America's New Manners
1. Eight men and one woman from the same office are riding the elevator back to work after lunch. The woman, naturally, is in the back of the elevator, since the men all stood aside to allow her to enter first. When the elevator door opens on the eighth floor:
a)The men all inhale deeply and, rolling their eyes to the ceiling and fluttering their hands in the vicinity of their heads, attempt to crowd aside so that the one woman, in the fragility of her gender, may exit first, followed by eight men and their dense exhalation of martini fumes. b) Since the sex of the passengers is irrelevant here, everyone leaves the elevator in the most efficient and logical order, the men nearest the door departing first. As some people of both sexes are still uncomfortable with such uncourtly procedures, a man may put them at their ease by making a suggestive remark about the woman 's figure. c) All passengers tumble out at once, landing in a heap before the eighth-floor receptionist.
2. At a friend's Sunday brunch, a woman uses an Anglo-Saxon barnyard expression. A polite male will:
a) Push half a grapefruit in the woman' s face.
b) Respond with a barrage ofscatology to make her feel more at ease talking filth.
c) Ignore her and turn to the hostess, exclaiming, "I'll just die if I don 't get this recipe!"
3. A woman is discussing business with a male colleague over lunch at an expensive Italian restaurant. She invited him. When the check comes:
a) She excuses herself and goes to the ladies' room ("I'll just freshen up my war paint"), not returning until the man has settled the bill. b) She offers the man a cigar, quarrels with the waiter's addition, pays the check from a roll of 50s and makes a knowledgeable remark about the vicissitudes of the Baltimore Colts. c) She extracts from her ice cream dish a fragment of broken glass brought along for just this purpose. She and her companion complain loudly about foreign objects in the food, and both exit in a huff, leaving the check unpaid on the table.
Who can sort out these social mysteries? It has become extremely complicated to be polite in America. There was a time when the upwardly mobile and socially inecure believed as fervently as The Four Hundred that there existed somewhere--in the mind of God, perhaps, or the graven tablets of Emily Post--an absolute standard of The Correct. All contingencies were covered in this elaborate system of law, as refined as the Talmud and sometimes as difficult to interpret. But trying to cultivate manners today is like buying a house in Grosse Pointe and discovering that the previous tenants were the Symbionese Liberation Army: the place is a mess. The old fixtures don't work; the walls are smeared with ego; the foundation is crumbling and practically gone.
The grand punctilio of high-bosomed dreadnoughts like Emily Post had been unraveling for years, of course. But to many of the young in the '60s, the laid-back luftmenschen of the counterculture, manners were as superfluous as flatware at McDonald's (the late 20th century's reversion to its fingers) or linen napkins at the Donner Pass. To this last half-generation, manners were sexist, hypocritical, emotionally invalid or, at last, hopelessly and rather touchingly quaint. The women's movement called a world of once reflexive rituals into doubt. The masculine urge to rise when a woman entered the room seemed a sort of humiliating impulse, uncontrollable, incontinent. A man seated on the downtown bus might endure agonies of self-examination before offering his seat to a woman. The male had to learn to size up the female by age, education and possible ferocity of feminism before opening a door for her: Would the courtesy offend her? It made for ambiguity: If a man studiously refuses to open the door for a woman, is he sexually liberated? Or just an ill-bred slob?
The '60s did their best to dismantle old family relationships and left in their place all kinds of jerry-built structures and subtle gradations of involvement--permanent dates, semimarriages, platonic living together, genteel common-law shackups and serial polygamy. This profusion of mating arrangements brought on wonderfully baroque confusions of protocol: How to seat the husband and two ex-husbands of the bride's mother at the wedding banquet? How to invite a homosexual couple for the weekend? There were few rules that applied to other new customs, such as living in coed dorms, coed jogging (should the man speed ahead of the woman?) and social soaking in hot tubs (keep eye contact at all times).
Civility was dealt a further crippling blow by what the author Tom Wolfe calls "The 'Me' Decade." The social crusades of the '60s (the civil rights movement, the antiwar campaign, the counterculture) broke up a lot of institutional furniture but left little to replace it in the mid-'70s except intense, aggressive self-regard. People went to classes to learn what frequently turned out to be bad manners, the assertiveness training courses that held that you have to be pushy to get what you want. Manners were not the message of Robert Ringer's 1977 bestseller, Looking Out for No. 1.
But too much aggressiveness is exhausting. Today there seems a lot of evidence that Americans are tired of it. Stragglers are descending from the culture of the Ik (that east African hill tribe that, as Anthropologist Colin Turnbull found, amused itself by snatching food from the mouths of children and kicking the elderly into campfires). Remarks Judith Martin, who writes a satiric "Miss Manners" column for the Washington Post: "We're coming out of a psychologically self-oriented era. I think there's a craving for tradition, form, orderliness--and there's also a desire to be protected from everybody else's expression of self."
A new formality is evident. It can be read literally in the sales and rentals of tuxedos, which are considerably higher than they were several years ago. Says the manager of Los Angeles Tuxedo Center: "There is definitely a return to the '30s look --chic, elegant tuxedos." In Chicago, I. Magnin's bridal-wear sales are up 70% over last year. After the era of write-it-yourself Kahlil Gibran barefoot weddings, the large traditional marriage ritual and reception are returning.
A craving for standards of social behavior is obvious in the sheer heft of mail to advice columnists and in the success of table-manner classes for children in 800 department stores around the nation. Enrollment in the lessons, begun by Marjabelle Young Stewart, a writer on etiquette, has tripled in the past three years. Publishers are rushing books into print to rehabilitate Americans' behavior and bring order to their vast social confusion. Columnist Ann Landers, with her wonderfully brisk "listen-cookie" style, has just come forth with a 1,212-page The Ann Landers Encyclopedia A to Z (abdominal muscles to zoonoses), which gets down to all sorts of nitty-gritty not only about social rituals ("Prince Philip, may I present my laundress Ruth Smith") but also about bedwetting, inverted nipples and nose jobs. Charlotte Ford, Henry II's daughter, has a "book of modern manners" due out in the spring. Probably the best guide to manners in 1978 is The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette, a Guide to Contemporary Living, Revised & Expanded by Letitia Baldrige (Doubleday, 879 pages, plain $10.95; thumb-indexed $11.95). The late Amy Vanderbilt, a distant cousin of the Commodore and a sensibly moderate arbiter of etiquette who eschewed the surpassing hoity-toity of Emily Post for a comfortably "modern" point of view, originally published her manners book in 1952, later revised it several times. Tish Baldrige, Manhattan public relations executive and once social secretary to Jacqueline Kennedy in the White House, has spent almost three years making further revisions and additions.
Baldrige, a superbly energetic amalgam of feminist and Tasteful Lady, left a few sections of the original Amy nearly intact--the formal wedding, heraldic devices, parliamentary procedure, how to visit a naval vessel and how to go fox hunting. (Do not show up in black derby with a pink coat. Never done!) But the farther Baldrige explored in the territory of manners, the more she revised and enlarged the Vanderbilt canon. She kicked the stuffiness out of it and inserted a clear-eyed, considerate feminism.
A certain amount of the Baldrige Vanderbilt is so obvious that it amounts to instructing people when to come in out of the rain. A section on going to the beach, for example, solemnly counsels the reader to take along food and drinks, "sun protection devices" and towels. When swimming one should never wave at someone on the shore "because the lifeguards may think you are calling for help and spring into action." Baldrige laughingly admits that much of this advice is elementary, but, "of course, it is possible that people might come to the ocean from Nebraska [Baldrige's home state] and might never have been to the beach before."
Alas, Tish's prose style, though always functional, has all the resonance of a schoolgirl's field hockey stick. Her sample "letter of apology for having seriously offended someone" sounds a little like W.C. Fields: "Dear Hank, There is no way I can erase the tragic error of my bumbling tongue." So with a letter to a colleague about a son who has just won a scholarship to Yale: "You and your wife must be bursting forth with unmitigated but understandable pride."
The most interesting and helpful sections of her book involve the conundrums that have arisen in the turmoil of morals, sexual roles and obsessive candor of the past decade: How, for example, should parents deal with the question of whether to allow their child to sleep in the same room with the person he or she is living with when they come to visit? (If the child insists on sharing a room with his partner the parents have every right, says Tish, to say: "Look, this is our house. You can both go to the hotel near by and pay for your own room if you refuse to accept the moral code of this house.") Generally Baldrige gives unmarried couples living together sympathetic though somewhat chilly treatment: "If they are breaking a moral law, it is their business and no one else's ... It has become ... a way of life. We must therefore cope with it as such." Baldrige hardheadedly notes that a single woman living with a man should find a good gynecologist to supply birth control devices and "a good lawyer to protect her rights."
Independence, Tish believes, has been the single most important factor in changing American manners in the past decade. "Women have discovered that they can live alone without crumbling," she says. "More men are living alone and not crumbling. A woman can entertain marvelously and tend the bar and make just as good drinks as when she had a husband making the drinks. And a man can get out in the kitchen and do a gourmet dinner that will impress anybody."
In an "equal world," Baldrige believes, the general operating principles are efficiency, kindness and elementary good sense. "Whoever happens to be in the lead opens the door and holds it for the other," she writes. "Whoever first sees the taxi hails it. People emerge from an elevator in a logical procession, the front people off first, the people in the back off last. Each of us puts on his or her own coat; however, anyone who sees someone else struggling to get into a coat lends a helping hand ... A person picks up a check in the coffee shop or a restaurant when it's his or her turn. A man or a woman stands up in the office to greet a male or a female visitor." Tish gears her book to an intuition that manners are practical and even liberating. They have long since been disjoined from moral
codes and from ostentation.
"Manners," Tish insists, "make you feel self-reliant.
There's nothing worse than feeling clutched. When you know you're right, you have an advantage."
Baldrige is the first social codifier to deal at length with the new and complex relations between men and the growing numbers of women arriving in middle-and top-management jobs.
A kind of double standard has emerged, Baldrige finds, with men and women treating each other as equals in the office but often reverting to the more traditional forms of etiquette and deference in their social lives.
"Women who are reaching for the executive suite are going to have to accept ... the financial responsibilities of their new status," Tish writes. Still she gets rather squeamish, for a feminist, about the way a woman should pay the check after a business lunch: If she uses a credit card or signs for the tab, she should do so "quietly, no one around them need be aware of her actions." Still more surreptitious is the course she advises for a woman when she senses that the man is uncomfortable about her paying: "She should excuse herself at dessert time on the pretext of going to the powder room and make the bill arrangements then."
The Baldrige Vanderbilt has no-nonsense advice to men and women traveling together on business. They "should not share a suite. They should have separate rooms, and when working in one of the bedrooms, both should be dressed"#151;that is, not in bathrobes or some such. A woman traveling alone on business should carry her briefcase along if she goes into the hotel bar or restaurant; it is a conspicuous sign of profession that should discourage attempted pickups. If a woman traveling decides to share a drink with a stranger, Tish remarks in her Tasteful Lady tone: "It is better to stop with one drink ... but you should most certainly stop after the second if you care anything about how people perceive your behavior in public."
On whether to ask an "extra woman" to a dinner party, Tish agrees with a character in the play Dinner at Eight who remarks that her guests are "invited for dinner, not for mating." Says Baldrige: "It is time that women who live alone let their hosts realize it is not the 'end of the world' if they do not have a man supplied for them." Singles bars make her nervous: "If you absolutely must go ... be forewarned and forearmed. You are proceeding at your own risk."
Temperamentally, Baldrige is a moderate. For that reason, her guidelines can serve as an interesting measure of how manners and customs have changed. The 1958 Amy Vanderbilt, for example, contained the rigid pronouncement: "It is poor taste for children of a first marriage to even attend the marriage of either parent the second time if a divorce has taken place." Baldrige advises: "If a person's ex-spouse supports the idea, and if the children are mature enough to accept the new spouse, it is a good idea to have the children present at their mother or father's second wedding." A word to women about to shake hands: "Both Amy and Emily say to leave the glove on. I say take it off. It's horrible to shake hands with leather."
At times Baldrige demands even more punctilio than Vanderbilt. "Amy said it wasn't necessary to write a note for a birthday present," Tish observes. "I disagree. I think you have to write a note for every birthday present, for every overnight stay." It does not have to be handwritten, however. Tish rules, sensibly enough, that a typewriter may be used if one's writing is illegible. Amy approved of the wedding reception "money tree," on which checks and cash gifts could be displayed. Tish considers this "vulgar" and advises against it. In a gesture Amy might not have thought of, Tish suggests that men should be invited to bridal showers: "It's a logical development of the working woman."
The ritual lighting of cigarettes is now something we can do without, Tish thinks. Women should carry their own smokes and lighters, she counsels, and take care of their own habit. Hosts and hostesses are no longer expected to furnish cigarettes at the dinner table--only ashtrays and matches.
Tish is commendably thorough and sensible about the intricacies of the table. Unlike some American arbiters, she endorses the Continental style with knife and fork--the fork retained in the left hand when bringing food to the mouth, rather than switching it to the right after cutting. "More efficient," says Baldrige. Asparagus and very crisp bacon may be eaten with the fingers, and salad may be cut with a knife, she ordains. (The old stricture against cutting salad with a knife was meant to spare the hostess's silver-plated blade, which could be corroded by vinegar dressing.) But it still is "heresy to cut spaghetti." Somewhat conservatively, Baldrige advises that fried chicken "should be eaten with the fingers only on such occasions as picnics, barbecues, boat rides and other informal outdoor gatherings." As for caviar, "never take more than a teaspoonful, or you will have everyone glaring at you, thinking there won't be any left for them." Like most arbiters since the Middle Ages, Tish believes that "burping is nature's way of getting rid of excess gas, and suppressing it may be physically harmful."
Every business executive ought to pay careful attention to Baldrige's section on telephone manners. People should place their own telephone calls, she believes, or at least be ready and waiting on the line when
the secretary makes them. It is insufferable one-upmanship to have a secretary chirp, "Please hold for Mr...." Baldrige offers a fairly quaint line for use in getting rid of a pest on the phone: "My staff informs me an emergency call is waiting for me on the other line. Please forgive me, and put in writing the rest of your thoughts." She is less than enthusiastic about recorded music being piped in to entertain a caller who is put on hold.
The sports section is almost all new and thick with detail.
When you are a guest on a yacht, Tish advises, use the shower very sparingly; wait until you are on shore to wash your hair. Always bring a decent can of balls, she reminds tennis players. Tish does not deal, however, with the vexing question of whether a man should deliberately ease up on his velocity when serving to a woman. Is it condescending to do so?
The Baldrige Vanderbilt makes a handsome flipping book, although it cannot rival in sheer opulence of detail and gesture the original Emily Post (1922), with its tensely fascinating vignettes, involving Mrs. Cravin Praise, Mr. Stocksan Bonds, Mrs. Climber, Mrs. Oldworld, Mrs. Wellborn, the Upstarts and the Richan Vulgars (see box). Tish is always straightforward, forbearing and rather elegant in her directness. She enjoys making sense.
Do Americans really need all of this advice? In any age, most of the interest in manners is casually voyeuristic rather than urgently practical. Manners are entertaining, inherently dramatic. Taken all together, they present a sort of shimmering petit-point likeness of a society. Especially now, in an era of broad transition, manners tend to be brittle and sparky--the friction of an older system being rubbed against by an abrasive future.
The texture of American manners is rich and bewildering.
As Robert Weiss of Harvard's Laboratory of Community Psychiatry accurately observed, "There is one social style in one block and a very different style in another block a couple of hundred yards away." Styles can also change rapidly. In The Late George Apley, Novelist John P. Marquand described a Brahmin who stepped out of his new house in Boston's South End and saw a man across the street fetching his newspaper; the man was in his shirtsleeves. The Brahmin judged, correctly as it turned out, that the neighborhood was on the way downhill; he sold his house immediately.
Americans do not always like to acknowledge class differences, even though one of the purposes of a more invidious etiquette for centuries has been precisely to establish one's own social superiority. "I once said something about the lower class in the hearing of my mother," recalls Social Chronicler Stephen Birmingham.
"She slapped me and said, 'There are no classes in America!' Then she said, 'Of course there are, but we never talk about it.' " Most Americans have only a spectator's interest in the problems of social kissing (a phenomenon they witness mainly on Johnny Carson) or in the protocol of inviting gay couples to a party. The Milwaukee housewife who hauls trash barrels to the curb every Monday morning is not affronted when her husband fails to pull out her chair at dinner. She settles for watching reruns of the butler Hudson on Upstairs, Downstairs and for the knowledge that wherever she goes, all day long, other Americans will be singing out pleasantly, "Have a nice day!"
All kinds of elaborate dress rituals are still at work. In the great communal noise bath of a rock concert, males of any birth often take off their
shirts. At baseball games, it is almost exclusively the blue-collar fans who remove their shirts and sunbathe in the bleachers; the Pierre Cardin numbers in the box seats are, if anything, unbuttoned only at the neck.
Children of the upper class generally seem to show less respect to their elders than the offspring of the upwardly mobile. The hulking, mouth-breathing surliness of adolescence knows no social distinctions, of course. But the upper-class child, while able to engage easily in small talk that won't bore his elders, rarely says "Yes, sir" or "Yes, ma'am" when talking to his parents' friends. The custom still applies in those provinces of the middle class where authoritarianism has not fallen into disrepute.
The upper class sees social pushiness as a trait of the new rich. Quarreling with a salesperson or bank teller is considered gauche--it should be handled discreetly by the husband's secretary. An Internal Revenue Service investigator observes that the new rich are the ones who cheat flagrantly on their income taxes. "The traditionally wealthy," says he, "are accustomed to paying high taxes and know the graceful ways to avoid it."
In Los Angeles, according to one observer, the basic rule is to defer to old money, and when that fails, defer to money. Consider a recent black-tie dinner for eight in the Trousdale Estates section of Beverly Hills, where liveried attendants park the cars and the houses are modeled after Tiberius' villas on Capri. The table was authentic Chippendale, the service gold leaf, the goblets and tableware gold. A chamber trio played. Among the guests: a history professor, a concert pianist, the wife of a German philosopher. And beside her: a young actor in a shimmering silk T shirt with a yo-yo appliqued on its front; the guests all deferred to him as he discussed his hit TV show. The yo-yo's weekly salary was something more than the yearly income of nearly everyone else in the room, and they knew it.
California is sometimes unique in the problems of protocol and manners it presents. Example: the nude after-dinner soak in the host's hot tub, as its waters are roiled by a Jacuzzi. Californians manage to maintain a casual dignity rather well; the rules are fairly well established and usually observed. They start from the presumption that not everyone may be inclined to participate. Therefore neither the host nor hostess may be the first to strip, nor may they even suggest it. Rather, convention requires what seems to be a spontaneous impulse on the part of a guest, who ideally should be a young woman. Men sometimes go first, but, if they do, are generally looked upon as show-offs or worse. This may seem reliquary chauvinism, but veterans of such evenings insist that the tone is somehow wrong unless a lady or ladies present lead the way, certifying the splash-in as not merely a male stratagem to get the women present to undress.
Other regional differences in manners are still evident. Sections of the South remain citadels of high courtliness.* But the old standards are besieged. A team of animal behaviorists could keep themselves fascinated for months merely observing the door-opening customs of the sexes in the South. Chris Kirby, a courthouse librarian in Orlando, hauls weighty law books all day long; not once during working hours, she complains, has a man ever opened a door for her, much less offered to cart the books. "But let me go out at night with nothing heavier than an evening bag," she goes on, "and three men will open the door for me. There's something about that I don't quite understand."
The most complicated problems of the new manners revolve around the almost endlessly subtle new variations on sexual roles. Says Marquette University Sociologist Wayne Youngquist: "There's a fair amount of ambiguity out there on the rules of behavior. Like dealing with blacks in the '60s, no one quite knows how to behave with women without giving offense." Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz tells an appalling story of taking out a woman who, when the check came and Dershowitz went to settle up, started griping: "Are you trying to dominate me?" Such women should spend the rest of their lives dining alone, preferably in bad restaurants.
These dilemmas extend from the most polished of society --where most hosts and hostesses have at last abandoned the practice of segregating the sexes after dinner (brandy and cigars for the boys, needlepoint chitchat for the girls)--to the working-class discos, where young women are cultivating a sexual aggressiveness that would have put Emily Post in an oxygen tent.
The manners of the urban singles scene can be as perplexing as the mating dances of the graylag goose. Psychotherapist Al Manaster observed a singles bar called Butch Maguire's in Chicago and detected four distinct sets of rules at work. "In the front section near the window, it is the garden of narcissism," he explains. "People go there just to be seen, not to make out. At the bar there is heavy hitting. You stand there to get picked up. The pinball section is heavy macho, with horseplay between the sexes. In the back room is backgammon, where the more mature and intelligent can go to talk and not get hit on. People shift from room to room, but every area has its definite rules."
The question of the unmarried couple is everywhere. How to handle the linguistic problem of what to call the person with whom one's daughter lives? "Lover" is too archaically lubricious by a shade or two. "Roommate" sounds like a freshman dorm. "Bedmate" is too sexually specific, but "friend" is too sweetly platonic. "Boyfriend" and "girlfriend" are a bit adolescent. "Partner" sounds as if they run a hardware store together. The Census Bureau calls them "Partners of the Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters" or PossLQs. Mrs. Billie Jenkins, an elegant hostess who lives on Boston's Beacon Hill, has developed a rather sweet technique for inviting living-together couples to her parties. "I send an invitation to the one of the two I know better," says Mrs. Jenkins, "and I write a personal note on it saying, 'Of course you'll bring your darling George!' "
Texas mothers, however, are not broadminded. One of them not long ago found that she could not send out any announcements when her daughter was finally married because she had been telling her friends for a year that her daughter was married to the man she was living with. A woman from Dallas took her PossLQ home for the weekend recently to meet her parents. Her mother usually came to the door to meet her, but not this time. Her father squared himself in the front hall like an immense stack of Gideon Bibles and announced: "That's your room there. That's your room there." Then the mother came on like a p.a. system: "NO HANKY-PANKY IN THIS HOUSE!'
Residual gallantries survive all over the society, but it takes something of an individualist to practice them. Mrs. Robert Wagner, wife of the former mayor of New York, laments that the thank-you note after a party is becoming rarer and rarer. "In the olden days," she says, "you wrote automatically. The notes were done by rote and said nothing. Now they may be fewer, but they mean more." Dr. Alfred Messer of Atlanta cheerfully tells a story of going to eat lunch at his hospital's dining room some months ago. "I instinctively stood up to hold the chair of a woman colleague who had carried her sandwich over to the table. She almost cracked me in the face!" Charlotte Ford insists that she still likes the old chivalry--doors opened, cigarettes lighted. "Men are still men," she says, "the tougher of the two sexes. It's nice to have them do things."
Washington. D.C., is the nation's capital, but its social rituals are a distinct tradition somewhat apart from the rest of American practice. While the nation may be just returning to some formality, Washington never really abandoned it. Says Betty Beale. Washington Star society columnist since 1945: "We've always been a long-evening-dress kind of town." Jimmy Carter is bringing blue jeans and an occasional touch of country to Washington, but the Government and diplomatic corps have never mothballed their dinner jackets. Still, the abrasions of sexual politics are a distinctly new development in high Government circles. Patricia Harris, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, remarks pointedly: "The President doesn't kiss the male Cabinet members when he sees them." One male member of the Cabinet (James Schlesinger), says Harris, required a bit of educating. "In our original days." says she, "he addressed me regularly as 'young lady,' in a tone that I did not find necessarily overwhelming. Now he says 'Pat' or 'Madame Secretary.' " Schlesinger was similarly given to irritating Commerce Secretary Juanita Kreps by calling her "lass," a practice he has also abandoned. The Green Book, the Social List of Washington, maintains extraordinarily strict rules. Separated couples like White House Aide Hamilton Jordan and his wife are excised from The Green Book by the register's mistress, Jean Shaw Murray, daughter of the late Carolyn Hagner Shaw, who presided over it for 34 years. Carolyn Hagner Shaw was a subtle and funny arbiter who could savor the preposterous in Washington's manners. Once a woman addressed an urgent query to her: Could she, the woman asked, fulfill her deceased husband's wishes and bury him in his white tie
I and tails? Was it proper to do so even though the funeral was to take place before 6 o'clock in the evening? Mrs. Shaw granted her approval.
Sometimes it seems that some ideal system of manners must be imprinted in the collective unconscious of the race; at any rate, men and women have been trying long enough to discover it. One of the earliest known books, the Instructions of Ptahhotep, was an Egyptian behavior manual written around 2350 B.C. (Among Ptahhotep's precepts: Never offend a self-made man, and "Be silent, for it is better than teftef flowers.") Ever since then, social thinkers have believed that in manners, even in the most frivolous gestures of a culture, they could detect its hidden tectonics and tendencies. The German scholar Norbert Elias, in a magisterial 1936 work called The Civilizing Process, argued that man's "progress" in manners from the intimate and even somewhat disgusting communalism of the Middle Ages to the fastidious individualism of the Renaissance and beyond brought about an unwholesome estrangement of people from one another; they became ashamed, as they were not before, of their smells, their bodies.
From Ptahhotep to Castiglione to Erasmus to Emily Post, the manners manual has been a permanent fixture of practical
literature. Americans have been especially obsessive about doing things by the book: democracy has always involved the ambivalence of men and women hell-bent upon being superior to their equals. In the exuberantly crass moneygrubbing of the gilded age after the Civil War, for example, Americans were springing literally out of ditches into great wealth. The trajectory that their money purchased into ostentation, if not aristocracy, gave them all kinds of anxiety attacks. And so the etiquette-book business flourished, scores of manuals pouring forth to soothe and lead the nouveau riche nervously forward to some kind of presentability. Some of the rules were quite exquisite then; one writer advised that books by male and female authors should never be placed side by side on a bookshelf.
After World War I, public morals and private manners deteriorated. "Day by day," one writer sobbed, "the art of living withers and fades, leaving us to face existence, unadorned, in all its nakedness." Still, the appetite for the Correct Thing remained. In the years 1918-29, some 68 different works on behavior were published in the U.S. From 1930 to 1945, nearly 80 more manuals went to press. The parodist Donald Ogden Stewart wrote a burlesque of Emily Post called Perfect Behavior, starting with his definition: "The perfect gentleman is he who never unintentionally causes pain." Manners are always simultaneously something more and something less than they seem. They are the body language of a culture, the gesticulations of its soul: in the profound formality of the Japanese, for example, or the surly and almost pathological caution of the Russians, it is possible to divine both personal and national character. Manners can be quite serious; the survival of the tribe always depends upon a kind of cooperative forbearance, which is the essence of manners. It is possible that the best manners have never prevented a man from being either an ass or a murderer. But Tish Baldrige would quarrel with that reading: to her, manners are a paradigmatic system of intelligent kindness. She would extrapolate: not giving offense in the minor transactions of life is fair training for avoiding more serious affronts, such as bullying, homicide and unprovoked warfare. Those awful things, Tish would say, are simply not done.
*The Four Hundred took their name from the dictum of the foppish writer Ward McAllister, who claimed in 1888 that there were only about 400 people in fashionable New York society who were at ease in a ballroom. Often tempered by a disarming folksiness. When a Yankee visitor, on meeting Chief Justice Susie Marshall Sharp of the North Carolina Supreme Court, asked how she was addressed, she replied: "Everyone just calls me Judge Susie."
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