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Table Manners by Jeremiah Tower
I HAD EXPECTED and hoped 130-plus pages on proper dining etiquette would make me want to become a more graceful host, guest, and friend, but by the end of Jeremiah Tower’s Table Manners, my instinct was to go to the nearest tableclothed restaurant and act like Andy Kaufman. Table Manners is a slim but authoritative guide for readers who’ve been suddenly thrust into a social class outside their comfort level — think Richard Pryor in Brewster’s Millions. Throughout, you’ll find yourself mentally listing acquaintances who could do for a read, all the while wondering how the book got into your hands.
Nothing asks to be outdated faster than a good etiquette book. The first modern best seller was Emily Post’s Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home (1922), a title you’re better off swallowing with your mouth closed. Etiquette, the earliest title Tower lists as a source, achieved success because, according to Dinitia Smith in The New York Times, “the country’s exotic mix of immigrants and newly rich were eager to fit in with the establishment. Men had to be taught not to blow their noses into their hands or to spit tobacco onto ladies’ backs.” Fair enough. In 1948, Millicent Fenwick took the baton with Vogue’s Book of Etiquette, a tour de force that included such gems as “those who are crippled, or in tears, or very shabbily dressed, or otherwise marked by misfortune, should at least be granted the dignity of privacy.” Tower begins his own introduction by quoting Tiffany’s Table Manners for Teenagers (1961), by Walter Hoving, a man who was born shortly after Grover Cleveland left office. None of these titles last, but how can any “manners” book written before The Beatles still be relevant in a world where adults walk into each other while searching for imaginary animaloids on handheld screens?
Hence the rationale for Tower’s present-day contribution. “You can go mad trying to stick to the man-woman-man format when someone cancels at the last minute,” he says. “Forget it. We live in a world of multitudes of fluid genders.” Take that, you old mothball sniffers — it’s 2016 and we have a black president! Tower is a celebrity chef and, according to Eater, one of the forefathers of “California Cuisine,” something I can only imagine involves avocado and linen pants. That the book is written by a renowned chef makes sense if you sort of think about it. But if you really think about it, it makes about as much sense as Sealy releasing a Kama Sutra manual. His manners have served him well, he says. From the introduction: “When I opened Stars restaurant in San Francisco in 1984, I knew that manners would let me gain access into the circles of the wealthy and social elite of that community.” This is a quaint, if not profoundly privileged way of looking at the world. But he recovers; the introduction finishes with probably the most useful kernel in the entire book: “You are always correct and safe from any embarrassing gaffes if you remember the Platinum Rule: do unto others as they would have you do.”
The Platinum Rule — and its less self-righteous sibling, the Golden Rule — are both built on the premise of empathy. But Table Manners is a manifesto that often relies on fear, a showcase of what is fundamentally wrong with any concept of “manners”: we learn the rules not to make life more enjoyable, but to prove our belongingness, our having been there. In language alone, Tower is keen to this. A general current of positivity can, all of a sudden, nosedive into admonishment. You learn to avoid being a “blundering” host. We are told, “it might be wise to change unless you like having others make unwanted unkind judgments about you.” He asks, “Who wants your blueberry jelly in their buckwheat honey?” It’s everywhere, and sometimes surreal: “no one is worth dying for”; “suffer with a smile, and no one else will have to feel your pain”; “warm hands on my cold wine are not welcome.” This all brought to mind The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney’s 1950 study of the American people. Riesman posits that the country’s cultural type had moved from tradition-directed to inner-directed and finally settled on other-directed. It’s as bleak as one might expect; screw up in a social atmosphere and you risk your spot in the grid. Tower gives the good advice of being courteous to guests who forgot gifts, but then shames those guests who are so unimaginative as to bring a bottle of wine. Who cares? It’s only a bad gift if we say it is, and Tower says exactly that.
By now we’re just circumnavigating class, something Tower deftly sidesteps. If there’s one question this book triggers over and over again, it’s who is this for? Like all etiquette books, Table Manners is aspirational, but in a much trickier way. Post, Fenwick, and Hoving convinced the lower classes and the misinformed they could be better perceived by changing (and if they learned not to spit tobacco onto ladies’ backs, all the better). But so much of Tower’s advice is superfluous; anyone who would come across this book obviously wouldn’t need it. At this point, if you don’t take your flatulence out to the balcony, a book’s not going to convince you to do so (and oh how I wish one of the book’s many fine illustrations had been devoted to that scene). The occasional effect of Table Manners is far more intriguing: it lets the reader locate the gestures they already perform and use that as proof that they’re of whatever class, sect, or clique they already believe themselves to be. It’s aspirational not in that it generates aspiration, but in that it confirms it.
That isn’t to say this is intentional — or even that Tower is always on the same page as what would be considered “normal” behavior. On mingling with strangers before dinner:
In one turn, Tower goes from suggesting preparative stalking to writing as if the reader has just landed on Earth (at a well-appointed pre-dinner cocktail hour, no less). If you can’t succinctly answer a question posed by another guest, “make up something fun.” Earlier on, regarding apparel: “it’s better to wear long sleeves you can roll up if it’s too hot. With short ones, you’re stuck with what you’ve got.” I often didn’t know whether I’d rather put Tower through the Psychopathy Checklist or the Turing test.
The three most enjoyable chapters are saved for the end: “Techiquette,” “Pretentious or Not?” and “Eating Around the World.” The last is a nice, straightforward, back-patting palate cleanser; why yes, I did know they serve quite a late dinner in Spain. “Pretentious or Not?” is occasionally misguided — apparently large peppermills are pretentious, while “finger bowls” of water for mid-course cleansing are not — but Tower properly frames ironic gestures, pragmatism, and the old appetizer versus hors d’oeuvre versus amuse-bouche dialectic. “Techiquette” is what you think it is, but it’s also a section we as a people desperately need. A few lines made me want to shove the book in front of certain faces I know and love — for example, “Keep in mind that staring at your phone doesn’t make you look less awkward and more popular, it makes you unapproachable,” and “An awkward cocktail hour without your smartphone is simply that, just one hour.” Perhaps it’s a hobbyhorse for this tech-allergic reviewer (who has never owned a smartphone), but Tower rails magisterially against taking calls during a meal, posting a gathering to social media (“Live Tweeting” is explicitly covered), and settling arguments over Google.
By the end, you can feel where all of these rules come from: the idea of being good to each other. What can be frustrating are the rules themselves, or rather, the need to put them into text, condescend to the reader, or let the reader condescend to the non-reader. Empathy is an essential human impulse, but how long will it take for Table Manners to become as antiquated as Vogue’s Book of Etiquette is now? 50 years, tops? In that dystopia/utopia, we’ll probably eat by plunging our digithumbs into piles of HorseSlop™. The point is, it doesn't matter how we eat, or share, or containerize our buckwheat honey. Each successive entry into our library of etiquette books is the same rule obscured by slightly different and ephemeral layers of mores, tradition, and fashion. It isn’t the Platinum Rule or even the Golden Rule. It’s much simpler — call it the Styrofoam Rule: just be decent.
Nothing asks to be outdated faster than a good etiquette book. The first modern best seller was Emily Post’s Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home (1922), a title you’re better off swallowing with your mouth closed. Etiquette, the earliest title Tower lists as a source, achieved success because, according to Dinitia Smith in The New York Times, “the country’s exotic mix of immigrants and newly rich were eager to fit in with the establishment. Men had to be taught not to blow their noses into their hands or to spit tobacco onto ladies’ backs.” Fair enough. In 1948, Millicent Fenwick took the baton with Vogue’s Book of Etiquette, a tour de force that included such gems as “those who are crippled, or in tears, or very shabbily dressed, or otherwise marked by misfortune, should at least be granted the dignity of privacy.” Tower begins his own introduction by quoting Tiffany’s Table Manners for Teenagers (1961), by Walter Hoving, a man who was born shortly after Grover Cleveland left office. None of these titles last, but how can any “manners” book written before The Beatles still be relevant in a world where adults walk into each other while searching for imaginary animaloids on handheld screens?
Hence the rationale for Tower’s present-day contribution. “You can go mad trying to stick to the man-woman-man format when someone cancels at the last minute,” he says. “Forget it. We live in a world of multitudes of fluid genders.” Take that, you old mothball sniffers — it’s 2016 and we have a black president! Tower is a celebrity chef and, according to Eater, one of the forefathers of “California Cuisine,” something I can only imagine involves avocado and linen pants. That the book is written by a renowned chef makes sense if you sort of think about it. But if you really think about it, it makes about as much sense as Sealy releasing a Kama Sutra manual. His manners have served him well, he says. From the introduction: “When I opened Stars restaurant in San Francisco in 1984, I knew that manners would let me gain access into the circles of the wealthy and social elite of that community.” This is a quaint, if not profoundly privileged way of looking at the world. But he recovers; the introduction finishes with probably the most useful kernel in the entire book: “You are always correct and safe from any embarrassing gaffes if you remember the Platinum Rule: do unto others as they would have you do.”
The Platinum Rule — and its less self-righteous sibling, the Golden Rule — are both built on the premise of empathy. But Table Manners is a manifesto that often relies on fear, a showcase of what is fundamentally wrong with any concept of “manners”: we learn the rules not to make life more enjoyable, but to prove our belongingness, our having been there. In language alone, Tower is keen to this. A general current of positivity can, all of a sudden, nosedive into admonishment. You learn to avoid being a “blundering” host. We are told, “it might be wise to change unless you like having others make unwanted unkind judgments about you.” He asks, “Who wants your blueberry jelly in their buckwheat honey?” It’s everywhere, and sometimes surreal: “no one is worth dying for”; “suffer with a smile, and no one else will have to feel your pain”; “warm hands on my cold wine are not welcome.” This all brought to mind The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney’s 1950 study of the American people. Riesman posits that the country’s cultural type had moved from tradition-directed to inner-directed and finally settled on other-directed. It’s as bleak as one might expect; screw up in a social atmosphere and you risk your spot in the grid. Tower gives the good advice of being courteous to guests who forgot gifts, but then shames those guests who are so unimaginative as to bring a bottle of wine. Who cares? It’s only a bad gift if we say it is, and Tower says exactly that.
By now we’re just circumnavigating class, something Tower deftly sidesteps. If there’s one question this book triggers over and over again, it’s who is this for? Like all etiquette books, Table Manners is aspirational, but in a much trickier way. Post, Fenwick, and Hoving convinced the lower classes and the misinformed they could be better perceived by changing (and if they learned not to spit tobacco onto ladies’ backs, all the better). But so much of Tower’s advice is superfluous; anyone who would come across this book obviously wouldn’t need it. At this point, if you don’t take your flatulence out to the balcony, a book’s not going to convince you to do so (and oh how I wish one of the book’s many fine illustrations had been devoted to that scene). The occasional effect of Table Manners is far more intriguing: it lets the reader locate the gestures they already perform and use that as proof that they’re of whatever class, sect, or clique they already believe themselves to be. It’s aspirational not in that it generates aspiration, but in that it confirms it.
That isn’t to say this is intentional — or even that Tower is always on the same page as what would be considered “normal” behavior. On mingling with strangers before dinner:
Once you’ve finished greeting or introducing yourself to the host, keep moving: it’s time to turn to the other guests. If you’re super-motivated, you might be wise to research them, and have a handful of conversation openers in your pocket. It’s never appropriate to ask who else will be there before you accept an invitation, so you might not know anything about the others. Walk up to anyone standing alone, put out your hand, and introduce yourself.
In one turn, Tower goes from suggesting preparative stalking to writing as if the reader has just landed on Earth (at a well-appointed pre-dinner cocktail hour, no less). If you can’t succinctly answer a question posed by another guest, “make up something fun.” Earlier on, regarding apparel: “it’s better to wear long sleeves you can roll up if it’s too hot. With short ones, you’re stuck with what you’ve got.” I often didn’t know whether I’d rather put Tower through the Psychopathy Checklist or the Turing test.
The three most enjoyable chapters are saved for the end: “Techiquette,” “Pretentious or Not?” and “Eating Around the World.” The last is a nice, straightforward, back-patting palate cleanser; why yes, I did know they serve quite a late dinner in Spain. “Pretentious or Not?” is occasionally misguided — apparently large peppermills are pretentious, while “finger bowls” of water for mid-course cleansing are not — but Tower properly frames ironic gestures, pragmatism, and the old appetizer versus hors d’oeuvre versus amuse-bouche dialectic. “Techiquette” is what you think it is, but it’s also a section we as a people desperately need. A few lines made me want to shove the book in front of certain faces I know and love — for example, “Keep in mind that staring at your phone doesn’t make you look less awkward and more popular, it makes you unapproachable,” and “An awkward cocktail hour without your smartphone is simply that, just one hour.” Perhaps it’s a hobbyhorse for this tech-allergic reviewer (who has never owned a smartphone), but Tower rails magisterially against taking calls during a meal, posting a gathering to social media (“Live Tweeting” is explicitly covered), and settling arguments over Google.
By the end, you can feel where all of these rules come from: the idea of being good to each other. What can be frustrating are the rules themselves, or rather, the need to put them into text, condescend to the reader, or let the reader condescend to the non-reader. Empathy is an essential human impulse, but how long will it take for Table Manners to become as antiquated as Vogue’s Book of Etiquette is now? 50 years, tops? In that dystopia/utopia, we’ll probably eat by plunging our digithumbs into piles of HorseSlop™. The point is, it doesn't matter how we eat, or share, or containerize our buckwheat honey. Each successive entry into our library of etiquette books is the same rule obscured by slightly different and ephemeral layers of mores, tradition, and fashion. It isn’t the Platinum Rule or even the Golden Rule. It’s much simpler — call it the Styrofoam Rule: just be decent.
¤
LARB Contributor
Andrew Lipstein is the creator and editor of 0s&1s Novels.
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