Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking

by Jessica Mitford

  Unobtrusively tucked away in the Lifelong Learning bulletin of the University of California Extension at Berkeley are two such offerings: Magazine Article Writing, 18 assignments, fee $55; and Short Story Theory and Practice, 15 assignments, fee $35 ($5 more for out-of-state enrollees). There are no academic requirements for these courses, anybody can enroll. Those who, in the instructor’s opinion, prove to be unqualified are advised to switch to an elementary course in grammar and composition.

  Cecilia Bartholomew, who has taught the short-story course by correspondence for the past twelve years, is herself the author of two novels and numerous short stories. She cringes at the thought of drumming up business for the course: “I’d be a terrible double-dealer to try to sell people on it,” she said. Like the Famous Writers instructors, Mrs. Bartholomew sends her students a lengthy criticism of each assignment, but unlike them she does not cast herself in the role of editor revising stories for publication: “It’s the improvement in their writing technique that’s important. The aim of my course is to develop in each student a professional standard of writing. I’ll tell him when a piece is good enough to submit to an editor, but I’ll never tell him it will sell.” Have any of her students sold their pieces? “Yes, quite a few. Some have published in volumes of juvenile stories, some in Hitchcock Mysteries. But we don’t stress this at all.”

  In contrast, Louise Boggess, who teaches Magazine Article Writing by correspondence in addition to her classes in “professional writing” at the College of San Mateo, exudes go-ahead salesmanship: she believes that most of her students will eventually find a market for their work. The author of several how-to-do-it books (among them Writing Articles That Sell, which she uses as the text for her course), she points her students straight toward the mass writing market. In her streamlined, practical lessons the emphasis is unabashedly on formula writing that will sell. Her very first assignment is how to write a “hook,” meaning an arresting opening sentence. What does she think of the word “The” for openers? It doesn’t exactly grab her, she admitted.

  During the eighteen months she has been teaching the correspondence course, several of her 102 students have already sold pieces to such magazines as Pageant, Parents, Ladies Circle, Family Weekly. She has had but six dropouts, an enviable record by FWS standards.

  My brief excursion into correspondence-school-land taught me little, after all, that the canny consumer does not already know about the difference between buying and being sold. As Faith Baldwin said, most advertising is somewhat misleading; as Bennett Cerf said, the crux of mail order selling is a hard pitch to the gullible. We know that the commission salesman will, if we let him into our homes, dazzle and bemuse us with the beauty, durability, unexcelled value of his product, whatever it is. As for the tens of thousands who sign up with FWS when they could get a better and cheaper correspondence course through the universities (or, if they live in a city, Adult Education Extension courses), we know from reading Vance Packard that people tend to prefer things that come in fancy packages and cost more.

  There is probably nothing actually illegal in the FWS operation, although the consumer watchdogs have their eye on it.

  Robert Hughes, counsel for the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Deceptive Practices, told me he has received a number of complaints about the school, mostly relating to the high-pressure and misleading sales pitch. “The real evil is in the solicitation and enrollment procedures,” he said. “There’s a basic contradiction involved when you have profit-making organizations in the field of education. There’s pressure to maximize the number of enrollments to make more profit. Surgery is needed in the enrollment procedure.”

  There is also something askew with the cast of characters in the foregoing drama which would no doubt be quickly spotted by FWS instructors in television scriptwriting (“where the greatest market lies for the beginning writer,” as the school tells us).

  I can visualize the helpful comment on my paper: “Good work, Miss Mitford. The Oakland widow’s problem was well thought through. But characterization is weak. You could have made your script more believable had you chosen a group of shifty-eyed hucksters out to make a buck, one step ahead of the sheriff, instead of these fifteen eminently successful and solidly respectable writers, who are well liked and admired by the American viewing public. For pointers on how to make your characters come to life in a way we can all identify with, I suggest you study Rod Serling’s script The Twilight Zone, in the kit you received from us. Your grade is D—. It has been a pleasure working with you. Good luck!”

  OBJECT LESSON

  “Every writer worth his salt develops, after a time, his own style.” Faith Baldwin, Principles of Good Writing, FWS textbook.

  (But Famous Writers Write Alike)

  By Faith Baldwin By Bennett Cerf

  If you want to write, my colleagues and I would like to test your writing aptitude. We’ll help you find out if you can be trained to become a successful writer. We know that many men and women who could become writers—and should become writers—never do. Some are uncertain of their talent and have no reliable way of finding out if it’s worth developing. Others simply can’t get topnotch professional training without leaving their homes or giving up their jobs. If you want to write and see your work published, my colleagues and I would like to test your writing aptitude. We’ll help you find out whether you can be trained to become a successful writer.

  We know that many men and women who could become writers—and should become writers—never do. Some are uncertain of their talent and have no reliable way of finding out if it’s worth developing. Others simply can’t get topnotch professional training without leaving their homes or giving up their jobs.

  (Reprinted from postcard inserts currently being circulated in millions of paperback books.)

  COMMENT

  This article gave me more pleasure, from start to finish, than any other I have written. Its preparation afforded the opportunity to apply everything I had thus far learned about investigative techniques. My efforts to get it published, a series of dizzying ups and downs, gave me an insight into the policymaking process of magazines that I should never otherwise have acquired. The aftermath of publication filled my normally uneventful life with drama of many months’ duration. It was also one of the few clear-cut successes, however temporary, of my muckraking career, so I pray forgiveness if an unseemly note of self-congratulation becomes apparent in what follows.

  At first it was a mere twinkle in the eye. By some fortunate confluence of the stars, the “Oakland lawyer” (who was in fact my husband, Bob Treuhaft) happened to tell me about his case of the aged widow vs. Famous Writers School on the very same day that Robert Byrne’s excellent and amusing book Writing Rackets appeared in my mailbox. Lunching soon after with William Abrahams, then West Coast editor of the Atlantic, I regaled him with stories of the misdeeds of these Famous Frauds. Why not do a short piece for the Atlantic, suggested Abrahams, about seven hundred words, combining an account of the Oakland widow’s unhappy experience with a review of Byrne’s book? And so it was settled.

  Here my publishing troubles began. The next day Abrahams called up to say that Robert Manning, editor of the Atlantic, had second thoughts about the piece: while Manning agreed that the Famous Writers School advertising was “probably unethical,” the Atlantic had profited by it to the tune of many thousands of dollars, hence it would be equally “unethical” for the magazine to run a piece blasting the school. I was aghast at this reasoning; would it not, then, be “unethical” for a magazine to publish an article linking smoking to lung cancer while accepting ads from the tobacco companies? I asked Abrahams. Well, yes, he saw the point. If Manning changed his mind, he would get back to me.

  A week went by; no word from the Atlantic. By now adrenalin was flowing (easily the most effective stimulant for the muck-raker); those Famous Writers, I was beginning to see, were a power to be reckoned with if they could so easily influence the policy of a ma
jor magazine. Without much hope, I queried the articles editor at McCall’s. She replied that McCall’s would welcome a full-scale rundown on the school’s operation, six to seven thousand words, no holds barred. This put the matter in an entirely new light; with McCall’s lavish backing for a piece of that length, I could afford to go all out in pursuit of the story.

  For weeks thereafter I lived in what turned out to be a fool’s paradise, traveling back East at McCall’s expense to see the school in Westport and to visit its Madison Avenue advertising headquarters in New York, interviewing the Famous ones, poring over the textbooks and the stockholders’ reports. The finished article drew extravagant praise from the articles editor and her associates at McCall’s, but when the editor-in-chief returned a week later from a trip out of town she rejected it. Why? I sternly asked her. “Well—I don’t think it’s very good,” she answered, a comment to which there is, of course, no possible rejoinder. However, she promptly paid not only my large expense account but the full agreed-on fee, rather than the “kill fee” that is usual in such circumstances. Did she have a guilty conscience? Had the Famous Writers got to her? Yes, it turned out, but I only learned this much later.

  Furious at this turn of events and in a black mood of revenge, I submitted the piece to Life, whose editor immediately responded: he would be delighted to have it, photographers would be deployed to take pictures of the school and its Famous Faculty, it would be a major Life story. But the next day the editor happened to drop by the office of Life’s advertising manager, who mentioned that the school had contracted for half a million dollars’ worth of advertising over the next six months. End of that pipe dream.

  By now the article, Xeroxed copies of which were floating around in New York publishing circles, had achieved a sort of underground notoriety; my editor at Knopf got a wire from Willie Morris, then editor of Harper’s, saying he would love to publish it. I was on the point of turning it over to Morris when William Abrahams at last did “get back” to me: the Atlantic wanted it after all. Furthermore, Manning had canceled the magazine’s advertising contract with FWS.

  How does one go about researching such an article? My first step, before laying siege to the Famous Faculty, was to accumulate and absorb every available scrap of information about the school, my objective being to know more about its operating methods than did the Famous Writers themselves—which, as I soon discovered, was not hard. Via the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, I found articles in back issues of Business Week, Advertising Age, the Wall Street Journal from which I was able to trace the school’s phenomenal growth over the years. Robert Byrne lent me his vast file containing among other treasures the school’s glossy promotional brochures, its annual financial reports, and the original correspondence between “Louella Mae Burns” and the “registrar.”

  Wishing to make contact with some live ones who had actually enrolled in FWS, I hit on the idea of taking an ad in the Saturday Review’s classified columns, giving my name and a box number: “Wanted: Experiences, good, bad or indifferent, with Famous Writers School.” I chose SR for the purpose because it seemed just the kind of middlebrow magazine whose readership might include likely victims. Nor was I disappointed; my ad drew several letters from dissatisfied students. Faced with the agony of selection from these, I decided eventually to use the one that seemed most representative—from the couple in “the boondocks of Arkansas,” as they put it, conveying in authentic tones of frustration their earnest expectations of the school and their dashed hopes. (My Yale students, to whom I imparted this story, loved the idea of using the classified columns as a research tool. I was told that during my stint there as instructor, the advertising revenues of the Yale Daily soared as a result of ads placed by members of my journalism seminar.)

  Thus prepared, I set about interviewing those of the Guiding Faculty whose home addresses were listed in Who’s Who and whose phone numbers I got from Information. Early one Sunday morning my husband found me at the telephone. “What are you doing?” “Dialing Famous Writers.” He insisted I was wasting my time: “They won’t talk to you, why should they?” “No harm in trying,” I said. “Wait and see.” He stood by fascinated as one after another they talked on interminably—it was hard to shut them up. Needless to say, their off-the-cuff comments—and their unanimously admitted ignorance of the school’s operating methods— made for some of the most successful passages in the piece.

  I was now ready to advance on the ultimate stronghold, the school itself. Armed with my list of questions, carefully graduated from Kind to Cruel, I called the director, Mr. John Lawrence, and explained that Miss Faith Baldwin, Mr. Paul Engle, and other faculty members had suggested he could help me with an article I was writing about the value of correspondence schools. He immediately offered to pay my fare, first class, to New York where I would be put up at the hotel of my choice, and to set aside a day to show me around the school. (When I reported this to the articles editor at McCall’s, she insisted that as a matter of principle McCall’s should pay. I suppressed the fleeting and unworthy thought that I might collect the price of the fare from both.)

  My day at the school was long, grueling, and on the whole satisfactory. Late in the afternoon, having elicited through persistent questioning Mr. Lawrence’s firm and unqualified assurance that never had the school demanded a medical certificate of ill health as the condition of a student’s withdrawal, I sprung the final Cruel: Bob’s file on the Oakland widow, which contained a letter stating, “It is the policy of the School that when difficulties such as yours arise that we require a statement from the physician in attendance attesting to the inability of the student to continue on with the studies....” After listening to Mr. Lawrence’s murky attempt at an explanation—“unfortunate occurrence ... a slipup”—I took my leave. There seemed to be nothing more to say.

  I saved Bennett Cerf for the last. My interview with him in New York went as described in the piece; the high point his illuminating remark about mail order selling: “a very hard sales pitch, an appeal to the gullible,” which he immediately regretted and asked me not to quote.

  How, then, could I justify quoting it? I have been asked this many times by my students, and even by other working journalists. Was it not “unethical” of me? The technical answer is that at no time had Mr. Cerf indicated that his conversation was to be off the record, hence I had violated no agreement. Yet there is more to it than that. I can easily visualize interviewing an average citizen who is unused to dealing with the press, and acceding to his plea not to quote some spontaneous and injudicious comment. But—Bennett Cerf, at the top of the heap in publishing, television star performer, founder of FWS, who was cynically extracting tuition payments from the “gullible” for the augmentation of his already vast fortune? This hard heart felt then, and feels now, not the slightest compunction for having recorded his words as spoken.

  We had one more brief encounter. I had just submitted the finished article to McCall’s and was showing a Xerox of it to a friend at Knopf, up on the twenty-first floor of the Random House building. We were giggling away about the Famous Writers when who should pop in but Bennett Cerf. The Random House offices are on the twelfth floor. What was he doing up here, I wondered —had somebody tipped him off to my presence? Genial as ever, Mr. Cerf took a chair and remarked jovially, “So HERE’S the archvillain. I hope you’re not going to murder us in that piece of yours.”

  “Murder you? Of course not,” I answered. “It’s just a factual account of the school, how it operates, and your role in it.”

  “I don’t like the look in your eye as you say that,” said Cerf. “Where are you going to publish it?”

  Three possible answers flashed through my mind: (1) I haven’t decided, (2) I’d rather not say, (3) the truth. I reluctantly settled on the last. “If I tell you, do you promise not to try to stop publication?” I asked. Cerf made pooh-poohing sounds at the very suggestion. “It was commissioned by McCall’s,” I said. He sprang out
of his chair: “McCall’s! They’re out of their mind if they think they can get away with this.”

  By the time the article had finally found safe haven at the Atlantic, I was aglow with unbecoming pride which, as we know, precedes a fall. It seemed to me I had diligently and fully explored every facet of the school’s operation. The luck factor had been with me all the way; short of reading matter in a motel where I was staying, I had picked up the Gideon Bible, which miraculously fell open at the very passage in St. Luke’s gospel quoted in the epigraph, “Beware of the scribes ...” And somebody in Robert Manning’s office had spotted and forwarded to me the postcard inserts in paperback books, an incomparable example of FWS’s sloppy yet devious methods, which I used for the box, “Object Lesson.”

  The fall came after the piece was published, and it still gives me nightmares. The Atlantic ran a letter from Cecelia Holland, a young novelist, who once when in financial straits had taken a job as instructor for FWS. She wrote: “Students are led to believe that each letter of criticism is personally written by the instructor. It is not. The instructor has a notebook full of prewritten paragraphs, identified by number. He consults this book and types out, not personal comments, but a series of numbers. Later, the paragraphs are written out in full by a computer-typewriter.”

  How could I have missed this stunning bit of chicanery which so neatly epitomized the ultimate swindle perpetrated by the school? I shall ever regret not having set eyes on those automated typewriters, sincerely clacking out “This opening is effective. It captures the reader’s interest....” “I can see you made a try at writing a satisfactory ending, but you only partially succeeded....” I had spent much of my day at the school watching the instructors at work—why had I not asked to see some of the “two-page personal letters of criticism and advice” promised in the advertising? Why had I not quizzed Mr. Lawrence as to whether I had been shown the entire premises—was there anything interesting in the basement that I might have overlooked? To this day it pains me to think of this lapse in my investigation, and I only relate it here as a solemn warning to the would-be muckraker to take nothing for granted, and never to be lulled into the assumption that one’s research is beyond reproach.