AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Cheerful money tad friend9/13/2023 So I ended up spending my inheritance and then some on psychoanalysis. Most of all, I am a Wasp because I harbored a feeling of disconnection from my parents, as they had from their parents, and their parents had from their parents. Bean to the north, the shingle style to the east, Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed polar expeditions to the south, and the limits of Horace Greeley’s optimism to the west.”Īs part of his inheritance of that tradition, Friend describes himself as “frugal to the point of cheapness - when out to dinner with friends, I used to contribute only for the dishes I had ordered. They lived in a floating Ruritania loosely bounded by L.L. George McClellan, who so tormented Abraham Lincoln.įriend’s vast circle of increasingly erratic, often alarming relations included uncles who carried on multinational affairs and wore white tropical suits to winter weddings, an aunt who donned pearls with her Keds and another who swam nude in her New England ponds.Ī cousin, who attacked his own brother with a knife, was taken first to Bellevue and then to Ward’s Island, “where he kept declaring, ‘I am John Trumbull Robinson the Third,’ incredulous that the storied name didn’t precipitate his immediate release.”Īh, the storied WASP sense of entitlement.Īs Friend defines his tribe, “Wasps were circumscribed less by skin tone and religion than by a set of traditions and expectations, cast of mind. “Head in the oven, and so forth.”) She was good with decorating and rather clueless with her children.īoth the elder Friends descended from English stock that had arrived in the 1600s, and the roster of their notable forebears included the feckless but overbearing Union Gen. (“Just as well I didn’t win,” she would say of the contest. His mother, a Smith grad and still-life painter who’d once finished second to Sylvia Plath in a student poetry competition judged by W.H. The author’s father was president of Swarthmore and managed their dwindling inherited finances. The exercise of power in Britain (more specifically, in England) cannot be understood unless it is recognized that it is exercised socially.”įriend, 47, grew up in the American circles in which a particular kind of power once was exercised socially, though, as he points out, by the mid-1960s those social bonds were fraying into lace as the fortunes that had sustained it bled away. Fairlie described how, following the well-connected traitors’ defection to Moscow, their families had been shielded from attention by other members of their influential social circle, which the writer - perhaps borrowing from the more familiar “Established Church” - labeled “the establishment.” “By the ‘Establishment,’ ” Fairlie wrote, “I do not only mean the centers of official power - though they are certainly part of it - but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised. The noun “establishment” was popularized by the English journalist Henry Fairlie in a 1955 Spectator essay on the Soviet spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Are there Anglo-Saxons of another hue? (Actually, as a sociologist, he was famously dismissive of quantitative methods, so perhaps he simply was unfamiliar with the stricture against multiplying categories beyond necessity.) Digby Baltzell first used the acronym WASP to describe white Americans descended from Anglo-Saxon Protestant stock in his 1964 book, “The Protestant Establishment.” Baltzell himself came from impeccably WASP-ish stock, but the designation “white” always has seemed curiously superfluous. University of Pennsylvania sociologist E. The terms “WASP” and “establishment,” usually linked, are so ubiquitous and deeply embedded in our consciousness that it’s seldom recalled that they’re of rather recent vintage. ![]() Friend is one of those journalists with an admirable eye for the telling detail, and his writing is at its best when he makes his point by allowing them to accumulate evocatively. Tad Friend’s “Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor” is a memoir of growing up in the once unassailable American ruling class - and of a long personal struggle to shed some of the emotional baggage such a lineage conferred.Īs one would expect from the author of the New Yorker magazine’s deftly observed “Letters From California,” Friend’s recollections of WASP America in the throes of decline are frequently amusing, carefully modulated, occasionally wearying and unfailingly stylish.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |