Which book’s world would be the absolute worst to live in?
The world of ‘The Perfect Gentleman; or, Etiquette and Eloquence’ of 1860 USA.
In 1860’s New York, the ‘manners’ of a New York ‘Gentleman’ may well have aped those of Old England, it being understood tht by then the word ‘gentle’ in ‘gentleman’ had been entirely robbed of the class inferences of the English world, now transferred to the bastrdiused term ‘genteel’ and considerably feminised. No longer Chaucer’s ‘verray, parfit gentil knyght’, as described in The Prologue to The Canterbury Tales but rather the ‘aristocracy’ of high bourgeois Manhattan, expected to officiate at ‘Parties, Dinners, or Popular Gatherings’ and show his leadership by giving charming toasts and exuding appropriate ‘sentiments’ with politenesse (another embougeoised form of Chaucer’s feudal ‘politesse‘.
What a perfect Hell this world would be to live in and not only for the forgotten inhabitants of Hell’s Kitchen: Manhattan:
In the sentiments of the book, a world of social distance management is refined in sayings of refined sentiment, where friends were defined as much by class as moral quality. Among those is this one one:
I falsely believed, as many of the contemporary chatty biographies, notably The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon by Daniel Farson, of the artist did but which got fixed by the film Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon, an 87 minute filmography from 1998 ‘made for television for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) by John Maybury and starrig Derek Jacobi, Daniel Craig (playing a very attractive George Dyer – Bacon’s working class lover) and Tilda Swinton.
The phrase commonly attributed (as above) to Bacon relates to an evening in the Colony Club (see it below extracted from the 1863book by my photograph), Soho in London (see my blog on this here) where Bacon reputedly tipped a bottle of champagne over the sorry head of his queer artist ‘friend’ (or in Bacon’s estoimation ‘sham friend’) John Minton, whilst mouthing the saying. It has resonance for Bacon for whom ‘real pain’ (oft the result of violence) was often a feature not only of his male friendships but shared male love and erotic charge. Nevertheless, as the 1863 book proves it was NOT his invention, the phrase being too near to the one quoted to be an accident, although it is certain the phrase was probably originated in common parlance of society dinners well before and after it, justifying perfectly as it does the social exclusion of the poor from those dinners and parties – for real friends had ‘class’ in every sense of the word.
Always inapproriate in that Bacon was using champagne inappropriately on a ‘sham friend’ to cause ‘real public pain and humiliation of the totured sensitive soul that was Minton, the oral pun on ‘Sham pain’ exposes the viciousness of ‘polite’ society’; its hellish qualities, the violent attitude to worlds not known or visited by a ‘gentleman’ of sensitive ‘sentiments’, though they ofy exploited that class who had to live in the Hell’s Kitchens of the world. Society dinners police attitudes to make hem exclusive in the true sense – venues that had barriers to them for the entry of the inappropriate, an inappropriate the gentlemen often abused in their role as entrepreneurs, rentiers, financiers and capital owners. That book is surely the book of a world we might live in. The truth is they not did live in it in 1863. We live in it now!!!!
With love
Steven
