Il Va Sans Dire
It goes without saying that Joe Queenan’s newest self-deprecating/myth-puncturing piece on New York is boss — bitchen’ in fact. Last time we caught him it was about the Eight Vermeers — Eight Reasons New York is Better — something we still laugh about.
This time, the message is simple — try as you might, there’s always someone more pretentious than you in New York:
New York City has long been a magnet for pretentious individuals from the heartland. Reared in stolid communities whose bedrock values discourage intellectual flamboyance, not to mention preciousness, the incipiently affected find that their witty aperçus regarding Couperin’s keyboard filigree and Henri de Montherlant’s curiously anachronistic Iberian imagery are not well received.
This is particularly true in regions where a rigorously proletarian ethos prevails, where the mere mention of Bossuet, Tacitus, Poulenc, Unamuno or Hildegard von Bingen can result in social ostracism, physical violence, even death. It is hardly surprising, then, that New York, home to some of the most pretentious human beings this side of ancien régime Versailles, can ceaselessly replenish its stock of home-grown show-offs with fresh recruits from the provinces.
As a child growing up in a plangently blue-collar neighborhood in Philadelphia, I aspired to being hailed one day as the most pretentious person in the entire Delaware Valley. Alas, I quickly realized that I had set my sights too low. The first time I borrowed “The Child’s Suetonius” from the local bookmobile, it became clear that I had not only outstripped my peers for pure affectation, but was already one of the most highfalutin individuals in the City of Brotherly Love.
The first on my block to own Deryck Cooke’s controversial “performance version” of Mahler’s unfinished 10th Symphony, I soon became aware that I was brandishing my rapier in an arena where no one else could spell épée. I knew I must eventually make my way to New York, where a veritable army of the precociously snooty would be in a position to give me a run for my money.
Alas, like a Division III football star who learns to his chagrin that years of dominance in a subpar competitive environment have not prepared him for the National Football League, I recognized upon my arrival in New York that I was but a very small fish in a very big pond. This was driven home to me one night in the early 1970’s when I made the acquaintance of a young music aficionado who actually turned down tickets to see Vladimir Horowitz at Carnegie Hall because he had attended a recital given by the magnificent soprano Janet Baker the night before. “My ears are tuned for voice,” he explained. “I simply wouldn’t be able to enjoy a piano recital.”
This Buxtehudian rebuff thrust me into the deepest throes of depression. Though I had once read Gide’s “Immoraliste” in the cab of a 18-wheeler while hitchhiking to Dallas, I now recognized that there was something crudely one-dimensional about my brand of pretentiousness. The ostentatious preciosity I encountered in Gotham was deployed in a cunning attempt to astound the literati and awe the recondite. With my generic bons mots regarding Proust’s madeleines and Céline’s punctuational innovations, I felt like a mere piker.
In the 28 years I have lived in the New York area, I have labored diligently to heighten my level of pretentiousness. As much as humanly possible, I have endeavored to introduce the subject of Blaise Cendrar’s influence on Henry Miller’s “Colossus of Maroussi” into as many conversations as possible, and have been no slacker when it comes to deploring the unfair critical slighting of Octave Mirbeau’s “Jardin des Supplices.” But whenever I feel that I am really getting somewhere, I am brought crashing back to earth.
One night, I was attending a guitar recital by Sharon Isbin when a man sitting next to me asked another member of the audience if he could stop breathing so hard, as the whistling sound emanating from his capacious nostrils was “terribly distracting.”
Another time, a dinner guest asked my wife (an Englishwoman whose culturally incongruous name “Francesca” pronounced in the espagnola, not the italianata, style, first attracted me to her) if the garlic cloves in the coq au vin were mountain grown or cultivated on the lower summits of the precipice, as it was widely known that the medicinal qualities of the former vastly exceeded those of the latter. In each instance, I was compelled to admit that in the presence of such Ciceronian bloviating, I was but a rank amateur.
As I grow older, I must reluctantly admit that my prepubescent dreams of attaining the Olympian heights of mannered pedantry will never be realized. Insufficiently schooled in the arts of condescension, a failing I blame on my fatally plebian Schuylkill Valley upbringing, I accept that I while I may occasionally be deemed the most pretentious person in the room, I will never be anointed the most pretentious person in the ZIP code. In the realm of the Yankees, I am but a lowly Astro.
This truth was driven home to me not long ago when I was standing in line at a Duane Reade pharmacy near Lincoln Center. I was on my way to hear Alicia de Larrocha’s farewell performance with the New York Philharmonic when my companion emitted a slight cough. A middle-aged woman standing directly in front of her immediately jumped out of line and covered her face as if she had been spat upon She stood glaring at us for several minutes while I made my purchase, then softened and apologized. “I’m sorry for reacting like that,” the stranger explained, “but you coughed on me, and I am a singer.”
This was not Cecilia Bartoli who addressed us. From the looks of it, the weather-beaten chanteuse may have been the lead singer in a Blondie tribute band. But I felt my heart soar as I once again realized that I was in the presence of a pretension so manicured, so recherché, that my feeble prattling about the late works of Shusaku Endo seemed jejune by comparison.
As a youth, I had dreamed of one day being acclaimed the most pretentious man in Manhattan. Ruefully, I now realized that I should have stayed in the Quaker City, where the great unwashed would still be impressed by my ability to hum Fauré’s “Berceuse.” Despite years of adventitious allusions to Marguerite Yourcenar, Cyril Tourneur and, of course, Alessandro Stradella, I had never gotten much further than being a coy smarty-pants. My dreams of morphing into a full-blown gasbag would never come to fruition.
It was a heartbreak, il va sans dire, that I would carry to the grave.
Bonus Points: “Eight Reasons New York is Better” (reprint)
Posted: January 9th, 2005 | Filed under: Sliding Into The Abyss Of Elitism & Pretentiousness