How art forgot the arriviste

At the age of 23, I was invited to a party that promised “An evening with Pol Roger”. So there I was, at the appointed hour, holding my own and waiting for the star guest to show. Perhaps Mr Roger was something in politics (the host of the party is now an MP). Or a writer (rich people like books). I can’t remember who apprised me that, mate, Pol Roger is the stuff going round the room on trays. What I do recall: the sting of shame, the delight that no one had overheard, the inner resolve to learn and improve.

Apart from romance, with which it is bound up anyway, there is nothing like social climbing. It is emotionally exposing. It involves gradual estrangement from kin. It is at once personal and near-universal. In fact, social climbing is too bespoke a phrase for what is, after all, what most people are doing much of the time: trying to get on.

The zeitgeist author is Sally Rooney, the bard of disappointment, who resonates in an era of graduates living four to a house as they cross 30

For all these reasons, artists have rendered the subject in ways tragic (Jay Gatsby), sweet (David Copperfield), complex (Rastignac) and broad (Del Boy). It might be the story in all drama, a way of retelling the Odyssey but with a big house as the ultimate prize in place of Ithaca.

Now here are some of the most talked-about dramas of our own time. Succession: a show about rich people vying to stay rich. Downton Abbey: a show about an aristocracy going to seed. Fleabag: a show about treading water. When there is individual go-getting — Top Boy, Breaking Bad — it is often in the context of crime. The zeitgeist author is Sally Rooney, the bard of disappointment, who resonates in an era of graduates living four to a house as they cross 30.

Then there is the telling seriousness with which sci-fi is now taken. Sci-fi, or fantasy, or “genre”, invents closed worlds that abstract away from our own social hierarchy. Characters face challenges (smite this orc or whatever) but not the classic one of material self-betterment.

Where did the arriviste go? What explains, on page and on screen, the jaded, anti-aspirational mood? Well, look who is making the stuff. The Economist’s Bagehot columnist wrote last month that, in publishing, “every third person is called Sophie”. The same is true in theatre, galleries, television and the features end of journalism. As pay is so much worse than in the corporate professions, and cities ever dearer, creative work tends to attract people who have parental help with living costs. If there is social mobility in their lives, it is on a mild downward gradient.

The result is a blind spot for unironic ambition — for the parvenu. I don’t mean they are snobbish or mocking about it, in the Anthony Powell style. It is just invisible to them. None of which would matter if they didn’t set the weather in culture and entertainment.

The Sophies (and Thoms and Jaspers) would say they are just reflecting the cynicism of a generation. There is no such thing as a generation. It is too big a unit to be defined by one experience or rite, unless there is a world war going on. Within Gen Z and the millennials are millions of successful or wannabe Gatsbys. This is still a society of desperate striving. It is there not just in the corporate world but in the motivational speakers laid on by Pentecostal churches in my childhood district of London, or in the lost boys following Andrew Tate and other online hucksters. It is as much the spirit of the age as the offbeat languor of what is really a small sect of society, privileged enough to have high expectations in the first place.

Forced to say what is difficult about middle age, I wouldn’t cite the slackening of the skin or the retiring of once beloved clothes or even the creeping awareness of death. It is the lack of something to hustle towards. I’ll keep inveigling myself into ever higher gradations of the urban upper-middle. I might perform a great leap of hypergamy. But the will is only half-there. I have got most of what I wanted. Sophisticated ennui, I can tell novelists and screenwriters, isn’t where the drama of life is. I was poorer, gaucher, worse-read, less confident and much, much more alive at 23 than I am now, a stalwart Pol-lover but more of a Taittinger man. 

Email Janan at [email protected]

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