Emily Post

by Laura Claridge

  The article itself promoted a thesis Emily would revisit throughout her life: though beauty, grace, intelligence, and radiance make a young woman popular, the “greatest of these” is the last. Every woman alive could possess all four gifts—if she understood that some people have to work hard for what appears to be bestowed by luck. Girls with limited assets were the potential equals of those blessed by nature or by a rich papa. It was the illusion, not the reality, of being thus endowed that guaranteed a girl’s success. “And even so,” she noted, “the one great attribute” above all the rest was “the sense of enjoyment, the gift of happiness.”

  To support her opinion, Emily told a story based on her cousin’s marriage to a wealthy Italian nobleman. “She [the American abroad] was not pretty and she had no money at all. The secret of her success was really one of good manners; manners that came from a happy and kindly attitude of mind that looked altruistically outward instead of egotistically inward; in other words, an appreciation of other people’s feelings and an equal forgetfulness of her own.” Most of all, Emily insisted, “people are drawn to others who seem happy.” In articles like this one, Emily seems every bit the natural writer her ex-husband was. Her voice rings with conviction, her ease in the role of advice giver apparent in every bend of the sentence.

  BY THE END of 1910, Emily Post seemed to be back on top. Impatient at the speed with which her agent got results, she bypassed him entirely and directly submitted two essays to the Delineator, and they were promptly accepted. The payment went by mistake to Paul Reynolds’s office, and the agent scribbled plaintively: “As I have never seen the manuscripts you turned over to them, I do not know whether this is in accordance with the previous rate or not, and I am holding the check until I hear from you if this is as it should be. Will you let me have a line from you?”

  A few days after Reynolds mailed his slightly querulous letter, the Washington Post, prompted by the upcoming publication of The Eagle’s Feather, due out, finally, at the beginning of the year, published “Emily Post, Author,” an interview that would have driven her mother to despair. Emily professed to have “given up society life almost completely that she may devote herself” to letters. “A woman of extraordinary talent,” she had written “several excellent books,” the interviewer explained. Though she lived amid the great temptation of Tuxedo Park, she yielded “few hours to frivolities. She has broken away from her old habits of ease and amusement, and devotes at least eight hours every day to literary work.” The article’s emphatic separation of her “wealth, social gifts, luxury, and friends among the members of the 400” from her present life suggested that Emily was redefining herself publicly.

  Her schedule as a working woman was given in detail. She now wrote until “luncheon” time, and then spent the afternoon revising her work. Al Winslow, the official chronicler of Tuxedo Park, recalled in his memoir that while Emily was writing in her cottage, he and his brother would run over there in the midmorning, and “she’d share toast with us two kids, as we sat on the edge of her bed.” Quietly, the boys watched her, awed by her concentration. She took her daily walk at five P.M., and, except when she dined out at friends’ houses, she reserved her evenings for reading books to provide her better “style and stimulus.” But in spite of her increasingly reclusive habits, Emily continued to seek new friends. “She is fond of bright, witty persons,” Winslow pointed out, “and makes it a point to meet as many as possible” on the weekends. Finally, Emily threw down the gauntlet, challenging the social set who disapproved of her professional profile: “She . . . shuns mere society,” Winslow said. Emily Post had joined the ranks of female professionals whom Josephine had scorned and taught her daughter to disdain.

  CHAPTER 32

  THE EAGLE’S FEATHER, EMILY’S MOST AMBITIOUS NOVEL, WAS PUBLISHED to tepid praise in January 1911. The story of an artist torn between his need to create and his love for a woman, the adroit melodrama features a European playwright unable to finish his masterpiece unless he destroys his real-life heroine first. Rather than allow brilliant, tortured writer Jan Piotrovski to divorce his long-estranged wife, his mistress, Vera, insists on living with the author in sin so that they will not betray the church. “For love of him she had given up her greatest possession, her honour, her reputation. Beautiful and pure as her own soul might still be, in the eyes of the world she was lost.” In a predictable ending, the love affair fractures only to recommence at the hour of the heroine’s death.

  Such a romantic yet desperate ending reflects Emily’s own confusion about norms that, in 1911, were supposedly now outdated in the Western world but, in fact, were often reconstituted in renovated garb. Society’s expectations of and opportunities for women were bifurcated; Emily was not the only Gilded Age baby to find herself utterly confused. In her beloved France, for instance, Marie Curie appeared in the news again, not only for winning her second Nobel Prize but because Stockholm authorities had suggested, in light of the widow’s married lover, that she send someone else to accept the award on her behalf. Rebelling at the spurious connection between her personal and professional lives, she attended the ceremony and then suffered a nervous breakdown.

  Closer to home, aspiring lower-class working women made the front pages as well. On a late Saturday afternoon in March, shortly before closing time at Manhattan’s ten-story Triangle Waist Company, just east of Washington Square, the factory workers, mostly immigrant girls between fourteen and twenty-five, were encased in a virulent fire speeding throughout the top floors. Witnesses would remember that spring day for the rest of their lives, the image of the young women workers desperately jumping from the ninth-floor windows. Piles of flattened corpses littered the sidewalks. Sharing the grisly details in photographs, the Times reported that most of the corpses were “headless and charred trunks . . . just a mass of ashes, with blood congealed on what had probably been the neck.”

  At the time of the city’s inferno, Emily, as usual, was not engaged with topical issues such as the plight of factory workers. She was busy reading proofs for another article in the Delineator, this one titled “The Traveling Expenses of the Stork”; the piece allowed her to catalog household expenses, clearly an activity that gave her great satisfaction. She counseled an imaginary young couple living on “Jim S.’s” annual salary of $1,800 (or $35,000 today) to be prepared for the unexpected. The twosome managed very well, Mrs. S. sewing charming curtains and proudly making their house a home. But unexpected medical costs during her pregnancy had threatened to ruin them, and Mr. S. has had to take on an extra job in the evenings.

  Everything continued to go badly for Emily’s well-meaning but misguided fictional family, from Mrs. S.’s need for medical specialists to her potential inability to produce enough milk to feed her baby. Emily counseled them about their options: families with reduced incomes could petition the doctors and the hospital for lower rates, and hire an inexpensive wet nurse from a small town near their home.

  Next, she tutored the future parents in ways to allocate the baby’s resources from their modest annual income. The minimal cost for a layette was $100, but a truly adequate one would cost $300 (in today’s terms, $5,500). Perhaps the mother-to-be could sew the layette? If not, she might obtain the bare essentials for a modest $50, as long as her friends and family supplemented her purchases with practical gifts.

  Such articles proved Emily sensitive to the financial realities confronting middle-class women, and her tone is breezily respectful, suggesting that with gumption and hard work, anyone could create a rewarding life. In contrast, during this same period she wrote an article for Century magazine that positioned Tuxedo Park as if the retreat were locked in time, subject to none of the social explosions that had made it an endless source of gossip from its beginnings. “Because of a long felt ambition to appear in the Century, and because of some familiarity with the development of Tuxedo, I shall be glad to write the article for you—and at your price,” she had grandly written the editor the summer before.
She sought to layer the park’s founding myth with her personal investment in the subject: Tuxedo was her father’s development, and Century was the most respected monthly yet to publish her work.

  In her eagerness to complete the Century commission, she sent the well-respected editor, R. U. Johnson, a rough draft, unaware that he was not accustomed to commenting helpfully on writers’ unfinished manuscripts. He abruptly returned a detailed critique, advising her to “make [her] writing interesting.” Embarrassed, she apologized, explaining several times that she was “the kind of writer who has to get things down ‘anyway at all’ and then write it all over again fast.”

  Until now, Emily had been coddled by editors willing to spend time sifting through her ideas and suggesting the best ways for her to develop a piece. The Century was different: Johnson wasn’t about to do her work for her. Between Emily’s nervousness and her desire to get on with her more relevant current work, the essay on Tuxedo Park would prove one of her least interesting pieces. But it turned out to be a valuable learning experience nevertheless. Tuxedo, Emily began to understand, had always been a mirage as well as a reality to her. It was time for her to let go, both of her actual life at Tuxedo Park and—this would be even harder—of the fantasy she had spun from its more banal truth.

  Her past nonetheless still informed her present in very specific instances. That same year, Uncle Frank, who had inspired Emily to become a writer, saw his latest book, Kennedy Square, become a national sensation. For his heroine, Hop had surely drawn upon Emily as she had appeared at the time of her divorce. Kate—tall and stately and beautiful—takes no prisoners. When her betrothed drinks too much one night—and in public, at that—their engagement is called off, in spite of her love. Whether Kate will forgive or not is the crux of the tediously long novel, the climax occurring even as she serves the ubiquitous canvasback ducks for dinner. Kate is “as proud as Lucifer and dislikes nothing on earth so much as being made conspicuous” (except when she has prepared for the spotlight). Nor would she ever forgive “anybody who breaks his word.” Like Emily, the only daughter, the narrator describes her as “the proudest and loveliest thing on earth.”

  “I won’t hear a word about him,” she says of her soon-to-be ex-fiancé. “He’s broken his promise to me . . . and I will never trust him again. . . . Some of my girl friends don’t mind what the young men do, or how often they break their word to them . . . I do, and I won’t have it.” It was as good as a flashback, a replay of Emily Post talking to her husband five years earlier, if only in the version she told to others.

  THE “PROUDEST THING on earth” was feeling tense that spring, as if her experience of being treated like a professional had chafed her sensibilities and roughed up the edges of her idealized image of a writer. She had expected to revel in this moment, and instead the tensions of getting her prose exactly right vitiated her pleasure. This wasn’t like being a star at all.

  Bruised, she took out her frustrations on her agent. Paul Reynolds had secured a commission for a summer article in the Delineator, but Emily clearly didn’t have her heart in it. Another episode of “The Traveling Expenses of the Stork” admonishes the next generation for failing to see how easy and natural having and raising a baby used to be. But Emily’s impatient tone bullies the reader, lacking the humor that usually leavened her reprimands.

  However unrewarding the “Stork” piece proved to be, the article, part of the planned series of “Letters of a Worldly Godmother,” confirmed the importance to Emily of being useful. In a moment of insight that surprised none of her friends, Emily Post suddenly realized that she liked giving advice. “Don’t you think it is about time to do something about selling the Worldly God-mother letters . . . to a publisher for book form? I don’t see why it is not of the same order as Letters of a Self-made Merchant [a current bestseller], etc. [The Godmother letters] are having a wonderful success in Delineator and it might be a profitable book. . . . Let me know in regard to this, will you?” she had prodded her agent.

  She waited a few days and then telegraphed Reynolds that she would simply circulate the pieces on her own; he was to return them. “I am interested in doing my best for anything of yours,” Reynolds replied, so busy these days that he had recently added Harold Ober to his firm, “but of course I want to help you in any way that I can and not hamper you, and I hope you will place ‘The Letters of a Worldly Godmother’ well and satisfactorily.” He expressed interest in the novel she had mentioned writing, asking, “Do you expect to have it finished at any definite date?”

  After two months had passed, he wrote her again: “I know five magazines that want serials. Have you ever started on the new novel, and could it be offered serially? Several of these magazines say that they would pay a large price if they could get the story they wanted.” From his plaintive tone, we can guess that communications between them had been sparse. “Won’t you let me have a line from you about this?” he pleaded.

  Two weeks later Reynolds tried to woo Emily with the news that the editor George Barr Baker, at Everybody’s Magazine, thought the proposed novel was the “kind of story that you could write and write very successfully.” She failed to answer with her usual alacrity. Reynolds pushed harder: “You know that I am very interested in that story, and very keen on it, and I do not want to see it go up the board.” Flattering her, he continued: “I know you could write it better than any woman in the United States that I know, and I want you to do it and I believe if you do it I can sell it for a large sum.” Desperate, he concluded: “You can add just a line to this letter if you like and say ‘I am hard at work.’ ”

  But by now her Century piece was out, and she still wasn’t a star. Nor was she hard at work. Instead, in early July, she finally confessed to Reynolds, “No use—the book has got to wait. I am really stagnated—although I did get a start—have my characters blocked.” She had meant to visit Maine’s coast for a while in hopes of rejuvenation—as she explained it, “just as a man decides to put his capital into a new venture.” Nor had Reynolds’ well-meaning use of George Barr Baker shored up her confidence. “Alas!” she responded. “I got, I fear, little incentive in hearing that your editor whom you wanted to interest was G.B.B. . . . It is scarcely an inspiring bit of news that your brother or your mother ‘will take an interest’! Geo. Baker could not be nearer to me, or more wrapped up in my life were he my brother. He will be the boys’ guardian should I die. And next to one other person, my aunt, he is the nearest family I have.” What she most sought was affirmation from outside. “I wish you could procure me a job—even a little one—from Bok,” she wrote, referring to Edward Bok, the editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal.

  Reynolds apologized at once; he hadn’t known of Baker’s close friendship with Emily. Now he entreated Baker to join him in urging Emily to visit a Hudson Valley spa in Kerhonkson, where an outdoor regimen would surely revive her flagging energies. While she was gone he could seek out Edward Bok’s opinion about a few of her recent pieces, since she was so keen to publish in his magazine.

  Several weeks later, Reynolds wrote to her about a subject she had obviously broached months earlier. Apparently, Emily had laid out for her agent her desire to become an advice columnist. After all, her roots allowed her an automatic advantage, as most European visitors found southern society to exhibit the most sophisticated manners in the country. Reynolds had followed through on her request, with disappointing news. “I talked to the Ladies’ Home Journal about you,” he explained. “They said that only [recently] they had got somebody new to run a department on proper social observances. I do not know if you would have liked running such a thing because there is such a lot of uninteresting work about it. Writing and deciding what kind of finger bowls people ought to have on their table when they give a luncheon, gets after a while, I think, to be a very tiresome pursuit.”

  This extraordinary letter buried deep in the archives of a literary agency lays to rest the myth of Etiquette’s genesis—most significa
ntly, that of Emily’s initial horror at the very thought of such an assignment. Paul Reynolds never urged her to pursue her interest in the subject; in fact, he tried to dissuade her, carefully implying that the subject was not worthy of her writerly ambitions. Consoling her and perhaps hoping to sweep the whole social advice idea under the rug until she forgot about it, he concluded, “I have never known how serious you were in this, but I thought I would go ahead and see what I could do anyway. The Ladies’ Home Journal people were very interested in the idea, and I daresay it will bear fruit in some shape or other later on.”

  CHAPTER 33

  EMILY POST WAS EXHAUSTED, EMOTIONALLY AND PROFESSIONALLY. She had written and published five novels in six years, suffered the deaths of both parents, and, most unsettling of all, ended her marriage. Since the divorce, she had worked nonstop to create a new identity, but her career was stalled now, just as she had learned to define herself through her work. Never one to mope or stagnate with worry, she opted to direct her talents elsewhere, employing the architecture skills she had learned from her father, while she allowed new literary ideas to incubate.

  Whether she realized it or not, this path was the way to heal her psyche. Almost one hundred years after the demise of Emily’s marriage, House and Garden editor Dominique Browning, when confronting personal chaos herself, would comment on the emotions played out in designing a place to live: “I began to pay close attention to how people talk about making homes, whether they are decorators, architects, clients, or people like me, who have always done it—or not—themselves. I began to appreciate how deeply charged a subject home is. . . . We invest our homes with such hope, such dreams, such longing for love, security, a good life to boot. . . . [M]aking a home is a materialistic endeavor. But it is often, maybe usually, undertaken with intense spiritual energy.”