A double Decca
Alastair Forbes
A Fine Old Conflict Jessica Mitford (Michael Joseph 25.95)
That old French proverb 'Jamais deux sans trois' has always seemed a hard saying enough but the publication, in under two years, of no less than four books by, with, to or from surviving members of the Swinbrook sisterhood has surely constituted, to use one of the rare eighteenth-century English expressions often on the lips of Jessica ('Decca') Mitford, the white, Caucasian, foreign-born US citizenauthoress of the latest of them, 'cruel and unusual punishment'. 'A wfidly good, easy to read, very funny in parts . . . clever little thing, you'll make pots' was how Nancy had greeted the part picaresque, part romantic Hons and Rebels, very properly keeping her perceptive professional literary judgment free of any contagious sense of family outrage at so public an act of lese-parente.
Crossing America by train during the war Decca had met a guy in the club car who, after a look at her palm, had pronounced, 'You have an overriding passion — money. That's all you really care about.' He may have had not second but just straight 20-20 sight for, since at the.end of the 'fifties she gave up her party hackwork — mostly the fund-raising she was fitted for by birth — for the Californian Commies and became a respectable writer-polemicist, a lecturecircuit leader and a Big Name plotted high on the sales graphs in the office of superKnopf-nob Bob Got lieb (numerous oily doxologies to whom interleave this book's text) she has kept merrily middling rich. As Philip Toynbee, her oldest and best U(K) friend has recently reminded, she 'is certainly a well-heeled lady. She spends her money. . . in ensuring that she herself shall never be threatened by the slightest avoida
ble discomfort. She likes good whisky, good food and sleek hotels, She takes the minimum risk of suffering any inconvenience when moving from one place to another,' keeping up almost the same state as that other old-timer, Dolores lbarurri, la Pasionaria.
But she emphatically does not deserve to rnake further pots out of her present potboiler which has struck this reviewer, though himself gifted by the fairies round his American cradle with a boredom threshold higher than the Statue of Liberty, as the most fearful falling off from the standard set by Hons and Rebels, in fact a real lemon from Dullsville besides which her sister Diana's recent book shines, in retrospect, like Hyperion himself.
Whatever contrary impression the Sunday Times may have contrived to give by some highly selective serialisation, it is full of such sentences as 'Furthermore, the principle of democratic centralism seemed to me essential to the functioning of a revolutionary organisation in a hostile world,' hardly what Nancy would have found either good, readable or even comic. 'I won't bore the public again,' the eldest sister wrote of the souvenirs she herself was planning during her long and agonising terminal illness, 'with our childhood to the extent of more than a few pages.' qiana, on the other hand, risked her first six chapters on this subject before being sidetracked on to a lengthy and defiant recital of her unreconstructed and unacceptable personal and political passions. Excellent and in places even enchanting chapters they were too, worthy indeed of a place, but not I pray too soon, in some future selection of the best Mitfordiana. Equally deserving of inclusion would be some snippets from the first Lord Redesdale, a self-confessed 'gluttonous reader' whose books were neither `depres Spectator 21 May 1911 singly huge' nor 'monstrously boring' as falsely claimed by his arch-philistine grand' daughter Decca who ought at least to have savoured, with something of a shock of rec" ognition if not of embarrassment, hi5 description of the painter Gustave Courbet. the Arts Minister of the Commune, sitting down in a restaurant 'with majestic condescension, like a true anarchist, deigning to he waited upon with all the adulation that 05 due to him' and who, asked why he wanted to pull down the Tuileries, rather Decca like replied, ' Parce que tant que cette sacree maison durera ily aura toujours des coquins qui voudront venir y demeurer'. Another classic Mitford connection first unveiled to present generations. by Diana was Great-Aunt Natty, Clemmie SpencerChurchill's gambling, gambolling and often near-bankrupt Ogilvy. mother, Blanche Hozier, who was wont to declare love privilege' and whose far from juvenile delinquency included smuggling her Scotch terrier from Dieppe to Newhaven al° squeezing its wriggling body close to nue side of her own while flinging open her cloak on the other and with true WAS's" chutzpah demanding of an accusing customs officer, 'Can't you believe the word of an Englishwoman?' Decca, like her cousin Randolph Churchill, clearly tn°' after her. Randolph even • instituted a Teasers' Club which enjoined its members to Tease All at All Times and in All WaYs' Decca's own prime piece of teasing' according to this book, has been to beccur.e, the first immigrant ever to seek and obtan't US citizenship with the express intention 01 overthrowing the Federal government and ain( Constitution, the sheer cheek of which might even have created a slight pre. isiuen--t tial smile on the most rocky of "nil Rushmore phizzes. She could certain ! cheerfully subscribe to what Dick Crossnia's said of himself, namely that 'Irreverence 11 my main socialist quality and not triculd indignation': As what she calls 'a gifted hater', her politics tend to be Feel-gnuo rather than Do-good, though the thWas motives mix usefully in certain fields stic" oi civil rights, cheaper burials and Peri reform. She has always 'delighted in matelli% wits with the world generally', preferahlY 'ever greater baiting and acts of octragur against the class we had left . . . it was way of life.' It is easy to see that her ing up', a process that in Hons and Rev's, 0 she said 'seemed interminable', remaius and that 'the great golden goal of eve.cii childhood — being a grown up' 'seemed impossibly far away' still elunes after all these years. And while one e„,i applaud her part in the unsucces,51:e attempt to save the black Willie Mcu. it from death in a Mississippi electric chalt:s., is hard not to think back to another ii`ce English-deb, Nancy Cunard, wh° ° fat fought for the Scottsboro boys and Was lid more deeply involved in black life 0, it letters and negritude in America, thoug",f was in France, as the poet discoverer Beckett and mistress of Aragon, that she Was successfully to free herself from her background and sublimate her debilitating hate-love of her remarkable mother. BY Comparison Decca suffers, alas, from the 'cultural barrenness' of which she accuses her adopted home of Oakland. As for her alleged escape from her parents' class, she has blown it, for a Harvardtrained lawyer with a big trade union practice such as her husband, Bob Treuhaft, is, toda y more Ruling Class than ever was poor rarve or Muv, however ci-devant aristo his dec/assee better half may be. The author met her husband, a second-generation American of Hungarian-Jewish origin, in wartime Washington where they both worked for the OPA — Office of Price Administration — which had to restrain her from throwing her bureaucratic weight about in defiance of the Constitution, trying wield a bludgeon like a blood-thirsty AT vampire. Bob Treuhaft soon took the wayward war-widow on for life and is clearly something of a saint in his way. When he overheard Decca ho-humming to herself 'A woman's work is never done,' he commented 'You can say that again, in this house."Bob never ceased to marvel,' his Wife writes, 'that I could have reached the age of thirty without mastering the rudiments of cooking, without gaining some Minimal understanding of the properties and uses of various cleaning materials, he having picked up such matters by observation and osmosis, as most of us men have Managed to do, even before being forced to live in what Decca patronisingly calls 'horrible little weeny cottages', rather as Sir Harold Wilson KG speaks of 'bedsits', in 'absolutely appalling and hard to understand poverty'.
°Ile of her family's' sobriquets kir her at s'_winbrook had been 'Squalor', so Bob
the preferred either to hire help or do h e housework himself. Doubtless they will end their days calling Room Service in some ‘si.eek hotel' across the Bay. Not content I', 1th boring us about her difficulties with Lady Redesdale who had her own problems (she loved her children but, like Queen Mary, was too reserved and uptight to hug ar!lci kiss them after babyhood or, in recca's case, to let her have her wish to go o boarding school, a surrogate version of Which the Communist Party had to become In later life) she even trots out that dreaded nlother_in-law routine. It is quite characteristic of her that she should complain of Madame Mere Treuhaft's unheralded des.e..ents from New York upon Oakland (where she couldn't help, poor woman, wishing she Were black, like fellow houseguest blues ?Inger Leadbelly, so that then Decca would iove her) though similarly descending herself, unannounced and four strong, on Nancy in Paris where in the Rue Monsieur the strain could of course be taken by the °,2nne-a-tout-faire Marie, always dubbed a British Intelligence officer in drag by Gaston Palewski. The considerable virtues of both mother and mother-in-law, who incidentally got on admirably together, shine brightly through Decca's paranoiac carping, Aranka Treuhaft, of whom there is a delightful photograph, dressed for a Women's Club Kill like any Kennedy matron from old Rose down, was a successful milliner who had had a hard fight to make it in the garment industry, where her son first got caught up in union work at the time of that memorably enjoyable pre-war revue Pins and Needles, performed by the talented girls and boys of Dave Dubinsky, the RussoAmerican who first spotted the sitting Muscovy duck in Treuhaft many .years before he and Decca were propositioned, in a murky manner more suited to a come-on for a California partouze than an invitation to join the CP. 'We exclaimed in unison, "We wondered when you were going to ask
us".' Once a member', she goes on 'I do not remember ever questioning "the correctness of the line", as we would have put it.'
Being a Mitford, she is able to escape the classification under either Fool or Knave that any other perpetrator of this remark would have to suffer. Or is she? As Philip Toynbee again has said, she 'has never been very good at seeing much further than her own nose', and sometimes, when that once pert proboscis is however usefully poked into somebody else's business, not even as far as that. There may, for all I know, have been a case in California as in, say, Calabria or Campania, or even Tuscany, for believing that in certain cases the Communist Party might be the most effective instru ment for hastening some overdue social reform. There can really be none made for the shameful, unquestioning acceptance of the Moscow line on all matters beyond the parish pump. Decca Mitford's account of her trip, before the Twentieth Party Congress, with her husband, daughter and friend, to Budapest is quite simply obscene. Their 'euphoria over the new regime' was scarcely diminished at all by appeals (rejected) to their western compassion from what they cocksuredly 'assumed' to be just 'vestigial opposition to the Communist government'. Nor was it Khrushchev's socalled 'ghastly disclosures' about the Stalin regime he had served so faithfully that caused them much later to back away from the Party and into the national and international limelight as jolly, clowning gadflies who are sometimes effective if facetious catalysers. Besides, had not her first husband, Esmond Romilly, on reading Koestler's Darkness at Noon, declared himself to be on the side of the Inquisitors?
The author still writes letters to The Times full of the sort of hack CP hyperbole such as even her uninspiring hero Ehrenburg would have eschewed. One is left with the impression that Decca and Bob Gotlieb hoped that this book would do for herself and the American Communists what David Niven's succeeded in doing for himself, his publishers and his fellow movie stars with so much more entertaining West-coast reminiscences.
Despite what Philip Toynbee has underlined, 'the strong element of unabashed frivolity in her nature', it has been insufficient to make this doughgirl's mix light enough to be palatable. She has acquired of American characteristics that `governessy' one sister Nancy most abhorred and that least suited to Mitford ways. Nor would Nancy have approved of her explanation of her book's title, which is quite simply an outrageous Fib. Writing of 'The Internationale's' opening line, 'Tis the final conflict,' she says, 'For some years, before I saw the words written down, I thought it began: "It's a fine old conflict .. .".' Stuff and nonsense. She knew the words all'right but it was her younger sister Debo, now Duchess of Devonshire who, as almost invariably the fans et origo of all the best Mitford jokes and esoterica, misheard the words and thereafter authorised for ever her own version. What shabby inverted snobbery to rob her of her due!
As for the Duke, the leading Friend of Israel in the Tory Party, he has borne the burden of his in-laws with more dignity and discretion than Jessica Mitford whose writing could only benefit from a study of Andrew Devonshire's so much more enthrallingly readable Park Top. We must keep our fingers crossed, lest Bob Gotlieb has succeeded in selling the movie rights and we be yet subjected to some Next Stop Swinbrook Churchyard nonsense with Dominique Sanda (or perhaps Patty Hearst) as Decca then and Shelley Winters as Decca now.
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