Decca, p.67
Decca, page 67
163. Armstrong was at that time the editor of Bantam Books, publisher of the paperback edition of Soledad Brother.
164. The rest of the letter—pages of detailed questions about Jackson’s literary and other influences, techniques, and goals—has been omitted here.
165. Murton was one of Decca’s key informants and the person who had most effectively publicized the prison conditions that led a judge to rule that the state of Arkansas was violating the “cruel and unusual punishment” standard of the U.S. Constitution.
166. One of Angela Davis’s attorneys (see next footnote).
167. Davis, a philosopher and former graduate student of radical political philosopher Herbert Marcuse at the University of California at San Diego, was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party. In 1970, she was fired as a philosophy lecturer at the University of California at Los Angeles after the FBI told the university’s Board of Regents she was a Communist. She was active in prison reform and was a defender of the Soledad Brothers and a friend of George Jackson. After Jackson’s brother Jonathan, a judge, and two prisoners were killed in a shootout during a failed escape-kidnap plot at the Marin County Courthouse, Davis was charged with providing the weapons and went underground. She was placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list and apprehended two months later, in August 1970, in New York. A defense committee marshaled international support on her behalf. She was acquitted of all charges at her trial in 1972 and went on to a career as a writer and professor.
168. The television and movie writer and producer best known as the creator and host of The Twilight Zone on television.
169. Magee, who had written Decca to comment on her prison article in the Atlantic Monthly, was the sole survivor of the three prisoners involved in Jonathan Jackson’s deadly courthouse escape attempt.
170. Benedict, a state prisoner at the time his correspondence with Decca began, had written to praise Decca’s Atlantic prison article and thank her for her efforts to expose prison conditions. He also said that her remedies, although correct in principle, would prove inadequate for meaningful prison reform, and that they were also politically unrealistic. He argued that thoroughgoing social reform was a prerequisite for prison reform.
171. In the last paragraph of the article, Decca wrote: “I believe the first essential step is to penetrate the closed doors behind which the authorities, from prison administrator to parole board, operate. The new access roads should be broad enough to accommodate the courts, legislators, the media, political activists who are spearheading demands for fundamental change—and that amorphous entity, the public, which bears ultimate responsibility.”
172. The indeterminate sentence—with the prisoner’s release conditioned on his or her progress in completing often contradictory or questionable programs or meeting vague standards to achieve release—was one of Decca’s main prison reform targets.
173. Macmillan, 1936.
174. American Correctional Association.
175. One of Decca’s favorite words. In a 1977 essay in the London Daily Mail (reprinted in the New York Times and later in Poison Penmanship), she wrote that “frenemy” (which she sometimes spelled “frienemy”) was “an incredibly useful word that should be in every dictionary, coined by one of my sisters when she was a small child to describe a rather dull little girl who lived near us.” Her sister and the neighbor girl, she said, were “inseparable companions, all the time disliking each other heartily.”
176. Joseph Spangler was at the time the administrative officer of the California Adult Authority, a nine-member board overseeing sentencing and parole.
177. That is, Marge Frantz.
178. At the time Robin Lamson was chief researcher for the California State Assembly Office of Research.
179. Raymond Procunier, director of the California Department of Corrections from 1967 to 1974.
180. Thorne was George Jackson’s attorney.
181. In another discussion on a related issue, Decca said she asked Procunier “why, in view of [a state law] requiring authorities to allow inmates to subscribe to all mags. etc that go through the posts except obscene & inciting-to-violence stuff, San Quentin allows Playboy and not Ramparts? He answered, ‘I guess the warden doesn’t like Ramparts.’”
182. The day George Jackson was killed in the prison yard at San Quentin in what authorities said was an attempted escape. He was armed with an automatic pistol that was said to have been smuggled in to him.
183. Indeterminate.
184. Politician and diplomat Sargent Shriver Jr. is married to Eunice Kennedy, sister of John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy.
185. Cerf had died August 27 at the age of seventy-three.
186. Decca had pronounced herself “quite proud” when the Famous Writers School was suspended from trading on the stock exchange, which an article in the Wall Street Journal attributed to her article. Although the school filed for bankruptcy, Decca reported in Poison Penmanship “a sad addendum: the Famous Writers School is creeping back,” with some of the same features as the organization she had done so much to torpedo.
187. In her reply, Nancy Mitford confirmed that Cerf had indeed suggested the title of her novel.
188. Nancy Mitford had written that she had a great respect for their mother and enjoyed her company, “but I never loved her, for the evident reason that she never loved me.” The reminiscences in this and subsequent letters were occasioned by Nancy Mitford’s intention to write her memoirs. Decca later wrote that her great regret during Nancy Mitford’s terminal illness was that she didn’t have the strength to write the memoir.
189. Lady Blanche Hozier, mother of Nellie Romilly.
190. Nancy Mitford replied, “I think I was telling lies if I said Muv wanted to marry me off…. I think I was probably in a blind temper about something else & talked wildly.”
191. An American who had rented the family’s Swinbrook cottage before the war.
192. Probably Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America, published in 1971 by Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich.
193. The characterization of Decca was their sister Diana Mosley’s, as reported by Nancy Mitford.
194. Editor, novelist, screenwriter, and biographer Merle Miller came out of the closet with a 1971 New York Times Magazine article entitled “What It Means to Be a Homosexual.” His was one of the earliest public declarations of homosexuality by a prominent American. The article was expanded and published as a book, On Being Different (Random House), later that year.
195. A word Decca had used to describe Lady Redesdale in her letter of October 13.
196. James Lees-Milne, architectural preservationist, socialite, and author especially noted for his voluminous diaries, was a longtime Mitford family intimate who had been a passionate friend of Tom Mitford’s at Eton. He was lifelong friends with most of the sisters and an admirer of Lady Redesdale. His tribute in The Times of May 28, 1963, portrayed Lady Redesdale as “a woman very much out of the common,” as the author said would be expected by her unconventional upbringing, “spent mostly at sea on her father’s yacht.”
197. The letter described Lady Redesdale’s “patrician reserve” as well as her perceptiveness—“surprised by nothing and amused by practically everything”—adding, “Nothing however is further from the truth than the popular conception of her, gleaned from Hons and Rebels, as a philistine mother with hidebound social standards.”
198. Nancy Mitford had heard from someone who liked what Decca and she had written in the Observer, but Nancy could not recall writing anything for the paper and asked Decca for details.
199. This story has been retold in many ways. In her most complete account, Decca wrote in A Fine Old Conflict that a writer from the Observer phoned her for an article on the subject of sisters. As Decca told the story there, “… she had already spoken to Nancy in Versailles, who had said, ‘Sisters stand between one and life’s cruel circumstances.’ I was startled into saying that to me, sisters—and especially Nancy—were life’s cruel circumstances, a remark that did not find favor with her when it appeared in print.”
200. O’Sullivan, at the time assistant professor in the Department of History at Florida Atlantic University, had written Decca to say he was doing research for a biography of General Lewis B. Hershey. He was inquiring, he wrote, about “the statement [in The Trial of Dr. Spock] that the trial was designed in part to appease Hershey” and requested further information.
201. A San Francisco criminologist and professor, author of The Felon (Prentice-Hall, 1970) and, a number of years earlier, a prisoner himself.
202. A friend and colleague of Decca’s, Fay Stender was chief counsel for the Prison Law Project in Oakland and a passionately committed and controversial advocate for prisoners. She was closely involved with the Black Panther Party and for a time represented Huey Newton and George Jackson, whose book, Soledad Brother, she helped to edit and bring to publication.
203. See November 24, 1989, letter to Laura Shame Cunningham.
204. A state mental hospital.
205. The discussion had been going on since at least a year and a half earlier, when the National Lawyers Guild—of which Walker was then chair—voted to admit legal workers to membership, following a heated controversy.
206. The United Federal Workers union in which both Walker and Decca had been active in the 1940s.
207. Midway through her book, Decca learned of abusive medical and pharmacological experiments on California prisoners. In a progress report to editor Robert Gottlieb, she said the information was “rather hot stuff, and nobody—including all my prison knowledgeables in the Dept. of Criminology and the state legislature, and the [Ralph] Nader drug busters—seems to know beans about it.” Decca developed her newfound information into an article for the Atlantic Monthly and a chapter of her book entitled “Cheaper than Chimpanzees.” She hoped to use the Atlantic article to elicit new tips on other instances of medical experimentation on prisoners.
208. The daughter of Doris Brin Walker and Mason Roberson.
209. The U.S. government department that, at the time, was named Health, Education and Welfare.
210. The California Medical Facility at Vacaville, a state prison.
211. The book was published by Alfred A. Knopf with that title. Decca once wrote that “titles should, in my view, be dead clear & recognizable to any fool … totally DESCRIPTIVE” and that Kind and Usual Punishment was in her view “hopeless, far too murky—title in England was changed to The American Prison Business which it shld have been called here, too.”
212. The four-day uprising in September 1971 at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York, which resulted in more than forty killed, including eleven hostages, focused unprecedented national attention on prison conditions.
213. The West Coast Communist was a longtime editor of People’s World who left the Party in 1969, although he was disaffected with many of its policies long before that.
214. Bettina Aptheker and her then husband, Jack Kurzweil.
215. The black prisoner whose cause Decca had championed back in the ‘50s (see September 16, 1953, letter to Lady Redesdale).
216. Walker and Treuhaft’s partner David Nawi.
217. Drucilla Ramey, another attorney in the office.
218. Probably a reference to Jerry Garchik, at the time an attorney in the office.
VII
FINE CONFLICTS
Constancia Romilly in 1980 with her family, husband Terry Weber and (from left) son James Forman, stepson Ben Weber, and son Chaka Forman.
Decca with son Benjamin in 1980.
In 1964, not long after publication of The American Way of Death, when Decca was back on her family’s island in the Hebrides for the first time since her mother’s death, she had written to a friend that “Inch K. is redolent of death (don’t tell the prospective buyers, if any!). It’s so queer to be here without Muv.” She described the trove of old letters she had discovered there—“lots of mine about the birth of Nicky and so on, and various yellowing telegrams from various wars announcing the deaths of various ones. I do long to be back in un-ghost-ridden Calif. Except that the whole of America sounds pretty ghost-ridden, with potential ghosts, that is, what with Goldwater and the dear old South and Harlem.” And she added:
I’m trying to think a bit, while here. … One thing I’ve thought of is… to settle seriously to My Life and Red Times, or, It’s A Fine Old Conflict…. I would like a few years …to do something that might be a tiny bit useful before croaking time rolls round. As I said, Inch K. is redolent of croaking.
Beginning even before publication of her first memoir and continuing through the 1960s and much of the 1970s, A Fine Old Conflict was always on Decca’s writing agenda. She wanted to “set down some personal reminiscences of the Party, and in doing so to try to exorcise a destructive poltergeist that kept knocking about in the furniture of American politics: the Communist conspiracy, or Red Menace …”
Memoirs can be elegiac. Not Decca’s. Hers were as high-spirited and sometimes combative as her life itself. The title of her second memoir—conceived in 1960 and finally published in 1977—was based on a childhood mishearing of “The Internationale,” the Communist anthem: “’Tis the final conflict.” It does not seem surprising, at any stage of her life, that Decca would hear “fine old conflict” when “final conflict” was intended. She reveled in the joie de combat, and when conflict didn’t find her, which it often did, she found it, as if by instinct. She meant the title A Fine Old Conflict as a literal description of her Communist years, saying, “to me it was, and ever shall be.”
While her second memoir was “cooking,” Decca periodically found herself enmeshed in fine new conflicts. Some she litigated—a favorite pastime; almost, at times, a sport—and others she transformed, like a literary alchemist, into brilliant magazine vignettes of petty bureaucracy and shabby commercial arro gance. Not infrequently, she took, or at least explored, both routes simultaneously. Not all of the conflicts she wrote about were worthy of the effort she put into them—or the national attention they generally received after her reputation was firmly established—but most of them seemed to illuminate, in personalized, anecdotal fashion, characteristic vagaries of American (or sometimes British) life.
Through much of the mid and late 1970s, however, Decca was simultaneously drawn back into her contentious, “ghost-ridden” family in England. Although she did not intentionally seek out conflict with her sisters, her presence and prominence were often the catalysts that turned mundane slights into epic battles. The famed English sisters’ fragile but decorous facade papered over the family’s notorious political history, but the facade seemed to crumble whenever the blunt, leftist American sister barged back onto the scene. Decca became embroiled in a number of prolonged spats with her sisters during this period. Although the issues in contention were as trivial as a supposedly lost (or stolen) scrapbook, their roots often stretched deep into the past—the Nazi past.
The oldest Mitford sister, Nancy, died in 1973. Within a few years, the British fascination with the family she had done so much to publicize in her satirical novels became almost a national craze, spurred on by a series of books, documentaries, articles, and appearances—even, in 1981, a musical—by and about the six sisters. In the mid-1970s, the Evening Standard described the various phenomena as “the Mitford Industry.” It was a term Decca adopted with relish, beginning with a 1976 letter to sister Deborah, the Duchess of Devonshire, in which she said she was looking forward to “the next episode in the Mitford Industry” on an upcoming visit to England. She repeated the term often over the years, with a number of abbreviations and variations, such as “the Mit. Ind,” and once wrote the duchess: “I wonder if there will be Mitford T-shirts & comic books soon? If so, how do we split the profits?”;
Two years after Nancy’s death, Harold Acton published his Memoir of Nancy Mitford, written with assistance from Nancy’s sisters—but not Decca, who felt she had been “excluded” by Deborah and Pamela.
The next year, 1976, saw the publication of Unity Mitford: A Quest, by David Pryce-Jones, who drew inspiration and some minor assistance from Decca, much to the resentment of the other surviving sisters, who had no wish to remind the British public of Unity Mitford’s Nazi fanaticism and flagrant anti-Semitism. “There is another factor at work here in this recent fracas,” Decca wrote at the time; “what they really loathe today is not so much newspaper attention per se as the rattling of unfortunate skeletons such as the Mosleys’ role in the thirties, and my parents’ Nazi leanings.”
Also in 1976, sisterly hostilities broke out over the duchess’s missing scrap-book, with accusations that Decca had taken it. What she called “the great Scrapbook Fracas” preoccupied Decca for years, as is amply reflected in her let ters. After she and the duchess re-established cordial relations, Decca still refused to “set foot in her territory,” the scene of the supposed scrapbook theft. “So we are on speakers (and meeters) but NOT at her house.”
In 1977 both Decca and Diana published memoirs. Although Decca’s A Fine Old Conflict dealt primarily with her years as an American Communist, her English sisters took offense at several sections, including a recapitulation of her earlier life that set the stage for her account of the Communist years. Decca was despairing at the unexpected reaction. “Perhaps,” she wrote to one friend, “it’s pointless to even hope to one day make it up with Debo as she clearly hates my book, takes everything in it amiss (whilst adoring the D. Mosley product!). Nevertheless I am fully, chronically sad about it all.”
Diana’s unrepentant memoir, A Life of Contrasts, like Decca’s, received widespread press and public attention. Further roiling the waters was a BBC documentary on Decca, The Honourable Rebel, timed to coincide with release of her memoir. The documentary contained references to a 1955 episode that deeply offended the Duchess of Devonshire, though the sisters had clearly read the episode differently: Decca as a comment on Robert Treuhaft’s gauche response to upper-class manners at the Devonshires’ house; Deborah as ridicule of those manners. Preparation of a subsequent documentary, a profile of sister Nancy in 1980 for which the surviving sisters were interviewed, only intensified the distrust as they wrestled for “artistic control”—in effect, control over references to Nazi-era memories.
