Taste, Class, and Mary Tyler Moore

...I wonder, do French intellectuals posture against the crassness of popular Frenchmen...

...Disputes across these lines touch a deep nerve and provoke disproportionate ferocity...

...This is true in the world of the arts-the world of culture in the narrow sense-but also in the underworlds of politics and ideas...

...The museum and its blockbuster shows are now the biggest tourist attraction in New York, according to The New York Times...

...As Edith Wharton posed her artistic and moral values (they are, for her, often the same) against her probably exaggerated, most certainly oversimplified tapestry of a morally and culturally ugly American society, the elite today draws attention to its specialness by posturing on cultural ramparts against the lurid apocalypse of a degraded, even evil mass culture in which the values of television commercials are lumped with the morals of the Vietnam war...

...As an index of how serious the true value game is, think of how an educated American can wound another most deeply: by suggesting he is dishonest or a cad in his personal relationships, by implying that he is mediocre at his trade, or by inferring that he is a philistine...

...When the concept of an hereditary upper class crumbled out of that very lifelessness and purposelessness which Edith Wharton spent so much energy lambasting, cultivation did’ become one of the major critenons for membership in the cosmopolitan elite...

...What interests me is what Mrs...

...Social standing, in the old sense of who your parents are, is no longer a criterion, although a touch of that sort of glitter still can be made to go a long way...

...Though the great masterpieces hang there, it does you no social good to go to the Uffizi, and you might even do damage to yourself if you mention a visit to the Parthenon...

...When Katherine Kuh, for many years art critic for the old Saturday Review, wrote that Andrew Wyeth was a drastically overestimated painter, really a “potboiler,” an “illustrator,” a painter of tepid, sentimental renditions of the past, she provoked a violent flood of letters, most of them attacking her rather than her ideas, including one which speculated that Wyeth had turned down a “salacious proposition” from the critic...

...In Edith Wharton’s work one can see some of the roots of these complications in an explicit way when she casts her cold eye on the conventions of her time but, more interestingly, in what she unwittingly reveals about her own attitudes...

...Wharton) a genuine interest in the arts was actually a liability...

...In the social context, true values are useful only if most other people don’t hold them, only if “the others,” like Edith Wharton’s characters, don’t know...

...Boiled down, the old question, are you a lady or a gentleman, has been replaced by the query, are you an aristocrat of the spirit...

...we’ve been specially produced, custommade...

...This was a battle over who was more select, a skirmish over one of the lines in the class structure of concentric circles in which each circle fights to distinguish itself from the next one outward, which it militantly blurs with “the masses...

...The other bad effect is the rigidly antipathetic attitude that the preoccupation generates towards American Culture, towards the country at large...

...Instead, we have a world where the questioning of values is too often taken as an intent to hurt and debase the holder of those values (and, in fact, is frequently so intended) and where values themselves are held less as living aides than as a kind of pedigree, the questioning of which is as grave a personal assault as it once was to question the legitimacy of a lady of society’s birth...

...Raycie gives his son a small fortune to spend abroad on Italian paintings for his “gallery’’ so that he can impress his guests after dinner, but young Lewis (after making the acquaintance of Ruskin) chooses the works of unfashionable painters (Piero della Francesca) for what he sees in them (and for his pains is disinherited...

...And, curiously, she continued to identify with what she ostensibly considered the very worst element in American life...

...According to Edmund Wilson, she was unnecessarily and exaggeratedly insistent on her own social credentials as a New York lady of background...

...The complications arise from the intense pressure on people to prove themselves aristocrats of the spirit-to be sensitive and aware-which is generated in a class structure in which distinctions are made largely according to these qualities...

...Being “in” nowadays is a condition which must be constantly and feverishly maintained and can depend upon such unexpected attributes as knowing a Black Panther yesterday and John Dean today, wearing your hair in a crew-cut (if you are a woman-it’s currently a sign of homosexuality for a man), or being an afficionado of the “Mary Tyler Moore” show (don’t rely on this one-it’s already stale...

...Thus in the name of the really important work of distinguishing between the genuine and the ersatz, ideas are turned into mascots and slogans in a struggle for a kind of personal ascendency...

...There is always much breast-beating about how artists and intellectuals are pariahs in America, which, if it pays any attention to them at all, wants only to turn them into commodities, but the truth is that it is precisely through carefully disassociating itself from American Culture, that the elite distinguishes itself...

...Her knowledge, and the superiority it gives her, is the protagonist in her work, and the blindness of her provincial countrymen the antagonist...

...We all know this and laugh at it as we engage in our particular compromise with the game, but underneath there is a more serious questioning of ourselves and each other...

...It is precisely because the business of discrimination-of piercing the aura of sanctity which can obscure the fallacy in an idea or a flaw in a piece of work, and of selecting enduring values in the flood of trivial notions which are constantly magnified by the lens of fashion-is so important that the psychology which perverts this business is important in a negative sense...

...Wharton had made fun of- the acquisition of the latest avantgarde paintings, rushing out to the Theater of the Absurd, quickly boning up on Malraux to add gloss to your cocktail conversation-more frenetic perhaps because a social aspirant now had nothing but cultivation to rely on to distinguish himself, had no listing in a social register to point to when this other, extremely vulnerable form of legitimacy began to erode...

...On a more serious level, the theme of most of her novels and short stories is how this frivolous, mindless world victimized worthy souls, obliviously crushing them in the trivial but brutal machinery of their value system...

...Do refined Italians offset their superiority by cultivating an attitude of disdain for their “duller” compatriots...

...The difference between the surface fripperieswhich we can laugh at-and the serious struggle underneath could be described as the difference between Edith Wharton’s characters, who lend themselves so easily to satire, and her own urgent, fumbling endeavor to identify the true light, an effort which is clearly directed by her deepest feelings about life and yet which breaks into expression in such trivial, helplessly inarticulate forms as saying that someone is noble because he reads poetry once in a while...

...At the very least it makes for variety...

...On the whole, though, the upper reaches of contemporary society are inhabited by self-made people...

...This sort of confrontation takes place on successive fronts...

...The world of politics has its own version of the true value-class game...

...Thus when my colleague James Fallows criticized Mary McCarthy (a writer he otherwise admires, as he made quite clear) for playing irresponsibly with facts in her reportage on Watergate and Vietnam, Harold Rosenberg, whose own books’ covers (he is an art critic) are embellished with flattering quotes from McCarthy, rose passionately to her defense, not by taking on the substance of Fallows’ criticism, but by spitting (for considerable duration) upon the impudence of a common reporter who dared to criticize a great artist (even when she was acting as a reporter), relegating him, in effect, because of a professional label, to the dreary plains of the philistines, the McDonald’s, while Rosenberg himself carried the banner of true values (McCarthy and, by association, himself) triumphantly to higher ground...

...It was important to know the name of the latest book and to be seen at the opera, but (at least according to Mrs...

...But in the last 20 years, even the credential of cultivation has been under siege, for culture, like money, has become available to the masses...

...Meanwhile, her characters are too often no more than potential recruits in this larger battle, lured back and forth across the lines and usually, in the end, falling into enemy hands...

...Are they refined...

...Newland Archer is one of the chosen because he loves Ellen Olenska who departs from convention in her flower arrangements (she’s “original”) and who has traveled in European intellectual circles...

...The nobility consists in purity of appreciation of these things for their own sake and in having a mind of one’s own in selecting...

...When I run across this it makes me angry because I think it’s cowardly and self-serving...

...Just as I think Edith Wharton, safe in Paris, was...

...They import the McDonald’s image...

...I don’t think Katherine Kuh was attempting to do anything more than make a genuine aesthetic judgment (although the terms she chose to dismiss Wyeth could not have been more hurtful to him or his admirers), but I wonder how many of her readers who had not particularly committed themselves to Wyeth saw Kuh’s opinion as a potential weapon and abruptly dismissed Wyeth at the next opportunity, preferably after someone else had expressed admiration...

...Wharton clearly was afflicted in the extreme with a sense of American cultural obscurity in comparison to what Europe had to offer and moved to Paris as soon as she could...

...Artists and writers, when they find themselves judged unfavorably from this flank, almost invariably resort to damning their critics as belonging to a lower class of sensibility...

...And so the game-the values war-has become more heated than ever and, with this new intensity, the price which inevitably accompanies a linkage of values with social distinction has probably also become greater...

...You’ve been mass-produced...

...In fact, a case could be made that, in the absence of a standard measure of acceptability, a far more obsessive and byzantine method of cataloging has evolved and that this is not true just of society column existence, but of the wider cosmopolitan circles which fringe on Leo Lerman’s hectic, paisley world...

...Mrs...

...But she could not let go of her country and continued to beat it, almost obsessively, with its lack of cultivation -to superimpose herself on it-long after she had ceased to have any real contact with what was going on here...

...Everybody” goes to Europe now, and “everybody” appreciates Picasso, so in order to assert the badge of true values-the quality of being discriminatinga social aspirant has to seek out more and more obscure European villages with a scrap of “undiscovered” fresco in the old church and make more and more daring avant choices in the paintings he will buy to hang on his wall (or if he is not in that financial league, to talk about...

...Yet, as Novak also notes, reporters “are subject to snubs and slights, too...

...I don’t think Edith Wharton can be held up as a mirror image of America’s neuroses, but in a limited sense contemporary society echoes her own complex...

...The narrowing in the gap in income between the upper and middle classes was probably a major reason why the true values game heated up into an exercise in class distinction...

...Percy Gryce collects “Americana” because he thinks this gives him social distinction, but Lawrence Selden actually reads what he collects, and one of the reasons we know Lilly Bart is “good” is that she gravitates towards Selden, and in addition her long-deceased father hoarded a few “slim volumes” of poetry in that one part of the house his philistine wife left to him...

...ticket to social success...

...As a result her work is not nearly as great as it might have been, for the primary aim of fiction cannot be to belittle human beings and discredit their feelings...

...Ethan Frome is set apart from strong-silent dolthood by hs tremors of appreciation upon seeing a snowy field at night and by the information that in his youth he read books...

...It’s a much better question, but it has its complications...

...The people one sees standing in line to see Wyeth’s work are not country bumpkins, observed Kuh...

...Europe postures against America...

...If lots of others do “know,” then knowing doesn’t set you apart at all: you are just a member of the masses jostling through the impressionists show at the Metropolitan Museum...

...I don’t really know enough to say, but what small experience I do have indicates that if this is done at all, Europeans do not use their own countries, but ours, as a backdrop...

...Wharton considers nobility of the spirit, or, to put it another way, how do we know which of her characters are “good...

...The rapid, sophisticated computations of multiple labels-dress, job, school, intelligence, political attitudes, accents (Southern country is passable, suburban Long Island is not), and acquaintances-with which one person judges whether another “is one of us ” makes the old society’s manner of judging (what’s your pedigree-usually meaning how much money do you have and how long have vou had it) seem more innocent than snobbish...

...Just as I think people here who pantomime aesthetic agony in front of McDonald’s are, too, although at least they are on the scene...

...What people resent in the media is the arrogance that tells people every day: ‘We’re smarter, better informed, more critical, more skeptical than you...

...Sensibility and awareness are qualities you can acquire, but they are also extremely perishable-or at least an image of having them is...

...Wharton pushes the clues forward with a special aggressiveness, addressing the reader less as an equal co-holder of these values than as a child of dubious manners whose attention must be directed to proper models...

...Where the social notes of Edith Wharton’s old New York would drop the names of a series of nearly identical stuffed shirts whose main claim to fame was their forefathers’ success in business, Leo Lermaii’s column, “People Are Talking About,” in the February Vogue, mentions Joel Grey the actor, Larry Brown the football player, Princess Radziwill “that’s Lee,” Treasury Secretary “Bill” Simon, “the Warhol gang,” as well as Rauschenberg, Andre Malraux, and Vladimir Horowitz (with Princess Lee, representative of pure status without accomplishment, these last high-cultural three give the select company its real “touch of class...

...These are surely flimsy grounds on which to establish a character’s superiority, but Mrs...

...The result is a more accessible elite, in the sense that a Barbara Howar from the boondocks can make it to the top on sheer ingenuity, and a more interesting one, in the sense that talent rather than genealogical credentials is the surer Suzannah Lessard is an editor of The Washington Monthly...

...Pedigree was something you either had or you didn’t have...

...Are your values true...

...On top of this, Wilson writes, she had reason to believe that she was an illegitimate child, a concern to which he speculatively attributes the recurring theme of illegitimacy and illicit love affairs in her fiction...

...The battle is made additionally complex by the fact that calling someone an elitist is a viable weapon in the true value game...

...The worthy souls are the true aristocrats, and their tragedy is that they live in a fundamentally commercial society, where money is really all that counts and where true nobility of spirit is likely to invite ruin...

...Besides being a bad habit, a trick which is used to wound, to inflict an injury of class, the chief damage done by the excessive preoccupation with and fear of philistinism is that it cramps growth and exchange of ideas...

...But there is a more serious aspect to all this...

...But we have all seen the tremendous social lift which association with the current “true values” can give and the ostracism which can descend upon a person who takes a “wrong” (naive, unliberal, unin telligent, uninformed) position...

...That is the role which cultivation, in the sense of a sophisticated appreciation of the arts and of ideas, plays in the American class structure...

...In America that’s going for the jugular, and any weapon available (Andrew Wyeth wouldn’t sleep with her) must be used against such a lethal smear...

...Thus Mr...

...Presumably, the old Saturday Review’s readership, while broad, was still what one would call select...

...Yet again, even critics are vulnerable...

...One could almost say that it is William Buckley’s metier to make opponents look stupid and clumsy (unrefined), thereby giving his own positions a cachet they otherwise never would have...

...Archer also reads poetry, although, like Lily Bart and Ethan Frome, his superiority stems more from vague intimations of a world of higher values than any real experience of them...

...Taste, Class, and Mary Tyler Moore by Suzannah Lessard The work of Edith Wharton may seem an unlikely place to look for illumination of current affairs, but there is one respect in which her novels and stories cast light on the workings of our own world...

...The price is the open exchange of ideas in an atmosphere in which scrutiny of values is uncluttered by the distorting emotions of class image, of a desire for personal superiority...

...Are they profound...

...The jostling for the “aware” position on the left has become fairly standard material for satire-a good thing for the left-but for the moment, in the dead air space between the moral hurricanes of Vietnam and Watergate and the premonition of world-wide economic disaster, there are few sure causes...

...As Edith Wharton, doubtful of her own legitimacy, clung to the idea of superior artistic sensibilities as the true sign of distinction, no American today can enjoy a secure sense of social superiority and must not only be measured and remeasured by the vague standard of cultivation but looks to that standard for his own measurement of himself...

...If for a moment I may be a parlor psychologist, we have here a deep dislike for America but an inability to let it go, an intellectual mocking of the empty badges of class but an irrational preoccupation with her own membership in it, and a grave doubt about that membership combined with a persistent effort to redefine, through her fiction, a “truer” form of social credit-cultivation...

...A second similarity between present day society and Edith Wharton is that the backdrop against which we measure ourselves and each other is the rest of the country-“American Culture”-which we must despise and resist in order to distinguish ourselves from it, in order to distinguish ourselves at all...

...By furiously generating an aura of wit and intelligence, he has given conservatives a classiness (a seriousness) which would be severely lacking . if it were left to people like Ronald Reagan and Roman Hruska...

...Since that image is of such great importance in the standing one has among one’s peers, the genuine search for true values gets mixed up with self-promotion, the need to draw the line between the philistines and the chosen people and put yourself on the right side...

...Katherine Kuh called Wyeth-and by extension his devotees-a McDonald’s...

...The last, I think, would inflict at least as great a hurt as the others...

...Michael Novak writes of the popular (mass) antipathy towards the national press: “National journalists participate in the culture of the upper classes-in the mobile, fluid, national superculture of America’s higher circles...

...note the prominence of the Prince and Princess Von Furstenburg-surely a couple of characters out of left field if there ever was one-in New York society columns, or the extra sheen the name “Bouvier” gives Jackie Onassis, not lost despite the almost blinding dazzle of her two other more newly glorious names...

...In the world which she wrote about-turn-ofthecentury New York “society”cultural values were a fairly low grade of currency...

...The fact that the high circles are accessible to a variety of people, however, does not mean that people judge each other more liberally than they once did...

...Class differences thus are to a great extent drawn along the lines of the aesthetic (and therefore probably moral) elect versus the cultural philistines, a distinction which, as a result, becomes invested with far more passion than is warranted...

...To a degree, this is just a more frenetic version of the value system Mrs...

...In one sense, this world was her target in the same way the foibles of contemporary society are for Tom Wolfe: she took aim at the false values of fashionable circles, the idiotic indices people used in judging each other, their enslavement to fads in tastes, and the hypocrisy behind their enthusiasm for those fads and for the people they “accepted...

...Losers can find themelves suddenly besieged by the weapons of true values, as though they had suddenly turned into a McDonald‘s hamburger stand which had invited itself into an Upper East Side neighborhood...

...We know a character is good if he reads poetry, or has a discerning eye for painting, or savors beautiful landscapes, or goes in for intelligent conversation...

...The endeavor to identify enduring values-in art, in political ideas, in ways of seeing-is a genuine one, but if one party is going to feel a withering panic when another adroitly brands his icon as phony, no dialogue can take place, only war, a war of self-esteem in which on one side the icon must be utterly destroyed-failing to perceive value is just as bad as being taken in by the ersatz-and on the other the icon must be preserved at all costs, thus becoming no more than a military banner...

...Her attitude is that most Americans are completely unaware of a greater world of the mind and imagination, afld while some of her heroes and heroines may have an inkling, may know a little, only she herself really knows with confidence...