He has a collective name for everything he hates. The species that he imagines as enjoying a more carefree way of life than his own (and thus ruining it—and this comprises proletarians as well as plutocrats, also “society people,” and “snobs” like John and Stella) is summarily known as “they.” “They” are the people responsible for (or rather guilty of) the fate of mankind—the powerful (oppressors), the rich (exploiters), the undisciplined uneducated (anarchists)—and are pilloried in sentences beginning “They’ve got us in another mess . . .” or “They’re grabbing the lion’s share, of course . . .” or “They can’t bear seeing something in order . . .” The obvious flippancy, frivolity, unscrupulousness, inconsiderateness of these plainly well known but unnameable anonymouses inspire such rhetoric as “They’re amused. . . they skim off the cream and relish it . . . they laugh up their sleeves, of course. . . they just let you kick the bucket . . .”

And this they is elastic enough to cover whole strata; nay, whole peoples: the British, for instance (“They imagine they’re superior”). It extends to writers of popular songs (“They give people highfalutin ideas”) and to Jews (“They’ve known how to cheat our kind for two thousand years now”). In addition, there is room for the traditional whipping-boys of middle-class resentment: they (aristocrats), they (Reds), they (priests), they (Freemasons), they (journalists) . . .

Thus, we can hardly assume that Uncle Helmuth has Uncle Ferdinand’s Middle Kingdom in mind in particular when he says, with specific emphasis and an indignation-bloated ring in his voice, “They”—meaning “plutocrats,” “society people,” “snobs.” I remember when I first moved into his home. In those days, the smart set of the upper ten thousand did not have the publicity they enjoy today as the so-called Jet Set (or Café Society)—an unwanted publicity that was to be so prophetically foreseen by Uncle Ferdinand. Uncle Helmuth could at best get some impression of it from my childish blather. (Incidentally, I soon stopped the blathering once I noticed the frosty rejection concealed beneath the artificial irony with which my stories were received.) Perhaps Uncle Helmuth’s imagination was assisted by the fashion magazines and society gazettes that Aunt Selma sometimes bought on the sly; she dreamed whole afternoons away with them in her darkened room, but somehow or other they came to light and were then devoured by Aunt Hertha and Uncle Helmuth (albeit more hastily, more sketchily, more nervously). This wholly inadequate re-portage presented yearning eyes with the dream life of the happy rich at the North Sea, Mediterranean, and Alpine resorts of high-society geography—a life lived in the chandelier brilliance of casinos, at racetracks, on the decks of huge white yachts, on the lawns of birthday-cake-like country villas and bougainvillea-flooded terraces on sepia-blue, pine-shielded shores—yet could only give a hint that this was where the true focus of his social hatred might be found: the nucleus, the axial pole of that other, blissful way of life that was so sneeringly opposed to his own, which made his own seem less worth living.