Giant Country: Essays on Texas

The Ground Sense Necessary

The Ground Sense Necessary It seems highly probable that the most satisfactory funeral seroice for the average family is one in which the cost has necessitated some degree of sacrifice . This permits the suroivors to atone for any real orfancied neglect of the deceased prior to his death. National Funeral Seroice Journal, 1961 hen I was an undergraduate at North Texas State University in the early 1960s I read Jessica Mitford's new book, The American Way of Death, with a good deal of excitement. What Mitford had to say about American burial practices struck a deeply responsive chord, and I remember the wave of denunciation that arose from the highest councils of the funeral industry. On the local front, in my hometown of Carrollton, the book drew a hearty condemnation from the leading mortician. He declared the author a communist, Giant Country 14 and that was that. In DaIlas in those days, anything critical of the American way of life, or death, was considered suspicious if not treasonous . Already at odds with many of the values trumpeted daily in the Dallas Morning News editorials of that pre-assassination era, I believed that Mitford was right on target. She had the goods on funeral homes. She was especiaIly adept at exposing absurd euphemisms. Somewhere in this vast and amusing land she had found an undertaker who styled himself a grief therapist, a delicious phrase that has stuck with me to this day. Her muckraking attack left no coffin unopened, no unctuous undertaker unscathed. Mitford's critique tallied beautifully with ideas I was gaining from reading and with my own, thankfuIly, limited experience with funerals . Great literature seemed preoccupied with two subjects, love and death. Poetry particularly spoke to the second. Emily Dickinson: "Because I could not stop for Death-He kindly stopped for me-/l; Wallace Stevens: "Death is the mother of beauty"; Andrew Marvell: 'The grave's a fine and private place/But none, I think, do there embrace./I In great poetry death made for compeIling, unforgettable lines, just as, in bad poetry, it made for the mawkish, the sentimental . As an English major trained to scorn the sentimental and as a youth disposed to the hardboiled, the laconic tone, the weary resignation , whether in a Hemingway novel or a western movie in which the hero takes a lonely walk down the godforsaken streets of Tombstone, I felt naturaIly at home with lean rhetoric and leaner rituals . The fulsome never pleased. That's how I came to love one of the most moving funeral poems in American literature: William Carlos WiIliams' 'Tract." Williams strips the cant and phony rhetoric away from the event of death, of burial, forcing us to look at the dignity and beauty of the bare coffin, unadorned, solitary, as pure as an imagist poem, and as spare: /Ian this the coffin lies / of its own weight" and "I will teach you my townspeoplelhow to perfonn a funeral," Williams wrote, and I believed him. Closer to home, in Texas literature, the most memorable treatment of death for me was in a bright new novel published by The Ground Sense Necessary another North Texas State English major who had graduated a couple of years before my time. That was Larry McMurtry, and the novel was Horseman, Pass By. The scene was the burial of the old cattleman, Homer Bannon. McMurtry, I learned later, started with this scene when he conceived the novel. Told from the young grandson's point of view, the burial scene is a thorough-going critique of the Protestant way of death; Jessica Mitford couldn't have done it better herself. The service is dishonest, materialistic, and nauseating. The only emotional power generated in the service comes from such old hymns as "Shall We Gather at the River." Many years and several funerals later, I find, upon glancing through Mitford's book, how accurate her view was and how little things have changed. The funeral industry marches on, secure in its faith in Christian capitalism. McMurtry's perspective, though, I feel a bit differently about. Oh, he is right; the service he describes is bloody awful; and it is a service familiar to anyone who has attended a Protestant funeral in Texas. But the point of view is that of a very young man. In my recent experiences with death and funerals, I have come to appreciate the need for rituals...