The Sound of Status

Early this morning a fat white envelope shot through my front door and hit the hall floor with the noise that only folding money can make, and in consequence I was out of bed and beside the visitor in one concupiscent stride. But instead of the anticipated package of negotiable artwork, all I found was something claiming on its exterior to have been dispatched from the Office of the Director of an organization calling itself Voice Improvement Programme (V.I.P. — get it? Yukyuk-yuk!). It was addressed to me specifically, even down to my first name, accurately spelled, and marked PERSONAL: To be opened only by the person to whom addressed.

I reeled, stricken.

Now, as any dropout student of English mores will tell you, a gentleman is identified by the noise he makes, above all else. Despite our feeble post-war scratchings at classlessness and our acquisition of a non-Etonian Prime Minister, the one true lubricant for anyone wishing to insinuate himself into High Society is still an accent. An accent is implanted in a gentleman early on, along with his rusks and talc. Not having any firsthand knowledge of the actual process, I can only pass on the rumor that highborn offspring are snatched from their cribs at birth and worked on rather in the manner of those Chinese baby girls who have their feet stuffed into eggeups: a ceremonial pebble (which has been in the family since before the Norman conquest) is slipped under the infant tongue, the lips are sewn together to leave a minuscule gap, and the child is then forced to read the social column of the Times for the next ten years in a high, clear voice. Thereafter, he is crated up and mailed to Eton for a further crash program in gentilesse, after which he is sent either to Beirut to secure oil rights, or to America to sell soft drinks. The accent is his trustiest piece of ordnance; it falls on the ear like a hacksaw cutting through thin steel, is generally accompanied by a brusque, sibilant laugh reminiscent of feet running through Rice Krispies, and conjures up visions of Waterloo, coronations, dependability, experience, and polo.

I, of course, never had any of this. In my family, it was considered a victory over the Evil Eye if a child learned to speak at all before he was eight, and as soon as I had discovered that a tongue-and-lip set could be used for employment other than spitting on the dog, I was handed to the state education authorities for them to do with me as they saw fit. But, being a canny child and realizing that one of the few ways out of penury for a workingclass mite in those days was to marry above his station, I set out to acquire the aforementioned trappings of breeding. Slowly, painstakingly, by listening to Conservative campaign speeches and the BBC and hanging around posh hotel lobbies in a hired tuxedo, I grew to be virtually indistinguishable from a genuine gentleman. I had a larynx the exercise of which could make headwaiters, policemen, tradespeople, tax officials, and cabdrivers fawn and cringe in a way that sent the burgeoning ego delirious with joy. I also married well.

And now, suddenly, this envelope had threatened the work of twenty years with overnight destruction; it doesn’t take long to unfrock a forged gentleman when the lower orders get wind of the fraud. Word passes from mailman to hall porter to delivery boys to tradesmen with all the crackling urgency and ravenous destructiveness of a brush fire. And the contents of this envelope were known to all, since the organization involved has been blasting every communications medium with its nefarious ads for weeks past. Across from our apartment block, in fact, is a billboard showing a debonair male socialite snowing a nubile debutante, while in the background loiters a thing like a human toad, ignored by the beautiful pair and staring at them in abject misery. Above this little tragedy runs the legend: YOUR FRIENDS CAN’T TELL YOU & YOUR BUSINESS ASSOCIATES WON’T. In slightly smaller print, the rejected fink is recommended to drag himself off to the nearest Voice Improvement Programme agent and buy his way out of purdah with one of their matchless elocution-andsocial-grace courses.

I opened the V.I.P. envelope. Apart from a dozen horrifying cautionary tales about accentlcss men who’d been driven into the social wilderness to die, it contained a Selfanalysis Speech Test, which included such delectable probings as: Are you effective and forceful? Does your voice express the efficiency and confidence that mark a leader of men? Are you ever caught in mistakes of grammar or vocabulary or pronunciation which instantly shatter the opinions others may have formed of you? Nor was this all: the V.I.P. boys, having got their subject paralyzed with fear over his social standing, pushed the thing ever deeper. Is, they asked, the pitch of your voice always appropriate to your sex, or does anxiety cause you sometimes to become shrill and piercing?

So. Here I was, with all the old, half-forgotten insecurity flooding! back, not at the fact of having this paltry challenge to my self-esteem, but at the knowledge that everyone by now, by due process of grapevine, would be unshakable in the belief that I had myself written off to these loathsome voicemongers. Why else should the envelope have been addressed to me personally? Suppose my wife were to find out? It’s hard for me to convey adequately to an American reader exactly what class betrayal means, even to the bestadjusted marriages, but a little of the effect can be translated if you imagine Grace Kelly marrying Prince Rainier and taking him home only to find she’d been coupled to Ernest Borgnine in a rubber mask, till death did them part.

It was while I was sitting there on the hall carpet amid the smoldering ruins of my life, wondering how long it would be before the paper boy engraved “TRAITOR” on my car, or the grocer closed my account, or the hall porter threw my visitors out on their ear, or my bank manager sued for recovery of my overdraft, when I noticed a second envelope lying near the first. This, too, was large and impressive, carried chunks of hysterical verbiage on its exterior, and was marked PERSONAL: To be opened only by the person to whom it is addressed. I picked it up. The person to whom, et cetera, wasn’t me this time, but my wife, who also appeared to be on firstname terms with the sender. But the latter was no underhand predator on self-confidence and reputation: it was something entitled Athena Reproductions and announced its mission with a Picasso sketch of Don Quixote above its name. I knew this gang too; but they are a very different kettle of promoters from the V.I.P. boys. They carefully preselect people deemed worthy of their attention as connoisseurs of Great Art, people who can afford and appreciate fine paintings, people of natural taste, upbringing, and loot. I opened the envelope. It contained, along with the handout, a personal letter from the director of the Art Selection Board. And no nonsense about mispronunciations, crass stupidity, and high hermaphrodite voices, either; just a yard of cool baby talk telling my wife about how there were only a handful of people who were capable of loving Great Art, and she was one of them; and how would she like to fork out an ingot or two for the chance of further enriching her already matchless cultural life?

It was then that it dawned on me that this was no mere coincidence of mailing lists. It was a planned accident perpetrated by some dark agency which had no interest in bringing Clear, Forceful Voices to the mumbling lower orders, or Vermeers to the cognoscenti; its aim was viciously to put asunder those whom God had joined together— to remind my wife that she was of a higher order, tricked into the enseamed bed of a yahoo, beneath whose bland polished surface lay the hirsute personality and coarse Cockney voice of the rebellious proletariat, a personality prepared, should the moment demand it, to change sex during periods of anxiety, a squeaky vulgarian threat to her birthright who must be immediately expunged.

You, no doubt, insulated behind your golden door, have already marked down this organization as the figment of a diseased and persecuted imagination. But this only betrays a pitiful ignorance of contemporary England, and of the insidious power of an aristocracy that refuses to yield to the pressures of democracy. The emergence of a worker-leader, the spread of affluence, the extension of equal opportunity have only served to weld the beleaguered nobility into a more determined and united force. Who can doubt that in some subterranean cavern beneath St. James’s or Park Lane, the Waffenkommando of the upper classes meets and plots and acts, sifting marriage lines and birth certificates, analyzing millions of marriages, drawing graphs of status and lineage, compiling its register of victims? Their aim is social purification, their dream the first upperclass revolution in the history of the world. The rending of that basic social unit, the family, is but the first stage of a vast nationwide campaign, and I, quite clearly and sickeningly, am already marked down for an early tumbrel. For me and my class, it will be, as Kipling foresaw, a case of watching the wall, my darlings, while the gentlemen go by. And waiting for the touch of cold steel on the unprotected kidney.

Because that is the way gentlemen are. I know. I used to be one myself.