Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking

by Jessica Mitford

  ORGANIZATION—all-important; here is where the article does or does not come together. You now have a thick notebook full of interviews, plus your typed versions; a flock of papers with details of other research, manuals, financial reports, newspaper clippings overflowing your desk, or kitchen table, or both. How to put it all together in readable fashion?

  One technique I have found useful in the early stages of an inquiry is to write letters to friends about what I am doing. In that way I perforce start editing the material for fear my correspondent’s eyes will glaze over with boredom if I put in everything I have learned. Also, one’s style is bound to be more relaxed than it will be at the dread moment when one writes “page 1” on a manuscript for an editor.

  When preparing Kind and Usual Punishment, I went to a five-day conference of the American Correctional Association in Miami and filled up several notebooks during the many sessions I attended. Each night I wrote to a friend in California, drawing on my notes to give what I saw as the highlights of the meetings. These letters became the basis for that chapter in the book. Similarly, during the Spock trial I attended court for four weeks, took down what amounted to a longhand transcript of the proceedings, dashed back to the hotel, and wrote a seven- or eight-page single-spaced letter to my husband telling what had happened that day. Eventually I boiled these down to about 110 pages in my book about the trial.

  Having reached this point, one is, of course, only at the beginning of one’s troubles; you have the letters (or carbon copies, if you remembered to insert the carbon paper) and all the other research paraphernalia, but you still have the problem of where and how to start and finish, plus what goes in the middle and in what order. With luck, the subject will suggest the form (see comments on “You-All and Non-You-All” and “Checks and Balances at the Sign of the Dove”).

  Sometimes it helps to draft in haphazard order the most striking, and hence the easiest, sections of the work in progress. At least this is fairly pleasurable; you can juggle these fragments around later, determine the best sequence, string them together with other material, rewrite them as needed. In the course of this a good beginning paragraph may occur to you; good endings are in my opinion far harder, and your editor will not be pleased if you give up the struggle and simply write (as I have done on occasion) THE END, hoping he will not notice your failure to construct an elegant conclusion and a chic final sentence—what a journalist friend of mine calls a “socko ending.” Nor will he welcome a dreary summation of what went before. I can offer no useful guidelines here, as each piece of work will present its own unique problem. One can only hope the solution will occur in a sudden blinding flash of insight.

  STYLE. Most textbooks on writing skirt around this knotty problem and caution against reaching to achieve “style”—be yourself, be natural, they seem to say. In a way I see what they are driving at, yet I am not totally convinced; I should have welcomed a splash of style (and did welcome it, when it occurred) in the student papers I read at San Jose and Yale. Many an important message in book or article is lost, founders on lack of style; unreadable, nobody has read it. Thus a conscious effort to foster style may not be amiss.

  Of the many texts on the writer’s craft, I recommend the following as pleasurable and amusing reading from which I, for one, have learned a great deal about the cultivation of style:

  The Art of Writing, by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the anthologist who compiled the Oxford Book of English Verse. The Art of Writing is a collection of his lectures delivered at Cambridge in 1913–14—in itself a poignant thought; how many of his adoring and gifted students (as I imagine them) perished shortly there-after in the First World War, never to put into practice his cogent teachings? The lectures, as Sir Arthur makes clear in his “Inaugural,” were a complete departure from the dry dronings-on of pedagogues, standard fare served up to students in those days. I detect that Sir Arthur had deliberately set out to be something of an iconoclast who would disrupt the calm and even flow of traditional academic instruction. He combines erudition and informality, depth and humor, in the most entertaining fashion. To cite just one sample passage that struck home to me: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.” A marvelous piece of advice; thanks to Sir A. Q.-C., my wastepaper basket is a veritable Herod’s graveyard of slaughtered innocents. (Editor: Please delete last sentence.)

  The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White, which first appeared in 1959, is now a standard high-school text; hence older readers may think it beneath their dignity to consult it. If so, they will be missing a rare treat and much valuable instruction. I only wish I had had access to this book when I first started writing; I could have avoided many a stylistic blunder (see comment on “Trial by Headline”). The last chapter, “An Approach to Style,” is particularly rewarding.

  On Writing Well, by William Zinsser. This book, which grew out of a course that Mr. Zinsser teaches at Yale, also appears at first glance to be rather elementary. Yet it is full of excellent advice that any writer, whether beginner or professional, would do well to absorb; see, for example, Zinsser’s chapters on “The Lead” and “The Ending,” and his delightful comments on humor as the secret weapon of the nonfiction writer.

  In addition to these texts there are a few reference books that I use as crutches or mind-jolters, consulting them constantly when struggling with some particularly difficult and elusive passage: Roget’s International Thesaurus, Fowler’s Modern English Usage, and Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. The last two can also be great time-wasters, as one can easily get sidetracked into reading all sorts of interesting passages having nothing to do with the work at hand; but wasting time is also part of the writer’s lot, since nobody can be expected to grind out word after word, sentence after sentence, without a bit of relief.

  EDITING. There are two stages: (1) your own editing, a continuous process until you are finally satisfied that you have organized, revised, pruned, polished your work to the limit of your ability and are ready to consign it to the uncertain mercies of book or magazine publisher; (2) professional editing by the latter.

  In the first stage, I rely heavily on the advice and criticism of friends who are good enough to read what I am doing and who give opinions on everything, ranging from the general thrust of the piece to faults of grammar and syntax. These amateur editors include my family, students, neighbors, the thirteen-year-old junior-high math wiz. Seldom has any one of them failed to come up with some valuable suggestion. On one occasion, when Kind and Usual Punishment was in galleys and had been proofread by me and half a dozen highly literate pals, I offered the thirteen-year-old a dollar for every mistake he could find; I wound up owing him eighteen dollars.

  I also make it a practice to consult with people who have first-hand knowledge of the subject matter. When writing Kind and Usual Punishment, I circulated the draft to members of the San Francisco Prisoners Union, all ex-convicts, who supplied many vivid details from their own prison experience. However, this method may not appeal to everyone. Most writers I know would shudder at the thought of passing around drafts of their work to miscellaneous friends. I can only say it works very well for me, in fact I could hardly survive without it.

  The final step in preparing a manuscript for submission is meticulous proofreading. This may seem too obvious and elementary to mention, yet at both San Jose State and Yale I was continually amazed at the number of jarring and annoying typographical and spelling mistakes, sloppy constructions, confusing inserts in otherwise excellent papers turned in by students. I urged them to consider that failure to proofread is like preparing a magnificent dinner and forgetting to set the table, so that the wretched guests have to scramble for the food as best they can.

  As to the second stage, professional editing, whether your piece will be helped or harmed depends on the individual editor. I recall a very nasty
moment when, having been given a contract for The American Way of Death by both an English and an American publisher, I sent them each a draft of the chapter on embalming. It was met with instantaneous and thunderous disapproval from the editors on both sides of the Atlantic; this chapter is too revolting, it must go, they said. I could, of course, have acceded to their wishes and excised the offending passages. After much agonizing, I decided not to do so even though it meant losing the contracts—and I was sustained in this decision by my circle of amateur editors.

  After this disheartening setback the book was eventually accepted by Robert Gottlieb of Simon & Schuster, who loved the embalming chapter and whose sympathetic editing vastly improved the text as a whole. A year after publication, those self-same embalming passages were chosen for inclusion in a college textbook on writing. Well! Of course I felt vindicated. The obvious moral is that although some editors can sometimes perform wonders in improving your work, in the last analysis your own judgment must prevail.

  While book publishers rarely alter a manuscript without the author’s approval, magazine editors, with their space limitations and frantic deadlines, are apt to take all sorts of liberties. The first time I wrote a piece for Life—and was ecstatic over its acceptance—the editor assured me that it would be published as submitted “except for word changes.” It was only after I saw the piece in print that it dawned on me that the only changes that can be made in a written text are word changes. In this collection I have generally used my own unedited manuscript, and will discuss some of the differences between my text and the published version in the comments on these pieces.

  JOURNALISTIC ETHICS. My students at San Jose and Yale often brought up this subject and questioned me closely about what is/isn’t “ethical” when in pursuit of a hot lead. Unfortunately ethics is not one of my strong points, so I am not sure my answers were satisfactory. In general, I think that if you have promised anonymity to the person you are interviewing, or if it is agreed in advance that he is speaking “off the record,” such agreement should be respected. Better, however, to steer him away from such untoward thoughts, which can often be done by fast and dexterous talk about the matter at hand, so that the problem does not arise. I shall have more to say about this in the comment on “Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers.”

  On a level with “ethics,” and likewise a subject of great interest to my students, is “objectivity.” Some ventured to suggest that I lack this quality. If to be objective means having no point of view, or giving equal weight to all information that comes one’s way, I plead guilty—although accuracy is essential, not only to the integrity of your work but to avoid actionable defamation. It can be ruinous to try to tailor the evidence to fit your preconceptions, or to let your point of view impede the search for facts.

  But I do try to cultivate the appearance of objectivity, mainly through the technique of understatement, avoidance where possible of editorial comment, above all letting the undertakers, or the Spock prosecutors, or the prison administrators pillory themselves through their own pronouncements. “When are you going to get angry?” a friend asked after reading a draft of my article about the Famous Writers. Never, I answered; it is not in my sweet nature to lose my temper, especially in print.

  LIBEL. Many of my students lived in perpetual dread of committing the murky crime of libel, and were forever anxiously asking whether some statement or characterization in a paper was “libelous.” I begged them not to worry their pretty heads over this, because should one of their efforts be accepted for publication the author would be subjected to the dubious benefit of counsel from the publisher’s libel lawyers.

  To the extent that I have had dealings with this curious subspecies of the genus lawyer, which breeds and proliferates mainly in the swamplands of Eastern publishing centers, I have concluded that their main function is best summed up by the title of a recent best-seller: Looking Out for Number One. Like the prison psychiatrist who habitually overpredicts “violent behavior” by inmates in his care—fearing for his own skin should a violent crime be committed by a prisoner he has cleared as safe to release—the libel lawyer will go to wonderful lengths to identify passages in a manuscript that he asserts might give rise to a lawsuit. Thus in one effortless operation he protects himself and garners a fat fee for doing so.

  To illustrate: After my manuscript of The Trial of Dr. Spock was submitted, I received a six-page single-spaced letter from Knopf’s libel lawyers listing thirty-four potentially libelous statements, beginning with “Page 1, para 1: it is alleged that Mitchell Goodman, Michael Ferber and Marcus Raskin were co-defendants with Dr. Spock and Rev. Coffin, which would be libelous if untrue....” Some other gems from this bizarre document: “The statement that Rev. Coffin spent time in Southern jails is libelous and should be deleted unless it can be verified from court records.” “The statement that Bertrand Russell was prosecuted is libelous and should be deleted unless it can be proven true from court records.” “The statement that Dwight Macdonald said he was ashamed to be an American, as used in the context of this passage, may be libelous as charging a federal crime.” And my favorite, from a passage in which I was describing a particularly boring moment in the trial: “It is alleged that Mitchell Goodman’s lawyer ‘perhaps was dozing off.’ Since he was supposedly defending Goodman at the trial, this is libelous and should be deleted.”

  “But what am I supposed to DO with this pile of junk?” I wailed to my editor at Knopf. Shrieking with laughter, he said I would have to go over it with the lawyer, which I did, patiently elucidating as I went: “Page 1, para 1—that’s from the indictment, which lists the co-defendants.... All the newspapers carried stories about Coffin’s imprisonment in Southern jails—of which he was immensely proud.... Bertrand Russell describes his prosecution in his autobiography....” And so on. “Oh, then that’s all right, that can stand,” the lawyer would respond to each of my explanations. The upshot was that not a single change was made in my manuscript as a consequence of the lawyer’s labors. How much would he have charged for this memo? I asked a lawyer friend. He took it in his hands and weighed it thoughtfully; upward of a thousand dollars, he would guess, maybe two thousand.

  I am often asked if I have ever been sued for libel in the course of my writing career; the answer is no, alas. I have been threatened with suit a few times—after The American Way of Death came out, executives of Forest Lawn Memorial Park announced they were preparing suit “against the authoress and her publishers,” but regrettably no such suits have thus far been brought; I should have enjoyed defending against them. I cannot, however, lay the failure of these libel suits to materialize at the door of the publisher’s libel lawyers. I take the blame upon myself for being quite careful to check facts—tedious yet necessary, if one’s work is to have any standing and value for the reader.

  RESULTS? Finally we should explore the question, Does muckraking really accomplish anything, or does it at best lead to reforms that merely gloss over the basic flaws of society? Lincoln Steffens, originator of the genre and author of the pioneering Shame of the Cities, eventually came to take a dim view. “He was now certain that muckraking in itself had run its course and led to no solutions,” writes Justin Kaplan, Steffens’s biographer. “Muckraking, it seemed, had only been a way of shouting at society, and this was pointless, especially now that one had to shout louder and louder to get people to listen, much less to do something.”

  What of today’s muckrakers? Ralph Nader is probably the leader in exposing misdeeds of the giant corporations. At least his loud shouts have succeeded in creating a nationwide awareness of consumer fraud, ranging from unsafe cars to dangerous and overpriced prescription drugs, thus educating a whole generation of consumers as to their rights, and to the possibilities of organizing and fighting back through the courts and legislatures.

  My own efforts have been (with the possible exception of The Trial of Dr. Spock and Kind and Usual Punishment) on a far less consequential scale. The unde
rtakers are, after all, hardly on a par with such formidable Nader adversaries as General Motors or the puissant drug industry. Most of the subjects of investigation in this collection are odd pockets of American enterprise that happened to strike my fancy (or, as the OED would say, appealed to my “depraved interest in what is morally unsavoury or scandalous”): Elizabeth Arden’s retreat for rich fat women; the Famous Writers’ correspondence school; the Sign of the Dove, a high-priced New York tourist trap. I wish I could point to some overriding social purpose in these articles; the sad truth is that the best I can say for them is that I got pleasure from mocking these enterprises and the individuals who profit from them.

  On the political front, it seems clear that over the last decade young and energetic muckrakers succeeded in laying the groundwork for the toppling of two presidents. Robert Scheer’s early pamphlet “How We Got Involved in Vietnam,” originally published in an obscure journal, became the text for innumerable teach-ins and source material for scores of subsequent books and articles. These in turn were immensely influential in fanning the anti-Vietnam War protest which led to the downfall of L.B.J. Similarly the Woodward-Bernstein exposures initiated the chain of events that brought down Nixon. In each case the written word lit the fire and fed the flames.

  But then (you will groan) we had Ford and now Carter, there have been no fundamental changes or improvements in any aspect of American life. Which merely points up the need for a new generation of muckrakers who will hone and perfect the craft, and will shout long and loud enough to get people not only to listen but to do something.