CHAPTER 40
HER SONS TRIED TO DISCOURAGE HER FROM THE NEW PROJECT. The flamboyance of the early twenties, they believed, hardly appeared an ideal time for yet another book on manners, in spite of Frank Crowninshield’s enthusiasm. They themselves knew no one who would buy such a book. Emily appreciated their advice: the flappers and petting-party devotees eager to create their own rules seemed unlikely to engender a run on etiquette manuals. Ned and Bruce worked hard to persuade their mother that her timing was off, further arguing that for an already established author to write an etiquette book was surely a step down from her previous work.
Their skepticism was well placed, for more than one reason. After all, Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis filled the popular press those days, boldly asserting the sexual nature of the female, who, it turned out, was relieved to shuck her Victorian constraints. Defiantly uninhibited, these liberated women sought new, not traditional, representations of what they were and wanted to be. As if unbinding their fetters, by 1920 women everywhere—from France to Brazil, Japan to the United States—were busy freeing themselves of any signs of repression or rules. Everything from dress lengths to hairstyles was abbreviated. Women, the primary consumers and purveyors of etiquette, were currently otherwise engaged. An age of gangsters and speakeasies and flat-chested women seemed entirely out of Emily Post’s domain.
But Ned and Bruce’s seemingly easygoing mother, more strategic than even they realized, was convinced that change was endemic to culture. As she had witnessed her sons and their cohorts readjusting to civilian life, she had accurately gauged a renewed opportunity. Not only were increasing numbers of immigrants hungry to learn how to become well-bred Americans; wartime brides and their husbands were confronting a home front whose landscape had shifted radically in the past four or five years. The war had sent two million soldiers back from Europe, many of whose tour of duty had opened their youthful eyes to freer sexual mores abroad. Even Prohibition, paradoxically, had furthered a cultural revolution, creating disgusted citizens whose defiance helped double the number of legal and illegal saloons in New York City, from fifteen thousand in 1917 to thirty-two thousand a few rebellious years later.
So Emily saw her opening, and, in the summer of 1920, with no travels to distract her and no book proposal languishing on a publisher’s desk, she either asked Frank Crowninshield to broker a deal or she jumped at one he had already offered her: she would compose a book about how to behave. Seated on a high stool in front of her father’s drafting table, she in effect wrote from and of her own life. Her reaching out for advice would prove one of the few avenues by which she socialized, otherwise cutting off society—of every ilk—more resolutely and severely than she’d ever done before. Humble enough to realize that she lacked expertise in this area or that, she occasionally embarrassed herself with her enthusiasm, so carried away that she grilled everyone around her to supplement her own knowledge. A substantial portion of Etiquette came from Emily’s polling of friends, family, even customers waiting for taxis.
As the summer of 1920 ended, Emily focused exclusively on her new project. She was well aware that her former agent’s business had expanded, his clients now brilliantly capturing the nation’s anxiety. This was the age of the “Lost Generation” of writers, those such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald who were convinced that the old values had rotted to their core. This Side of Paradise serenaded the Jazz Age inchoate, while The Great Gatsby would lament its decline. The Paul Reynolds agency had little use for Emily Post these days. It was not surprising that her sons were convinced she was out of touch.
NEVER A SLOUCH, she now worked nonstop, every day but Sunday. First she reviewed Mrs. John (Mary) Sherwood’s etiquette book, which Josephine had reared her on. Next she made herself read the brand-new version of the out-of-date Emily Holt book. Reading others’ compendiums of everything from table settings to funeral services, Emily quickly realized she needed a more elaborate filing system than she’d used for her novels or even for her road trip. To organize such an expansive project, she spent weeks devising categories for the subjects she would discuss. Next, she thumbtacked rows of cards across one entire wall of her home office, positioning new research under the appropriate heading: “Weddings,” “Introductions,” “Traveling,” “Cards and Visits,” “Correspondence,” “The Debutante.”
Organizing, cataloging, sequencing, designing, constructing, teaching: she was performing the tasks she excelled at, and she was satisfied. “When she had a job in hand she was like a bird dog on a scent,” her son Ned remembered. Emily’s panoramic vision of her subject contained advice that today would come from a marriage counselor, psychologist, doctor, or fashion consultant. Several of the resultant thirty-eight chapters, such as “Fundamentals of Good Behavior,” consisted of a mere five pages; others, including “Balls and Dances” required twenty-six.
Throughout 1921, with Emily in semi-isolation, writing Etiquette in her resolute, relentless fashion, she experienced the culture’s hybrid reality primarily through her sons’ anecdotes. She heard that Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence had won the Pulitzer Prize. The book’s backward glance complemented Fitzgerald’s lament: an era was almost over before it had had a chance to take root. How to move forward while saving the best of the past? As if determined to appear at least among the minor league of the day’s novelists, Emily created vivid fictional characters in her own text to play out such scenes as happened in the seemingly ever-changing life of the day.
She did take a short break when William Goadby Post, her first (and only) grandchild, was born that year, on her favorite holiday (or so she told him), the Fourth of July. As if to ensure that Bruce didn’t feel overshadowed by his older brother, Emily found extra opportunities when she could share time with him as well. A few months after Billy’s birth, Emily and Bruce, who had developed performance skills much like his mother’s, appeared in a privately made movie, a story about a moonshine still. The Kick in It was based on an actual incident described in city newspapers the preceding spring: a family living as if untouched by civilization had been discovered in the Ramapo Mountains, within a few miles of genteel Tuxedo Park.
Local residents, including Emily’s friends Mrs. George St. George (Katharine Collier’s daughter) and Mrs. Philip Rhinelander, a relative of Edith Wharton’s, worked hard on the private production, which Tuxedo Park was sponsoring as a benefit for its town hospital. Nonetheless, in light of the inelegant subject, Emily’s sardonic, witty son couldn’t stop himself from teasing his mother about having taken Lorillard’s fairy-tale village so seriously throughout the years.
EMILY SIGNED HER CONTRACT with Funk and Wagnalls on January 27, 1922. The book, written in longhand, had taken a year and a half of almost nonstop work. Though her friends still complained that she was rarely available for lunches at the Colony Club, Emily no longer even tried to make excuses for putting her profession first. She had become convinced that there was not enough sustenance in her old way of life for her to ever return to it, or to the person she had assumed, as a young wife, she had to be.
Even the packaging of the royal blue Etiquette reassured while it motivated, striking a fine balance between contentment and desire. Illustrated with “private photographs and facsimiles of social forms,” its 250,000 words required 627 pages. The unadorned title, Etiquette, and the name Emily Post stand alone on a dark blue case. Both are printed in a gold Art Deco font, the up-to-the-moment aesthetic cleverly offsetting the potential stuffiness of the subject. The book’s long subtitle—In Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home—was wisely relegated to the pages inside.
Etiquette was published in July 1922. It cost a hefty $4 (approximately $44 today). According to an account Emily gave years later, rival publishers pronounced her book “too full of footmen” to be successful—a prediction quickly proven wrong when their stenographers rushed to buy the volume within weeks of its debut. During the subsequent four decades, Emily would revise Etiqu
ette—its subtitle changed after this first edition to The Blue Book of Social Usage—ten times.
In his introduction, Richard Duffy, a scholar of Romance languages, would make serious claims for its importance: “As a social document, it is without precedent in American literature. In order that we may better realize the behavior and environment of well-bred people, the distinguished author has introduced actual persons and the places of her own world; and whether we can or cannot penetrate the incognito of the Worldlys, the Gildings, the Kindharts, the Oldnames, and the others, is of no importance. Fictionally, they are real enough for us to be interested and instructed in their way of living. That they happen to move in what is known as Society is incidental.”
Etiquette became—and arguably still is—a ticket into the American establishment, even as that monolith changed shape at an ever-faster rate. Emily’s subject took form in the crucible of race, class, and gender, the ghost in the machine of an ambitious, multifarious nation. As the University of Chicago’s Professor James Cate has claimed, “With rigid standards in matters of principle, she showed a spirit of compromise in the unessential; the successive editions of her book reveal how aware she was of the changing scene in America and how she sought to accommodate herself to the changes. But perhaps the test of her significance is the degree to which she herself was responsible for these changes in the mores.”
America had expanded, geographically and culturally, to accommodate newcomers and new economies. The United States, at least until World War I, and with the exception of the stunning, steady vitriol aimed at Asian immigrants since the early 1800s, had prided itself on accepting foreigners, the country’s magnificent Statue of Liberty appropriately lodged, at the end of the century, at the mouth of the mighty Hudson River. There Emily had proudly watched her father standing on the dais during the statue’s dedication. Though she never publicly articulated the symbolic connection between that moment and the role her book on etiquette played for the masses greeted by Liberty, at some point, surely, she realized it. With Etiquette, an amalgam of the experiences that had shaped her along with her epoch, she was in perfect step with both time and place.
CHAPTER 41
ETIQUETTE WAS A HIT. IN MARCH 1923, EIGHT MONTHS AFTER ITS publication, Emily’s “little blue book,” as she self-deprecatingly referred to it at first, would finally top Publishers Weekly sales list for nonfiction, having occupied second to fifth place throughout the fall of 1922, and would stay in fourth place for much of the following year. Its author was in good company: Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt took the honors on the fiction list, and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence was still selling strongly two years after its publication. Babbitt, The Age of Innocence, and Etiquette: this triumvirate of the modern moment, nostalgia lacerated by a sharp-eyed honesty, made odd but perfect sense. Mrs. Wharton skewered society, while Lewis lacerated the joyless businessman. Emily Post would represent the truth of their fiction, her prose teaching the country that manners, in the end, mattered even more than money.
In the ages-old tradition of Horace, Etiquette’s dramatis personae entertained the audience through amusing, occasionally painful lessons, providing instruction that was both sweet and useful. The Toploftys, the Eminents, and the Richan Vulgars were composites of Emily’s acquaintances. Though her book frequently invoked a mythical, sometimes contradictory “Best Society of Best People,” Emily knew there was no hereditary ruling class in the United States: the leveling ideals of a democracy funded its very foundation. Her heroes and overwrought villains implicitly acknowledged the fiction at the base of Best Society: “Best Society is not a fellowship, nor does it seek to exclude those who are not of exalted birth, but it is an association of gentle-folk [in which] charm of manner . . . and instinctive consideration for the feelings of others, are the credentials by which society the world over recognizes its chosen members.”
Whatever their expectations when they opened Etiquette, readers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Arthur Schlesinger, and Edmund Wilson quickly found themselves transported by the travails of Emily’s vivid characters. According to Wilson, after finishing the book, Fitzgerald “became inspired with the idea of a play in which all the motivations should consist of trying to do the right thing.” Mrs. Worldly, Mr. Bachelor, Mrs. Younger, Constance Style, Mrs. Bobo Gilding, Mr. and Mrs. Littlehouse, the Kindharts, the Titherington de Puysters: all starred in leading roles, with the Joneses, the Smiths, and the Browns contentedly confined to the chorus. Wilson would note that the names of Emily’s actors sounded like stock figures from a fifteenth-century morality play, a drama that drew the reader into the text’s mise-en-scène. Snobs such as the Gildings, for instance, revealed the small cruelties thoughtless people committed against those they considered their inferiors. In contrast, “real Best People,” such as the Kindharts, converted a failed dinner party into a chance to encourage a pair of nervous newlyweds, reassuring the young wife that the disastrous meal she had just served was of no consequence.
Some of the characters resonated with New York readers more than others. “To you my friends whose identity in these pages is veiled in fictional disguise it is but fitting that I dedicate this book”: this edgy, provocative dedication implied a tension about Emily’s past that she kept close to the chest. Among Emily and her parents’ crowd, the Prices, in fact, had not been the social equals of their peers. Bruce and Josephine could afford to criticize the gilded crowd privately, while making a strong show of personal and family pride, because they themselves never really fit in with the Yankee elite.
Though she would claim Francis Scott Key in her ancestry, Emily still couldn’t match the Dutch ancestry that passed in New York society as the real thing. Her parents were not the integral part of Gilded Age society to which, for instance, George Post belonged. Post represented old money. Emily and her parents were belated, allowed in because they knew how to act and because they were genteel; they bore an air of “breeding.” Lacking the requisite bloodlines, Bruce and Josephine had had to depend on their wits and their manners for their ticket into Best Society.
There must have been slights through the years. Bruce was a professional man, his Maryland family distinguished but still suspiciously southern, and certainly not rich. Josephine’s moneyed parents commandeered the coalfields more often than the ballrooms. The Prices were in society primarily because Bruce had built Tuxedo Park, his friendship with Pierre Lorillard deepening in the process. If Emily was the park’s princess, she was still just another ordinary upper-class girl when she moved to Manhattan. Many of those whose company she kept were aghast as they watched the “army of nouveaux riches advancing on Fifth Avenue from Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Detroit; and the march of the miners from Montana, California, and Nevada.” At times, the Prices probably felt themselves uncomfortably close to such a crowd.
Maybe Emily Post had had enough. By creating emblematic characters easy recognizable by the Manhattan cognoscenti, she was putting into the text those who had undoubtedly snubbed her and her family along the way. From Etiquette’s 1922 edition to the final volume under her personal supervision, almost forty years later, she would maintain that no error of etiquette could ever match that of the cruel arbiters of society, those “real outcasts,” who acted unkindly with “inexcusable” crudeness and attracted attention to someone’s shortcoming whenever they had the chance. Now that she no longer had anything to prove, Emily was able to attend to the worth in the ordinary people of the working world, people who sincerely wanted to improve themselves, the type that had always impressed Bruce Price. She emphasized in each edition of Etiquette that knowledge was power. Knowing how to give a formal dinner party was one thing; actually spending the money to do so, if you didn’t have it, was caving in to the wrong, not the “Best,” people.
THE THEME OF APPEARANCE versus essence, the superficial versus the significant, recurs throughout Etiquette. A naturally beautiful bride turns instantly unattractive if she fails to treat guests courteously at he
r wedding, whereas a “plain girl” becomes stunning when she glows with joy: “No other quality of a bride’s expression is so beautiful as radiance; that visible proof of perfect happiness which endears its possessor to all beholders and gives to the simplest little wedding complete beauty.” And pity those unlucky brides marrying against their will (Consuelo Vanderbilt’s fate was never far from Emily’s mind): “The sight of a tragic-faced bride strikes chill to the heart.”
Doggedly, Emily reinforced her central message every chance she had: the way people treated others was more important than an address or last name could ever be. With each subsequent version of Etiquette, she further defined “good breeding” or “class” as an external sign of people with good character. She had thought through this issue much earlier, when she confessed to her father that she had spoken roughly to a new acquaintance whom she deemed “common.” After seeing how her abruptness hurt the young woman, she had made amends. Now Elaine and she were close friends.
Counseling generosity of spirit toward the underclass or the unsophisticated, she nonetheless wrapped such advice in the cloak of privilege. In 1922, she’d still failed to think through the class implications of her advice. As Emily insisted, anyone could be a “thoroughbred” in behavior or habits, but in fact few readers of Etiquette could afford to hire help, a problem she underestimated. One of her most earnest pronouncements throughout the years maintained that “all thoroughbred women, and men, are considerate of others less fortunately placed, especially of those in their employ.” Most of her audience rarely had such a problem, though if they did, Emily had spoken clearly: the way to distinguish between a “woman of breeding and the woman merely of wealth” was to observe the way she spoke to her servants.
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