A Guide to Modern Manners

From the Financial Times March 5th 2005

Scene 1: I am at my next door neighbour's funeral. Her daughter, who has nursed her through a difficult decline, has tried to arrange something traditional that is verging on the grand. The discreet chapel is filled with Hollywood roses that scent the air with sugar and lime. My neighbour’s daughter is threading her way through the pews, courage itself, welcoming people and thanking them for coming. Afterwards, at the reception, she hands round flutes of Mumm to toast her mother. A small group is huddled round the hostess who is trying, shakily, to keep things together. Then I hear someone approach her and exclaim cheerily, 'I must say, Dear, you're looking awfully well on it!'

Scene 2: A relative telephones and at the end of the conversation says she will be having a big dinner in three weeks time and she does so hope I will attend. I hear no more about this invitation and so two nights before the appointed day I telephone to ask if the party is still on and to check the time. 'Oh dear’, she says, awkwardly. 'Had you earmarked it rather? I know, why not come afterwards for a drink around eleven!'

Scene 3: An old friend is at a wedding seated next to the bride's aunt. the first course is being served and someone is coming round with the wine. 'So,’ the aunt begins, 'Nicola mentioned to me that you're Jewish. Tell me, why didn't your people do more to defend themselves in the war?'

Why is it that so many people don't know how to behave? Have they forgotten? Did they never know? Sometimes I wonder how people have the confidence to behave as badly as they do. Do they have no vanity? Perhaps they are so certain of their own appeal that they can afford to ruffle feathers, safe in the knowledge that their other powers will provide a healing salve. Sometimes it's an absence, rather than a surfeit of confidence that causes people to act badly: having given up on themselves they seem to have given up on everyone else also. Stupidity must also surely play a part and narrow mindedness: it seems to me that consideration for others' feelings requires little more than having the most basic imagination of one's own.

All my life these matters have obsessed me. Ever since the playground, which I still inhabit in my heart of hearts, I have continually wondered how to behave. As a highly sensitive child I often wished there was some handy paradigm for good, sane behaviour, with graduated colour charts and graphs to g uide me, like we had for the times tables. Learning to handle myself correctly seemed to me something I absolutely had to master in order to have a happy life. Should I give my money to the scarey girl at the bus stop when she asked my timid friend for hers? Was it right to try and wash the smelly girl in my class when the school took its annual jaunt to Devon, so she would no longer be teased? When I asked my friends and family about my dilemmas no one quite knew the answers. The heroines I admired weren’t much help either. I looked to people like Judy Garland for guidance, picturing her married to an alcoholic James Mason in A Star is Born with tears dripping through her painted-on freckles as she faced the cameras bravely for her close-up. The whole thing seemed so strewn with obstacles. When hurt, or slighted, or worst of all neglected, should you get up and fight to defend yourself in the way you certainly would for someone else? Should you pretend you didn’t care to save your pride? Or was the best ploy, perhaps the best revenge, to have a cup of tea and a custard cream and roll your eyes to the heavens? I still do not know the answer to this.

Of course , in the past, what constituted good and bad behaviour was so much clearer. I was taught not to keep people waiting, ever, not to cause others’ distress by my thoughtlessness and how and when to keep secrets. . My mother sat me down one day (after Brownies) and told me it was really terrible to pass on any kind of comments that were made to me about a third party. Asking highly personal questions of people I didn’t know well was unthinkable. Even now I would only enqure deeply into an old friend’s predicament (marital problems, problems conceiving) if given more than one unmistakable invitation to do so. Old fashioned good manners concerned themselves with smoothing things, making interaction easy and stress free to produce communication without waves.

This approach was charming and soothing yet it was essentially an intolerant code. It required people to be smaller than they were, to sandpaper away all their plights and gripes and their crazier hopes and desires. . It was unaccepting of eccentricity, let alone difficulties or complications. To survive under these guidelines you had to present yourself in your best light at all times. It was as though human unhappiness was some sort of environmental pollutant and did not belong in a civilised setting. I’ll never forget a friend’s father in his green velvet trousers scowling at me when he caught me sobbing in a downstairs bathroom when I should have been dancing, carefree, in the summer house. To him this scene did not just signify a colossal failure on my part. It was actually a betrayal. Viewed in their worst light old fashioned manners have a brutal aspect to them that I find unacceptable. I would never have expected the august old gent to perch on the lip of the bath and encourage me to talk through my feelings. But he might have patted me on the back, given me his handkerchief or a stiff drink and offered to fetch my friend.

A more modern approach demands this sort of flexibility. It accomodates difference and sudden awkwardnesses. It is both a more authentic and a livelier way to exist, with kindness not convention at its heart. This modern code allows for the fact that we don't want our social interaction to be governed by someone else's set rules. We like to make things up as we go along. If the only way a friend can come to your birthday party is by putting her two year old twins to sleep in your bed-why not? Can it really be a moral error to enquire very delicately in private into a friend’s trouble so that she knows you have it in mind? The rewards of a more fluid system are obvious. I don’t want my friends to hide their diffficulties and I don’t want to have to hide mine, although I may choose to. I don’t want anyone to feel obliged to eat or drink anything they don’t want to at my house to save my feelings. It didn’t bother me that quite a few people seemed to wear jeans and a sweatshirt to my wedding-I thought it was sweet. I do love it when people make the effort to consume a good quantity of alcohol if I give a party, but I do see it’s not always possible. Good modern manners require that you are always responsive to the demands of each separate situation. This involves not just a high degree of sensitivity to your environment, but self awareness too. And this is where many people come unstuck.

All over the world, at this exact moment, thousands of people will be causing great offence because they are attempting to find shortcuts to intimacy. Intimacy cannot be demanded, it is the result of a gradual process. The lady at the wedding who asked about the holocaust was trying, mistakenly, to get to the heart of my friend’s being before she had even said hello. No-one could pull that off. She saw herself as being attentive and engaging, but without any sort of boundaries her comments were grotesque. To him her interested enquiry felt like an assassination attempt.

Bad behaviour can also be the result of our wish to move seamlessly between different environments without making any sort of adjustments to our conduct. A funeral may seem a bit like a party where compliments are always welcome, but if you genuinely cant tell the difference you are a liability and should not really leave the house. It is not acceptable to function on automatic pilot for all social events. As invitations very occasionally say, your presence is required. It would have been fine to whisper to a chief mourner at a funeral, ‘I hope you don’t mind my saying, but you do look so beautiful today.’ But this wouldn’t be appropriate in a cancer ward.

There is a huge emphasis now on pleasing the self. It’s become the modern equivilent of duty. . I’ve watched this selfishness trend blossom in society and I have mixed feelings about it. I have friends who never do anything they don’t want to and part of me cant help but admire them. They are still kind and generous when they choose to be so, yet when faced with the mildest tasks they don’t relish they are filled with outrage. ‘Writing all the thankyous for my wedding presents is going to take twelve hours. I cant possibly!’ A friend declared to me recently. ‘It wont matter will it?’ What those who flex their selfish muscles regularly are often slow to grasp, however, is that every gain involves a loss. The good oppinion of others may not seem valuable when you have it, but sensing it dwindle and then die may be disconcerting. If you do something that is unashamedly selfish at someone else’s expense I think it is best not to offer excuses. However, after a decent interval, do re-invest in the friendship. Find an unusually lovely present or make the person feel highly valued by confiding or including him or her in some other way. When people see me at my worst, I don’t like to leave it too long before they see something of my good side too.

Of course what you regard as good behaviour may hinge on what you think love is. Marjorie Hemming, the heroine of my new novel ONLY HUMAN, is a marriage guidance counsellor with exceptionally high standards. She takes her view of love not from the letters of St. Paul, like many a wedding service, but from King Lear. Marjorie believes that the pinnacle of love is expressed in that play when Cordelia declares that she wouldn't have let her enemy’s dog spend a night outside in such a terrible storm, not even if it had bit her. Now I’ve never been big on dogs myself, but I do find the extravagance of that sentiment alluring. It really is the last word in politeness.

. Yet how do you apply any sort of principles to situations where there just isnt a good clear line of conduct? Dilemmas abound and these are what tax my insomniac head in the small hours. Recently a novelist friend of mine was giving a reading at a literary festival with Fay Weldon, whom I only slightly know. I had decided to take my friend a huge bunch of flowers partly because I thought it would amuse her and partly to thank her for some recent help she had given me with my own book. I saw the whole thing in my mind: me bounding out of the audience my head obscured by a large but not enormous cloud of yellow roses, but then I thought: What About Fay? I know Fay Weldon has scant need of my blooms, but when I imagined her sitting there, ungarlanded, the scene did not look right to me. I could offer her a bunch as well, of course. I'd be happy to; I'd be honoured; but as she doesn't really know me she would think I was insane. It might embarrass her. It might embarrass my friend. What to do?

Of course scenarios far worse than this have kept me awake at night too. I do realise that there is nothing more unmannerly than finding fault with others constantly . I know also that the sorts of people who are interested in the subject of good behaviour are often no better than they ought to be themselves. Eighteen years ago I too did something terrible. I had made a new friend, a motherless girl who was vastly intelligent and delicate and in poor health and I adored her. One day we were talking about our relative cooking skills. 'I just cant cook' she said. 'I never learned. I wish I could, but I don't even know the simplest thing. It's terrible. Hang on though. Now I think of it there is one thing I can do. My grandmother taught me beofre she died. Duck with cherries.’

Without a moment's hesitation, what did I say to this new acquaintance of mine whose friendship at that time meant the world to me? I turned to her and said. 'God! How disgusting!'

ONLY HUMAN by Susie Boyt is published in paperback today by Headline Review