Emily Post

by Laura Claridge

  THE SUMMER OF 1939 was Emily’s idea of perfection. Though not the princess of the park that Tuxedo had anointed her, she was now a revered fixture in Edgartown. A local journalist invited to her house marveled that Mrs. Post was “absolutely modern not only in ideas” but in her appearance and conversation: “Gowned in a simple frock of red and white crepe, her costume was completed by a wide-brimmed red straw hat and large pearl earrings. The red color scheme was becoming to her dark hair and seemed to reflect the vigor and brightness of her personality.” A grumpy writer from the New York Times instead fussed on her behalf that summer about the busload of tourists “walking on her grass” and “peering about,” in general “making a nuisance of themselves. Thus is rewarded labor in behalf of etiquette,” he sniffed grandly. Clearly, he’d failed to understand how much Emily herself genuinely enjoyed the tourists and the respect their interest implied.

  Between the strangers who gawked at the exterior and the local residents who gained access to the inside, Yvonne Sylvia sometimes felt responsible for protecting her boss from potential embarrassment. She laughs when she recalls how humiliating it was when her employer held garden club meetings at the house: “The kitchen desperately needed new appliances to be seen by the public, I finally told her. She never went into the kitchen herself, and her food tastes were so simple that it just hadn’t occurred to her how antiquated everything was. Mrs. Post quietly listened to me and ordered all the equipment I suggested.”

  Emily relished the equilibrium she achieved by balancing the island against the city. In June, Bill had graduated from St. Paul’s, his elite boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire, and he would be leaving soon to attend MIT. More than ever, as her family pursued new places and relationships, Emily found herself appreciating the familiar. Back in New York, the co- op that she had so carefully designed and filled with people she loved continued to be a major stalwart in her life. Foremost remained her friendship with Katharine Collier. Katharine’s great- grandson remembers what steadfast companions the two women remained through the years. “When I was a little boy, I used to go over to 39 East Seventy- ninth all the time,” A. St. George B. Duke, or “Pony,” recalls fondly. “And they’d always be together—whenever Emily wasn’t working, that is.” Katharine “was a very dear person,” he says, and “it’s no wonder that Emily was over at the apartment” so often. For their lunches, at least several times a week, they alternated homes, “both feeling lucky to be living right next to the other.”

  Almost as important, there was Hilda, who continued to occupy a seminal role in Emily’s life. She supervised the other servants: Ebba, the cook, Girda, the housekeeper, and Ailfi, an all- around helper. That year, the movie everyone had to see was the blockbuster made from the novel Gone with the Wind. When asked if their great- grandmother saw the film, Cindy Post Senning replies, “She must have, and Hilda would have gone with her. That film had to resonate with a Baltimore woman from Emily’s generation and background, the way Scarlett knew in the end it was all up to her.” Given the auguries of war threatening the Western world by the end of the year, you didn’t have to be southern to vibrate to the epic scenes of death and decay on the larger- than- life screen.

  To counter isolationists who demanded that the United States remain neutral, Roosevelt and his cabinet tried to enlist Hollywood’s help to mobilize American opinion against Hitler. President Roosevelt even roped a cowboy, matinee idol Gene Autry, into helping fight the enemy abroad. Dining at the White House with the president, Autry was asked to travel to Great Britain and assure the British of American support. The sandyhaired, pink- cheeked, blue- eyed, baby- faced fellow with the slow smile and easy drawl was thought a perfect representative of the iconic American ethos. “Right thinking, clean living, and a devotion to duty are the ingredients necessary to success,” the singing cowboy affirmed. That offscreen he would soon play loose with his marriage vows and go heavy on the alcohol were both beside the point.

  CHAPTER 60

  THROUGHOUT MOST OF THE FALL OF 1939 NED DINED WITH HIS mother every Monday night in Manhattan. She treasured their routine and kept urging her son to come to the Vineyard the next spring for a visit, but he wasn’t interested, even after his property on Long Island had proved no sanctuary. Since the end of the war, Ned had been working as an executive advertising manager for Mack Trucks. For now, his frequent presence in New York City helped compensate Emily for her loss: her grandson was rarely around anymore. Because his studies at MIT had been compressed into an accelerated three- year program, Billy was working nonstop these days. His grandmother was amazed; the eighteen- year- old Billy already planned to join the navy upon graduation and move to Washington, D.C., to design training simulators. Clearly he was cast in her mold, someone who acted methodically and with foresight.

  By the beginning of the new year, Emily was hard at work on the next revision of Etiquette, following, after only three years, on the heels of the fourth edition. Sales had climbed, in part because of a lessening of the nation’s financial crisis, but also because of Emily’s radio appearances. Now she meant to incorporate feedback provided by her listeners, some of them a new audience to her book. Mrs. Three- in-One, the servantless wonder woman Emily had devised with her younger son just before his death, now (at the end of the Depression) occupied not two or three but nine pages of text. “The Vanishing Chaperone” of 1936 (already reduced from “The Chaperone” in the first Etiquette) was unceremoniously laid to rest, dispensed of in a few sentences headed by “The Vanished Chaperone.”

  In “New Aspects of Hospitality,” Emily took on the changing norms of kitchen etiquette. She pointed out that nowadays many men cooked routine meals, unlike the “terrapin or canvas- back duck” specialties that husbands of old undertook. Addressing readers both with and without servants, she acknowledged, through her easy juxtaposition of different classes, the fluid nature of her audience. Suggesting that some couples might enjoy eating in the kitchen, where it was informal—even having friends join them there—she also comfortably discussed how to train and treat a servant if one was suddenly able to afford such assistance, stressing that a loss of privacy was the price of hiring help: “All- time occupancy of the kitchen by the family is possible only in the house of Mrs. Three- in-One, whose kitchen is her own. In the house of Mrs. One- Maid, the kitchen should be considered available only when the maid is out. And in the house of one who has many servants, the kitchen, of course, belongs to them as entirely as the front of the house belongs to the family.”

  With the nation in better financial shape than during the past ten years, Emily felt justified expanding the subject of hired help into a more detailed discussion, in essence tutoring readers in the art of treating underlings with respect. In the section “An Obligation of Courtesy to the Servants,” she wrote: “The kitchen should be returned to its rightful tenant, the cook, in just as good order as it was turned over to the family when she went out. The same is true of the pantry and even the dining room. A few pots and pans left filled with water in an otherwise clean sink in an otherwise tidy kitchen, is reasonable. But it would not be fair to the cook, any more than it would be to the maid alone, to leave her a kitchen that requires hours of scrubbing and polishing to put it back in order.”

  A stronger economy demanded advice on etiquette for passengers on airplanes. This newest form of travel required decisions about choosing the best seats, considering others in new ways (wipe out the restroom sink when you are finished), and understanding the rules that governed group conversation in the air (where talking was expected to cover nervousness) versus those applicable to less communal train travel. In turbulent weather, “laughter and conversation by the other plane passengers is always reassuring as well as diverting,” Emily noted.

  She also covered bumpy territory back on the ground, appending a section ostensibly about drinking but couched vaguely enough to cover sexual freedom as well. In addition to “Saying No to Cocktails,” Emily’s advice for “Youn
g People Afraid to Say No” at various moments seems to be aimed at men, at others, women. “A real leader,” Emily explained, was one who said “ ‘No’ lightly, and yet this ‘No’ has an immutable finality. Such a person says very little about what he will or won’t do. In fact, he rarely forces his opinion upon anyone, but if asked, he gives his answer as truthfully, as uncritically and as briefly as possible—especially if he thinks his opinion may be in serious disagreement with that of the other persons. Such people never lose the confidence of their friends.” She emphasized the point that tone told as much as the words themselves:

  It is quite amazing how frank we can be when our manner is sympathetic, eager, or appreciative. We can say “No” and make it sound almost as nice as “Yes.” On the other hand, we can say “No” and make it sound cold, critical, and almost as affronting as a blow. We can say “I’m sorry, no,” and make it sound a poignant regret; or make it sound as casual and lighthearted as the flitting of a butterfly. Or it can come down upon the sensibilities of others with the weight of a sledge hammer. The secret of how this is done is first of all an innate attitude by which, while we refuse, we hold no criticism of those who do not refuse. At the very moment we set ourselves up with an “I am better than thou” attitude, we become as intolerable to others as we ourselves are intolerant.

  In some of her new pronouncements, Emily’s unchecked earnestness opened her to a mild degree of ridicule, and journalists, predictably, emphasized her more provocative comments. Women, Emily had warned, should avoid gaining weight, if only because it was hard for an overweight woman to look dignified. “The tendency of fat is to take away one’s gentility; therefore, anyone inclined to be fat must be ultra conservative—in order to counteract the effect.” If all else failed, a fat woman (she minced no words) should wear black. There were more than a few who snickered at the notion that dignity had anything to do with appearance.

  SOON AFTER SHE ARRIVED at Edgartown in late spring, Emily holed up to write Children Are People, spending the entire summer of 1940 working on the manuscript and delivering it to Funk and Wagnalls in time for December publication. According to Yvonne Sylvia, this, not The Personality of a House, was her favorite book. “One of the least sentimental of women,” according to her son, she related to the young as if she and they were a natu-ral fit, as if being an only child had taught her the importance of adults to children. At a birthday party she had given for a young Billy, for instance, she had noticed that “one little boy, younger and less assertive than the others, was left behind in all the games.” Her grandson observed Emily “calling Hilda to bring her bag of wools of which she had quantities in all colors and shades. She snipped several small pieces from all of these, tossed them out in a heap on a table and offered a prize to the child who could match the most colors in a given time.” Bill’s father marveled, years later: “How she knew that the shy little boy who hung back from the active games could and would be the winner at this she herself could not have told you.”

  Children Are People exhibited an intuitive grasp of child psychology. Almost seventy years later, the book still rewards a close reading. Though it discusses basic questions about child care and training, even more, it assumes that parenting should be a positive experience, producing offspring who become self- confident adults. Aware of its audience of young parents, Funk and Wagnalls set the price at $2.75, lower than that of any of Emily’s other nonfiction.

  Early in the book, Emily described the challenges of the new decade. Parents of the day faced “restlessness, . . . craving for novelty and excitement, the lack of resources within ourselves. The radio turned on—just to make noise; hordes of people encouraged to come in at all hours of the day and night, or else each separate member of the family going out somewhere. The homes of many might just as well be railroad stations . . . . I am afraid [this is] a not unusual picture . . . not alone in the great cities, but in countless small ones as well.” She hoped to offer parents ways to sustain “the spirit of home” and the “beauty of living.”

  Surely it was no accident that Emily chose gardening as her metaphor for effective parenting—tending the pliant stalks, protecting them from chaos, ensuring that no harm comes to them until they have a chance to blossom; all these impulses she had exercised on her soil at Edgartown after she lost her son. Such careful tutelage, she conceded, wasn’t always necessary: there existed “flower seeds blown by the wind and falling upon the bare earth, and babies without cradles or any . . . tender care,” who mysteriously have grown to “perfect maturity.” More often, though, a successful adult evolved from careful parenting: “As a usual thing, the flowers watched over by a skilled gardener, and the children watched over by skilled parents, have far greater perfection . . . . [J]ust as flowers bloom for those who wisely understand and patiently supply their needs, so too does wise understanding, known by the name of comradeship, bring to full flower the heart and mind of a child.”

  Far more explicitly than in the past, she addressed issues of class and money. “It is not necessary for parents to have had the advantages of more than humble education to set an example to their children while they are little, and also to inspire them with a lifelong ambition to live up to the standards their parents set,” she wrote. Refusing to flinch in the face of social realities, Emily acknowledged that “this does not mean that the advantages of cultivation and sufficient wherewithal to insure beauty of home surroundings are not valuable, or that anyone of us would choose illiteracy ever!” Still, it was “the greater value of fundamental character” that directed the growth of a child: “Self- control, integrity, trustworthiness, patience, kindness, tolerance, and common sense are qualities that can be possessed by those in humble circumstances quite as fully as those who from a material standpoint are far more fortunately placed.”

  As if awakened to the reality confronting many American families, she rode her theme hard: “The belief sometimes expressed that ideal parents are necessarily rich, could not be farther from the truth. Poverty is a handicap certainly, and illiteracy is a greater one. Yet the history of our country gives proof after proof of parents who have triumphed over both. In the world of today—in spite of its disintegrating tendencies—many a mother and father whose backgrounds were of the simplest, have succeeded in creating a home that has never ceased to satisfy, to hold, and to influence their children.”

  Equally important were the manners parents showed their offspring. To expect children to contribute to the household was essential. To interrupt Johnnie or Jane and ask them to perform tasks for lazy parents, however, was just rude. “The child who is at the moment doing nothing but loll in a chair, trying to make up his mind what he wants to do or where he wants to go, can certainly be sent to fetch anything for anyone . . . . But if a child is really engrossed in doing something, whether it be work or play, interrupting should be avoided almost as much as it should be for a grown person.” Clearly speaking from her own frustrations as a writer whose schedule was not always respected, she added: “As a matter of fact, few people, except composers or writers, have any idea of the meaning of interruption! Every writer knows the impulse of people to whisper an interruption, as if it made any difference whether the announcement, ‘Mrs. Jones is on the telephone,’ is whispered or shouted—if it is necessary to go to the telephone.”

  Her chapter “The Stepchild and the Adopted Child” boldly instructed “mixed families” how to make their new lives run smoothly, even as Emily rehashed her arguments against divorce, all centered on the children’s welfare. Only cruelty or abuse, not venial unhappiness or lack of compatibility, justified wrenching a family apart. Just as she’d believed so long ago, she still maintained that one should keep up pretenses, however unhappy the marriage was, for the sake of the children. Refusing to blink at the price children paid for divorce, she completely sidestepped the physical or emotional well- being of the unhappily married couple.

  She also plunged into the turbulence of remarriage and stepparent
ing, an issue she had given little thought when she was a young wife. Unconsciously implying her own low expectation of men’s domesticity and her assumption of the husband as breadwinner, she explained that a stepfather naturally had a “comparatively easy” task, since earning a living required most of his time. The man, the “family member least often at home” had only to be “kind and decent,” and he would win everyone’s affections. In contrast, fairy- tale lore had forever tainted the word stepmother, an image Emily suggested upending by showing steady, patient love. “A stepmother has a dozen quicksands to build bridges across, before she can reach firm ground on which to meet the temperament and gain the confidence of each child in turn,” she said. The stepmother who “inherits” the children when they are babies faces the problems typical of new mothers everywhere. Then, when she gives birth to her biological children, “tactless people say to the older child” things like “The boy is her own baby—you’re only her stepchild!” Such people, Emily practically spat out, “ought to be boiled in oil.”

  Months after the book’s publication, while speaking in Edgartown, Emily advised her audience to tell children “early” of their parentage. “One tactful parent” she knew well had told her adopted child that “out of all the babies in the world we had to choose from, we chose you because we felt that you were the very nicest.”

  Children Are People was dedicated “To Billy.” “I knew the book was for me, in essence,” Bill Post says. “In many ways, especially compared to relationships today, my grandmother and I had a rather formal one. Yet we loved each other deeply, and I never doubted how important I was to her. Grandmama enjoyed providing for me many of the things she recommended in her book for children,” he recalls fondly. “Most of all, I know where those pages that urge parents to read to their children came from—she read aloud to me all the time. Books such as Alice in Wonderland, Kipling’s Jungle Book—that kind of thing.” One of the few early photographs of Emily with her young sons shows Ned sitting at her knees and Bruce on her lap, listening as she concentrates hard on the text, her senses clearly engaged. She continued the tradition with her grandson and later, in spite of her eyesight, tried her best to read aloud to her great- grandchildren as well.