Not Our Kind, Dear.('Snobbery: The American Version')

Snobbery: The American Version, by Joseph Epstein (Houghton Mifflin, 274 pp., $25)

They are thorough chaps, the staff at National Review. Before they sent me this book for review, they telephoned, asked if I might be interested, and sent me details so I could decide. I did not need details. Who would not want to review a book on snobbery? I even got quite excited waiting for it to arrive. At last we would have a full- length defense of snobbery. That's obviously what it would be, and about time too. Why obviously a defense? For the same reason that a book on racism, xenophobia, class hatred, and cruelty to small animals and children would obviously have to be a defense of them. All right, I shouldn't have put it quite like that. Try some quotation marks: What needs defending is "xenophobia" and the others, that is, what passes today for xenophobia; that defense would be great fun to read. Xenophobia, racism, and cruelty to kittens are bad things. So what modern liberal society does is use these words to describe behavior it dislikes, but which is not xenophobic, etc. So patriotism gets put down as xenophobia. The traditional disciplining of savage young children to make them civilized adults is put down as child cruelty, and a sensitive attachment to the interests and lifestyles of one's family, friends, and community is called class hatred.

Much of what is denounced as snobbery today is simply a thoroughly commendable attachment to elitism, to high standards, and a concomitant rejection or ridicule of low standards together with an equally commendable refined and precise distinction of the social manners that go with them. What Snobbery would surely do then would be to take modern illustrations of "snobbery" and show them to be no such thing. That is not what Joseph Epstein does. Now, there is no reason why Epstein should write the book that ought to be written about "snobbery" -- except that what he has written in its stead is neither right nor amusing.

Some of what he thinks is snobbery is not. Thus he quotes V. S. Naipaul: "The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid and common people, and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and the common." This is not mere snobbery; in fact, I don't think it's snobbish at all. Naipaul regrets it as a melancholy fact; he doesn't revel in it or use it to advance himself. And what he asserts is no more than the commendable elitism mentioned above, a care for quality. Epstein is wrong about it. He is also wrong to declare that Evelyn Waugh was a snob; wrong in the sense that there is much more to say about Waugh and that these other things -- his wit, his social perceptiveness, his genius for characters -- were inextricably tied up with what Epstein calls snobbery. He tells a story about Alfred Knopf's brother, who knew Knopf's fondness for good wine, served him an expensive bottle, failed to get a reaction, asked him what he thought of it, and received the reply, "How can I tell, drinking it out of these glasses?" He is wrong to call this snobbery. It is very clever and funny. It is a neat, gentle, social put-down and it contains quite as much of the truth as befits a dinner conversation (glasses do matter). He cites, as an instance ...