Decca, p.1
Decca, page 1
BY JESSICA MITFORD
The American Way of Death Revisited
The American Way of Birth
Grace Had an English Heart
Faces of Philip: A Memoir of Philip Toynbee
Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking
A Fine Old Conflict
Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business
The Trial of Dr. Spock
The American Way of Death
Hons and Rebels (previously published as Daughters and Rebels)
BY PETER Y. SUSSMAN
Committing Journalism
TO DECCA
For her inspiration
AND TO PAT
For her love and tolerance
Contents
Introduction
I. BABY BLUEBLOOD AND HOBOHEMIAN
II. AMERICA, IN LOVE AND WAR
III. SUBVERSIVE HOUSEWIFE
IV. REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST
V. DEATH AND THE AFTERLIFE
VI. A CAT AMONG THE PIGEONS
VII. FINE CONFLICTS
VIII. AN ENGLISH HEART
IX. A FEISTY OLD DAME
THE LAST WORD
Correspondents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Jessica Mitford, daughter of the second Lord and Lady Redesdale, escaped from the “milk-bland life” of the Cotswolds in prewar England and spent the rest of her illustrious life and career—and her extensive correspondence—in a kind of continuing conversation, or argument, with her privileged upbringing, her unruly family, and the tempestuous political passions of the era in which she was raised.
She once recalled telling an interviewer that I Led Three Lives would have made a good title for her first memoir, “only unfortunately it had been used by the FBI and of course I wouldn’t have anything to do with them as I despise them.” As usual, her arithmetic was wrong, but uncharacteristically she erred on the conservative side. The myriad lives of Jessica Mitford, known to friends—and even at times to the FBI—as Decca Treuhaft, included the three that she probably had in mind in that 1960 interview: rebellious fifth daughter of reactionary and notoriously eccentric English aristocrats; full-time American Communist Party organizer and civil rights activist through much of the 1940s and ‘50s; and, at the time of her interview, a middle-aged author plugging her first book.
Over the ensuing decades until her death in 1996, Decca was best known in the United States as a distinguished and wickedly irreverent “muckraking” journalist, celebrity wit, and author—most notably of The American Way of Death, a runaway best-seller in 1963 that forever changed the country’s funeral practices. In England, she may be remembered best as the Honorable Jessica Mitford, one of the Mad Mitfords or the Mitford Girls, the six sisters who entranced and infuriated the British public through much of the twentieth century.
Along the way, she moved easily among the world’s Most Important People—aristocrats and meritocrats, politicians, radical intellectuals, artists, writers—as well as the misfits and outcasts whose grievances she championed and whose stories she brought to public attention. Very few people could straddle so effortlessly the many worlds she inhabited, but her ability to do so was a source of many of her most enduring achievements, as a writer, as a social critic and reformer, and as a mother, friend, and mentor.
From the time the teenager first made the front pages as “Peer’s Daughter” escaping her largely fascist family and eloping to the Spanish Civil War, Decca was rarely out of the headlines for long. A few years later, after she and her first husband, Esmond Romilly, the brilliant and engaging “naughty boy” nephew of Winston Churchill, emigrated to the United States, their escapades as “Baby Bluebloods in Hobohemia” were serialized prominently in the Washington Post—and syndicated to other papers—and her photo was on the Post’s front page when their daughter Constancia was born. Journalists sought her out every time one of her fascist sisters made headlines of her own. Still later, the press was reporting on Decca’s Communist Party activities and confrontations with congressional Red-hunters and her disinheritance by Baron Redesdale. For decades thereafter, with each new book and article, she gained a new measure of renown.
Decca’s very public life and her inimitable personality are refracted in her extensive, lifelong private correspondence. Her letters amount to a characteristically uninhibited and revealing form of autobiography, but they are also a kind of social history and commentary. The correspondent list of this self-described “renegade aristo” is an idiosyncratic Who’s Who of a century in breathtaking transition, and her always original voice helps to illuminate that century and its quirks.
As newspaper feature writers never tired of reminding their readers, Time magazine conferred on Decca the hybrid Anglo-American title Queen of the Muckrakers. “I rather loved it,” she told one reporter. “If they were going to mention me at all, I’m glad it was as a queen.” But a more appropriate title might be Mother of New Journalism. Decca’s work is a reminder that some of the best journalism comes about in the most unconventional ways. She was a brilliant agent provocateur who, through withering humor, offbeat observations, unflinching directness, and sheer force of personality, flayed social injustice and often provoked her adopted country to glimpse itself with unaccustomed clarity. Like many of the New Journalists, her life and her art were at times inseparable, a kind of social and political theater; her writings and her conduct combined to form a critique of the society in which she lived. The two strains merge in her correspondence, along with the biographical and social roots of that distinctive achievement, going back to childhood.
The Mitford daughters and their brother, Tom—insulated from even their peers by the conventions of their class—grew up in what Decca called in her first memoir “a timeproofed corner of the world, foster children, if not exactly of silence, at least of slow time.” Their parents, she once said, saw England’s socioeconomic classes as “traveling along parallel tracks that could never meet or intersect in any way.”
By all accounts, the uninhibited Mitford children lived a self-sufficient life of tradition and frivolity punctuated by their charming but sclerotic father’s blustering outbursts. They filled their circumscribed world with a culture of their own invention; one commentator called them “a savage little tribe.” They played childhood games that sometimes seemed cruel to outsiders; they communicated in secret, made-up languages, and they patented “the Mitford tease,” an unrelenting form of ridicule that Decca later turned outward on the world. She once quoted family friend Robert Kee as saying, “It has always seemed to me that your family regards the rest of the world, and everything that happens in it, as a huge joke put on for their benefit.” Foremost promoter of this form of huge joke—at a time when it was still primarily a form of sisterly torture and then, later, in her popular novels—was the eldest daughter, Nancy.
Lord and Lady Redesdale did not believe in school for their daughters. (Throughout Decca’s distinguished career as a writer, her résumé included the line “Education: Nil. Autodidact.”) Decca’s resentment, she wrote, was “absolutely burned into my soul,” so that decades later on another continent, “the subject came up and I found myself literally fighting back tears of rage.” She told her sister Nancy once that when they were children Decca couldn’t confide to Nancy her secret childhood ambition to be a scientist “because whenever one told you one’s deepest ambitions it was only to be TEASED UNMERCIFULLY and laughed off face of earth.”
When Nancy Mitford delighted her English fans with novels such as Highland Fling, Wigs on the Green, and The Pursuit of Love parodying her family’s eccentric ways, their early lives became communal legend, so much so that both the public and the family itself were sometimes hard-pressed to separate childhood legend from childhood fact.
Another family friend, James Lees-Milne, perceived “a vein of callousness” in Nancy Mitford—shared by the rest of the family—“which almost amounts to cruelty.” One newspaper critic commented, “I think you could say that again, without the ‘almost.’”
Decca found her protected, upper-class childhood insufferably boring: “nothing ever happened.” She nursed an “eternal FEAR OF BOREDOM” (often capitalized in her letters). She compensated for the monotony with a bracing lifelong passion for controversy and combat. In another letter, she told a friend, “You must remember that English people on the whole are a lot tougher than Americans in terms of verbal torture (had you been raised in the hard school of teasing and being laughed at as a child you’d see why!) and general one-up-manship.” Whatever its origins, Decca always took a perverse delight in stirring things up. “Oh dear,” she wrote a correspondent in 1988 with mock distress, “I can see I a) caused a flutter in the dove-cote, b) put the cat amongst the pigeons, or c) the shit in the electric fan, depending if you prefer 19th cent English, early 20th Cent English or modern American …”
Before she found her voice as an activist, social critic, and writer, Decca’s reaction to her stultifying circumstances was to dream of emancipation, beginning at the age of eleven when she sent ten shillings to Drummonds Branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland to establish what she and her “obedient servants” at the family’s bank both referred to as her “running away account.”
The social and political cyclones that swept through England in the 1920s and ‘30s ultimately took a heavy toll on the Mitford family. Yet, although big social and geopolitical issues were suddenly of immediate and urgent concern, the time-honored routines of the English aristocracy ground on. Decca respond
Decca leapt at the chance to elope to Spain with Romilly, who had already made a name for himself as a public school rebel and “underground” journalist, a book author, an emancipated minor, a left-wing functionary in London, and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War—all by the age of eighteen. The two soul mates, with a mix of rebellious hijinks and political high-mindedness, conducted what Decca called “a conspiracy of two against the world” in their four-and-a-half-year marriage before Romilly died on a bombing mission in World War II, leaving his wife well placed in Washington with their daughter, Constancia. The prominent New Dealers among whom she lived and worked were another powerful influence in her personal and political evolution.
In 1943, soon after the start of Decca’s second marriage, to radical labor attorney Robert Treuhaft, she realized one of the dreams of her childhood. Now settled with her new husband in San Francisco, she joined the Communist Party. She devoted most of the next fifteen years to the Party, primarily working with the Civil Rights Congress across San Francisco Bay in Oakland, where the family settled in the mid-1940s.
Decca confessed that it was rather uphill work “escaping from the private Mitford cosmic joke, originally fashioned by Nancy, into the real world and eventually into the earnest life of the Communist Party.” The organization for which she labored so single-mindedly was indeed earnest; it was also theoretical and ideological—Decca considered herself nominally a Stalinist at the time—but most of her party activities were far from rigid or abstract. She cared deeply for society’s victims, as individuals, not concepts, and tirelessly championed their rights. With her husband, for example, she defended a penniless, orphaned black “shoeshine boy” named Jerry Newson who was wrongly accused of murder, continuing to defend him for decades, long after his imprisonment would have ended most advocates’ involvement.
Yet, predictably, even during her Communist years, the Mitford in her periodically bubbled to the surface. She was constitutionally incapable of subordinating her humor to any group or ideology. She recalled being hauled before the Party’s Security Commission on charges of joking. When she was subpoenaed by the California Senate’s Un-American Activities Committee, she had the audience laughing so hard that the committee forgot to demand documents it had ordered her to produce. (She was subpoenaed also by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, which she listed in her résumé under “Honors, Awards & Prizes.”) And “Lifeitselfmanship,” her first published book—actually, a hand-duplicated and personally distributed booklet—was simultaneously a send-up of bureaucratic Communist Party rhetoric and a takeoff on her sister Nancy’s famed essay on U (upper-class) and non-U language. (Acting on the complex rationale of the emotions, Decca emulated her oldest sister and craved her approval as much as she resented her stinging sarcasm.)
Decca finally left the Party, not primarily over some issue of high principle but because it had become dull … boring. Rather like London’s debutante circuit.
When Decca was hounded by the FBI from a “real,” albeit menial, nonpolitical job, she was left with little occupational choice but to become a writer. At the age of forty-three, she published her first memoir, Daughters and Rebels (entitled Hons and Rebels in the U.K. and in the most recent American edition). As an author, with the public platform that came with it, Decca began to find her life’s purpose. She lived out in her new public role the themes that had dominated her earlier lives. That first commercial book was about her unusual upbringing, which had also been the starting point for her sister Nancy’s career as a novelist. Daughters and Rebels was written with the humor, the fearlessness, the directness, and the elegant writing style that characterized Decca’s later work. Her righteous outrage finally found a comfortable home, as did her irrepressible humor.
Decca didn’t make highfalutin claims for her writing or her life. She told her friend Sally Belfrage, “I don’t think I could ever take myself seriously enough to go grubbing about looking for my soul—that is, I couldn’t get interested in it, hence religion, psychiatry, consciousness-raising & the like are all totally beyond my ken.” She told another friend and collaborator, “I don’t strive for ‘substance, depth & scope’ as you put it—not that I don’t see the importance of these, but merely because I do better—or find it more natural for me—if I stick to specifics, finding out facts & presenting them without underlining for the reader conclusions they should be drawing, or global Moral Messages that I wish them to absorb.”
One might argue with her observation that she presented facts without underlining—the choice of facts she chose to present was sufficient underlining—but she certainly never stood back from her writing and pointed grandly to a ponderous significance that it didn’t possess. More typically, when she read that Evelyn Waugh had suggested that The American Way of Death lacked a “plainly stated attitude to death,” Decca wrote to her sister, a mutual friend, “… tell him of course I’m against it.”
Decca wrote of her life with Esmond Romilly, “We not only egged each other on to ever greater baiting and acts of outrage against the class we had left, but delighted in matching wits with the world generally; in fact, it was our way of life.” It was also Decca’s way of journalism.
In a sense she was the quintessential journalist, whether in newspapers, magazines, or books. She loved—compulsively—narrative, information, observations, the revealing cultural trivia on which journalism feeds. And she loved newspapers. She once expressed amazement that her beloved old-world cousin Ann Farrer Horne didn’t read newspapers: “I could hardly pry my eyes open in the a.m. were it not for the S.F. Chronicle clattering on the porch; although I admit most of it is not only v. boring but v. forgettable. Once ages ago, when I was about 30 & thought I might be dead soon (near-raped in a rather dismal creek …) I’m sorry to say that my Last Thoughts (as I thought they might be) were not so much for Bob & children as ‘I’ll never see tomorrow’s paper.’”
The subjects of some of Decca’s most outlandish and amusing letters would fly beneath the radar of most serious journalists—a folkloric remedy to discourage dog trespassing with male urine, for example, or the treatment of arthritis with potatoes—but the same eye for life’s little absurdities focused the world’s attention on funeral purveyors’ Fit-a-Fut Oxford with “soft, cushioned soles and warm, luxurious slipper comfort…true shoe smartness” for the corpse of a loved one. Cushioned soles! Perhaps living in two cultures helped Decca to become so exquisitely attuned to cultural nuances that escaped other commentators.
“I realize,” she wrote in a letter to a Communist admirer long after she had left the Party, “that often I get absolutely besotted by trivial subjects which haven’t got much to do with the class struggle, but I fear that is a fault of character.” Whether a fault of character or not, it was a key ingredient of her professional achievements, every bit as much as her ability—acquired in childhood and refined by the Communist Party—to understand issues of class and race and their relation to such cultural trivia.
In Decca’s letters we can also see in stark relief some of the other personal traits that informed and enriched her writing. She was, for example, a verbal clown, an inspired mimic. She dreamed at times of becoming a “character actress in [a] telly sit-com” (to which a friend responded, “But you ARE a character actress in a permanent sit-com”), and she recognized in her grandson Chaka Forman—now a professional actor—a kindred spirit. He is, she wrote, “an Original, a smashing clown & general free-thinker.” She delighted in tracing that impish part of her character (and her grandson’s) to a branch of her ancestry—“Stanley blood,” she called it, telling one correspondent it was “believed by many of the grown-ups to have been thoroughly bad blood & responsible for the aberrant strains that showed up in so many of us.”
