The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [3]
The public reaction was absolutely astonishing. The Post editor reported that more mail had come in about Tunley’s piece than about any other in the magazine’s history, and observed that it “seemed to have touched a sensitive nerve.” Bob got a call from the Oakland postmaster: “We have hundreds of letters here addressed simply ‘Jessica Treuhaft, Oakland,’ giving no street or number.” (They were eventually delivered. One envelope bore the stark direction “Jessica Treuhaft, Cheap Funerals, Oakland.”)
Surely this spate of letters showed enough public interest in the subject to warrant consideration of a book? I wrote to Roul Tunley, urging him to expand his piece into a book. He replied that he was too busy with other assignments. “Why don’t you write it?” he suggested.
Bob and I discussed this possibility. I said I would consider it only if he would help and work with me on it full time. And so it was settled.
Aside from the usual difficulties that inevitably occur (at least in my experience) in the course of writing, a crisis of huge proportions threatened to sink the whole endeavor when the book was about half finished. At the outset, I had obtained contracts from the two publishers who had taken my first book, Hons and Rebels (in America, Daughters and Rebels), published in 1960: Victor Gollancz in England, and Houghton Mifflin in the U.S., with whom I was on the friendliest terms. They had both been pleased with the outline and first chapter of the funeral book. At some point I sent them more chapters, including a detailed account of exactly what happens in the funeral director’s inner sanctum, the embalming room, which is strictly off-limits to the public, and especially to the family of the deceased. Hoping to infuse this admittedly revolting subject with a touch of macabre humor, I cast the whole description in mortuary jargon (see chapter 5, “The Story of Service”).
To my extreme dismay, Victor Gollancz and the editor at Houghton Mifflin with one accord demanded the excision of this passage.
From Houghton Mifflin: “We think that you make your book harder to sell by going at too much length and in too gooey detail into the process of embalming.” From Gollancz: “The joke, such as it is, surely is going on far too long. I cannot imagine any publisher here wanting it.”
This was devastating news. As embalming is the ultimate fate of almost all Americans, the economic base of the funeral industry, and as practiced on a mass scale a uniquely American practice, to omit a description of it was unthinkable. We considered finishing the book and reproducing it for self-publication. At this point, my brilliant agent, Candida Donadio, stepped in. She found a publisher, Robert Gottlieb of Simon & Schuster.
Thenceforward, all was plain sailing. Gottlieb, at the age of thirty something of a prodigy in the publishing world, loved the embalming chapter and made an inestimable contribution to the book as a whole.
Months before The American Way of Death was published, the funeral industry became aware of the work in progress, and it was not long before the trade press rounded upon me in full force. A new menace had loomed on their horizon: the Menace of Jessica Mitford. Headlines began to appear in the undertakers’ journals: JESSICA MITFORD PLANS ANTI-FUNERAL BOOK, AND MITFORD DAY DRAWS CLOSER!
When Mortuary Management began referring to me as Jessica tout court, I felt I had arrived at that special pinnacle of fame where the first name only is sufficient identification, as with Zsa Zsa, Jackie, or Adlai. Greedily I gobbled up the denunciations: “the notorious Jessica Mitford”; “shocker”; “stormy petrel.”
In an article headlined WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG, BAD BOOK? the