Smart

Jeffrey J. Williams Smart Features of Class My father has a disconcerting habit, especially for people who don't know him, of pointing to things with his right pinky. Why it's disconcerting isthathis pinky is only a stub. Its top halfwas shearedoffon a conveyor beltwhilehe was working in a feed mill that supplied the many duck farms then dotting a good part of Long Island east of Queens. As a teenager in the early 40s, he loaded eighty-pound bags of feed, then after coming back from driving a half-track across Africa, Italy, and Germany, he forewent the GI Bill to drive a tractor trailer delivering those eighty-pound bags to the duck farmers. While Long Island metamorphosed from farms to suburbs, he took a job as a dispatcher—as he puts it, telling the truckers where to go—at a cement plant that flourished with all the building. When I was an undergraduate at Stony Brook, founded with the sluiceway of postwar money to universities and serving the people in the new suburbs, I would sometimes show up at the office hours of a well-known Renaissance scholar and Shakespeare critic. He was born the same year as my father and also served in World War II, but after the war signed on for the GI Bill to get through the University of Chicago. He always seemed surprised to see someone appear at his door; he was tough-minded, with a neo-Aristotelian, analytical edge common to Chicagoans of his generation, which put some students of my generation off, but I saw the gleam of ironic humor underneath, plus I liked the challenge. He would typically fuss with his pipe (this was when professors still really smoked pipes, and in their offices) while we were talking. One afternoon in his office, watching him light his pipe, I remember noticing that his fingernails were remarkably long, and polished to a low gloss. Ifyou've ever done what used to be called manual labor for any extended period of time, you'll know ifs hell on your hands. Or if you've ever read Life in the Iron Mills, you'll realize that class is not just a question of what money you have or don't have, nor solely a question of status conferred by cultural capital, but that it marks your body. If you look at most fellow academics ' hands, you'll rarely see calluses. I start with this not to invoke guilt (I prefer to have all my fingers), nor to take part in a form of academic abjection (that we don't do real work), but to broach both the visibility and invisibility of our class position. As academics , especially in the humanities, we have a vexed relation to class. On the one hand, by normal markers such as educational level (only about 10% of Americans have grad degrees, not to mention doctorates), the kind of work we do (white collar, with some autonomy, setting our ownhours, etc.), salaries (which, while we might complain of how low they are, are much 172 the minnesota review above the national mean, and certainly higher than, say, school teachers), as well as by tastes (what kind of magazines we have on our coffee tables—if you've ever tabulated the survey at the end of Paul Fussell's Class), we are of the cultivated classes. Attaining our position through educational credentials , we are quintessential denizens of the professional-managerial class. On the other hand, we often eschew or deny our class position, projeding a distance from the normal parameters of class in America. There are several ways that we do this: sometimes by projecting a kind of bohemian position on the peripheries of, if not antagonistic to, normative culture (we're not like sharkskin suited lawyers, but wear jeans and open collars, and proclaim our queerity); sometimes by asserting a clerical position set against mainstream capitalism (we are not profit-seeking businesspeople, instead working in the non-quantifiable realm of culture, whether conservatively sanctifying its lineage or progressively opening it); sometimes by celebrating our uselessness (we fumble at basic tasks like filling out forms, because we reside in...