Judith Martin, Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior
soil chemistry & superhero costumes
“It’s wonderful how death transforms the spirits, so that everyone who is deceased becomes a self-effacing promoter of the comfort of the living.”
The advice column and the novel should be happy neighbors, surrounded by their common flora — anguish, confession, the occasional bloom of wisdom. But the advice column’s landscaping tends to be a mess: the soil is either inhospitably arid (quotes from ancient stoics, weedy strands of college ethics) or disastrously soupy (fervid self-involvement, ransom-letter-esque capitalization).
Only Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners, seems to have mastered the fragile chemistry. Her obsessions are neither trivial nor queasily intimate. Her prose is clear and funny and no more acidic than necessary. Many a novelist, toiling away at his own unruly orchard of human predicaments, would do well to peer over the fence.
In the almost twenty years I’ve owned it, Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior — an 800-plus page brick of good sense — has rarely rested on the shelf. At the end of an enervating, back-to-back-birthday-party weekend, I refresh myself with a dash of Martin’s counter-stereotypically warm and tolerant writing about children (“If it is wrong to make cracks about the elderly, and an aging population is working hard on that, then it should be wrong make cracks about the young.”) Fighting off yet another cold (It’s not Covid, I swear!), I wrap myself in the wry sympathy of her chapter on illness (“It is of surprisingly little comfort to be told that one’s sickness is considered by others to be either more serious or more trivial than one has oneself decided that it is.”)
What her writing offers is not the workaday satisfaction of a reference book (So that’s where Belgium is) — it is, rather, a distilled version of the pleasure on offer in Kafka or Dickens or Woolf. When I read Martin, I feel understood. And not understood merely as I am (impatient, exhausted, distracted by that one last text I need to send), but understood as I would like to be.
Good writers (Don DeLillo, Richard Powers) impress you with their intelligence. Great writers impress you with your intelligence. Alice Munro finds a couple of half-dead AA batteries in the back of my mental drawer of insights, attaches them to an already blazing klieg light — and somehow the feeling, as a reader, is of being an equal partner in illumination. When I read Tolstoy I feel peculiarly enlisted in the project of describing life — it feels as if my latent powers of observation have been liberated by his prose and now he and I will race around the countryside together, seeing into the soul of every laborer and woodland creature we pass.
Miss Manners (whose own good manners would never permit her to make such a comparison) achieves something similar. No one has ever accused me of being a paragon of etiquette, but I feel, when I read Miss Manners, as if I know just what every situation calls for. I experience her books not from the side of the muddled questioner (Dear Miss Manners… House painters, window installers, roofers and the like have asked to use my bathroom. I could hardly say no, but I wanted to), but from the side of the elegant repository of wisdom (Gentle Reader… Not just good taste, but human decency (not to mention good sense) requires that you allow people on your premises to use your bathroom). Of course you shouldn’t specify No children on an invitation! Of course thank you notes should be written before the gift-wrap is thrown away! How could anyone — least of all me — ever have thought otherwise?
A stylistic quirk of Martin’s books is that she writes about Miss Manners in the third person. Miss Manners believes… As Miss Manners recalls… This not only provides Martin’s prose with its acerbic bounce; it also allows her to create an identity that stands some distance from her — a many-limbed superhero costume into which she and the reader can squeeze together, vanquishing the foes of consideration and civility.
Toward the end of the book (appropriately), Martin takes on that hardiest and least amenable-to-niceties of subjects: death.
“It’s wonderful how death transforms the spirit, so that everyone who is deceased becomes a self-effacing promoter of the comfort of the living. Or so one would assume from hearing surviving friend and relations saying things like ‘He would have wanted me to go out and enjoy myself on a day like this,’ ‘She would have preferred that I go to the football game instead of being glum at her funeral service’ and ‘He would have told us to go ahead with our festival and not cancel it on his account.’
Nonsense. Miss Manners’ knowledge of human emotions tells her that he would have wanted you to be too overcome with grief to be capable of enjoying anything, and she would have wanted national mourning.”
Here is an insight worthy of Proust — in prose too clear and stern to wave away as so much psychological nuance-savoring. And like Proust (but unlike most advice columnists), Martin is interested less in what should be true than what is true. The dead are as self-centered as the living; the mind is an inexhaustible and ingenious excuse-generator. Hearing these truths spoken aloud provides a relief something like the relief that criminals are said to feel upon being caught at the end of a long and wearying stretch on the lam. With her tart and measured prose (deceased rather than dead, nonsense rather than bull), Miss Manners gently clicks the cuffs in place and leads us — or rather reminds us to lead ourselves — to the funeral.
Oh, Ben. This is very, VERY good. I must now find THIS book to add to my shelves. (And I would welcome adding a book of YOUR insightful (and beautifully-written) essays.)
OH YES! Facing the need to intervene with someone in my church I suggested we turn to Miss Manners. A fellow board member said his son had recommended the same thing! When my mom was in her last weeks I read Miss Manners to my sisters. Her guide to Raising Perfect Children was ever-open during my 20 years as a single mother. Her straightforward voice is a reassuring guide for nearly every confusing situation.