Correspondre à: Works of Art that Talk to Each Other
A Newsletter by Slaney Chadwick Ross
Issue 1 Jan. 2025
Works Cited
The Art of Gathering: Priya Parker - Riverhead, 2018
The Letters of Gustave Flaubert - New York Review of Books, 2023
The Lily in the Valley: Honoré de Balzac - New York Review of Books, 2024
In May, 1861 Gustave Flaubert invited Edmond and Jules de Goncourt over to hear him read the latest version of his second novel, Salumbo. His invitation is printed in full in The Letters of Gustave Flaubert:
The solemn event will take place on Monday, grippe or no grippe. And I beg your pardon for having made you wait so long. Here is the program:
1. I’ll begin my bellowing at four o’clock sharp. So come about three.
2. At seven, dîner oriental. You will be served human flesh, bourgeois’ brains, and tigresses’ clitorises sautéed in rhinoceros butter.
3. After coffee, resumption of Punic caterwauling until listeners’ last gasp.
Does this suit you?
P.S. Punctuality! And mystery!
Unconventional gastronomical offerings aside, Flaubert’s gathering checks all the boxes of what makes a successful gathering, according to Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. Flaubert has a “disputable” purpose for inviting his friends to listen to him caterwauling (the Goncourt brothers said his voice had “the lulling effect of a purr, but a bronze purr”). Disputability of purpose, says Parker, gives a gathering “energy” and acts as “a decision filter.” He gives clear guidance on when the event will begin, and whether guests can expect refreshment, and his post-script lays down the law: don’t be late and don’t tell anyone about this private event. These are what Parker calls “pop-up rules,” which she distinguishes from traditional “etiquette”: one-off guidelines and strictures designed specifically to match an event which may initially seem “controlling” but create “new freedom and openness to our gatherings.”
So far, so charming - until the Goncourt brothers report that Flaubert read his “immensely fatiguing”manuscript until two in the morning.
The divide between what we wish were true and what is true is sometimes illustrated for us in unexpected ways, for me no more than in Parker’s book, which had been on my Kindle for several years because I love rules and books about them (and thanks are also due to my friend Elise Nussbaum for reminding me that it exists). My friends in theatre and not-for-profit organizations also say The Art of Gathering is widely circulated in their industries as something akin to a professional handbook. And for good reason: it’s full of gems and Parker is a clear, compelling writer who believes in her own disputable purpose: that bringing people together is a worthy, difficult, and sacred art. Much - not all - of her guidance comes with philosophical underpinnings that I agree with and admire. Parker is right about so many things, as our rocky post-Covid re-entry to the world of in-person office work, social gatherings, and public spaces has shown us all too well - it is easy to assume the role of host, and far harder to really pull off a successful event. I nodded vigorously many times!
But while its philosophy is strong, this book suffers from its examples and I was surprised to see that it was published in 2018, well after - I had thought - the sheen had worn off of anecdotes about Barack Obama, private pre-conference dinners at Davos, TED Talks, and The New York Times. The fumes of neoliberalism waft off this text like gasoline, although it’s certainly not the fault of Parker - herself a former Obama staffer, that the Times has lost all integrity. But the world she describes exists, I think, only in the minds of not-for-profit gala hosts and Disney event planners. Of course this book is passed around in workplaces: it’s smart, practical, and it makes you feel good to think of these strategies working. The world would certainly be a better place if they did. But how to think about “the art of gathering” in 2025 on the cusp of the second inauguration of a man who tried to overthrow the US government? Whither diplomacy?
The heart of my beef with this book is that Parker likes whimsy and I hate it. Parker’s problem with the Junior Cotillion etiquette she was taught as a child - which is rules-based and requires a certain amount of instruction - is that not everyone has access to it. Says Balzac’s Madame de Mortsauf, “My dear, laws aren’t all written in books, custom also makes its laws, the most important ones being the least known…If you fail to obey these secret laws you will remain at the bottom of the social ladder rather than rise to dominate it” (Lily in the Valley, 148). Parker agrees, dryly: “What’s nice about etiquette,” she writes, “is that no one clogs up your inbox about it. No one tells you what it is in advance. No one forces you to practice it. You just may not get invited back if you mess it up” (114). She doesn’t comment on what happens if you fail to follow pop-up rules, presumably everyone at Davos is super chill about it on the jet afterward.
This perspective strikes me as a bit hard on our old friend etiquette. In fact, I don’t see how you can have whimsy at all if it’s unfenced by boundaries that might be called etiquette, or might be called common sense. I’ve been to parties with pop-up rules - they are usually weddings (not YOUR wedding, of course, dear reader, someone else’s) - and I didn’t care for them. Frankly, I’m not sure we’re at a place where most of society is equipped to handle the wholesale replacement of a broad base of good manners with the expectation that each expedition into public life will come equipped with cue cards. It would be so nice to live in a world where I didn’t have to worry about someone at the theatre opening TikTok during Act I, but I don’t, and those people also get invited to parties (somehow).
Etiquette, because it has structured elements and definitions and rules, seems undemocratic to some people and superfluously demanding to others - is there really a difference between these two forks? Will the world end if I seat the wrong person to my left? Such questions are both sly and trite, they are from romcoms where the bumpkin heroine accidentally drinks from the finger bowl: they have nothing to do with good manners but are excuses rude people use for not following them. There are few skills more accessible to anyone with an internet connection than the proper usage of cutlery in a variety of settings. How else to explain the rise of J.D. Vance? Fascism can use a knife and fork.
This is Madame de Mortsauf’s point as well: “you will see both ill-brought-up individuals and educated ones incapable of mastering their future, hurting a child, being guilty of rudeness towards an old woman, refusing to help an upstanding elderly man on the excuse that they aren’t at all useful” (149). But etiquette is something else: “civil behavior, dear child, consists of forgetting oneself on behalf of others” (150). (Balzac’s wonderful novel, The Lily in the Valley, part of his Comedie Humaine, takes the form of a letter from a young man his new girlfriend about how great his old girlfriend was, in case you thought the French didn’t invent irony).
Etiquette, I thought on my way home from a family holiday at which we marked a terrible loss, is sometimes the only thing keeping us sitting upright in our chairs. It can be a form of heroism. I wish everyone could know the pleasure of making life smoother for someone you love, whether it’s starting a nice conversation or noticing their glass is empty. These are Advanced Skills, but they are not beyond us, and as we enter this next phase of evolving American fascism, good manners can be a mainstay, especially for those of us who live and work in cities, strongholds of democracy and diversity which have been reviled by the right and neglected by politicians. Allow me to vent my spleen: Don’t walk three abreast down a busy sidewalk, and veer to the right when you pick a side. Wear headphones for the love of God. Hold the door for each other. Send proper thank-you notes. Clean up after your dog. Stand up when a woman joins your party or when she comes and goes from the table. Put your napkin on your lap when you sit. Don’t text while you walk. Wipe down your exercise equipment. Don’t throw your weights. Don’t be late. Being polite to your server means saying please and thank you, and it means tipping properly. Obey traffic laws. Obey bike traffic laws. Don’t ride ANYTHING that isn’t a wheelchair on the damn sidewalk. Move all the way in to the subway car and move your bag so someone else can sit down. Don’t put your feet on the furniture at the airport. Bring backup headphones. Don’t spit on the street. Help a tourist take a family photo. Put your phone away at the table and whenever you’re with your friends. Apologize if you bump into someone. Light your friends’ cigarettes. (Stop fucking vaping).
Thank you for reading the inaugural issue of Correspondre à! Stay tuned for Issue 2, where we will talk about Don DeLillo’s End Zone, Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium, and Robert Harris’s Conclave.