JESSICA MITFORD: LIVES OF THE RICH, FAMOUS, LEFTIST 
                                              By J. Charles
        artssf.com, the independent observer of Northern California books
                                                                 Weeks starting Dec. 6, 2006
                                                                  Vol. 9, No. 39
          The 1940's featured a radio soap opera, "Our Gal Sunday," which was based on the question: can a young girl from a small mining town in the West find happiness with a wealthy and titled Englishman?"   In the actual 1940s, Jessica Mitford, a titled and (sometimes) wealthy Englishwoman, did the opposite, finding happiness with her American husband in a middle-sized city on the California coast.   
          Say what you will about Jessica Mitford, she was never a conformist.  Born into an eccentric aristocratic British family, she reacted against their fascist enthusiasms by eloping in 1937, at the age of 19, to Republican Spain.  Her new husband was her second cousin, Esmond Romilly, a nephew of Winston Churchill and, like her, a committed left-winger.  To the chagrin of their families they ended up, via France, in the United States.  Romilly enlisted and was killed in the war and Decca, as she was always known to her friends, ended up, a single mother, in San Francisco, where she married Bob Treuhaft, a Jewish progressive lawyer.  
            She lived the rest of her life in Oakland, active in civil rights causes and making a good living as an investigative journalist.    She wrote The American Way of Death, and carried on an amazing correspondence with the great, good, and up-and-coming (Winston Churchill, Maya Angelou, and Hillary Rodham, among many), for more than fifty years.
            In Decca, the Letters of Jessica Mitford, Berkeley journalist Peter Y. Sussman presents a wide selection from this correspondence, producing in the process a sort of autobiography of this extraordinary woman.  She emerges from the letters as an intriguing combination of the practical and the eccentric, opinionated, wickedly witty, with the energy of ten.
            Sussman has done an excellent job of editing the letters and has presented a vivid portrait of an extraordinary character, warts and all.   
            As a Mitford, going to extremes was a way of life, and yet Decca, for all her rebelliousness, never got very far from her family.  In the midst of her elopement, she wrote to her mother, "I wonder if you could send me my dress allowance?  I can't help feeling it would come in awfully useful."  Her family was always in the headlines.  Her youngest sister Deborah became the Duchess of Devonshire, the chatelaine of Chatsworth.  The eldest, Nancy, countered sixties egalite by enshrining the English class system in her writings on U and non-U speech (she also refused to use air-mail stamps because she thought they were middle class).  Three of the middle girls were political:  Diana  married the British fascist Oswald Mosely and spent part of World War II in jail;  Unity fell in love with Hitler, shot herself in the head when England declared war of Germany, lived on, brain-damaged, and died nine years later.  In comparison, Jessica seems quite understated, but she never lacked publicity for her causes.  Whatever she engaged in, the newspaper accounts would always begin, "Mitford girl does so-and-so. " 
          Jessica led a lively life.  In partnership with Treuhaft she embraced civil liberties causes with gusto.  She thrived on quarrels.  (Once, over dinner at Chatsworth, she argued so vehemently with her sister about an old family scrapbook that she broke into tears and Bob growled, "Let's go before they start counting the silver.")  In her letters she shows a great, often malicious, eye for detail and a subtle wit.  About LSD she wrote: "it makes one love everyone, they say.  For instance, a locally well-known poet called Ginsberg said it made him feel very sympathetic to Lyndon Johnson.  I wish they would invent a loather's drug." She changes her tone to fit her audience, and at times she can sound very grand indeed.  Answering a question about family professions for her daughter's Sarah Lawrence application, she wrote:" We were uncertain as to what occupation to list for her maternal grandfather, as he never worked.  However, from time to time he was fairly active in the House of Lords."
          The early letters seem quite brittle in their stiff-upper-lip reaction to the death of her first husband, her early financial struggles, and her attempts to juggle the demands of a young family with her political activism. Later ones show a softer  side, although even these are short on introspection.  Jessica, who must have seemed an Americanized hoyden to her family, never lost her essential English nature.
          Sussman’s notes are extensive and the index is meticulous.  The volume offers everything one needs for a portrait of Jessica Mitford and her worlds, both American and European.  It provides much material for researchers of the post-World War II period, but it can also be read right through for pleasure.
          Buy it for that politically-aware Anglophile reader on your holiday list.
          "Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford," edited by Peter Y. Sussman, Knopf, 744 pp.,  $35.

       ©J. Charles 2006

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        J. Charles is a book-review contributor to www.artssf.com.
   These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly)focus on book reviews (by authors of the region), plus theater, dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into recordings by local artists as well.
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