The Table That Turns

In her Etiquette of 1922, Emily Post describes a dinner party going quietly wrong. The soup has been cleared, and so has the fish. Until now the hostess has been talking to the gentleman on her left, as hostesses were expected to, and every guest has been talking to the neighbour on the same side. Now she turns to her right, and the whole table is meant to turn with her. The lady who has been talking to the gentleman on the hostess’s right turns to the man beyond him, and within a moment everyone has a new neighbour.

Then Post reaches the part that interests me. Sometimes a single couple is so absorbed in each other that they will not move, and then, in her words, “the whole table is blocked.” A lady and a gentleman on either side of the obstruction are left staring at their plates.

The remedy she prescribes is wonderfully direct. The hostess catches the lady’s eye and tells her, in front of everyone, that she cannot keep Professor Bugge any longer, because Mr Smith has been trying to get her attention. The lady, shaken awake, turns to Mr Smith. The professor, however little he wishes to, turns the other way. To go on as they were, Post says, would be inexcusably rude to the hostess and to everyone present.

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It is easy to laugh at this, and plenty of people have. A century on it reads like choreography for a very stiff ballet. Look at it again as an engineer would. A dinner table is a chain. Each person is joined to two others, and one link that refuses to move jams every link beyond it. Post had noticed what most hosts learn only by sitting through it: a conversation left to itself does not share attention out fairly. It pools. It collects around the two people who like each other best and leaves everyone else to cope.

This piece is about the old machinery built to prevent that, why it was dismantled, and why what it protected is still worth protecting. It turns out to explain a good deal else, including the way the English once policed one another’s vocabulary and the most famous act of social suicide of the 1970s. (Last Thursday we looked at the guest’s side of the bargain. This is the table’s.)

A Rule With One Job

The turning of the table does one thing, which is to deliver kindness by mechanism. Think what it does for each person present.

The guest stuck beside a bore is promised release at a known moment, with no excuse to invent and no small rudeness of turning away. The guest who is enjoying herself is made to stop, also without rudeness, because the signal comes from the hostess and not from her neighbour’s preferences. And the guest at the far end, who might have waited politely for someone to notice her, is noticed by the structure rather than by charity. Nobody has to be the one who ends a conversation, which is the part most of us find hardest. The rule did it for them.

The seating plan worked on the same principle. Formal tables of the period alternated men and women and kept husbands and wives apart, so that the evening’s conversation had been designed before anyone sat down.

What makes this more than a curiosity is the word we use for what it governed. We say conversation and mean talk. For the first English readers of Stefano Guazzo’s La civil conversazione, which appeared in 1574 and reached them when George Pettie translated its first three books in 1581, the word meant something wider: keeping company, the manner of living among other people. That is the sense in which the King James Bible, in 1611, tells its readers to let their conversation be as becomes the gospel. It is about how they behave. Guazzo’s four books range over education, family life and social life, and Pettie’s version had a considerable influence on what Tudor and Jacobean England thought a gentleman should be.

Read the turn of the table in that older sense and it stops being a rule about talking. It becomes a rule about living together at close quarters for three hours, which is what a dinner party is.

How the Rule Died, and What Replaced It

By the middle of the century it was already being mocked. In 1968 a reader in St Paul, Minnesota, wrote to Amy Vanderbilt to say that she had come across “elaborate, and to me silly” instructions for turning the table in an old etiquette book. They struck her as artificial, and certainly not of this century. Did anyone still do it?

Vanderbilt’s answer is one of the quietly wise paragraphs of twentieth-century etiquette. Not by rigid formula, she said. A hostess keeps an ear open for the whole table. She divides her attention equally between the guests on her left and right, notices where the talk has gone slack, and steers it in a general way, perhaps by putting a question to someone who has been silent. She should not break into a conversation that is going well merely to honour the rule. “Over-assiduous hostesses can be point-killers,” Vanderbilt noted, some of them so anxious that no guest is ever allowed to finish a sentence. And when talk turns acrimonious, it is her plain duty to change the subject firmly. Vanderbilt offered the wording: perhaps we had better leave politics until after the meal, since she wants everyone to have a pleasant dinner. The traditional subjects to avoid were accidents, illness, religion, scandal and politics.

So the rule did not die so much as dissolve into the judgment it had always been standing in for. The formula had been a prosthesis for attention. Once hostesses were trusted to pay attention, the prosthesis could go.

The same decade found a second answer, and it was furniture. In the early 1960s Jacqueline Kennedy retired the long U- and E-shaped tables of White House state dinners in favour of round ones. The White House Historical Association says she wanted a more intimate feeling, and Letitia Baldrige, her social secretary, remembered small round tables chosen so that guests would find it easier to talk. With the tables small, hosts could also think more about who would get on and less about rank. At a round table of eight or ten, everyone can see everyone, and the turn mostly takes care of itself. The Kennedys solved by architecture the problem Post’s hostess had solved by timing.

Both answers leave behind the same idea, and it is the useful one. At a well-run table, somebody owns the conversation. The rule, the seating plan and the round table were all tools for that person, who was usually the hostess, and who was thereby spared having to be heroic.

U and Non-U: The Word List That Gave the Game Away

A table that has been turned well produces a particular kind of talk: unhurried, unperformed, not especially brilliant. In the 1950s the English found they could turn that into a parlour game.

It started, as the best games do, by accident. Alan Ross, a professor of linguistics at Birmingham, published a paper in 1954 in the journal of the Modern Language Society of Helsinki, hardly the obvious home for a social bombshell. His subject was the language that marked off the English upper class, and his labels were U and non-U. The national biography records that he had started it as an undergraduate amusement at Oxford, which gives you the right register. Ross’s claim was that the upper class could by then be told from everyone else solely by its language. It was not necessarily better educated, cleaner or richer than anyone else.

Nancy Mitford, who had settled in France after the war, read the paper, turned it into an essay called “The English Aristocracy” for Encounter in 1955, and the following year edited the lot into a small book, Noblesse Oblige, which carried a condensed Ross, contributions from Evelyn Waugh and others, and a poem by John Betjeman on how to get on in society. The argument that followed drew in half the literary establishment.

The famous list is short and addictive. House, not home. Napkin, not serviette. Sitting-room, not lounge. Scent, not perfume. “How d’you do?” and not “Pleased to meet you.” “What?” and not “Pardon?” The pattern Mitford enjoyed pointing out was that the anxious reach for the grander or softer word. “Home” sounds finer than “house,” and “pardon” sounds more refined than a blunt “what.” The people who felt they were being watched were the ones who gave themselves away.

The best thing about Ross, though, is how honest he was about how little of it lasts. He went to John Walker’s pronouncing dictionary of 1791 and found that, in three cases where two pronunciations were then in use, the one that was upper-class in 1954 was the one Walker had marked down as the lesser. The markers drift. They always have. And when he asked whether a non-U speaker could ever become a U speaker, he gave a dry answer: send him to a preparatory school and then to a good boarding school, a method he judged almost completely effective. In other words, the word list measured upbringing and not taste, which is rather the sort of thing a snob would prefer you not to notice.

So I would not memorise the list. If you say “lounge,” nobody at a good table will faint, and I am not suggesting you answer the next person who speaks to you with “What?” What lasts is the posture the list was accidentally recording. The person who says “home” where “house” would do is monitoring himself. He is asking the room for a mark.

That, I think, is the real job of a host, and it is what the turn of the table was for: to arrange a room so that nobody has to audition. The talk at a good table sounds plain because the people at it have stopped trying to be graded. (That reading is mine, not Ross’s, but I think he would have let it pass.)

What the Table Keeps

A table that turns well also keeps its doors closed, and the best-known demonstration of that is a negative one.

Truman Capote was, for a long time, the ideal dinner guest. He listened with an intensity that women who were used to being listened to by no one in particular found irresistible, and the circle he called his Swans (Babe Paley, Slim Keith, Lee Radziwill, Marella Agnelli and others) told him things they told almost nobody. Babe Paley, by most accounts, confided in him about her husband’s infidelities.

In November 1975 Esquire published a chapter of his unfinished novel Answered Prayers, under the title “La Côte Basque, 1965.” It is set at a lunch table, in a fashionable New York restaurant, where two characters gossip about their friends, and the friends were not hard to recognise. Paley, already ill with cancer, never spoke to him again. Keith did not either. He was not asked to Paley’s funeral in 1978.

Capote had broken the oldest term of the arrangement. The table gives attention freely, and in exchange what is said at it does not leave the room. Vanderbilt’s list of subjects to avoid at dinner (accidents, illness, religion, scandal, politics) was in part a list of the things that make people hold back, and so make the room less safe. Capote did not merely discuss scandal at dinner. He took the dinner and published it.

The lesson is not a cautionary one about famous people. It is that a table’s generosity is only possible because of its confidentiality. People will give you their full attention only if they trust that you will not later give it to everyone else.

How to Turn the Table Today

Most of the machinery has gone. Standing parties have no seating plan, group chats have no hostess, and the dinner where two friends talk all evening to each other has no Mr Smith to rescue it. In 1999 Baldrige, who had spent a career writing down the rules, complained that families no longer sat down at the dinner table to talk about the small things that make caring people. The conversation, in the old sense of the word, has lost its owner.

You can take the job on without any of the apparatus. If you are the host, Vanderbilt’s three tasks are all you need. Divide your attention fairly between your neighbours. Listen for the lull. Steer. Do it with the seating first. Six to eight guests is my own preference, with men and women alternating if that suits your friends, couples separated if they will not mind, and a round table if you have one. At about the main course, do what Post’s hostess did and make a deliberate turn, a sentence that tells the table a new chapter has begun, ideally a question to the quietest person about something only they know. And do not break into a conversation that is going well just to honour a rule. The point is the people.

If you are a guest, the work is smaller and just as valuable. Notice who has been left alone. Bring them back with a question you could only have asked them: Marta, you were about to say something about the gallery. When you are stuck in a conversation, or wish to leave one, use the old art of the introduction as an exit: bring over someone passing, introduce them to the person you are with, mention something they share, and step back as it takes hold. Put your fork down when you answer a question, which is an old rule against speaking with a loaded fork, and which has the side effect of slowing you down. Keep your phone out of sight, even face down. And try replacing “What do you do?” with “What has been keeping you busy lately?”, which lets the other person choose what to be.

Finally, keep what is said. It is the oldest rule and the easiest to break by accident, now that every private confidence can be screenshotted in a second.

What It Costs

None of this requires money. A dinner for six is a roast chicken and a loaf of bread. The Kennedys’ round tables were a state banquet’s worth of china, but the idea behind them cost nothing, and it works as well in a rented flat. Of everything Vedlen writes about, the dinner party is perhaps the cheapest form of luxury, and also the one most likely to be remembered.

At Post’s dinner, the remedy for a blocked table was a woman with a clear voice and a settled sense of responsibility for the room. Somebody has to be that person, and it can be anyone. The remarkable thing about the old table was how rarely it needed the rescue, because it had been built so that no one was left staring at their plate.

Sally, I like to think, was embarrassed for about four seconds, and then very glad of Mr Smith.

If you enjoyed this, Vedlen arrives every week: one quiet look at what living with class meant, where it can still be found, and how to bring a little of it into an ordinary Thursday.

Images generated with AI (Google Gemini).

Vedlen · The Unspoken Code of Class