Biography, that old buzzard, is having a field day, running along behind them picking up all the bits and pieces. Biography is used to kinks and where-withal, it expects to find people in odd pockets, it’s used to surges of speechless passion that come out of nowhere and sink without a murmur. It doesn’t care. It doesn’t even have the decency to wait until Martä and Malcolm get to the People’s Square, shake hands, go their separate ways and resume their different versions of time travel, not to collide again. This isn’t one of Martä’s movies, this is life. This is biography. Nothing matters except for the harvest, the gathering in, the adding up, the bringing together, the whole story, the way it happens and happens and goes on happening.

Good Manners

Good Manners

The stern, peremptory social arbiter, Georgia Willow, has been overseeing Canadian manners for thirty-five years. She did it in Montreal during the tricky fifties and she did it in Toronto in the unsettled sixties. In the seventies she operated underground, so to speak, from a converted Rosedale garage, tutoring the shy wives of Japanese executives and diplomats. In the eighties she came into her own; manners were rediscovered, particularly in the West where Mrs. Willow has relocated.

Promptly at three-thirty each Tuesday and Thursday, neatly dressed in a well-pressed navy Evan-Picone slub silk suit, cream blouse, and muted scarf, Georgia Willow meets her small class in the reception area of the MacDonald Hotel and ushers them into the long, airy tearoom-called, for some reason, Gophers-where a ceremonial spread has been ordered.

Food and drink almost always accompany Mrs. Willow’s lectures. It is purely a matter of simulation since, wherever half a dozen people gather, there is sure to be a tray of sandwiches to trip them up. According to Mrs. Willow, food and food implements are responsible for fifty per cent of social unease. The classic olive pit question. The persisting problem of forks, cocktail picks, and coffee spoons. The more recent cherry-tomato dilemma. Potato skins, eat them or leave them? Saucers, the lack of. The challenge of the lobster. The table napkin quandary. Removing parsley from between the teeth. On and on.

There are also sessions devoted to hand-shaking, door-opening and rules regarding the wearing and nonwearing of gloves. And a concluding series of seminars on the all-important langue de la politesse, starting with the discourse of gesture, and moving on quickly to the correct phrase for the right moment, delivered with spiritual amplitude or imprecation or possibly something in between. Appropriateness is all, says Georgia Willow.

Our doyenne of good manners takes these problems one by one. She demonstrates and describes and explains the acceptable alternatives. She’s excellent on fine points, she respects fine points. But always it’s the philosophy behind good manners that she emphasizes.