Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking

by Jessica Mitford

  Robert Manning scheduled the article for publication in July. Once having taken up arms against the school, he proved himself a most effective ally. It was he who thought of the clever and apposite title, “Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers,” and who commissioned the brilliant cover cartoon by Edward Sorel, depicting Famous Writers William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Johnson, Gertrude Stein, Voltaire, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, Edgar Allan Poe, and Dylan Thomas gathered to pose for their publicity photograph.

  Before the July issue appeared on the newsstands, Manning telephoned to say the Atlantic had already received fifty letters about the school from subscribers, who get their copies early. He was amazed—generally, he said, even a controversial article draws no more than a dozen letters during the whole life of the issue. (I can attest to this, having often published in the Atlantic on far more important subjects, such as the Spock trial and prisons, which generated maybe six to ten letters apiece. What stirs up readers to the point of writing letters to the editor will ever remain a mystery to me.) Before the month was over, more than three hundred letters arrived, all of which were forwarded to me and all of which I answered. Most of them were from FWS students who felt they had been swindled and who wanted to get out of the contract. To these I replied, “Don’t make any more payments and tell the school I advised this.”

  Developments now came thick and fast. Manning reported that the July issue of the Atlantic had the largest newsstand sale of any in the magazine’s history—which recalled to me a line in the “registrar’s” letter to “Louella Mae Burns”: “Just consider how a single article can cause a magazine’s newsstand sales to soar....” Both the Washington Post and the Des Moines Register ran the piece in their Sunday editions, the first and only time one of my magazine articles has been picked up and republished in a daily paper. It was subsequently reprinted in England and West Germany, both countries in which the school was trying to establish a foothold. The state universities of Washington and Indiana ordered reprints for distribution to all secondary-school principals and counselors, and all university directors of independent study. Television producers invited me to discuss the school on programs ranging from the Dick Cavett Show to ABC’s Chicago.

  As a result of all this, the controversy heated up in the most exhilarating fashion, reaching an audience far beyond the readership of the Atlantic. I put up a map of the United States and began shading in the battle areas as they developed: D.C., Virginia, Maryland, covered by the Washington Post; Middle Western states, the Des Moines Register; and so on.

  Soon the consumer watchdogs got into the act, and my map filled up accordingly. Congressman Laurence J. Burton of Utah read the whole thing into the Congressional Record as a warning to the public. The Attorney General of Iowa filed suit to enjoin the school from sending its literature into that state, charging use of the mails to defraud. Louis J. Lefkowitz, New York State Attorney General, announced a crackdown on the school’s “deceptive practices” and, adding injury to insult, ordered the school to pay $10,000 in costs. The New York City Department of Consumer Affairs demanded “substantial revisions” in FWS advertising and required the school to pay $3,000 to cover the cost of the investigation. The Federal Trade Commission launched a full-scale inquiry, sending investigators around the country to take depositions of the school personnel, the Famous Faculty, and disgruntled students.

  Cartoonists merrily joined the fray. A drawing in The New York Times Book Review portrayed an amply proportioned middle-aged lady writing a letter at her desk: “Dear Bennett Cerf and Faith Baldwin, Yes! I have a strong desire, nay, a lust to write....” The National Lampoon ran a caricature of a disheveled Cerf, red pencil in hand, captioned: “Unlikely Events of 1971: Bennett Cerf Stays Up All Night Correcting Student Papers from the Famous Writers School.” A New Yorker cartoon showed a scowling husband at the typewriter, saying to his smirking wife: “Go ahead, scoff. Bennett Cerf and Faith Baldwin say I have writing aptitude, and they know more about it than you do.” Screw magazine ran a full-page ad for the Famous Fuckers School: “We’re Looking for People Who Like to Fuck. Earn money at home. We know that many people who could become professionals—and should become professionals—never do.”

  The letters, the media interest, the cartoons filled me with nostalgia—they were so reminiscent of the response to The American Way of Death, published seven years earlier. So, too, was the school’s counteroffensive, which was not long in coming, its opening shot a letter to the Atlantic saying that my article contained “at least twenty-three errors according to our latest count.” Famous Writer Bergen Evans repeated this libel on the Dick Cavett Show, where he was given equal time to rebut my remarks. Pressed for what the errors were, Evans was unable to answer, nor were they ever revealed by the school; although Time, in its roundup of the story, said the list was “long but quibbling.” The Evans effort drew a sharp comment from Harriet Van Horne, television critic for the New York Post: “One might have expected a professor of English to refute Miss Mitford objectively and efficiently. One expected wrong. Dr. Evans leveled a purely personal attack.”

  There was more of the same to come. In October, an outraged employee of Congressman (later Senator) Lowell P. Weicker, Jr., of Connecticut sent me a Xerox copy of a letter to Weicker from John J. Frey, president of FWS. Drawing attention to the fact that I had just been listed by Congressman Ichord, chairman of the House Internal Security Committee, as one of sixty-five radical campus speakers, Mr. Frey suggested that Congressman Weicker should read this information into the Congressional Record to counteract the damage done by Congressman Burton: “Most interesting is her association with the Communist Party, USA. We would like to visit you to discuss the nature and depth of damage to our reputation and with a suggestion that may set the Congressional Record straight.... We feel that this matter has assumed urgent proportions and would like to take counteraction quickly.” (Weicker, the employee assured me, had no intention of participating in the “counteraction.”)

  Had Mr. Frey borrowed this idea from the undertaking fraternity, whose response to The American Way of Death had been to get an ally in Congress, James B. Utt of Santa Ana, California, to read into the Record a lengthy report by the House Committee on Un-American Activities about my subversive background? In any event, it set me thinking about what undertakers and Famous Writers have in common: both promise their customers a measure of immortality, overcharge for it, and then fail to produce.

  While all the attention lavished on the fracas in the popular press and on television was most gratifying, even more so were accounts of the school’s growing financial difficulties as reported in the daily stock market quotations, The New York Times financial pages, the Wall Street Journal, and Advertising Age. Having in the past been a resolute nonreader of stock market reports, I now swooped down on that page in the San Francisco Chronicle first thing each morning to see how the school was doing. For some months after my article appeared, FAS International stock declined consistently and precipitately, plunging from 35 to 5. But then it started creeping up again: 5 ¼, 5 3/8, 5 ½ ... I was in despair. “What can I do?” I wailed to my husband. When the stock reached 6, fearing perhaps for my mental well-being, he presented me with a certificate for ten shares of stock bought in my name as a special surprise: “That way, you won’t mind so much if it does go up a bit,” he said sympathetically.

  In May, 1971, I was staying in Washington, doing research for my book on prisons. One morning I got a telegram from my husband: “SORRY, YOUR FAMOUS WRITERS STOCK WIPED OUT. SUSPENDED FROM TRADING ON THE STOCK EXCHANGE.” Later, he told me that when he had phoned in the telegram to Western Union, the operator had suggested, “Don’t you think you should phrase that more gently? Your wife might do something drastic—jump out of the window—if you tell her she’s been wiped out.”

  Early the following year the school filed for bankruptcy. The final windup was reported in More magazine’s Hellbox column for January, 1972:
“Rosebuds (late blooming) to Jessica Mitford, whose devastating dissection of the Famous Writers School in the Atlantic has produced what all exposes aim at but so few achieve: tangible results.... The Mitford article and all the nosing around it prompted has staggered the school financially. Earnings dropped from $3,466,000 in 1969 to $1,611,000 in 1970....

  “A wilted rosebud should also go to the editor-in-chief of McCall’s, who originally assigned the piece and then rejected it because, she explains, ‘I did not want to offend Bennett Cerf at a time when McCall’s was trying to improve the caliber of its fiction.’ ”

  There is, however, a sad addendum: the Famous Writers School is creeping back.

  I first became aware of this in 1974 when Justin Kaplan, the distinguished biographer and a long-time friend of mine, sent me a letter he had received from Famous Writer Robin Moore inviting him to join the Advisory Board of the “new” FWS: “The emoluments are not inconsiderable,” Mr. Moore had written. Justin replied, “I am interested in hearing more about the Advisory Board. I do need to find out how the new operation differs from the old, which as a friend of Jessica Mitford’s I followed with more than routine interest.” But answer came there none; on this matter, Mr. Moore “stood mute,” as lawyers say.

  More recently friends have clipped and sent me ads for the school—not the huge full-page clarion calls of yore, rather discreet columns headed “Are You One of the ‘Quiet Ones’ Who Should Be a Writer?”

  Seeking to make a cursory check of the school’s comeback, I asked a friend in San Francisco to write for the Aptitude Test. It arrived: the same old Aptitude Test. She sent it in, and within days a “Field Representative” appeared at her house: same old pitch, almost indistinguishable from the one I described in my article.

  Some of the “Advisory Board” members listed in the current 1978 brochure are holdovers from the same old Guiding Faculty, although as a regular reader of the obit page I have noted that quite a few of these have gone to join the Famous Faculty in the Sky. I mentioned this circumstance to Cecelia Holland, who replied, “Oh—well, but surely you’ve heard of ghost writers.”

  *They are: Faith Baldwin, John Caples, Bruce Catton, Bennett Cerf, Mignon G. Eberhart, Paul Engle, Bergen Evans, Clifton Fadiman, Rudolf Flesch, Phyllis McGinley, J. D. Ratcliff, Rod Serling, Max Shulman, Red Smith, Mark Wiseman.

  A TALK WITH GEORGE JACKSON

  THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW / June, 1971

  The idea of interviewing George Jackson about his writing occurred to me last autumn when I read Soledad Brother, his remarkable and moving collection of prison letters. Although I had never done an author interview, I have read many and know roughly how they go: “When do you do your best work?” “At dusk, in a Paris bistro, over a glass of Pernod.” “What childhood influences shaped your literary tastes?” “My parents’ home was a gathering place for the foremost writers of the day....”

  But authors are sometimes elusive and this one, through no wish of his own, proved exceptionally so. Prison walls, I soon discovered, are not only to keep convicts in but to keep reporters out. After months of frustrating and fruitless negotiations with prison officials, who refused to permit the interview, Jackson’s lawyer, at his request, secured a court order for my visit.

  George Jackson, now aged twenty-nine, has been in prison almost continuously since he was fifteen. Seven of those years were spent in solitary confinement. In his introduction to Soledad Brother, Jean Genêt calls it “a striking poem of love and combat,” and says the letters “perfectly articulate the road traveled by their author—first the rather clumsy letters to his mother and his brother, then letters to his lawyer which become something extraordinary, half-poem, half-essay, and then the last letters, of an extreme delicacy....” What was that road, and what kind of person is the author?

  As to the latter question, the San Quentin guard in charge of visitors undertook to enlighten me. “We have to set up this interview for you,” he said. “You’ll be seeing Jackson in the attorney’s room. Now we suggest posting a guard in the room for your protection. He’s an extremely dangerous, desperate man, liable to try anything.” I replied, a trifle stiffly, that I preferred a private interview as specified in the court order. “Then we can post a guard by the window—he won’t hear the conversation, but he’ll be able to look through and see everything that goes on.” No thanks. “We can erect a heavy wire screen between you and the prisoner?” No wire screen, thank you. Thus my interlocutor unwittingly acted out for my benefit the most pervasive cliché in all prisondom: “They treat the convicts like caged animals.”

  Jackson’s appearance surprised me in two respects: unlike other prisoners I have met, whose stooped, impoverished physique attests to their long years of confinement, he has the bearing of an athlete. Nor does he affect the stony, ungiving glare of so many of his black revolutionary contemporaries on the outside; on the contrary, he came forward with both hands outstretched, face wreathed in smiles, and exclaimed, “How wonderful to see you!”

  I had been warned by no less an authority than Alex Haley, author of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, that it is extremely difficult to get political, revolutionary people to talk about themselves. This proved true in Jackson’s case. From a long discussion, ranging across the globe and over the centuries, I distilled the following “author interview”:

  Q. What time of day do you do your writing?

  A. I don’t stick to any regimen. I generally get two or three hours of sleep a day, six hours of exercise, and the rest reading and writing. [In the letters, Jackson describes the exercises possible in his tiny solitary cell: “One thousand fingertip push-ups a day. I probably have the world’s record on push-ups completed....”]

  Q. Do you get a certain number of hours of writing in each day?

  A. Of course. After my six and three, I write. At present I’m engaged in a study of the working-class movement here in the United States and an in-depth investigation of history of the last fifty years, when Fascism swept the Western world. I split my writing time between that and correspondence with people I love.

  Q. Do you revise much?

  A. I write strictly off the top of my head. I don’t go over it because I haven’t time.

  Q. What about writing equipment? I noticed that the letter you sent me was written with a very stubby pencil.

  A. That’s all they allow you. I have thirty pencils in my cell right now. But keeping them sharp—the complication is I have to ask the pigs to sharpen them.

  Q. Yes, I see. But do they sharpen them?

  A. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, depending on whim.

  Q. Typewriters are not allowed?

  A. No, of course not. There’s metal in typewriters.

  Q. Your book has been hailed here and in Europe as a superb piece of writing. How did you become such a good writer?

  A. You’ve got to understand that I’m from the lumpen, that every part came real hard. I spend a lot of time with the dictionary. I spend forty-five minutes a day learning new words. I’ll read, and I’ll come across words that I’m not familiar with. I record them on a piece of paper, in a notebook I have laying beside me. I look them up in a dictionary and familiarize myself with the entire meaning.

  Q. Were there any problems about sending out the original letters to your family that make up the bulk of Soledad Brother?

  A. The letters that went to the family had to go through the censor, of course, and they were all watered down. Three-fourths of the letters were returned. There’s a rule here stipulating one cannot make criticisms of the institution or society in general.*

  Q. What’s the mechanism for censorship of letters? It starts with the guard, right?

  A. They go through about three censorships. The first one is the unit officer who picks the mail up. He reads them. Then they go to the mail room and a couple of people over there read them. And in special cases—when it was a question of whether I was attacking the institution or the social system—they go f
rom the mail room to the Warden or the Assistant Warden, and he reads them. Every one of my letters has been photostated or Xeroxed, and placed in my central file folder.

  Q. If the warden decides he doesn’t want a letter to go out, does it come back to you with notations, or what?

  A. Either that or they’ll just put it in my file and I’ll never hear anything else about it.

  Q. In other words, you eventually find out from the person you wrote it to that it was never received?

  A. That’s all.

  Q. In Soledad Brother you describe your grandfather, the stories and allegories he made up to tell you. Did anyone else stimulate your imagination as a child?

  A. Well, my mother. She had bourgeois ideas, but she did help me. I can’t give all the credit to my grandfather, Papa Davis. My mother had a slightly different motivation than my grandfather. Her idea, you know, was to assimilate me through the general training of a black bourgeois. Consequently, her whole presentation to me was read, read, read. “Don’t be like those niggers.” We had a terrible conflict, she and I. Of course I wanted a life on the street with guys on the block and she wanted me to sit on the couch and read. We lived in a three-story duplex and the only way out was through the kitchen. It was well guarded by Big Mama. I’d throw my coat out the window and volunteer to carry out the garbage and she wouldn’t see me any more for a couple of days. But while I was home, Mom made me read.

  Q. What books did she give you?

  A. Black Boy, by Richard Wright, was one. All of her life she had the contradictions of black people living in this country. She favored W. E. B. Dubois. She tried to get me interested in black intellectualism with overtones of integration. When I was twelve or thirteen, I’d read maybe two books a week, also newspapers and periodicals.