![]() NEW YORK ? The family nicknames give them away: Tad, Dorie, Nan, Timmie, Daisy. ‘Wasps emerge from the womb wrinkly and cautious, already vice presidents, already fifty-two.Click here for a list of local libraries in our area. ‘Preppies are infantile and optimistic, for ever stuck at age seventeen,’ says Friend. Wasps are too prematurely care-worn to truckle to the delusion of optimism. The ‘cheerful money’ of the title refers to his parents’ tradition of rewarding their children with cash tokens for exhibiting a perky and upbeat attitude, though Friend explains that such perkiness should never be confused with optimism, which is a preppy rather than a Wasp attribute. But the Wasp outlook is still ingrained in the DNA of a swathe of boys and girls educated at Ivy League or Seven Sisters colleges and their feeder schools - even those like Friend who are captivated by the casual, unbuttoned ease of their Eurotrash college friends.įriend’s memoir is always wry and often extremely funny. Since the social stature of Wasps has declined, their style has been co-opted into the wider culture by such outsider tastemakers as Martha Stewart (Catholic) and Ralph Lauren (Jewish). Boozing was de rigueur among earlier generations of Wasps, ‘as long as it conformed to protocols designed to avert the word “alcoholic”’.Ī Wasp would never break a sweat in the metaphorical sense: ‘Visibly striving or seriousness of purpose is unWasp because it suggests you aren’t yet - haven’t always been - at the top.’ Yet the top remains ultimately unattainable: ‘No matter how inside they seem, Wasps always sense a further circle just beyond reach.’ Self-criticism is a social norm: ‘Wasps live on the narrow margin between consciousness of their bad habits and preoccupation with their faults.’ While Wasp food is nutritious and well presented, there is never quite enough of it on the table. As with the British upper class, it is ‘acceptable for Wasps to discuss necessary expenses ($18,000 for a new roof, the shocking price of heating oil) but not elective expenses and never income’. Propagation is a duty rather than an urge and Wasp women ‘labour under son-and-heir anxieties like those of Henry VIII’s wives’. They are inveterate list-makers, especially the women. They enjoy reciting achievements, not just their own. So what are some of the things that make a Wasp? Wasps are credentialists. Regarding the last of these, he explains in a dryly self-deprecating manner (another Wasp trait) that ‘a woman I fooled around with in my early twenties told me, years later, that she had to get a new mattress and headboard after I remarked on her “game-show bed”.’ What makes this book so affecting is that its author is not sure whether he approves of his Wasp heritage or not, but is nonetheless ‘drawn to what we had in great part because it’s gone - drawn to the ruinous romance of loss’.ĭespite some un-Waspish attributes - he belongs to no club, prefers beer to hard liquor, and enjoys pop culture - Friend harbours enough classic Wasp traits to admit the pull of his caste: an awkward body language, a conservative dress sense, an aloofness, a feeling of disconnection from his parents, a judgmental aversion to non-Wasp taste, and an effortless capacity to render non-Wasps ‘a little uneasy’. And the first to abstain from church, to give God a rest.’ All four of Friend’s grandparents were Wasps, and his parents were the last Wasp generation ‘to grow up with servants who took care of the meals and the children and the bother’, whereas his own generation was ‘the last to receive silver christening cups and to be taken shopping for the chain mail of adulthood - camel hair coats and Brooks Bros suits and Lloyd & Haig shoes. By the mid-1960s the certainties of the Wasp world were fraying. There were Southern conservatives and later Sunbelt conservatives, but traditional Wasps were predominantly Rockefeller Republicans, conservatives with a conscience.Īt the height of Wasp power and influence, around the turn of the century, industrial and financial fortunes were combined with civic and academic leadership. But it is also geographically confined to the North-east of the United States, with an entrepôt in the Georgetown district of Washington, DC. ‘Wasp’ is a more elastic term than it might at first appear to be, since it embraces those Americans of northwestern European origin in general, not just those of British origin - though the signatories of the Declaration of Independence were of exclusively British extraction.
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