Through the good offices of InterLibrary Loan, I have
borrowed a 1959 volume of British humor (or humour) from the Seattle Public Library
entitled The New Book of Snobs, being
a collection of pieces commissioned by Punch magazine that describe various
species of snob. When I ordered the
book, I had persuaded myself that the book might possibly reach back to include
some of Ashley Sterne's snob articles from Pan
in 1920. No such luck.
Nevertheless, the book has its delights. British writers of 1959 still generally preserved
the hallmarks of British comic literature – irony, wit, and erudite allusion –
that flowered in the years following the Great War. I especially enjoyed the lead-off article,
"Drink," written by Tom Girtin.
A Google search indicated that Girtin (1913-1994) wrote a flurry of comic
fiction in the late 1950s: Come Landlord
(1957), a fictionalized account of a pub landlord; Not Entirely Serious (1958), a tale about "a civilian entangled in the military machine that was the Home Service Command;" and Unnatural Break (1959), a commercial
novel. On the strength of my
appreciation of Girtin's snob piece, I ordered Come Landlord from a London used book store and should receive the book
in six weeks. (From this estimated
arrival date, I must assume that the book will be traveling to America in the hold
of some tramp freighter.)
Here is the first part of Tom Girtin's snobbery article
"Drink." I took particular
delight in his arcane but apt reference to the abstemious Old Testament clan of the
Rechabites.
* * *
DRINK
Since almost the whole joy of Snobbery lies in the act of
communicating the sense of your superiority it is of course essential that your
victim should speak, or at any rate understand, the same language. And for this reason the Drink Snob is in a
peculiarly happy position: literally the whole world is his prairie
oyster. Anybody can play. For the inescapable truth is that every one
of us must, in order to sustain life, drink something; and although when snobbery
in drinking is mentioned thoughts turn snobbishly to wine, yet snobs every bit
as accomplished are to found among both Rechabites and non-denominational
water-drinkers.
Consider, for example, the following incident involving
those old troupers A, B, and C:
A (gulping water
thirstily): A-a-a-a-ah!
B: The best water I've tasted anywhere – and as you know
I've knocked around a bit – came from a little stream in the hills at the back
of St.-Jean-de-Luz, of all places.
C: Water? Never touch
it meself. Rusts the guts, hahahah.
In this incident B is a straight snob. C is an inverted snob, though it looks as if
he may also be a straight snob in the sub-species of "over-indulgence
snobs" who, on the basis of a "session" on light ale, wish to be
thought devil-may-care hard-drinking characters.
On the evidence before us, A is not a snob at all – but he
may be an inverted snob who, by drinking water, is trying to prove something –
perhaps that he has the common touch and does not mind using a chained metal cup
belonging to the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association.
The number of permutations and combinations that can be read
into this one simple incident gives uneasy intimations of the vast unplumbed
depths that face the explorer.
When the successful preparation of a beverage involves a
more or less complicated ritual the opportunities for the snob are correspondingly
increased. The connoisseur will have
long since noted with malicious pleasure that in tea-drinking the problem
whether the milk shall be placed in the cup first or last has actually ceased
to be a matter of taste and has become one of class. Moreover, among tea-drinkers there is always a
place for the inverted snob with his reminder that the best tea you could get
anywhere was in the Army: "You can have all your China teas – just give me
a cup of 'gunfire' (that's what we called it, 'gunfire'), where old Cookie just
flung the tea-leaves and sugar together into the boiling water in a
dixie."
