Hemingway characters do not like tipping; they would rather be served out of love. Through approximately half of Across the River and into the Trees, the aging colonel and his young mistress' are meticulously cared for by assorted Venetian factotums, all of whom are really friends. When the colonel slips an extra bill to a young second waiter, the tip is reproachfully returned—an event about as plausible as the Grand Canal turning to Valpolicella. John O'Hara, a Hemingway disciple but less sentimental, is not so much concerned with friendship between servant and master as with correctness; his elderly club members know that it is as gauche to overtip as to undertip, and they seem to get away with shiny half-dollars that would be flung into the faces of lesser men. J. P. Marquand also knew, along with the late George Apley, the virtue of the correct tip, but he saw the grim portents of the future in Willis Wayde, an obnoxious and insecure climber who plied bellboys with folding money where the quick, light slap of metal would have been sufficient.
Between them, these three social novelists define the American attitude toward tipping, a perennial presence which—like wet martinis, shaving, the traffic problem and Christmas cards—can be resisted but can probably never be banished. The Hemingway attitude is what everybody yearns for, but no one finds; the O'Hara attitude is what everybody ought to stick to, although the situation is increasingly complex; and the Marquand menace is what more and more people face. On their summer travels across the U.S. this year, Americans will run into many regional tipping differences. New Yorkers will be overcome when a Southern taxi driver not only thanks them for a 10% tip but actually opens the door, and Californians will find that Yankee New Englanders still throw quarters around as if they were manhole covers.
But in general, tipping is inexorably on the rise. It is straining to break the 15% limit and in many cases has crashed through, leaving a sense of poignant nostalgia for the days when Emily Post was advising such favored characters as Jim Clerking, Sally Hiborn and Mrs. Kindhart that one never tips "less than 25^ in a restaurant with tablecloth on table."
The Experts. The steady growth of tipping is not simply an extension of rising prices. At a time when material abundance is shared in by more and more people, the real feeling of luxury is increasingly based not on goods but on service. Tipping seeks to buy that feeling —usually in vain. In crowded restaurants, in huge, barracks-like apartment buildings, at the mercy of deliverymen or repairmen, in dozens of other situations that make the individual powerless, he seeks feebly to reassert himself through tipping.
Today there are at least 800,000 restaurant employees in the nation who collect tips amounting to about a billion dollars a year, and an additional million or so people in the other service trades whose tip income is beyond estimate. Restaurant owners continue to pare employees' pay to the bone; even at Manhattan's high-priced "21," waiters' salaries are about $42 a week, while perhaps two or three times that amount comes from tips.