Dry Paths in a Swamp

THE POLITE AMERICANS by Gerald Carson. 346 pages. Morrow. $1 >.50.

Americans are incorrigible joiners, as witness the National Association of Former FBI Agents, the Asparagus Club, the Auto Dismantlers Association of Southern California and the Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo (lumbermen). A dog named Socrates Lovinger is listed in the Manhattan phone book. In colonial times, cussers were punished with a red-hot poker thrust through the profane tongue. In 1900 a New York judge committed an actress to Bellevue for smoking cigarettes. In 1905 the U.S. had more pianos and cottage organs than bathtubs. Mickey Mantle's testimonial versatility pales beside that of Henry Ward Beecher, the preacher, who in the 19th century endorsed numerous products, including soap, sewing machines and trusses. Once, nice girls wore black silk mittens to breakfast, and gentlemen kept their hats on indoors. And, in polite company, gentlemen referred to chickens as boy-birds and girl-birds, and never used the word peacock at all.

No Map. Such curious insights into three centuries of American manners and morals stud this book like the hammer work of a carpenter who has been paid by the nail. Gerald Carson is quite capable of organizing a text, as he demonstrated in The Roguish World of Doctor Brinkley, the goat-glands man, The Social History of Bourbon and The Old Country Store. But here his source material, the mere listing of which takes 19 pages of eyestrain type, apparently overwhelms him. Confronted with so much unassimilated abundance, Carson opts to fly over it, presenting what he calls "a bird's-eye view of the folkways, conventions and inherited ideas governing civilized behavior which have been followed--or flouted--among the English-speaking inhabitants of the United States."

The result is a swampy omnium gatherum of a book, a disjointed, inchoate and intriguing recital for the negotiation of which the reader desperately needs a map. A map is not supplied. Carson simply fires his tidbits of intelligence helter-skelter, letting them fall where they may, and making no pretense whatever of stitching paragraphs or even sentences together so that they scan.

Wrong Dog. Slogging through this chaos is exhausting, uphill work, made none the easier by a fallible and somewhat pretentious guide. Carson's book is strewn with such showoff, jawbreaker words as armigerous, pogonologist, acescent, enchiridion, ochlocracy.* He lapses frequently into ungrammatical constructions and even into error. In his hands, the Court of St. James's, to which all ambassadors to Britain pay their respects, loses its possessive case. L'Osservatore della Domenica, a Vatican weekly, is falsely identified as the more familiar Vatican daily, L'Osservatore Romano. Anyone who dials Socrates Lovinger's number, as given by Carson--LE 5-3221--is bound to get the wrong dog. And where Carson wants to score a point, he fudges: "More people are drinking, but per capita they drink less."

But perseverance can pay. From The Polite Americans' morass, the patient reader can pick out a few dry footpaths to a reasonable comprehension of the country's character. It would have been nice, though, and this would certainly have been a better book, if the author had required of the reader a little less perseverance and of himself a little more perspicacity.

*Bearing heraldic arms; an authority on beards; turning sour; a handbook; government by mob.

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