Thinking About Taste

   My own bad taste once took the form of a white gold pinky ring that I bought at an antiques fair when I was nineteen. It was around Christmas, I think, and I remember that its stone was a deep lilac in color. An amethyst, though I didn’t know at the time that its round unfaceted cut was called a cabochon. I wore it until my mid-twenties. Then I got rid of it, and really there is no excuse for that ring. My father didn’t wear any jewelry beyond his watch and wedding band, and neither do I, now. But I had a dandyish streak, it marked me off from other kids, there was something fin de siecle about it, and I thought it was what I then called classy. I can explain that ring but I cringe whenever I think of it, and I suppose it wasn’t all that different from the gold chains worn by some of the boys with whom I played high-school football.

Or I don’t know. Bad taste? Not in itself. Maybe for me, but not for others. Yes, that’s what that ring was, it was in bad taste for me, out of keeping with the person I wanted to become.

 

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The Portrait of a Lady, Chapter XXIX, and Isabel Osmond sits in her Roman hotel in “a wilderness of yellow upholstery,” though not only yellow; the furniture is orange and the walls “draped in purple and gilt.” Gilbert Osmond has come to propose, and finds the place “ugly to distress; the false colours, the sham splendor were like vulgar, bragging, lying talk.” Just the kind of talk he ought to recognize, in fact, being so good at it himself, so good that almost nobody suspects it of him. Isabel will refuse him that night, but a few years and eight chapters later, when Osmond has married both her and her money, he has a room of his own done up in yellow; and there the young connoisseur Edward Rosier will sit and talk with his beloved, Osmond’s little daughter Pansy.

The room’s furniture comes from the French First Empire, and Rosier has already been taken there to admire a clock of the same period, an “immense classical structure” that Henry James tells us he “didn’t really admire.” In fact he finds the room remarkably “ugly,” the same word Osmond had used for that hotel, and I think we can trust him on that. He recognizes the good things that Osmond does have, almost all of them acquired before this new marriage, and Rosier himself will later sell his own dec arts—his bibelots—at auction for more than he ever imagined. This particular room, Pansy says, is meant for summer, and it’s done in “papa’s taste; he has so much.” And Rosier agrees. Osmond has “a good deal…but some of it was very bad.” Let’s stipulate that that includes the yellow-upholstered furniture as well as that clock. We already know that Osmond once found that color oppressive. What’s made him change his mind? James doesn’t tell us, but maybe there’s a clue in something he’s earlier said to his one-time mistress, Serena Merle. She has complimented the taste with which he has decorated the rooms of his apartment in Florence. They’re adorable, she says, and he replies that he’s “sick of my adorable taste.” I wouldn’t put it past him to pick something he thought ugly, and then hug himself in sneering delight, hating those who actually like it. The irony is that Rosier shares Osmond’s original taste, and judges him by it as well.

Moreover that upholstery has a corollary. Osmond can’t accept the idea of Rosier as a son-in-law, and when the young man goes up to shake hands Osmond sticks out his left, and without turning to face his guest squarely. The furniture is in bad taste. That’s an aesthetic flaw, one that inheres neither in objects nor persons, but in the relation between them. But the bit with the hand is tasteless. It is literally and deliberately gauche, not an object but a form of behavior; an ethical lapse, and one belonging to Osmond alone.

 

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Another classic text. Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park is in love with Mary Crawford. He’s a newly-ordained minister and has never been comfortable with the London-bred raciness of her conversation, but he does admire her beauty and charm. Only there’s a difficulty, something beyond his doubts of her readiness to serve as a country clergyman’s wife. One of the things I’ve always loved about Jane Austen is the way she lets you believe that manners and morals are as one. Not that they’re transitive: rather morals dictate manners. No bad person in her world is ever truly polite, and even the good ones have much to learn. Mr. Darcy doesn’t think the Bennets are worth considering at the start of Pride and Prejudice and so he doesn’t consider them; ditto with the insult the eponymous Emma delivers to Miss Bates near the end of that novel, when her exasperated cleverness makes her think that a good line is worth any amount of rudeness. Neither has learned to take other people’s feelings into account, and so their manners fail them. Or perhaps we can say that their actions want taste, for in Austen those qualities are indeed synonyms. Both Darcy and Emma will get their second chances. But Mary Crawford’s taste goes missing in a way that is much, much worse, and Austen will grant her no possibility of improvement or reform.

Edmund is on the verge of proposing when the news comes that his married sister Maria has run off with Mary’s brother Henry; my apology for all these names. They’re shacking up in some hidden place, and what is to be done now? Edmund cannot possibly marry her after what has happened, after the shame her family has brought upon his. Or can he? When they meet Mary begins by condemning the “folly of our relations,” yet to her it is only folly. Their real mistake lies in being caught. And anyway, Henry isn’t to blame, Maria is just a squeeze, and none of this would have happened if only Edmund’s poor mouse of a cousin Fanny had agreed to marry the man, as everyone wanted. The reformed rake would have made the best of husbands.

Edmund is horrified by her levity, but still unwilling to condemn her. Their wooing must be over, but her faults aren’t those of “temper,” and she’s only spoken “as she had been used to hearing others speak.” Though he then contradicts himself, for he also describes her flaws as those of “principle, of blunted delicacy and a corrupted, vitiated mind.” Which sounds like a fault of temper, temperament, to me. But there’s worse. He turns to go, and she comes after him. “Mr. Bertram,” she says, and smiles, a “saucy playful smile, seeming to invite, in order to subdue.” A seductive smile, out of keeping with their conversation, a sexy smile, and who knows what might have happened if he had stayed a minute more?

Darcy’s and Emma’s bad manners almost cost them their future. Mary’s does. Her vitiated mind makes her misjudge the situation. She can’t read Edmund at all, she doesn’t see the need for gravity, and both her words and her smile are wildly inappropriate. Look, our sibs are doing it, why shouldn’t we? That’s what her smile says. And her behavior too I will call not merely tactless but tasteless.

 

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One of Richard Taruskin’s best essays is the darting, dizzying work of cultural history that he called “Taste, Bad Taste, and Franz Liszt.” Taruskin argues that the idea of good taste–and hence bad–is a 19th century formation, and essentially bourgeois. You can have good taste in clothes or books or furniture, but the concept of taste itself, that unmodified word, belongs to an earlier and more aristocratic society. One either has it or one doesn’t, it is at once innate and objective. You might speak of someone as having a correct taste, but that too comes from a society in which there is, supposedly, but a single and stable standard of judgment; as stable, anyway, as the ancien régime believed itself to be.

Mozart had taste, not good taste, but taste; so Taruskin writes, quoting from a letter by Haydn. Gilbert Osmond has taste, or at least has persuaded people that he does. It’s part of his pose, passing his sensibility off as a survival from a lost world; Edward Rosier lacks that particular pretension, and spots the fraud. Taste for Taruskin implies a sense of what’s fitting, and when. But good taste—or more often the judgment that something is in bad—that’s essentially snobbish, a social weapon masquerading as an aesthetic category. (For evidence, click on the website called McMansion Hell, whose judgments I mostly agree with. It lets me look down on a lot of people who’ve got more money than I do.) There’s no arguing with taste: so we say, and take those words as a statement of open-minded relativism. But they could just as easily have meant, once, that there was no arguing with it because taste stood as an absolute value.

So where does that leave the tasteless, as a category? I sliced open a cantaloupe this morning, and found it had no flavor at all. It didn’t taste bad, and probably won’t for a few days yet, but instead was simply tasteless. My mouth had something in it, but it still felt empty. For the tasteless is an absence, a nullity; something missing that you expected to find. It isn’t the same as bad taste, and in terms of human behavior it entails instead a decision to ignore the whole question. It flouts any sense of what’s fitting. Osmond is conscious of that, Mary Crawford not so much.

 

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At the time I participated in Salmagundi’s fall 2023 symposium on “Taste” I was teaching a seminar on Edith Wharton. It’s a long class, once a week for 150 minutes, and I always give my students a break in the middle, telling them that this used to be when people would go out for a smoke. They look at me as if I’m crazy, and instead they stretch, or scroll through their phones, they head off to the toilet or refill their water bottles, and when they come back I take out a bag of chocolate and pass it around, knuckle-sized, foil-wrapped chunks of solid Dove dark. Except that once the store was out, and I bought a bag of milk chocolate instead. My students didn’t precisely complain but they did leave half of it uneaten, and when I asked they told me that dark bittersweet chocolate was objectively “better.” It was more “adult,” they claimed, more sophisticated, and then one of them explained or justified that preference. Grown-ups have a greater tolerance for bitter tastes, she said, it’s got something to do with changes in the flavor receptors on one’s tongue. Children prefer things sweeter, hence their preference for milk chocolate, like Hershey’s Kisses, where you can feel the sugar on your teeth. So: a developing taste and not simply a learned one, in these twenty-somethings, a mark of maturation, whatever the language they used to describe it. And I suppose that’s true; I prefer dark chocolate myself, and could also cite my own love of broccoli rabe. Still, what interests me here is that my students—antinomian, relativists in almost all other aspects of their lives—were entirely willing, indeed insistent, on erecting a hierarchy of tastes. Some things—some categories—were simply better than others, and I wondered for a minute if I could get them to be so firm in their judgments of movies, or books, or genres.

Well, as I said, we were reading Wharton, and maybe some of her own firmness had rubbed off on them. And not just Wharton, but The Custom of the Country, a book that depends on the juxtaposition of one taste to another. Undine Spragg likes writing paper the color of pigeon’s blood, and is startled to receive a note on plain white stock from a woman she’s been told is fashionable. She lives in a hotel called The Stentorian, all gilt surfaces and florid carpets, and is surprised at the slightly faded quality of an old family house on Washington Square, owned by people said to be “in society.” Its furniture is all dark mahogany, and its entry paved with a checkerboard of black and white marble: a place of “inner consciousness” as much as “outward form,” and one that offers a judgment on the “social disintegration” represented by the steel-framed palaces at the other end of Fifth Avenue. But it is also a place of kindness and quiet conversation, and in Wharton’s mind that’s inseparable from worn Turkey rugs and polished floors.

Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence sees his bookcases as “sincere,” for their shelves are open rather than glass-fronted; and thinks of “Taste,” unmodified, as the divinity of which “Form”—the right shoes and ties—is but the “visible representative.” Aesthetic choices are ethical ones for Wharton, no less than for Austen, but in a different time and country she often has to rig the plot to make it seem that way. Else why do only good people in Custom have good taste and come from “good” families? She herself would deny this. In The Decoration of Houses, the 1897 book that she co-wrote with the architect Ogden Codman Jr., she argued that “architecture addresses itself not to the moral sense, but to the eye….nothing can be more fallacious than to measure the architect’s action by an ethical standard.” Yet she often relies on a moral vocabulary to define what the eye sees, what it values. Sincere. The “best American houses,” she writes, “all contain imported, marble mantelpieces,” and that “best” does triple duty at least. We’re meant to laugh at Undine’s choice of papers, and to see it as inseparable from the way she treats husbands as disposable objects.

 

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T.S Eliot famously wrote that one function of criticism was the “correction of taste,” and Wharton would have agreed with him. That’s what The Decoration of Houses is about, a book dedicated to pointing out all the mistakes one can make about the placement of doors or the height of a ceiling. Though maybe that does it an injustice: at its best the book is a history of interior design, tracing the process through which the smaller (but still grand) private houses of her own day emerged from the city palaces and great country villas of earlier centuries. The note of correction remains, however, and in reading you can imagine her wincing at any dining room that isn’t lit, and lit alone, by “wax candles in side appliques or in a chandelier.”

But in truth it is all a muddle, this question of taste, a muddle in the way it confuses manners and morals with the things one eats and those one reads or looks at. How did they ever get so mixed together? Joseph Conrad once complained that no English word had clean edges. They all meant too many things at once, “instruments for exciting blurred emotions,” and “taste” is a good example. So is gout, for that matter, and you don’t need a qualifying adjective in either French or English to set that blurriness to work. I like wax candles too, only one at a time and on the table, and accompanied by dimmed electric lights. Nevertheless I’m suspicious of the moral language in which aesthetic preferences are so often defined, and I’ve gotten more suspicious as I get older, even or especially when those preferences are ones I share myself. So as a critic, a book reviewer, I no longer see my job as involving anything like the correction of taste. In my twenties, sure, that’s part of the game when you’re young, though in retrospect the negative reviews I doled out were never very convincing. I’ve always been happier in celebration, and haven’t yet felt the need to respond to any critical consensus I don’t share. My taste is my taste. It’s not the one I grew up with, not in all things anyway, it has been shaped and trained by the years, and I hope that it is at least informed. I will defend it, defining what I like and why, and yet it’s not my business to try to correct yours, except possibly around that dinner table, and among friends.

Still, this begs a few questions–for how would I describe that taste? I like simple things, though some of them are only apparently so: a stripped-down, windowpane prose, a Macoun apple. I like intricate things: Conrad’s Nostromo, or the slow-cooked tomato I once had in Paris for dessert, all basted and lacquered and stuffed with bits of nuts and sweetmeats. It would be a sorry world–I would be a sorry person–if I couldn’t enjoy both kinds of language, both kinds of food. But taste is also defined by what you don’t like as much as by what you do, and my own has its limits. Otherwise it would be no taste at all, I’d be tasteless, though in a different sense of the word than the one up above. The last two novels I didn’t finish are Anna Burns’ Booker Prize-winning Milkman and Rachel Cusk’s Second Place, each of them admired by friends whose judgment I respect. I will happily eat pied de cochon in France but one long-ago serving of chicken feet at a New York dim sum palace was enough for me. I prefer Porter to Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart to either, though that’s mostly the lyrics and not the tunes. Chandler over Hammet, fruit desserts over chocolate ones. The only Bergman movie I really like is Smiles of a Summer Night. Trollope knew more about people than any other Victorian novelist. Long stretches of The Brothers Karamazov bore me. Eudora Welty’s “No Place for You, My Love” is the greatest American short story of the 20th century, and if you don’t agree I will correct you. Shall I go on?