Money and Class in America by Lewis H. Lapham

Author:Lewis H. Lapham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Nonfiction
Publisher: OR Books
Published: 2018-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

private

the self

feeling

simplicity

expression

the country

innocence

public

the world

thought

complexity

art

the city

experience

By and large this same system of value defines the cosmology of recent American literature, which, with few notable exceptions, constitutes another of the American rituals of innocence. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the country’s better writers (among them Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, William Dean Howells, Henry Adams, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Thorstein Veblen, John Dos Passos, H.L. Mencken and Dorothy Parker) still could discuss the mechanics of money. The sardonic spirit was never dominant, but prior to 1945 it still could reflect the temperament of a people who didn’t take themselves too seriously, who could afford to laugh at their own absurdity. After the war, and more obviously through the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, the voices became muffled in abstraction and overlaid with the gloss of metaphor.

Like any other crowd of arrivistes, the newly rich society wished to put as much distance as possible between its place of residence and its place of business. Polite opinion became too solemn to tolerate affronts to its dignity, and it was as impolite to discuss money in “serious fiction” as it was to mention the subject in the drawing room. Among writers applying for membership in the company of immortals a well-bred lack of knowledge about money, or anything else that stunk of the marketplace, served as proof of a refined sensibility.

Beyond the flowering borders of John Updike’s prose, the country recklessly abandoned itself to a frenzy of conspicuous consumption. All kinds of vulgar people went about the vulgar business of making vulgar fortunes. The booms in real estate matched or surpassed the booms in electronics, in the record and publishing industries, in television, in professional sports, in oil and arbitrage. Excited herds jostled to get into the best deal, the most prestigious resort, the most expensive store. In Washington the government joined the orgy of speculation. Through a sequence of Democratic and Republican administrations the government inflated the currency to float the bubble of prosperity. Congressmen ordered new suites of offices and assistants. President Lyndon Johnson pronounced the country rich enough to afford both the luxury of peace and the sport of war. The Defense Department approved cost overruns amounting to many billions of dollars for weapons so ornate and ineffectual as to bear comparison to the poodles kept by the plutocracy in the Newport of the 1890s. Vulgar journalists, of course, were allowed to talk about such things; such was their métier, and they were expected to provide the stuff of gossip—about deals, mergers, the gold and credit markets. So also the commercial authors who, like Harold Robbins, could talk about the so-called real world with as much license as the anonymous chroniclers at Forbes, Newsweek and The National Enquirer.

But in the spheres of writing specifically and self-consciously literary none of the acquisitive frenzy of the period intruded upon the solemn contemplation of the self. Most of the writers were themselves rich. Having been well brought up

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