The age of experience - the lost art of manners and self-control in social situations - Column

National Review, Dec 27, 1993 by Linda Bridges

IT IS SURELY no coincidence that Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence and Emily Post's Etiquette were published just two years apart. By the early 1920s, it was becoming apparent that the world was not simply going to settle down, scarred but not essentially altered, to the status quo before the First World War. For Mrs. Post, the bubbling capitalism of the postwar era had created a readership of people with new money who wanted to give it a quick patina of age by emulating the way her Mrs. Worldly and Mr. Clubwin Doe, the Oldnames and the Gildings, conducted their lives and their households; there was also, perhaps, a readership of young people whose social education had been interrupted by the war.

In the case of Mrs. Wharton, as Louis Auchincloss--the author of a later generation's portraits in brownstone---once put it, "In the turmoil and dislocation of the postwar world Edith began to look back with a new appreciation on the quiet, settled New York of her childhood that she had once found so stultifying. If the older generation had spent their lives sweeping things under rugs, at least they had had rugs to sweep them under." And, as Mr. Auchincloss suggests in a recent Conde' Nast Traveler, that is part of the appeal Martin Scorsese's movie version will have for the denizens of an even more turbulent time.

Of course, the calm of Edith Wharton's childhood world had already, long before the war, been shattered by the arrival of really big new money, accompanied by varying degrees of refinement and of social aspiration--the Vanderbilts and Goulds, the Morgans and Astors, the Rockefellers and Carnegies. Even in The Age of Innocence, which begins in the early 1870s, we have Julius Beaufort, the financier of dubious origins and doubtful morals, who gains social entree by marrying a daughter of old New York and gives her a ballroom that enables her to stage the social event of the year. And by the 1880s, the elegant, unpretentious brownstones of the real-life equivalents of the Wellands and Archers and Leffertses had been eclipsed by the Renaissance palazzos and Gothic chateaux rising on upper Fifth Avenue, just as Mrs. Beaufort's annual opera ball paled beside Mrs. Vanderbilt's French costume ball.

It was in the world dominated by these people's children and grandchildren that Mrs. Post was writing, and while some of the advice in that first edition of her frequently updated work seems positively Neolithic (there is nothing so out of date as yesterday's fashion), much of it remains, fundamentally, as true in the age of feminism and political correctness as it was in the age of flappers and Prohibition.

One passage caught my eye at the time Jean Harris was on trial on charges of murdering the Scarsdale Diet doctor. Among the principal items of evidence by which the prosecutor convinced the jury that Mrs. Harris had gone to Dr. Tarnower's house that night with murder in her heart were the searing letters she had written him, letters of accusation and pleading and self-torment. If only she had taken heed of this passage from Etiquette, which she must have come across while instructing the girls at that Virginia finishing school:

THE LETTER NO WOMAN

SHOULD EVER WRITE

The mails carry letters every day that are so many packages of TNT should their contents be exploded by failing into wrong hands ....

Few persons, except professional writers, have the least idea of the value of words and the effect that they produce, and the thoughtless letters of emotional women and underbred men add sensation to news items in the press almost daily.

Of course, the best advice to a young gift who is impelled to write letters to men, can be put in one word, don't.t

Or if you have ever been at a dinner party where a row has broken out between two of the guests (not a heated but serious discussion--which, granted, would have been enough to get both guests scratched off Mrs. Archer's, and even Mrs. Post's, dinner list--but an out-and-out I'd-feelthat-way-too-if-I-looked-like-you donnybrook), you might long to send the combatants a copy of this passage:

At dinner once, Mrs. Toplofty, finding herself next to a man she quite openly despised, said to him with apparent placidity, "I shall not talk to you--because I don't care to. But for the sake of my hostess I shall say my multiplication tables. Twice one are two, twice two are four--" and she continued on through the tables, making him alternate them with her. As soon as she politely could she turned again to her other companion.

And while Miss Manners is doubtless right in today's world to give house-party hostesses laissez-faire advice on sleeping arrangements for unmarried couples, one treasures this mechancete' (recounted by Mr. Auchincloss in his book on Edith Wharton):

There was always a half-mocking, halfrespectful note in her evocations of old Manhattan customs. A young American woman who had gone to the theater in Paris with a gentleman friend was startled to hear Mrs. Wharton's sharp carrying voice in a row behind her: "I didn't know that Julia Hoyt was engaged!" In her day such would have been the only polite conclusion to be drawn. It probably amused her to startle young people with old constructions of their conduct. But if she smiled at the naive formalities of the ancien regime, she may have a bit condescendingly pitied those who did not even know what they were.