There were rivals, chief among them Lillian Eichler, whose The Book of Etiquette (1921) was for a time an even bigger bestseller. But, as the critic Edmund Wilson observed, Eichler’s manner was comfortable and made social life sound jolly, whereas Emily Post had real imaginative powers and a much stronger snob appeal. F. Scott Fitzgerald told Wilson that reading Post’s Etiquette had inspired him to think of writing a play in which the characters were preoccupied with doing the right thing.2 Post scored with the public precisely because she was alive to the unjolly, uncomfortable competitiveness of the world.
From the outset Post provided a wealth of detail about what to do at dances, christenings and funerals, how to write letters, how to dress and how to greet people. Yet she also recognized that society was forever changing. She made this plain in the first edition of Etiquette, published in 1922, and her attention to change is evident if we compare successive editions of her work. The first edition was presented on the title page as a guide to etiquette in society, in business, in politics and at home; the tenth, published in 1960, was simply The Blue Book of Social Usage, reflecting the work’s established status. Some of the changes are as we would expect, the society of The Great Gatsby having turned into the world of Mad Men; the 1960 edition addresses travel on aeroplanes, whereas the 1922 edition naturally has nothing to say about this. Another shift, less immediately obvious: the fear of disagreeable occurrences, to the fore in 1922, has by 1960 been displaced by a fear of criticism.
Post’s coverage of restaurants is a sign of changing habits. In 1922 she is concerned with whether one can wear a headdress in a restaurant, and explains that an engaged couple may have lunch or tea in such an establishment, but should not take their evening meal there. In 1960 she is more concerned with tipping, a subject that in 1922 came up in the context only of hotels, steamboats and other people’s domestic servants. ‘It is impossible to give definite schedules for tipping,’ she writes in 1960. She does her best, but mainly seems startled that ‘The ten per cent rule of yesterday is today at least fifteen and sometimes even twenty!’3 As ‘rules’ go, that’s vague. Yet here she offers a useful perspective on one of the more vexed forms of gratitude.
As a word for a small present of money given to a servant or a dutiful schoolboy, tip emerged in the eighteenth century – not, as myth has it, an acronym for ‘to insure promptness’ – and gained real currency in the nineteenth. (The word gratuity was used with this sense by the middle of the sixteenth century; it sometimes had connotations of bribery.) The tip is embarrassing because it is a brief acknowledgement of unequal status, of the fact that different lives have momentarily touched. Walter Donaldson’s Synopsis Oeconomica (1620) stressed that servants should be paid on time, but advised against handing out gratuities. In 1760 the Select Society, an Edinburgh debating club that included David Hume, considered the question of whether one should tip servants and firmly concluded that one should not. Hannah More was among many writers of the period to condemn giving tips (often known as vails) in the home; Voltaire, having dined once with Lord Chesterfield, turned down a second invitation because the servants expected such great vails. The Victorian actor Sir Henry Irving was noted for the generous tips he gave; he laughed off the complaints of his frequent collaborator Ellen Terry, who felt such generosity was vulgar. The modern service charge, automatically added to one’s restaurant bill, is a sanitized version of the tip, supposedly designed to insure against the meanness or forgetfulness of customers, guarantee staff a decent wage, and satisfy the taxman.
‘You will not get good service unless you tip generously but not lavishly,’ states Emily Post. ‘Tipping is undoubtedly an undesirable and undignified system, but it happens to be in force.’4 One of the ironies of guides to manners is that they often bolster practices they would prefer to condemn. Saying that something happens to be in force implies a degree of nuisance or absurdity, but it does not have the effect of quelling that ‘something’.
Post’s central credo was that codes must be observed as strictly as possible, even if their logic is questionable. The key to success was conformity. Her first rule of behaviour was ‘Try to do and say only that which will be agreeable to others.’ If you were to abide by this religiously, you would never say anything of consequence. However, Post offers many pieces of counsel that, scrupulously followed, would avert life’s awkwardnesses. That they are no longer observed does not make them worthless. For instance, ‘Don’t plaster your face with powder until it no longer has any semblance of skin … Remember that a mask can never take the place of a face’; ‘Intimate letters of condolence are like love letters in that they are too sacred and too personal to follow a set form’; and, when playing cards, ‘The good loser makes it an invariable rule never to play for stakes that it will be inconvenient to lose.’5 We may find the pronouncements a touch prim, but there is wisdom here, a sense of life lived and examined.
Many have taken up Post’s mantle. One of her inheritors, Amy Vanderbilt, hosted a TV show called It’s in Good Taste in the 1950s, and her writings were carried in numerous newspapers during the the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. In 1968 she noted how widely it was asserted that American manners were uniformly bad, and argued against this, suggesting that ‘The very mobility of American society brings into sharp focus the bad manners of the minority, thus making bad manners seem to be the norm.’ Nevertheless, she identified certain reasons for the deterioration of manners: ‘the decline of the mother’s influence’, a ‘revolution in homemaking’ that meant that ‘houses are not necessarily homes’, and a public language ‘so free … that even grandmothers have become shockproof’. Her essential maxim was simple: ‘Good manners … are the traffic rules of society.’6 Her readers were perpetually anxious to give the right signals. In her final years she received 25,000 letters a month, and these enabled her to keep abreast of new bugbears and anxieties, ranging from when to take off one’s sunglasses to how to behave in a sauna.
Another writer in the mould of Emily Post was Letitia Baldrige, who offered volumes of guidance aimed at executives, brides and mothers. A typical pronouncement from her New Manners for New Times (2003) is ‘When children see parents accept situations that are morally wrong, it inspires them to grow up to become liars, cheats, and thieves – or perhaps extortionists, inside traders, and stock manipulators.’7
But the leader of the pack is Judith Martin. Since 1978 this American journalist has written a popular and widely syndicated advice column under the name Miss Manners. The title of her magnum opus suggests her temper: Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior. Like Emily Post before her, she invents characters, and her greatest invention is herself – poised, humorous, at times starchy, but the opposite of naïve. ‘What is the proper way to eat potato chips?’ a correspondent asks. Miss Manners mocks: ‘With a knife and fork. A fruit knife and an oyster fork, to be specific.’ She quips that arguments between husband and wife should be conducted in a foreign language: ‘You’d be surprised what an inducement that is to the education of children.’ Reflecting on matters of domestic taste she declares, ‘No house can be truly elegant unless it contains at least half a dozen atrocities of varying sizes and uses. This must not include the residents.’8
Miss Manners has described her abhorrence of the ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau School of Etiquette’: in a speech to Harvard students in 1984 she argued that Rousseau’s ideas about children, filtered through the thought of Thomas Jefferson, have licensed sloppy parenting and an attitude summed up in the phrase ‘I’m just as good as anyone else’.9 Her preferred view is that ‘the world needs … more false cheer’. The only acceptable answer to the question ‘How are you?’ is ‘Very well, thank you. How are you?’ Any other response is a symptom of the failure to discipline one’s natural selfishness.
Curiously, one of the three epigraphs to Bret Easton Ellis’s notoriously grisly novel American Psycho is a quotation from Miss Manners:
One of the major mistakes people make is
that they think manners are only the expression of happy ideas. There’s a whole range of behaviour that can be expressed in a mannerly way. That’s what civilization is all about – doing it in a mannerly and not an antagonistic way. One of the places we went wrong was the naturalistic Rousseauian movement of the 1960s in which people said, ‘Why can’t you just say what’s on your mind?’ In civilization there have to be some restraints. If we followed every impulse, we’d be killing one another.10
The purport of this quotation is ambiguous. Is Ellis abjuring the attitudes of the 1960s? Or is he in fact hinting that mannerly behaviour and psychosis are compatible? Is he endorsing Miss Manners’s view that codes of behaviour are essential to – and effective in – the repression of our violent urges, or is he playing ironically with this idea? This epigraph is sandwiched between a long quotation from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, about the inevitability of society engendering deformed characters, and a short one from a Talking Heads song: ‘And as things fell apart / Nobody paid much attention.’ Ellis’s novel depicts moral apocalypse as the result of misdirected attention: by focusing on signs rather than meanings, modern capitalist society has sent into exile the very idea of meaning.
The essay in Fortune magazine from which Ellis took his Miss Manners quotation posed a number of workaday questions: Should you invite colleagues to your wedding? If someone lays claim to your handiwork in a meeting, should you speak up? Is it ever okay to bring your kids to the office? Miss Manners is clear-cut in her answers: ‘I’m firmly against it’, ‘Yes’, ‘Basically, no.’11 Most people, confronted with such questions, will hedge and fudge. Those who don’t will generally be regarded as too abrupt and direct. Miss Manners has a rigid idea of common sense; her judicial process admits few grey areas. How should you respond when offered drugs, one of her readers wonders. The answer is that one should say either ‘Yes, please’ or ‘No, thank you’.
Modern guides to manners have, naturally, to address questions that would not have troubled our great-grandparents. A selection of prescriptions from Debrett’s A–Z of Modern Manners (2008) shows this: ‘Trust your fake tan to the professionals’; ‘Don’t be an online bore: blogs that enumerate the minutiae of your day … won’t make you popular’; at office parties ‘Steer clear of mistletoe and dirty dancing’; when embarking on internet dating ‘Use the best photograph you have’; and in the realm of social networking, ‘Remember, it’s not a competition to see how many friends you can get.’12
Debrett’s A–Z is a British publication, whereas all the writers I have previously mentioned in this chapter are American. It is significant that in Britain guidance on etiquette is purveyed by a company that has existed since 1769, while in America there is a more personal touch – or at least an illusion of the personal. Americans seem to prefer a touch of homeliness, where the English like their etiquette served de haut en bas. Who is the leading English expert on manners, the equivalent of Judith Martin? It is hard to think of an individual whose authority is taken seriously. Indeed, people who present themselves as authorities on manners are automatically not taken seriously; they are treated as self-important throwbacks. It is as though the act of talking about manners makes manners disappear beneath a froth of drivel.
The closest we come to an English version of Miss Manners may be Drusilla Beyfus. Her Modern Manners (1992) is substantial and wide-ranging but as a result has the appearance of a cookbook. It is sensible and worldly, yet sometimes causes unintentional amusement, as when it proceeds directly from thoughts about the etiquette of using condoms to discussing how to offer a proposal of marriage. A 1950s volume that is partly the work of Beyfus has the title Lady Behave: A Guide to Modern Manners, which says a lot about its intended audience and that audience’s attitudes. An updated edition from 1969 is much concerned with ‘the new woman’, ‘the new staff’, ‘the new manners’ (‘a slimmer’s best compromise is to make her dieting as unobtrusive as possible’) and ‘new relationships’ (which is mainly about dealing with doctors and nurses).13
The American market for straightforward guides to etiquette dwarfs the British one. Even though large numbers of the British and especially the English are sticklers for etiquette, they pretend that such matters are either unworthy of discussion or in no need of it. Much more popular are guides that give them cynical or supercilious treatment. These reflect, wittily and sometimes not so wittily, on when it is a good idea to lie, how to navigate the hell of a second family, and the art of deflecting people who threaten to be tedious. It is a defining feature of English manners that they can be treated, simultaneously, as vitally important yet also comical. But then one could apply the very same terms to Englishness itself.
21
Creative hubs and ‘extreme phenomena’
negotiating the modern city
In an anonymously published dialogue dating from 1579, a gentleman called Valentine lists the reasons for preferring town life to country life. Among these are the better opportunities for education, public service and making money. His interlocutor, Vincent, is at first unconvinced. He believes that urban folk have little love for one another; instead they hide behind ‘ceremonies of civility’. But Valentine makes his case forcefully, and ends up persuading Vincent that city life is healthier and quieter than life in the country.1
Even in 1579 that was a brazen claim, and our own view of city life is likely to be more equivocal. The architecture scholar Elizabeth Collins Cromley, an expert on the resort hotel and the history of bedrooms, chose for her academic study of New York’s early apartment buildings a singularly apt title: Alone Together. The apparent gregariousness of modern living is an illusion. In reality, towns and cities are scenes of impersonality and transience. True, they afford opportunities for collaboration – and may allow us, in the recent and popular view of the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, to be happier, richer and greener. Freed from a preoccupation with obtaining food and shelter, people moving to cities from the country have long been able to engage in business and creative projects. But amid the social churn, anxiety festers. Urban citizens have tended to be more fearful about plague, fire, floods, foul smells and vermin, as well as more beset with rumours.
In cities, our physical proximity makes manners useful as a means of co-operating to achieve the best use of limited space, yet they are also a means of maintaining social distinctions that are constantly under pressure. Jonathan Raban evokes the psychological climate of city living in his book Soft City, published in 1974. ‘In a community of strangers, we need a quick, easy-to-use set of stereotypes, cartoon outlines, with which to classify the people we encounter.’ Accordingly, ‘People who live in cities become expert at making … rapid, subconscious decisions,’ and ‘mechanical aids to such character-reading are at a premium in cities.’ It is certainly a feature of modern city-dwellers that they are quick to pigeonhole those around them. ‘The riot of amateur astrology,’ observes Raban, ‘is one of the more annoying expressions of this city hunger for quick ways of classifying people.’ At the same time, though, character seems fluid in the city. One’s presentation and personality appear to be constructs: ‘Identity is presented as plastic, a matter of possessions and appearances.’2
Urban living exposes people to a relentless stream of stimuli. In the modern city this can be overwhelming, and the best defence against being overwhelmed is to develop cool indifference. That indifference can be a sterile inexpressiveness, or it can be something more callous, calling to mind George Orwell’s alarming remark about England: ‘In no country inhabited by white men is it easier to shove people off the pavement.’3 Anonymity makes rudeness easy. In cities, we avert our eyes from the sufferings of others because, if we allowed ourselves to become involved in their affairs, we would never get anything done. Or so we imagine – and so we have been conditioned to imagine.
‘The deepest problems of modern life,’ wrote the German sociologist Georg Simmel in 1903, ‘flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain
the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society.’ Simmel argued that city life, fragile and dangerous, may stimulate the nerves to the point where they cease to be able to produce a reaction. He concluded that amid the impersonal culture of cities, individuals feel the need to save what he called a ‘personal element’; the result is a cultivation of ‘extremities and peculiarities’.4
A century on from Simmel, the public sphere feels anything but intimate, and we associate cities with a lack of social cohesion, with randomness and perhaps also unnaturalness (a state of decay rather than fertility). In a small, tightly woven community it is hard to do wrong with impunity, but a city’s sheer size weakens social constraints, and the impersonal nature of its regulations seems almost to invite disregard.5 In the modern city different cultures are meeting all the time, and so are different assumptions about conduct. These encounters resemble collisions more often than felicitous convergences. Communication with strangers seems impossible because it interferes with the apparently automated flow of human traffic. To make this personal for a moment: When did you last travel on the London Underground? And when did you last talk there to someone you’d not previously met? How do you react to a stranger addressing you on the Underground? (If you’ve never travelled on the London Underground, imagine using your local bus service at its busiest – and add in an extra batch of disgruntled commuters.) Cities feel like archives of grievance and grime, which we traverse mechanically.
Today most Europeans live in urban environments. Among the great narrative strands in twentieth-century history was the transformation of urban living. At the start of the century, three-quarters of England’s population was urban – a high proportion compared to, say, France – and the crucial change was not that people moved to towns and cities, but that the towns and cities altered. They burst the boundaries that had previously contained them, becoming intricate clusters. According to the historian Emily Cockayne, the period from 1919 to 1944 was one of suburban development and semi-detached living; between 1945 and 1969 the spirit of semi-detachment became less harmonious; from 1970, detached living and home ownership increased; and today our informal encounters are ever more infrequent, with less and less significance attached to one’s reputation on the street where one lives, and long-distance relationships, conducted electronically, often seeming more important than physically immediate ones.6 It is not just the texture of home life that has altered; changes in the way we travel and the environment in which we work have transformed attitudes to space and the people with whom we share it.
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