Emily Post

by Laura Claridge

  Treating respectfully those with less power or position than oneself remained central to the message of Etiquette and to Emily’s own life. Almost fifty years after her death, the Post great-grandchildren would receive a letter from a woman in New Mexico, attesting to the difference such concern made in real lives: “My father grew up [outside Tuxedo Park] in the village, on Augusta Place, more commonly called ‘the hill.’ As a very young man, perhaps late teens, he acquired the temporary job of census-taker. Being from a family of English/Scots who had sometimes worked ‘in service,’ he proceeded to the Park [to take the census], and knocked on many back doors, to be correct for that time. At your great-grandmother’s house, she cordially greeted him and informed him that he should have come to her front door. This made such an impression; he repeatedly related the story throughout his life.”

  Throughout the decades, in the face of countless changes, the central commandment to put others at their ease would remain constant. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” the agnostic etiquette expert maintained. One’s clumsy guests, for instance, must be made comfortable over any mishap their carelessness might have caused: “If a guest knocks over a glass and breaks it, even though the glass be a piece of genuine Stiegel,” the host’s only concern must appear to be “that her guest has been made uncomfortable. ‘I am so sorry’ that your meal is spoiled, and I will replenish it at once: ‘The broken glass is nothing.’ ” The “right and wrong” of the situation centered not on events themselves but on how those involved reacted. People and their feelings always came first.

  To wittingly cause distress to others was, to Emily, the antithesis of good manners. Even as Etiquette gently instructed women innocently but unsuitably dressed for a solemn occasion, she upbraided those who dared to disdain the newcomers’ naïveté: “How often has one heard said of a young woman [whose mother has died] who was perhaps merely ignorant of the effect of her inappropriate clothes or unconventional behavior that the girl didn’t really respect her recently deceased mother, for instance, or she would now be dressed in proper mourning?” The cruelty of such “thoughtless” remarks ranked far higher than mere ignorance.

  But the heart of Etiquette is a succinct five-page model of glacial prose, “Fundamentals of Good Behavior,” delineating moral conduct from dishonorable actions. Most of all, for those who remembered her divorce, the brief chapter resurrects the pain that Edwin’s ignoble debauchery had caused her personally. “Far more important than any mere dictum of etiquette is the fundamental code of honor, without strict observance of which no man, no matter how ‘polished,’ can be considered a gentleman. . . . The man who publicly besmirches his wife’s name, besmirches still more his own, and proves that he is not, was not, and never will be, a gentleman.”

  In years to come, she would modify the assumptions that had governed her relationship with her ex-husband, back when a father’s rights counted for little. But the ignominy her failed marriage had imposed ensured that she would remain ferocious in other respects until her death. It is difficult to read the author’s cool, crisp dispatch of a spousal cad without wincing at her payback. “Fundamentals of Good Behavior” is built upon clean, tense sentences that bend but don’t break, as Emily’s unyielding decree on marriage and divorce resurrects her own past. She believed in being generous, but even now, she could not forget that Edwin Post had humiliated her.

  ETIQUETTE CANTERS ALONG genteelly, its charismatic cast put through their own paces and sometimes in their place. Certainly Emily had her pet peeves, superficial but telling denotations of class that she believed put the speaker at a disadvantage. “Illiterate” pronunciations prevented movement into a better order, because others, fairly or not, disdained the speakers for their ignorance: say “family,” not “fambly,” and “picture” instead of “pitcher,” Emily crisply instructed. Higher on her list of don’ts was anything that suggested overrefinement: “Saccharine chirpings should be classed with crooked little fingers, high hand-shaking and other affectations. All affectations are bad form.” She aimed a quiver of arrows at pronunciations such as “iss-you” instead of “ishue,” and at the silliness of enunciating Paris “with trilled r’s and hissing s’s.” “I used to cringe when I heard Johnny Carson being hypercorrect,” her grandson recalls. “He would always say ‘I’ when a simple ‘me’ was called for, and that unnecessary attempt to sound correct, thereby getting it wrong, was the kind of tension that trying too hard created. That kind of thing used to make my grandmother wince.”

  In the first edition of Etiquette, Emily’s list of “Never Say”s (NS) paired with “Correct Form” (CF) included the following:

  NS: In our residence we retire early (or arise); CF: At our house we go to bed early (or get up).

  NS: I desire to purchase; CF: I should like to buy.

  NS: Lovely food; CF: Good food.

  NS: Attended; CF: Went to.

  NS: Converse; CF: Talk.

  NS: Perform ablutions; CF: Wash.

  NS: Phone, photo, auto; CF: Telephone, photograph, automobile.

  “Bovine continuation” instead of “cow’s tail” was typical of affected speech, she explained, incredulous herself at such locutions. “The very worst offenses” in language were overwrought diction such as “Pray, accept my thanks for the flattering ovation you have tendered me,” with the speaker tripping over her own grandiloquent speech. In 1937, Emily would shorten her list of “Never Say”s, admitting slang to “appropriate contexts.” But “I desire to purchase” rather than “I should like to buy” or “Will you accord me permission?” instead of “Will you let me?” remained the type of over-speak that made her shudder until she died.

  Even more than overreaching through ignorance, Emily was deeply offended by the pretentious and the pompous, and she disparaged especially the supposed “omniscience of the very rich.” Nonetheless, she had her inconsistencies. As one otherwise admiring critic lamented, while declaring “few rules of etiquette” to be “inelastic,” she had nonetheless weighted Etiquette down with an ample use of “never” and “always.” It seemed that at least in the writer’s psyche, there were still absolutes.

  THE GIRL WHO had pouted when denied the stage was a self-possessed woman come full circle: she had got her chance, after all, to be famous. This time, however, her narcissism would work to the good of others as she freely dispensed her knowledge and the fruits of her background. Emily Post’s genuine if confused respect for all people registered on page after page of Etiquette. The subject hardly mattered: funerals or flower arrangements, broken hearts or broken glasses, Emily held her audience in esteem, and she meant to teach her readers, would-be “Best People,” whatever their background, race, or creed, to do likewise:

  The endeavor of a hostess, when seating her table, is to put those together who are likely to be interesting to each other. Professor Bugge might bore you to tears, but Mrs. Entomoid would probably delight in him; just as Mr. Stocksan Bonds and Mrs. Rich would probably have interests in common. Making a dinner list is a little like making a Christmas list. You put down what they will (you hope) like, not what you like. Those who are placed between congenial neighbors remember your dinner as delightful—even though both food and service were mediocre; but ask people out of their own groups and seat them next to their pet aversions, and wild horses could not drag them to your house again.

  Tellingly, as the book’s “Best Society” became more elusive with each revision, it also became more egalitarian. Emily’s “Society” eventually grew into “a corporate concept—not simply about individual display, but about a class and its cohesion and dominance,” historian Eric Homberger maintains. But Etiquette’s principle of practicality remained the same: if you wanted to belong, if you wanted to get ahead and join the “Best People,” you needed to know the rules. “Good manners open many doors that money will never move!” an advertisement for Etiquette claimed several years after its initial publication.

  The 1922 publicatio
n of Etiquette: In Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home was an epochal moment. On an average of every five years, a revised edition of those original 250,000 words would track the changing conventions, revisiting and reenvisioning society. Most extraordinary, the name Emily Post, associated with elegance, would nevertheless signify the democratization of manners into the next century.

  CHAPTER 42

  TEN YEARS BEFORE SHE DIED, EMILY POST WOULD RANK SECOND ONLY to Eleanor Roosevelt in a Pageant magazine list of the midcentury’s “most powerful women in America,” in which 272 women journalists judged the influence of the country’s prominent females. In 1990, decades after her death, Life’s “The 100 Most Important Americans of the 20th Century” included Emily in its celebration as well. From the frequency with which she retold the story, however, Emily’s keenest pleasure would still have come from the statistic citing Etiquette second only to the Bible as the book most often stolen from public libraries, an honor it would hold through the end of the twentieth century.

  A month after Etiquette’s publication in July 1922, Anne Whitney Hay conducted an extensive interview with the author for the Sunday Morning Telegraph, a New York City newspaper. Accompanied by a flattering sketch drawn by the well-known illustrator James Montgomery Flagg, the article allowed Emily to stake a claim with her audience as a trustworthy arbiter of manners. She also began spinning her story of Etiquette’s difficult birth. Far more concise than the versions to follow, that early account cast Funk and Wagnalls as supplicants, imploring her in vain to write on the subject. Only when the publishers convinced her of the “ignorance and inaccuracy” filling the current etiquette books did she acquiesce. She felt compelled to help rescue, she implied, the “uninitiated.” Her motivation was not purely altruistic, Emily hastened to add: “Few of us write entirely for the love of seeing our names in print. Frankly, the money appeals.”

  The reviews of Etiquette came fast. They were, for the most part, favorable, with the August issue of the highly respected Literary Digest even starting its review with Matthew Arnold’s statement “Conduct is three-fourths of life.” What Emily Post had achieved was impressive by any measure, its writer noted: “Not to teach us to display our sophistication, but to enable us to live without friction. Such is the real object of a book on etiquette, and the recent resurgence of such books is perhaps a sign of the times.” Uneasy about endorsing a retrograde subject, however, the New York Times nearly apologized for supporting the book: “It is so easy to grow baldly clownish over the various dicta in the book that one is tempted to lose sight that many a person may receive needful instruction from it.”

  There were plenty of raves. The New York Tribune claimed that “not since Mrs. Sherwood” had there been such a thorough compendium; the Chicago Sunday Tribune called it “the most complete book on social usage that ever grew between two covers. . . . It is a readable, interesting book on a subject which becomes dull and ‘precious’ only when it is disassociated from life”; the Philadelphia Inquirer declared that it “should be in every library”; and the Cleveland Plain Dealer believed “the book is invaluable to the average thinking man or woman who wishes to live today’s life in as polished and near-conventional a manner as possible.” Particularly gratifying was the endorsement Emily received from the bestselling author Gertrude Atherton, who wrote that Etiquette “reads like a fine high-society novel, without a trace of snobbery, and is both convincing and entertaining.”

  Many smaller newspapers outside the large cities defensively adopted a superior air toward what they considered indulgence in a trivial topic: “The introduction on morals and manners by Richard Duffy (a scholar of classics) is of no use to us whatsoever, as our morals are exemplary and our manners are beyond criticism. One gets that way after 20 years in the newspaper business,” the Nevada State Journal writer sneered.

  THOUGH THE READER would never know it from her son’s memoir or see even a single mention of it in any of the countless interviews Emily gave through the years, Etiquette had serious competition. Emily Holt’s 1901 Encyclopaedia of Etiquette: A Book of Manners for Everyday Use, the out-of-date etiquette book reenvisioned by the recent high school graduate Lillian Eichler, alternated with Emily’s for top sales position. Eichler is without a doubt the great forgotten figure in American manners. For those who aspired to the middle class after World War I—especially those who had only a basic knowledge of English—the young copywriter proved a great teacher, her voice “friendly and accessible,” as Edmund Wilson remarked. Literary histories may have anointed one history of twentieth-century etiquette books as orthodox, but until the late 1940s, the actual sales figures for the competing works shifted back and forth.

  Decades after Lillian Eichler and Emily Post ran neck and neck, the younger writer would share her story with Arthur Schlesinger, who was researching Learning How to Behave, his historical study of etiquette books. Eichler (by then Mrs. Lillian Watson) was thrilled to get credit at last: “The true story of [my] ‘Book of Etiquette’—how it came to be written and how it helped start the widespread vogue for etiquette books back in 1921—has never been told, and I think your readers might find it interesting.”

  To help Doubleday deplete its company’s remaining stock of the outdated etiquette book by Emily Holt, the large and important advertising firm Ruthruff and Ryan put together what they believed to be a simple campaign. Figuring that one or two mail order coupons in magazines would do the trick, one of the partners assigned the job to his clever relative Lillian Eichler. The nineteen-year-old, in touch with the younger, less affluent readers of the period, promptly devised a cartoon ad that showed a guest spilling a cup of coffee on the hostess’s fine table linen. “ ‘Has This Ever Happened To You? What would you say?’ I asked. ‘What would you do?’ ” Eichler explained to Schlesinger.

  Her ads proved immensely popular, bringing in an unexpected “avalanche of coupons” that depleted the remaindered stock, her success forcing the company to reissue the book they had thought to bury. Again, Eichler prepared catchy drawings showing puzzled but well-meaning guests fumbling at every social juncture. But almost as soon as Doubleday shipped out the orders, they confronted a serious new problem: Holt’s actual books were dated, unlike the of-the-moment ad campaign. Within days, disappointed customers returned the misrepresented books.

  Doubleday immediately commissioned Eichler to draft an updated version of the original. Writing after business hours, she finished it in two months. “I made myself the thing that was wrong in the picture, and wrote the kind of book I felt would be helpful to people like me—just beginning to be successful and just beginning to go out socially. The book was an instant success, and has continued to be a big seller for 20 years,” she proudly wrote Schlesinger in 1946.

  Only one article had ever told the real story behind her book, Eichler lamented. Emily Post instead became “so well known” because “her name was used in all the advertising of her book—but my name was never so used. That was my mistake!” Her magazine cartoon ads, she proudly believed, “helped make America etiquette-conscious back in the 20’s.”

  WHEN FUNK AND WAGNALLS had first mentioned Doubleday’s competition to Emily, they had downplayed her potential rival, a mere girl, after all. Now every week Emily found herself staring at advertisements for the rejuvenated book in the newspapers and bookstores around town. As soon as Emily’s Etiquette had begun selling well, Doubleday had redoubled its own ad campaign. To combat the challenge, notices for Emily’s book stressed its authority, the author’s ability to share precious knowledge with those not so fortunate. “A guide to Good Form in speech, to charm of manner, and to those refining influences that serve to smooth and sweeten modern social life,” read a typical ad. “Information on personal manners . . . practically from the cradle to the grave,” another one claimed.

  Caricaturing a young couple’s ignorance in the midst of society, Eichler’s tableaux, in contrast to Emily’s regal stage characters, depended upon embar
rassment as their motivation. However whimsical, the cartoons were meant to shame readers into buying the guide that would save them from sure ignominy. Starring Ted and his wife, the pictures showed a young couple embarrassed repeatedly as they tried to impress their employers or neighbors or fellow diners at a fancy restaurant. The couple proved so inept that they even managed to offend the waiter escorting them to their table.

  Emily found Doubleday’s ads insulting. She believed that humiliation and intimidation had no place in a civilized society. She was even more dismayed when she realized that Lillian Eichler was a Jewish teenager barely out of school. In one sense, the quick young woman was obliquely acknowledging the special needs of the immigrant class to which she herself belonged, intelligently using pictures to explain the abstract. The cartoons that advertised her book were easy to understand, transparent shorthand about a subject that terrified many. If Lillian Eichler’s age, occupation, and cultural standing were ordinarily beneath Emily’s notice, she was now forced to pay attention. Doubleday’s campaign was ideally suited for its era because young Lillian Eichler belonged to it. Her book sold for $3.50, versus Emily Post’s $4.00.

  Almost immediately, Eichler began building strategically on the audience she had tapped into with her cartoons. Brilliant if clumsy, her own Etiquette Problems in Pictures—her quick follow-up to the outdated Emily Holt publication—promised to teach the untutored how to behave in a cultured manner. Eichler’s social misfits wore business suits instead of evening clothes to the opera, where they illustrated their “lack of good taste by studying the people in the audience.” At home a well-meaning hostess making a “most uncompromising blunder” even served the male guest first, “instead of his wife!” At this point, any reader familiar with Emily Post’s book must have wistfully recalled the thoughtful Mr. Kindhart, reassuring the distraught young wife at her first dinner party, “Cheer up, little girl, it doesn’t really matter.”