Irrepressible

by Leslie Brody

  Nancy Mitford was living a soufflé of a life in France, wearing marvelous clothes amid beautiful furnishings, taking off for a few weeks to the Riviera, to Venice for carnival. She’d worked hard for what she had, and earned it all by her writing. Her early novels gained respectable readerships, but The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, both fictionalized versions of the Mitford sisters’ youth and family life, had become best sellers. They had affirmed her role as the aristocratic socialite “lady” novelist whose novels were frothy with just enough bite and whose biographies and histories were original, perceptive, and as amusing as her fiction. From her perch in Paris, she was positioned to weigh in on the debate in midfifties Britain on class and language.

  In the background of Nancy Mitford’s essay “U and Non-U Language” and Decca’s contrasting piece Lifeitselfmanship is Alan S. C. Ross, a linguist at Birmingham University, who labored to elucidate the vocabulary employed by the English aristocracy around the mid-twentieth century. According to Ross’s thesis, the spoken English language in Great Britain could be divided into two categories: U, which was proper, upper-class usage, and non-U, which was employed by the rest of the population. For instance, while upper-class types would say “vegetables,” non-U speakers might say “greens.” “Cycle” is non-U for “bike,” and “rich,” non-U for “wealthy.” In September 1955, when Nancy Mitford launched Ross’s findings into the greater world, she added more vocabulary to Ross’s lexicon, and some attitude:The aristocrat can augment his fortune in many a curious manner, since he is impervious to a sense of shame (all aristocrats are: shame is a bourgeois notion). The lowest peasant of the Danube would stick at letting strangers into his house for 2s. 6d., but our dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons not only do this almost incredible thing, they glory in it, they throw themselves into the sad commerce with rapture, and compete as to who among them can draw the greatest crowds. It is the first topic of conversation in noble circles today, the tourists being referred to in terms of sport rather than cash—a sweepstake on the day’s run, or the bag counted after the shoot.

  Another indicator: “Any sign of undue haste, in fact, is apt to be non-U, and I go so far as preferring, except for business letters, not to use air mail.”

  Decca had the same speech patterns, the same original vocabulary. She too had been bred to an innate U-ness, but by then had spent two decades repudiating those U codes, sometimes even wrangling them to her benefit. She recognized how funny the miscues between the English and Americans could be. Despite the somewhat rarified atmosphere of her Communist fellowship, she still lived in America. Her kids went to public schools, she shopped in supermarkets, watched American TV (not yet commonly broadcast in England), read American newspapers, understood California dreaming and the American way of life. She understood the texture of the protocol and social values of the U world in England. If she could just figure out why anyone would care, she was in a unique position to explain these contrasts and to translate the language of each for the other. She looked around again at the piles of laundry and unwashed dishes and wondered how to mine this raw metaphor.

  Decca borrowed her title from the book by Stephen Potter, One-Upmanship: Being Some Account of the Activities and Teaching of the Lifemanship Correspondence College of One-Upness and Gameslifemastery, which Bob had read on the boat to Europe. After Nancy’s essay on “U and Non-U” was published in the United States, the New Yorker magazine picked up the thread, publishing a series of letters about quirky diction and syntactical oddities, which amused and inspired Decca. In her essay, she intended “a great send-up of the obscure, convoluted language of the Left,” and mocked the verbose, official patois of its bureaucracy. Lifeitselfmanship functioned as a glossary of a dying language (Marxism in America), as had Nancy’s lexicon of aristocratica. The essays of each sister were tongue-in-cheek with just enough sincerity to make them resonate among their populations, students of the form, or curious outsiders (i.e., government agents in America and social climbers in England).

  Among Decca’s friends and comrades, her booklet was deemed an immediate, hilarious success. It featured the artist Pele deLappe’s “Thurberish” illustrations, inflated Marxist rhetoric, and mock-studious matching quizzes. For instance, “What does one do with cadres?” Decca wrote. “One develops them, trains them and boldly promotes them, poor things.” Asked, “How do contradictions get started?” she answers, “They either stem from or flow out of situations. Sometimes roots of problems stem from contradictions , a botanical anomaly.”

  Over two days, Decca and friends mimeographed and stapled together five hundred copies priced at fifty cents each. Decca turned all her considerable organizational abilities toward a promotional campaign. She sent copies to party members and the left-wing press. The project was framed as a benefit for the People’s Daily World, with all proceeds going to benefit the newspaper, although Marge thought the booklet was “welcomed as something that needed to be done.” Decca was still “a trifle apprehensive about its reception,” and she had a Plan B:Hoping to disarm my readers in advance, I added a check list of appropriate criticisms of the author. These include: Anti-leadership, anti-theoretical, right opportunism, left sectarianism, Rotten liberalism, Philistinism, Fails to chart a perspective and Petty Bourgeois cynicism.

  In October, she wrote to her mother: “The extraorder thing about Lifeitselfmanship is that the worst offenders love it best (some that is, there have also been a few violent reactions anti it).” In England, Lifeitselfmanship was positively reviewed in the Observer. Orders came from as far away as Australia. Benjy peddled copies on the local bus, and altogether, they sold over twenty-five hundred copies.

  This was in contrast, of course, to her sister’s book Noblesse Oblige, which Decca presumed to be selling millions. However circumscribed, the attention Lifeitselfmanship attracted gave Decca great satisfaction. She was making people laugh at the same time that they were taking her seriously. The most important response was Nancy’s, and although Decca had to wait for it by slow-boat mail (U-mail), it was a good one: “I’ve been screaming over your pamphlet it’s too lovely,” Nancy wrote.

  Decca’s fortunes were changing. In further news from London, she discovered that she would indeed be inheriting money from the Romilly estate. Her first thought was to travel. The Treuhafts still had not been granted new documents, but a Supreme Court case in process contested the government’s right to withhold passports from its law-abiding citizens, regardless of their political beliefs. The Supreme Court had three new justices, so there was reason for cockeyed optimism.

  Then, in late October 1956, Soviet forces crushed the Hungarian uprising, killing over thirty thousand people. Decca recognized that Stalinist repression had laid the groundwork for revolt. She acknowledged that the Hungarian revolt was “originated by workers and students with most justified grievances,” but at first her perceptions were colored by personal interests. Her Jewish relatives feared that an independent Hungary would be a fascist and anti-Semitic Hungary. They feared the rebels would be joined by fascists, and they wanted to believe that Russian forces entering Hungary did so to suppress a fascist coup. In 1956, opposing fascism, the enemy she’d been fighting since her youth, was still Decca’s primary political rationale. She realized how she had misjudged that geopolitical event, just as she had missed the nuance on their journey through Hungary the year before. In retrospect, she could imagine all too well the strains upon the Hungarians they had met. “One thing was dismally clear . . . Bob and I had entirely failed to perceive the widespread discontent that must have seethed beneath the surface.”

  DECCA AND MANY of her friends viewed the Communist Party leadership in New York as a bunch of out-of-touch hard-liners whose enduring influence gave the organization “something of the character of an ideological old folks’ home.” Leaders had not convened a national conference in seven years. Despite rank-and-file requests, they hadn’t called a national congress to address either the
Hungarian revolt or the Khrushchev revelations—to look into the details of Stalin’s many atrocities and the horrors of the Gulag (which had rocked the U.S. party membership). To many members, the congress called for in February 1957 seemed promising, if not exactly the spring of reform.

  There remained between five thousand and twenty thousand active American Communist Party members (only the FBI knew for sure). The California contingent to the New York convention elected Decca Treuhaft as one of its four delegates. She was delighted to escape the routine and eager to argue their reform position, which looked to her to be poised for success.

  Decca arrived on the East Coast—like many Californians who experience winter only occasionally—with inadequate outer clothes. When a snowstorm threatened, Aranka insisted her daughter-in-law borrow her own mink coat against the cold. Although Decca cared not a whit for the judgmental looks of proletariat fashionistas, the heavy press coverage and phalanx of FBI agents surrounding the Communist Party Congress moved her to camouflage. In a nearby subway stop, she folded Aranka’s fur coat into a carrier bag and covered it with newspapers. This, no doubt to the accompaniment of unsolicited assistance and commentary provided by observant New Yorkers: You’ll never get it in that paper bag . . . you’re covering that with a New York Herald Tribune? . . . You want ink on your beautiful fur? Trimmed down to her California frock, bulky paper bag, pocketbook, and briefcase, Decca ran through the snow to the meeting.

  The congress, like others of its ilk, opened with a few agitated speeches between endless procedural meetings, while the real meat-and-potato debates were scheduled for prime time. During the day, friends wandered off for reunions, drank coffee, caught up on gossip, and updated the various scandals. Right away, Decca discovered that Lifeitselfmanship had made her a minor celebrity. She “thrilled to the praise of comrades from all around the country.” This general goodwill toward Decca was a notable exception in the increasingly poisonous and polarized atmosphere. Once the real business of the congress got under way, the two main factions faced off. The California delegation and their supporters opposed the New York-based Old Guard, who defended the Stalinist hard line and status quo.

  One of her group’s symbolic successes was its motion to change the location of party headquarters from New York to Chicago. This effort to further decentralize the party passed unanimously. Everyone knew it would take more than a motion to move the Old Guard, but when Eugene Dennis, a longtime leader (just out of federal prison after serving a sentence as one of the original Smith defendants), threw his weight behind reform, Decca believed the platform would prevail. She hadn’t considered the firepower that the aging leaders could bring to bear on their home turf. They defended themselves aggressively and at every meeting; every panel was fragmented with attacks, counterattacks, accusations, and denunciations. When it was clear that the confused membership could not agree on a new direction, several of the young reformers resigned, leaving the Old Guard in place. The New York leadership response to the subsequent avalanche of resignations was “good riddance.”

  DECCA LEFT THE convention feeling resolved to quit the party. She had made a fair attempt, but her faction had been defeated. The party had become “stagnant, ineffective.” It was “a bore,” and “leaving was no great trauma, because the trauma had all come earlier.”

  For fifteen years, the character of their comrades had been tested. Their friends had survived the worst of the McCarthyism and, for years afterward, still parried spies and bullies. Decca stayed in the party until 1957, after others had left, and after she and Bob had stopped believing in the usefulness of the organization. As long as the witch hunts continued, they hated to think that their old comrades might feel abandoned; some of these friends had been in the underground with its odd tensions and abnormalities, some had endured prosecution and imprisonment. Many had shown gallantry and resourcefulness. “Despite all evident drawbacks, I can hardly imagine living in America in those days and not being a member.” She would gleefully refer to herself and Bob as “ex-menaces.”

  She and Bob wouldn’t make a big deal out of quitting; they would just occupy themselves with other things and, in the eventual drift, find themselves far away. There would be no speeches, no grandstanding or repudiation of what had been a driving influence for over half her life. She was already sure she wanted to write more (perhaps repeat the success surrounding Lifeitselfmanship), and she was toying with a new subject. Her friends were always telling her to write down all those Mitford stories. Returning to England in 1955, she had felt the force of that atmosphere, but she needed a point of entry. During a forced sabbatical after the New York Congress, with no job and no long-term political project on the horizon, she began to go through some of the boxes of papers and souvenirs that had piled up over the years. She found a box of Esmond’s letters (a relief, since she’d feared them lost), read through them, then wrote nineteen pages of prologue at a white-hot speed.

  Decca attacked the idea of a book with serious intent. But how serious a book, she had no idea. Why write another version of something that had been thoroughly covered in Nancy’s novels? As it turned out, it was the kind of thing she absolutely loved doing. How would she have ever known if she hadn’t plunged in? She’d wake up early and write at the kitchen table before anyone was awake in the “wonderful moment between 5:30 and 7:30, of total calm and quiet.” Once the kids left for school, she’d write until lunch-time. When she had some pages, she’d show them to a few select friends whom she called her book committee: First among these was Bob, then Marge, Pele and Steve Murdock (now Pele’s husband), and other friends Barbara Kahn, Betty Bacon, and Dorothy Neville.

  She had begun, she thought, so that Dinky could have a better sense of her father. Early on in the process, she realized there was another reason. She had appeared as a character in Nancy’s novels and in Philip Toynbee’s memoir Friends Apart. She had been sketched adroitly by both authors, but what Decca wanted was to tell her own story.

  CHAPTER 21

  NINE MONTHS AFTER she had begun researching and writing her book, Decca had typical writerly apprehensions and always the same money woes. She had begun sending portions of the book out to editors and publishers with little encouragement on the literary front and none financially. Then one happy day, the promised check from the Romilly estate arrived, around eleven thousand pounds. Decca deposited a couple thousand dollars into what she would call her “frittering account” to indulge her family and her friends, who never had any spare money. She bought clothes for Bob and the kids, a dress for Pele, and an embroidered blouse for Marge. She splurged on a cocktail dress at a fancy dress salon, whose saleslady advised her regarding accessories, “If I were you I wouldn’t wear any jewelry with it,” to which Decca replied, “That won’t be difficult at all.” For sixteen years, she had been squirreling away the veteran benefits she had received from the Canadian Air Force to pay for Dinky’s education, and now, she had fewer worries on that account for either child. She lent some money to the Durrs, for their daughter Tilla’s college tuition. Then she put aside a nice bit for her eventual return to England, whenever that might happen. Sooner than later, perhaps, since the judicial tide looked to be turning, thanks in part to Justice Hugo Black and the new, more liberal constituency of the rest of the Supreme Court (which would eventually overturn a raft of red-scare convictions). When a reporter for the London Evening Standard phoned Decca that fall to interview the “American” Mitford sister, the interviewer had been aghast to hear that Decca’s passport was still being withheld (as if that kind of barbaric behavior was something you heard about only in connection with the most repressive regimes or in the distant past). Decca had welcomed the publicity; any type of social pressure would help the Treuhafts recover their passports.

  After dozens of rejections from publishers Decca took a break from her book and turned her hand to freelance writing. The form flowed with surprising ease. Her first article, about a man in San Francisco falsely accused of
rape, was accepted by the Nation magazine and, after considerable editing, was published under the title “Trial by Headline.” Decca clearly identified with the vulnerable and despised outsider, whose life was scrutinized unnecessarily. (The theme—under the surface—speaks to Decca’s own sense of mistreatment at the hands of a press corps that whipped up so many false attacks during the red scare.) As it was Decca’s first magazine publication, she was “inordinately proud of it,” and the seventy-five dollars she received for her article signaled a turning point that encouraged her for the first time to call herself a writer.

  ON MARCH 17, 1958, Decca’s father died at Redesdale Cottage, where he had been living with Margaret Wright since his separation from Muv. He had just turned eighty. By that time, Decca and Farve hadn’t seen one another for almost twenty years. His death came just at the time she was writing about him, and in her memoir, he is the father of her childhood, bigger than life, eccentric, idiosyncratic, and adored. Nancy had written about their father earlier, as the barely disguised “Uncle Mathew,” the father of the Radlett clan. A Farve-like character was central to her novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, and his various quirks and comments would show up in subsequent books. In a letter written in 1950, Nancy noted that their father had an unexpected new interest: He “thinks of literally nothing now but cocktail parties.” She added that quirk to Uncle Mathew’s character in her later novels alongside this elegiac characterization:I had known him so vigorous and violent, so rampageous and full of super-charged energy that it went to my heart to see him now, stiff and slow in his movements, wearing spectacles; decidedly deaf . . . Uncle Mathew was only in his seventies but he was not well preserved.