Emily Post’s “Etiquette” is out again, this time in a new and an enlarged edition, and so the question of what to do with my evenings has been all fixed up for me. There will be an empty chair at the deal table at Tony’s, when the youngsters gather to discuss life, sex, literature, the drama, what is a gentleman, and whether or not to go on to Helen Morgan’s Club when the place closes; for I shall be at home among my book. I am going in for a course of study at the knee of Mrs. Post. Maybe, some time in the misty future, I shall be Asked Out, and I shall be ready. You won’t catch me being intentionally haughty to subordinates or refusing to be a pallbearer for any reason except serious ill-health. I shall live down the old days, and with the help of Mrs. Post and God (always mention a lady’s name first) there will come a time when you will be perfectly safe in inviting me to your house, which should never be called a residence except in printing or engraving.
It will not be a gruelling study, for the sprightliness of Mrs. Post’s style makes the text-book as fascinating as it is instructive. Her characters, introduced for the sake of example, are called by no such unimaginative titles as Mrs. A., or Miss Z., or Mr. X.; they are Mrs. Worldly, Mr. Bachelor, the Gildings, Mrs. Oldname, Mrs. Neighbor, Mrs. Stranger, Mrs. Kindhart, and Mr. and Mrs. Nono Better. This gives the work all the force and the application of a morality play.
It is true that occasionally the author’s invention plucks at the coverlet, and she can do no better by her brainchildren than to name them Mr. Jones and Mrs. Smith. But it must be said, in fairness, that the Joneses and the Smiths are the horrible examples, the confirmed pullers of social boners. They deserve no more. They go about saying “Shake hands with Mr. Smith” or “I want to make you acquainted with Mrs. Smith” or “Will you permit me to recall myself to you?” or “Pardon me!” or “Permit me to assist you” or even “Pleased to meet you!” One pictures them as small people, darting about the outskirts of parties, fetching plates of salad and glasses of punch, applauding a little too enthusiastically at the end of a song, laughing a little too long at the point of an anecdote. If you could allow yourself any sympathy for such white trash, you might find something pathetic in their eagerness to please, their desperate readiness to be friendly. But one must, after all, draw that line somewhere, and Mr. Jones, no matter how expensively he is dressed, always gives the effect of being in his shirt-sleeves, while Mrs. Smith is so unmistakably the daughter of a hundred Elks. Let them be dismissed by somebody’s phrase (I wish to heaven it were mine)—“the sort of people who buy their silver.”
These people in Mrs. Post’s book live and breathe; as Heywood Broun once said of the characters in a play, “they have souls and elbows.” Take Mrs. Worldly, for instance, Mrs. Post’s heroine. The woman will live in American letters. I know of no character in the literature of the last quarter-century who is such a complete pain in the neck.
See her at that moment when a younger woman seeks to introduce herself. Says the young woman: “ ‘Aren’t you Mrs. Worldly?’ Mrs. Worldly, with rather freezing politeness, says ‘Yes,’ and waits.” And the young woman, who is evidently a glutton for punishment, neither lets her wait from then on nor replies, “Well, Mrs. Worldly, and how would you like a good sock in the nose, you old meat-axe?” Instead she flounders along with some cock-and-bull story about being a sister of Millicent Manners, at which Mrs. Worldly says, “I want very much to hear you sing some time,” which marks her peak of enthusiasm throughout the entire book.
See Mrs. Worldly, too, in her intimate moments at home. “Mrs. Worldly seemingly pays no attention, but nothing escapes her. She can walk through a room without appearing to look either to the right or left, yet if the slightest detail is amiss, an ornament out of place, or there is one dull button on a footman’s livery, her house telephone is rung at once!” Or watch her on that awful night when she attends the dinner where everything goes wrong. “In removing the plates, Delia, the assistant, takes them up by piling one on top of the other, clashing them together as she does so. You can feel Mrs. Worldly looking with almost hypnotized fascination—as her attention might be drawn to a street accident against her will.”
There is also the practical-joker side to Mrs. W. Thus does Mrs. Post tell us about that: “For example, Mrs. Worldly writes:
“ ‘Dear Mrs. Neighbor:
“ ‘Will you and your husband dine with us very informally on Tuesday, the tenth, etc.’
“Whereupon, the Neighbors arrive, he in a dinner coat, she in her simplest evening dress, and find a dinner of fourteen people and every detail as formal as it is possible to make it. . . . In certain houses—such as the Worldlys’ for instance—formality is inevitable, no matter how informal may be her ‘will you dine informally’ intention.”
One of Mrs. Post’s minor characters, a certain young Struthers, also stands sharply out of her pages. She has caught him perfectly in that scene which she entitles “Informal Visiting Often Arranged by Telephone” (and a darn good name for it, too). We find him at the moment when he is calling up Millicent Gilding, and saying, “ ‘Are you going to be in this afternoon?’ She says, ‘Yes, but not until a quarter of six.’ He says, ‘Fine, I’ll come then.’ Or she says, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m playing bridge with Pauline—but I’ll be in to-morrow!’ He says, ‘All right, I’ll come to-morrow.’ ” Who, ah, who among us does not know a young Struthers?
As one delves deeper and deeper into “Etiquette,” disquieting thoughts come. That old Is-It-Worth-It Blues starts up again, softly, perhaps, but plainly. Those who have mastered etiquette, who are entirely, impeccably right, would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness. The letters and the conversations of the correct, as quoted by Mrs. Post, seem scarcely worth the striving for. The rules for the finding of topics of conversation fall damply on the spirit. “You talk of something you have been doing or thinking about—planting a garden, planning a journey, contemplating a journey, or similar safe topics. Not at all a bad plan is to ask advice: ‘We want to motor through the South. Do you know about the roads?’ Or, ‘I’m thinking of buying a radio. Which make do you think is best?’ ”
I may not dispute Mrs. Post. If she says that is the way you should talk, then, indubitably, that is the way you should talk. But though it be at the cost of that future social success I am counting on, there is no force great enough ever to make me say, “I’m thinking of buying a radio.”
It is restful, always, in a book of many rules—and “Etiquette” has six hundred and eighty-four pages of things you must and mustn’t do—to find something that can never touch you, some law that will never affect your ways. Once somebody gave me a book of French conversation; I looked through it, sick with horror at all I had to learn. But hope came to me, for on one page there flashed like a friendly smile one single sentence that I knew I should never need to study, one blessed group of words for which, though I lived to be eighty, I could find no possible use. That sentence was “I fear you have come too late to accompany me on your harp.”
And in “Etiquette,” too, I had the sweetly restful moment of chancing on a law which I need not bother to memorize, let come no matter what. It is in that section called “The Retort Courteous to One You Have Forgotten,” although it took a deal of dragging to get it in under that head. “If,” it runs, “after being introduced to you, Mr. Jones” (of course, it would be Mr. Jones that would do it) “calls you by a wrong name, you let it pass, at first, but if he persists you may say: ‘If you please, my name is Stimson.’ ”
No, Mrs. Post; persistent though Mr. Smith be, I may not say, “If you please, my name is Stimson.” The most a lady may do is give him the wrong telephone number. ♦
