We should notice that there was total agreement among aristocrats and parvenus about what it was that those at the top of the pyramid wanted: there was one goal, just as at Versailles there was only one stage on which to perform. Both at Versailles and among the tight circles of upper-class intimates, those who were “in”—those around whom that barrier was raised—knew and even decided what was what, and how to behave. The bourgeois with his undeniable wealth longed to be accepted, to crown his achievement with the “finishing touches,” the aristocratic je ne sais quoi.
It is clear why manners should have become so mystifying, so ineffable. It was essential that those outside the pale should not be able simply to learn the social skills required to be “accepted.” It could not be that for the steadily decreasing price of a book on manners you could make your way into “the best circles.” If you could, you would in any case no longer want to be let in, for the whole point about prestige is that it is possessed by few—what is available to the multitudes is devalued by the very fact of being “common.” Manners, and most especially “manner” or “air,” which includes speech, bearing, and gesture, require to be learned at one’s mother’s knee. One has to be born in the right place and brought up there; one has to be “well bred.” Manners of the “ineffable” kind are learned, above all, by living with people to whom the style is “second nature.”
Not to know how to behave—and nowhere is this more the case than at the sensitive and essential dinner table—is never to be invited in the first place. If you “arrive” at the table of the great, and there disgrace yourself, you will never be invited again. Mere breaches of manners are not immoral; but partly for that very reason they are, in “society,” unpardonable: forgiveness, where adroitness rules, is an inappropriate response to incompetence. Never being invited means never becoming intimate with those who count: dinner invitations have always constituted vitally important rungs on the ladder to worldly success. Not knowing how to behave, you are never in the company of those who do know, and therefore you will never have a chance to learn the only way it is possible to learn, by their example.
It is also clear why simplicity, informality, and intimacy were so useful to aristocratic mores under the threat of being “arrived” at. It was ingenious to outlaw and ridicule expense and bombast, because these came increasingly within the reach of the nouveau riches; profuseness, if you have riches, is easy to copy. The rules of protocol, of ritual, everything that can be known by precepts beginning “Do not …”—all these can be written down and learned. They are wares which the etiquette books can offer; they are vulgarly available. But when a pinnacle of prestige is created, where an exclusive few have it in their power to decide who will “do” and who will not, then, with the aid of ineffable charm, indescribable simplicity, and exquisite taste, a fortress is created which is almost unassailable.
Furthermore, this particular “fortress” (and here begins a dance we feverishly perform to this day) need never stand still. Whenever the anxious intruders, the “impertinent, the improper, the vulgar,” draw close enough to achieve the object which will grant to them, too, the honour of being inside the charmed circle, the elite simply moves on; it changes the fashion. As soon as too many have whatever it is (holidays on the Riviera, shoes the right shape, the latest turn of phrase), the prestige of the thing is automatically disqualified. The aristocrats, the trendsetters, have already fled elsewhere. Timing is the trick. Mobility, the freedom conferred by money, appears to offer even to the hordes of the excluded a chance to “get there” in time. In fact, the race dooms them to failure in terms of the very metaphor of races; those not to the manner born begin way behind the starting line. They will suffer continuing disappointment because they will never be in the right place at the right time. The “right time” of course, in this particular game, usually means “first.” And whoever tries really hard to catch up is condemned from the start as “pretentious.”
No sign must appear of all the training involved in the production of “polish.” As Castiglione put it when speaking of noble prowess at tennis, “Never let it appear that the Courtier devotes much effort or time to it, even though he may do it ever so well.” Correct manners at table must make the politeness surrounding food—the tight control over appetite, the elevation of conversation and “things of the mind” over the merely physical love of eating, the consideration not for self but for neighbours—seem the most natural behaviour in the world. No effort, no hesitation, no clumsiness of movement must intrude, in spite of the fact that table manners, which constitute proof positive that the people employing them are not “like beasts,” have always set out to make eating not easier but (until the techniques are mastered) more difficult. You must sit straight, no elbows on the table, no slouching or fidgeting—all the while, of course, contriving to look relaxed and “natural.” There are particular ways of handling knives, forks, and spoons, and rigid rules for what can and cannot be used with what: take olives with a spoon but never a fork, take walnuts with fingers, serve cheese with a knife, always take milk products with a spoon even if they are firm enough for a fork, use a spoon to eat curry, and know which way to sweep your spoon when eating soup (one never drinks soup). “The expert,” we are informed by the Chinese writer B. Y. Chao in 1956, “removes the bones from his mouth with his chopsticks.” We must talk as we eat—it is rude not to—but never open our mouths if food is in them. “Nothing indicates a well-bred man more than a proper mode of eating his dinner,” wrote “Agogos” in 1834. “A man may pass muster by dressing well, and may sustain himself tolerably in conversation; but if he is not perfectly ‘au fait,’ dinner will betray him.”
In republican and egalitarian North America, it was soon not enough to get rich; you had next to learn “the graces,” and polish the roughness which might well have aided your rise to power in the first place. But Americans were much harder to persuade that they should wait before bounding over the barriers. “I have seen it gravely stated by some writer on manners, that ‘it takes three generations to make a gentleman,’” wrote an American expert on how to behave in 1837. “This is too slow a process in these days of accelerated movement.” And she stoutly encouraged her readers to work and study hard, in order to fit themselves “for intercourse, on equal terms, with the best society in our land.”
Americans were not suspicious of handbooks. As another great leap forward took place in printing technology and book distribution, etiquette manuals poured off the presses of the United States during the nineteenth century. They offered advice on how to become “refined.” The models were English and French—but there was a determination, too, to search for new American ways. The etiquette of blatant deference to superiors was ignored, as members of the middle classes increasingly demanded ritual expressions of mutual respect from one another. There was a tendency from the beginning to counsel against stiffness, pomp, and over-refinement: both eighteenth-century aristocratic ideals of simplicity and revolutionary American egalitarianism are tightly intertwined at the roots of the modern craving for the casual. Another tradition which Americans inherited was a British distrust of overdone manners, of foppishness, affectedness, and other “Continental” exaggerations; the island British had their own line in snobbish contempt for foreigners in fancy clothes, with food smothered in sauces and no respect for “genuine” simplicity. American opposition to theatrical manners was further reinforced by a “radical Protestant antipathy toward social and religious ritual.”
American etiquette books explained all the ancient precepts of table manners, simply and clearly. There was little embarrassment about being basic or cut-and-dried; people who knew very little about the niceties were anxious to learn, and the manual-writers—many of them claiming to be high-born themselves and therefore assumed by everybody to be “in the know”—enjoyed spreading the word. They were much less afraid, to begin with, than their European counterparts of seeing their ramparts stormed: they felt it was far more urgent
to raise the general level of correct behaviour. Their desire to improve the manners of the working classes is now viewed with suspicion. “Their enterprise,” says John Kasson, a historian of nineteenth-century American civility, “must be viewed within the larger concern of how to establish order and authority in a restless, highly mobile, rapidly urbanizing and industrializing democracy. Seeking to avoid overt conflict, they turned issues of class and social grievance back upon the individual” by redefining such problems as questions of propriety and “good taste.” Nevertheless, European visitors to America, such as the petulant Mrs. Trollope, complained about the roughness of manners among the Americans, and stung some of them into redoubling their efforts at improvement.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the great shift from the countryside to the huge modern cities was under way. City people could live rushed but anonymous lives: no one need know who you were or where you had come from, provided you looked like everybody else and gave no clues. It was usually politic to behave as everyone “was supposed to.” One manners manual, typically forthright, explained that chances for success in the city were better if “a person going from one place to the other [that is, from the country to town] should be utterly undistinguishable from those about him.” Having good manners (but nothing too refined or overdone) had become a way of avoiding remark. And it had always been the case that showing bad manners was truly unforgettable behaviour. As Erving Goffman has put it, “Infractions make news.”
A whole new generation of etiquette manuals began to appear in the twentieth century. The doyenne of the new breed of experts was Emily Post, who produced Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home in 1922. Her text was enhanced with examples figuring characters many of whose names expressed the snobbery of “polished” society: the Smartlingtons, the Oldnames, Mr. Stocksan Bonds, the Bobo Gildings, and even the Onceweres. But Post was careful to remind her readers of the greater tradition of civility: “Best Society is not a fellowship of the wealthy, nor does it seek to exclude those who are not of exalted birth”; but she adds, with at least one ear cocked in the other direction, “it is an association of gentlefolk, of which good form in speech, charm of manner, knowledge of the social amenities, and instinctive consideration for the feelings of others, are credentials by which society the world over recognizes its chosen members.” Her rules are utterly categorical. If one’s tablecloth is made of lace, on no account should a coloured undercloth be laid so that it will show through; and “To eat extra entrées, Roman Punch, or hot dessert is to be in the dining-room of a parvenu.” According to Post’s grand-daughter-in-law and recent editor, Elizabeth Post, “When [the book] was first written, Emily Post thought it would be bought by the upper class, but that wasn’t true—they didn’t need it.”
Emily Post had thought of herself as writing a book that was to be a bastion against a tide of new ways of which she could not approve. The people who did read the book—people who longed for advice in a world where conditions were indeed quickly changing, and they wanted to know how to cope “correctly”—wrote thousands of letters which convinced Post that her attitude should change. The next and succeeding editions of her book began to include advice on how to remain cool and polite when faced with new social facts. She admitted that women now smoked, and could not be frowned upon for doing so: the frowner, not the smoker, was now “out of place.” She virtuously allowed that “No rule of etiquette is of less importance than which fork we use” (1929). From now on, writers on politeness were going to have to see one of their duties as keeping their readers up to date; they remain defenders of what the French call “the usages,” but must extend their repertoire of rules if they wish to keep their readership. The latest Emily Post’s Etiquette (1984) has new material on single parents and unmarried couples living together, and answers doubts about whether French fries may be eaten with the fingers (use a fork—unless they are served with sandwiches, when fingers become permissible).
As early as 1924, the etiquette manuals recognized the trend towards simpler and simpler manners; the Great War had played havoc with custom. But Americans could see the new attitude as in fact a return to the past—to the homespun values and the spontaneity of the American tradition, and to freedom from pomp, pernicketiness, and repression. They could choose to have their cake and eat it, however, through also insisting on the ineffable primacy of taste. “This liberty of behaviour,” wrote Emily Post, “requires more real breeding than ever. You must have an innate sense of the fitness of things, and sure feeling for the correct time and place” [my italics].
The most popular of the new arbiters of elegance on the North American scene is Judith Martin, “Miss Manners.” She keeps thoroughly in touch with the preoccupations of her readers by listening, as Emily Post learned to do, to their questions. Miss Manners is a syndicated columnist. Her persona is crisply rigid, as her role requires, and she always sticks to the wonderfully formal third person, for instance as she remains firm where even Emily Post had caved in: “If Miss Manners hears any more contemptuous descriptions of etiquette as being a matter of ‘knowing which fork to use,’ she will run amok … Forks are not that difficult … we will now take a minute to learn everything there is to know about Which Fork to Use.” She injects common sense and asperity into her rulings: “There is no such thing as instant intimacy”… “Nothing is more ingratiating than asking a foreigner for instruction in his code of manners.”
She also maintains the humorous tradition in picturing disastrous mistakes, especially those involving food. “At the party, a lady in a low-cut gown tripped, stumbled, lurched across a table, falling face first into a bowl of guacamole dip, and in the process ‘popped out’ of her top.” You really have to permit yourself to laugh on such an occasion, Miss Manners replies to the reader’s question about the right response. After wondering briefly whether a mere avocado dip would have been less demanding of mirth than guacamole, she goes on to point out that not to laugh would be to suggest “that the lady did it all the time and her friends have gotten used to it.”
Miss Manners supplies for her readers a system of etiquette that is demanding, unbending, and precise. Her constant charge is “You must not be rude,” but the point is that you can win much more roundly through maintaining the civilities. People read her avidly, partly because she is so much fun to read, and partly on account of the prevailing fear that a total demise of “good behaviour” might be just round the corner. People appear to have tried—and, worse, experienced—careless spontaneity, and wonder what the other possibilities might be.
A whole new branch of the genre of etiquette manuals is the lucrative list of books on manners for people “in business.” People making money know that good impressions can facilitate the making of more of it, whereas an image wanting in the proprieties can actually get in the way. Where aspiration has definite chances of leading to success, decorum and inhibition lose their connotations of repression and pretentiousness, and take on suggestions of honing, competence, confidence, and speed. “Even polished brass,” Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son in 1777, “will pass upon more people than rough gold.”
3
The Pleasure of Your Company
The Latin word for a hearth or fireplace is focus. The meaning which that word now has in English has developed directly out of the role which fireplaces have played for thousands of years in western European households, and indeed in most dwellings on earth: where the fire in the house is kept, there is the household’s focus. Since before the dawn of history, we have cooked on that fire, made our beds near it, sat round it as a family “circle,” and eaten with the sound and sight of the fire as a comforting background to our meals.
Fireplaces have always tended to be placed physically and psychologically in the centre of the house. We have now pushed ours to one side of our living rooms (families are only semi-circles these days); both the cooking and the eating are done elsewhere. What is called, interestingly enough, �
�central” heating is all over the house, and not solely at the “focus.” But in modern houses too, if they include the luxury of a hearth which can contain a real fire, or even an electric one disguised as glowing coals, the fireplace remains the spot where family and friends meet. We sit and face the fire to talk or read; near it we watch television, a new and rival focus of attention; we decorate the mantelpiece with family photographs, a mirror, a clock, vases of flowers, and annual Christmas cards. Clichés like “hearth and home” are still comprehensible to us, and we hope when we are away that the family will “keep the home fires burning.” The French word for a household is a foyer, literally, a “hearth.” (Our theatres have foyers because they once offered their patrons a fire in the vestibule, so that people could warm themselves on arrival.)
The cooking that went on over the hearth fire, and the daily meals consumed nearby, expressed the relationship of members of the family to each other, their kinship and their unconditional, continuing loyalty. One definition of a family—a definition with different degrees of significance in different cultures—is “those who eat together.” In Africa as a general rule, according to L-V. Thomas, people traditionally eat daily meals together because they are consanguineous, and the fact of doing so proves kinship. Marriage means, for a man, being cooked for by a woman, and for a woman, feeding a man: eating together and sleeping together are two sides of the same coin.
In some societies it is considered shameful to be seen eating by outsiders, even guests; people may sit in a corner or facing the wall to eat in some cases, or delicately hide their mouths when masticating. Visitors must be offered food in most cases, so that unexpectedly visiting others at dinner-time is always tactless behaviour. The Wamirans of Papua New Guinea, for example, feel they must share their food out equally with as many people as have set eyes on it; visitors are thought to be slighted if not fed. Food might be hidden away if people visit and there is not enough to give them, or if unprepared hosts do not feel like sharing: the family will fast until the coast is clear. People may (perhaps as a result of this caution before visitors) count eating with defecation and sex, as behaviour intensely private and hedged about with taboo.
The Rituals of Dinner Page 10