Irrepressible

by Leslie Brody

  After Farve’s death, Decca was worried about how her mother would manage and offered one possibility: “I will gladly share my Fortune with you. I don’t seem to be using it up much though I did get some fairly nice clothes.” (Muv wouldn’t need Decca’s fortune; the Redesdale estate would provide for her.) Decca had lived on such a tight budget for so long that her mother and friends were glad to hear that she was using some of the Romilly money to take a road trip around Mexico with Benjy, aged eleven; Dinky, seventeen; and two of Dinky’s friends. The travelers would drive around in Decca’s DeSoto, then meet Bob in July. Their trip would be an exercise in freedom. Although they would be as closely observed as any other American tourists with a “fortune” to dispose of, they would escape the constant scrutiny of FBI agents. The “tor,” as they called it, was a great success. Dinky and friends became amateur mechanics as the DeSoto frequently broke down in areas without service stations. Young Benjy started to seem like a “gay blade or roué” to his amused mother when he spent the twenty dollars Aranka had given him as mad money on high-heel shoes for the hotel maids at Ciprés.

  At the end of June, the travelers arrived in Mexico City to discover the news about Decca’s Redesdale inheritance. Her father had cut her entirely out of his will by adding the words “except Jessica” after each clause. She answered calls at her pension from newspapers in the United States and Canada once this “non-legacy,” as Decca called it, made international news. What was her reaction? the reporters wanted to know. She hadn’t been “expecting anything,” she replied. The FBI clipped several articles for Decca’s file, including this interview with the San Francisco Examiner: “It seems a hundred years ago,” she said. “My father and I disagreed. I was against HITLER. So I ran away to Spain and joined the Spanish Loyalists. He was pretty bitter about this and we’ve had no contact since.”

  Mary Lovell, a Mitford biographer, thought Lord Redesdale “had never recovered from her attempt to hand over part of Inch Kenneth to ‘the Bolshies’ and was fearful that anything he left her would be given away.” Years later, in an interview, Decca summarized her feelings:I knew I was cut out, and I’d have been very surprised if I hadn’t been . . . I think to most people their parents are absolutely everything up to a certain age, and then very soon they become a complete backdrop, so whatever feelings you had towards them are terribly diffused. It’s like birds getting out of a nest. You don’t feel bound to them any further, and whatever feelings of bitterness you had you don’t dwell on it.

  IN 1958, WHILE she continued writing, Decca also continued to mail her unfinished manuscript to editors and agents in the hope that someone might recognize its potential and give her the professional endorsement she longed for. Eventually, she found a writer’s agent willing to represent the book. Barthold Fles had a small agency with distinguished clients, many of them European leftists, including Heinrich Mann, Ignazio Silone, and Cedric Belfrage. (He also represented Anaïs Nin.) Fles asked Decca to assemble the typical nonfiction proposal package of “two chapters and an outline.” He also discouraged her from showing her manuscript around anymore before it was finished. To Fles, it was “like parading around in your underwear.” Bob and the agent agreed. “To prove the point the other day,” Decca wrote to her daughter, who was in her first year at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, “Bob came in in his undershorts at breakfast time and I pointed out to him that he made me feel as though I were reading one of his briefs.”

  The next greatest change in the Treuhafts’ daily life surrounded Bob’s increasing involvement with the Berkeley Co-Op and his appointment to a co-op committee investigating the formation of a low-cost funeral society. (Co-ops represented a counterculture perspective and spoke to those discontented with orthodoxy or majority dominance. There were famous housing co-ops; later, food co-ops emerged. The funeral co-op was not a new idea, having had a successful run among immigrant groups earlier in the century.) In his work as a union lawyer, Bob had become suspicious of the way union death benefits almost inevitably covered the cost of a funeral, with little surplus. It seemed as if undertakers typically encouraged their vulnerable clients to exhaust their benefits on expensive funerals. A funeral society could offer an alternative service. A family would pay once for membership, and then the association could negotiate for less expensive burials.

  Their co-op committee’s early research eventually led to the formation of the Bay Area Funeral Society. At first, Decca had teased Bob about his new interest. “Off to meet with your fellow necrophilists?” she would ask him. Bob brought home funeral industry trade magazines, like Mortuary Management and Casket and Sunnyside, whose somber attention to clothes and cosmetics for “the loved one” appealed to Decca’s sense of the absurd. Those magazines were, in any case, irresistible: All the “extras” they advertised added up to so many unnecessary expenses. Cremation, when mentioned at all, was regarded as a threat and greatly discouraged.

  Bob encouraged Decca to write an article on American funeral practices. If nothing else, it would provide a helpful introduction to new funeral co-op members. The timing was right. Decca was fed up with her memoir and ready for a break. In her life, she had seen more than her share of death and dying, but here was a kind of way to dominate the subject. The ghoulish and morbid lent themselves most naturally to puns and teases. There were plenty of underdogs here to defend, secrets to uncover, and who wouldn’t want to write about morticians? (They were, in her opinion, “a very lively group.”) Drawing on the funeral trade magazines, which exposed the wilder frontiers of American salesmanship, and Bob’s research, Decca went to work.

  The resulting article featured a sprightly, no-nonsense narrator who relished delving into the social customs, economic forces, and folklore surrounding the funeral industry. She condemned the high cost of funerals and was lucky enough to get some killingly good quotes, like this from the past president of the Funeral Directors of San Francisco: “In keeping with our high standard of living, there should be an equally high standard of dying.” Her work led Decca to this explanation of the industry’s cutthroat nature:It should be borne in mind that the funeral industry faces a unique economic situation in that its market is fixed or inelastic. There are only a certain number of deaths each year and the funeral directors must compete with each other to obtain their share of the business. The television industry touts the advantage of a TV set in every room; auto salesmen advocate several cars to each family; cigarette manufacturers urge “a carton for the home and one for the office”—but in the funeral business it’s strictly “one to a customer,” and the number of customers is limited by circumstances beyond the control of the industry.

  She concluded by promoting funeral cooperatives as an alternative. These organizations, she said, “have declared war on ‘materialistic display’” and are dedicated to the principle of “dignified funerals at reasonable cost.”

  She sent her article to many of the national news magazines, and all rejected it. Eventually, a small, progressive Southern Californian magazine called Frontier bought the article for forty dollars and published it in the November 1958 issue under the title “St. Peter, Don’t You Call Me.”

  DECCA WAS STILL engaged in various political campaigns. She and Benjy attended an NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) meeting to hear about the latest activity in the civil rights movement in the South. It seemed to her a waste to have accumulated all that experience in the CRC and yet be so far away from the heart of the struggle. For the time being—at least until she sold her book—Decca knew she had to stay put. Some days, particularly when confronted by another rejection, she yearned to run away again, to go anywhere, to do anything but this routine of getting up to write “at the crack of Bob.”

  Then in December, the Supreme Court ruled against the government in the matter of withholding citizens’ passports. The Treuhaft philosophy was that once you received your passports, you made use of them for as long as they lasted. Decca immed
iately made plans to return to England, where she expected she might find a more receptive audience for her memoir.

  WHEN DECCA AND Benjy set sail for England in April 1959, she had been working on her memoir for over two years. Her agent Barthold Fles had been trying to sell her book, but so far had not succeeded. If Decca felt frustrated by the New York publishing world’s lack of interest, she also had to wonder whether the book was really bad or whether the rejections were because of her radical past.

  It was hard for someone so used to controlling her own sphere of influence to leave everything in the hands of an agent, capable and kind as Fles seemed. She gathered the names of publishers abroad and considered how to shop her book around London. In the months leading up to her and her son’s departure, she threw herself into the discipline of a low-calorie diet, aerobic exercise, daily writing, and domestic chores. “I hope to be completely re-molded as the Chinese Reds say by the time I see you,” she wrote to Dinky, who was finishing her first year at Sarah Lawrence. Such moral probity was, of course, utterly dull, Decca admitted. “How much more interesting could I have written, ‘Dined at Fleur de Lys, got drunk afterwards, held up a department store.’”

  Mother and daughter had a mutually admiring relationship, but the subject of Dinky’s education divided them. As someone who had been prevented from going to school, Decca couldn’t understand her daughter’s discontent with her elite college. Both women were animated and charismatic, with the gift their friends reported to “lift up” others in their circle and the ability (though not extravagantly employed) to wound one another. Dinky frustrated Decca when she affected indifference. She knew how to parry her mother’s teasing and where to land her own zingers. In the days leading up to their ship’s departure, Benjy and Decca visited Aranka and Dinky in New York. Dinky appreciated her mother’s project—which had begun as a gesture of love, in memory of Esmond. The college freshman also recognized its value to Decca as a life-changing occupation, even if she didn’t quite see her mother as a famous author.

  ON DECCA AND Benjy’s second day at sea, the worst storm that year slammed the ocean liner carrying them. The grand decks were spookily abandoned since most of the passengers, in all classes of travel, and much of the crew suffered dreadful seasickness. Whatever was not tied down went whizzing by, including paisley shawls, umbrellas, small dogs, and, as Decca reported, several dowagers with bloodied heads. Decca was never seasick; Benjy was not so lucky.

  In London, Decca stayed with her friend Joan Rodker. Their first night, they had dinner with Doris Lessing and Clancy Sigal. Decca found it so pleasant meeting other writers, ex-menaces, and once unfriendly witnesses, that she fantasized about moving back to London permanently. She was also fascinated that so many people from her past had become writers. Like Philip Toynbee and Giles Romilly, many of her English friends either had books in progress or were engaged in some kind of journalism. She ran into Joe Starobin, a blacklisted American writer who edited a trade journal for British dentistry. When he offered Decca $120 for an article, Doris Lessing said she’d introduce her to some top dentists.

  With all her considerable energy, Decca launched her campaign to find an English agent and publisher for her still-untitled memoir. Someone, perhaps at the English Communist Party headquarters, recommended the literary agent James MacGibbon. Over a drink, Decca found MacGibbon simpatico, a former party member, and willing to read her manuscript. A few days later, he phoned to say how much he had loved her book. He wanted to show it to Gollancz Publishers, confident they’d like it, too. Meanwhile, he’d been in touch with an American editor, Lowell Thompson from Houghton Mifflin, and Thompson was already on the verge of making an offer for the U.S. rights. Decca and MacGibbon met on Monday. The following Friday, after a day spent sightseeing with Benjy, they were walking into Joan’s house from the tube when Decca heard the news.

  Gollancz had accepted the book for publication and made an offer of a sizable advance. It had all happened at a dizzying speed. The English publishers wanted her to complete the book by adding a concluding section. Now, in chronological order, she had “to gently fire Fles” and delicately inform her mother that she was writing an autobiography. She told Muv, “The book is sort of memoirs of my life with Esmond. It isn’t quite finished so I shall have to be working on it like mad at the Island, and later, because it’s got to be finished by the time I leave for the U.S.”

  Two weeks later, in early May, Muv, Benjy, and Decca left together for Inch Kenneth, where Decca would install herself in a spare bedroom in the big old Victorian house on the little island. She was glad not to have sold Inch Kenneth, and alternated between hours of writing and hosting tea parties with her mother to the “nutty” island society.

  Bob joined them in May. They had been apart three months, but her letters to him were full of endearments and promises never to part for so long again. She was also glad to have a confidant with whom to share her new work. In California, she had relied on her writing committee and at first felt uneasy without them. From Philip Toynbee, she had learned “that editors are a completely new thing here, copied from the United States. Philip said he had never heard of them at all until recently, and couldn’t imagine how any self-respecting author could let a third person mess around with his book.” Once her book was absolutely finished, she would work with a copy editor, but she couldn’t count on much help before then. “They just don’t work that way in England,” she explained to Bob and Dinky in a letter, “but cruelly leave one on one’s own. It does make me a bit sad as I really thrive on suggestions and help.”

  Her mother was circumspect and dropped many helpful hints, in particular wishing that “there should be no bitterness in it.” Eventually, Decca let Muv read the first few chapters and was much relieved to find her mother approving and even complimentary, with only a few reservations regarding certain obscure details that it amused Decca to correct. For instance, Muv edited the length of her daughter’s appendix scar (eight, not twelve, inches) and suggested she not mention the brand of their “foul”-smelling water heater, to avoid a libel suit. Muv admitted she was bothered in places by Decca’s portrayal of her as a snob, but in general, she seemed pleased with the book. To her sisters, Decca said she was writing a memoir just about her life with Esmond. She was careful that none of them—especially Nancy, whose approbation she particularly yearned for—would learn how much more of their youth together she planned to cover. All her sisters were mad to read it; Debo even volunteered to edit the revised version. Decca was getting along with both Nancy and Debo so much better than they had at their last reunion. Benjy had won a great friend in his Aunt Debo, and Nancy had come to enjoy Decca’s companionship again. Nevertheless, they suffered some nervousness about her memoir. “Oh Hen, I do hope it’s not going to be frank,” Debo said.

  Meanwhile, the island proved a lovely place to write. The food was divine: lobsters, fresh milk and cream from the dairy, and there was always homemade bread. She set up her writing desk in a large room whose window overlooked the sea. It was so appealing that Decca wrote to her daughter with a proposal:Here is some exciting news (if it comes off, that is). Bob and I have decided to try to buy the Island from the others—buy out their shares . . . Muv, of course, would live here rent free for the rest of her life or as long as she wants to. A great consideration in making this decision is your feelings in the matter. I know you always wanted to keep it if we could . . . might you be interested (a few years from now) in taking a real hand here, either the farming end or possibly running a summer guest house? With Benj as (un) handy-man?

  Nancy told Decca that if their other sisters would agree to sell their shares, she would give her share to the Treuhafts as a gift. Nancy was irritated enough by her father’s will and affluent enough to do exactly as she wished. Her recent string of successes had run unabated, and Nancy was quite comfortably set, even without the Redesdale inheritance. Over the previous year, she had published a biography of Voltaire and begun work o
n her next novel, Don’t Tell Alfred (and finally divorced her husband, Peter Rodd—to whom she’d been married since 1934). This act of generosity from her unpredictable eldest sister caused Decca to inform her English lawyer “to be prepared to deal with yet another inadvertent inheritance.”

  BY JUNE, THE deal had gone through. All Decca’s sisters, including Diana, had agreed to sell and all had been madly curious about why on earth Decca even wanted Inch Kenneth. In a letter to her mother, Nancy speculated, “Atom base I suppose—you’ll probably see Khrushchev arriving any day, to be greeted with jugs of cream by the simple islanders.” Decca told her friends that she and Bob thought it a good investment, that Dinky had asked them to do it for Muv, and that it might make a retirement home someday. She and Bob had been struggling for so long, no one who hadn’t been there could understand the stress and tension and pressure they’d endured on account of their politics, but on this small island, life was like a dream.

  Back in London, Decca and Bob visited their old friend Paul Robeson, whom Benjy and Decca had recently seen in the role of Othello at Stratford. In mid-May, the Treuhafts rented an apartment in the same building where W. E. B. DuBois and his wife, Shirley, lived. Over the past year, there had been a signal shift. Now DuBois and the Treuhafts all had their passports again. DuBois was ninety-one years old. “Can you believe it?” Decca wrote to Aranka. “And absolutely chipper, not a bit deaf, delightfully amusing and conversational. We took them out to dinner last night and he had a martini, wine and cigarettes along with us!”