Even after sleeping on it, I’m not quite sure what to make of this new book by Henry Hitchings, Sorry!: The English and Their Manners; and I’m wondering, of course, if my inability to be definite about it is a failing of some kind. Usually, it is. Indefiniteness, not being sure about something — these betoken a confusion in the reader that perhaps the writer ought to have cleared up. But there is nothing confused about Sorry! It is a straightforward survey of the history of books, most of them written by and for the English, about commendable behavior. If there is any confusion at all, it is in our shared, sloppy willingness to use “manners” as a synonym for good conduct. Hitchings, a journalist rather than a theorist by nature, has no interest in correcting that mistake. Quietly and without bullet-points, he lets the evidence pile up: all behavior is “manners,” and what we call “good manners” is a sort of colloid, in which chunks of timeless principle are suspended in fluid fashions.

I am fairly certain that the book has been mispackaged: both the title and the dust-jacket, which at least here in America features a formal dinner place setting, to which a red plastic “party cup” (so labeled) has been added, suggest a marketing scheme to plant the book in the gardens of Downton Abbey. In other words, a volume of etiquette porn, presided over by that dark goddess of drawing-room sadomasochism, Princess Margaret, who appears to have insisted upon the observance of regimentally correct protocol by everyone around her whilst she indulged in fantasias of rudeness. (See Edward St Aubyn’s Some Hope for a sampling.) In the world of etiquette porn, nothing is allowed to happen unless it happens correctly; otherwise, in those cases not leading to beheading, it is ignored, rejected, overlooked, like an improperly executed ballot. The two fellows washed up on a desert island in WS Gilbert’s “Etiquette,” having worked up the nerve to discover that, since they have a friend in common back in London, they might “know” one another, decide that they must part when their mutual friend is discovered to be a criminal.

They laughed no more, for Somers thought he had been rather rash
In knowing one whose friend had misappropriated cash;
And Peter thought a foolish tack he must have gone upon
In making the acquaintance of a friend of Robinson.

Readers of etiquette porn wait with baited breath to discover the punishment inflicted upon the benighted diner who tries to use a fish knife to cut the roast. They want to be thrilled by that cliffhanging moment of terror that is magically resolved when Edward VII, or some other potentate, decides to drink from his finger bowl, too.

Sorry! is not that book. (Sorry!) There may have been one or two other examples, but I remember coming across only one high-grade etiquette-porn story. It concerns the old taboo about addressing grown men by their given names.

A book on contemporary manners from 1933 reports that “In no way is the offhand attitude of these days as apparent as in the extravagant use of Christian names.” A year later, the mountaineer Eric Shipton, after a month or so of sharing a small tent with his fellow Himalayan explorer Bill Tilman, asked if they could stop calling each other by their surnames. Tilman replied, “Are you suggesting that I should call you Eric? I’m afraid I couldn’t do that. I should feel such a bloody fool.”

That’s a good one. But the tale is not representative. Representative is the immediately following paragraph.

In 1939 Laura, Lady Troubridge, whose guides to etiquette were popular before the Second World War, wrote that “Friendships are made far quicker now that the barrier of undue formality has been lifted, and Christian names follow swiftly on mutual liking in a way which would make old-fashioned people aghast.” Yet thirteen years previously, her attitude had been different: she had warned that “everyone, and women especially, should be extremely careful in making friends and acquaintances in hotels,” on the grounds that “strangers still remain strangers, even though you sleep under the same roof with them.” It is striking, too, that Lady Troubridge’s thoughts were in 1926 being packaged as The Book of Etiquette — subtitled The Complete Standard Work of Reference on Social Usage — whereas by 1939 they werre presented as Etiquette and Entertaining — with a jaunty explanation on the cover that the book would serve “to help you on your social way.”

This passage is representative of Hitchings’s book in several ways. The style is agreeable but not brilliant. It takes the reading of such treatises as Lady Troubridge’s quietly for granted, and does not trumpet Hitchings’s researches. (Hitchings is, if anything, undemonstrative to a fault.) Most representative of all, however, the bit about Lady Troubridge illustrates that manners change.

This is something that the consumers of etiquette porn don’t want to hear. They like to think that there used to exist a world that bristled with punctilio, governed by edicts of Japanese nuance (and severity) on every aspect of personal conduct. They don’t lament the fact that this world has passed away so much as they miss the manifold opportunities it presented for other people to sink into lurid, tragic disgrace. Henry Hitchings, in contrast, is concerned to explore what manners tell us about humanity, and also what the fading of rigid codes tells us about our world of safe opportunity.

Failing to observe a dress code, whether prescribed or implicit, is considered at best gauche and at worst a sort of vandalism. Observing the code is a passport into a realm in which the code can (sometimes) be dropped: we are granted more latitude. The most tightly specified dress codes are ephemeral ones: what you’re expected to wear to a party, for instance. Then there are broad codes that may not even be explicitly set out, such as what’s appropriate in a particular office; these are likely to be absorbed, as if by osmosis. The broadest codes might be called “general principles of dress”: men’s attire and women’s are different, clothes protect the skin and keep certain delicate parts of the body out of sight, and our garments exist perhaps not so much to protect our modesty as to create it. But these principles are not rock-solid, and plenty has altered that once seemed immutable. Women no longer expect to have to put on gloves before leaving the house. Jeans are not associated with protest or even that often with the utilitarian needs of cowboys. Nor do we associate striped garments with ignominy, whereas in the medieval world they marked a person as an outside: juggler, fool, prostitute, executioner.

The first two of these alterations in the general dress code took effect during my youth; the third one took place so long ago that stripes are now associated with dress suits and ceremonial formal wear. That gives an idea of Hitchings range, which manages to line up the new and the old with aplomb. But the note most characteristic of Sorry! is struck by that eye-widening remark about garments creating modesty rather than, as we all think, guarding it. This amounts to asking, provocatively, if there is anything at all natural about modesty, at least in the same way that there is a natural need for protection from wind and snow. No one dies of immodesty; it is a socially-conditioned response. We learn about it from clothes, ours and other people’s — Genesis 3:7 to the contrary notwithstanding.

What’s misleading about the book’s subtitle is its promise of a look at English manners from the outside. It ought to read, The English and Our Manners. This is, especially, not a book written for Americans obsessed with the arcana of precedence and heraldry. It is not a handbook for navigating the stairwells at Buck House. Most English people have no more contact with “the royals” than most Americans, and such contact as there is is likely to be fleeting. The privileged few who frequent regal precincts do not need books of conduct to guide them; in their everyday behavior, they themselves are walking codes. “The moment codes of behaviour are written down, they become accessible to people who have previously had only a limited, second-hand knowledge of them.” Hitchings’s point might well be taken further: there is a difference between manners learned from a book and manners learned from social life. The former come attached to training wheels that are invisible only to the novice. A book such as Sorry! can’t help with that problem — no book could — but at least it can caution the novice against overconfidence. It can also explain manners that everyone takes for granted — that we don’t see as manners. My greatest difficulty in speaking French (or any foreign language) comes from the need to strip away the brief qualifying phrases (Hitchings calls them “epistemic” — however easy to read, this book is not fluff) that begin almost every sentence that I speak: “I think,” “I’m afraid that,” “I suppose,” and so on. This is an Anglophone tic, not an English one.

“Paradox will come up again and again in this book,” Hitchings warns us in the first chapter, and Sorry! bears him out so well that you might doubt that anything at all can be learned from it. But paradoxes are usually illusory. “The readiness of the English to apologise for something they haven’t done is remarkable, and it is matched by an unwillingness to apologise for what they have done.” There is nothing self-canceling about this amusing observation. In the teeth of physical impossibility, we human beings are very good at holding on to our cake even as we eat it. If there were a way to illustrate that comestible truth with graphic design, then Hitchings’s understated treatise would have the proper package.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 7th, 2013 at 12:12 pm.