Rules of Civility

by Amor Towles

When I was in first grade, a poet named David McCord came to read some of his work to our class. By the time he was finished, I knew I wanted to be a writer. That night, I read one of his books and began writing poems that were inspired by his. From that point forward, the mission of my life was simple: Read, write, repeat. I read and wrote fiction in high school, read and wrote fiction in college, read and wrote fiction in graduate school. But when I arrived in New York at the age of twenty-five and entered a career in the investment business, I set aside the writing of fiction—telling myself that I’d get back to it soon enough. Five years went by. Ten years went by. New York was thriving. Our firm grew. My circle of friends grew. I got married. We had children. In short, I had no shortage of things for which to give thanks. But at the same time, I understood that I was betraying myself. Or at least, betraying my younger self. Betraying the boy who knew with such avid certainty that he was going to be a writer. That he was a writer. So, in what spare time I could carve out, I started a novel. It took seven years to complete, and it was no good. But my childhood mantra remained with me as an encouragement: Read, write, repeat. I took what I had learned from the failed novel and started something new. That book was RULES OF CIVILITY, published ten years ago this July, when I was forty-seven. I have many people to thank for the success of that book. My family and friends; my agent and the team at Viking; the independent bookstores who supported it; the readers who took a chance on reading it; you, perhaps. But what I am most grateful for is that on that day ten years ago, the goodwill of this collective community allowed me to become who I had always hoped to be.

On the night of October 4th, 1966, Val and I, both in late middle age, attended the opening of Many Are Called at the Museum of Modern Art—the first exhibit of the portraits taken by Walker Evans in the late 1930s on the New York City subways with a hidden camera.

Walker Evans and the Subway Photos: While I began writing RULES OF CIVILITYin 2006, the genesis of the book dates back to the early 1990s when I happened upon a copy of Many Are Called – the collection of portraits that Walker Evans took on the New York City subways in the late 1930s with a hidden camera. At the time, I primarily knew of Evans’s iconic Depression-era photographs of rural America, such as those that appear in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: the tilting clapboard houses, weathered signs, stalwart women in summer dresses… But this was the first I’d seen of his urban work. The subway photos weren’t shown publicly until the 1960s, and, as I flipped through the pages, I had the fanciful notion of someone at the exhibit’s opening recognizing the same person in two of the portraits. In the manner of such things, I wrote the idea on a matchbook cover and threw it in a box. Twenty years later, I pulled the matchbook back out of the box and set about writing this tale. One of the reasons I’ve remained interested in the Evans portraits all these years is that they are fundamentally haunting. In part, this is because the photos are artifacts of the Depression. But in part, I think they haunt because they evoke the public/private paradox of the subway ride. The men and women in these photographs are being captured in an extremely public environment – a crowded subway car in one of the largest, most racially diverse cities in the world. But the anonymity secured by this chance gathering of strangers, by the relative brevity of the ride, and by that start-of-day/end-of-day weariness, all seem to prompt the riders (or allow them) to drop their guard. We, as viewers, thus seem to get a glimpse not simply of social class and ethnicity, but of the individual histories, sentiments, and dreams that lie just beneath the surface. On a personal note, the Christmas after RULES OF CIVILITY was published, both my wife and my father gave me one of the Walker Evans subway portraits. They continue to be haunting and are two of my most prized possessions.

It was the last night of 1937.

Twenty-Six Chapters: In my late thirties and early forties, I wrote a novel that I ended up sticking in a drawer. It’s pretty depressing to work on something for seven years and dislike the outcome, so I took some time to reflect on what had gone wrong. That book had five points of view and a series of complex events that I had only roughly outlined. As an investment professional with two young children at the time, this structure proved hellish. Every time I sat down to work on the book, I needed two hours just to figure out where I was. Worst of all, in re-reading later drafts, I often found that the material from the first year was often the best. So as I prepared to launch a new novel in 2005, I decided it would be a distinctive first person narrative; all events and characters would be carefully imagined in advance; and the first draft would be written in one year. After months of preparation, I started writing RULES OF CIVILITY on January 1, 2006 and wrapped it up 365 days later. Here’s a weird fact: the book was designed with twenty-six chapters, because there are fifty-two weeks in the year and I wanted to write a chapter for a week, revise it for a week, and then move on to the next chapter, in order to keep my forward momentum. Not coincidentally, the book opens on New Year’s Eve and ends a year later. Over the next three years, I revised the book three times from beginning to end; but the original constraint of a twelve-month draft proved a much more effective artistic process for me than an open-ended one. As you might expect, given the success of RULES OF CIVILITY I followed a similar process with both A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW and THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY, although I needed a year-and-a-half to complete the first drafts of those two longer works.

I took a sip of my martini. It was well diluted with the melted ice. You could barely taste the gin. It wasn’t going to be much help. —You look good, I said finally. Eve eyed me patiently. —Katey. You know I can’t stand that sort of crap. Especially from you. —I’m just saying that you look better than when I saw you last. —It’s the boys in the basement. Every day it’s bacon with breakfast and soup with lunch. Canapés with cocktails and cake with coffee. —I’m jealous. —Sure. The Prodigal Son and all that. But pretty soon you feel like you’re the fatted calf. With some difficulty she sat upright. She reached out two fingers and picked up a small white pill that was almost invisible on the surface of the table. —I’m gonna find me Jesus one of these days, she said, then she washed the medicine down with her tepid gin.

Quotation Marks: When I began writing RULES OF CIVILITY I was using traditional quotation marks, but after fifty pages, I scrapped them. Principally, I did so because they were bugging me. Quotation marks are designed to let an author insert parenthetical observations or characterizations in the middle of a spoken statement. By scrapping the quotation marks, I was generally forced to write conversation in such a way that the dialogue would do most of the work on its own. In addition, by dropping the quotation marks (and the opportunity to insert narrative commentary mid-speech), I felt the book would have more pace, and pace was something that I definitely wanted RULES OF CIVILITY to have. In GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW, I returned to using quotation marks because narrative interruptions and commentary seemed perfectly in keeping with the style of the Count’s thought process. But I scrapped them again in THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY, a novel centered on eighteen-year-old boys with a lot of forward momentum.

I couldn’t have been inside more than ten minutes; but by the time I got back, the paper manufacturer was gone and one of the blondes from the couch had taken his place. This, I suppose, was to be expected. Wallace Wolcott had to be in the sights of every young socialite without a ring on her finger. Most of the able-bodied girls in town would know his net worth and the names of his sisters. The industrious ones knew the names of his hunting dogs too. The blonde, who looked like she’d been thrown a cotillion or two, was wearing white ermine a few months out of season and close-fitting gloves that climbed all the way to her elbows. Drawing closer, I could tell that her diction was almost as good as her figure, but that didn’t mean she was captive of a ladylike reserve.

Grandma Hollingsworth: None of the characters in the book are based on anyone in real life. But three of my grandparents and a great grandmother lived into their late 90s or early 100s. My maternal grandparents lived across the street from me in the summers and I’d see them every day. Over lunch when I was in my twenties, it was great fun to talk with them about their lives between the wars–when they were young adults. My grandmother, who was simultaneously a woman of manners and verve, fended off marriage proposals until she was thirty because she was having too much fun to settle down. Like Katey, while at a party by the sea, my grandmother pushed a romantic rival in white furs off a dock. She told me that’s when she decided to marry my grandfather. It was my conversations with this grandmother that solidified my view that her generation was less Victorian than my parents’ generation. In America, the 1920s and 1930s allowed a certain openness for women that was then countered by the conformity of the 1950s. All one need due is watch the films of the 1930s to see the role models that women had for boldness in the era.

As the Wolcotts were in the paper business, they had access to every kind of wrapping paper on earth: forest greens patterned with candy canes; velvety reds with pipe-smoking Santas in sleighs. But the family tradition was to wrap everything in a heavy white stock that was delivered to the house by the roll. Then they dressed the gifts with a different-colored ribbon for each member of the clan.

Christmas with Wallace: In Chapter Fifteen, as Wallace Wolcott prepares to go fight in the Spanish Civil War, he and Katey shop for Christmas presents and wrap them so that they can be delivered to his family when he is overseas. As is the family tradition, all the presents are wrapped in white paper. This little detail is drawn from my life. When I was a boy, my grandfather ran a commercial paper company and at Christmas time, my grandmother would have a thick white paper stock delivered to her house by the roll. So on Christmas day, rather than presents wrapped in an array of red, green, and gold, all the presents under the tree were wrapped in white. The notion of having different colored ribbons to identify the presents of the different family members is an added element drawn from my imagination. In this scene, after wrapping all the presents, Wallace Wolcott takes the black-dialed officer’s watch from his wrist (which he inherited from his father) and wraps it for his nephew and namesake, the young Wallace Wolcott Martin. It is Wallace Martin, eventually known as “Woolly”, who some years later becomes a central character in THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY and who, in turn, hands the black-dialed officer’s watch down to the young Billy Watson.

—This is the whole school? I asked after another moment of scanning the boys’ faces. —You’re . . . looking for Tinker? —Yes, I admitted. —He’s here. Wallace pointed to the left side of the photograph where our mutual friend stood alone at the outskirts of the assembly. Given another minute, I would certainly have identified Tinker. He looked just as you’d expect him to look at the age of fourteen—his hair a little tussled, his jacket a little wrinkled, his eyes trained on the camera as if he were ready to spring. Then Wallace smiled and moved his finger across the photograph to its opposite edge. —And he’s here.

The School Portrait: Wallace Wolcott and Tinker Grey first came to know each other as students at St. George’s, the prestigious, all-boys boarding school in Rhode Island. According to my original outline for RULES OF CIVILITY, in Chapter Fifteen—when Katey joined Wallace in his apartment to wrap presents—she would see a photograph of the St. George’s student body, and identify the young Tinker in the crowd. This would prompt a conversation with Wallace that would give Katey a better understanding of the challenges that Tinker faced as a young man. As I was writing the passage and beginning to describe the photograph of these few hundred students standing in rows in their coats and ties, I was struck by a sudden memory. I too had attended an old New England prep school where the student body was photographed ever year. The school portrait would be taken by a man who used a traditional box camera on a tripod. In this type of camera, the photographer draws a narrow aperture across the face of a large negative, slowly exposing it from one side to the other. Given the slow movement of the aperture, a game young student who started on one side of the frame and ran as fast as he could behind the student body to the other side of the frame, could appear in the photograph twice. As soon as I had the memory, I realized that Tinker should be the game young student who has met this challenge, appearing in the picture twice. By adding this element, I felt the photograph would not only represent Tinker’s boyish sense of joy, but also prefigure the fact that years hence, there would be two Tinkers coinciding at the same time.

Hell Hath No Fury

My novels are like my children—which is to say, I love them equally. But in each book, I do have a favorite chapter or two… In the case of RULES OF CIVILITY, my favorite has always been Chapter Twenty. In the first half of RULES, Katey maintains something of a cool distance, watching and analyzing people and events with a sharp if somewhat passive intelligence. In Chapter Nineteen, however, when Katey discovers Tinker’s duplicity, she breaks out of her passivity, entering Chapter Twenty like a tiger escaped from its cage. In quick succession, she has three encounters in which she is a determined actor. First, she bests Anne Grandyn in her suite at the Plaza; then she puts Tinker in his place in a diner; and finally, she seduces Dicky Vanderwhile in his own bathtub. It is in this chapter, I think, where we get our first real glimpse of how formidable Katey will be in the years to come. The title of the chapter, of course, comes from the old maxim: Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

Could there have been a more contrary statue to place across from one of the largest cathedrals in America? Atlas, who attempted to overthrow the gods on Olympus and was thus condemned to shoulder the celestial spheres for all eternity—the very personification of hubris and brute endurance. While back in the shadows of St. Patrick’s was the statue’s physical and spiritual antithesis, the Pietà—in which our Savior, having already sacrificed himself to God’s will, is represented broken, emaciated, laid out on Mary’s lap. Here they resided, two worldviews separated only by Fifth Avenue, facing off until the end of time or the end of Manhattan, whichever came first.

Atlas and the Pietà: Even though I create detailed outlines for my books, while I’m writing I inevitably stumble on historical facts or images which are so perfect for my story, it’s almost as if the universe has dropped them in my lap. One such case in RULES OF CIVILITY is the Atlas statue in Rockefeller Center. In Chapter Twenty-Four, at something of a low point, Katey leaves her office to sit for a moment in St. Patrick’s cathedral. While she’s there, Dicky Vanderwhile finds her. The two end up having a conversation on the steps of the cathedral about Tinker Grey that proves a turning point for Katey—as she begins to confront her own shortcomings. When I wrote the first draft of this chapter, Katey makes only passing reference to the fact that in the back of the church is a large Pietà, the statue depicting the dead body of Christ draped in the lap of Mary. Shortly after writing the chapter, I happened to be at a meeting in midtown Manhattan. As it was a nice day, when the meeting was over, I decided to walk down Fifth Avenue. Suddenly, I was passing St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Having not be in St. Patrick’s for years, I slipped inside in order to confirm that the Pietà was where I thought it was. Having done so, I was leaving the cathedral and there, framed in the open doorway, was the Art Deco statue of Atlas directly across the street. The sculptural and moral contrast between the two statues was so striking, I immediately understood they belonged together in the book. So I went straight home and revised the chapter accordingly.