Class and Taste
Posted: July 12th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »Robert Isabell was an event planner to the A-list. He orchestrated Kennedy weddings and the notorious fin de siecle Talk magazine launch party in 1999. Last week he died suddenly at age 57. In his New York Times obit, one mourner pondered Isabell’s working-class Duluth, MN upbringing, coupled with his ability to “put tomatoes and fruit in a bowl” and make it look “like a still-life painting,” and asked: “A guy comes out of nowhere from Minnesota…How does he know this?”
There’s a lot to be said about this — the way people try to account for an individual who has abilities not typically associated with someone of their socio-economic background — but the first thing that came to mind are these lines from Nelson Aldrich’s Old Money (published in 1981 and never, far as I know, released in paperback). Aldrich quotes from a conversation he had with interior designer Mark Hampton, himself no slouch in the razzle-dazzle department. Says Hampton:
I think good taste sometimes appears like a talent—for singing prettily, say. Perhaps her grandmother sang, and her mother, but you don’t have to suppose a genetic inheritance. Background and breeding will do. Then there’s a somewhat arid learned good taste. One can almost hear the poor creature flipping the pages of Architectural Digest and House and Garden in her mind. Finally, there’s an irregular, intuitive sort of good taste—a personal taste. It’s sometimes more difficult to work with such people, but it’s always more fun. Their responses are so surprising.
Then Aldrich adds his gloss:
The class contexts are pretty clear. The ‘background and breeding’ sort of good taste I would guess Hampton associates with upper-class antecedence: ‘learned’ good taste he probably sees as a product of middle-class striving; while ‘personal’ taste he doubtless believes to be the result of one of those random descents of the gift, which even the most class-ridden societies are obliged somehow to account for.
Random descents of the gift — well said. More later.
Getting a bad review in the New York Times hurts. I speak from experience. Upon first reading the Times review of HTBU, dozens of ways I might enact revenge—my reviewer, I felt, had been careless at best, intellectually dishonest at worst—flashed before me. I typed up my thoughts. I deleted these thoughts. Finally, I decided this: Were I to meet Mrs. Jacobs at a party, I would say, “Nice to meet you. You’re taller than I expected,” and then excuse myself.
Subtle. Too subtle. But I’m not convinced that responding angrily accomplishes anything, particularly when, as was the case here, several authors the reviewer had scorned previously had already chosen that route. Clearly, my reviewer enjoyed bitch-slapping. No aggrieved bluster on my part could change that.
I mention all this because earlier this week, in response to his bad review in the New York Times, the author Alain de Botton posted the below in the comments section of his reviewer’s blog:
Full disclosure: I know Caleb Crain and like him personally and as an analyst. I’ve liked de Botton’s books—he’s published nine—also. How Proust Can Change Your Life is great, almost as good as The Architecture of Happiness. This screed hardly impresses. It suggests to me that De Botton has not only “lost perspective,” to put it in over-used therapeutic terms, but is so accustomed to adulation that he’s come to feel entitled to it. Or maybe he was having a bad day.
His response reminds me of nothing so much as Jon Gosselin, in fact. Gosselin is paid millions for allowing television cameras into his home, and chronicling his disastrous marriage and parenting misadventures for a national TV audience. He recently got riled up over negative tabloid attention. “I didn’t sign up for this!” he complained. And the only thing you can say to that is, “Well, what did you think all that money was for?”