Gentleman Lost : Are They All Gone, or Is It Just the Nature of the Times That Makes It Seem That Way?
“I am not quite a gentleman but you would hardly notice it but can’t be helped anyhow.” --Daisy Ashford, “Young Visiters”
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In the early 1950s, when I was 8 or 9, my parents started sending me to ballroom-dancing classes at the Beverly Hills Women’s Club. One night a week, along with several dozen other boys and girls of similar age, I was taught to shuffle my small feet in tentative approximation of the fox-trot and the waltz and, at the same time, received a measure of polite indoctrination in the social graces.
I had to dress for the occasion, in a pint-sized blue suit, with a clip-on necktie and a pair of shiny black lace-up shoes. So attired, I was taught to bow from the waist to a female counterpart, who was usually wearing a gauzy pink or yellow party dress, before asking, “May I have this dance?” She was to reply, “Yes, you may,” with a curtsy. (Refusing would have been unthinkable.) I was also taught not to speak in a loud voice, not to push or butt in when it was time to line up for the punch bowl and not to hold my punch glass with both hands “like a chipmunk.”
My mother didn’t leave everything to the Beverly Hills Women’s Club. The lessons of the dance floor and the punch bowl echoed what I learned at home: make eye contact and shake hands firmly; say “Please” and “Thank you” at every reasonable opportunity and write bread-and-butter letters to acknowledge hospitality; don’t talk with a full mouth or chew with an open one; hold doors and coats for girls and grown-ups, and, in general, treat both with exaggerated respect....
I was learning manners. I was learning how to be a little gentleman, or at least to act like one. I know exactly what Gore Vidal meant when he asked rhetorically, in an interview not long ago, “An air of gentility isn’t difficult, is it, if you’re nicely brought up and have gone to dancing school?”
It didn’t last, of course. As I got older, I stopped hanging out at women’s clubs. I stopped drinking punch and forgot how to dance. I went years without writing a bread-and-butter letter, and spoke as loudly as I damn well wanted to. About the only time anybody called me a gentleman was when one of my high-school teachers said something like, “Perhaps the gentleman in the back row would like to share his little joke with all of us?”
By the time I started tentatively thinking about manners again--inspired in part, I’ve always suspected, by the fact that a door I passed through frequently in the UCLA building where I studied philosophy was marked “Gentlemen” instead of merely “Men”--the world had changed. The social fabric, at least the one I’d grown up cloaked in, had colored and was rent (and high time, too). Gentility, always something of an evanescent quality (an air indeed), seemed to have evaporated, and gentleman , in any non-ironic sense, had become almost a dirty word--”Defamed by every charlatan/ And soiled with all ignoble use,” as Tennyson had put it somewhat earlier. Holding doors and coats was suddenly not a good idea at all. The little gentleman in me lay low.
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Today I am myself a parent. I don’t have any little gentlemen of my own, but I do have two young daughters, and it has occurred to me to wonder whether they are likely to encounter any gentlemen, little or big, as they grow up--whether there are any gentlemen left around here--and, for that matter, whether encountering a gentleman is something that I’d wish for them. Is it true, for instance, that a gentleman is, by definition, sexist--a socio-sexual Neanderthal who expects all women to be “ladies” and to say, “Yes, you may?” Is a gentleman, by definition, a sap, a wimp, a weenie? Is it precious or pretentious or archaic or just plain silly for an American male in the final years of the 20th century to attempt, or want, to be a gentleman? Oh, and is being a gentleman a goy thing?
The answers to such questions depend partly, of course, on how we define gentleman . The immediate derivation and core meaning of the word seem obvious: A gentleman is a gentle man. Fair enough. But gentle , in this case, doesn’t have to do with delicacy or politesse; it means of noble origins or high social standing--from the Latin root gentilis , “of one’s clan.” (If you’re not a gentleman, you’re Not Our Kind, Dear--and vice versa.) That’s the sense the Oxford English Dictionary is using when it gives, as the first definition of gentleman , “A man of gentle birth, or having the same heraldic status as those of gentle birth.”
How did we get from there to Cary Grant? How did a piece of heraldic terminology, linked inexorably with lineage and social class, come to mean just a suave guy with good manners, an old-fashioned value system and maybe his own tuxedo?
It might be as simple as this: By the Middle Ages, nobility was codified. It was determined by one’s heritage. High social standing was slightly more ambiguous and could be more easily counterfeited. The OED traces the word gentleman , in its heraldic sense, back to 1275. Once the notion of gentleman was defined, those who were not gentlemen could at least aspire to the state--and the obvious way to do that was to adopt the gentlemanly attributes. At first, these attributes were largely those of medieval chivalry--which included, to quote historian Maurice Keen (parentheses his), “ prouesse , loyaute, largesse (generosity), courtoisie , and franchise (the free and frank bearing that is visible testimony to the combination of good birth with virtue).” Attached to these, of course, was respect bordering on adulation toward ladies, or gentlewomen--with its implications of condescension and enforced propriety.
Just over a century after the term gentleman first appeared, Chaucer broadened its meaning to encompass not just the fact of gentle birth but a set of admirable virtues attached to that condition (“[H]e sholde nat be called a gentil man, that . . . ne dooth his diligence and bisynesse, to keepen his good name”). The idea that a gentleman could be defined by virtue rather than by station found another early serious expression in, of all places, Izaak Walton’s “The Compleat Angler” (1653). “I would rather prove my self to be a Gentleman,” wrote Walton, “by being learned and humble, valiant and inoffensive, vertuous and communicable, [than] by a fond ostentation of riches.” There is also a long tradition of defining the gentleman jocularly by habits, taste or appearance rather than by birth: “He cannot be a gentleman which loveth not a dog” (John Northbrooke, 1577); “No gentleman ever weighs over two hundred pounds” (Thomas B. Reed, c. 1895).
But would-be gentlemen soon figured out that it wasn’t always necessary to be vertuous and valiant; the state of gentlemanliness could be shammed--imitated by an assumption of the manners of a gentleman. By Shakespeare’s time, wholesale pretense in the matter was abroad: “Since every Jack became a gentleman,” he has Richard III observe, “There’s many a gentle person made a Jack.” A slightly later playwright, Thomas Shadwell, proposed, in one of his Restoration comedies, that “The qualifications of a fine gentleman are to eat a la mode, drink champagne, dance jigs and play at tennis.”
The aping of the rituals and amusements of the born gentleman defined pretension; it was a case of literally pretending to be something one was not. It is little wonder, then, that the word itself quickly assumed ironic connotations: The old gentleman in black was the devil; a gentleman in brown was a bedbug; a gentleman-farmer or a gentleman-scholar was perhaps not quite serious about what he did. Gentleman also came to mean layabout, someone who did no work--as in Darwin’s remark, in one of his letters, that “Now I am so completely a gentleman, that I have sometimes a little difficulty to pass the day.” Then there is the curious elective mediocrity implied by the notion of “the gentleman’s C”--the intentional restraint of one’s academic capabilities, so as not to call attention to oneself with anything so vulgar as, say, straight A’s. (This idea seems to have been institutionalized, incidentally, in a 15th-century motto from All Souls College, Oxford: “ Bene nati, bene vestiti, et mediocriter docti’ ‘--”Well born, well dressed and moderately educated.”)
And gentleman took on a sinister implication as well: It was a given, in certain circles in both England and America, that no Jew could be a gentleman. The Jew was parvenu, money-grubber, loud and Mediterranean; the real gentleman, descended at least in his imagination from the virtuous knights who had sought the Holy Grail, was quiet and almost certainly Northern European in origin, and did not (did not have to) engage in trade. A “gentleman’s agreement”--originally an admirable enough thing, an oral contract or understanding guaranteed by the honor of the participants--came to mean, as in Laura Z. Hobson’s 1947 novel of that name, an unwritten covenant among Christians to keep Jews out of certain housing, schools and jobs. This was a base corruption of the gentlemanly ideal, concealing greed and murderous discourtesy behind a skein of social ritual--air of gentility as smoke screen.
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Neither of my parents was the product of a gentle world. My mother was born into a middle-class family of French Canadian origin in upstate New Hampshire; her father left home when she was a girl, and she left home as a teen-ager, working as a model and a showgirl and marrying badly, twice, before ending up in Hollywood. My father was brought up on a Sioux reservation in North Dakota, where his father, who was the reservation doctor, acquired the morphine addiction that killed him at the age of 35 or so. My father, too, went out into the world as a teen-ager, becoming a newspaper reporter in Chicago and a radio soap opera writer in New York before heading west. Neither one, in other words, went to dancing school. Neither one was inculcated with the social graces by a doting parent or granted any sort of formal moral education.
Whence my parents’ concern for etiquette, for the social forms and folderol? The answer is, I think, that both wanted to leave their pasts behind, to forge new and improved identities--and so they made it a point to learn and assume good manners, and gave good manners a place of importance in their lives (and the lives of their children). In those days, that’s how you achieved upward mobility: You became ladies and gentlemen by acting like ladies and gentlemen.
Though I remember my mother as my primary tutor in at least the more cosmetic aspects of gentlemanliness, I now realize that it was my father, through example rather than bald instruction, who taught me what being a gentleman really meant. He knew the moves, certainly. He knew which fork to use and how to tie a bow tie and when to leave a dinner party; he knew how to seat a lady and how to stand up in a lady’s presence. But it wasn’t his mastery of these rituals that influenced me so much as that he was, simply, a moral man--who valued and was loyal to his friends, never in my hearing uttered an obscenity, seemed incapable of intentional rudeness and believed, naively, as it turned out, that a good job well done would reap adequate rewards. He was also a great host--my parents were, at one point in their lives, famous party-givers--and considered the guest-host relationship to be practically sacred.
My father also tended to trust other people and to consider violations of that trust their problem and not his. I suspect that his relative lack of success in Hollywood, where he labored for some decades as a screenwriter, had to do at least partially with what might be called his gentlemanly innocence. He considered it self-evident that a man’s word was his bond and a deal was a deal, and if he was cheated or betrayed in this regard, as inevitably he sometimes was, his reaction was more disappointment than anger. I doubt that he knew La Rochefoucauld’s maxim that “ Il est plus honteux de se defier de ses amis que d’en e ^ tre trompe “--”It is more shameful to distrust one’s friends than to be deceived by them”--but it would have made perfect sense to him.
Would it make sense to anyone now? Do such sentiments have a place in modern-day America? Or is the old-style gentleman, in today’s society, as out of place as the chain-mailed knight would be on a 20th-century battlefield? Is there anything to be salvaged for contemporary purposes from the gentleman’s code, however that code might be defined? Forget those slimy “gentleman’s agreements.” Forget the japes and jocularity at the gentleman’s expense. Forget, if you can, the sexism supposedly inherent in the gentleman’s relationship to the lady. Recall instead loyalty, courtesy, generosity, diligence, humility, inoffensiveness. These are not fashionable virtues. They sound like sucker bets. They won’t get you far in this town. In certain lines of work, they have likely not been seen in years. But they are vital motivating forces for a civilized society. Manners impose order and an ease of intercourse upon the sitting room and dining room and ballroom, but they are only a gloss; the underlying gentlemanly attributes, the real ones, help give structure to the society whose citizenry sits and dines and dances.
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What I’m saying is that I hope there are still gentlemen in our world. I think there are, but probably not enough of them. They are almost surely getting rarer as the century fades. They’re out of step with the times. They play by different rules--rules no one else remembers, or quite comprehends. They run the risk of seeming snobbish, prudish, holier-than-thou; this bothers them, because they don’t like to give offense, or even really to be noticed--but they’re not about to change their ways to suit the common perception.
I do not claim to be a gentleman myself. For one thing, I’ve always thought that gentleman was one of those terms, like poet , that had value only if it was applied by someone else. For another thing, I am nowhere near as courteous or diligent or humble, among other things, as I ought to be. I would like to be more of a gentleman, however--and I have an idea of what a late-20th-century gentleman ought to be.
In describing him, I would be tempted to begin with trivialities. I would propose, for instance, that no gentleman would own a car alarm: Car alarms are based on the premise that a piece of one’s property is worth more than an afternoon of peace or a good night’s sleep for an entire neighborhood; they subject the common good to the perceived good of the individual (which, of course, is very American). Besides, a gentleman doesn’t call attention to himself. I would also propose that a gentleman shares his income (even if it is small) with the less fortunate, but that he makes his donations anonymously, and doesn’t name fountains or plazas or buildings after himself even if he is able. A gentleman doesn’t insult those who are required by circumstance to work for him or serve him, and a gentleman doesn’t lord it over his peers. A gentleman does not look out for Number One. Whoever has the most toys when he dies was not a gentleman.
I love hearing about people like novelist John P. Marquand’s grandfather, who reportedly asked to be dressed in evening clothes on his deathbed so that he would be properly attired when he met his Maker. That’s another definition of a gentleman: Someone who takes trouble, who observes the form of things for the sake of form, even when it doesn’t really “matter.” Form always matters to a gentleman. Another definition of a gentleman, which I ran across somewhere not long ago, is this: “A gentleman uses his butter knife even when he’s dining alone.”
It would be difficult for an adulterer to be a gentleman because adultery is betrayal, and betrayal is antithetical to chivalry. In Marquand’s novel “H. M. Pulham, Esquire,” when the cuckolded title character finds himself suspecting for the briefest moment that his wife and his best friend might be having an affair, he immediately rejects the possibility, reminding himself that “Bill King was my best friend, and besides he was a gentleman.”
A gentleman does not confuse the legal with the moral. “We broke no laws,” say corporation flacks; “I am not a crook,” pleads one of our presidents--as if not breaking the law, not being a crook, were somehow admirable in themselves, proofs of goodness. To a gentleman, laws are not standards of behavior. They are the last resort, the outer boundaries, far beyond the standards. Laws are the emergency measures to be invoked only when morality and civility have failed.
What is a gentleman’s view of women? This gets tricky. It can be argued that the ancient codes of chivalry helped render women powerless by placing them on pedestals, turning them from flesh-and-blood into ideals--but it can also be argued, I think, that in an age and a milieu in which women were, for the most part, powerless (for whatever reasons), chivalry was the perhaps essential discipline that forbade the gentleman, and everybody else, to take advantage of them. Today, the question seems to me to be whether it is appropriate for a gentleman to express a particular respect or concern for a woman, simply because she is a woman--or whether so doing automatically insults and belittles her. The easy answer, which may be a bit of a weasel, is that perhaps a gentleman ought to express respect and concern for anyone who seems at all deserving of it, female or not. The slightly more difficult reply--and I hope this doesn’t sound ungentlemanly--is that no one with a strong sense of self is likely to feel insulted or belittled by a deferential courtesy.
Most of all, a gentleman has rules and lives by them. When Albert, the famous and courtly mai^tre d’ho^tel of Maxim’s in Paris, was brought before a tribunal after World War II and accused of having pandered to Goering, Goebbels and other high-ranking Nazis when they dined at that celebrated restaurant, he is said to have replied, in all earnestness, “Yes, I served them, but I never gave them the best tables.” Albert had his standards, as ludicrous as they may seem to us now. The Nazis were not gentlemen, and he wasn’t about to treat them as if they were. This, you might point out, was the least of their problems--and indeed it seems the height of fatuity to accuse Hitler and his henchmen of mere ungentlemanly behavior. Yet, I would argue, if they had been gentlemen, they could not have done what they did. A gentleman does not take things by force. A gentleman does not threaten the lives and livelihoods of others to assuage his own fears and prejudices and desires. “It is almost a definition of a gentleman,” Cardinal John Newman once proposed, “to say he is one who never inflicts pain.” To those who aspire to be gentlemen, that might be a good enough place to start.