The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [4]
My husband Bob and I were inclined to agree with his estimate; we did not anticipate a readership much beyond Unitarians, funeral society members, and other advocates of funeral reform, a relatively tiny group. Not so Bob Gottlieb. A few months before publication, he rang up to say the first printing would be 7,500. Some days later, he told us this had been increased to 15,000. Then he telephoned again: the first printing was now set at 20,000. I found this slightly worrying; “Aren’t you afraid that we’ll end up with a final chapter, ‘Remainders To Be Seen’?” I asked him. I need not have worried. On publication day in August 1963, the book went out of stock, the first printing having been sold out.
The response was nothing short of thrilling. To my extreme pleasure, the reviewers not only lavished unstilted praise, they also got the joke. Thus the New York Times: “A savagely witty and well-documented exposé …” New York Herald Tribune: “Bizarre and fantastic … a wry account of the death business.” San Francisco Chronicle: “Explosive. Continually absorbing. Often very funny.” Cosmopolitan: “A brilliant book … written so wryly it is difficult to consider it an exposé …” National Guardian: “One of the strangest and funniest things in literature … astonishing, but exceedingly funny.” The Reporter: “She has the rare ability to make the macabre hilariously funny.” Denver Sunday Post: “Sane observations and witty … sardonic commentary …”
The American Way of Death zoomed to No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, where it stayed for some weeks. CBS broadcast an hour-long documentary, “The Great American Funeral,” based on the book. Major newspapers (Miami Herald; New York Herald Tribune; Denver Post; San Francisco Chronicle; Chicago Tribune; Cleveland Plain Dealer) published in-depth reports on funeral costs and practices in their respective communities. For a while, funerals were topic A on radio talk shows, with listeners calling in to relate their own dismal experiences at the hands of morticians. Walt Kelly and Bill Mauldin mocked the funeral industry in syndicated cartoons. Elaine May and Mike Nichols produced a televised skit on “That Was the Week That Was” starring Elaine as “your Grief Lady.” TV and radio stations around the country featured debates between funeral directors and myself. Clergy of all faiths reinforced the major theme of The American Way of Death and denounced ostentatious, costly funerals as pagan. Membership in the nonprofit consumer-run funeral and memorial societies rose from seventeen thousand families to close to a million.
There came a delightful moment when a textbook for college students entitled The Essential Prose came clattering into my mailbox—an anthology, according to the editors, of “prose of the first order from the past and present.” There, tucked between Plato and Sir Thomas Browne, was the very description of embalming upon which my book had almost foundered. Furthermore, as of this writing, some fifty textbook editors in the past four years alone have chosen this selfsame passage for inclusion in their anthologies. Is there a moral here for the neophyte writer in his dealing with editors?
For me, most rewarding of all was the response of the funeral industry. The trade journals reacted with furious invective, devoting reams on how to combat “the Mitford syndrome,” as one put it. Mortuary Management was of the opinion that “actually, the danger to the equilibrium of funeral service is not in the book per se. It is in the residual use of Miss Mitford’s material.… Newspapers, large and small, are reviewing the Mitford volume, passing and repassing its poisons among the citizenry,” which I thought was a good point.
Month after month, the funeral mags fulminated against “the Mitford bomb,” “the Mitford