Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (23 page)

A FWS graduate who had completed the entire course (and has not, to date, sold any of her stories) echoed the views of many: “It’s tremendously overblown, there’s a lot of busywork, unnecessary padding to make you think you’re getting your money’s worth. One peculiar thing is you get a different instructor for each assignment, so there’s not much of the ‘personal attention’ promised in the brochures.” However, she added, “I have to be fair. It did get me started, and it did make me keep writing.”

I showed some corrected lessons that fell into my hands to an English professor. One assignment: “To inject new life and color and dimension into a simple declarative sentence.” From the sentence “The cat washed its paws,” the student had fashioned this: “With fastidious fussiness, the cat flicked his pink tongue over his paws, laying the fur down neatly and symmetrically.” The instructor had crossed out “cat” and substituted “the burly gray tomcat.” With fastidious fussiness, the lanky, tweed-suited English professor clutched at his balding, pink pate and emitted a low, agonized groan of bleak, undisguised despair: “Exactly the sort of wordy stuff we try to get students to
avoid
.”

The staggering dropout rate cannot, I was soon convinced, be laid entirely at the door of rapacious salesmen who sign up semi-literates and other incompetents. Many of those who told me of their experience with the school are articulate, intelligent people, manifestly capable of disciplined self-study that could help them to improve their prose style. Why should adults of sound mind and resolute purpose first enroll in FWS and then throw away their substantial investment? One letter goes far to explain:

My husband and I bought the course for two main reasons. The first was that we were in the boondocks of Arkansas and we truly felt that the Famous Writers School under the sponsorship of Bennett Cerf etc. was new in concept and would have more to offer than other courses we had seen advertised. The second was the fact that we had a definite project in mind: a fictionalized account of our experiences in the American labor movement.

I guess the worst part of our experience was the realization that the school could not live up to its advertised promise. It is in the area of the assignments and criticism that the course falls down. Because you get a different instructor each time, there is no continuity. This results in the student failing to get any understanding of story and structure from the very beginning.

My husband completed about eight assignments, but felt so intensely frustrated with the course that he could not go on. He couldn’t get any satisfaction from the criticism.

While the school is careful to advise that no one can teach writing talent they constantly encourage their students towards a belief in a market that doesn’t exist for beginning writers. For us, it was an expensive and disappointing experience.

The phenomenal success of FWS in attracting students (if not in holding them) does point to an undeniable yearning on the part of large numbers of people not only to see their work published, but also for the sort of self-improvement the school purports to offer. As Robert Byrne points out, what can be learned about writing from a writing course can be of great value in many areas of life, “from love letters to suicide notes.” For shut-ins, people living in remote rural areas, and others unable to get classroom instruction, correspondence courses may provide the only opportunity for supervised study.

Recognizing the need, some fifteen state universities offer correspondence courses that seem to me superior to the Famous Writers course for a fraction of the cost. True, the universities neither package nor push their courses, they provide no handsome buckram-bound two-tone loose-leaf binders, no matching textbooks, no sample Hollywood contract.

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)

(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 major 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.