Well, having stuck a pin in a particular balloon yesterday, as the air has been slowly escaping (as it were), I have been inundated by memories of when I've been snobbish, and, perhaps, its origins in my life. This doesn't seem to be a moment for sitting on anything and letting it fester, especially if it might speak to anyone else's condition, as the Quakers say.
I guess it should come as no surprise that most of my snobbishness stems from my twin passions for English church music and England itself. I've told the story of my joining the girls' choir at church, and realizing with a shock that I wouldn't be singing with the men and boys. I wouldn't be singing the repertoire that I had already started to love. Despite the fact that I pivoted as quickly as possible into "I'll be the best girl chorister that I can be" mode, and began piano and organ lessons, the fact is that being so firmly excluded from a world I felt so strongly called to be a part of was traumatic and (as is evident from my writing in this blog) I've never gotten over it. As a teenager, I wore my Royal School of Church Music medallion over my choir robe with a lot of pride, perhaps a little too much. Ditto my pride at being in the choir of Royal Holloway in 1980 -- I soaked up the experience like a sponge, and yet never afterwards had a place to "put" all the expertise in singing choral evensong and that specific genre of music. In recent years, when I have attended services at English cathedrals, I felt actively superior to most of the tourists in the stalls or pews around me. I knew when to stand, when to sit, when to say the confession, and the words of the hymns and canticles by heart, and it probably showed. I mean, it is one thing to adore the music and the environs and the glorious acoustics. It's quite another to feel superior to the people around you. My only consolation is that perhaps being blocked from doing your true work, and being (myself) condescended to at times in that world, has this kind of effect. I had a "ton" of knowledge, skill, and musicality within me, of which only perhaps a few pounds has made its way out over the years. Some of it came out, uh, inappropriately.
Of course the larger England thing comes to me genetically, although early on I didn't really understand that. But from when I was about eight to fifteen, my family lived what could only be described as an upper crust WASP lifestyle. We had the big house, the oriental carpets, the bits of sterling silver, the summer cabin away from the city. I attended a private school, and slowly, the layers of assumptions that came with that privilege started to pile up. A relative passed on some genealogical material with our almost exclusively English heritage (some of it aristocratic), which I became fascinated with. And the original "Upstairs, Downstairs" started airing on TV in 1971, when I was in tenth grade. (I resonated most with Upstairs...)
Ironically, that was the very moment when our family's fortunes were in the process of taking an extreme turn, in part because there had been no "fortune" in the first place! Soon after my high school graduation in 1973, we moved out of the swank house and up to the North Country, where my parents would live year-round in our cabin for the next dozen years or so. I would come home from college or my early jobs to find no food in the fridge, no gas in the car, and my dad asking to "borrow" money. Again, shock seemed to be the catalyst for snobbery. I held onto my supposedly upper crust roots like a life preserver. On and off, washing dishes at my Smith College house's dining room, or being the downstairs nanny in the home of a prominent family, or living at the YWCA in Helena, I would pinch myself and try to remind myself of my real roots, my real persona. I held onto -- as I still do -- a few small silver bowls, spoons, and picture frames. Now, finding certain things beautiful, preferable, or enjoyable is fine. If I could have simply said, these things are important and beautiful to me, it would have been fine. But to the extent that I have at times tried to make myself feel better about my ongoing situation by thinking that I am actually superior to other people, as I do on many occasions such as on the bus the other day, that is decidedly not OK.
My dad's aunts were the epitome of snobbishness...think Maggie Smith in "Downton Abbey", minus the sense of humor! I was rather scared of them, to be honest. When I was in my thirties, I went to see one of them for the first time since childhood. I rang the doorbell, and my great aunt answered the door, looked me over, and exclaimed in a most imperious voice, "I must say, Elizabeth, you don't look like a Wilson!" (She would laugh if she would see me at 70, the spitting image of my father.) She spent the first half of the weekend making these kinds of cutting remarks, before I finally started standing up to her and showing a little moxie. By the end of the visit, I think she began to like me, and gave me two gifts which were telling -- and useless...a mink stole and a copy of The Social Register.
Well, I guess that is all I can manage for today. Snobbery seems like a relatively minor thing by comparison with what we are seeing in the world today, but still, it isn't love. It's like the curving upper slope of something that can turn downhill fast, into rejection, outright discrimination, and hatred. And there are snobberies in a lot of areas of life...I am sure I haven't covered all of mine in this "confession", but it is a start.
