Money and Class in America.

He bemoans the life of the upper class but can't tear himself away from the dinner parties Lewis Lapham's Lament

Wealth and status are difficult subjects. They are so personal. At the very beginning of Money and Class in America,(*) Lewis Lapham writes:

One more than one occasion I have

passed the night in earnest argument with

a number of otherwise intelligent people

who, although they thought they were talking

about money and class, were talking

about something else. Only at the end,

when the wine was gone and the host was

no longer speaking to most of the guests,

did it occur to the company still in the room

that one of us had been talking about freedom,

another about his lost youth, another

about God.

I can see how lost youth is entangled with the subject because class is a quintessentially family matter--and so is wealth, though to a lesser extent. It's because of this family connection, in my view, that the topic is so personal, painful, and seemingly deep. I think I know how freedom comes into it. Money can make us free, but the wish for money, and even the possession of it, can also imprison us, as can our family, or class background. Lapham's book tells us quite a lot about this. As for the connection between money and class and God, this is never clarified. Perhaps he means that our concepts of Providence originate in childhood and can be dictated by the class and wealth of one's family. It's very easy to confuse inherited wealth with an idea of Providence-endowed superiority--when in fact it may well be a fate of separation from one's true self, of choicelessness, a test of the soul. Or perhaps Lapham just means that when we talk about money and class we end up talking about all sorts of basically unrelated matters that have a deep meaning for us. "We assign spiritual meanings to the text of money," he writes. This is an inspired but imprecise book.

It is also an angry, obsessed book, propelled by pent-up energy. Like the dinner party he describes at the beginning, it rarely seems to be quite about what it's really about. His polished but driven style gives the impression that he can't stop talking, that he was talking this way for a long time before he started writing the book, and that he has gone on talking since. I also got the funny feeling that he had been talking to the very people he is writing about, and they said, "That's brilliant. You should write a book!" The book raises the question, "If you think these people are so lousy, why are you hanging around with them?"

Lapham says a number of times that he was born into "the precincts of wealth," in just that phrase. But the fact is that there are many attractive alternatives to upper-class society these days. Judging from the book, Lapham has never in his life had to worry about being on the right guest list. His problem is how to get off the lists. Wherever "there" is, he is always there, always aloof, observant of the foibles and anxieties of others, always presenting himself as objective where others are lost. His condescension toward the people whose society he has chosen is disturbing. In a way this book can be read as a tour de force of snobbery. By the end the most elite circles are laid to waste, leaving only the author standing. At the least, the contradiction creates a weakness in the book and a falseness in the outrage that is its dominant theme.

But all this doesn't mean that Lewis Lapham himself is false. I'm inclined to believe that his predicament is a true one. He plunges his sword over and over again into the heart of the monster who holds him captive, but nothing happens. The monster does not die and Lewis Lapham is not free; he is only going to more dinner parties. So all he can do is stab again, and he does, indefatigably. At times I felt that if he really wished to free himself from his class background he would tell us a little more about himself, about who he really is and what he really cares about. As he is not a prisoner of external forces, the key to freedom surely lies within himself. But he doesn't do this. Perhaps he can't do this. He emerges as a captive who has been given a voice and can shout very loud but has no freedom of choice. He emerges as a strange inversion of Don Quixote, protesting wildly against real enemies but rooted to the spot, himself having become the windmill.

That said, I found a great deal of what he has to say stimulating and worthwhile. His basic premise is that rich people are empty, insatiably greedy, and terminally materialistic. He says this in many different ways, through anecdotes, through wit, through frontal attack. Sometimes he's silly and sometimes he's brilliant--but since he's always going at 70 miles an hour it doesn't matter which, because it goes by so fast.

He can be funny, too. Of the tendency of corporation executives to seek the extra status of celebrity by doing commercials for their own products, he writes that "learning to talk to a television camera is the equivalent of learning to talk to the Duc D'Orleans." Tattling on the San Francisco Club, where money is washed before it is returned to members as change, he points out that laundering money is a favorite American pastime. In a witty breakdown of the differences between Old Money and New Money, my favorite item is that the Old Money goes to great pains to treat the servants as equals while the New Money screams at the cook. "To the new money the cook is still real." He is especially cruel to Old Money, telling its secrets, and cruelest of all, lumping it with New Money. For example, he equates "the wish to appear convincing in an old duck-shooting hat while talking to a potato farmer about the prospects of an early winter" (Old Money) with "the wish to appear convincing on a dais at the Waldorf, preferably seated next to Barbara Streisand or Ed Meese" (New Money). He speaks of the absurd rituals of an august men's club in the same tone as he speaks of the parvenu hostess who says "Thackeray is always blue," meaning that this is so of the books bought by the yard by a certain chic decorator. He calls corporation presidents and eccentric aunts equally to account for narcissism and disconnection from reality.

Money changes everything

His thesis is that the materialistic tone of the very rich sets the tone for all of us, and indeed he often strays rather far afield from the precincts of wealth into the precincts of power, celebrity, and journalism. Something strong rose from this book despite its flaws, a palpable sense of the greed in the air we breathe, a sense of how we have been stupefied by materialism, especially in the last decade or so.

I don't know when in the book this came about. Perhaps it was the mention of the Madison Avenue butcher who stocks hippopotamus, nilgai, and chamois. Perhaps it was the story of Lapham's journalist friend who confessed that his terror of flying left him when someone who owned or controlled assets in excess of $500 million was aboard. Perhaps it was when he remarked that the rich are never satisfied, that there is never enough, and for a split second I saw that this was true, that if you get to the point of having to relieve your boredom with steak by eating nilgai, then nilgai will not be enough.

Along the way I began to be aware of something like a noise that I had mistaken for silence, the presence in the air of the imperative that says "Want" and "More." I began to think about the power that just the mention of large figures can have to dwarf the rest of life. Somebody says, "He got a quarter of a million for his book without writing a word," and suddenly the rest of the writing community seems reduced to the status of children. I thought about how the entrance of a wealthy person can change the atmosphere in a room; of how a person can seem different from other people if he is rich. I thought about ads, and credit cards, and the sharp desire that comes along every so often to have something very, very expensive, simply because it is expensive. (It's important to know how to satisfy this urge with bath salts rather than a Mercedes.) I thought about the difficulty I have from time to time when a contemporary achieves or marries in the upper reaches of wealth. I thought about my small son, in whose undefended soul the best minds on Madison Avenue are striving to carve the void of craving. Dealing honestly and effectively with this force is one of the most complex problems in child-raising these days. Sex and death, comparatively, are a breeze. How does one teach a child that the cornucopia of a consumer society is lots of fun (which it plainly is to him), but that's all it is? How does one arm him against the cycle of dissatisfaction without at the same time indoctrinating him with a pretentious and untruthful Puritanism? How does one teach him that money is grand but that attributing powers to it that it doesn't have can be lethal? How does one preserve his freedom of choice?

Lapham writes, "Obsession with money dulls the capacity for feeling and thought." His book makes you paranoid about greed in the way one can get paranoid about toxins in the food. One knows that toxins are present; the trick is to know at what point worrying about toxins becomes a disease in itself. (*)Money and Class in America. Lewis H. Lapham. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, $18.95.