Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford - Hardcover

Mitford, Jessica

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375410325 ISBN 13: 9780375410321

Verlag: Knopf, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

“Decca” Mitford lived a larger-than-life life: born into the British aristocracy—one of the famous (and sometimes infamous) Mitford sisters—she ran away to Spain during the Spanish Civil War with her cousin Esmond Romilly, Winston Churchill’s nephew, then came to America, became a tireless political activist and a member of the Communist Party, and embarked on a brilliant career as a memoirist and muckraking journalist (her funeral-industry exposé, The American Way of Death, became an instant classic). She was a celebrated wit, a charmer, and throughout her life a prolific and passionate writer of letters—now gathered here.

Decca’s correspondence crackles with irreverent humor and mischief, and with acute insight into human behavior (and misbehavior) that attests to her generous experience of the worlds of politics, the arts, journalism, publishing, and high and low society. Here is correspondence with everyone from Katharine Graham and George Jackson, Betty Friedan, Miss Manners, Julie Andrews, Maya Angelou, Harry Truman, and Hillary Rodham Clinton to Decca’s sisters the Duchess of Devonshire and the novelist Nancy Mitford, her parents, her husbands, her children, and her grandchildren.

In a profile of J.K. Rowling, The Daily Telegraph (UK), said, “Her favorite drink is gin and tonic, her least favorite food, trip. Her heroine is Jessica Mitford.”

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jessica Mitford is also the author of Hons and Rebels (previously published as Daughters and Rebels), The American Way of Death, The Trial of Dr. Spock, Kind and Usual Punishment, A Fine Old Conflict, Poison Penmanship, Faces of Philip: A Memoir of Philip Toynbee, Grace Had an English Heart, and The American Way of Birth. Until her death in 1996, she lived in Oakland, California, with her husband, labor lawyer Robert Treuhaft.

Peter Y. Sussman was an award-winning editor at the San Francisco Chronicle from 1964 to 1993 and has written, edited, taught, and lectured widely since then. He is the coauthor of Committing Journalism and was a coauthor of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. He lives in Berkeley, California.

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I

BABY BLUEBLOOD AND HOBOHEMIAN


Just enough letters survive from Decca's childhood to give a feel for the peculiar nature of the close-knit, even ingrown, world in which she was raised, mostly in a succession of country mansions and the family's London house. Even without biographical background—available in innumerable memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies of the Mitford sisters and their friends—Decca's earliest surviving letters convey the self-confidence and freedom that come with a pedigree of privilege, as well as the bantering, chattering, brash playfulness, and the sometimes stinging wit and candor that characterized this particular family.

As devotees of the family's legend are all too aware, in addition to the secret languages and rituals the children and their parents had numerous nicknames that sometimes showed the daughters' cult of inventive nonsense and sometimes carried political or ironic undertones. In Decca's early letters, Baron Redesdale was "the Old Subhuman" and "the Feudal Remnant," among other names, and both parents were "the Revereds" or the Female (Fem) and Male, although they were most commonly and endearingly simply Muv and Farve.

Decca's parents, she once wrote, were "Edwardian by chronology but Victorian in ideology." Her father, she said, "acquired [an] extra degree of British jingoism, remarkable even for his class and generation," and she noted that her two Nazi sisters used to refer to him, "approvingly and accurately," as "one of Nature's Fascists."

Most of the sisters have published their sometimes contradictory recollections, and it is pointless to rehash all their childhood motivations and influences, much less the long-running disputes over the degree of, say, Lady Redesdale's vague detachment or her husband's fiery temper, unwavering habits, or atavistic views. Decca's letters, as well as her memoirs, convey her own reactions, both at the time and in retrospect. Her perceptions of her childhood changed somewhat over time, and more than most writers, she returned to the subject frequently throughout her life, as if she could never quite make sense of it or, indeed, define herself except in terms of the family she left abruptly at the age of nineteen.

Decca once summed up her sisterly relationships before global and family politics shattered their confined world:

Boud [Unity] was the one I really adored. Family relationships at that age changed in a kaleidoscope: first one, then 'tother was foremost Loved One amongst the sisters. Nancy was a remote star. Pam, a cypher, a perennial butt of teasing by the rest of us (led by Nancy), & I barely saw her at all; she went off to do farming or something for Diana & [her first husband] Bryan [Guinness] when I was about 12. The Diana relationship (from loving to loathing). . . . Debo & I, closest in age, veered a lot. That is, I think we always had a certain HONNISH* ADORATION of each other, but hardly any common interests, even when v. young.

Although the Mitfords' financial resources were in decline during her childhood, partly because of Baron Redesdale's fascination with buying and building houses, "we were sort of cosseted, lapped in luxury & comfort," Decca has written. There were always household retainers to attend to their needs and whims. The six daughters were tutored by their mother and then placed, in turn, "under the jurisdiction of a series of inept governesses, from whom we learned next to nothing," she said. The sisters tormented the governesses mercilessly. As but one small example of their habitual defiance, Decca recalled how, when forbidden to say the word "damn," they delighted in infuriating the governess by routinely referring to the cities Rotter and Amster.

Decca's parents were Conservatives to the core, comforted by the motto on the Redesdale coat of arms: "God careth for us." Decca dated her earliest awareness of the inequities of the English class system to walks she used to take with her mother near their rural Swinbrook home, bearing small charitable gifts for the "village people." Disturbed by their poverty, she recalled asking her mother one day why all the English people's money wasn't divided among everyone, so that no one would be so desperately poor. Her mother, she said, replied, "But that's what Socialists want," explaining that "Socialists want everyone to be poor, but we Conservatives want everyone to be rich." Although she never forgot the anecdote, it was years later before she rebelled against the family's politics. At the time of the general strike in England, when she was nearly nine, she recalled being "a confirmed Tory" and harboring fears of being shot by the "Bolshies." She volunteered in the strikebreakers' canteens—a fact that she probably refrained from mentioning when she later joined the Communist Party.

Her early rebellions were apolitical in nature, like the time when she was forbidden from visiting the estates of shocked neighboring families because she had passed along to her dancing-class friends some information she'd picked up about "conception and [the] birth of babies."

In her early and midteens, Decca followed her oldest sister and role model Nancy to the left, becoming an "avid reader" of, first, pacifist literature. "By age 12, influenced by Nancy," she wrote in one letter, "I was a crashing intellectual snob." Decca then developed a broader interest in Communist and other left-wing periodicals, pamphlets, and books. As she became more earnest and excited about her newfound socialist insights—"suddenly confronted for the first time with a rational explanation of society"—she grew disenchanted with Nancy and her fashionably witty friends, who "didn't take anything very seriously."

Decca once wrote to her grandson James Forman that at about the age of fifteen, "the clarity, the brilliance, the total solution to horrors of war & mass poverty contained in the Communist Manifesto & other writings . . . burst on me like fireworks."

Thus began her growing estrangement from her parents and class, which continued as she sulked through weekend house parties and fulfilled the coming-of-age rituals demanded of her. "You've no idea of the boredom (to me, anyway) of the company," Decca once wrote to the writer Alex Haley. "Try to visualize twittering debutantes and what we (or I, at least) used to call Chinless Wonders, i.e. the deb escorts—goodness they were DULL fellows. What did we talk about? The latest dance, the next ball, who was going." The rituals culminated with her formal presentation at court before "what appear to be two large stuffed figures, nodding and smiling down from their thrones like wound-up toys."

Decca started confronting her parents on their political views, which her mother evidently took as a generalized sign of her unhappiness. She recalled at one point accusing her mother of being "an Enemy of the Working Class." The "genuinely stung" and angry Lady Redesdale is said to have replied, "I'm not an enemy of the working class! I think some of them are perfectly sweet!"

Nancy Mitford, thirteen years Decca's elder, was a distant model at best by her teenage years. The only brother, Tom, eight years older, had been sent away to school, as boys were, and was also a less immediate influence. And Pam, born between Nancy and Tom, was so...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0375410325
• ISBN 13: 9780375410321
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 768
• Herausgeber: Sussman Peter Y.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar