Roundabout
Leastest
By KATHARINE WHITEHORN
Much of both books is concerned, inevitably, with manners. Constance Spry finally settles, to my delight, the absurd question of Milk in First, not done in the Mitford Country; apparently the confusion comes because if you use milk it is better to put it in first, however polite the society; it is when cream is to be used that it goes in afterwards. She obviously has little use for these sugar-tong manners, as she calls them; which one would expect of anyone interested in food, when you think of some of the more idiotic contrasts between social practice and functional purpose. Hock glasses, for example, have long stems so that the cool wine need not be touched by a hot little hand—yet it is socially OK to hold the bowl; it is a faux pas to smoke a cigar with a band on, yet the band was origin- ally there to protect the fingers of Cuban ladies from nicotine; the frill on a cutlet is there for those who pick the bones up with their fingers, yet paper frills appear on exactly those occa- sions when no one would dare to use his fingers.
There are some questions which these and all other books leave unanswered. How is it, for instance, that when you have someone coming to dinner about whom you are nervous, the food does not necessarily burn or blow up—that would be understandable—but is always in some way subtly less nice? How can one counteract the trend—to which enormous numbers of us are prone—to have only one pudding at a time, and give it to everybody who comes in the house for a few months, shifting only when the home team absolutely cannot stand it any ,longer? Why is it, again, that preparing to have people to dinner or lunch always, like packing or doing home- work, takes as long as you've got—all day in some cases, a scant hour in others? And how does the char always uncannily know you are having people in, and so go sick on that day and no other? The hell of hostessing is surely that one can know perfectly well, from ex- perience at the receiving end, what things make a good hostess, and still be quite unable to achieve them. I think myself, for instance, that if there is enough to drink and enough warmth it doesn't really matter what else goes wrong; but is this any help the day the gas fire is on the pop and the fuse breaks in the electric fire? Or when you run out of drink-money on a Sunday? None at all.
Actually neither book, to my mind, is a patch on two others I know; the superb Lady Behave, by Anne Edwards and Drusilla Beyfus, which distinguishes itself from any other etiquette book by reporting what people actually do, now, instead of what their grandmothers were told to do, and in fact contains all the information in The Modern Hostess as well. And there is another book, not in print since the war, called The Perfect Hostess, by Rose Henniker Heaton. This reads practically like a historical document by now, with its instructions on how to get a parlourmaid not to sing, how to balance the claims of your cook and your poor relations; but some of her remarks are unalterably true: such as that no house ever has enough matches or coathangers, and that (I think this is a quo- tation) it isn't the menu that matters but the men you sit next to.
Which is, now I come to think of it, the essen- tially unsatisfying thing about all books on hostessing as such; the basic dishonesty behind all the advice on how to treat home entertain- ing as a job. The one thing that really makes a party or -a dinner fun is liking the people at it; but the implication of such books is always that you are trying to build up your circle, make an impression and, above all, entertain people who may be useful in your husband's career. In other words, the people are not there because you like them but because they are hard currency.
People like headmasters' wives and consuls' wives, of course, may have to go through the motions of being friendly to people they have never met before, and might find these books use- ful; for them, there is no real dishonesty in- volved, since a visiting official knows that he is being offered official and not private hospitality. This is fair enough; like cook and chauffeur, the man and wife do a double job together. But this semi-private entertaining fills me with horror. The more one goes into the details of impressing useful people—tactfully inveigling the famous, balancing the unknown against the lions—the more not worth doing the whole thing seems to be. What on earth is the point of doing any amount of social climbing if everyone you meet is still a means and not an end? (Though I can think of plenty of cases where it is actually the other way round : people think they are using friendship to further their busi- ness interests, and are in fact using the business contacts to make them feel they have more friends than they have.) I admit that it is easy to feel smug if you belong to a profession where the only entertain- ing that ever does anyone any good is standing a round in a pub; also there is nothing like a row of empty oilcans on the stairs (say) to deter one from trying to curry favour with the Prime Minister by asking him to drop by. And even among those of us who never entertain for busi- ness purposes there is a distressing tendency to be more lavish with strangers than with close friends, which could be another, more insidious version of the same thing. The result of reading these books, on me at least, is to resolve that from now on people who come in numbers will get hash and beans: and when our best friends come back from America we will cook them six elaborate courses and make them wear evening dress. Which is cock-eyed, no doubt—but not so much as the other.
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