Decca, p.29
Decca, page 29
131. This is the first of many references in Decca’s letters to a small-scale scam the Treuhafts—and doubtless many others—played surreptitiously during the days of expensive long-distance phone calls, to avoid charges. Calls were placed through the operator, person to person, for people with elaborately conceived names that included a message, as in this example. The calls were refused on the receiving end with word that the person called was not available. Since the call didn’t get through to the fictitious intended person, there were no charges. Decca wrote about the ploy in a 1961 Life magazine article.
132. Students and workers had taken to the streets of Budapest on October 23 to protest food shortages and Russian control. After newly appointed Prime Minister Imre Nagy abolished the one-party system and announced that Hungary would withdraw from the Warsaw Pact, infantry units and thousands of Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest on November 4. Soviet MiG fighters bombed the city, and artillery fired on it. There was fierce resistance, but by the date this letter was written, the rebellion was suppressed, with about 30,000 killed in Budapest alone. Hundreds of thousands escaped to the West.
133. In February 1956, Decca had written an article for People’s World on their travels in Hungary in 1955. Entitled “We Visited Socialism,” it was a sunny account of the peaceful, friendly, industrious, and increasingly prosperous country the Treuhafts observed. Decca wrote a long account of their “exhilarating” trip in A Fine Old Conflict, where, in retrospect, she characterized her People’s World article as “rather tedious.” In the memoir, she described two encounters in Hungary that might have alerted them to the widespread disaffection in the country. Although she largely dismissed the incidents at the time, she said she included them in her People’s World manuscript, where they were removed by a copy editor for “reasons of space.”
134. The confusion and ambivalence Decca expressed here was felt by other American Communists, many of whom left the Party after the Hungarian uprising. Decca and her husband remained members for another two years.
135. Decca’s artist friend Pele de Lappe had illustrated the booklet.
136. Robert Treuhaft’s law firm.
137. That is, the possibilities of purchasing a television.
138. In a letter to her mother, Decca wrote that Nancy Mitford had “sent me the cutting about the anti-American interview.” She added—describing this letter to Nancy—“I wrote back, all in American.”
139. Lucy Durr married Sheldon Hackney, who became a historian, author, and educator-administrator, serving five years as president of Tulane University and twelve as president of the University of Pennsylvania. He was also chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Decca’s presence at the wedding provoked a crisis in the Durr family; see April 7, 1977, letter to Ring and Frances Lardner.
140. Nancy Mitford’s odd and parsimonious mail habits were a frequent refrain in Decca’s letters. Nancy had told Decca that she didn’t use airmail because she considered it “so middle class,” prompting Decca to refer to airmail as “non-U mail.” Nancy also told her sister that it was too much trouble and expense to purchase a machine to weigh airmail letters.
141. Marge Frantz is the daughter of Virginia Durr’s dear friends and southern political colleagues, Joe and Esther Gelders, and was herself an ally in Durr’s early civil rights work. She remained a lifelong friend of Durr’s. Frantz initially met Decca at the Durrs’ Alexandria home in 1941—a meeting Decca later said she didn’t recall—and became one of her closest friends soon after moving to Berkeley, California, from the South in 1950 with her husband, civil rights attorney Laurent Frantz. Marge Frantz and Decca, in their Communist Party days in the early ‘50s, had adjoining offices, Frantz with the Independent Progressive Party and Decca with the Civil Rights Congress. After leaving the Party, Frantz returned to college and became a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
142. Virginia Durr’s namesake, known to Decca when she was living with the family as Baby Sister, was by now called Tilla.
143. Constancia Romilly had gone to Mexico to study during the summer.
144. Bert Edises.
145. Judy Glasser, wife at the time of Abe Glasser, who had been Robert Treuhaft’s best friend and housemate during his OPA days in Washington. Judy Glasser would become better known as Judy Viorst after she married Milton Viorst.
146. Decca subsequently wrote her mother that she had bought her a “non-shorty” nightgown, so “be careful not to trip and break your neck, or the sales lady will say I told you so.”
147. This is one of the earliest allusions in Decca’s letters to her memoir-in-the-making.
148. The article about the suspected rape-torturer was reprinted more than twenty years later in Decca’s collection Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979). In the anthology, Decca commented, “Looking back, I realize that publication of this slim effort was for me a turning point. It gave me encouragement to continue struggling with my book despite rebuffs—it made me, for the first time, begin to think of myself as a ‘writer.’”
149. The pension for Esmond Romilly’s service in the Royal Canadian Air Force.
150. As it turned out, Constancia’s trip was canceled for unrelated reasons.
151. Adam Lapin and his wife, Eva, were close friends of the Treuhafts who moved to San Francisco from New York in the 1950s. Editor of the Daily Worker, then of People’s World, Adam Lapin was underground for years and, following his newspaper days, wrote travel books under a pseudonym. After his death, Eva, a social worker and, later, an expert on Charles Dickens, married Bill Maas. The Lapin children, Nora and Mark, grew up with the Treuhaft children.
152. Decca’s father had died two days earlier at the ancestral Redesdale Cottage in Northumberland, where he had retreated years earlier with a housekeeper who had been the assistant parlormaid at the family’s London home.
153. In a previous letter, Decca had floated the idea of selling or renting Inch Kenneth with ads in American publications as well as British.
154. Constancia Romilly was to start at Sarah Lawrence College in the fall.
155. The Good Body, which needed little aid from doctors or other modern advances, was one of Lady Redesdale’s refrains when Decca was growing up. In adherence to her principles and “in defiance of the law,” Decca wrote in Daughters and Rebels, Lady Redesdale “refused to allow any of us to be vaccinated (‘pumping disgusting dead germs into the Good Body!’).”
156. Constancia Romilly and her two friends.
157. A playful allusion to earnest Communist Party rhetoric of the type Decca satirized in “Lifeitselfmanship.”
158. Hotel Belmar.
159. A San Francisco restaurant with a Polynesian theme.
160. People’s World.
161. Her father’s will, recently probated, as Decca wrote in a later letter, “had ‘Except Jessica’ after each clause” in his bequests. She told newspaper reporters, who continued calling for days afterward, that “I certainly wasn’t expecting to be left anything & couldn’t see why it was considered such staggering ‘news.’” In 1995, Decca wrote that “… once having run [away], [I] never, ever asked for or received any dough from the family I think everyone has the right to leave his money as he wishes.”
162. Decca had written a “memo” to her husband and signed it “Miss L. Aneos,” so “Lord Aneous” would refer to her father.
163. Decca, like her husband a great Bertolt Brecht fan, quoted elsewhere from The Threepenny Opera, saying, “In the words of the 3d Opera, ‘Let the prisoner forthwith be freed! And given a castle in Mucking on the Creek, and ten thousand pounds a year till the day of his death.’”
164. Jean Vandever had been chair of the East Bay CRC chapter, which had apparently folded by this date. One of Vandever’s functions had been raising funds, which may explain the reference to a “J.V. quota.”
165. Constancia Romilly had just arrived to begin her studies at Sarah Lawrence College.
166. Barthold Fles was Decca’s first literary agent. She had been introduced to him by Doris Brin Walker’s husband, Mason Robeson. Fles’s appeal included his continued representation of blacklisted screenwriters whose work was carried by small, leftist publishing houses during the years of anti-Red hysteria.
167. For more detail, see letter of May 1985 to Philip Kerby, the editor of Frontier.
168. Decca’s first indication of publishing interest was a nibble from Kamb, who asked to see an outline and the two opening chapters.
169. A Berkeley librarian, writer, and editor who had previously worked at the Daily Worker in New York. Bacon was very helpful to Decca in her early days as a would-be author.
170. The plight of John William (Bill) and Sylvia Powell and their colleague Julian Schuman was a concern of Decca’s for years. The three were grilled by Red-hunting congressional committees after they returned from China, where Bill Powell had edited and his wife and associate had assisted in producing a Shanghai-based English-language political journal called China Weekly Review. Among its purported offenses, the publication had reported on U.S. biological warfare during the Korean War. The three were indicted on sedition charges in San Francisco in 1956. The Treuhafts’ good friend Doris Brin Walker was their lead counsel.
171. Before Frontier magazine purchased “St. Peter, Don’t You Call Me,” the second piece she had published in a mainstream publication, it had been rejected by half a dozen prominent national magazines. The article that Decca here describes as “no great shakes,” she later said, “proved to be virtually an outline” for her breakout best-seller The American Way of Death. Frontier paid her $40 for the article.
172. The Bay Area Funeral Society.
173. Pasternak’s novel about the Russian revolution and its aftermath had been published abroad the previous year—becoming an international sensation—after the Soviet Union denounced the book, banned its publication, and ordered all copies of the manuscript destroyed. The Soviet government made Pasternak decline the Nobel Prize he was awarded in 1958.
174. “Goodbye my dear girl, I think of you often, and live only to see you. (Is that OK? I forget how to conjugate the verb ‘to live.’)”
175. Translated roughly from fractured Spanish: “Goodbye. How are you? (Or should I use the familiar form of the word you?) Do you work on a warship? Or in school?”; The translation was part of a running joke for Decca, who had studied Spanish using records produced by the army.
176. An old friend of the Treuhafts who was also active in the Communist Party and the Berkeley Co-op.
177. The Treuhafts’ good friend Ephraim Kahn was a doctor.
178. Although Treuhaft and his partner Bert Edises had prevailed in court and the murder charges were dropped, Newson remained in prison for thirteen years, ostensibly for an unrelated robbery but actually because he wouldn’t accept responsibility before the parole board for the murders for which he was exonerated. The Treuhafts continued to defend him. See letter of January 31, 1960, to Aranka Treuhaft.
179. Terry Francois was a San Francisco attorney who had assisted in Newson’s case. He was also a civil rights leader and public official who switched parties and endorsed San Francisco Democrat Edmund G. (Pat) Brown for governor of California. Brown was inaugurated a week before this letter was written, which may explain Decca’s hope for political influence. Brown had soundly defeated conservative Republican Senator William Knowland, who was an ally of District Attorney J. Frank Coakley, Newson’s prosecutor.
180. The Powells’ sedition trial ended in a mistrial within days after some of the government’s evidence was disallowed. With the sedition indictment still hanging over the Powells’ heads, the U.S. attorney then set about trying to gather enough evidence for a new indictment for treason. Although the government requested that the defendants be imprisoned without bail pending the new indictment, the judge disallowed the request and continued the existing bail.
181. Decca worked for years to break restrictive racial covenants and other discriminatory practices in real estate transactions, often fronting for black would-be buyers who would otherwise have been denied the right to purchase homes.
182. Name omitted by editor.
183. Constancia had warned her parents that her semester grades would likely be disappointing, leading her mother to reassure her that that was to be expected in times of indecision such as Constancia went through while considering a transfer. “Only vegetables and flibbertigibbets go through life with no problems or painful doubts about the future,” Decca wrote, and “as you are unfortunately neither, I guess you can expect a few ups and downs.”
184. The Treuhafts’ housekeeper.
IV
REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST
With Lady Redesdale on Inch Kenneth in May 1959.
Decca with her sister Nancy during a visit to Paris in the 1960s.
Still no sale,” Decca wrote to a friend in early 1959, speaking of the memoir she’d been writing and reworking for several years. “I’m going to take it to England as I think there would be more of a chance to sell it there.” For one thing, she was not “tagged” as a subversive there—a label that she thought made her too hot to handle for the “timorous” American publishing industry in the late 1950s. In addition, much of the book focused on her upbringing in England. Her sister’s best-selling novels and the right-wing politics of her parents and two of her sisters had helped to keep the klieg lights on the family there, so it was reasonable to assume that the book might find a more enthusiastic reception in that country. But after numerous rejections from American publishers, Decca was unprepared for the sale of her memoir to both American and British publishers within days of her arrival.
It was her second trip back to England from America, and this time she felt more “at home.” With this visit and the book she brought back with her, Decca began to put together the parts of her life she had strained to keep separated during her intensely political Communist years: her aristocratic past in England and her radical present in the United States; her English and American friends and her family. Over time, without formal acknowledgment, she seemed slowly to become almost binational and even purchased her family’s remote island in the Hebrides where her mother was living—a long, long way from Oakland, Calif.
Decca’s search for her public identity as a writer was reflected in her changing byline. On the cover of “Lifeitselfmanship” in 1956, the author was identified as Decca Treuhaft, the name by which most people knew her in Oakland. In her Nation article “Trial by Headline” in 1957, “Mitford” crept in as a middle initial: Decca M. Treuhaft. In “St. Peter, Don’t You Call Me,” in 1958, she was again Decca Treuhaft. The author of Daughters and Rebels in 1960 was Jessica Mitford, the name by which she was known in English headlines (after “Peer’s Daughter” lost its instant recognition). Still, Daughters and Rebels was also the only one of her commercially published books to be copyrighted by Jessica Treuhaft, not Jessica Mitford. Less than a year later, she wrote an article for The Nation in which she covered all bases; the byline was Jessica Mitford Treuhaft. But the popularity of her first book soon cemented her public identity. Decca Treuhaft, Communist housewife, became Jessica Mitford, author, in both Britain and the United States.
As Decca’s life expanded geographically and professionally, her correspondence assumed a greater importance. When in England or on the authors’ public-speaking circuit, she shared every detail of her adventures with family and friends back home; when at home, she kept up with a growing circle of friends and associates in both countries. Her higher profile also put her back in touch with old friends, English and American, such as Katharine and Philip Graham in Washington. Letter-writing was the lifeline that held her many worlds together. She documented more of her thoughts and activities. It was during this period that many of her letters began doing double and triple duty, as chatty updates on her activities, as masterful exercises in storytelling, and as early drafts for her professional writing. She seemed to recognize the changing role of her correspondence as she not only started to carbon-copy most of her letters but took to traveling with a portable typewriter and carbon paper.
Because the story of Decca’s emergence and development as an author and public figure were reported in great detail in her letters, with fewer gaps in the narrative than in previous years, there is less need to fill in missing biographical pieces here. Nevertheless, a few broad-brush observations and missing details may help.
It’s possible that Daughters and Rebels, or Hons and Rebels to use its British (and most recent American) title, could only have been written with the perspective of an emigrée, but its publication and her own return to Britain immediately enmeshed Decca once again in the Mitfords’ complex family dynamics—the mix of relationships, memories, and legends that she recounted in her book. She followed intensely every nuance of her family’s reaction to the writing and publication of the book. They, in turn, had their say both publicly and among themselves. The family’s reactions were predominantly negative, reflecting both political differences and the confused response to her re-entry into their lives. According to sister Nancy, Diana, in particular, was “outraged for my mother … & of course minds being portrayed as a dumb society beauty!!”
The apolitical Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire and first lady of the grand ducal estate, has carried a generous selection of Mitford books in Chatsworth’s public gift shop—but none of Decca’s. Decca once recounted the story of a friend who visited Chatsworth and mentioned that she knew the duchess’s sister; the guide replied, “We don’t mention that side of the family.” In relaying these apparent slights, which can be traced back to the reaction to her memoirs, Decca said, “I just thought that rather amusing, didn’t at all interfere with my friendship with Debo.”
