THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN FUNERAL DIRECTING (636 pp.)—Robert W. Habenstein & William M. Lamers—Bulfin Printers ($5).
Death on the American Plan is practiced in a temple of make-believe known as the Funeral Home. The shrine is constructed, as often as possible, along the lines of a country club and rectory combined. Outside, there are gracious plantings of evergreens—designed to "create favorable public sentiment." Inside, there is a sumptuous succession of music rooms, chapels, lavatories, storerooms, and, of course, "slumber rooms." The decoration is "subdued but cheerful," which enables many funeral homes, when their business is lagging, to rent space to wedding parties. And here, where the reek of euphemism mingles with the chemical deodorant and the recorded hymn, has been perfected "the new aesthetic of death," a specifically American response to the handwriting on the wall.
If it is true, as Mark Twain once remarked, that a community can be known by the funerals it holds, then The History of American Funeral Directing, by Sociologist Robert W. Habenstein and Historian William M. Lamers, may reveal more about America than many Americans want to know. Though the style of the authors is as dry as Aristotle's ashes, their history of the social, commercial, sanitary, sexual, artistic and religious relations between the living and the dead has a great and gruesome fascination.
Grisly Jollity. Before entering the American slumber room, the authors sketch the millennia of funeral customs that led up to it.
Confronted with the dead body, men have asked themselves at various times: "Shall we lay it in a boat that is set adrift? . . . Shall we expose it to wild animals? Burn it on a pyre? Push it into a pit naked to rot with other bodies? Boil it until the flesh falls off the bones, and throw the flesh away and treasure the bones?" Primitive peoples discovered that, by devouring a dead body, they did not acquire its spirit; with that insight, as myths tell it, the original oneness of spirit and body, heaven and hell, was torn asunder. The ancient Egyptians spent half their lives preparing for the afterlife (some lucky corpses were sent to eternity in a glass shaft carved to represent the phallus of Osiris); at times it seemed as if only the grave robbers, who returned a large percentage of buried wealth to circulation, saved the nation from bankruptcy. The Macedonians did things more simply (Alexander the Great was transported to his burial in honey).
The Christian Middle Ages at first simply and starkly re-enacted Christ's burial. Later, the ceremonials of death became complicated, e.g., many families employed a "sin-eater" who took the dead man's sins upon himself by eating a loaf of bread and drinking a bowl of beer over the corpse. Embalmers, whose craft the book covers in the most intimate detail, advanced steadily (one notable medieval corpse was preserved in olive catsup). It was Leonardo Da Vinci, the father of modern embalming, who developed the method of intravenous injection which was adopted in 17th century England. There were setbacks, of course. One Richard Hull, of Scotland, in accordance with a notion that on Judgment Day the world will be tipped the other way round, had himself buried upside down on his horse.