Читать книгу The Accursed - Joyce Carol Oates - Страница 15

AUTHOR’S NOTE: PRINCETON SNOBBERY

In our egalitarian American society, it is considered a kind of evil to feel superior to other Americans; though the lower strata of all human societies yearn to feel superior to other, yet lower, strata, still it is sacrosanct to pretend that this is not so; that snobbery, in all its forms, is aberrant as well as evil.

This may be a convenient time for me to provide to the reader some information concerning the subtle yet crucial differentiations in social rank between those persons in our chronicle who belong to the old “county” families, of long-established lineage and wealth, and those of a more recent sort who have but lately, that’s to say within the past century, migrated to the area.

The original category is pilgrims, settlers, or colonists; the second, much vaster, is immigrants.

On one hand we have the old Jersey families of the stature of the Slades, initially inhabitants of the Massachusetts Bay Colony who had moved to the Crown Colony of New Jersey at a time when “Princeton” did not exist, being but one of three small villages—“King’s Town,” “Queen’s Town,” and “Prince’s Town”—on the old pike road between New York and Philadelphia. Along with the Slades, if not rivaling them in reputation and wealth, are the Morgans, the FitzRandolphs, the Bayards, the van Dycks, the Pynes (of the magnificent mansion Drumthwacket, in more recent years the residence of the governor of New Jersey), the several families of Burrs (descended from Reverend Aaron Burr, Sr.)—and others, falling beyond the periphery of this history. That these noble old families predated Princeton University by decades should be kept in mind, for, in its earlier guise as the College of New Jersey, the institution was first founded in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and later moved, in 1748, by the Reverend Aaron Burr, Sr., to Newark; then, a decade later, the college was moved by President Samuel Davies to its present location in the village of Princeton, on Route 27, or Nassau Street as it is called, near the intersection with state highway 206. From this modest beginning, with its close ties to the Presbyterian Church, the university has grown, and grown—and has now overgrown itself, one might say, in a crowded and cramped campus in which “green” is scarcely glimpsed and unsightly high-rise structures fly in the face of the elegant Collegiate Gothic architecture of the earlier era. In the West End of Princeton, to this day, descendants of the old families yet reside, some very nearly anonymously; for time has passed them by, as the admission of women, “blacks,” and a quota-less quantity of Jews to the great university would indicate, a trickle of anarchy at first in that low decade, the 1970s, and now a flood.

Thus, one can see a clear division between the old “settler” families and the swarm of “new persons” who had moved into the area merely to be employed by the university, at decidedly modest salaries.

(It was held against Woodrow Wilson, by individuals like Adelaide McLean Burr, that, being too poorly paid to afford a motorcar, the president of the university was obliged to bicycle much of the time; this is a cruel sort of snobbery, indeed. Yet we must laugh with Adelaide, for she is very witty!) Naturally there was some overlapping as in the case of my father Pearce van Dyck, the son of one of the most distinguished “county” families, who was also a scholar and philosopher of national reputation, with degrees from Cambridge (U.K.) as well as Princeton. To reason more finely, Ellen Wilson was related, on her paternal grandmother’s side, to the Randolphs of Virginia, by way of which she might have claimed a familial connection with the wealthy FitzRandolphs of Princeton, except, we have to assume, Mrs. Wilson lacked the courage to do so, and risk being snubbed.

As to Josiah and Annabel, the principal characters of The Accursed—though they are wholly sympathetic, and indeed very good-hearted individuals, it is inescapable that they, too, are snobs—all unconsciously and helplessly, as they are Slades.