Decca's Blithe Zeitgeist

By Melvin Maddocks

A FINE OLD CONFLICT by Jessica Mitford; Knopf; 333 pages; $10

If the Mitford sisters did not exist, Evelyn Waugh would have had to invent them. Their splendid improbability makes his ongoing saga of the decline and fall of the English upper class read like an understatement. Take for instance Nancy Mitford, one of the Mad Young Things of the '20s and a bitter-comic novelist in her own right, who ended up in self-imposed exile in Paris, musing about Louis XIV. Or consider the two fascist Mitfords: Diana, who married Sir Oswald Mosley, Fuehrer of the British Blackshirts, and Unity, a prized exotic of Hitler's inner circle until she shot herself in the head the day World War II was declared.

After them among the daughters of utterly respectable Lord and Lady Redesdale came Jessica Mitford, known to her family as Decca, who scratched hammers and sickles on the windowpanes of her stately home with her diamond ring before running off to the Spanish Civil War at the age of 19 with a nephew of Sir Winston Churchill's. In A Fine Old Conflict, a sequel to her earlier memoir, Daughters and Rebels, Decca promises to explain why she in particular and Mitford sisters in general have behaved so--well, Mitfordly.

Nobody can fault her story for lack of plot. After Spain, Decca married her lover, Esmond Romilly. They came to the U.S. She conceived his child, Constancia, nicknamed Dinky, before he returned to Europe with the Canadian Royal Air Force and died in action in 1941. Despite that tragedy, Decca tells, with a nice sense of wartime humor, of her duty on the Washington front in the Office of Price Administration. At last it is the moment for the slap in the face of the British Empire--the really big Mitford-sister gesture. After moving to California, marrying a brilliant radical lawyer. Bob Treuhaft, and becoming a naturalized citizen, Decca Mitford joined the Communist Party. What more could a daughter of Lord and Lady Redesdale's do?

By her own account, Decca made an odd sort of Communist. She drummed up attendance to party rallies with flame-colored flyers that read: CHICKEN DINNERS LIKE MOTHER USED TO MAKE. FREE-FLOWING LIQUOR. 20 BEAUTIFUL GIRLS 20. Whether investigating police brutality in Oakland in the '40s or leading a White Women's Delegation to Mississippi to appeal the case of convicted Rapist Willie McGee in 1951, Mitford the Marxist seemed to operate with a touch of what she called "high jinks." Missions might be missions, but why could they not also be "a thrilling adventure," or at least "a welcome breather from diapers and housework"?

All this, of course, makes a good story too. It is when Decca tries to explain the Mitford syndrome that everything falls apart. Why did she join the Communist Party and remain a Communist for the better part of two decades? "The Zeitgeist of the thirties" is the best she can do for an answer. She is no more convincing about why she left the party in

1958 with "no regrets." Arguing that "civil rights" and the Communist Party were once "indivisible," she serenely declares:

"I can hardly imagine living in America in those days and not being a member."

There is something charming and at the same time infuriating about this transcendental blitheness. Going on to attack the funeral industry (The American Way of Death) and the penal system (Kind and Usual Punishment), ex-Communist Decca, turned bestselling muckraker of the '60s and '70s, concludes: "I hoped and believed I was as subversive as ever." The question is: What does "subversive" mean to a Mitford?

In the famous terminology of Sister Nancy, Decca's "subversive" has a very U-word sound, as if it were "privilege" turned upside down and thumbing its patrician nose. At best, it is a pink-cheeked cry of "Fair play!" coming from the hockey field of a posh girls' boarding school.

At bottom, it smacks, as Decca admits, of the world of "English tease," where nanny nicknames like Decca and Dinky stay with one to the grave -- long after party code names have been forgotten.

And so the rebel crosses the Atlantic, moves to the outer edge of the New World, becomes an American and a Communist -- and ends up rather remarkably like what she rebelled against. This is the unmistakable message between the lines of A Fine Old Conflict. The last English eccentric is alive and well and living comfortably in Oakland.

--Melvin Maddocks

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