novels come closer to solving the problem of maleness...
...New York City is out to get Sherman—not because of his money, but because he is the "Great White Defendant...
...Lewis Lapham is a semidelinquent scion of the old elite...
...When Wolfe invents a good line— "A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested" —he can't resist using it twice...
...They can't create, but they can destroy factories, companies, and cities with their pieces of paper...
...give up the blind faith in money...
...The Irish been living the last twelve hundred years on dreams of revenge...
...Anthony Lukas's Common Ground has much more to say about racial and class antagonism...
...It has no usefulness there, but Wolfe's protagonist still wants it...
...Civil religion" can account for the self-advertisement of the new wealthy and for the fact that my working-class students feel no hostility to them...
...Money leaves the Masters and riders feeling insubstantial...
...Wolfe's protagonist can't tell his daughter what he does...
...Albert Gore, George Bush, Robert Dole, and Richard Gephardt accused each other of belonging to it but wouldn't be caught dead in it...
...Since the October 1987 break in the stock market, they have sought to defend themselves against tighter regulation by blackmail: Let us have our way, or we'll cause a depression...
...This fear makes them dangerous...
...Wolfe offers Sherman, and by implication the new moneyed class, a way out...
...Lapham doesn't really want to change gods...
...it fits the ritualistic nature of American politics...
...For both Lapham and Wolfe, the answer is status...
...Shaw's equestrian class lived in Horseback Hall, which "consisted of a prison for horses with an annex for the ladies and gentlemen who rode them, hunted them, talked about them, bought them and sold them, and gave nine-tenths of their lives to them, dividing the other tenth between charity, churchgoing (as a substitute for religion), and conservative electioneering (as a substitute for politics...
...Above all, the Masters and riders demand...
...Even in good times, according to Lapham, "the faithful fall victim to a nameless and stupefying dread...
...Lapham erects a different scenario of doom on the same premises of a false god...
...These pretenders believe in class intensely...
...It might be worthwhile to think about Lapham's fear that the new wealthy are a doomed Ancien Regime—but he offers the idea as an afterthought...
...Old wine in new bottles isn't so bad when the audience would never look at the old bottles...
...This gives Sherman the same kind of exhilaration he found while selling bonds...
...19.95...
...New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1987...
...Lapham describes the same people, those who capture the new money bubbling up in New York...
...the president of his co-op board wants him out of the building...
...There are no friends here, only "cold . . . lizards" in Lapham's phrase...
...Donald Trump and Lee Iacocca revel in it...
...These books are revealing, but neither is really worth reading...
...That someone else is undependable—a rival in status games who grudgingly gives approval while seeking to change the rules and take one's status away...
...If these books have some value as observation, major problems come when Wolfe and Lapham try to build on their observations...
...Wolfe's scenario has one glaring exaggeration: The power of "Them," Wolfe's black demon and his demonstrators and the supineness of the media and the justice system before them...
...They "want it all"—sex, status, fame...
...He barely restrains himself from waging class warfare when a worker in his garage calls him "Sherm...
...Our guides don't give us a systematic description of the ruling class...
...That thought makes Lapham pull back...
...His wife woundingly resorts to metaphor: Golden crumbs stick to his hands...
...Similarly, one would be a fool to say that Wolfe's scenario couldn't happen...
...Sherman doesn't build buildings or print books...
...Wolfe and Lapham are drawn to this new money because its possessors are more colorful, less inhibited than older segments of the ruling classes...
...In his hour of need, no one will help Sherman McCoy...
...That makes them dangerous, but we still ought to find ways to cut them down to size...
...The wealthy are hardly so powerless and ready to drop each other to woo the masses: Look at how the "system" goes on rehabilitating Richard Nixon, Victor Posner, and Ivan Boesky...
...Tom Wolfe's publisher portrays him as "the foremost chronicler of the way we live in America...
...Sherman has now taken Wolfe's advice, given earlier in the book: Turn "fucking Irish...
...They" —resentful poor blacks, egged on by an evil antipoverty pimp, who leeches off gullible liberals—howl for Sherman's head...
...He likens the riders to Roman senators before the fall of the Republic and to the Ancien Regime in France...
...Get rid of your vanities—your belief in the old moneyed class, your desire to join Society, your belief that you can buy immunity—and Fight Back...
...The new wealthy have no sense of tomorrow or of the whole of society...
...In Wolfe's scenario, it is necessary to use physical violence against the underclass...
...Compare them with the captain of Shaw's Heartbreak House: "Learn your business as an Englishman...
...But status is intrinsically unsatisfying: It exists in someone else's mind...
...More significantly, think of the advice that neither Lapham nor Wolfe offers to the elite: Carnegie's plea for a Gospel of Wealth, using intelligent charity to buy the masses off and recycle the money...
...running for reelection all feed the resentment...
...Escape the sterility of the Midas touch...
...He doesn't make anything or have men working under him...
...he doesn't ask whether they've really taken power away from industrialists and inherited wealth...
...Sherman McCoy makes millions, but can't leave his desk to go to the bathroom...
...Lapham prefers the "equestrian class," which he uses less ironically than Bernard Shaw did in Heartbreak House...
...Here Wolfe and Lapham part company...
...Maleness is a given—there are no important women in either book, just hostesses— and, for Wolfe, a problem...
...But, as Wolfe and Lapham show, their claims have a precarious base...
...Civil religion" is a useful idea (and it doesn't matter that Lapham borrowed a lot from Marx...
...Corrupt newspapers, repulsive radicals and feminists, and a D.A...
...This new part of the ruling class doesn't rule anything but pieces of paper...
...He has visited the famed Bohemian Grove and rubs shoulders with those who matter on Manhattan's East Side—yet he is so daring as to edit an old and prestigious magazine...
...Sherman and his mistress panic and lash out at a boy who intends to rob them...
...As Wolfe works out his scenario, the panic is justified...
...But they are frustrated by their own civil religion...
...They show us the pretenders...
...Our ruling class has resources that these two authors don't see...
...What can a poor boy do...
...They kill the boy...
...These new wealthy have no visible relationship to the means of production and no particular social function...
...That's all they use their power for— to rewrite the rules of the game to give themselves more money, through tax "reforms" and the proliferation of exotic gambling devices such as stock market futures...
...What is notable about this cry, hidden at the end of the book, is its feebleness...
...They even find it hard to name them...
...Many sociologists deny there is a ruling class...
...Navigation...
...Both, however, agree that their subjects want to be a separate class...
...Paul Fussell says there is one—but it is "top out of sight...
...Wolfe's protagonist, Sherman McCoy, struggles to assert class everywhere...
...Lapham ultimately sees the basis of their incessant demanding as priestly rather than economic: They are the priests of a civil religion of money...
...If not, why get into this morass of consumption...
...The Masters or riders have two attributes—money and maleness...
...But there's no need to take Wolfe's advice, to turn New York City into Belfast...
...Maybe an environmental ethic would do, but he has no love for it...
...Both definitions would comfort those who say there isn't a ruling class—Lapham's by its vagueness and Wolfe's by its mockery of pretense...
...Wolfe's book has good observations of cops and courts, punks and fear, but the claim that he's "the foremost chronicler" is hype...
...The things they acquire don't satisfy needs, nor do SUMMER • 1988 • 377 they confer freedom...
...So his counsel to the rich is at most a plea for moderation...
...One can't just design a new civil religion because there's a need for it...
...Learn it and live...
...The humor is mostly one-liners...
...This exaggeration is matched by another exagger378 • DISSENT ation...
...Their chief fear is of losing their status and the money that makes it possible...
...Earlier he has said that he doesn't want to be a prophet, that he finds money truly enjoyable...
...They consume, but are not a leisure class...
...Is Reagan's accumulated deficit really the same as Louis XVI's...
...Sherman is a bond salesman, but that's not glamorous enough...
...his mistress runs away with an artist...
...He has no other god in mind...
...To take his advice would be to turn back into the colorless WASP elite Lapham can't even bear to write about...
...Wolfe calls them the "Masters of the Universe" after the children's fantasy figures...
...It also solves the masculinity problem...
...Lapham concentrates on them because they are the model presented to all of America to copy...
...Neither of these arguments is conceivable to our new moneyed classes...
Vol. 35 • July 1988 • No. 3
