BOOKS: The woman behind the manners

DAUGHTER OF THE GILDED AGE, MISTRESS OF AMERICAN MANNERS

By Laura Claridge

Random House, $30, 525 pages

REVIEWED BY MARION ELIZABETH RODGERS

Fifty years after the death of Emily Post, her book on etiquette (“Emily Post’s Etiquette”), remains one of Barnes & Noble’s best-selling books in its category. Recently, Life named Emily Post one of “The 100 Most Important Americans of the 20th Century.” During her lifetime, Emily Post ranked only second to Eleanor Roosevelt as one of the most powerful women in America.

So it is only natural that there should be interest in the woman behind the manners. Laura Claridge, author of “Norman Rockwell: A Life” and “Tamara de Lempicka: A Life of Deco and Decadence” takes an enthusiastic approach to her subject, though I confess this reviewer has been left less than enthusiastic.

Was Emily Post truly such an “amazing personality” as the blurb-givers say? If so, there are not enough instances in this narrative to convince me that her personality was so exceptional as to merit a long biography.

Her father, handsome and talented Bruce Price, was an award-winning architect. His buildings included New York’s American Surety Building, still standing at the heart of Manhattan’s Financial District, and Quebec’s Chateau Frontenac. Her mother was a well-born railroad heiress, Josephine Lee. The family soon left Baltimore for New York, mingling with the Roosevelts and Astors, and - what my own imperious grandmother used to call “the Johnny-come-latelies” – the Vanderbilts and Morgans. Down to earth, Bruce and Josephine taught Emily an important value: Real quality has nothing to do with money or birth.

Statuesque and pretty, Emily triumphed as a debutante; after one party, her departing carriage looked like a florist shop. While dancing to waltzes and polkas, she captured the heart of aristocrat Edwin Main Post, from a Dutch family of impeccable pedigree, “the bluest of blood” of a certain privileged class. Soon after, the belle of the ball and the handsome Edwin married, but were unsuited for each other from the start.

We are not meant to like Edwin, nor do we. His taste in art was sophomoric; his integrity questionable; his ego swelled. He was a typically Victorian, baby-faced lout. When not playing bridge or the stock market (successfully, even during the Depression of the 1890s), he sailed his yacht or blasted his gun at every single animal or bird that moved.

The portrayal of the limited Edwin is so limiting that the reader almost shouts for joy when a terrapin escapes from its makeshift cage in the basement of the family home and sinks the sharp edge of its beak into Edwin’s leg, “unmoved by Edwin’s blood dripping onto the floor.”

Emily longed for the companionable marriage she witnessed growing up. Increasingly, she felt estranged from her husband. As for Edwin, his feelings for Emily were based on “pride of possession. He had no interest in the contents of the elegant package.” He escaped to his club, the sea and eventually into the arms of chorus girls.

When Edwin drew his decorous wife into a scandalous divorce in the summer of 1905, the lurid details were splashed across the front pages of New York papers. Humiliated, Emily never forgave him.

It was not until 22 years later, midway through the book, when Edwin drowned to death, that we are given an iota of Edwin’s side of the story. At the end of his life, he had found “a loving family that embraced his passion for the sea, a theatrical wife like the woman he’d thought he was marrying the first time around.”

And therein lies the rub. As one-dimensional Edwin has been, the reader can relate. Emily bored him.

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