Peter Y. Sussman, editor
DECCA
The letters of Jessica Mitford
768pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £25.
978 0 297 60745 8
"It is fearfully hard for me to write about somebody I really like”, Jessica Mitford once told Julie Andrews, whose profile she had been commissioned to write. “I’m much better at what you might call combative writing – that is, sticking in the old knife.” Confrontation fuelled Mitford’s life; and it is this spirit of attack combined with a desire to confront injustice in all its forms, as well as hypocrisy, cant, self-importance and greed, that fills her letters, from those written as a young woman to her last ones, sent shortly before her death in 1996. Decca, a collection of her letters that spans sixty years, is not only a portrait of an intrepid, humorous and affectionate woman, but a look at class and politics through the eyes of someone to whom good writing mattered and intimacy mattered even more.
Decca – the name Jessica Mitford was always known by – was the second youngest child of Lord and Lady Redesdale; she grew up in what she later described as suffocating upper-class boredom, remembering the long tedious country walks as prompting “inner tears of bitterness” at the “general futility of that life”. The Redesdale family motto was “God careth for us”. Not allowed to go to school, she craved learning and knowledge. And as her sisters moved rapidly to the political Right – Unity towards Hitler, Diana towards Sir Oswald Mosley, whom she married in Joseph Goebbels’s house in Berlin – so Decca turned to the Left, eloping at seventeen with Esmond Romilly, a nephew of Winston Churchill, to the Spanish Civil War. Decca would not see her mother again for ten years, and her father disinherited her. For Unity, her favourite sister – left damaged by a suicide attempt – she retained a troubled affection, as she did for three of her sisters, Nancy, the writer, Debo, who married the Duke of Devonshire, and Pam, the only one who seems to have created no stir. Decca never forgave Diana for her marriage to Mosley, and when the couple were released from prison she wrote to her mother that she was “furious”.
Escaping Europe and her increasingly Fascist family, Decca settled with Esmond in America, and when war broke out, Esmond joined the Air Force in Canada. In 1941, his plane went down over the North Sea. Decca was now alone with a small baby – a first baby, Julia, having died of measles – but for many months she continued to believe that her husband had been saved. “I’m absolutely certain Esmond is all right”, she wrote to her mother, three months after he was reported missing; “at first I kept expecting every day to hear from him, but now I realise it may be a very long time.”
Returning to England was not an option; Decca became an American citizen, to avoid, as she said, deportation as an “alien subversive”. She soon met and married a radical labour lawyer, Robert Treuhaft, with whom she had three children and a long and happy marriage. They wrote to each other daily, when apart, long, close letters about work, their causes, the children. They moved to Oakland in California, and Decca embarked on fifteen years’ work with the American Communist Party and a lifelong engagement with Civil Rights. Another tragedy followed: her elder son, Nicholas, was killed when a bus ran into his bicycle. For a while there were no letters.
It was almost chance that led to her writing career. Hounded out of a job by the McCarthy- era FBI, she wrote Hons and Rebels an account of her childhood: it became an instant success on its publication in 1960. Most of the Mitford sisters, whether as fact or fiction, would sooner or later write about their peculiar upbringing, with its nicknames, its private jokes and private language; later, too, would come a spate of biographies and memoirs and even a musical, The Mitford Girls. By the 1980s and 90s, the personal life of the family had become an industry. “Bob thinks that the ‘I hate the Mitfords’ book might go down well here”, she wrote to a friend, “followed in the US by ‘100 ways to kill a Mitford’.”
After Hons and Rebels came an attack on American funeral practices, The American Way of Death, which was to change not only Decca’s personal fortunes – it spent six months on the New York Times bestseller list – but the unscrupulous, venal way in which funerals were often conducted across America. It was, she wrote to the literary agent Candida Donadio, “a practical guide and a handbook about how to beat the funeral racket”. (Told that Cyril Connolly had complained that it lacked a “plainly stated attitude to death”, she replied: “Tell him of course I’m against it”.) This was the perfect subject for a writer who loved humour and the absurdity of cultural nuances, who revelled in indignation and ridicule and who hated sentimentality and profiteering; and it was social commentary at its best, much of it aired in these letters, many of them full of the details of causes won or lost. But it was not a polemic, Decca always insisting that she was above all a reporter, who preferred to gather and present facts and leave it to readers to reach their own conclusions. After this came books, articles, talks and television programmes on a wide variety of subjects, as well as a book on the American prison service (which she suggested calling “Cons and Rebels”). She was still writing furiously at the time of her death from cancer. She treated her illness as she had treated the rest of her life, with courage and many jokes. “DO come to my funeral”, she wrote to the Duchess of Devonshire, “about 9 months or a year off I’ll let you know as plans progress.”
Decca was a natural letter writer. Born at a time when it was usual to spend part of every day writing letters, into a family for whom letters were a crucial means of communication, she wrote constantly: to her many friends, like Virginia and Clifford Durr (passionate civil libertarians from Atlanta) or Steve Murdoch (the Political Editor of the Communist Party paper), to her husband and children, whenever she was apart from them; to strangers who wrote to her; and to her editor, Robert Gottlieb. Her letters, in which memories of the past and particularly her childhood returned again and again, are direct, full of energy and laughter. They pursue feuds, especially with her sisters, from whom, despite their differences, she never disengaged herself. For someone who once wrote that she never felt “let down” by anyone in her family, “for I expected nothing and got nothing”, she remained obsessively entangled with her past. For months, even years, she was what she called on “non speaks and non meets” with one or other of her sisters. Forthright, determinedly honest, she was nevertheless too passionate to be chilling. To Maya Angelou, a good friend with whom she had a falling-out, Decca wrote: “For me, true friendship does include being able to discuss differences of opinion”. Nothing, she said, was too sacred “for airing – or indeed slogging out. A wee bit of hammer-and-tongsville, all cards on the table etc can be a splash of salt, just makes life more interesting, & friendships more enduring”.
This collection of letters, edited by Peter Y. Sussman, is much too long: it would have benefited both from cutting and from tighter editing. But it is impossible not to reach the end without great admiration – for a life so generously and humorously led, in which injustice and causes really mattered, and in which happiness, love and friendship played such an enormous part.
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Caroline Moorehead has written biographies of Martha Gellhorn, 2003, Iris Origo, 2000, and Bertrand Russell, 1992.
