Am I a snob?

 

Am I a snob? The short answer is yes. But since I am a snob, I will take advantage of my snobbish status and digress a little about my snobbishness, as snobs are supposed – or expected - to do.

Virginia Woolf’s definition in her excellent essay Am I a snob? Is:

The essence of snobbery is that you want to impress other people. The snob is a flutter-brained, hare-brained creature so little satisfied with his or her own standing that in order to consolidate it he or she is always flourishing a title or an honour in other people's faces so that they may believe, and help him to believe what he does not really believe - that he or she is somehow a person of importance.

As for myself, my snobbish has been mostly an intellectual snobbishness, not a social one – but I guess it could be considered also social, in the way everything we do is intended to affect our relation to others, so it has a social meaning, even if not related to class. Maybe it started because my parents were so intellectually brilliant so I, as their child, felt I had to prove my own intelligence to keep up to their standards. Also, being a skinny kid awful at sports and feeling awkward in an ugly and unattractive body, my intelligence and wit were my biggest assets. Anyway, my snobbishness helped me to cope.

One of the ways my snobbishness is shown is in my literary snobbishness. I’ve always been a voracious reader, and of course I always loved to appreciate the right books, the classics and the cool contemporary books, and fortunately I have been able to get a great pleasure from reading them. But I also enjoyed reading cheap comics and corny books like my grandmother’s favorite The Redbreast of the Mill. They became a kind of guilty pleasures, like enjoying the musical Cats or a few soaps on television. But then, aren’t intelligent people allowed these harmless dalliances in popular culture? One feels comforted to read the Bruce Chatwin’s account when he visited Nadezhda Mandeltsam and brought some thrillers, and he said something like “I hope they’re not literary works, I want real trash!”

I’m writing about this on account of a recent clash with my literary snobbishness. A few years ago, a dear friend gave me a book by Maria Teresa Horta, a fictionalized biography of the Marquesa de Alorna, an 18^th century Portuguese poetess. Well, Maria Teresa Horta is someone I’ve always laughed off as the kind of feminist that would burn bras in the 60s, and whose writing was, as a friend of mine described it, “very feminine, very open-legged”.  So I shelved the book, and didn’t think about it until recently, bored and having nothing better to read, I took it from the shelf and started reading it.

And then, I’m actually enjoying it! Yes, the writing is often corny, using the same images again and again, too many descriptions of dresses and jewelry. But the subject is quite interesting, and the book seems reasonably well researched. So I’m enjoying reading a Maria Teresa Horta book; how is that for a snob?