Manners, Beards, and the Bill of Rights

FORMALITY is a word that has never had much immediacy or much aura in the history of American living, and seems not just rather alien but a touch absurd against the headlines of today. Yet the at all international-minded reader has only to come upon such a phrase as “the formal French” — in this case, the title of a book — to envisage not only particular objects or occasions, but entire eras and a national culture. French chateaus and gardens, long-ago Versailles, and a much more recent Faubourg Saint Germain at once leap to mind. But along with such French emblems of formality come almost all the marks of prescribed or elegant living that we ourselves have borrowed, whether comme il faut or r.s.v.p., haut monde or grand seigneur, bal masqué or fête champêtre, maître d’ hôtel or sommelier, foie gras or champagne, doyen or débutante, première or vernissage. How much that is festive, fashionable, ceremonial speaks French the world over. W. L. Wiley in The Formal French (Harvard University Press, $6.75) does not quite satisfy our expectations of his title, being only a little concerned with the amenities of today, and only a little more with those of times past. His chosen scene is France in the great ages of ceremony, his subject matter is predominantly their arts, their courts, their ritualistic culture. Much of such formality is what we — and Professor Wiley —would call formalism: something that in seventeenthand eighteenth-century France wasn’t even a stone’s throw from pedantry. Even this, however, as Mr. Wiley presents it, can have its mildly amusing side — such as whether, in the theater, the unity of time restricting the action to one day should rule out hours for sleep. Much more familiar to us are the roles and rules of the French Academy, which got its start as “something like a men’s luncheon club,” what with men of letters becoming bored with the pretentious female chatter of the salons. (“I like the melon” was not good enough for such précieuses; one said, “I esteem the melon.”) Roughly half a century after the French Academy was founded came the Comédie Française: where the Academy split hairs over words, the Comédie split hairs over how to pronounce and declaim them.

Formality, in life as opposed to art, has largely to do with rank as opposed to rules. There is a sense about it of special or habitual homage, special or habitual privilege, special or habitual festivity. Mr. Wiley most reasonably ascribes to Louis XIV “the ultimate in formalism,” and indeed we associate him with not just great ceremonial occasions, but with such set rituals as his lever and coucher; with just who might hold the candlestick, or be seen to the foot of the stairs, or see the King getting ready for bed, or talk to him after he got there. In the century before Louis XIV there was actually more extensive ceremonial: Mr. Wiley describes how, after the death of Francis I, an effigy of him fashioned by François Clouet and his assistants was put on a nine-foot-square bed and for eleven days served dinner and supper, course after course along with wine, by a large staff of functionaries, the napkin being formally presented to him by a grandee, and the blessing pronounced by a cardinal. Only after this did the pompes funèbres begin. Even insult used the language of amenity, as when a lady repulsed a Prince of the Blood with “Your Highness has the kindness to be too insolent.”

Mr. Wiley offers the French love of elaborate ritual and ceremonial as one reason why the Reformation, with its Calvinist severity, failed in France; as he attributes to the French feeling for order and classical form their rejection of the baroque, which flowered all around them. As against this, Mr. Wiley cites the paradox of the formalistic French welcoming again and again new and avant-garde movements in art and letters, from the libertins and philosophes, to the Symbolists and Cubists, the surrealists and existentialists. Mr. Wiley might have added that the nation which desires a week’s notice for a cup of tea spends much of its life in the voluble informality of the sidewalk café.

AND indeed, though Mr. Wiley’s text is almost entirely concerned with the past, his title is still apposite in the present. For the French are still formal: Mr. Wiley himself tells of a very young Boy Scout who, before getting off a bus, bowed formally to his grandmother and then shook her hand. Mr. Wiley reminds us of all those ceremoniously polite warnings in public places not to do this, that, or the other thing, and of all those prosaic processes with polysyllabic names—a permanent wave, for example, being an “ondulation indéfrisable.” Somehow no fires of revolution or flares of republicanism have quite done away in France with monarchical flourishes and seignorial traditions. The French seem to have a great public sense of occasion, a European sense of position; of rank and caste, of ribbons and orders. Formality is in their awed-peasant or their awesome-patrician bones. It is very much less in ours; as a tenet of American life it has, despite a Philadelphia or a Baltimore or a Charleston, never really prospered. For ours was for a long time, of course, a movingfrontier culture, with the middle-class front parlor so formal it played host largely to coffins. Nor have we ever contrived a truly indigenous formal style. Our splendid eighteenth-century architecture and furniture—even a Bulfinch’s or McIntire’s or Duncan Phyfe’s — were derived from England’s. In the nineteenth century we went classically public in an orgy of Greek Revival, and expensively parvenu with Renaissance chateaus and palazzos. Whether or not, in modern architecture, form follows function, formality usually walks the other way. Grand-style formal living in America today, where not despaired of from a shortage of servants, is disliked for all the time and fuss involved. In any case, the private car has given way to the company plane; the private ballroom to the public hotel; and though women may load up on jewels and spend fortunes on clothes, tiaras are optional and trains are defunct. Moreover, our luxury-class life resists formality if only because formality resists change — which is something America can never resist. Change is a fixed star of our way of life. Ours may be the only anchored society in which the brand-new enjoys the highest rank and the right “contact” the widest sway, for if push is the American gospel for getting there, pull is the American proof of having arrived.

Thus, however much given to lavishness, American culture has small taste for established forms. Informality, indeed, might very well be called an American invention. To begin with, it partly springs from our actual inventions, from the telephone replacing the letter, and the typewriter the letter written by hand; from hot dogs banishing forks, and ice cream cones spoons; from electrical gadgets creating a hospitality that does without servants, without dining rooms, and as often as not without chairs. As who does not know, today’s formal “black tie” was under its maiden name of tuxedo a triumph for informality. Informality, moreover, has killed off many tiresome genteel customs and proprieties — paying calls, leaving cards, straightbacked chairs, over-long dinners, cumbersome clothes — and has done this so decisively that today even stuffed shirts seldom wear stiff collars.

A fair amount of the informality that has stuck is due to the young. In the twenties and thirties, Ivy League college boys relaxed their dress with the button-down-collar soft shirt and the decline or decease of garters, underwear tops, and hats. A fair amount, too, of benign informality is due to that mingling of people in the arts, of people in the professions, and of the unstuffy well-to-do known as Upper Bohemia. Where genuine, this eclectic, unshowy, unstandoffish world is unmarred by the claims of status. Practiced by the status-minded, it travesties the real thing, with the hostess in her $1000 peasant smock and the food flown in from places halfway around the world. The status circuit must face endless dilemmas: Cleveland Amory tells of a Hollywood hostess who, ruling out black tie, asked the men to wear “sincere suits.”

In general, definitions of formal and informal can only, by now, prove relative and “regional” — informal, excusing you from wearing gloves; formal, permitting you to wear shoes. And in today’s age of sociological upheaval, it can perhaps seem both trivial and pointless to make such distinctions at all. Yet this can be an age in which extremes meet. For in essence hippiedom and “high society” are equally abiding by rules and subscribing to protocol, whether with butlers or bedbugs, Brooks Brothers or the Collier brothers. If the hippies carry us into a problem world, they return us to a world of formulations, to a reversal that can yet be a ritual, a credo that pervades a society. But the significant distinction between the formal and the informal in American life has much less to do today with social habits than with social relations and the motives behind them. From having been a kind of invention in America, informality is becoming a kind of investment. The American taunt of “snooty” on the one hand and of “stuffy” on the other has opened the door wider and wider on “informality”—on something with glib overtones of the good mixer and the regular guy, of the democratic tradition and the American way.

And, fortified by these connotations, informality is an investment that can pay off handsomely. And furthermore, fast. Someone half your age, meeting you for the first time, calls you by your first name. Half an hour later he wonders whether you’d do him a big favor — he hears you’re a great friend of, and so on. Next morning his wife may invite you to dinner; if you go, it may turn out not quite a social one. Of such is the informality known as presumption in social circles and as aggression in sociological ones. Permeating a whole brightyoung-man, Greater Madison Avenue kind of culture, it has turned business and pleasure into identical twins.

FOR the genuine article no praise is too high. But the genuine article is never sold separately; with informality must go sensibility, tact, a feeling for occasion; dispensing with “rules,” one must bring instincts to bear, and antennae. Formality, by its very nature, snubs familiarity and aggression; informality must prohibit them. To be sure, there is always the element in all this of When in Rome. . . . Habitats vary, and so do generations, To their elders, the informality of the young can seem a blend of strict ritual and total anarchy. But with the young, dissent is the oldest of traditions; that much of it today involves higher stakes and grimmer penalties carries us beyond mores into a world whose own headlines have created young people’s. At a far less dire level, the young today don’t just classically say to hell with this or that: they can convert even a crotchet into a cause, they can make badly needing a shave no mere bohemianism but an adjunct of the Bill of Rights. Yet why not? The young, along with generous sympathies, have always turned their backs on heirloom beliefs, or cut off their noses to spite their fathers.

Yet whatever the undergraduate chaos on the campus, a strong sense of formalism can still operate among the faculty. Here rank can still advertise itself, titles still be waved like flags. Perhaps the most public formalism appears in the prefatory acknowledgments of academic books, not least where the book is some poor wretch’s Ph.D. thesis or chief bid for tenure, with the faculty members he is indebted to marching down the page in squads and platoons, each and every name carefully preceded by “Professor.” Himself no offender, Mr. Wiley does pay his respects to a colleague who happens to be “Alumni Distinguished Professor of French.” Imagine an institution of learning contriving such a botch and bathos of words. Imagine the precedent it creates — Trustees Extremely Popular Professor of Botany; 1966 Dropouts Unparalleled Adviser of Students.

In life as in art, formality calls for talent. Japanese friends in New York once took my wife and me to the Kabuki, and beyond the stylized art on the stage, we met other Japanese members of the audience whose costume and postures, whose bows and gestures, whose greetings and farewells were marvels of highbred style. Such things are virtually extinct, if they ever existed, in our society. Certainly formality, or a Yeatsian feeling for ceremony, can have great resonance and distinction; to go no further, the marriage or funeral service of the Book of Common Prayer achieves through sentiment something beyond all the powers of showmanship. And, particularly in a homogeneous society, formality can prove very convenient and useful, whether as a time-saver, a thought-saver, or a licensed form of insincerity. “How do you do?” can be a dismissal as well as a greeting; “Thank you very much,” a refusal and not an assent.

Informality, too, works best in a homogeneous society, with an agreed-upon sense of freedom and a frowned-upon taking of liberties. It is a kindness, so to speak, for one man to tell another that his fly is open, but not that his wife’s dress is cut too low. But what informality, today, is too often being made to stand for is the right to ask indiscreet questions, exploit social situations, put people on the spot, be intrusive from having an “outgoing nature.” If today’s nearest approach to formality is a worship of chic, of status, of in-ness, of a thismorning’s knowledge of What’s Done, the great sin of informality is a total indifference to what’s not done, or at any rate shouldn’t be. Rather be stared at in one’s grandfather’s green-from-age frock coat than in Hollywood sit above the salt in a sincere suit.