Short History of Rudeness: Manners, Morals, and Misbehavior in Modern America - Softcover

Caldwell, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312263899 ISBN 13: 9780312263898

Publisher: Picador, 2000

Synopsis

A funny and provocative cultural history of class, manners, and the decline of civility

About this title

About the Author

Mark Caldwell is a literary critic and the author of an acclaimed sociomedical history of tuberculosis in America, The Last Crusade. He teaches at Fordham University and lives in Manhattan and New York's Hudson Valley.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A Short History of Rudeness

Manners, Morals, and Misbehavior in Modern AmericaBy Mark Caldwell

Picador USA

Copyright © 2000 Mark Caldwell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312263898

Chapter One

Colonel Mann and Mrs. Post: Manners,
Morals, and Class in Modern America

The rudest man of the twentieth century was a master of every socialgrace.

    A paradox? Not entirely: as Amy Vanderbilt wrote in the firstedition of her enduringly popular etiquette guide, "some of the rudestand most objectionable people I have ever known have beentechnically the most `correct'." And Colonel William d'Alton Mannmight have been born to prove her point. He appeared in New Yorkin the 1890s, at the dawn of a turbulent era of world war, boom,and depression. Yet if one could believe his Who's Who entry, Mannwas everything turn-of-the-century Americans most admired: CivilWar hero, entrepreneur, business tycoon, millionaire, inventor, editor,publisher. He presided daily over his own table at Delmonico's,the grand restaurant at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 26th Street.Like most real and would-be metropolitan aristocrats, he kept severalresidences?a Manhattan brownstone, a country house in Morristown,and a private island retreat on Lake George in theAdirondacks, where he dispensed seigniorial hospitality to friendsand employees alike. He was a family man, with a faithful, dowdywife and a daughter on whom he doted.

    Yet by 1905 he was being roundly vilified by every respectablenewspaper in the city and several national magazines as a socialmenace, a coarse criminal mocker of every bond that united theprivileged world of New York's elite. And for this hurricane of civicoutrage, Mann, if he had to trace the blame to a single person, mightwell have pointed to a then obscure and deeply unhappy youngsociety matron?the thirty-three-year-old Emily Post, a decade anda half before she launched her public career as the century's leadingdoyenne of manners and protectress of etiquette.

    Mann's origins were shadowy and probably humble (his life wasthoroughly and entertainingly chronicled in 1965 by New Yorkerwriter Andy Logan). Born in Sandusky, Ohio, on September 27,1839, to a family of thirteen children, he studied engineering for awhile, then earned first a captain's and finally a colonel's commissionin the Civil War, ultimately distinguishing himself at Gettysburg.He also raked in a fortune in royalties by inventing an equipment-totingrig for infantry troops, then licensing it to the U.S. and Austrianarmies. After the war he settled in Mobile, Alabama, where hemanufactured cottonseed oil, dabbled in railroads and oil swindles,founded the Mobile Register (which still publishes today), ran forCongress, and invented a luxury railroad car, the "Mann BoudoirCar" (the prototype design for the Wagons-Lits still in use onContinental European railroads). In appearance portly, white-haired,snowy-bearded, he might, depending on his mood and the state ofyour relations with him, appear as either a beaming Santa, thundervoicedJehovah, or swaggering Falstaff.

    In 1891, his brother, E. D. Mann, vanished in the aftermath ofan obscenity conviction and left his business?a soon to be notoriousNew York weekly named Town Topics?leaderless. The magazinehad begun life some years earlier as The American Queen,edited by Louis Keller, the founder of the Social Register, and"dedicated to art, music, literature, and society." Under E. D. Mann,however, while preserving a tone of strict propriety, it ripened intoa scandal sheet, faithfully reporting high-society peccadilloes andoften identifying perpetrators by name.

    With his brother now incommunicado at a location unknown,Colonel Mann came to New York, assumed the editorship, andgradually raised Town Topics to a hitherto unmatched mastery in theart of scandal. The gossip was personal, vicious, salacious. But thesophistication with which Mann served it up was a world above thatof latter-day tabloids like the National Enquirer or the Globe.Mann himself rewrote and edited the magazine's opening "Saunterings"feature. The prose was refined, funny, elegant, and razor-sharp, aclear precursor of The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" in its soigne'tone, but with a hidden payload of brutal satire underneath the polish.As the Saunterer, Mann became a celebrity in his own right,and apparently an intimate of the very elite he took delight in savaging."When mature spinsters take it into their heads to indulgethemselves in a little souse party," a typical item commenced,

they should do it in the privacy of their house. I thought this at the reveillon at a certain hotel on New Year's Eve, when I saw the hennaed head of a fair but fat and fully forty maiden vainly striving to direct her uncertain feet on a zigzag course around the tables. Ordinarily she is a very handsome lady, but youth?sweet, sweet youth?is the only period at which one may be drunk and still retain some degree of attractiveness.

    Nor were all Mann's targets left thus mercifully nameless. Whenher 1915 charity ball at Sherry's slid into rigor mortis at the intendedheight of the festivities, and an exasperated Mrs. AlexanderBlair Thaw, the Pennsylvania Railroad heiress, hurled herself in atantrum upon the balalaika orchestra (which had donated its servicesfree of charge), "Saunterings" gleefully identified her.

    In 1904, the Saunterer unleashed a scathing attack on the twenty-year-oldAlice Roosevelt, just beginning her controversial social career:

From wearing costly lingerie to indulging in fancy dances for the edification of men was only a step. And then came?second step?indulging freely in stimulants. Flying all around Newport without a chaperon was another thing that greatly concerned Mother Grundy. There may have been no reason for the old lady making such a fuss about it, but if the young woman knew some of the tales that are told at the clubs at Newport she would be more careful in the future about what she does and how she does it. They are given to saying almost anything at the Reading Room, but I was really surprised to hear her name mentioned openly there in connection with that of a certain multi-millionaire of the colony and with certain doings that gentle people are not supposed to discuss. They also said that she should not have listened to the risqué jokes told her by the son of one of her Newport hostesses.

     Mann typically wrote "Saunterings" items up from notes suppliedby eavesdropping servants or hired spies disguised as ball musicians.But the unsavory side of this information-gathering systemhardly fazed him. "There is no feature of my paper of which I ammore proud," he wrote, trumpeting Saunterings' "reformative andregenerative influence. To save the sinner by rebuking the sin is anachievement over which the angels rejoice." Mann ducked lawsuitsby a clever device: describing the scandal without naming names inone item, then following it with an apparently innocuous social notethat just happened to identify the miscreants. Readers quicklycracked the code; Town Topics was never successfully sued for libel.

    The colonel stoutly maintained?and from all the evidence reallyseems to have believed?that he was performing a public service.Taunting the errant to purge incivility, however, was not his soleaim. For behind its satiric commentary on the manners of therich, Town Topics was actually the front for a blackmail operationperhaps unique in history. Having nosed out a lapse, Mann woulddispatch a henchman, who would threaten to publish in "Saunterings"unless the culprit either bought advertising in the magazineor a block of its essentially worthless stock.

    If the victim balked, a damaging item duly appeared (to be followedby as many more as the magazine's considerable ingenuitycould gather). But?fiendishly enough?the outcome was just as badif the blackmailer cooperated, because Mann, in mock gratitude,would then plant not one but a whole series of flattering?indeed,suspiciously unctuous?notices in "Saunterings." This merely hadthe effect of revealing to the ever-growing number of those whoknew how Town Topics worked that the subject had either paid (outof vanity) for favorable coverage, or (out of fear) to hide a shamefulsecret. And, of course, when the payoff took the form of an advertisementin the magazine, its appearance blazoned not only the advertiser'sbusiness but the probability that he'd forked over liberallyto conceal a blackmailable secret. By paying, in other words, onesimply purchased a different, more ironic kind of exposure; to anyonewell attuned to the magazine, it became completely impossibleto distinguish between florid compliment and corrosive insult.

    Mann enjoyed the double if paradoxical rewards of crime andsanctimony until 1905, when he miscalculated by making an ill-judgedattempt to blackmail Emily Post's husband, Edwin. A WallStreet stockbroker mired in a financial bad patch, and on strainedand distant terms with his wife, Post had been supporting a Broadwaychorine in what the euphemism of the day called a "white apartment"in Stamford, Connecticut. Unable to disgorge the $500demanded by Mann, Post confessed to Emily. From the very beginning,her sense of propriety differed sharply from the false modestythat would have counseled hushing the matter up at all costs.Instead, she advised him to contact the district attorney and set upa sting operation. He did. Mann's agent, Charles P. Ahle, was arrestedin Post's Wall Street office on July 11, 1905, triggering apublic sensation, which was to fill the columns of newspapers andtitillate readers for nearly a year. Collier's magazine, prompted (itspublisher claimed) by the scabrousness of the attack on Alice Roosevelt,launched a series of sharply worded articles, disclosing thatMann had been paying a city juvenile court judge, Joseph Deuel, tovet Town Topics for actionable items. This was bait laid for Mann,but Deuel hotheadedly seized it, suing Collier's editor, NormanHapgood, for libel. A jury took exactly seven minutes to declareHapgood innocent, and the district attorney, sifting through Mann'stestimony, promptly charged him with perjury, and subjected himto a criminal prosecution that kept the fires of scandal burning wellinto the spring of 1906.

    In the midst of all this, another, even more titillating scam cameto light: a keepsake folio, bound in green morocco, profusely embossedin gold leaf, printed on the heaviest and crispest vellum, andfloridly titled Fads and Fancies of Representative Americans at theBeginning of the Twentieth Century, Being a Portrayal of Their Tastes,Diversions and Achievements. It too was a front for blackmail andextortion, but here the stakes were higher. Inside were short andapparently flattering biographical tributes to eighty-one eminentAmericans, including a past president, Grover Cleveland, and thechief executive then sitting, Theodore Roosevelt (whom Mann musthave thought above holding any grudges over Alice). To gain anironically flattering mention in Fads and Fancies (and avoid a publicsniffing of one's dirty linen in Town Topics), one paid a minimum of$1,500, but some subscribers?presumably those with the biggestbank accounts and the most explosive secrets?forked over as muchas $9,000, essentially to immortalize themselves as victims (andhence as guilty provokers) of blackmail.

    In its singularly insolent way, Fads and Fancies is a masterpiece ofdouble entendre. It opens with a declaration that "the plates fromwhich the impressions were made have been destroyed." Reassuranceto the bibliophile? Or a derisive echo of the blackmailer'spromise to destroy incriminating material? The introduction teetersdelicately between gushing with appreciative wonderment andthrowing down a gauntlet: "American society! What is it? Whogives it the right of being? Whence is it derived? What influenceshave borne upon it and shaped it?" This pointed question gets noanswer, but there is an explanation of high society's usefulness tothe less privileged onlooker. "It is the touch of romance in theirworkaday world," it dryly continues, "to read in the papers of howsuch a one, who has risen from their ranks by his own energy andability, is now disporting himself among the world's greatest onequal terms."

    With all Mann's schemes exploding to a chorus of scorn, itlooked, to the relief of polite society, as if fashionable New Yorkwas about to rid itself of its most dauntless and pernicious pest. Butthey'd underestimated their enemy. Mann ultimately beat his perjuryrap, and while it's not clear that he ever fully reassembled hisblackmail apparatus, Town Topics lost little of its bite, declining onlyafter his death in 1920. It lingered on into the 1930s, when, to therelief of the sinning elite and the chagrin of everybody else, itfolded.

Are Manners Moral?

Colonel Mann's saga was a juicy scandal in its own right. But it alsobetokened a sense of crisis about manners that marked the earlyyears of this century. Between 1900 and 1920, the nation's popularmagazines were full of articles assessing the state of American socialbehavior and carrying titles like "Has the American Bad Manners?"(Ladies' Home Journal, 1900), "Decay of American Manners" (Harper'sWeekly, 1903), and "Are We Ashamed of Good Manners?"(Century Magazine, 1909). Interest in the subject peaked in 1922with the runaway success of Emily Post's Etiquette. Though it echoedpopular late Victorian etiquette authorities like Mary ElizabethWilson Sherwood (1826-1903), Post's book soon overshadowedthem, in part because it acknowledged the treacherous and shiftingground under the subject, and addressed frankly a widening convictionamong Americans that good conduct and morality were becomingunglued from each other.

    Fated enemies though they were, Mann and Post, had they evermet, could nonetheless have seen eye to eye on one key point. Bothtook manners seriously; neither thought them a trivial study; bothsaw them as indissolubly linked to the gravest issues of morality.Blackmailer and extortionist he may have been, but a genuine moralindignation fueled Mann's attack on the hypocrisy of the gilded classhe'd stealthily invaded. He despised the perverse misuse of socialpolish as a cover for vice. Manners, he thought, ought to reflectmorals and reinforce them, not cover up for their absence. And Post,though she belonged to that class by unassailable birthright, agreedemphatically as to the moral importance of manners and the extentto which her compatriots often casually betrayed them. "The codeof ethics," Emily Post wrote, "is an immutable law of etiquette."True good manners were therefore the reverse of vacuous rituals."The code of a thoroughbred," she continued, "... is the code ofinstinctive decency, ethical integrity, self-respect and loyalty."

    As the twentieth century closes, Americans seem troubled anewby the state of their manners and seem also to agree that the problemis serious, even momentous. But is civility really on a par withmore obviously fateful ethical issues?war, murder, euthanasia? Philosophy,in fact, has traditionally been very much of two mindsabout the moral significance of manners. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679),the great seventeenth-century English social theorist, disparagedetiquette, defining it in his best known work, Leviathan, as"how one should salute another, or how a man should wash hismouth, or pick his teeth before company and such other points ofthe small morals." Hobbes meant the latter phrase pejoratively,ranking good manners far beneath issues of real moral moment.

    Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the hugely influential eighteenth-centuryGerman ethicist and metaphysician, characteristically tooka more nuanced and convoluted position. On the whole he seemsto have thought etiquette ("accessibility, affability, politeness, refinement,propriety, courtesy, and ingratiating and captivating behavior,"as he defined it in an early lecture at the University ofKönigsberg) a concern separate from and inferior to morals. Manners,he argued, "call for no large measure of moral determinationand cannot, therefore, be reckoned as virtues." Yet he didn't finallydismiss them, for "even though [manners] are no virtues, they area means of developing virtue.... The more we refine the crudeelements in our nature, the more we improve our humanity and themore capable it grows of feeling the driving force of virtuous principles."

    Advocates of manners often repeat this idea forcefully?nonemore so than Edmund Burke (1729-1797):

Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and colour to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.

Elsewhere, Burke accorded even more importance to manners, asserting?inthe brief and tantalizing way so characteristic of him?thatthey actually help to form laws. "Whilst manners remain entire,"he wrote in 1777, "they will correct the vices of law and softenit at length to their own temper."

    Conservative such convictions may be, but they are also common,and not merely theoretical. Judith Martin, for example, sometimesmakes tongue-in-cheek assertions to the effect that "Miss Mannersdoes not mess around in that morass known as morality." Yetmany of the problems she confronts, even where they start withprotocol, escalate into questions of right and wrong. In the summerof 1996 she advised the relatives, friends, and recoverers of the victimsof the just-crashed TWA Flight 800. "The more horrendousthe situation, the more you need etiquette," she was quoted as sayingin Newsday. "This is why etiquette is so extremely strict in situationswhere the issues you are debating are of major importance?thecourtroom, the government legislature, diplomacy." Indeed, abreakdown in manners can deteriorate into a confrontation whereboth morals and laws are violated, and what ought to be an easilysettled interpersonal ruction flashes into violence. On the Fourth ofJuly in 1995, a group of teenagers riding in an old Chevrolet onInterstate 17 near Phoenix accidentally sideswiped a pickup truckduring a maneuver to avoid another car. But when they exited thefreeway and tried to talk to the driver of the truck, a passengerleaped from it and shot a sixteen-year-old sitting in the Chevrolet'sback seat, leaving him a quadriplegic?probably for life. Small moralsaren't really small if they can tame the passions that lead to thiskind of tragedy.

    In her book The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtuesto Modern Values, Gertrude Himmelfarb deplores what she sees as aperverse modern urge to wall custom and convention off from morality,reducing right and wrong to questions of personal taste andpreference. "Virtue" (as opposed to the contemporary "value," aterm Himmelfarb despises as indicative of moral relativism) is herword for an organic normative blend of manners and morals thatshe views as characteristic of a now lost time and place of grace:Victorian England. According to Himmelfarb, Edmund Burke foreshadoweda widespread middle-class Victorian conviction that mannersare "the harbingers of morals writ large, the civilities of privatelife that were the corollaries of civilized social life." By observingsuperficial civilities punctiliously, Himmelfarb thinks, Victorian societyaffirmed in everyday life its allegiance to deeper ethical valuesas well. The benefit, she argues, was double. Normal existence wasmore graceful and pleasant than now; catastrophic breaches wererarer.

    In this moralistic model, even hypocrisy has its uses, becoming,as Rochefoucauld put it, "the homage vice thinks it should renderto virtue," rather than the monstrous gap between superficial proprietyand deep-down rottenness that Colonel Mann both deploredand illustrated. Himmelfarb cites the diaries of Queen Victoria'sfour-time prime minister, William Gladstone, which harrowinglyrecord the chasm between his unvaryingly circumspect public utterancesand his compulsive secret interest in pornography and nubileprostitutes. Gladstone's need to appear respectable, however illit matched his real thoughts, may (by serving as a constant andpainful reminder of the virtues he wasn't practicing) have kept himaspiring to goodness.

    The urge to re-moralize public behavior, upgrading optional nicetiesinto duties in the hope that this will stiffen our moral spines,has been sounding more and more insistently among a wide spectrumof cultural critics, political theorists, and philosophers. Their rankspredictably include conservatives like Himmelfarb, William Bennett,James Q. Wilson, and the late Christopher Lasch, but they includetoo a surprising number of voices from the center and the left: RichardSennett, for example, makes an analogous case in The Fall of PublicMan (1976), as does Nicolaus Mills in The Triumph of Meanness(1997). Jürgen Habermas, the contemporary German philosopher,has spent a long career attempting to assemble a metaphysics ofcivility, a system designed to guarantee individual freedom yet atthe same time subject it to reasonable government by moral principles:"`Moral consciousness' signifies the ability to make use ofinteractive competence for consciously processing morally relevantconflicts of action.... Competent agents will?independently of accidentalcommunities of social origin, tradition, basic attitude, andso on?be in agreement about such a fundamental point of viewonly if it arises from the very structures of possible interaction."

    Simplified, this rather abstract formulation means that productivecommunication is impossible without support from a bedrock ofmorals?a shared belief (for example) that any useful social interactiondepends on reciprocity. And while Habermas is far moreconcerned with the politics of deliberative democracy than he is withetiquette, his point is nevertheless relevant for our discussion. Ifsocial interactions do indeed collapse for want of a firm moral underpinning,then manners?which form, after all, a key part of socialinteraction?are vital.

    Michael Sandel's widely discussed Democracy's Discontent (1996)contends that American politics, once ruled by a consensus that governmentshould create a climate friendly to the practice of publicvirtue, has degenerated into what he calls the "procedural republic,"a society obsessed at all costs with preserving as absolute the autonomyof the individual. Sandel quotes Benjamin Rush's 1786 Plan forthe Establishment of Public Schools approvingly as supplying a moralcompass we've since abandoned in favor of moral relativism: "Letour pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that heis public property."

    Miss Manners would surely agree, as would her predecessors,Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt. Behavior that ignores the proximityand the sensitivity of others may fall short of crime, but remainswrong. The diner sitting next you at a lunch counter whomops her face with a paper napkin, crumples it, then tosses it ontothe Formica inches from your plate, commits an antisocial and thusimmoral act as well as a rude and unsanitary one. The risk of disease,while small, is real enough to constitute a moral assault if not a legalone. And even discounting the possibility of physical harm, citydwellers in the developed world like to keep their distance fromothers, instinctively avoiding unwanted contact: observe, the nexttime you board a jammed train, bus, or subway car, how deftly evenoblivious-looking people contort themselves into unnatural posturessimply to avoid unseemly closeness to fellow commuters.

    Yet every instance where manners are morally momentous counterbalancesanother where they're trivial?situations where wrongnessis plainly a matter not of ethics but taste, and wheremiscalculations signal only that one hasn't mastered the ways ofwhatever class or clique one wants to join. In 1922, the year ofEmily Post's debut as a manners expert, Doubleday placed a seriesof advertisements in Redbook magazine for a competing guide (theauthor, not cited, was Lillian Eichler, and the guide her two-volumeBook of Etiquette). Though Eichler, like Post, often stressed themoral dimension of manners, the ads appealed to readers on fardifferent grounds. They were a month-to-month soap opera, recountingthe social misadventures of a well-meaning and ambitiousbut instructively gauche young couple, Ted and Violet Creighton.

    In the February 1922 installment, they've been invited byMr. and Mrs. Brandon to an elegant dinner party. "They were todine at the Brandon home?actually be the guests of WilliamBrandon! ... But were they ready for it?" Mr. Brandon is consideringTed for an executive job, and since Ted's rival Roberts andhis wife are also guests, the dinner is a test.

    "The first two courses of the dinner passed rather pleasantly,"the narrative begins.

But then, something happened. Violet noticed that Mrs. Roberts had glanced at her husband and frowned ever so slightly. She wondered what was wrong. Perhaps it was incorrect to cut lettuce with a knife. Perhaps Ted should not have used his fork that way. In her embarrassment she dropped her knife and bent down to pick it up at the same time that the butler did. Oh, it was humiliating, unbearable! They didn't know what to do, how to act!

    In the evening's crowning abasement, Ted mistakenly follows theladies when they adjourn to the drawing room, provoking the"amused glances of the others." Hence he's not surprised when Mr.Brandon?politely waiting until Violet is out of earshot, retrievingher coat?tells him they've failed the exam. "I'm sorry, Creighton,but I've decided to consider Roberts for the vacancy. I need a manwhose social position is assured."

    Ludicrous as the vignette appears at this remove, it raises a seriousissue. The Creightons and the Brandons obviously agree onthe importance of etiquette, and the ad confidently expected readerswould do likewise. But the actual customs described are in themselvesempty of moral meaning, indifferent conventions whose onlypossible use is to denote social class at its snobbiest. And every usemade of them by the characters is flagrantly immoral. Even theCreightons, however hapless, are not without guilt. They hope, afterall, to use etiquette as a forged passport to worlds they don't belongin. Roberts is worse, wielding social rituals as stealth weaponsagainst an unarmed rival. Mr. Brandon is worse yet: he treats mannersas tools of triage for an exercise in social Darwinism. And thead itself outdoes all of its characters in cynicism, by trading on etiquetteto wheedle the reader into buying the volume out of mauvaisehonte.

    For every instance, in other words, where manners are moralswrit in miniature, there's an opposing instance where they eitherlack moral significance entirely or (worse) serve as vehicles for pretense,fakery, and greed. And if manners aren't always good, rudenessisn't always bad. History's truly immortal louts tend to beconscious opponents of the codes they violate, mockers of pretension,satirists who rarely view their acts of rudeness as immoral.Quite the reverse. Rudeness, they seem to be telling us, can supplythe good swift kick a besotted society deserves and needs. Plato'sAthens, conventionally the apotheosis of civilized Western urbanity,endured Diogenes the Cynic, who (according to tradition) dwelt incontented filth under an overturned bathtub outside the city gates,heaping ribald scorn on philosophers and citizens alike. A characteristichigh point in his career occurred when he wandered into alecture at which Plato was pontificating on human nature before thecream of Athenian youth. "Plato had defined man as an animal,biped and featherless, and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowland brought it into the lecture-room with the words, `Here is Plato'sman.'" Yet Diogenes figured to his fellow Athenians not as a nuisancebut a valuable gadfly (as even Plato conceded, red-facedly adding"having broad nails" to his definition of man).

    Nor did the impulse to use rudeness as a moral corrective expirewith Diogenes. In early 1996, at a Washington meeting of city officials,Sandi Webb (a councilwoman from Simi Valley, California)leaped to her feet, gave U.S. senator Diane Feinstein the finger,then stomped out. "I blew it," Webb later conceded, in a characteristicallymid-nineties version of public apology. "I was so pissedat her, I got up and left." Called to account for such outbursts,the perpetrators typically invoke just such a defense: they know itwas unmannerly, but thought an insult just the right note, a neededstink bomb thrown at smug and immoral convention. Colonel WilliamMann, after all, proved a thorn in society's side because heclaimed to understand its mores, to have found out just how hispresumed betters were violating the code that should have governedthem, and then rebuked them by wielding it not only more expertlythan they did but more lethally.

Continues...

Excerpted from A Short History of Rudenessby Mark Caldwell Copyright © 2000 by Mark Caldwell. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312263899
• ISBN 13: 9780312263898
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 292