In a Climate of Wealth
Mink on Weekdays.
by Felicia Lamport.
Houghton, Mifflin. 309pp. $3.00.
“The very rich are different from us,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald, and was right at least in the sense that wealth creates Lebensraum for particular qualities of character. Benevolence, quizzicalness, a general blandness in the face of surprises—these are the sprouts of a wealthy climate. In that indulgent world where chambermaids are changed once a week, carrots served in the shape of birds, religious orthodoxies tempered to whim, and babies wear mink on weekdays, it is gratuitous to treat oneself or one’s experience intensely.
Felicia Lamport, born to the casual manner, affectionately mocks the prodigious circumstances of her youth, which permitted unwanted eggs to be dumped onto Fifth Avenue, and glutted her with culture like determined hostesses. By the time she was ten, she and her sister had been catapulted from Fräulein to Mademoiselle, through tennis, swimming, piano, golf, trips abroad, and “responsibility” in the shape of twelve chicks and an un-housebroken lamb. They had heard of a cache-sexe, were read to at night from the works of Madame la Comtesse de Ségur, but could never join the literary discussions of their contemporaries who were reading The Five Little Peppers and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. They said their prayers in four different languages, “rather like a report to God of our linguistic accomplishments to date.”
The Lamport zeal to educate their young is understandable when one sees that they regarded skills and knowledge as simply another kind of possession. They may have found these the most tantalizing possessions of all, since they could infinitely prolong the act of acquisition, pursuing them in new forms when Parisian gloves and linens began to pall. Property is heroine, plot, and stage-set for Mink on Weekdays—it is the fifth dimension in which the Lamports move. If they are distinguished from the dreary rich, it is by that hearty sensuality which teaches them how to use property without being intimidated by it. Still they never can get away from their belongings. Their strong opinions, even their eccentricities, always concern “things.”
In some respects, property makes the whole world kin. At least, it makes for a world that recognizes only its own demarcations and exclusions. And in the universe of property, the Jew momentarily loses his displacement and becomes a citizen. The Lamports, though Jewish, are never excluded from anything. They cannot be: they are consumers on too large a scale as well as mass producers of their own pleasure. In summer, the cornucopia of their lawn-party food and hospitality deflects members from the country club next door. At home, they furnish the costumes for their costume parties. Their servants intermarry: prudish French governess versus Japanese libertine. They are able to incorporate into their front rooms the “feeling” of Palestine, hold out for interior decorators with the Byzantine spirit, and manifest upon their walls “interpretations” in bas-relief of the Dead Sea, the Jordan, Rachel’s Tomb, and the Long View of Jerusalem with Orange Groves in Foreground. Since all Lamport experience ultimately refers back to such private palpable consummations, what place or relevance remains for class or religious barriers, for snobbery or malaise? Mrs. Lamport, who leads the family crusades, empirically discovers that a Swede can possess a unique instinct for the geography of Palestine, a dress model may turn out to be a kindred spirit during an intimate discussion of haute couture, and a Japanese butler turn into a master of Chinese-American chow mein.
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The elder Lamports enact a kind of holiday Jewishness that their Gentile servants take more seriously than they themselves do. Felicia’s father, caught absentmindedly munching a grape on Yom Kippur, proceeds to an apple with defensive bravado—“might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.” The laws of the Lamport kitchen are kosher, but the nursery obeys its pediatrician’s commandment to serve bacon. The real defender of the faith is Jo, the Japanese butler. When the maid takes two plates from the shelves, he follows her into the dining room. “ ‘Clala!’ he said dramatically, ‘God gonna stlike you dead. You got milkik plate touching fleikik plate.’ ” (I have, incidentally, been authoritatively informed that the Japanese cannot pronounce l’ s. Either Felicia’s memory was tricked by a conventional stereotype or Jo was a Chinese in disguise.)
Though Mrs. Lamport’s frivolous matriarchy is described in the Clarence Day tradition, Father is a classic Jewish figure in his skeptical, punning obeisance. Felicia writes of her parents’ Judaism in the vaguely affectionate tone an agnostic Protestant son might take toward his parents’ churchgoing. Her descriptions of Jewish life read like an aunt’s letter about the antics of nephews and nieces that she providentially need not take home with her. Her own humor is not really Jewish: everything is so much taken for granted that there is no residue of tension from which a comic notion might leap. Mink on Weekdays does take a humorous attitude toward pomp and circumstance, and some episodes are funny, but only to the extent—and with the unreal sprightliness—of the college column. How can the reminiscence of this vivid leisure-class life turn into a fundamentally dim and sagging account? Perhaps property is jealous of the mind, and exerts itself to censor the imagination.
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