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The Editor’s Desk: Manners maketh man

What can we learn from an etiquette book first published in 1960? Quite a lot.
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On the face of it, an etiquette book written in 1960 would seem to have as much relevance in 2018 as an instructional booklet on how to make buggy whips. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” wrote L.P. Hartley, and as anyone with a cursory knowledge of etiquette goes, things were done very differently indeed in the past.

However, Peg Bracken’s I Try to Behave Myself, first published in 1960, still holds up as very relevant indeed. Etiquette is in many ways just a fancy word for “good manners”, and Bracken wrote about the good manners needed in ordinary social settings and everyday relations, not the etiquette demanded of someone dining at Downton Abbey.

That sort of etiquette, she writes in the introduction, was designed to keep people out. Her intention was to make people comfortable in everyday situations, and the result is a book that I have read more times than I can count. This is not necessarily because I need to learn good manners (although it’s useful to get a reminder, from time to time, of some areas that need work); it’s because Bracken is, in addition to being practical, laugh out loud funny.

In one chapter, for example, she advises letting a child know that pain is sometimes unavoidable: “This lesson can keep him, one day, from biting a dentist, and if this isn’t a fundamental point of etiquette I don’t know what is.” She tells a (fake) correspondent who sort of has a feeling she’s not entitled to wear a white dress on her wedding day that “If white actually meant today what white used to be supposed to mean (and if it always did, how did Grandma learn to count so fast on her fingers?), they wouldn’t be selling all the white wedding dresses today that they’re selling.” Women are advised not to keep men waiting too long before they head out for the evening: “Ten gets you twenty the man you’re with won’t notice what colour stockings you’re wearing, if any, but he’ll certainly notice the three cigarettes he had time to smoke while he waited.”

A couple of chapters, such as those dealing with telephone and letter-writing manners, are somewhat outdated, to be sure, although RSVPing when requested—whether said request comes on embossed letterhead or via email—is still Very Good Manners Indeed (and I wish more people would remember this). However, a chapter entitled “Lord Chatterly’s Mistress: Men & Women & What to Do About It” must have caused a few raised eyebrows back in the day.

It begins “The subject of men and women versus etiquette is absolutely fraught with sex, which is as it should be.” Bracken continues, “Most etiquette books never get into the bedroom, but this one will, because, after all, a great deal of etiquette takes place there, or ought to.” Thus it is that, in a section suggesting times when a woman might not feel like making love, she notes “At 8:00 Saturday morning for the 336th consecutive 8:00 Saturday morning.”

Good manners are about making other people comfortable and not inconveniencing them, something Bracken understood. Even today—especially today—her practical and humorous advice is as relevant as it was in 1960. As Bracken knew, true good manners never go out of style.



editorial@accjournal.ca

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