Manners

New York’s moneyed class has always loved to read about itself. In the early years of the twentieth century, it particularly loved to do so in a magazine called Town Topics: The Journal of Society. Far and away the weekly’s most popular feature, titled “Saunterings,” offered material of a sort that other publications, many of which had society columns of their own, deemed unprintable.

In late June, 1905, Edwin Post, a financier who had recently suffered a string of losses, received a visit from a representative of Town Topics named Charles Ahle. Ahle carried with him a letter of introduction from the magazine’s managing editor, along with a set of galleys. He offered Post a choice. Post could purchase a copy of a forthcoming book, a sort of Who’s Who of the Social Register crowd, tentatively titled “America’s Smart Set,” for the sum of five hundred dollars. (This price—roughly ten thousand dollars in today’s money—was, Ahle asserted, a bargain.) Or he could turn down the book, in which case he could expect to read about himself in “Saunterings.” The item would describe how Post, a resident of Manhattan and Tuxedo Park, New York, kept a studio apartment in Stamford, Connecticut. There he liked to entertain “a fair charmer” who favored “white shoes with red heels and patent leather tips.” Post told Ahle that he needed a few days to consider the matter.

For reasons that are unclear—some accounts suggest that he simply couldn’t come up with the money—Post, instead of playing along, went to the police. On July 11th, he arranged a rendezvous with Ahle in the gentlemen’s washroom of the Holland House restaurant, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirtieth Street. As soon as he handed Ahle an envelope containing five hundred-dollar bills, a cop leaped out of one of the stalls.

Ahle’s arrest, splashed across the front pages of the city’s many dailies, became the talk of the town. In the legal wrangle that ensued—lawsuits followed by countersuits—numerous reputations were damaged. It was revealed, for example, that some of the highest members of high society, including John Jacob Astor, Stanford White, and William K. Vanderbilt, Jr., had already made substantial down payments for deluxe editions of the book offered to Post. Though their interest could perhaps have been literary, it was generally assumed that they had paid to prevent details of their own “saunterings” from appearing in print. When asked about these and other disclosures, Town Topics’s publisher, a Civil War veteran named William D’Alton Mann, defended his magazine, maintaining that it was on a moral mission.

“My ambition is to reform the Four Hundred by making them too deeply disgusted with themselves to continue their silly, empty way of life,” he told the Times. “I am also teaching the great American public not to pay any attention to these silly fools.”

Among those most embarrassed by the affair was Post’s wife, Emily. Her marriage had been in trouble for years, but, to protect her two young sons, she had pretended that nothing was amiss. Now everyone who mattered to her, and millions more, could read about her husband’s unfaithfulness. In a final show of conjugal solidarity, she accompanied him to the courtroom and listened to him testify against Ahle. Six months later, the couple filed for divorce.

Emily Post could have responded to the whole sordid episode in several ways. She could have slipped away in shame. She could have turned against the “smart set” in anger. But her response was neither to run nor to fight. Instead, she chose to celebrate the mores of her class, even, in a manner of speaking, to become them.

“Etiquette,” Post’s monument to American manners, was first published in 1922. Even at that Gatsbyesque moment, the audience that it addressed was minuscule. “Etiquette” takes it for granted that its readers are the kind of people who employ butlers and ladies’ maids—“it is seldom practical for a debutante and her mother to share a maid”—who leave visiting cards, and keep “dinner lists,” and have one set of stationery for their city addresses and another set for their country homes. (“A big house in important grounds should have very plain, very dignified letter paper.”) The publisher, Funk & Wagnalls, had only modest hopes for “Etiquette,” and put in an initial order for five thousand copies. The book spent eighteen months on the best-seller list, and in that period had to be reprinted at least eight times.

A quarter of a century and seven editions later, “Etiquette” was still selling more than three thousand copies a week. (During the Second World War, it was supposedly the book most often requested by G.I.s.) Time dubbed Post the “undisputed autocrat of U.S. etiquette.” Life observed that her name had ceased to refer to an actual person and, instead, had become “a synonym for etiquette and manners, more widely used perhaps than even the words themselves.” In 1950, a survey of female reporters identified Post as the second most influential woman in America, just after Eleanor Roosevelt.

Today, of course, you can barely dig up a débutante, let alone a ladies’ maid. And yet from the great beyond Emily Post continues to offer counsel. “Etiquette,” revised and edited by her great-granddaughter-in-law, a former flight attendant, is now in its seventeenth edition. (Thumb tabs have been added for ease of reference.) Various Post relations write deportment columns for, among other publications, Good Housekeeping, Parents, and the Boston Globe. On its Web site, the Emily Post Institute provides guidance on subjects ranging from holiday tipping (for a pet groomer, one session’s fee is appropriate) to exercising at the gym (“Wipe up your sweat, please!”). There is even a feature called “What Would Emily Do?,” which each week takes up a new, post-Post question, such as whether it’s permissible to text-message from a luncheon party and “How do you tell a co-worker that she has an odor?”

“Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners” (Random House; $30), by Laura Claridge, is the first full-length biography of the author to appear. (Post’s son, Ned, published an affectionate, ghostwritten memoir, “Truly Emily Post,” back in 1961.) Claridge, a former English professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, has written previous biographies of Norman Rockwell and the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka. In turning her attention to Post, she takes up two mysteries. One has to do with etiquette: why, in a supposedly classless society like America, do so many people fret about table manners? And the other has to do with “Etiquette”: how did Post convert social disgrace into such a triumph?

Emily Price was born in Baltimore on October 27, 1872. (According to Claridge, she was “confused”—probably purposefully—about her birth date, which is often listed as the following year.) Her father, Bruce, was an influential architect whose design credits would eventually include the American Surety Building, in lower Manhattan; Château Frontenac, in Quebec City; and the Jay Gould estate, in Lakewood, New Jersey. Her mother, Josephine, was an heiress to a Pennsylvania coal fortune. When Emily was five, the family moved to Manhattan, where they occupied a brick town house on West Tenth Street.

The Prices didn’t have the bloodlines of New York’s true élite—the so-called Four Hundred—but between Bruce’s talent and Josephine’s money they managed to insert themselves into what Emily would later term “Best Society.” In 1885, Price was commissioned to lay out Tuxedo Park. Families like the Astors and the Pells soon bought lots in Tuxedo Park, thirty-five miles north of Manhattan, as a result of which it became the place to spend the late summer, beating out such old society favorites as Lenox and Newport. Price built a cluster of “cottages” for his own family in Tuxedo Park, and Emily, in Claridge’s words, became the community’s “resident princess.”

By the time Emily was a teen-ager, in the late eighteen-eighties, the ritual of “coming out” had become so elaborate that only the most well-drilled débutantes could hope to make a good impression. Among the many dance figures they were expected to know were Blindman’s Bluff, the Ladies Mocked, the Cards, the Ropes, the Mirror, the Dresden (in which participants pretended to be pieces of china), the Hobby-Horse (for which the men were supplied with horse costumes and the women with little whips), and Mother Goose (which featured a specially dressed society matron holding a live goose under her arm). As her own début approached, Emily, who had already taken years of lessons, devoted herself nearly full time to practicing her steps, experimenting with hair styles, and being fitted for gowns. She “came out” at Delmonico’s, then situated on East Twenty-sixth Street, in December, 1889.

At the ideal débutante ball, the young woman being presented meets and falls in love with the man she will eventually marry. As Emily liked to tell it, this is precisely what happened at hers. Supposedly, she caught sight of Edwin Post while she was waltzing by in the arms of another. He was trim and handsome, and, as it turns out, possessed a near-perfect pedigree. (It included, importantly, Dutch ancestors.)

For her part, Emily was considered a great beauty. Photographs from the time show her to have been slender and tall—Edwin was a few inches shorter—with pale skin, dark hair, and a thin nose. In the spring of 1892, when Edwin was twenty-two and Emily was nineteen, the couple got married in Tuxedo Park. The following year, they rented what Emily considered to be a modest five-bedroom house on Staten Island. In the summer of 1893, Ned, their first son, was born. Their second son, Bruce, followed in 1895.

Outwardly, everything seemed to be going swimmingly for the young Posts. The pair travelled to Europe, bought themselves a town house on the Upper West Side, threw elaborate dinner parties, and spent their summers on the South Shore of Long Island. Privately, however, they were growing to detest each other. Why, exactly, is obscure. Claridge makes much of the fact that Edwin was an avid sailor, while Emily was prone to seasickness. But, with the sort of diffidence Emily herself always advocated, Claridge only hints at the possibility that other, more intimate forms of incompatibility were at work. (It is worth noting that after her divorce, at the age of thirty-four, Emily does not appear to have had another sexual relationship.) The couple continued to be seen together socially—the Times, for instance, reported that they attended a bridge tournament at the Tuxedo Park clubhouse—even as they spent less and less time together. When Edwin was not at work, he could mostly be found on his boat. He complained in his sailing log that, having “committed matrimony,” he had been “sentenced to life for it.” Emily, meanwhile, turned to writing. Her first book, a novel titled “The Flight of the Moth,” appeared in 1904. It was based partly on her own experience and partly, it seems, on wishful thinking: after five unhappy years of marriage, the narrator’s husband dies in a dreadful accident. “The French say that the ideal condition for a woman would be to be born a widow,” the book’s heroine explains.

“T he Flight of the Moth” was respectfully reviewed—the Times declared it “lively and thoughtful”—and, following her divorce, Post took to writing more or less full time. She was at this point residing in Tuxedo Park—her sons were away at boarding school—in a “cottage” that had been given to her by her father. (Though Edwin had been financially ruined and paid no alimony, Emily continued to live more than comfortably—and with several servants—off various inheritances.) In 1909, she published “The Title Market,” a novel about an American ingénue who is nearly seduced by an Italian count, and in 1910 “The Eagle’s Feather,” about a Polish playwright who must choose between his art and his beautiful but doomed mistress. As an author, Post was entirely self-trained; beyond her years at finishing school, she had no formal education, and to the extent that her friends evinced any interest in her literary career it was to warn her not to take it too seriously. The more Post published, though, the worse the reviews became, and eventually she gave up on fiction. She began writing articles on such subjects as “What Makes a Girl Popular in Society” for magazines like Cosmopolitan and Collier’s. In 1915, she took a cross-country car trip with Ned and wrote up their adventures—roadside cows, country cooking, bad hotel plumbing—in a travelogue titled “By Motor to the Golden Gate.”

According to Ned, when Post decided to write “Etiquette,” in 1920, she intended it to serve as a sort of antidote to the guides that were popular at the time. During the Gilded Age, the rules of etiquette had become increasingly baroque; to be considered well-bred, a lady had to know not just how to wield a knife and fork but where to seat the guest of honor at a formal dinner, how to arrange a receiving line, when to send flowers to whom, and what to wear to a morning function, an afternoon function, and a ball. (As one etiquette writer of the eighteen-eighties observed, “Not even a saint could, from ‘inner consciousness’ alone, evolve a conception of the thousand and one social observances of modern fashionable life.”) Etiquette books had, naturally, followed suit; Emily Holt’s popular “Encyclopedia of Etiquette,” first published in 1901, was more than five hundred pages. By contrast, Post said that she wanted to write a small book, a “sensible book,” because “the whole subject can be reduced to a few simple rules.”

Post worked on “Etiquette” for nearly two years. Claridge describes her daily routine as follows: she woke at 6:30 A.M., ate breakfast in bed, and began to write. Midmorning, she took a break to give instructions to the household help; then, still in bed, she continued to write until noon. Somewhere along the way, Post either changed her mind or simply lost sight of her original goal. By the time she was finished, “Etiquette” ran to two hundred and fifty thousand words, took up more than six hundred pages, and was even larger than Holt’s “Encyclopedia.”

For the most part, Post’s book is Holt’s “Encyclopedia” reworked and slightly updated. For instance, where Holt declares that calling cards must be printed on “pure white bristol board of medium weight, with the surface polished, not glazed,” Post maintains, “All visiting cards are engraved on white unglazed bristol board, which may be of medium thickness or thin.” This is Holt on the subject of napkins: “On the plate is placed a large white dinner napkin, folded and ironed square, with the monogram corner showing, and with a dinner roll or a square of bread laid between the folds.” And this is Post:




A dinner napkin folded square and flat is laid on each “place” plate; very fancy foldings are not in good taste, but if the napkin is very large, the sides are folded in so as to make a flattened roll a third the width of its height. (Bread should not be put in the napkin—not nowadays.)



Post was responsible for one important innovation, presumably inspired by her earlier career as a novelist. “Etiquette” has characters—the Worldlys, the Wellborns, the Toploftys—who periodically appear and reappear to make introductions, hold christenings, and ask friends to their great camps for the weekend. In what might be described as the climax of the book, a newly married young woman whom Post refers to simply as “you” invites all three couples over for dinner. The party is a disaster: the fire in the drawing room smokes; the cook produces a watery fish mousse topped with a curdled hollandaise; and the serving maid, instead of removing the plates one by one, clatters them together in a pile. Later, after the guests have left, the young woman’s husband tries to reassure her, telling her “it was not so bad,” but she refuses to be comforted. She has failed, and in front of Mrs. Worldly, a woman so discerning that, “if the slightest detail is amiss, an ornament out of place, or there is one dull button on a footman’s livery, her house telephone is rung at once.” Ostensibly, the lesson of this drama is that the young woman should have held a series of “little dinners” before attempting a larger one, but the deeper message, which is, of course, the implicit message of all etiquette books, is that without the author’s advice “you” run the risk of constant humiliation.

Just who bought “Etiquette” is hard to know. (The owners of houses that employed footmen presumably didn’t need anyone to tell them that “footmen take turns in answering the door.”) In response to feedback she received to the first edition, Post, in 1927, produced a revised version that made significant concessions to the middle class, a group she referred to as “the servantless.” Among the additions was a new character, Mrs. Three-in-One, who, at her dinner parties, acts not just as hostess but also as cook and waitress. Mrs. Three-in-One devises all sorts of clever schemes for making the evening run smoothly; to serve dessert from the table, for example, she hides a freezer full of ice cream under her chair. Her guests, the ever-popular Worldlys and Toploftys, supposedly are delighted by her ingenuity. In subsequent editions, Post included successively more instructions for the servantless—for instance, advice on how a stenographer should enter her boss’s office—while still retaining the (increasingly anachronistic) rules for managing a valet. The result was that “Etiquette” swelled to nearly nine hundred pages.

In the nineteen-thirties, Post launched a syndicated column, titled “In Good Taste,” which was eventually featured in nearly two hundred newspapers. She also began to appear regularly on the radio. (She had now moved back to Manhattan, to East Seventy-ninth Street.) Post always claimed that she was more interested in weighty questions of morality than she was in the finer points of table manners. She told a reporter from the Brooklyn Eagle that her goal in speaking on the radio was to “get to the root of the matter and talk about really important things.” It was her listeners, she complained, who kept dragging the conversation back to which fork to use.

Claridge not only accepts Post’s account but goes it one better. “Etiquette,” she claims, is a key text in the history of American democracy. “Emily Post’s life and work would have been inconceivable without the story of Ellis Island, and the millions of immigrants who sought to become what they considered to be real Americans during Emily’s lifetime,” she writes. These outsiders to Best Society turned to “Etiquette” to become insiders. Claridge attributes to Post a “natural inclusiveness,” and quotes approvingly her assertion, in 1937, that she had done more to “knock down the social walls which used to enclose fashionable society than even Mr. Roosevelt.”

Claridge makes much of the testimony of Post’s own employees, some of whom she managed to interview. By all accounts, the author treated the help with consideration. When she learned, for example, that it was onerous for her staff to bring her breakfast in bed at six-thirty, she allowed her tray to be set up the evening before. And when her longtime seamstress died, in 1947, she paid for the burial and sent the woman’s hard-up family thirteen hundred dollars.

But to turn Post into Emma Lazarus would require a more radical rereading of American history than Claridge—or perhaps anyone—can supply. Along with most of the other members of the Tuxedo Park set, Post detested F.D.R. and everything he stood for. Like her invention Mrs. Worldly, she could see when a single ornament was out of place; the flip side was that she could choose not to see so much else. (As Claridge notes in a telling aside, Post didn’t like to talk about “distressing matters, or even think about them much.”) By the time Post died, in 1960, in her Manhattan apartment, she had lived through almost a century’s worth of social transformations—the Russian Revolution, the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, the Depression, the rise of Nazism, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the early stirrings of the civil-rights movement. Not only were her professional judgments unaffected by these developments; she seems on a personal level to have been uninterested in them. There is no record of her having had anything penetrating to say, even in private, on the major issues of her day. And, by her own rules, she really couldn’t have.

In a section of the original edition of “Etiquette” titled “Think Before You Speak,” Post lays down what she considers to be the first principle of conversation: “Try to do and say those things only which will be agreeable to others.” Obeying this “first rule” certainly would prevent many awkward interactions. It would also preclude discussion of any topic that could possibly matter. In a later edition of “Etiquette,” Post added a section on what she called “American neighborhood customs.” (These include such prosaic entertainments as baby showers and bridge parties.) Here the first principle is that “all well-bred persons” should “follow the customs of the locality in which they live. In other words to do exactly as your neighbors do is the only sensible rule.”

Anyone who turned to “Etiquette” to advance up the social hierarchy learned from Post’s book that the key was conformity. This was a lesson that Post herself had clearly internalized. Unlike the typical author biography, which suggests that salvation comes in the form of self-expression—shame and alienation converted into art—her life story testifies to the redemptive power of repression. Emily Post became Emily Post by doing what Emily Post advised. She learned the rules, and she followed them.