Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (8 page)

Bob became absolutely immersed in this curious project; as president of the newly formed Bay Area Memorial Association, he devoted his every waking hour to thinking up ways of spreading the message and expanding the membership. He pursued the few writers of our acquaintance, local journalists and English teachers, and tried to persuade them to do a magazine piece on the funeral industry and the emergent funeral cooperatives; nobody was interested. I was still mired in my book
Daughters and Rebels
, for which there was no publisher in sight. Why don’t
you
do the article? he urged. It would provide me with some comic relief and a needed break from the book, and could be useful to the funeral societies as part of their information kit. Reluctantly at first, but with growing enthusiasm as I began to see the fascination of the subject, I set to work.

By now I had an agent who was assiduously, though unsuccessfully, trying to place
Daughters and Rebels
. He offered “St. Peter” to half a dozen nationally known magazines, including the
Saturday Evening Post, Coronet
, the
Atlantic
, the
Nation
, all of which turned it down on the ground that the subject matter was too gruesome. It finally found a home in
Frontier
, a Los Angeles-based liberal Democratic monthly with a circulation of two thousand, for a fee of forty dollars.

Rereading this, my second published piece, together with the earlier “Trial by Headline,” I detect some improvement: it seems to flow along better, and the paragraphing makes more sense. But this piece, too, could have been vastly improved by interviews with some of the principals: undertakers, vault men, funeral society leaders. However, the quotations from the funeral press and the testimony of W. W. Chambers brighten it up somewhat.

When three years later I started writing
The American Way of Death
, “St. Peter” proved to be virtually an outline for the book; in fact, I recycled some of the material in the piece for use in the book, a form of self-plagiarism that I recommend, as one does not want to waste one’s better bits on the readership of one magazine, especially if that readership is as tiny as
Frontier
’s. Ironically, to my extreme pleasure after the book was published the same editors who had rejected “St. Peter” were after me to write follow-up articles on the very subject they had found so distasteful (see comment on three funeral pieces, page 103). Is there a moral here for the aspirant writer? The old bromide “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” would seem to apply nicely.

PROCEED WITH CAUTION

LIFE /
June, 1961

There are various reasons why visitors to America do it. Some yearn to see enormous things like the Grand Canyon and Yellow-stone National Park, and are in general devotees of scenic routes more easily attained by car than by jet or train. Others long to linger at the site of Abe Lincoln’s log cabin, the battlefields of the Civil War, the final resting place of the late President Millard Fillmore.

“Did you have fun on your trip?” I asked an eight-year-old, just returned from a long journey with his history-minded parents. “No!” he said disgustedly. “We had to stop at all the darn old hysterical monuments.”

I sympathize with him. There are many other disadvantages to the long and grueling transcontinental auto trip, or the drive from California to New Orleans. It is, however, far and away the cheapest and most practically adventurous way to go.

Nothing in your previous experience will have prepared you for the turnpikes, freeways, thruways, skyways you will encounter in America—particularly if you are, as I was, a Londoner. The actual sensation of highway driving in America is that of traffic whizzing slowly. This contradiction is achieved by getting up to the legal speed limit (50, 70, or 80, depending on the state) and staying there—which is precisely what every other car is doing. For hours and hours you drive at this speed, with no necessity for slowing, accelerating, or changing gear—you are alone on your track, like Yuri Gagarin in his space capsule.

There are sinister portents, however. From time to time your nervous eye will rest momentarily on recurrent signs along the way, proclaiming starkly, “NO STOPPING OR TURNING,” and, more unnerving still, “CRIPPLED CARS TO THE RIGHT.” If you are a person ridden by imagination, the question will inevitably occur to you, what then?

You visualize the scene: a dreadful and threatening sound develops in your motor, or that funny feeling in the steering wheel that means a flat tire. Your car is crippled. Obediently you draw up and stop at the right. Years later your skeleton is discovered. The image persists even though turnpike authorities assure you that a policeman will pick you up within a half-hour if you simply tie a handkerchief to your radio aerial.

Other American highway signs tend to be tautological (“SLIPPERY WHEN WET” is a great favorite), suggestive (“SOFT SHOULDERS”), or baffling because they are impossible to comply with (“BEWARE OF FALLING ROCKS” or “DEER CROSSING”).

Here and there one encounters “POINT OF INTEREST AHEAD.” These signs are strategically placed a quarter of a mile or so before the point of interest to enable the driver to slow or stop as the extent of his interest may dictate. If there are children in the car, they will start jumping up and down, shouting, “Point of Interest! Point of Interest!” at the top of their lungs. Once, acceding to those screams in the back seat, I actually did stop. It was somewhere in the Middle West, and we saw a tree growing out of a rock, which really was rather extraordinary. Small thanks I got, however. To this day, the children complain in heavy tones of censure, “... And the
only thing
we saw on the entire trip was a crummy old tree growing out of a rock.”

One must rest, naturally, between such lively points of interest. Places to stay along the way in America range from luxury run wild, at corresponding prices, to the most heavenly camping in the world.

The really expensive motels ($16 to $25 a night), found on the West and East coasts but not much in between, reach heights of fantasy hard to believe. They are usually called Magnolia Court, no doubt after a person named Magnolia. They may be Tudor, Queen Anne, Colonial, Knotty Pine, Ranch Style, or Futuristic in décor, and are invariably built around a heated swimming pool of immense proportions (a Tudor swimming pool?).

Inside, you are in a sort of Eliza Doolittle dream world; and you, grimy from hours on the road, with your battered little overnight kit, are Eliza. Your dusty old sandals or tennis shoes sink into two-inch-thick wall-to-wall carpeting; your eye lights on yards of built-in Mr. and Mrs. drawer space into which you will unpack your one clean blouse (for you have been cautioned to travel light). The soft, adjustable, concealed lighting reveals rich satin brocade bedspreads and matching curtains. An entire paneled wall may slide back at the touch of a button to reveal a giant clothes wardrobe; on one of its myriad hangers will go your rumpled mackintosh. Various discreetly placed knobs will reproduce for you at will the climate of the equator, the North Pole, or any point between. Even the huge color TV set fades into insignificance before all this glory.

To your amazement, these truly extraordinary surroundings seem to be taken for granted by the other patrons; there may even be an occasional shrill complaint: “What’s the matter with this joint? No tissues in the dispenser!” Are they, then, millionaires who live this way normally? In a word, no. They are middle-income tourists like yourself. The point is whereas in most parts of the world overnight stays are a necessary evil, normally attended by discomfort not endured at home, in America the situation is exactly reversed. The motel patron has come to expect and demand a standard that boggles the imagination—and that must transcend in all ways his daily mode of life.

As for camping, one dollar a night will get you a private campsite in a state park under towering pines or redwoods. Here again, at the other end of the scale, the American genius for comfort under all conditions will astonish you—if you have been accustomed really to roughing it. Each campsite is usually supplied with rustic table and benches, barbecue pit, tap with spring water, a cupboard fastened to a tree where your provisions will be safe from bears. The facilities in the more frequented camps usually include communal W.C.s.

But when it comes to dining along the American highway, the connoisseur of descriptive writing is likely to fare better than the gourmet. Standard menu offerings are often phrased in whole paragraphs of lyrical prose—a pleasure to read if not to eat: “Juicy young farm-raised milk-fed broad-breasted baby roast tom turkey, served with golden tender-sweet oven-baked yams, garden-fresh tiny peas, home-style hot Southern biscuits, crisp mixed-green chef’s salad ...” Sorting fact from fancy, it may occur to you that whereas a turkey is almost by definition “farm raised,” you cannot visualize one actually
eating milk:
that how else could one bake yams except in an oven? You will soon learn that “garden fresh” too often is synonymous with “canned” (first cousin to “frozen fresh”) and that the adjectives “young,” “hot,” “juicy,” “crisp,” and even “chef’s” are apt to be in the realm of poetic license.

One final observation may be useful to the foreign visitor. Because of the great distances, keeping in touch with friends or family in America can become extremely expensive as the miles stretch on and the telephone charges mount. There appear to be two techniques for overcoming this difficulty—both of which can be effective. The standard gambit is to put through a person-to-person call for yourself. Your friends or family need merely report to the operator that you are not at home; thus you save the expense of a telephone call and your loved ones know at least that you are still alive.

But some elaborative travelers I know use a more esoteric approach. Thus if the operator announces, “Person-to-person call, collect, for Minnie S. Oder,” it is clear to the husband who answers that his wife has arrived in Minnesota. Sometimes a further stage of reasoning is required to get the message: Homer V. Hickles—Home of Vehicles—conveys Detroit, where cars are manufactured. Wishing to know whether any important letters have arrived, the wife may ask for “Esther Annie Mehl?” On one occasion the wife, having just reached Mexico, asked for Mary Atborder. She clearly heard her husband tell the operator: “No, Mrs. Atborder’s not here at the moment—but she can be reached in a small town called Checkbookunderseatindesotopleasesend.” It did sound like an odd name for a town, even in America; but the husband’s checkbook, which he needed desperately, was on its way to him in the next morning’s mail.

COMMENT

I include this piece not because it has any intrinsic merit—in fact it has many of the built-in defects of a written-to-order article—but because of how it came about, and some unforeseen consequences of its publication that brightened my life at the time.

By the time “Proceed with Caution” was commissioned, I had reached a plateau in the long upward climb to become what is known in the trade as “an established writer.”
Daughters and Rebels
had at last been accepted, and had been published the year before by Houghton Mifflin. It had even made a brief appearance on
The New York Times
best-seller list, albeit at the bottom. I gradually began to notice that doors to magazine publishing, formerly closed to me, were magically opening up. (Not that my difficulties were over, far from it; they are not over to this day. On several occasions I have written articles on assignment that for one or another reason proved when submitted to be unacceptable to the magazines that commissioned them. In this case, one must make do with a “kill fee,” a singularly brutal phrase meaning some fraction, generally one-third to one-half, of the agreed-on payment, and try one’s luck with the piece elsewhere.)

In the spring of 1961 I went to a cocktail party in New York and there met a young woman who was doing research for a special “Come to the U.S.” issue of
Life International
, beamed to Europeans. I happened to mention that I’d just driven nonstop from California with a couple of friends, and that we had made it in three and a half days. True to life, so to speak, she immediately expressed interest; she would send a teletype to Mr. Whipple, overseas
Life
editor, to see if he might want a piece on this subject. To my absolute amazement, she telephoned the next day to say the piece was commissioned, it was to be fifteen hundred words, the fee would be five hundred dollars. This news was thrilling yet horribly overwhelming, because (a) how could fifteen hundred words possibly be worth five hundred dollars, and (b) how could one make that dull trip sound interesting? The deadline for the article, she said, was Wednesday. It was now Monday. I was cast into a sort of euphoric despair: my first major commercial magazine breakthrough—until then I had aspired no higher than the
Nation
, which paid seventy-five dollars—but how on earth to pull it off?

I spent the next two days holed up in a friend’s apartment, a soul in agony because the writing was such uphill work, but I got it done. By the time I learned that the piece was actually accepted, I even felt rather pleased with it—after all, what was my opinion against that of the
Life
editors? Furthermore, they told me, it would run not only in the international edition but also as a “Special Report” in domestic
Life
, for which they would pay yet another five hundred dollars.

What followed was even more pleasurable. The only part I had rather enjoyed writing was the last paragraph explaining our telephone gambit. This had been developed and refined over the years by our family and a few friends since the 1957 earthquake in Mexico City, when my sixteen-year-old daughter, who was staying there, had called person-to-person for Alice Okie—her way of assuring us, without paying for the call, that All is O.K.

I never really expected
Life
to run that paragraph—surely these giant corporations stick together against the slingshots of us little Davids—so I was mildly surprised to see it in both the overseas and the domestic editions. However, there were swift and terrible reprisals. A friend who worked at
Life
told me all about it: “The telephone company was fit to be tied; they called all the brass at
Life
on the carpet and ordered them to show cause why the phone company should pour millions of dollars into advertising in
Life
only to be knifed in the back like this.” What happened? I asked. “Well, first we fired Murphy.” Murphy, my friend explained, is a fictitious
Life
editor who is always fired whenever some high-up in politics or business complains of being maligned in an article. To further assuage the phone company’s injured feelings, my friend continued,
Life
arranged to produce a special eight-page color spread on the company’s contribution to the space program.