The Art of American Sophistication
Posnock is also strong on what someone must have named the Grant-Leach dichotomy, and he generally lands on the right people and the right points. He has a flair for aphorism: “Sophistication insists that being and appearing coincide. We do not express sophistication; we appear sophisticated.” (True, certainly, of Astaire and Ellington.)
A persistent difficulty, though, is that Posnock seems to use “sophistication” to describe two very different categories of people, without ever quite distinguishing between them. There is the term as we use it of Astaire or Ellington. That’s Sophistication One: effortless elegance and apparent ease. But he also uses it in another way, Sophistication Two, for people who are broadly erudite across a surprising range of subjects, such as the New Yorker critic Edmund Wilson, whom he greatly admires—but whom one can’t imagine in a top hat, or even in a well-cut suit, or as an ornament at a dinner party.
The members of the first clan are hardly intellectual at all; indeed, the follies of intellect are part of what they mock or, in Grant’s case, have to escape to become worthy of Katharine Hepburn (e.g., “Bringing Up Baby”). The members of the second clan, meanwhile, can’t be relied on to dance or to wear clothes well—just look at the images of Wilson on the beach at Truro, holding forth in a dress shirt. A very few figures cross or combine the two types, most notably Leonard Bernstein, to whom Posnock devotes some good pages. Bernstein was a know-it-all who was also a showoff, to put it bluntly, with both qualities neatly packaged as high style. If we need an ideal type of the American sophisticate, Bernstein is it.
And what, as Edward Everett Horton might have sighed sibilantly in one of those R.K.O. movies, of the distaff side? The book is a bit thin on sophisticated ladies. Several friends of mine, when prompted, gave Jackie O. as their first choice; she appears here only briefly, as an adjunct to J.F.K. Hepburn gets a single reference against Grant’s multiple ones. Sadly scanted are the still underrated writers Dawn Powell and Anita Loos, whose genius for putting extremely canny judgments in the mouth of her seeming simpleton Lorelei Lee is exactly what we mean by a sophisticated joke. The novelist and journalist Mary McCarthy, by contrast, is discussed at length, though her inclusion even in the second sense seems unconvincing. What gives her work its bite is not so much assured knowingness as a persistently disingenuous sense of surprise. Florence, sex on trains, the Vietnam War, Lillian Hellman’s dishonesty—McCarthy registers a kind of wide-eyed disbelief at everything she encounters.
The book does eventually reveal an arc and find a climax. Posnock firmly identifies the nineteen-fifties as the high-water mark of American sophistication. From there, he rises to a kind of grand unified theory of the subject, complete with a family tree: “Younger New York sophisticates coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s, among them Mike Nichols, Jean Stein, Sontag, Jason Epstein, Baldwin, Avedon, George Plimpton, and Stephen Sondheim, affirmed urbanity as if a birthright (and in some cases, it in fact was) and their inevitable subject matter.” He continues, “Inspiring both generations were the Olympian models of national sophistication who had been reigning since the 1920s and 1930s: Astaire, Ellington, Grant, and Katharine Hepburn”—a “critical mass of sophistication as enacted ideal.”
He rightly insists that the satirical duo of Nichols and Elaine May were the most rewarding and complex comedians of their time, or ours, because they built their act around a failed sophistication, in their improvised characters, that presupposed an achieved sophistication in their audience scarcely imaginable a decade earlier. They harvested the comic fruit of the great revolution in liberal education, which marked the period when, as Auden wrote, soldiers who had stood up to the Nazi assault were now “shot to pieces by the shorter / Poems of Donne.” The great Nichols-and-May lines—“I can never believe that Bartók died on Central Park West,” or, on Albert Schweitzer, that he was “a lot of laughs” though “I personally have never dated him”—still ring as portraits of arrivistes eager to show that they know what everyone around them is expected to know. (The two met, it turns out, at the University of Chicago during its great heyday, though neither graduated, and May didn’t even enroll.)
