Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Decca's Story, In Her Own Words, November 14, 2006
Jessica Mitford was the epitome of paradox. Daughter of a British Lord, she was brought up at a level of privilege few can imagine today. As a teenager she outrebelled everyone in her highly talented and eccentric family by becoming a dedicated Communist. She then ran away from home with her second cousin and fellow left winger, married him in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, and eventually wound up in the United States in the middle of World War II, widowed with a young daughter. She married again, this time to a leftwing California lawyer, and spent the remainder of her long life as a scourge of Fascism, Conservatism, and anything petty, mean, or small minded. Eventually she abandoned the Communist Party as ineffectual, and she is probably better known today for her muckraking exposes of abuses in everything from funerals to prisons to Elizabeth Arden salons and (ironically) for being a member of the fabulous Mitford family, sister to Nancy the novelist, Pam the farmer, Deborah the Duchess, and Diana and Unity the unrepentant Nazis.
Jessica, or Decca as she was known to friends and family, had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances (many well known today), and she communicated with them in hundreds of fascinating letters which have now been collected here. Those who have read her memoirs Daughters and Rebels and A Fine Old Conflict, or her many muckraking works like The American Way of Death know that her wit was sharp and her insights remarkable. These letters are as screamingly funny and profoundly moving as any of her other writings.
Peter Sussman, the editor of the letters, had an enormously difficult task since Decca and her family and friends customarily used a vast array of nicknames and throwaway references in their correspondence. To make things even worse, Decca and her sisters had their own private language: Boudledidge, which was often interspersed with English freely through their letters to each other. Sussman has done a magnificent job of deciphering and interpreting these Mitfordisms and other obscurities. Nearly every page has footnotes providing insights and definitions. These do not distract the reader but rather amplify the enjoyment.
I have read and enjoyed nearly everything Jessica Mitford wrote, and she is one of the people I would most dearly love to have met. Although I can't have that pleasure in this lifetime, I can read these letters and hear her still (after more than fifty years residence in America) elegant upper class British voice rippling with laughter as she identifies and mocks yet another absurdity.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Muckraking for Fun and Profit, January 24, 2007
Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking was the book that made me a Jessica Mitford fan. The articles in it combined journalism with humor and an occasional hint of outrage. Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford, contains little journalism, more than occasional outrage, and humor throughout. Mitford knew just about everyone, and she was friends (or at least on corresponding terms) with almost everyone she knew. She wrote often and at length. And apparently everyone she knew kept her letters. Lucky for us.
It's risky to take someone's memoirs or letters too seriously. After all, the memory is notoriously unreliable and the person writing the memoirs or letters is hardly a disinterested party. They can forget things that were embarrassing or exaggerate things that make them look good. Still, a sort of truth emerges. In Mitford's case, it is of someone who grew up in privileged circumstances, developed strong political views early in life, suffered great personal losses, and never lost her sense of humor, or of outrage. She had no formal schooling, and according to Mitford, once her mother taught the Mitford sisters to read, that was the end of their informal schooling as well. In spite of that, Mitford became, as she approached forty years of age, a writer, then a journalist, and famously, a muckraker. Imagine her amusement and the thrill of being paid to teach muckraking classes at Yale when she had never been to school in her life.
She had more than her share of sadness: a sister committed suicide, she had a falling out with another sister over that sister's support of Hitler, she lost two children, her first husband died during World War II, leaving her a widow with a small child, her grown son suffered from depression for several years, and finally, she was diagnosed with cancer and given only months to live. Sounds like a sad life, but that's not what the letters reveal. It seems she didn't write about the saddest episodes in her life - she even admitted in later years that she left them out of her autobiographies, because she couldn't bear to write about them.
These letters contain the expected: Mitford's battles against racism and war, her emergence as a published author, the ups and downs of her family relationships. There is also the unexpected: the story of her spat with Maya Angelou, possibly over Angelou's support of Clarence Thomas for Supreme Court Justice. (Also note the photo of Mitford and Angelou playing Boggle.) There's the story of Mitford's husband, Bob Treuhaft, rendering Princess Margaret speechless. Find out why Mitford and Molly Ivins were thrown out of a museum in Houston. She also had occasion to write to Hillary Clinton and to Julie Andrews, among many others. Although I expected to skim most of this book, I ended up reading nearly every letter. Mitford's writing style, in books and letters, was apparently the same as her conversational style, entertaining and authentic.
Although Mitford wrote this book, letter by letter, throughout her life, editor Peter Y. Sussman merits a note here, if only to acknowledge the difficulty of having to keep track of all Mitford's correspondents, each of whom has at least one or two nicknames. It's a bit like reading one of those Russian novels where everyone has multiple names and titles. Thanks to Sussman and his helpful footnotes, we always know who Mitford is referring to.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
She's the Historical Person that I'd have Lunch with. . ., December 30, 2006
I first learned of Decca in Angela Lambert's "1939: The Last Season of Peace." She was one of the smartest debs from an earlier season and her sister, who'd become the Duchess of Devonshire, got a lot of press (not to mention her sister Unity who was mentioned as attempting suicide when England declared war on Germany.) I would later do a report for a Hospice class on "The American Way of Death" which she authored and it was from that that I fell in love with her. I acquired an old copy of the Hons and the Rebels and appreciated her even more-- somehow this girl came from a cloistered environment and mastered everything she did. (Pronounce the h-- Hon was not part of Hon-orable but rather part of the Honnish language which she and her siblings spoke amongst themselves.)
Her letters reveal her from a time when letters were written. Decca was a gifted hater but was not hateful-- she, like the rest of us, had her quirks-- but she lived them well and they were part of a dynamic package.
This book of letters is full of anecdotes about her political involvements and her day to day life-- among many topics, she tells of her experiences in a spa, eye glasses and discovering that one could see individual leaves on trees, her opinion of politicians, domestic life, and of course death-- that of many of her friends dying. Her sense of humor never slows down. She has anecdotes about people that I've read about all over the book and of course, pokes fun at the funeral industry to her friends, 'Did you know that one can get a thing called, "new Bra-Form, Post Mortem Bra Restoration, Accomplishes so much for so little?" They only cost $11 for a package of 50. Shall I send some?' She advises her friends on her new information on the funeral industry asking if and then telling them when the best time is for emblaming.
Decca has a long, exciting life and the letters only reveal a snippet of it.
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