Taste, Class, and Mary Tyler Moore

...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 the backdrop...

...The difference between the surface fripperies-which 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...

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

...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...

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

...Losers can find themselves 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 neighbo rh o o d . Katherine Kuh called Wyeth-and by extension his devoteesa McDonald’s...

...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...

...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...

...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 use .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.’’ 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...

...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...

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

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

...Suzannah Lessard is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly and on the staff of The New Yorker...

...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...

...we’ve been specially produced, custommade.’ ” Social ‘True Values’ The world of politics has its own version of the true value-class game...

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

...Being “in” nowadays is a condition that must be constantly and feverishly maintained and can depend upon such unexpected attributes as know’ ing 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 aficionado of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (don’t rely on this one-it’s already stale...

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

...The McDonald’s Image The other bad effect is the rigidly antipathetic attitude that this preoccupation generates toward American Culture, toward the country at large...

...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...

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

...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...

...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 cataloguing has evolved, and that this is not true just of society-column existence, but of the wider cosmopolitan circles that fringe on Leq Lerman’s hectic, paisley world...

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

...n e 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” make the old society’s manner of judging (what’s your pedigree-usually meaning how much money do you have and how long have you had it) seem more innocent than snobbish...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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 Lerman’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...

...The complications arise from the intense pressure on people io 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...

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

...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...

...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 aids 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...

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

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

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

...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...

...The museum and its blockbuster shows are now the biggest tourist attraction in New York, according to The New York Times . ) And so the game-the values warhas 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...

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

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

...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...

...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 implying that he is a philistine...

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

...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...

...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 painting he will buy to hang on his wall (or, if he is not in that financial league, to talk about...

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

...Boiled down, the old question, are you a lady or a gentleman...

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

...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...

...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...

...Are they refined...

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

...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...

...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...

...has been replaced by the query, are you an aristocrat of the spirit...

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

...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...

...Are your values true...

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

...The endeavor to identify...

...Europe postures against America...

...This article originally appeared in March 19 75...

...You’ve been mass-produced...

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

...The Aesthetic Elect 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...

...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 ticket to social success...

...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...

...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...

...A More Frenetic Version 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...

...Are they profound...

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

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

...Wharton had made fun of-the acquisition of the latest avant-garde 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 has nothing but cultivation to rely on to distinguish himself, has no listing in a social register to point to when this other, extremely vulnerable form of legitmacy begins to erode...

...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 selfpromotion, the need to draw the line between the philistines and the chosen people and put yourself on the right side...

...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...

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