The Loved One

One evening, in the middle of that decade baptized by I.F. Stone as “the haunted Fifties,” a labor lawyer named Bob Treuhaft came home from work in a bad mood. The “death benefit” for union members, which had been a hard-won gain, was being consumed in one swallow by undertakers and funeral directors. “These people,” the labor lawyer exclaimed, “seem to know exactly how much a warehouse worker gets, and how much an office secretary.” But in the nature of such things, most people didn’t like to complain or to seem “cheap” about burying a loved one. Treuhaft’s spouse and helpmeet was sympathetic but not galvanized. Were there not, she asked, more pressing issues of justice and exploitation? So Treuhaft brought home some samples of the trade magazines put out by the industry, and his wife began to turn the pages.

Jessica Mitford Treuhaft did not need to look up the word “exploitation” in the dictionary any more than her husband did, and the Thanatos racketeers were correct in saying from the first that her motives were probably anti-religious and certainly anti-capitalist. Although Mitford’s “The American Way of Death,” published in 1963, can be read (and now, reread) as a hilarious piece of satirical writing and muckraking journalism, it exists at a deeper level as a relentless critique of the consumer society and the manipulation of supply and demand. The title alone is a beautifully calibrated strike on the collective unconscious.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, a lot of stuff was justified as being in defense of our “way of life.” Nuclear brinkmanship and loyalty oaths were both required for this purpose, while below the Mason-Dixon Line, the exhortation of white citizens’ councils was invariably to the preservation of a certain W of L. Mitford might have quit the ranks of the Communist Party (“crypt-o Communist” was one of the cleverer epithets to come her way), but she still knew her ABC of Marxism and was indignant at the idea of workers being harried even beyond the grave.

Not that the book itself is at all didactic or propagandistic. It essentially consists of a series of discrete and well-ordered chapters, first explaining its original purpose and motivation in a hilarious introduction, and then going step by step through sales techniques (“The Funeral Transaction”), the cemetery industry (“God’s Little Million-Dollar Acre”) and the latest fashions in professional deathmanship (“The Newest Profession”). Other passages, such as the one on cremation, are more simply informative and helpful--the whole being a sort of “before need” manual for those of us who know that, like it or not, we will all be death consumers one day.

To the end of her life, which came suddenly and for many people (interest declared: myself included) tragically, in 1996, Mitford kept up her keen perusal of Mortuary Management, Casket and Sunnyside and kindred glossies. Having got the credit for a number of important reforms governing the burial industry, she was alert to backsliding and to any sign that her old foes were relapsing into bill-padding, needless embalmings and the pressure-selling of wasteful, embarrassing and pagan caskets. (“Ancient Egypt,” she once trilled in a museum of antiquity. “Now there’s a society where the funeral directors were allowed to get completely out of hand.”)

One laughs and snarls on the same page, because there is a reason why the words “rapier” and “wit” are so closely allied. As she checks out two unattributed quotations often employed by boosters for the industry, one from Gladstone and one from Ben Franklin, she demonstrates the Gladstone one was invented. Of the Franklin excerpt (“To know the character of a community, I need only to visit its cemeteries”), she observes: “Wise old Ben! Could he but visit Forest Lawn today, he would have no need to go on to Los Angeles.” And then there’s this:

“Funeral people are always telling one another about the importance of ethics (not just any old ethics but usually ‘the highest ethics’), sentiment, integrity, standards (again ‘the Highest’) moral responsibility, frankness, cooperation, character. . . . Yet, just as one is beginning to think what dears they really are--for the prose is hypnotic by reason of its very repetitiveness--one’s eye is caught by this sort of thing in ‘Mortuary Management’: ‘You must start treating a child’s funeral, from the time of death to the time of burial, as a golden opportunity for building good will and preserving sentiment, without which we wouldn’t have any industry at all.’ ”

Or this in the National Funeral Service Journal: “Buying habits are influenced largely by envy and environment. Don’t ever overlook the importance of these two factors in estimating the purchasing possibilities or potential of any family. . . . Envy is essentially the same as pride. . . . It is the idea of keeping up with the Joneses. . . . Sometimes it is only necessary to say, ‘Here is a casket similar to the one the Joneses selected’ to insure a selection in a substantially profitable bracket.’ ”

Since they knew that Mitford was in all probability scanning their output like a lynx, it seems little short of insane for the morticians to have been so brazen. But then, theirs is a commerce of the short-term and the quick return. Unlike car dealers or cable guys, they are only going to see their customers once.

Those who loved this book the first time around will still love it. The famous chapter on what goes on in the embalming room (“The Story of Service”) has been retained. When the original manuscript was submitted to its London and New York publishers, they both recoiled in dismay from the macabre depiction of what happens to the ex-Mr. Jones. Excision was demanded. Only when Robert Gottlieb, then of Simon & Schuster (who has devoted his retirement to the editing of this posthumous edition), saw the point did a bestseller become a moral certainty. The chapter has since been included in more than 50 anthologies of English prose. “Is there,” asks Mitford quizzically from beyond the grave, “a moral here for the neophyte writer in his dealings with editors?” I should say that there is because, all other considerations to one side, the embalming chapter is written with faultless good taste.

And, indeed, though the book is as stoutly secular and materialist as its author, the temptation to profanity is avoided as carefully as the temptation to vulgarity or general ickiness. Confronted at a public reading in Vidalia, Ga., by some incensed morticians, Mitford was gentle but firm:

“A black suit rose up and he said: ‘I am a vault man. I sell vaults. I listened to Mrs. Mitford’s speech and she never said that when Jesus Christ Our Lord was crucified, a rich man gave him his vault.’ And then he sat down. I replied that since I spend a lot of time in motels where the only reading matter supplied was a Bible, I was indeed familiar with the story of Joseph of Arimathea and his gift to Jesus of his vault. But if you read further, it seems he didn’t stay there all that long. I mean he was up and out in three days.” The book is punctuated with happy moments like this one, which afford the ideal contrast to the lugubrious hypocrisy and Dickensian fraudulence of the Thanatos faction.

The “value added” of this edition is considerable. Mitford follows the upward curve of a business named Service Corp. International, a Texas-based undertaking conglomerate. This outfit has set itself the task of changing the dying habits of the British and the Australians, while continuing to farm the American market. Her innate knowledge of British customs and sensitivities allowed her some imperishable moments of confrontation with this new marketing phenomenon. (When Mitford employs the word “confrontation,” by the way, it is usually with the prefix “bracing.”) Here is an excerpt from the transcript of a filmed interview between her and one of the new breed of yuppy morticians, who is showing her a “mahogany finished poplar timber” version of a casket known as “The Last Supper” (“Angel corner pieces supplied on request at no extra cost”):

JM: But they must cost a fortune. First off, how much is the wholesale cost?

YM: Well, we supply purely to the trade, so what funeral directors do in this country is they buy the casket from us, and then they add it to the cost of their traditional funeral service.

JM: How much do you charge them for this, for example? You charge them how much?

YM: Well, I would be loath to say, because as I say we supply to the trade and they would actually add this to their traditional funeral.

JM: That’s why I wanted to find out. How much do you pay for it?

YM: I don’t really want to discuss what we pay--is this a rehearsal?

No, you poor sap, it’s the real thing, and so is this book. The “Die Now, Pay Later” merchants do a great deal of burbling about how people are “free to choose,” but if your choice is an inexpensive funeral or (if you are rich and have good taste) an unostentatious one, then these choices are not made readily available and are often denied those who seek them. In buying up as many of the smaller outlets as they can, oligopolies of death such as SCI are seeking to remove the option of cremation and to impose the pagan and costly practice of embalming. They also seek, in an attack on the general health as well as the general wealth, to limit the practice of autopsy--so unsuitable for later cosmetic treatment--and to discourage the donation of cadavers to teaching hospitals.

This kind of profiteering, which produces nothing and wastes prodigious resources--and often gravely upsets the bereaved as well as leaving them with empty pockets--was dealt a hefty blow by the first Mitford edition. Reforms were enacted by the Federal Trade Commission, and contempt for the body-snatchers was widespread. But the FTC has, as shown here, failed pathetically in its task of enforcement. New styles of graveside manner have evolved to gull a new generation (such as the one that went early to funeral homes because of the AIDS virus). Valiantly, Mitford appended a most useful list of not-for-profit burial and memorial societies, some of them set up to protest the most recent excesses. Clearly, this is a battle that needs to be joined every few decades or so. But nobody will ever bring to it the combination of irony, brio, grit and vitriol that stamped the Mitford style on every page--and of which this book is the ideal (and only) headstone.