Dear Michael,
But you don’t really want to talk about the subject, and though it isn’t a King Charles’ head problem with me, I was a little surprised at your brushing it to one side and asking instead what my views were on nuclear proliferation. … OK, you’ll have them and anything else you want from me, but let me linger for a moment on the subject I raised. Harold Nicholson wrote a nice book–what, 50 years ago?–called Good Behavior (Good Behaviour, of course) in which he touched down on different civilizations and what they individually held indispensable to their own culture.
I wish I could remember the details, recalling only that stiff-upper-lipness was the British sine qua non. I don’t remember that he brought up a distinctively American cultural signature, though I do remember a discussion on the general question that asked, if to be thought unmanly is the supreme vice in England, what is it in America? … If you want to know, I’ll pass our finding along in the next letter.*
But I want to say this much, that there is a matter of sensibilities here that merits more than the dismissal you attempt. You are saying that you are a part of a culture in which everybody is Bill and Mike and that you are quite happy with it.
But shouldn’t you be unhappy that there are those who are not happy with it? Should I train myself not to wince when a total stranger from CompUSA asks, what can I do for you today, William? My roots are only half Connecticut Yankee. My mother and father were resolute Southerners, and we lived in the winter months in Camden, S.C., where they are buried. There was in Camden, when we settled there, a reigning presence, a 65-year-old widow whose approval everyone sought both because she was arbiter elegentiae in Camden and because she was the soul of high standards and kindness. Age 13, I heard her recount to my mother that a colored lady had put in for a job to replace the retiring cook/maid/laundress and when asked her name, gave it as “Mrs. Whittaker.” This brought laughter from Camden’s first lady, who said simply that of course she would not hire a servant who gave her name as “Mrs.” anything.
It took me a while to turn around on that because I lived in a Jim Crow world, and it was some years before the implications of the episode marshalled my thoughts. I remember reading of the amusement Alan Tate (I think it was) expressed to a colleague on receipt of a letter signed “Faulkner.” “I never heard of anybody signing a letter using just the surname except a British lord.” Well, that doesn’t mean, of course, that British lords shouldn’t maintain the habit, or that–if it pleases them–one shouldn’t address them as Lord. The American contribution here, in the sense of the democratization of manners, is the universal “Mr.” Imagine Thomas Jefferson consenting to anything else other than Mr. Jefferson?
It is a movement in either of the two directions that we should watch out for. At dinner in Ames, Iowa, I asked the Hoover librarian whether the former president was regularly referred to as Mr. President (I knew him a little, and he was Mr. Hoover, or Chief, in my own experience). Vexed by the question, the librarian/historian looked up the first 150 letters addressed to Hoover after he left the White House and found equal parts of Dear Mr. President, Dear Mr. Hoover, and Dear Sir. But contemporary ex-presidents would kill before acquiescing in anything other than Mr. President. We can both worry about any tendency to overdo honorifics, but you seem to leave me alone to worry about the galloping reluctance to speak of Mr. Kinsley or Mr. Buckley. OK, I’ll go it without you.
You wanted to hear about public financing? And the sneaky brotherhood of power? And Rich Lowry for mayor of New York? Ah, but you have overextended your hospitality, and I, the exploitation of it.
Warmest,
Bill
* That’s coy. The supreme American vice is: to be thought humorless.
