Where there's a will, there's a won't

Despite its centrality to their lives, people have difficulty understanding money.  Most seem to think they simply want more. For the truly impoverished this is perfectly right. But beyond a certain point - the yuppie level - the power and meaning of money shifts subtly. 

Money begins to scale.  Twice as much gives you the same real spending power because the value halves.  Similarly the perception threshold of money - the smallest sum which you are aware of as a conscious act of spending - rises in direct proportion to the amount of money you possess.  The widow's mite bites back.

This impotence has occurred throughout history.  Whenever a ruling class attains a critical level of material wealth, it loses the ability to appreciate absolute value.  The commonest response - a consequence of habit - is to seek ever more money in the mistaken belief that there is further threshold beyond which money regains its pristine power.  Hence the limitless rapacity of those already rich beyond most people's conception, and the larger urge to empire.  Ancient Rome, imperial Spain, and Victorian England all maintained its favoured classes in sybaritic luxury.  And in all of them, the result of this superfluity was first ennui, then a gradual slipping into excesses - usually sexual - followed by terminal decline and eclipse.

The most recent manifestation of this recurrent historical process is America.   The high level of material comfort has meant that for many people possession is but a signature on a credit card slip away.  Already the first two stages of ennui and excess have set in.

Americans are bored with the materialism they strive for so obsessively.  The foreign cars, large-screen colour TVs, jacuzzis and personal computers have become the basic starting point not the goal.  As a result, the nation is totally at the mercy of fads and crazes.  However absurd, novelty seems to offer the possibility of new satisfactions, though inevitably transitory ones.  For the same reason, Americans acquire fur-lined cars or inlay diamonds in their teeth.  They are all attempts to widen the boundary of acquisition.  It is the original frontier spirit driven mad by running out of frontiers. 

The group worst affected are the yuppies.  They have been brought up on the credo of wanting equals getting.  They are the conspicuous achievers; but the rose of their success is cankered.  They have not only attained the critical level of wealth where money loses its power and pleasure, they have achieved it young.  They have nowhere to go, and half a century in which to get there.

And so we are beginning to see the ultimate irony of a generation predicated upon desire and its fulfilment lose the ability to want.  Everything has been too easy.  It is like living in a cursed castle where every wish is granted: soon it is too much effort even to wish.  A generation which began as gilded youth has become gelded.  All we can do now is stand back and wait for the messy backlash.

(15.2.87)

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The baby boomers

The history of the developed world in the second half of the twentieth century has been shaped by the trajectory of a great wave.  That wave is the passage of the post-war baby-boomer generation through the successive stages of life.

The wave began with the surge in the number of births back in the optimistic fifties; its flotsam includes the current surplus of red-brick schools and the plate-glass universities - testaments to the generation's progress through the educational system in the sixties and seventies.  Now that wave has turned into a second deluge; the baby boomers have been transmogrified by quirks of economics and history into the eighties insufferably affluent and ebullient yuppies.

Today they cover the green places of the earth like locusts.  They can be seen at myriad sports clubs, their bodies aglow with health and the pastel shades of designer sweatshirts; to cater for their unabashed appetites, new and exotic restaurants open daily; everywhere the style machine offers the essential but ephemeral rags, mags, books and looks.  But as the yuppies’ age profile slouches towards a peak around 30, many are being forced to face the omnipresent but unasked question which lies at the heart of their lifestyle: just what do you aspire to after you have achieved your £25,000 salary, the South London flat and company BMW? 

The answer is babies. Yuppie couples everywhere are espousing a way of life that seems an abnegation of all that yuppiedom stands for: the 24-hour freedom, egotistical self-projection, and constant storming of the successive citadels of ambition.  Instead they appear to be opting for the nuclear family, moderation, altruism.  A renaissance in the nannying profession will doubtless cushion the impact of this shift.  The need to pay for this increasingly sought-after and expensive commodity will also provide the perfect excuse to return to the world of the crowded filofax.

On the one hand a baby represents the ultimate consumable.  It is more interactive than the Gaggia machine, and higher tech than a CD player or Amstrad word-processor.  It even offers that most important of yuppie prerequisites, constant change.  The one thing they dread is running out of new experiences.  Babies come with built-in programmes of development; just start them up and watch them go - batteries not included. 

But the baby is more than the latest accessory.  It is an affirmation that the yuppie has grown up, is an adult.  For all their sophistication and worldly wealth, the baby boomers are aware that they are premature, that they have succeeded before their time.  It is as if their whole lifestyle were a kind of illicit sherbet liquorice, bought with pennies stolen from their mother's purse.  In their heart of hearts, they know that conspicuous consumption is simply a ploy to impress their parents.  Babies are the ultimate counter in this game.  See, they seem to say, like you we have children; ergo, we are no longer children.  What is worrying is the thought of this new baby boom thirty years hence as they battle it out with their still-redoubtable parents, now progressed from yuppies to euppies - ex urban professionals. 

(5.2.87)

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The discreet charm of Perrier

What is it about Perrier that accounts for its fizzing success? Why does it seem to be on the lips - and in the mouth - of practically every yuppie around?

For aesthetes, there is the clear attraction of the bottle.  Not since the first introduction of the Coke bottle has a shape so impressed itself on a generation and summed up an era.  Its lines are smooth and unhurried, with a classic amplitude which reminds you of Rodin, a delicacy of curve that is positively Brancusi.  It could almost be a Greek artefact, miraculously preserved in some southern French port after a long journey from Neapolis.  It is the embodiment of the Platonic essence of bottleness; as such it deserves no less than to be the carrier for the essence of liquidness: water. 

But perhaps that water is more central to its appeal than its form.  In fact it goes some way to negating the studied artistry of its container.  On the one hand, you see the ultimate in artifice, a bottle which somehow represents the summation of the bottler's art, a lifetime's - perhaps a chain of lifetimes' - experience refined and solidified.  On the other we have the simplest compound in the world - water.  Tasteless, odourless and colourless, it is utterly self-effacing.  It is almost a rebuke to its bottle.

But the power of the imagery of water is too strong; even a beautifully gross encapsulation cannot dim its bright purity.  And this is what the punters are buying: they are purchasing a symbolic purification, conveniently sold in bottles.  It is a token of their own rarefaction, of the fact that they are not constrained by gross mortal needs.  No vulgar sticky Coca Cola for them. Each cool green bottle bespeaks a moral refinement, a self-control, attained only by the chosen.  It says: "See, I have chosen almost nothing; so subtle are my tastes that I can derive pleasure even from this." 

Perrier is the ichor of the bronzed gods and goddesses who live and die by the Nautilus machine.  It argues the same rigour, the same sense of sustained self-improvement and maintained asceticism as gritty physical exertion and tight-kneed celibacy.  It is a statement about the depraved and corrupt times in which we live, and in which its drinkers have no part save as wiser and happier onlookers.

But where water on its own would be passive, and quite out of sorts with the dynamism which lies at the heart of the near manically active yuppie.  Perrier has a further attraction, which is at the same time its own emblem: effervescence.  It is nothing, mere invisible gas.  It is a mysterious quality, only released when the bottle is opened.  It is the ultimate metaphor for its consumers: people who pre-eminently fizz.

However, like all great and deep trends, the pursuit of Perrier contains within it the seeds of its own destruction.  Lately we have witnessed the ultimate perversion: flavoured Perrier.  It could well be that the languorous tear-shaped bottle becomes a fitting memorial too.

(30.6.86)

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Symphony in white

Everywhere you go there are white cars: white Golfs, white Peugeots, white Escorts.  And not just any model; always the boy racers, the young professional's car.  These are the white chariots of yuppie desire.

This white mood is clearly part of a generation, not an era.  It is not the late eighties which display this dazzling candour: it belongs to the prime inhabitants of the late eighties.  They are making their distinctive mark, and that mark has no colour.

Which is just as they would wish it.  For above all, they value style, and they value sophistication.  They are a supremely self-aware generation; they are as incapable of the crass naivety of the 60s as they are of the blind nihilism of the 70s.  Unlike those generations they do not judge society; nor do they want to change it, not even from within the citadel.  They do not need to: they are the generation of success, a success so sure of itself that it is self-image not social milieu which counts.

A success of this purity demands an almost religious dedication; they are expert in it, professionals at it.  As befits this band of serious-minded succeeders, they dress for action; they know that you dress for success.  Hence the resurgence of black business suits, suits which say nothing and therefore everything about you.  And along with that severest of tones there is its opposite.  Both transcend mere colour, and instead aspire to intensity.  Both are ciphers - riddles and zeros. 

And just as nothing is stronger than these nothing colours, so nothing is more modern.  Pure black and white are timeless, and therefore of the future.  Which is where all yuppies are heading, because it is there that success awaits them.  Yuppiedom differs from the American Dream because it is real where the other is illusion, and because it is happening now.  The American Dream always happens in the next canyon, or on the next block.

This future love explains in part the yuppies' obsession with technology, their never-ending romance with cellular telephones, with computers, with compact discs.  As well as saying "I am the future, and I am there now", technology is the ultimate yuppie weapon.  The down-and-going older generation is caught on the horns of a dilemma: it is afraid of technology, and knows that it will bring about its downfall.  But it also knows that technology is the future: to deny it is to deny the future, to deny their own future, and hand it to the generation already waiting there for history to catch them up.

The white car is an example of vanishing technology, in the same way that the ever-smaller microcomputer, or the ever-more portable phone is.  The logical limit of technology is its own negation as its power increases to the point where it disappears - the computer on a pinhead.  The white car proclaims its effortless technology at the same time as it effaces itself in empty blankness.  As a marrying of brute power and sleek engineering, as a perfect symbol of the mobility - along rather than up - of the young professional, and as an unarguable monument to having arrived, the white car of the yuppie leaves everything else standing.

(27.8.86)

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The carwash

In American TV sitcoms of the 60s, there was a ritual which occurred with such regularity that it assumed an almost iconic significance in the genre.  At some point, in a manner that could be either central to the plot or totally tangential, somebody would clean the family car.  Family because such comedies almost invariably dealt with nuclear groups, either perfect, imperfect or potential.  Car and not cars because people had not yet attained the consumer nirvana of multiple car ownership.

The ritual almost always took place in the front drive.  It therefore became a social act, and assumed a proportionately greater significance.  First, it said "we have a car."  That is, that the family had arrived on the first rung of the materialistic ladder.  Secondly, it said "we look after our car.”   The Puritan virtues of labour and cleanliness combine in a non-productive activity which nonetheless asserts a set of middle class values central to the American self-image at that time.

How things have changed.  Today, to be seen sloshing water over a soapy car is to cut a figure of fun.  Anyone who aspires to be a member of the culturally dominant generation - yuppies today, as in the 60s it was the newly-affluent middle-aged middle classes - uses a carwash.

The carwash is the one of the pantheon of perfect yuppie machines.  It is fully automated, and its robotics, albeit crude, meshes with the hi-tech world of cellular phones, Amstrad word-processors and CD players.  It is slightly surreal, with green nylon brushes spinning and rolling over the car like dervishes in a kind of manic caress, and the obscene dangling orifice of the hot-air dryer.  This controlled bizarrerie, because it is totally impersonal, affords the driver an opportunity to maintain the requisite coolness throughout the operation.  This is in stark contrast with the 60s approach; it is hard to be stylish with a chammy leather.

Because the process is automatic, it can be provided round the clock.  This kind of eternal availability is part of the yuppie credo which says that Thou shalt not be constrained by petty limitations such as time of day.  What could be cooler than roaring up to a 24-hour petrol station at three in the morning and sluicing down the car?  Nor is this just a luxury: it is a necessity.  Unlike 60s carwashers who wish to proclaim to the world that they are cleaning the car, because such an act of purgation is in itself praiseworthy, the latterday equivalents must maintain the impression that their car never needs cleaning; that it retains its gleaming pristine state whatever escapades its owner puts it through.  In this, the car, here as so often one of the truest symbols of yuppiedom, must mirror its keeper.  For as we all know, come what may, the locks and looks remain untrammelled, the dress still immaculate - and the corresponding success assured. 

The carwash has joined the lavatory as one of the yuppy unmentionables.  It is a monument to unstylish things.  It is further evidence that the post-modern stylists stand in opposition to the neo-realists with their earth and dirt.  For the yuppies such grime and grit is about as desirable as the eponymous Kitchen Sink and about as suitable for their cars.

Carwash, 866/(10.10.86)

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The Golden Gate

Originally all novels were in verse.  Except that they used to be called epics: the Iliad, the Aeneid.  The introduction of writing weakened the oral tradition which lay at the root of these works, and allowed the form to be watered down by prose.  Prose was also simpler to write, and better suited to the years following the fall of the Roman Empire when civilisation itself was enfeebled and precarious.

The verse novel made a come-back in the later Middle Ages, when a new spirit of poetry was in the air.  If Dante’s Commedia is backward-looking in its inclusiveness, its attempt to explain everything and assign it its place in an ordered universe, there were many other works which were more modern, and paradoxically truer to their hidden ancient roots.  Works such as Le Roman de la Rose, all the Arthurian poetic cycles, and the new epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso.

Later still, this poetry became merely the heightened form of prose, and produced glittering Augustan gems like Pope’s Essay on Man, or Swift’s diatribes.  It took the passion of the Romantics, heirs to the medieval story-tellers in verse, to marry verse and narrative once more.  The prime examples are probably Byron’s Don Juan, and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.

And so the cycle goes on.  After falling into decades of neglect, the verse novel has burst upon the scene once more.  Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate is a tale for our times, an everyday story of yuppies in San Francisco as they battle with the tricky years of their twenties.  If nothing else, the book is a remarkable tour-de-force.  Using Pushkin’s verse form,  Seth manages to produce smooth-running lines which rarely seem short-breathed despite their unusual tetrameter length.  Equally the rhyme scheme is never obtrusive, and there are some masterly matches worthy of Byron.

And yet there is something not quite right about the enterprise.  It would be too easy to lay this at the door of Mr Seth’s English.  He wield a formidable vocabulary with an assurance that passes beyond dictionary definitions.  His dodgem skill at careering round the corners of short lines and awkward rhymes is exemplary.  The problem lies deeper, and has to do with overall pace and structure.

Certain forms require a certain breadth of approach.  It is no accident that Wagner’s operas are monster: he was attempting the largest of themes, and needed space to accommodate them.  Similarly, it is instructive to note that Byron’s Don Juan is conceived on the largest scale.  Seth’s work is not.  A lot happens – these are, after all, yuppies; many characters are introduced, and rounded sketches attempted.  But there is jut not enough space.  This problem is exacerbated by the fine but totally unbalancing sermon in chapter seven.

Having mastered the form so fluently, and writing compellingly about issues which affect even non-yuppies, Seth should have had the courage to write at the length they deserved.  In the end, the book’s worst fault is that there is not enough of it; some fault.

(27.8.86)

See also Moody Sonnets - Pushkin’s “What if?”

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