Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford (Hardcover)

by Jessica Mitford (Author), Peter Y. Sussman (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Best known for her classic funeral-industry exposé, The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford (1917– 1996) was fifth of the famous Mitford sisters, but rebelled against her privileged English roots to become a member of the American Communist Party and union organizer, a civil rights activist and a celebrated investigative journalist. Sussman, a former longtime editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, has gathered an array of letters that capture Mitford's legendary wit, warmth and self-deprecating humor: decades of exuberant—and sometimes sparring—correspondence with friends, including civil rights activists Virginia and Clifford Durr, publisher Katharine Graham, journalist Shana Alexander, writers Kay Boyle and Maya Angelou. Mitford's prickly relations with her aristocratic clan are much in evidence, as is her estrangement from its fascist members; writing to Winston Churchill in 1943, she unswervingly protests the release from prison of her sister Diana Mosley and Diana's husband, the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley. Relating her bold emigration to the United States with her cousin and first husband, Communist journalist Esmond Romilly; her resilience as a war widow in a foreign country with an infant daughter; and the evident happiness of her 50-year marriage to her second husband, radical labor attorney Robert Treuhaft, Mitford's letters crackle with wit and mordant observations. 59 illus. (Oct. 21)
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From The Washington Post
Mitford? Now where have we heard that name before? Let me count the ways, or at least a few of them.

Once upon a time, in England, Lord and Lady Redesdale had six daughters and one son. All the girls were good-looking but a little out of the ordinary, especially after they grew up. Nancy resided in Paris, lived "in sin" and wrote delicious comic novels, including The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. Deborah married very, very well, becoming the duchess of Devonshire and chatelaine of the great English country house Chatsworth. Unity, alas, got to be an intimate friend of Adolf Hitler, whom she just adored, and shot herself in the head on the day Britain declared war on Germany. The particularly beautiful Diana divorced her first husband to wed her lover, the infamous British fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley. Brother Tom was killed during World War II, and sister Pam somehow led a quiet, fairly conventional life, probably just to be different.

And then there was Jessica (1917-96). If you don't know about Decca, as everyone called her, just start reading this terrific collection of letters and hang on for the ride.

During the 1930s, Decca took off to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War with her boyfriend and eventual husband, Esmond Romilly. Later, the adventurous lovebirds moved to Washington, where they became close chums with the young Katharine and Philip Graham, as well as the crusading civil libertarians Virginia and Clifford Durr. After World War II broke out, Esmond enlisted, returned to Britain, and one day never came back from a flying mission. Esmond's uncle, Winston Churchill, told Decca that there was no hope of her 23-year-old husband being found alive.

By this time, Decca was working for the Office of Price Administration and was happy to leave Washington, with its painful memories, for a position in San Francisco. There, she married a crusading young attorney named Robert Treuhaft. The two almost immediately joined the American Communist Party, tirelessly focusing their efforts on the cause of civil rights. This never changed, even after they quit the party in the late 1950s. Throughout his career, Treuhaft took on myriad cases of perceived injustice, defending the wrongfully accused, agitating for retrials, fighting for prisoners' rights. He even became lawyer to the legendary Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and something of a hero of the times. In the late 1960s, a young Yale law student named Hillary Rodham spent a summer clerking for Treuhaft's law firm.

Meanwhile, Decca, the subversive housewife, reared three children, agitated, protested, and wrote magazine articles, a memoir of the Mitford family (Hons and Rebels) and, as this book shows, lots of letters. Wonderful letters. On every page of this enormous volume, she is right there -- funny, smart, swinging hard, fiercely uncompromising. In 1943, she complained to Churchill ("Dear Cousin Winston") about the Mosleys' release from prison on health grounds: "My personal feeling is that the release of the Mosleys is a slap in the face to antifascists in every country, and that it is a direct betrayal of those who have died for the cause of anti-fascism. The fact that Diana is my sister doesn't alter my opinion on this subject." For the rest of her life, she remained "off-speakers" with Diana, and the two sisters never saw each other again.

But Decca corresponded regularly with Lady Redesdale, Nancy and Deborah (or "Debo"). On June 25, 1950, she wrote to her very proper and conservative mother, in an example of what she sometimes called the "Mitford tease": "Could you possibly ring up the Daily Worker next time you're in London & ask them whether they know of any interesting mass meetings or demonstrations in Paris scheduled for late Sept. or early October; if so, we could arrange accordingly about when to go to Paris." She ends another note to Lady Redesdale with this P.S.: "On re-reading this letter I see it is full of references to jails, sorry, but that is where most of our friends are."

Throughout her life, Decca laughs -- "roars" is her favorite verb -- at the quirks and prejudices of the rich or racist. Here are two anecdotes from a single letter (June 19, 1957), describing a wedding in Montgomery, Ala.:

"The wedding was preceded by innumerable lunches, evening parties with Ladies Home Journal type food (croquettes, creamed asparagus, ice cream in shape of bridal shoes, jellied salads, etc. etc.) where the conversation tended to run in similar channels: 'My, you look lovely.' 'I deaclare [sic] I never did see a prettier bride than Lucy.' 'Well Tilla will be the next one now,' and similar gems of wisdom and erudition. . . . I had an interesting conversation with Lucy's father-in-law. He is a leading light from Birmingham, on the school board etc. We were deploring the state of education all over, lack of provision for bright kids, etc. He asked me what was being done for them in Calif, so I told him about the special group at Washington Grammar School for children with IQ of over 150, and let drop the information that in the group are 1 white child, two orientals, 1 Negro. He said, in genuine amazement, 'It don't seem possible that no Nigra would have no IQ of no 150, do it now?' I answered politely, 'Well, I think it do seem possible, I don't think no race has nothing to do with no IQ.' "

A few years later, Decca found herself back in Montgomery -- locked in a church with Martin Luther King Jr. and other supporters of the Freedom Rides while a mob outside set fire to her borrowed car.

In the early 1960s, Decca started to investigate the gruesome subject of funeral arrangements, which she found bizarre, exorbitantly expensive and emotionally exploitative. The result was her 1963 bestseller The American Way of Death. When the book appeared in England, Evelyn Waugh -- whose novels included The Loved One, about Forest Lawn Cemetery -- reviewed it positively, but, as Decca wrote to Debo, he "said I don't have a 'plainly, stated attitude to death.' So if you see him, tell him of course I'm against it."

For the rest of her life, Decca was widely known as the "Queen of the Muckrakers," publishing a subsequent book about prisons (Cruel and Usual Punishment), a retrospective account of her years as a communist (A Fine Old Conflict) and much else, even a magazine exposé of the Famous Writers School. She wrote to Betty Friedan about women's issues and to Merle Miller about "coming out," to the Black Panther George Jackson in Soledad Prison and to Carl Bernstein about being a "red diaper" baby. Her American "sisters" included both Maya Angelou and the novelist Kay Boyle, but she had friends everywhere. When a restaurant refused her check, she phoned New York Times food critic Craig Claiborne. Vanessa Redgrave inquired into the possibility of a movie about her life. Julie Andrews became a pen-pal, as did her now celebrated editor Robert Gottlieb, and she gradually renewed contact with Katharine Graham. In one note to the San Francisco columnist Herb Caen, she even mentioned doing a piece for Nina King, "the v. nice book editor at Newsday." (Mitford later wrote for King again after the latter became editor of Book World.)

Decca's activism naturally passed on to her daughter Constancia (by Romilly), who joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and became the partner of its leader, James Forman, by whom she eventually had two sons. Decca adored the boys, though the couple seemed uninterested in actually getting married. Still, as Decca explained to Nancy, now when a racist asks if she'd want her daughter to marry a Negro, she can answer, "Rather."

Jessica Mitford was once pressed about what kind of funeral she would like, and the author of The American Way of Death replied, with tongue firmly in cheek, "six black horses with plumes and one of those marvelous jobs of embalming that take 20 years off," adding that she also wanted "streets to be blocked off, dignitaries to declaim sobbingly over the flower-smothered bier, proclamations to be issued -- that sort of thing." As it happens, after her cremation, Decca's good friends in San Francisco obliged with just that sort of thing, including the horses, an antique hearse and the 12-piece Green Street Mortuary Band playing "When the Saints Come Marching In."

This is a superb collection of letters, and editor Peter Y. Sussman deserves the greatest possible praise and gratitude. His introduction, connecting essays and extensive notes supply all the biographical and historical information a reader needs. Being witty as well as scholarly, he is precisely the right guide through this life in letters of the most astonishing of the astonishing Mitford girls.

Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 768 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition. states edition (October 17, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375410325
• ISBN-13: 978-0375410321
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #526,512 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

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

By	John D. Cofield - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Muckraking for Fun and Profit, January 24, 2007

By	takingadayoff "takingadayoff" (Las Vegas, Nevada) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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.

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

By	Alouette1 "alouette1" (USA) - See all my reviews

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.