I WAS IN NORDSTROM, buying a black blazer. My salesman was a genial man in his forties, bald and plumpish, carefully turned-out. Good at what he did, not pushing in any way, he smoothly played along with my desire to be taken as a man of the world. Our transaction complete, he gave me his business card, suggesting I ask for him when next I came in.
The name on the card was the same as that of a Jewish family that used to make and sell ice cream in Chicago. Was he, I asked, of that family?
“No,” he said. “My grandfather was a tailor and so was my father. And if I could have had my way, so would I have been.”
“Really,” I said, marveling at the notion that today, in the early 21st century, a middle-class American would want to be a tailor.
“Did you know that a good tailor can make a salary in the six figures?” he said. “We have tailor-made ties in this store that go for more than $200 a shot.
“I remember, as a young boy, watching my grandfather at his bench making neckties,” he continued. “I was fascinated. I wanted him to teach me how to do it. But he wouldn’t. He and my father both discouraged me from becoming a tailor.”
“Sounded too immigrant-like, too old world, to them?” I asked. “Exactly,” he said. “They would have felt great failures in life if their grandson and son had become a tailor. It’s too late for me to learn how to do it now.”
An aura of dolor clung to our conversation. It’s one thing not to know what one wants to do in life; another to know what one wants to do but not have the talent to do it; but a third, sadder thing, is to know precisely what one wants to do and never be permitted to discover if one can do it. Wanting to work at the useful craft of his ancestors, my salesman was prevented from doing so by the very American aspirations of his family.
These same aspirations probably explain why it seems so difficult to hold on to a family business for three generations. An exception is a younger friend of mine, who, along with his brothers, is among the third generation in his family to run a number of restaurants in Chicago. He recently sent me a half-joking email announcing that his restaurant received an award for having the best tap beer in Chicago. I consider that award more significant than many poetry prizes given out over the past year, because the beer doubtless gave more pleasure than the poems, and I say this as a reader of poetry who is not an enthusiastic beer drinker.
This man also happens to have been a student of mine. He wrote a very solid paper on Joseph Conrad for a master’s degree. He could have been a respectable academic, but my guess is that he is more content and providing more happiness running an excellent restaurant.
I know a man, the son of Greek immigrants, who sells produce west of the Loop, who once told me that he shall always honor my friend Edward Shils because he discouraged him from going to school to become a dental technician and encouraged him to remain in the business of selling fruits and vegetables.
Yet the pull (ostensibly) to improve one’s status is always there, turning out to be a goad, often, to dissatisfaction. Perhaps it all started with John Adams, who, in a famous letter to his wife Abigail, wrote: “I must study politics and war that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy . . . geography, natural history, naval architecture, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” Put in more contemporary terms, this might read: “I worked at dry cleaning in order that my son could have the liberty to study sociology in order that his son could have the right to undergo a sex-change operation.”
I search the long roll of my friends and acquaintances and discover that scarcely any of them actually makes anything. They write and teach and go to court and attempt to reduce pain and gamble on markets and shuffle paper generally. I, too, am a paper shuffler; the only difference is that the papers I shuffle have my own words on them.
Before I went to college, my father, who was himself a salesman, told me, an indifferent high-school student, that he would pay for my college education, but he thought I would make a fine salesman and my college years might just be a waste of time. I often wonder what my life would have been like if I had listened to him. I wonder, too, what would have happened if my father had said that, given my high-school record, he would not permit me to go to college. The only way I could have gotten him to change his mind would have been to reply, “That’s okay, Dad, I really want to be a tailor anyway.”
–Joseph Epstein
