'A Wrong Judgment of Complaisance'

Human nature is such that even good manners, the lubricant that keeps the social engine from seizing, can be weaponized. In “The Anthropology of Table Manners from Geophagy Onwards” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981), Guy Davenport tells the story of a traveling salesman who stayed overnight at a farmhouse in Arkansas. For breakfast the next morning he was served, along with eggs and biscuits, a slab of fatback, a dish he found as unappetizing as its name:

“He knew his manners, however, and in passing over the fatback, chatted with the lady of the house about how eating habits tend to be local, individual, and a matter of how one has been raised. He hoped that she wouldn’t take it wrong that he, unused to consuming fatback, left it untouched on his plate.’

The “genial Arkansas matron,” Davenport tells us, agreed. “She then excused herself, flapped her copious apron, and retired from the kitchen. She returned with a double-barreled shotgun which she trained on the traveling salesman, with the grim remark, ‘Eat hit.’ And eat hit he did.”

The wish not to offend can prove dangerous to one’s health. Many years ago in a private home in the French Alps, I was served a generous portion of an entrée I assumed was roast beef. I’ve never been much of a meat eater but I silently complied. Mid-dinner the host announced he had purchased the roast from one of the local boucheries chevalines. I was eating Trigger. Only a supreme effort of will kept me from returning the ingested meal to my plate.

In an essay published in The Tatler on this date, March 3, in 1710, Jonathan Swift endorses what the French call “les petites morales, or the smaller morals [which] are with us distinguished by the name of good manners, or breeding.” He warns, however, that manners in the wrong hands can become oppressively unmannerly:

[I]t is odd to consider, that for want of common discretion the very end of good breeding is wholly perverted, and civility, intended to make us easy, is employed in laying chains and fetters upon us, in debarring us of our wishes, and in crossing our most reasonable desires and inclinations.”

Swift turns truly Swiftian when he describes a visit to a country house: “As soon as I entered the parlour, they forced me into the great chair that stood close by a huge fire, and kept me there by force till I was almost stifled.” Things degenerate from there. The daughter of the house serves him a drink he didn’t want:

“She returned instantly with a beer glass half full of aqua mirabilis and syrup of gillyflowers. I took as much as I had a mind for; but Madam vowed I should drink it off, (for she was sure it would do me good after coming out of the cold air) and I was forced to obey, which absolutely took away my stomach.”

Swift, of course, is a connoisseur of human idiocies: “It is evident that none of the absurdities I met with in this visit proceeded from an ill intention, but from a wrong judgment of complaisance, and a misapplication of the rules of it.”