This review by Florence King appears in the June 2007
issue of The American Spectator. To subscribe to the
monthly print edition, click here.
Decca: The Letters of Jessica
Mitford
Edited by Peter Y. Sussman
(Knopf, 744 pages, $35)
DO NOT READ THIS BOOK while drinking or eating, else its pages will
be splattered with whatever you were about to swallow when you came
to an hysterically funny line and everything went down the wrong
way.
Laughter is the last thing you would expect when politically
solemn Communists cross swords with professionally solemn
undertakers, but when the Communist is the English aristocrat who
wrote The American Way of Death, all bets are off. Jessica
Mitford’s 1963 expose of our overpriced funeral industry and its
maudlin extortionary wiles was condemned as an assault on
capitalism by a godless Red, a subversive harpy who wanted to
deprive grieving loved ones of the beautiful “memory pictures” of
American funerals and substitute the dismal primitive procedures
practiced in the Soviet Union.
Mitford, who was once disciplined by her American Communist
Party cell for joking, was ready with the unanswerable. “All the
best embalmers are Communists,” she said. “Look at Lenin.”
The Hon. Jessica Mitford (1917-1996), known as Decca, was one of
the six daughters of Lord and Lady Redesdale, a family so
dysfunctional that if a Mitford girl wanted to be a rebellious
nonconformist she had to be dull, sane, and stay out of the
newspapers. Only one sister managed this feat: Pamela, who enjoyed
healthy outdoor life and country pursuits, was so pleasant and
conventional and helpful to others that Decca and Nancy nicknamed
her “Woman.” The rest made headlines, one headline in particular:
“Whenever I see ‘Peer’s Daughter…’ I know it’s one of you girls,”
said their mother.
Nancy, the oldest, moved to Paris, wrote novels, and had a long
affair with a prominent French statesman. Deborah became the
Duchess of Devonshire (Decca told people she had gone
“duke-hunting”); Diana married Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the
British Union of Fascists, and declared herself a Nazi (“Peer’s
Daughter as Jew-Hater”); Unity moved to Germany and became a Hitler
groupie (“Peer’s Daughter Is Adolf’s Nordic Ideal”); and Decca
became a Communist and eloped to Spain with Esmond Romilly,
Churchill’s “Red Nephew,” to fight for the Republicans in the
Spanish Civil War. This last was too much for Baron Redesdale. A
Nazi sympathizer himself, he had no quarrel with Diana and Unity,
but up with Communists he would not put, particularly those related
to Churchill, so he disinherited Decca, instructing his solicitors
to insert “except Jessica” after each bequest (“Peer’s
Will…”).
When England declared war on Germany, Diana and her husband were
imprisoned and Unity tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide,
shooting herself in the head, but the bullet lodged in her brain
and paralyzed her for the remaining nine years of her life. Decca’s
husband joined the RAF but, fearing for Decca if Germany should
win, insisted she move to the U.S. where they had spent time after
their Spanish adventure.
Money was tight, so she stayed in suburban D.C. as the guest of
progressive Alabamians Clifford and Virginia Durr, he a New Deal
advisor on race relations and she a passionate advocate of
abolishing the poll tax. The Durrs knew everybody in the
limousine-liberal set, and Decca’s title and English accent did the
rest. She earned commissions masquerading as a saleswoman in an
exclusive dress shop where all she had to do was be present and let
herself be heard speaking; she cultivated the Meyerses, owners of
the Washington Post; and she devised an ingenious way of
emphasizing her lineage to impress those in the know while winning
the sympathy of the uninitiated. On job applications she wrote None
under Education, explaining that her family did not believe in
sending girls to school; and None under Father’s Occupation,
adding, “Worked at times in the House of Lords.” It was all true —
the sisters were tutored at home — but some might easily think she
was the underprivileged daughter of a part-time janitor.
After her husband was killed in the war she married Robert
Treuhaft, a radical labor lawyer whose firm would one day hire an
intern named Hillary Rodham. They moved to Oakland, California,
where Decca joined the American Communist Party, a shadow of its
former self but “the only game in town for civil rights,” now her
cause celebre. She soon put the there in Oakland,
masquerading as a prospective tenant to catch out landlords in
racial discrimination, lionizing black folksinger Leadbelly, and
making an American version of The Headline (“Sister of Hitler
Girlfriend…”) when she wrote Churchill demanding that he keep her
sister Diana in prison “where she belongs.”
The genesis of The American Way of Death was her
husband’s legal defense of a local burial society that kept running
into obstructive state laws lobbied into being by the powerful
California Funeral Directors Association. Seeing her chance to do
battle with her hated trifecta of greed, hypocrisy, and
sentimentality, she rescued the subject from her husband’s lawyerly
approach and quickly became the most notorious woman in the
country.
Her first success was getting “P.O.” (for “please omit flowers”)
into obits when former President Eisenhower included it in his
mother-in-law’s. The book also earned accolades from the Kennedy
brothers thanks to Decca’s sister Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire,
whose title would have gone to Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy if Kick’s
husband, and Kick, had lived. Deborah had remained friends with the
Kennedy family and Bobby read Decca’s book (which influenced him a
few months later when he chose JFK’s coffin).
To Decca’s (and everyone’s) surprise The American Way of
Death found favor with clergymen, who considered many funeral
practices pagan. That did not stop enraged politicians from
delivering their usual gems, however, like this one from California
Congressman James B. Utt: “I would rather place my mortal remains,
alive or dead, in the hands of any American mortician than to set
foot on the soil of any Communist nation.”
Handing Decca statements like that was like handing a baby a
loaded gun. The book and her many media appearances drew so much
fan mail that she had to hire someone to answer it. To avoid
spending time dictating, she told the typist to make up suitable
replies to each letter. The girl was intelligent enough, but she
was also an English debutante. As Decca described what
ensued:
Some serious old soul in North Dakota wrote to say that
having thought it all over, she decided to bequeath her body to
med. school. So my sec’y writes back: “What a perfectly smashing
idea. I’m sure the medical school will be so delighted to
get it.”
One wishes the whole book were like this, don’t one? Unfortunately,
Decca does not go full-sailed into the political night, but
founders on the shoals of her — wait for it —
bete
noire. Whenever her subject is race relations, and it often
is, she loses her lofty detachment, English understatement, and
perfect dead-pan and turns into just the sort of two-faced,
guilt-ridden, sycophantic crawler she claimed to despise.
Some of the blame can be traced to her Communist Party training,
which subjected members to a level of political correctness that
would make our present-day rules seem like free speech. They
weren’t allowed to order “black coffee” or use figures of speech
like “the dark days ahead.” Another problem was her subconscious
association of her aristocratic girlhood world with the gentrified
Jim Crowism she found in America: “I simply loathe the old South
and old Southerners, they are completely uncivilized and are too
vile about the Negroes. In fact, they’re just like Empire
Builders.”
A MAJOR CATALYST FOR HER racial conflicts was her friendship with
Maya Angelou, the garrulous, gravel-voiced Poetess Laureate and
non-stop autobiographer of the you-go-girl school of intellectual
reparations. Decca’s letters to Angelou are virtually
unrecognizable as the words of one of the greatest wits of our
time. One in particular, in praise of Angelou’s third autobiography
(Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas) is
a gushing fan letter that opens with “Dear Miss Absolutely Amazing
Thing,” and descends to girlish superlatives… “a lovely breath of
life… most tremendous lift… totally fascinating.”
Angelou realized that she had a peer’s daughter for a whipping
boy and behaved accordingly, as when she blew up at another white
woman at a party and left Decca to plead for all whites. The woman
asked, “But what can we DO about racism?” and Angelou exploded,
“YOU are asking ME?” Decca’s letter is a danse macabre of
how to walk on eggs, a Euclidian treatise on how many hands will go
into on-the-other-hand, all followed by a P.S. almost as long as
the letter itself.
The friendship broke up when Angelou did something unforgivably
white. She came out in favor of Clarence Thomas in a New York
Times op-ed, saying that the hysterics calling for his head
should calm down and listen to his side of the story, if only
because a black man who had come that far was too precious to
sacrifice. This time it was Decca who exploded, concocting the
bizarre theory that “Maya has completely cast her lot with
right-wing Republican blacks, all Bush toadies.”
It goes without saying that Decca supported Jesse Jackson for
president in 1984, but what boggles the mind is her take on the
O.J. Simpson case. “We were pleased with the verdict but thought he
was probably guilty,” she wrote in one letter. In another she said,
“We welcomed the verdict as Benj [the Treuhafts’ son] did, serves
the cops right. A thought: sort of an Affirmative Action type of
vote? Redressing centuries of injustice in our law courts.”
It also comes as a surprise, though a rather pleasant, nostalgic
one in view of today’s approaching moral collapse, that the Hon.
Jessica Mitford, for all her rebellious eccentricities, was just
that: Honorable, in ways beyond her title. Nowhere in this mountain
of letters is there the slightest hint of lovers, lesbians,
abortions, radical feminism, or any of the lubricious confusion our
world takes for granted. Whatever else she stood for, she was an
old-fashioned girl who slept with only two men and was married to
both of them.
