On Being Pretentious

“I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point.”

That’s a quote from Cary Grant, which I came across recently in a book review in the Atlantic, and it reminds me of another quote I came across while researching my next project. But it relates more to How to Be Useful. Here’s the first part:

“All people are endowed by nature with certain methods and mannerisms of speech and movement. The conscious alteration of these attributes is called affectation. The term is used, however, in general as one of reproach…”

Translated from 1914 speak, the author’s saying: People are born and raised to talk and move a certain way, and sometimes, at some point during their growing and maturing, they will try on other ways of talking or moving. When they do this, other folks tend to call them “affected,” and it’s not meant as a compliment. The writer’s name is Russell Herts, I’ve no clue who he was or what he did, and Google doesn’t either. The line is from a book he titled Depreciations, and given the contents, I’ve only the foggiest notion of what he was aiming at with that title. It was published by Albert & Charles Boni, a long defunct outfit, in New York.

Throughout Depreciations, Herts conveys his sense that authenticity was totally overrated — practically un-American, even — because living an interesting life involved trying different things, and striving to achieve a variety of things, and this might mean you’d sometimes have to act in ways that did not, so to speak, come “naturally” to you. (The book’s introduction was billed as a defense of “Art and Affectation.”) Any culture that valued exploration, achievement, and the basic human impulse to better oneself, Herts argued, couldn’t — shouldn’t — then turn around and label some people who were, however awkwardly, trying to improve themselves “pretentious.” He felt pretentiousness shouldn’t be used as an insult, and that it was, in fact, a social good, because if you didn’t have people around who were aware of the many different ways one can do a thing, or people around who could look beyond their own upbringing and admire other ways of doing or saying things, well then…you’d have a bunch of smug, ignorant sourpusses on your hands. Which is no fun.

Here’s more from that introduction, a wind-up to his eventual call to arms:

“Your typical fat-head is no contemned creature of affectation. He is far too lazily self-satisfied to tax himself with any alteration in his natural qualities…. Who, indeed, are your affected poseurs, but the most talented, the most cultured, sophisticated, thoughtful, brilliant, and suggestive members of your acquaintance?”

But too many well-meaning Americans, he felt, were very quick to slap people down for not acting “themselves.” So his final argument is this:

“One of the iconoclastic onslaughts of this generation must be directed against the prejudice of the unthinking regarding the valuable and very social art of affectation. Without this we should have no conscious advances in personality, no growth of self-control. We must not condemn even a poor exhibition, or not any more strongly than we do an inferior work in painting or literature. In such cases our function as appreciative critics is to demand improvement. We are all in a state of ‘becoming’ and only he who stagnates can be completely consistent or supremely sincere.” [emphasis mine]

A fantastic, concise line, that. And a good thing to keep in mind, especially on overcast days — or when people’s expectations of you start chafing a little.

Update: Someone just suggested that this post veers awfully close to an earlier one I wrote on snobs. He’s right. There will likely be more, too, before it’s all worked through my system.

Snobs

I’m tired of snobs. Culturally-sanctioned snobbery seems to ebb and flow, and right now, New York is a snobbish place. We have them in many varieties and sizes. In intellectual circles, you will unmask a snob whenever you admit you don’t watch “American Idol” ironically, but that you truly enjoy it. Actually, anyone who boasts that they don’t own a TV is probably a snob. I know this because I used to not own a TV. As for wealth-based snobbery, I don’t see much of it.

That is, I don’t see it expressed as such, or so baldly. What I see more of is this: I’m at a birthday party, and a man in his early thirties is recalling his last flight to Paris, and how the woman seated next to him — amply proportioned, by the way — was talking loudly in Midwestern-accented English, tossing out a few French phrases where she could — practicing, evidently — and butchering the most basic French pronunciation. That, and she was keenly excited about seeing the Eiffel Tower. Her first time out of the country, she beamed. He was horrified. She had to be in her late forties, at least.

This woman was clearly not savvy, urbane, or well-traveled, and possibly not intellectually curious either. And by telling us this fun story, this man was suggesting to us that he was. Making snobbish comments is a way of informing people that you know the standards. You know what constitutes déclassé (see? some more French for ya). And you don’t mind — in fact, you relish — being in a position to judge.

But is there anyone left, below the age of fifty, who doesn’t feel themselves to be in a position to judge? Seems everyone feels qualified to hold opinions on people and matters far, far removed from their own experience. Just read the comments sections on US Weekly’s website.

Anyhow, being surrounded by people so vocally and aggressively sure of themselves, whatever their beef, is tiring. But the most tiresome aspect of this rash of snobbery is that it’s essentially anti-progressive. It treats others as finished products, ready and waiting for your critique. Here’s another example: Two summers ago, I find myself in the Hamptons (yes, I know) in the company of a successful husband and wife. Both had authored books, and the wife had also parlayed a friendship with a semi-famous clothing designer into a lucrative merchandising deal with a national retailer. We left their high-modernist waterfront summer rental, and were driving to meet another group for dinner in town. Then, spoken laughingly from the wife in the front seat, came a comment that left me speechless for five minutes. It seems their former nanny — a nanny they’d recently and summarily fired — had a habit of ordering shoes from Payless Shoe Source. Guh! This unfortunate nanny also, I was told, got excited about these Payless packages, and quite possibly — they couldn’t be sure — and quite sadly, had a little crush on the husband.

Now, there are a couple of reasons why someone might be drawn to cheap-ass shoes. One is that, like this couple and most everyone I know, you do the whole high/low thing. Middlemarch one day, Days of Our Lives the next; $400 Theory jacket on top, Gap jeans below, blah, blah, blah.

The other reason one might shop at Payless is, oh I don’t know, because you can’t afford much better. I think our fascination with the mashup too easily lets us imagine everyone around us is choosing from the same, big cultural buffet. Where one’s only obligation is to make good selections. So when you encounter someone who makes the “wrong” choice so consistently, you get to fault their taste.

Acknowledging the socio-economic structures that led to that choice — well, that rarely happens. It’s a temporary blindness — and it results in two smart, sophisticated people (who really do know better) not even checking themselves before condemning their former nanny (hello!) for being poor, essentially. It means your choice becomes a platform for me to tell everyone a little bit about myself.

Snobbery also displays a willful ignorance of opportunity costs — and that’s probably the only thing interesting about it. Opportunity costs are what you can’t buy because you bought something else instead. Wealthy people don’t have to worry about this so much. But for a working woman from, say, Lincoln, Nebraska, a flight to Paris could mean not replacing that 1996 Subaru for yet another year. Maybe that’s why it took her so long to leave the country. Perhaps while our birthday party friend was poring over Verlaine, she was too busy learning the ins and outs of employment in a broom factory.

Let’s say you taped Monet postcards up in your middle-school locker. Now you’ve moved on to the harder stuff, and gauzy, chocolate-box Impressionism sets your teeth on edge. Is scoffing at a middle-aged woman who’s just now learning about Monet appropriate? I don’t think so.

Lost in all this is a sense of process. The post-snob’s reaction to sitting next to a fat woman excited about glimpsing the Eiffel Tower would be different. The post-snob would, I like to think, be really happy for her.