You Could Look It Up (57 page)

Even as he worked on the music dictionary, he could not resist taking on side projects. “I have no temptation to be idle,” Sir Walter Scott once wrote, “but the greatest temptation when one thing is wanted of me [is to] go and do something else”—Grove understood that urge deep in his bones.
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He wrote a geography primer, as well as monographs on Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schubert. He also worked to raise money
for the Palestine Exploration Fund, hoping to develop scholarly knowledge about the Holy Land.

Oddly, the highly productive writer found writing wearing. “My botherations often won’t let me work,”
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he complained. He had much to complain about. He suffered the death of several friends and, at the end of 1886, the death of his daughter; he had a deeply unhappy marriage. At times he let hyperbole get the best of him in complaining about his lot:

How cruel life is! I declare to you I lead the life of a slave. From the moment I wake up till the moment I close my eyes it is one fight to do what it is impossible to get through. Hard work is a delight, but when it comes to giving up everything that you care for, and being always in anxiety, always in difficulty, never to have a quiet or a good time undisturbed by the thought of masses of duty left undone, then really life is not worth having.
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But, despite his grousing, the work was thorough. The entry for
appoggiatura
, for instance, goes on for four pages, with examples from Mozart’s
Sonata in A Minor
and
Fantasia in C Minor
, Bach’s
Passionmusik
,
Adelaide
, and
Suites Françaises
, Beethoven’s
Andante in F
, Haydn’s
Sonata in E
, and so on. Grove wrote his Schubert article “at least four times over, each time quite differently. Each time I think now I have got it, and then the next morning I find that it won’t do.” It finally appeared in 1882, and has been praised as “perhaps his most remarkable contribution to the Dictionary.”
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What was going to be two volumes turned into four, appearing in 1878, 1880, 1883, and 1889. Among musicologists in the English-speaking world, “Grove” is now as familiar as “Webster” or “Roget”: the name has come to stand for the book. After his work appeared, Grove was rewarded with a knighthood. Grove—by then Sir George—suffered a stroke early in 1899, and he continued to decline until his death at the end of May 1900. His book, though, remained a fixture in every musician’s library for decades, until its place was taken in 1980 by an even larger
New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
, not four volumes but twenty, with 22,500 articles. The edition of 2001 hit twenty-nine volumes, the first to be available online.

Grove informed the more learned members of the cultured world about what they might hear in the world’s great concert halls, but Emily Post was more concerned about how to behave when they got there.

Born Emily Price to a socialite family in either 1872 or 1873 (the records are unclear), she was educated at home, then spent some time at Miss Graham’s finishing school in New York. “For years I was made to carry a sandbag on my head,” she recalled. “With this I had to curtsy to my governess, who pretended to be my hostess; and then in turn I, playing hostess to her, would smile and bow, and dance and walk across a polished floor without swinging my arms or resting a hand on my hip. And of course I sat bolt upright on a backless chair.”
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The debutante life seemed to pay off with a marriage to a wealthy banker, Edwin Main Post, in 1892, but all was not well. Edwin, no dutiful husband, had a string of affairs. At the turn of the century any divorce was scandal, but
Post v. Post
was more scandalous than most. The scandal sheet
Town Topics
found out about Edwin’s affairs and tried to blackmail him to avoid the details appearing in the paper. He refused, and both Posts had to suffer the embarrassment of being tabloid fodder against the background of police stings. Once on her own, Emily Post was forced to make a living with her pen. Still she had no thought of writing the kind of book that made her famous.

That changed after a series of letters. “For several days in succession,” she recalled, “the same message was brought to me that Mr. D. of an important publishing house wanted to speak to me about an encyclopedia.” She wanted nothing to do with the importunate salesman. “As I already had five encyclopedias,” she wrote, “I sent word that another was one thing in the world I did not need. Mr. D.’s reply at last made it plain: ‘We do not want you to buy an encyclopedia, we want you to write one.’ ”
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That got her attention. “Mr. D.” was Richard Duffy of Funk & Wagnalls, and she agreed to meet him over tea and discuss what he had in mind, though she was “unable to imagine what kind of encyclopedia it might be.” When the answer came, though—an encyclopedia of etiquette—“all the lovely balloons of vague fantasy collapsed.” Etiquette, she thought, “meant a lot of false and pretentious fuss over trifles. I
refused even to talk about it, and thought the matter closed.” Duffy kept at her, though, and at one point sent her a stack of books about etiquette mostly to show her how bad they were. That tactic worked. “
I will
write the book for you,” she told Duffy, “and at once! It will be only a little primer—just a few of the essential principles of taste. I’ll begin it tomorrow morning.”
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After eighteen months of work, the “little primer” grew to a typescript of 692 pages.

In 1922, Post’s audience was largely made up of the newly rich, as those who climb the social ladder are often eager for information on what is expected of them in their new station. Nowhere was class insecurity greater than in the United States. After the First World War, America found itself a world power, richer than all the others. Many of Europe’s cultural treasures were being snapped up by Americans: European dukes and viscounts with impeccable pedigrees found themselves in dire need of cash, and wealthy Americans were looking for cultural cachet. It therefore made perfect sense that there would be an American market for a book on etiquette. Richard Duffy of Funk & Wagnalls explained at the time that “We Americans are members of the nation which, materially, is the richest, most prosperous and most promising in the world.” And yet, while “America … has her ancient
manners to remember and respect,” there were difficulties with “the rapid assimilation of new peoples into her economic and social organism.” The book was necessary: “The perfection of manners by intensive cultivation of good taste, some believe, would be the greatest aid possible to the moralists who are alarmed over the decadence of the younger generation.”
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Early in 1922 Funk & Wagnalls published
Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home: Illustrated with Private Photographs and Facsimiles of Social Forms
. Post opened with a meditation on the nature of “best society”—“an ambiguous term,” she warned; “it may mean much or nothing.” For her it was not based on inherited rank or wealth, though she rarely ventured too far down the socioeconomic ladder. She included a heading “Money Not Essential to Social Position,” and she worked to put the less well-off at their ease—“The fact that you live in a house with two servants, or in an apartment with only one, need not imply that your house lacks charm or even distinction”—but she did not consider the possibility that some houses had only one servant, and many apartments had none at all. Post said that “A very well-bred man intensely dislikes the mention of money, and never speaks of it (out of business hours) if he can avoid it,”
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though it was much easier not to mention money if one had a lot of it. Not caring about money can be expensive.

Some of the advice seems worlds away from twenty-first-century life:

The younger person is always presented to the older or more distinguished, but a gentleman is always presented to a lady, even though he is an old gentleman of great distinction and the lady a mere slip of a girl.

No lady is ever, except to the President of the United States, a cardinal, or a reigning sovereign, presented to a man.
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Alongside the positive advice came the negative. “Do
not
say: ‘Mr. Jones, shake hands with Mr. Smith,’ or ‘Mrs. Jones, I want to make you acquainted with Mrs. Smith.’
Never
say: ‘make you acquainted with’ and do not, in introducing one person to another, call one of them ‘my friend.’ ”
And if that is not bad enough: “Under no circumstances whatsoever say ‘Mr. Smith meet Mrs. Jones,’ or ‘Mrs. Jones meet Mr. Smith.’ Either wording is equally preposterous.”
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Being preposterous was bad, but being vulgar was worse. The lurking bogeyman throughout the book is vulgarity. We may expect the proletariat to be vulgar: “A ‘show-girl’ may be lovely to look at,” Post acknowledged, but the moment she opened her mouth and said something like “My Gawd!” her “vulgar slang” immediately convicted her as insufferably low. But even those traveling in the best circles could find themselves among the vulgar. “Acceptances or regrets,” for instance, “are always written. An engraved form to be filled in is vulgar.” Elaborate designs on tablecloths “inevitably produce a vulgar effect.” A man wearing diamonds? “Nothing is more vulgar than a display of ‘ice’ on a man’s shirt front, or on his fingers.” Flowers in the hearse at a funeral were not just vulgar but “very vulgar.” A hat too fancy for the occasion was so vulgar that one might as well have been running naked through the jungle: “Vulgar clothes … are always too elaborate… . The woman of uncultivated taste has no more sense of moderation than the Queen of the Cannibals.” Post archly considered it “unnecessary to add that none but vulgarians would employ a butler (or any other house servant) who wears a mustache!”
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Conversation was also governed by Post’s rules. How should one speak to the valet (“pronounced val-et not vallay”)? “In a dignified house, a servant is never spoken to as Jim, Maisie, or Katie, but always as James or Margaret or Katherine, and a butler is called by his last name.” Sometimes the rules were complicated, but that is why a book like
Etiquette in Society
was essential: “A gentleman on the street never shakes hands with a lady without first removing his right glove. But at the opera, or at a ball, or if he is usher at a wedding, he keeps his glove on.” “On very informal occasions, it is the present fashion to greet an intimate friend with ‘Hello!’ … This seemingly vulgar salutation is made acceptable by the tone in which it is said. To shout ‘Hul
low!
’ is vulgar, but “Hello, Mary’ or ‘How ’do, John,’ each spoken in an ordinary tone of voice, sound much the same.”
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A great historical distance separates our world from Post’s, but at the core of all her rules, even those most alien to us, was the imperative to
put people at their ease. For Post, manners were part of ethics. She summed up this principle well in the golden rule of etiquette:

Consideration for the rights and feelings of others is not merely a rule for behavior in public but the very foundation upon which social life is built.