The Art of American Sophistication

The prompt, let’s say, is “American sophistication.” What does it make the L.L.M. in our heads, trawling the riverbed of our old reading and viewing, produce? Whom do we think of first? Fred Astaire, I suspect, still comes to mind as the exemplar, even among many of those who know him only from stills or streaming. And, if we have a rudimentary knowledge of who he was and where he came from, we can begin to discern a larger pattern: he was not a New Yorker but a Midwesterner, a boy from Omaha, Nebraska, pushed along by a strenuous stage mother, the son of an Austrian Jewish father. His distinctive manner was eerily captured by Scott Fitzgerald, himself a refugee from the Middle West, in his description of Gatsby, another escaped Midwesterner, as someone possessing “that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American . . . He was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand.” Astaire to the life. He could have played the part perfectly.

For that matter, Cole Porter, Astaire’s greatest word-giver and another model of sophistication, as we commonly use the word, arrived at Yale from Peru, Indiana. So perhaps American sophistication is something that begins, like a Broadway show, out of town. But is this more a general rule than an American peculiarity? Maurice Chevalier and Cary Grant are the first two names that the prompt might supply for France and England. Chevalier was the working-class son of an alcoholic housepainter; Cary, born Archibald Leach, was neglected by his father, a tailor’s presser, and became a travelling acrobat before immigrating to New York. His debonair manner—which came to embody an American ideal of sophistication even more than an English one—was as hard-won as Edmund Hillary’s summit. Much the same can be said of Noël Coward, who learned his crisp enunciation through sheer aspirational effort. The one poshly reared product of high-period Hollywood was Humphrey Bogart, who grew up in a wealthy Manhattan household among private schools and tennis courts, and whose authentic upper-class sneer first found its natural American use as the expression of a desperate, cornered criminal.

Sophistication, one begins to think, is a thing won against the grain of privilege—a substitute for it, a social sleight of hand. A “classy” entertainer is almost never someone from the upper classes; sophisticated people are mostly smart people passing as rich people. At its sharpest, this inversion conferred titles of nobility on those denied social ease: the only Americans ever credibly, rather than jeeringly, called Duke and Count were Black musicians who spent their exhausted lives on buses and trains, and in segregated diners. At the same time, the Wasp élite regarded the top-hat-and-tails sophistication of the Astaire sort as amusingly forced and fraudulent, their own sophistication being evidenced by slightly frayed trousers, white-bread sandwiches, and suits worn for half a century. (There’s a whole world of Wasp resorts whose positive value is their sheer shabbiness.) Only truly sophisticated taste, in this code, grasps the superiority of deprivation over the more ethnic notions of actual comfort and good food.

Now Ross Posnock, an emeritus professor at Columbia who has previously written thoughtfully on Philip Roth, among many other subjects, offers an encyclopedic study of this one, “American Sophistication: How the Casual Became Cool” (Princeton). The book is breathtakingly large in scope and purpose, tracking the ideal from pre-Revolutionary America to the postmodern age. Almost flamboyantly digressive and parenthetical—with long excursions into Henry James’s memoirs and the elegance, or lack of it, among the Partisan Review crowd—it will invite plenty of quarrels and cavils. A good thing, since a book of this kind should provide stimulation rather than what Humpty Dumpty would have called a knockdown argument. A big, comprehensive book on, say, the history of cancer or the evolution of astrophysics should give us irreproachable information and sound conclusions. But from a book on a general squishy human subject like sophistication or masculinity or eros we want something else. We don’t need to be persuaded; we want to be provoked.

And we are, so much so that we might come to think that the idea of sophistication, like that of intelligence, is a composite chimera, hardly worth analyzing. Yet we know what we mean when we use it. A Paul Simon song like “Something So Right,” with its jazzy dominant ninth chords, is sophisticated in a way that “Bridge Over Troubled Water” is not. The term seems to imply a mastery of all the resources of a form, displayed in a surprising context without self-conscious artfulness. That’s Astaire: a perfectionist with Mozartean skills as a tap dancer but no pretensions to ballet. Or Ellington, a genius of harmony, one of whose greatest surviving works is a dance-hall concert recorded in Fargo. No one would think to call Stravinsky or Mondrian “sophisticated” in this sense, since their reputations already assume it. Sophistication implies a rising from a simpler background. You could do it the obvious way; you chose another.

Posnock’s pages on Astaire and Ellington are among those in which the argument locks most satisfyingly into place while still striking some original notes. He sees Astaire as both “a glorious exception to the rule of American ambivalence about sophistication” and “a distinctive version of that anxiety.” One expression of that anxiety, he shrewdly points out, is Astaire’s almost invariable pairing in the classic R.K.O. films not just with Ginger Rogers but with a fussy, effete opposite number, often Edward Everett Horton, Jr., whose presence marks Astaire’s dancing more securely as masculine.

Posnock is equally good on Ellington’s cultivation of “composure,” an achieved serenity in music and life alike, and on the repressed anger that this presumably cost him. He tellingly quotes the photographer Gordon Parks on Ellington’s “socializing of cool”: “Ellington never grinned. He smiled. Ellington never shuffled. He strode. It was ‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,’ never ‘How y’all doin’?’ ” He was extending into Black show business the strict code that he had learned in his Black bourgeois family, in Washington, D.C. Yet, Posnock notes, “his statement of transparent filial piety contains a wink within its sincerity, a reminder of the artifice involved in possessing a manner”—a truth that he could well have confided to Astaire.

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.)

Curiously, Posnock is cautious, even grudging, toward the apotheosis of this moment and this style in the brief Presidency of J.F.K., whose apparent display of sophistication he treats skeptically, as a kind of façade drawn up for the masses, a goatee painted on his face by Jackie. But, compared with his predecessors and successors, J.F.K. really does seem to incarnate both types of American sophistication: he knew how to dress and how to make a dry joke, and he was genuinely erudite, at least given the field. He didn’t entirely write the books he bylined, but his enthusiasm for David Cecil’s “The Young Melbourne” was very real.

In a work so dense with references, mistakes will sprout like crabgrass; write a big book on André Le Nôtre’s formal gardens and the earthworm experts will gather to deride your confusion. The more you know the ground, the more crabgrass you see. So The New Yorker, in developing its distinct sophisticated voice, wasn’t really trying to be “urbane”; its decisive turn came when the anti-urbane E. B. White and James Thurber became the magazine’s voice, insisting that nothing could be more chic than to reminisce about Columbus, Ohio, or escape to Maine. The magazine’s urbanity lay in the anti-urbanism of its singular voices. Its most characteristic contributor, John Updike, left New York as quickly as he could for the fleshpots of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and made that and its people his subject for half a century. (Posnock also makes perhaps unduly heavy weather of the opening scene of the 2022 movie “Tár,” treating a scripted exchange—in which a character bearing this writer’s name and impersonated by this writer interviews a fictional musician—as though it were a spontaneous metropolitan conversation.)

A larger idea survives these local confusions and is neatly summed up by Posnock’s subtitle: casualness added to elegance is the particularly American contribution to the kind. Ellington and Astaire are surely instant winners by this definition. Like any general truth about a vast country and culture over a long period of time, it is bound to be a half-truth, but, then, all sociological truths are half-truths, and this one seems hardy enough to make its half as close to whole as we can hope to get.

But is a more illuminating idea missing from his account of American sophistication, one that perhaps most neatly distinguishes it from older European kinds? Since the Renaissance, the European ideal has rested on the pursuit, or, rather, the nonpursuit, of sprezzatura, unhurried grace, an ideal Posnock recognizes and celebrates. Certainly, the greatest image of sophistication ever conjured is Raphael’s 1514 portrait, now in the Louvre, of Baldassare Castiglione, who gave the ideal its name. The work is a miracle of resourcefulness: a “Venetian” portrait, painterly, almost monotone, and shimmering, by an Urbinate trained in sharp-edged drawing. Its point, if a painting can be said to have a point, is that the perfect gentleman doesn’t make a fuss, just as he doesn’t overdress. It is a pasquinade against posing.

Yet Castiglione’s sprezzatura, though humane, is not in itself charming. American sophistication has its sprezzatura—Astaire made an art of it—but characteristically turns effortlessness outward, into charm, something ingratiating and democratic-seeming. Charm is what turns the arriviste’s effort into a social gift. As the Cambridge critic Adrian Poole and others have observed, Henry James uses “charm” over and over, almost obsessively, the way Shakespeare uses “sweet” as his highest term of praise. It belongs to James’s own inescapable Americanness, and to his effort to delineate an American style. No English or French author would have used it in quite the same way. Proust uses “charme” often enough, but usually to mark the limits of an illusion. We are charmed by the charming Odette as a snake is charmed, held swaying in wonder, only to be disillusioned afterward.

American “charm,” as James incarnates it in characters from Daisy Miller, in her own novella, to Isabel Archer, in “The Portrait of a Lady,” is a kind of weaponized naïveté: innocence about the rules joined to impatience with following them, which wins the hearts of those who know the rules and would secretly rather not see them followed. What James means by “charm” is naïveté married to aesthetic ambition. Behind American sophistication lies the charm of American ambition: not where we find ourselves effortlessly but where we’ve put ourselves purposefully. Daisy wants to see the Colosseum by moonlight; it’s a foolish, and ultimately fatal, ambition, but in its way a fine one. Astaire’s dance steps are always directional, carrying him somewhere and toward something—the girl, the boat, the park bench.

And that alloy of innocence and impatience connects Astaire with Grant, whose tone, though we call it “sophisticated,” is less hauteur than genial affability punctuated by exasperation. The balance is intelligence against impatience, warmth against energy: the physical restlessness of Gatsby and Astaire, or Whistler’s refusal of finish, the most American of painters in his very expatriation, who said that “completeness is a reason for ceasing to exist.” The late Calvin Tomkins’s “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” a biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy, describes how an overeager American couple became, through a kind of wonderful unself-conscious bluff, the cynosure of European modernity. The Murphys went to the South of France off-season, both a terribly ingenuous choice and a shrewdly worldly one that everyone copied. That mix of wide-eyed naïveté and pragmatic nous does seem typically American. Even Ellington’s willed composure is the composure of the afterglow, to use a term he liked—the calm that follows exertion, rather than the grace that pretends exertion never happened.

Posnock ends, dourly but necessarily, on the inevitable evil figure: Donald Trump as the opposite of any kind of sophistication. Instead, this “graceless” figure reminds us that true sophistication can help immunize us against “the depths of the subterranean.” Yet America was once, and at moments still is, a place of passionate pilgrims and new arrivals; as the old advertising slogan put it, We try harder.

When my wife and I first arrived in New York, we went, as often as we could afford, to the Bemelmans Bar, then a dark, cool, largely unvisited place at the Carlyle Hotel, with its beautiful, half-lit, uncleaned murals of children in an imaginary Central Park. (I went after my first seminar report and was so unprepared for the effects of a Black Russian on a grad student that I passed out and had to be lifted from the carpet by the Italian waiters.) It was our nearest approach to sophistication. Later, it became an object of amusement to our genuinely sophisticated friends, one of whom sent a photo of Ludwig Bemelmans with the slightly supercilious text “See you at the bar!” There was something naïve about our twentysomething readiness to try on so roomy an overcoat of sophistication, but, looking back, I suppose that this could have been . . . part of our charm. If there was doubtless something pathetic in the pursuit—we could have been down at CBGB, being punks—all culture begins in imitation, with the hope of growing into what one pretends to be.

Nowadays, the Bemelmans Bar overflows with tourists fresh off the bus and twentysomethings who have pre-screened it on Instagram, and has lost its old, beautiful emptiness, but doubtless the same pull that drew us draws them. Perhaps sophistication is not a way of feeling superior to the world but a wish that the world would itself become superior. Sophistication seems a shared longing more than a set style; it’s the desire to see the world shine brighter than it does while still knowing that all the light that shines from it is the light we bring to it. In a darkening time, maybe it isn’t so shabby an aspiration. The luminous Bemelmans himself began his life in New York as a busboy, was then promoted to waiter, and only afterward emerged as an artist: one more ambitious American arriviste, like Astaire, like Porter, like Gatsby, like the rest of us. ♦

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