Customer Reviews

Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

"Decca" contains the annotated letters of Jessica Mitford aka Decca Treuhaft, one of the six Mitford daughters and a member of the Communist Party of the United States. I'm giving the book five stars because Peter Sussman has done an extraordinary (or as Mitford would write, "extraorder") job in selecting, editing, and annotating Mitford's letters cleanly, clearly, and without introducing his own opinions. He should be commended, especially given Mitford's eccentric use of the English language.

On the other hand, her letters are well-written and interesting, but they show Mitford to have been a thoroughly unpleasant person and *much* less intelligent or moral than she comes across in her journalism. I grew to hate her - absolutely detest her - over the course of the book. Here we have a woman who denied that Stalin's victims were telling the truth, who wrote that even if OJ had killed Nicole he deserved to get away with it because other blacks in the past had been railroaded, who thought that child molesters are harmless (going so far as to wave away her own child's molestation as no big deal), who thought drugs and even medicines were horrible despite being an alcoholic herself, and who judged her son's bipolar disorder as a moral failing that was unfortunate mainly because it hurt *her*. Yes, she did show immense bravery as a civil rights worker in the 60s, but the reader is left with the impression that she was involved solely as a reaction against her family's racism and not as a deeply held personal belief. She comes across as being just as narrow-minded and unsympathetic as her sisters Unity and Diana (who were fascists, in the literal political sense). And far from being the sharp, critical journalist I thought she was after reading The American Way Of Death, she turns out to be an unthinking quack enabler whose "muckraking" was intended not to uncover corruption and lies but to destroy anyone with more education than she had - in other words, almost everyone.

Do I recommend this book? Yes, because the editor was sensible enough to let Mitford speak for herself. I'm probably not the only reader to find myself absolutely sickened by Mitford, but the excellent editing allows every reader to make up his or her own mind. Well done, Mr. Sussman.

This book was giant, in size and in scope. I must admit I did not finish it. Jessica "Decca" Mitford was a bitchy, brilliant, fascinating, annoying, funny, sarcastic and altogether mysterious woman. This book of her letters gives us a very tiny keyhole of insight into that enormous personality. I don't mean that it fails to give us enough; I just mean no book is really capable of parsing the enigma of Decca. It would be a good addition to anyone's book collection, especially Anglophiles, Francophiles, and Bibliophiles!

I got this as a gift for my brother and I was lucky enough to receive it as a Christmas present a few months later. Jessica Mitford Treuhaft was one of the famous Mitford sisters. Her sister Nancy wrote novels of manners such as "Love In A Cold Climate", her sister Unity was a Hitler groupie who shot herself in Munich shortly after WWII was declared and spent the remainder of her life with severe brain damage, her sister Diana divorced Brian Guinness to marry the head of the Union of British Fascists, and her sister Deborah is the current dowager Duchess of Devonshire. Jessica, or Decca as she was called since childhood, ran away from home to elope with a Communist named Esmond Romilly and to fight against fascism in Spain; all of this caused rather a major rift with her family. The couple eventually moved to America; Esmond was killed in action after joing the Royal Canadian Air Force, and Decca ended up in Oakland, CA married to a radical lawyer named Bob Treuhaft. But like many who grew up in her time and class, she wrote wonderful letters - quirky, funny, sometimes about awful serious matters but always with a sense of the absurd. She was committed to the work of the Communist Party in the early civil rights movemement in California and traveled to many parts of the country to demonstrate; she and her husband were targets of Congressional investigations and denied passports for years, and she became an effective community activist. After falling away from the CPUSA, she continued her activism, and her letters describe some of the most important struggles of progressive America in the '40s, '50s and '60s. She really came into public awareness in a bigger way when she wrote a groundbreaking expose of the predatory practices of the funeral industry, "The American Way of Death." She followed that up with exposes of the prison industry and other abuses and was active until shortly before her death in the late 90s.
The letters are gems - when I finished the book, I thought, "I'd really have loved to have known this woman and to have received some of these wonderful letters." Some made me laugh out loud, others made me recognize anew the courage of those who had the vision and the foresight to combat racism in America at a time when it was simply taken for granted. They show a concern for family that is poignant as well as a sense of honor that is almost rigid - when Winston Churchill, who was her cousin, freed her sister Diana and Diana's husband Oswald Mosley from prison after WWII, she wrote to him in protest, saying that their work on behalf of fascism was a danger to freedom everywhere and that they belonged in prison, and that the fact that Diana was her sister did not alter her opinion about that.
The only shadow I found over this wonderful collection of letters was the lack of any sense of real recognition of the evil committed in the name of Communism by Stalin, Mao and others. She defended against this criticism by pointing out that no one but the CPUSA was taking serious action on civil rights when she came to this country in the '40s, but she never really acknowledges the darker side of the party's international activity. One gets the impression that she sees it as the lesser of two evils; and as much as one can recognize that at that time and place Fascism was certainly the more immediate and powerful threat, one is still troubled by Decca's lack in this area of the uncompromising commitment to truth that characterizes so many of her activities.
I cannot imagine anyone who is familiar with this period of history in England and America not being fully engaged by this wonderful book. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Mitford-despisers complain that we fans too easily forgive them their sins on account of their rare wit and charm. Well, in the case of Decca at least, this charge is unfair. She was funny (and cruel): her account of a 1962 house party at Chatsworth is quite delicious; ditto her accounts of what passes for high society on Mull. But she was also brave, in journalism and in life. A deathbed letter to Bob - 'It's so odd to be dying, so I must just jot a few thoughts' - is a model of clarity (though perhaps you would expect this in one who had so much time and energy railing against an industry that so pointlessly prettified corpses); so, too, is a letter to Benjamin in which she urges him to seek help for his illness. The fact remains that as an example of what a woman can do once she has rid herself of, or at least decided to ignore, the expectations of others - family, men, society - Jessica Mitford will always take some beating. That she is also a hoot is merely the icing on the cake.

As with most of the writings of and about the Mitford sisters, this is at once humorous and remarkable. Her own words to some of the most important people of her time but more importantly, a fabulous use of letters to paint a picture of a person and the events around her. It would be hard for any book written about someone born into English aristocracy who became a Communist, a muckraking reporter and an American citizen to be dull. For those who, like me, are depressed that she is no longer with us, you can catch a delightful panel discussion with Jessica Mitford and Christopher Hitchens recorded at the NY Public Library and available on iTunes. It's free and allows those of us who never heard her interviewed to hear about some of her most famous writings and experiences from her own lips. This book is a must for people who enjoy social history projects, droll humor and the Mitford "girls."

Jessica Mitford was the lefty sister who rebelled against her family. After losing her first husband in WW2, she had to make a career for herself, and without a formal education became a hugely influential writer.

These letters are a must for anyone who has sisters. They document the rivalry between five of the most complicated and interesting women of the 20th century, all in first person. It is a pleasure to read and brings history alive.

Sussman does a great job of, first, setting the scene and then laying out in a very readable way this enormous collection of Jessica Mitford's letters. She's always been a favorite of mine. This collection is adding greatly to my appreciation.