Lewis Lapham's Lament
Lessard, Suzannah
Lewis Lapham's Lament by Suzannah Lessard Wealth and status are difficult subjects. They are so personal. At the very beginning of Money and Class in America,* Lewis Lapham writes: On more than...
...It is also an interesting moment to read about and think about the whole matter of riches and greed in our society...
...Suddenly he seems to be qualifying to be Mrs...
...Money changes everything His thesis is that the materialistic tone of the very rich sets the tone for all of us, and indeed he often strays rather far afield from the precincts of wealth into the precincts of power, celebrity and journalism...
...Occasionally disapproval seeps through his man-from-Mars impartiality, as when he writes, "The practice of naming male scions for their illustrious forebears represents a form of ancestor worship for wealthy families" One could even say that spleen appears in a ghostly form when he says that these famous names give the rich an advantage when they enter politics and that they achieve success only after adopting "pedestrian nicknames," like "Jay" and "Pete," as if there was something underhanded about this...
...I don't know about you, but I knew this...
...This is achieved by going to the right schools, copying the right people, and marrying the right people...
...Although the corporate rich have lost some significant political battles, such as the imposition of progressive transfer taxes, they have certainly not lost the war for wealth...
...His polished but driven style gives the impression that he can't stop talking, that he was talking this way for a long time before he started writing the book, and that he has gone on talking since...
...Astor's secretary...
...By the fourth some freedom and individuality comes back...
...It seemed to me that both these fates took place in something larger, a certain atmosphere in which sensibilities were dulled and values askew...
...I thought about ads, and credit cards, and the sharp desire that comes along every so often to have something very, very expensive, simply because it is expensive...
...With the shock of the crash still in our bones and the deluded atmosphere of the Reagan years lingering on, it's a moment of change in which it is possible to see that we have been soaking in materialism and have become dull in a way and blind...
...For example, he equates "the wish to appear convincing in an old duck-shooting hat while talking to a potato farmer about the prospects of an early winter" (Old Money) with "the wish to appear convincing on a dais at the Waldorf, preferably seated next to Barbara Streisand or Ed Meese" (New Money...
...Dealing honestly and effectively with this force is one of the most complex problems in child-raising these days...
...It's because of this family connection, in my view, that the topic is so personal, painful, and seemingly deep...
...THE WASHINGTON MONTHLY/APRIL 1988 I happened to read these books right after Rachel and Her Children, Jonathan Kozol's gripping book about the homeless...
...Of the tendency of corporation executives to seek the extra status of celebrity by doing commercials for their own products, he writes that "learning to talk to a television camera is the equivalent of learning to talk to the Duc D'Orleans ." Tattling on the San Francisco Club, where money is washed before it is returned to members as change, he points out that laundering money is a favorite American pastime...
...Here Allen's muffled opprobrium of the social climbing of the corporate rich has the effect of making him seem to approve of this exclusive upper class...
...Weidenfeld and Nicholson, $18.95...
...For example, he points out that tax avoidance devices, like generationskipping trusts, in which income goes to one generation and capital to the next at some far-distantfuture time, brings about a situation in which you can't really say at any given moment to whom the money belongs: you can say only that it belongs to "the family...
...I thought about how the entrance of a wealthy person can change the atmosphere in a room...
...His kind of contradictory distress, anger, and entrapment is as much a part of the American story as that of the immigrant who is clever and hardworking and becomes rich...
...They tend to live near each other, they go to regular family reunions, they share staffs that handle their wealth for them...
...In a rare touch of color, Allen quotes a Rockefeller cousin as saying, "Within the family one hardly ever talks about who we are without our Rockefeller identity...
...House burns down and insurance company doesn't pay...
...I'm inclined to believe that his predicament is a true one...
...But I have no trouble believing that they also cohere because of the dictates of wealth, and while I disagree with Allen's apparent feeling that family coherence is in itself unnatural, it's true that his mini-histories of our richest families makes them seem rather lugubrious...
...In the beginning of the book he writes, "As G. William Domhoff puts it, 'legally the government is all of us, but members of the upper class have the predominant, all-pervasive influence.'" At the end of the book, he writes: In the final analysis, the issue is not whether the corporate rich in America have lost any important battles, but whether they have lost the war...
...The book raises the question, "If you think these people are so lousy, why are you hanging around with them...
...In this atmosphere, which can be called an atmosphere of greed for the sake of brevity, some people become homeless and some people become rich, and there, but for the grace of God, go the rest of us...
...How does one teach him that money is grand but that attributing powers to it that it doesn't have can be lethal...
...Allen's book is not nearly as much fun to read as Lapham's, but in its dry way it reveals the emptiness at the heart of our culture more effectively...
...He doesn't even tell us this much about himself...
...of how a person can seem different from other people if he is rich...
...In a witty breakdown of the differences between Old Money and New Money, my favorite item is that the Old Money goes to great pains to treat the servants as equals while the New Money screams at the cook...
...Those instances in which families disintegrate quickly seemed like instances of a benign fate...
...Lapham says a number of times that he was born into "the precincts of wealth," in just that phrase...
...Judging from the book, Lapham has never in his life had to worry about being on the right guest list...
...Somebody says, "He got a quarter of a million for his book without writing a word," and suddenly the rest of the writing community seems reduced to the status of children...
...is, gives the book the air of exposing some hitherto unsuspected evil, namely that the rich have a lot of money, that they manage to keep it by hiring good tax lawyers, that they have more power than other Americans because they contribute to campaigns, own newspapers, and set up philanthropic organizations to retain power over money that would otherwise go to the government...
...nate in childhood and can be dictated by the class and wealth of one's family...
...He calls corporation presidents and eccentric: aunts equally to account for narcissism and disconnection from reality...
...There is a sadness in this relief, because it makes everything seem so pointless—that after all is said and done, the great thing is to escape and be ordinary...
...So all he can do is stab again, and he does, indefatigably...
...1-le has some autonomy, some fun, some freedom of choice...
...This has always been so...
...We assign spiritual meanings to the text of money," he writes...
...It also matters very much if, because I live in an anesthetized and deluded state, I don't notice that you have no house...
...Like the dinner party he describes at the beginning, it rarely seems to be quite about what it's really about...
...Wherever "there" is, he is always there, always aloof, observant of the foibles and anxieties of others, always presenting himself as objective where others are lost...
...some of it is quite solid...
...That identity, in that sentence, sounds to me like a burden...
...As he is not a prisoner of external forces, the key to freedom surely lies within himself...
...But the fact is that there are many attractive alternatives to upper-class society these days...
...tions at private schools used to be serious costs, but not extravagant ones...
...As he goes on with the story, it is the second generation to whom the job of entering society falls, and this is done by acquiring "cultural capital," to wit, the right clothes, accent, and conversation (knowing not to say that Thackeray is always blue...
...This is an inspired but imprecise book...
...This matters very much to me as well as to you...
...the trick is to know at what point worrying about toxins becomes a disease in itself...
...Costs in these areas today are astronomical, which may be one of the reasons for our growing obsession with money and the resulting atmosphere of greed...
...It takes away freedom of choice...
...I am as helpless as you...
...It is at this level and beyond that Lapham's predicament emerges...
...Stories like this make one see that homelessness doesn't belong to another world, that the strata of our society are porous, that it would be possible to become homeless oneself...
...In fact, an uneasiness with the family association may have set in...
...This pseudo-naivete, or whatever it *The Founding Fortune: A New Anatomy of the Super-Rich Families in America...
...The difference between Lapham's book and The Founding Fortunes by Michael Patrick Allen* is amusing...
...Indeed, many of these homes are so large they can only be called mansions...
...That said, I found a great deal of what he has to say stimulating and worthwhile...
...Lapham writes, "Obsession with money dulls the capacity for feeling and thought ." His book makes you paranoid about greed in the way one can get paranoid about toxins in the food...
...Minor works of art by known artists were once easily in the range of the middle-class pocketbook...
...But it doesn't really matter if you are rich and I am not...
...The whole level of my existence is debased by it...
...Something strong rose from this book despite its flaws, a palpable sense of the greed in the air we breathe, a sense of how we have been stupefied by materialism, especially in the last decade or so...
...All in the family Unlike Lapham, who is a whirling dervish of opinion, Allen is so coy that he never states in his own words that he personally feels that it's bad for the rich to be rich and powerful...
...Social climbing is every bit as American as the drive to be rich—in fact it is one of the great motives behind the drive to be rich...
...As for the connection between money and class and God, this is never clarified...
...His problem is how to get off the lists...
...It does matter, a lot, if I have no house or if you have no house...
...At the least, the contradiction creates a weakness in the book and a falseness in the outrage that is its dominant theme...
...Along the way I began to be aware of something like a noise that I had mistaken for silence, the presence in the air of the imperative that says "Want" and "More...
...That second cousins should have contact is, evidently, a sure sign of depravity...
...Perhaps it was when he remarked that the rich are never satisfied, that there is never enough, and for a split second I saw that this was true, that if you get to the point of having to relieve your boredom with steak by eating nilgai, then nilgai will not be enough...
...Free at last What one sees in these stories is a kind of fate entrapping the progeny of the entrepreneur...
...The effect was not the hackneyed one of shock that such disparities could exist (although the information in Kozol's book is shocking) or of wishing to reform society by taking from the rich to give to the poor...
...Unlike Lapham, who believes that we are really all just like the rich, and who talks to us as if we know what nilgai is, Allen's tone suggests that until recently he had never heard of rich people and is sure that we haven't either...
...But he doesn't do this...
...One of the striking elements in Kozol's book is that he tells the stories of how individuals become homeless...
...I thought about my small son, in whose undefended soul the best minds on Madison Avenue are striving to carve the void of craving...
...How does one arm him against the cycle of dissatisfaction without at the same time indoctrinating him with a pretentious and untruthful Puritanism...
...I learned of the Texaco connection elsewhere...
...They are born into the gelatinous substance of these families held together by money, from which they must struggle to escape for generations...
...Allen is a professor of sociology at Washington State University (Lapham, of course, is the editor of Harper's magazine) and his book, studiedly neutral in tone, structured, full of even, word-processed research out of the library, rather than life, is so cleansed of detail, color, and human interest that one begins to feel that one has left life altogether for some kind of sociologist's hereafter...
...This is an example of the flimsier material in the book...
...When I read later about the fate of becoming rich, it seemed in a way not unlike the fate of becoming homeless...
...He speaks of the absurd rituals of an august men's club in the same tone as he speaks, of the parvenu hostess who says "Thackeray is always blue," meaning that this is so of the books bought by the yard by a certain chic decorator...
...It's very easy to confuse inherited wealth with an idea of Providenceendowed superiority—when in fact it may well be a fate of separation from one's true self, of choicelessness, a test of the soul...
...Of both these books one can say that they make you glad that you are not rich...
...Or perhaps Lapham just means that when we talk about money and class we end up talking about all sorts of basically unrelated matters that have a deep meaning for us...
...Sometimes he's silly and sometimes he's brilliant—but since he's always going at 70 miles an hour it doesn't matter which, because it goes by so fast...
...What has changed is the cost of improving one's class status...
...Secondly, what Allen describes is quite interesting, not, to me, for what it shows about the undue influence of the rich but for the shapes that the family takes in this context of great wealth...
...Escape does come, though gradually...
...He can be funny, too...
...In a way it's all there is...
...By the end the most elite circles are laid to waste, leaving only the author standing...
...By the third generation the family is socially secure...
...Lewis H. Lapham...
...Husband and wife both get sick at the same time...
...Only at the end, when the wine was gone and the host was no longer speaking to most of the guests, did it occur to the company still in the room that one of us had been talking about freedom, another about his lost youth, another about God...
...It is, in any event, in his view, a custom practiced only by the rich...
...I hope we are turning a corner, that we have had enough of this sleep, that we are going to emerge from this miasma soon and take responsibility (which is, after all, a sign of freedom) for the economic and social problems that really need solving and that are within our power to solve...
...Perhaps it was the story of Lapham's journalist friend who confessed that his terror of flying left him when someone who owned or controlled assets in ev cess of $500 million was aboard...
...His condescension toward the people whose society he has chosen is disturbing...
...Perhaps he means that our concepts of Providence origiSuzannah Lessard is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...To him it strains belief, for example, that first cousins would know each other...
...It's freeing...
...The peculiar sadness of these stories is an American one, because making lots of money is the American dream...
...After that you are trapped in a combination of dire need and insane bureaucracy, from which it is nearly impossible to emerge...
...You should write a book...
...The monster does not die and Lewis Lapham is not free...
...At the very beginning of Money and Class in America,* Lewis Lapham writes: On more than one occasion I have passed the night in earnest argument with a number of otherwise intelligent people who, although they thought they were talking about money and class, were talking about something else...
...His story is a real story that arises out of his character make-up and how he responds to the hazards of life...
...The gent is in a stylish froth, the outsider is imperturbably dull...
...It's important to know how to satisfy this urge with bath salts rather than a Mercedes...
...To the new money the cook is still real ." He is especially cruel to Old Money, telling its secrets, and cruelest of all, lumping it with New Money...
...I don't know when in the book this came about...
...In a way this book can be read as a tour de force of snobbery...
...How does one preserve his freedom of choice...
...First, I found it fascinating that Lapham, who was born into the upper class and therefore belongs to it by virtue of being a member of a family, never mentions families, while Allen, who sounds like he was born in a laboratory, sees this class entirely in terms of families...
...In other words, class mobility into the upper echelons has become prohibitively expensive, drawing our society into a crisis in which we will either have to blow out in an apoplexy of avarice or simply learn to stop caring about class...
...he is only going to more dinner parties...
...As Allen discusses how families rise in social status through generations, another surprising difference between him and Lapham emerges, for where Lapham revels in destroying snobbish distinctions between breeding and riches, Allen is downright fastidious in pointing out that money is not all that is needed for entry into the "upper class ." Indeed some members of the upper class don't have a lot of money themselves (what they have is "cultural capital"), and these new multi-millionaires who come along are often shunned as crude and unscrupulous characters...
...It's true that the rich have more money and power than other people, one can see that, but somehow in the form that Allen gives this situation it is really hard to care...
...Lapham's book tells us quite a lot about this...
...He emerges as a strange inversion of Don Quixote, protesting wildly against real enemies but rooted to the spot, himself having become the windmill...
...It is also an angry, obsessed book, propelled by pent-up energy...
...Perhaps he can't do this...
...In my experience, families cohere for lots of reasons, among them a sense of heritage and connectedness, a sense of safety, an obsession with its their myths, a set of special business relationships, and special brands of insanity that make it difficult for members to associate comfortably with anyone else...
...Allen's approach to the rich is strictly through their money: how they make it, how they keep it, how they spend it, how they hide it, how they bequeath it...
...It used to be possible to live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for a little more than elsewhere, but not much more...
...Perhaps it was the mention of the Madison Avenue butcher who stocks hippopotamus, nilgai, and chamois...
...It doesn't take much...
...For the members of these families, the most important war is the war for wealth...
...It's a fate...
...One knows that toxins are present...
...At times I felt that if he really wished to free himself from his class background he would tell us a little more about himself, about who he really is and what he really cares about...
...I began to think about the power that just the mention of large figures can...
...But to return to Allen and the ways of the super-rich, his enumeration of their habits builds to one of his favorite themes, which is that the families of the rich cohere to a much greater extent and longer than other families...
...Dutton, $22.50...
...He says this in many different ways, through anecdotes, through wit, through frontal attack...
...He plunges his sword over and over again into the heart of the monster who holds him captive, but nothing happens...
...As for the rich, I fear that they will have to devise solutions for themselves...
...His case is looking good until he startles us with his Martian affect: suddenly he seems to have barely heard of families at all...
...The result of this approach is that his book is all about families, and this, in my opinion, is where its interest lies...
...I think I know how freedom comes into it...
...A coincidence of this and that and one evening you are sitting with your children waiting for an assignment to a shelter...
...I thought about the difficulty I have from time to time when a contemporary achieves or marries in the upper reaches of wealth...
...In fact, as a fourth-generation heir to the Texaco fortune he fits right into Allen's scheme...
...But his children and grandchildren seem to be born into prefabricated destinies, in which everything they do, where they live, whom they marry, how they spend their time and with whom, and even how they spend their money (tax avoidance must ever be kept in mind, as well as investment value) are heavily dictated by the imperatives of wealth...
...The homes of the corporate rich are generally much larger and more expensive than ordinary homes," he writes...
...Though you'd never know it from Allen's book, this endeavor to enter a higher class by acquiring manners and taste wasn't invented by the newly super-rich...
...The gent and the outsider, they would make a good comedy team...
...But all this doesn't mean that Lewis Lapham himself is false...
...Even if that is something you might change your mind about if you had different information, it feels good to be positively glad not to be rich...
...It is as if soul began to escape like butterflies...
...Michael Patrick Allen...
...have to dwarf the rest of life...
...I can see how lost youth is entangled with the subject because class is a quintessentially family matter—and so is wealth, though to a lesser extent...
...The effect was simply that the rich have become irrelevant, that the whole tool of analysis of society by the standards of class and money has become much less interesting and potent in today's reality...
...By reading between the lines, I think that we can deduce that Allen feels that this state of affairs is bad...
...The family may cohere still, but with far less solidarity...
...He emerges as a captive who has been given a voice and can shout very loud but has no freedom of choice...
...Sex and death, comparatively, are a breeze...
...His basic premise is that rich people are empty, insatiably greedy, and terminally materialistic...
...Money can make us free, but the wish for money, and even the possession of it, can also imprison us, as can our family, or class background...
...I also got the funny feeling that he had been talking to the very people he is writing about, and they said, "That's brilliant...
...All the numbers tell us that the real heft of redistribution has to come from the middle class...
...How does one teach a child that the cornucopia of a consumer society is lots of fun (which it plainly is to him), but that's all it is...
...Family members feel more free to marry whom they please, rather than other rich or socially prominent people, and family control of the original corporation has also often slipped away by this time so that they do not have this common interest...
...I came to the point in Allen's stories where the families began to dissolve with relief...
Vol. 20 • April 1988 • No. 3
