Jessica Mitford’s Handbag

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0:00

You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and today I'm joined by Rosemary Hill to talk about a new biography of Jessica Mitford and what she, Jessica, once called the Mitford industry. Rosemary Hill's most recent book is Times History in the Age of Romanticism. She's a contributing editor at the LRB and presents London revisited on the LRB's Close Readings podcast. Her piece in the latest issue of the paper is a review of the Fierce Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford by Carla Kaplan. Hello, Rosemary, and thank you for talking to me today.

1:07

Hello, Tom. Thank you for asking me.

1:41

You write in your piece that the Mitford sister's mother, Lady Redesdale, once said that whenever she saw a headline beginning Peer's Daughter, she knew it would be one of hers. So, very briefly, I suppose, in case anyone needs reminding, who were the Mitford sisters and why were they so often in the headlines?

1:44

Well, they were the Reedsdales daughters. There was one brother, Tom, of whom not much is ever said, but the daughters were Jessica, who's the subject of this biography, who was generally known as Decca and who's referred to as Decca mostly in the book. There was Nancy, who was the novelist and the bright young thing, great friend of Evelyn Waugh, great letter writer and wit. There was Unity, who was one of the two fascist sisters. She was the one who became a great personal friend of Adolf Hitler and at the outbreak of war, attempted suicide. Then there was Diana, who was the other fascist. She was first married to Brian Guinness, but left him for Oswald Mosley, who was the interwar and wartime fascist leader in Britain. And then there was Debo, who was Known in the family as nine, because that was what Nancy said her mental age always remained. And she had said when they were little and the others talked about meeting Mr. Wright, she would like to meet Duke Wright. And indeed she became the Duchess of Devonshire. And then there's Pamela, about whom much less is ever said. Private eye characterized her once as Doreen, the missing Mitford sister. But she also lived quite a colorful but not actually internationally sensational life. And then there was Tom, who's the real Doreen of the story because he was the only boy and nobody has ever said very much about him, but they were all fearless, I suppose is one word. They all just had extraordinarily big personalities and a sense of both aristocratic privilege and also being brought up in a way that was so remote from most people's ordinary experience of life in the interwar years that they just, I mean, what you or I might think of as, you know, hobby and enthusiasm or something, they took literally to an international level. I mean, they were all over the newspapers one way and another. And that's why their mother always knew that piers daughter would be one of hers.

2:04

Yeah, and just think about their nicknames for each other. Pamela was known as Woman by the others, wasn't she? And that apparently Nancy said to Deborah, everyone cried when you were born.

4:19

Well, they were. I mean, Pamela was known as Woman because she wasn't very womanly. And indeed, after her marriage, I mean, she embarked on same sex relationships. And the thing is that being a lesbian was really, although it was a bit off center at that date, it was really nothing compared with the others.

4:29

And Jessica was one of the younger ones, wasn't she? That Nancy was the oldest. And then Pamela, I think this is right, I'm really gonna get it wrong, but. And then there was Tom and so there was quite a bit and there's sort of two or three years between them. So then Diana Unity, who was a great friend of Hitler's, in love with Hitler, had this troubling relationship with Hitler. And then Jessica, also known as Decca. So there's quite a big age gap between them. I mean, Nancy was a teenager by the time Jessica was born.

4:49

Yes. And Nancy of course was very much glamorized by her younger sisters, especially Decca, who from a very early age was intent on running away. I mean, she wasn't quite clear obviously at that. A lot of children haven't. I mean, it's so typical. Lots of children at some stage think they're going to run away and they usually get to the End of the road and then mummy or Daddy, who's been following them, brings them back. But Decca was very keen on running away and indeed opened a bank account as a child at a very smart bank labelled Running Away Account. But when Nancy, the older sister, was able to leave, was old enough, so she did leave home and got a bed sitting room, which was again, you know, very much that inter war bright young things, new woman way of life. But she came back after a short period of time because she said she just couldn't cope. She was knee deep in underwear. There was just no one to put things away. And later on, of course, Decca and her first husband had. They were astonished when they got bills for electricity. They had no idea how anything worked. So in a way, they had a sort of psychological long sight. I mean, they couldn't understand the minutiae of everyday life. But when it came to becoming special friends, as Unity put it, special friends with Hitler, they saw no obstacle.

5:17

And there are already several books by the Mitford sisters, including Nancy's novels the Pursuit of Love and Love in A Cold Climate, Decca's memoir Hons and Rebels. And there are even more books that have already been written about them as all part of the Mitford industry. So what's new about this one?

6:37

Well, this is, I must say, my first thought when the jiffy bag thudded onto the doormat was, oh, not another book about the Mitfords. But actually, not only is it a very good book, it's a really interesting perspective because Carla Kaplan is an American scholar, it's a very scholarly book, it's a proper. It's not a kind of fangirl account, by any manner of means. And because Kaplan's an American and she sees and Jessica settled in America fairly early on in her life and never lived permanently in England again. And it was her life in America, her involvement with the civil rights movement. And that is what this biography opens up and sets her very firmly in an American context, in the context of American wartime and Second World War and post war politics. And of course, Decca comes right up to date. She's a friend of Hillary Rodham, who she thinks is far too good for Bill Clinton. She's a friend of Salman Rushdie, so she's a very unlike the others who seem in some ways, well, Unity died. Nancy seems very much stuck in the 1920s. Jessica comes right up to date, larger than life as in life, and very much a phenomenon of American politics, which I think at the moment is particularly relevant because we see her and her second Husband Bob Treuhaft, negotiating what it means to be a left wing and a certain point in their lives, a communist sympathizer and a civil rights activist in a very, very hostile climate. And of course, Decca, being a Mitford, does everything on a bigger scale. And at one point during the war, of course, she was being watched by the FBI because of her communist sympathies, but also because of her sisters under suspicion of being a fascist. So she got it from both ends.

6:57

And before going to America, I mean, her running away, the first place she ran away to was Spain, into the Spanish Civil War. And how did she end up there?

8:54

Well, she, you know, she's desperate to run away, but away where, who knows? And in the 30s, before the outbreak of the Second World War, of course, the great left wing cause was the Spanish Civil War, the fight against fascism, against Franco. And brigade, famously, we know Ernest Hemingway, Orwell, everybody on the left either went or talked about going to fight in Spain. And Decca had this very glamorous cousin, Esmond Romilly, who was Winston Churchill's nephew. I mean, everyone's frightfully well connected all the way through all of this, which is why their very slightest actions start getting headlines. Anyway, she met Esmond, who had already been in Spain and had come back and she met him at a very grand country house dinner and said, was he thinking of going back? And so he said yes. And she said, well, would you take me? So he said yes. So they ran away to Spain. And in one way, of course, this was a very, was certainly a very glamorous thing to do from the outside, I think it was much less glamorous if you were inside it. But it was a very conventional upper class coupling, but kind of through the looking glass because they were doing the right thing but for the wrong reason. Socially, absolutely. On a parent. But Romilly, Esmond Romilly, who's a quite. I mean, they didn't get married. Jessica was underage. So of course the family tried very hard to get her back with both sticks and carrots. The sticks being legal proceedings and the carrots being copies of Vogue which her mother sent out regularly, suspecting that her daughter, for all the rightness of the courts, was probably rather homesick and miserable. And I think she was. And Esmond Romilly, there was certainly a very dark side to his character. He was quite manipulative, he was very light fingered and he was just in practical terms, very incapable. So they didn't have a very good time. Finally they got married. Decca's mother came out and oversaw the wedding, by which time Jessica was pregnant. And that was the very chaotic start to a rather chaotic marriage.

9:04

Yeah. And that pregnancy, I mean, thinking about in the Pursuit of Love and in Love in a Cold Climate in those novels that. I mean, they're sort of autobiographical, but also not that the characters are all mixed up, but Linda has elements of Decca about her and elements of Nancy and. Well, and of Diana as well, I suppose. But she dies in childbirth, I think, at the end of it. There's the bit that she does go to Spain and then that doesn't work, and then she comes back and she goes off to Paris and she sort of is told by the doctors not to have any more children, and then she does, and then she dies in childbirth. And of course, that didn't happen to any of the Mitford sisters, but her. Decca's first daughter died when she was very young. Died as a baby.

11:16

Yes. Well, again, I mean, they came back to England, they got a very basic room in the East End, and there was an outbreak of measles. And it was assumed. I mean, if you've had measles and you're breastfeeding, then the baby just gets your immunity. So nobody was very well worried about the baby but the Mitfords. I mean, the same was true, of course, of the late Queen, that she was brought up in such isolation. She'd never had measles or chickenpox or anything, and had to be protected her whole life because if she'd caught it later on, it'd be very serious. And it is serious in older people and is very, very serious in children. So, yes, this first baby died of measles in a more or less a slum where they were living. And it's very. I think Karl Kaplan's very good about Jessica Mitford's sort of emotional temperament. I think she possibly slightly overdoes it in attributing it all to the upper classes, but the determination to say nothing, to carry on. But she traces this rather thin but persistent thread of the loss of this first child all the way through Decca's life, and I'm sure that she's right to do so, because how could it not have been the most traumatic experience? And later on, after, she'd managed to have Constantia, her daughter, who did and does indeed survive, but then she had another miscarriage in a toilet at a gas station. I mean, it was in many ways an awfully difficult life.

11:56

And it was in this flat in Rotherhithe's that they got the Unexpected utility bills. And in order to run away from paying the gas bill, Deccan Romilly went to America. I mean is that more or less how it happened?

13:32

More or less the case? And I think, I mean it's very striking again there is this kind of emotional long sightedness that Decca absolutely hated. Injustice, the discrimination against people on the basis of color was very, very wrong. But the idea that actually just running away and leaving your landlord short of money was not. I mean that was fine and it didn't matter about your. And especially I think Romilly was the main one for just, you know, not paying bills and running off and being irresponsible. So they set off for America. Decca's nanny came to see them off which I think tells you quite a lot about the parental familial relations. So yeah, they set off for America and of course when they arrived they were already famous because Esmond was Churchill's nephew and so they were sort of feted everywhere as this glamour power couple which wasn't really quite the case. It wasn't as though after that Decca never settled in England permanently again. But they were trying very hard to support British interests insofar as they could as the war approached, but also cause they had to earn a living. And that was another thing that Decca learned very early on that when she was applying for jobs she filled in the form rather as you would fill in a passport form, the application forms. And where it said colour she assumed that they meant hair colour so she was writing brown and never getting any jobs anyway somebody explained that it meant skin colour so she started writing white and immediately got a job and she was very good. And again it's something that Kaplan brings out very well. I think she was very good at knowing how to parley herself at times as the radical and at times as the English aristocrat. And she got a very good job selling tweed in the old merry England village at the World's Fair. And I'm sure she was marvellous at it. She also did some modelling. I mean the other thing about the Mitfords was they were all very good looking and Diana was particularly really beautiful and Decca could make herself look fabulous if she wanted to but most of the time she didn't really see the point. But she was very good at manipulating her appearance over the years to come across as either a more innocent and simple person than she was or a more respectable person than she was. She fully understood the power of clothes and makeup and accessories. She just deployed them in rather a different way from Nancy.

13:46

We'll be back after this short break to talk more about Decca and the Mitford industry.

16:17

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16:44

This is the LRB podcast and I'm talking to Rosemary Hill about Jessica Mitford and her life in America. During the war in America, there's occasion that she met Churchill at the White House and this sort of slightly implausible sound, but everything about the Mitford seems so implausible. But Christmas at the White House in 1941, and of course Churchill's there, and of course Jessica Mitford's there.

17:31

I mean, he. By this time, obviously, Churchill, was trying to get America into the war, but these sorts of families, family things always matter. So by this stage, Unity, with her special friend Hitler, had been telling Hitler how very worried she was about Decca being a communist and everything. And apparently the Fuhrer was extremely understanding and consoling. But then when the war broke out, Unity just couldn't take it and she tried to shoot herself. She did shoot herself. She didn't kill herself. She was brought back very badly wounded. And Diana and Oswald Mosley were interned because they were fascist sympathizers with Germany, with which Britain was at war, so that they were in prison and they were allowed to be in prison together by this stage. So then Churchill in America thought that he would arranged to see Decca and reassure. So he had her brought. He wanted her. He tried to kind of get her to do what he wanted and go where he said, but of course she wouldn't. Anyway, finally they met up and he said he was awfully sorry about having had to intern Diana and Oswald, but not to worry because he'd made absolutely sure that they had Much better conditions than most of the prisoners and he'd got some rather more humble prisoners to act as staff for them. And Decca of course, instead of being grateful and reassured was absolutely feeble and said no, it's all their fault this war and these people dying and like how dare you give them special treatment. So poor old Churchill, not a phrase one often uses. Poor old Churchill was very disconcerted and then tried to give, we did give her $500 and she was very broke at this point but she said it was blood money and she gave it to the civil rights causes that she was by then supporting. And Kaplan points out that at Christmas dinner that year in the White House people commented on Churchill seeming oddly, rather morose. And she suggests very plausibly I think that this was as a result of having had a real tongue lashing from the ungrateful Decca. And then at that point one is completely on her side. I mean she really was prepared, unlike most of those aristocratic families, to put her principles before her family loyalty. And that was one of the things that her sisters could never understand because as far as they were concerned all this stuff was just. It came under the heading of what they referred to as politics. And you could be interested in politics or not interested in politics but you know, you were still all family surely and Decca just said no, I'm sorry, it's bigger than that. And then of course Romilly who trained with the Canadian Air Force because the Americans still weren't in the war, trained with the Canadians and some idiot appointed him as a navigator, which of all the things he couldn't do and there were many things he couldn't do that would have been the worst. And so he was reported missing, lost over the North Sea and it was a long time before Decca could be persuaded that he must be dead. And a lot of his friends didn't believe that he was dead, but he was dead. And so she was left with her daughter Constantia and it was a very low time in her life but she.

17:53

Must have acknowledged it by the time she married her second husband who you've, you've already mentioned Bob Truehafter.

21:10

Yeah, oh yes, I mean, but I mean it took years but yes, I mean she met him, Jewish civil rights lawyer and he was impressed. One of, I mean one of the many eccentric things about Jessica Mitford was her enthusiasm for. You can't really call it shoplifting cause it was food but she worked out that if you were in a self service canteen, if you took things off the counter and Ate and drank them before you got to the till. You probably could get away with just paying for your final cup of tea. And she went on doing this all her life, very oddly. But Truehalt, who was a lawyer, as I say, and a man with great sense of humour, I'd observed this behaviour of Becker's and thought it made her quite interesting. So, yes, they did marry and they had two sons together. Nicholas, the elder of the boys, was later killed when he was riding his bike on a paper round. And that was another of these shattering disasters in Decca's life, which she. When Nicholas was killed, she just took down all the photographs of him and went to bed with flu and never talked about it again. And that was very. A very Mitford y thing to do. And she only mentions later on, in Horns and Rebels, she mentions the death of Romilly in a footnote. And even then, Diana's saying, why bring all this up? You know, all the drudgery she calls it? Why not just move on? So, I mean. And I think Karla Kaplan's very good at dealing with that temperament. I think she's wrong, perhaps, in suggesting that it's purely aristocratic. I think there's a very English tendency to say very little about a lot of things, but it was, as we say, much else very extreme in the Mitford family.

21:17

Yeah. I mean, you said that when the brother Tom was killed in the war in 1945, that Decca wrote to her mother to say that she couldn't think of anything comforting to say.

23:11

Yeah. Yes. I mean, it was particularly poignant because he was killed right at the end of the war, having survived, obviously that far. And none of them really ever. They're constantly talking to each other about each other in this endless. Of course, it's a great age of letters and Nancy's letters, as I say, in particular, are really brilliantly funny. I think she gets. We see her very, very spiteful side in this biography, and she was very spiteful, I think sometimes also she was perhaps being a little more ironic and teasing than perhaps this biographer. I think she's sometimes a bit hard on Nancy, but yes, none of them really. They were fond of him, but he wasn't part of that extraordinary bond that the sisters had. And indeed, the only time when Decca did become very explicit about her emotions and talk about being desperately, desperately hurt was when, towards the end of her life, the other sisters all. I mean, she was. Somebody asked her at one point whether having so many sisters had been a help in warding off life's cruel Circumstances. And she said, well, sisters were life's cruel circumstances and they were always falling in and out with each other. But there was this point towards the end of her life when she cooperated with a biographer of Unity, the other sisters wouldn't. And the other sisters, surviving sisters, accused her of stealing a family scrapbook and they all, as a body, turned on her. And that was the only time where she really expressed the sense of terrible emotional loss and was quite open about the fact that she was completely traumatized by it. Something that she never said about the loss of the children or anything else, or indeed the fact that she broke off all relations with her father or her father broke them off with her. I mean, for many years before his death, there was no communication. But that didn't trigger the same sense of absolute desperation that the sisters all turning on her over this scrapbook, which, of course is typical of many families. It's always some small thing, relatively small. And then, very interestingly, the scrapbook turns up again and it turns up exactly where it is always supposed to have been, at Chatsworth Debo Devonshire's house. And Debo writes a letter to Decca saying, oh, you know, it's all fine now, we found it, but you can tell it's not fine. That went very, very deep.

23:19

Yeah, because it wasn't really about the scrapbook at all. So the scrapbook being found doesn't.

25:59

No. Well, those family things never are, are they?

26:03

No, quite so finding the scrapbook doesn't help because it wasn't actually the problem.

26:06

No, because it was never the point. And it's the moment when, because they were baffled the others about why she should be so interested in what they thought of as politics and why she should have. There was quite a feeling in the rest of the family that, you know, what's wrong with Decca? You know, she's had this lovely life, wonderful family, every opportunity. Why can't she just be content sort of marching about the fact that she cut her hair short and wore trousers and as Debo said, when she went over to see her about in America, she said she does the accent. I mean, most appalling, which you can imagine. Of course, Decca ramped up her Americanness, just as when she was dealing with difficult Americans, she ramped up her upper class Englishness. But no, in that way, she was the outlier. And to be the outlier in a family with Unity Mitford in it is quite something.

26:09

And that question, we've already mentioned that her closeness to Unity and some of it seems quite surprising in the way that politically they were so far apart. And yet she was the one, in some ways she seemed fondest of, if fond, as a word you can use, of the Mitfords.

27:04

Oh, I think so. I think she was devoted to Unity. And partly it's because they were the closest in age, so that was a bond when they were little. And also, of course, all extremists have more in common with other extremists than non extremists. So I think whether you were extreme fascist or an extreme communist, you could understand extremism and each other. And that's one of the things that Daca said. She was the only one who shared my absolute dissatisfaction and who obviously was equally determined to do something radical with her life and in her life. And then, of course, for all the awfulness of Unity's behavior, and indeed, people who wrote memoirs afterwards, who'd been fascists themselves, said she was awful. She just sort of screamed and made everything worse. She wasn't. I mean, Decca, who took great trouble to educate herself and read very widely in American political history and things, you know, she didn't know any German history, anything like that. She was just devoted to the Fuhrer. But her failed suicide and then this very pathetic last few years, and dying in her 30s as a result of this, I think, meningitis because of the bullet wound, I think. I don't know. I don't know. But I feel that the fact that Decca was so absolutely implacable about Diana, there was to be no reconciliation with Diana. Perhaps she just transferred some of what she couldn't express about Unity to Diana, because Diana was never remotely. I mean, there were people like me, old enough to remember Diana Mosley on Desert Island Discs, not being. Sorry.

27:19

Yeah, in a way, that Diana got away with being a fascist, being one of the. Well, one of the, I suppose, two leading English fascists during the 30s. And then there she is on Desert Island Discs, instead of being sort of ostracized to the remotest corners of wherever she's. Whereas Unity very much did pay for it.

29:01

Yes. And I mean, one of the things, however bonkers and maddening that the Mitford sisters are at times, you can't say that they didn't take their ideals seriously and that they weren't prepared to suffer for them. They weren't prepared to shoot themselves and go to prison. And Jessica managed not to go to prison in America, but it was a very close run thing. I mean, this is through Civil rights movement, through the McCarthyite years, and she was in Some ways. And she was very aware of the fact that she was in a lucky situation because she and Bob had work, they had a reasonable house, but it was a time of tremendous suspicion. They didn't have a right to passports, for example, because of their known associations. They eventually got passports because somebody made a mistake and they managed to get out of the country and go to Hungary via Britain before anybody was able to stop them. But they were under constant surveillance and any kind of interaction with any sort of authority, like if you have to get your child registered at school or something, the wrong answer to a certain question would lead to being reported. And Decca was more than once up on charges of communist sympathies at a time when, I mean, one of her lesson, I mean, in Britain she's known for puns and rebels and the American way of death, but she wrote a very workmanlike but successful book about the trial of Dr. Spock. And this people, perhaps in Britain haven't noticed so much, but Dr. Spock, whose famous manual on childcare, this was very much part of the international image of America in the post war years. All very kind of well organized and squeaky clean. And Spock's manual, I mean, children, babies all over the world were brought up on Dr. Spock's manual for Child rearing. But he was had up and tried in 68 for his opposition to the Vietnam War. And Decca went to the trial she took. She was incredibly hard working and because she was resented very understandably not having had a proper education because girls in those families weren't educated properly. But I think one of her superpowers was the fact that she was an autodidact. So she took everything very seriously and she worked really hard and she didn't make any assumptions about what she knew. And she covered that trial, taking notes and she said even by the end of the trial, she never found out where the bathroom was in the courthouse because she never had time to go. And she wrote up her notes every night and she produced this account at a very critical moment.

29:20

Yeah. And I mean, another case that she campaigned on, which she talked about in the piece is that was a man called Willie McGee, who is a black man who was accused of rape and very quickly convicted on inadequate evidence. And, you know, there were lynching attempts and eventually, you know, his execution by electric chair was broadcast live on the radio, which is.

32:00

It's just horrendous, just really horrible. And also the fact that through those years, well, it is still the case with, as we know in America, People are on death row for 20 years or something. This endless toing and froing. And the Jim Crow laws were in place, and Decca and her husband were busily campaigning to get justice for black people. But then, of course, there's another episode which again, I think Carla Kaplan handles very well because of all the things that Decca didn't talk about. There was one very traumatic episode that she talked about a lot, but in a very contradictory way, that on one occasion she was going to a meeting, a political meeting, and she was attacked by a young black man. And in her sort of, most of her accounts of it, Bob, her husband, who was going to the same meeting, comes along, hears the struggle and rescues her. But it seems unlikely that that's actually what happened. What seems to have happened is that he actually raped her. And although she went to a doctor, she didn't go to a lawyer because her whole position was trying to defend black men from false accusations by women of rape. And it was a kind of horrible, ironic position for her to be in. But she's just said that. Well, she didn't say. Kaplan deduces that she felt that she could not put herself in that position of charging a black man with something which was a capital offense. And so the story comes round and round with variations, and towards the end of her life, she told someone that that's what had happened.

32:19

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting you say. I mean, I don't know if this is paraphrasing Kaplan or if it's your thought, but you suggest that she may have felt that an involvement in feminism would be self indulgent, too much like doing something for herself.

34:03

Well, that's not what Kaplan says. I mean, she raises all these questions about. Decca was great friends with many prominent feminists, and latterly, early on, Virginia Durr was a great friend of hers. And latterly, Maya Angelou was very close to her, but she was always very dismissive of feminism and it's not clear why. So it's my suggestion, I don't know. But partly, as Captain says, you know, she wasn't just. She just says, actually almost in passing, she wasn't very sexual. And she certainly, you know, all this silly fuss about rape, she would make rape jokes. And that went with the very Mitfordian upper class, not making a fuss, not mentioning anything. And also, of course, the kind of feminism that was going on later in her life in the 60s and 70s, there was a lot of introspection involved and she certainly wasn't one for that. So I Don't know. I don't know. I mean, I think, as I say, there was a kind of emotional, psychological, long sightedness. It was easier to see the injustice being done to someone quite unlike yourself than to see, see what was happening right under your nose.

34:16

And you mentioned that they did manage to get passports because someone made a mistake and they went to Hungary in 1955. So that was just the year before the uprising, the Soviet invasion of 1956. And they, like many people, left the Communist Party as a consequence of that.

35:29

Yes, I mean, they came back from Hungary filled with enthusiasm because of course they'd been shown very carefully a very positive side of Hungary. And there were, there was at that time, I mean, obviously there was a great freeing up which was what was suppressed after the uprising. And. Yes, but they didn't, unlike other people who hung on, shall we say, they just left. They saw that that was not the way forward for them or indeed a way that forward that they could square with their conscience. And they remained quite sort of Decca especially, I suppose, quite kind of free range in their activities. They were not easy to corral. And there are some wonderful moments in the book, like Decca driving Josephine Baker to state penitentiary to visit somebody. And also Johnny Cash who of course famously made this great donation to the prisoners after his famous concerts and it turned out, surprise, surprise, that the money hadn't gone to the prisoners. And Decca sorted that out for him and made sure that. So there were lots of kind of flashes of glamour. And it is a moot point, I think, whether if she hadn't been Jessica Mitford, whether she would have achieved so much or been so much recognized in the American civil rights movement. I mean, she occasionally gets fed up because she's asked to do a book signing or do a talk or something. And Bob, her lawyer husband, isn't asked and she says, well, he's much more qualified, there's more his thing. But she still retains the Mitford aura. And of course, you know, she's a glamorous, she's a glamorous English aristocrat, but she went through various different careers. And Kaplan says wonderfully, she says, you know, she was great at reinventing herself, but her superpower was the pivot. And she managed always to kind of whatever she was doing as she got to the end of it, she pivots into the next thing. And by the time towards the end of her career where she was teaching, she's managed to be super cool by being so uncool. She's still, she's Got her kind of shingled hair and her big handbag and her double knit, very dowdy suits. But fashion has revolved all the way around and now this looks pretty cool again to the students. But the final disaster, I suppose, in her life was when she realized that, well, he told her, Bob told her that he'd been having a very long affair with a friend of theirs and he had now broken the affair off. But they were going to stay together on the condition that she didn't bring it up. And I think again, Captain's very good on why that. I mean, obviously it would be a grave blow for anyone. But that was Decca's among the sisters who all had unhappy love affairs or I mean, Nancy was always chasing this very unromantic French colonel who she romanticized madly, who was married and when his wife died, he promptly married somebody else. Debo had learned to put up with the fact that dukes tend to have mistresses and so on, and her. And of course Diana had been divorced. But Decca had this very solid marriage. And of course the sisters were very spiteful about the fact that Bob was Jewish. They were very, very spiteful about the fact that Constantia married someone of mixed race. But it was a very solid marriage until it wasn't.

35:45

Yeah, you know, she left the Communist Party in 1958 and then her two most famous books, Hans and Rebels and the American Way of Death, came out quite soon after that. So was that one of her pivots was to writing books once the Communist Party was no longer there to take up her time, as it were.

39:18

I'm not sure that those things were causally related but it may well have been that something became unblocked and Hans and Rebels, after all, was her. It was her turn to tell the story. And she was a very accomplished writer and she'd begun to be quite a practiced journalist. Of course, all the others hate it, her account of the family. And Nancy is really rather patronizing about it because I think Nancy, who by this stage had her own reputation as a writer as rather her nose was rather out of joint by the very fact of Decca writing. And then of course, nobody likes anybody else's account of their life and their family. And then there was the American way of death which when Daca's mother, Sidney did come out to visit and there were things that she wanted to see. She wanted to see supermarket and she wanted to see an American funeral parlor. And Sidney's absolutely astounded reaction to the goings on of American undertakers prompted Decca to think that she might do an expose of the American funeral industry. I mean she was. The thing about Decca was wherever she was she always saw an opportunity for activism. When she was in hospital having Constancia there was an insufficient regularity of. She insisted on being in a public ward but there was an insufficient supply of bedpans so she organized a pee in in the women's ward and they all just wet the beds until they got the bedpans they required. And when it came to looking at the American funeral industry and realizing there's most tremendous rip off and exploitation of people at a very vulnerable moment in their life she embarked on an expose and did it again very clever about how she could present herself. So she would turn up in the offices of American funeral directors looking slightly vague and wispy, middle aged lady, a bit upset, big handbag and a little notebook and they really, really walked straight into that. And so it was a very good book. And also, I mean everything she wrote they were all very witty. I mean at one stage somebody in London much to everyone's. And all the sisters and isput on an operetta about the Mitfords which one of them I think it was probably Debo described as La Triviata because it was just so annoying. I think Decca's writing I think is one of the areas where she rather perhaps underestimated herself. I mean she wrote to get a point across, to do something with her writing. She regarded it as I think very instrumental rather than Nancy who saw herself in a literary sense as a writer but perhaps, I mean, I think in many ways Decca slightly underrated herself and.

39:37

The question of the relationships with her sisters again and also her glamour to younger generations that Christopher Hitchens who, I mean he interviewed her at the New York Public Library and I suppose they were friends of a kind and he once wrote in the lrb that he'd asked her about when she'd last. When she'd last seen Diana to which she apparently replied I bowed a bit icily to Diana at dear Nancy's funeral but otherwise it's been utter non speakers since at least Munich. And that's, you know, the heavenly Jessica Mitford as Hitchens described it. Except that isn't. That isn't quite right, is it? I mean it's according to Captain's biography that it wasn't at Nancy's funeral but it was at Nancy's deathbed that they saw each other.

42:41

Yes, yes. I mean there were these poignant moments of. Of re meeting and they did the last time that they were all together after their mother's death was at Nancy's deathbed. And Nancy Mitford's last letters are agonizing to read because she was in terrible pain. And again, the very English, not particularly aristocratic, but very English thing that you couldn't tell someone that they were dying and you had to be very careful with how much morphine you gave them in case you overdosed them. And Decca actually managed to lie to the nurses and by her own account, she upped the morphine dose and speeded Nancy's end and said it was the only thing she felt she'd done for her. But she writes that she was moved by seeing Diana again, who was very beautiful and she sort of aged like a sculpture. She looks older, but just very beautiful. And there was a sort of stirring of affection because they. I mean, inevitably in a family, however badly you fall out, there are things, especially as you get older and parents have died, there are things and memories that no one else on earth has except for you. And so there was that sort of momentary stirring, but no, I mean, she was in plaque and their mother, while she was alive, had to keep. Had to keep avoiding the question from Decca about whether she was in touch with Diana or not. And one of the things that I think comes out very well from the biography is that Sidney, their mother, Lady Redesdale, was much more flexible and imaginative with her daughters and kind, really, very kind than perhaps one would imagine. I mean, she put up with Decca. I mean, she remained certainly very right wing indeed and of course very grand, and has to ask Decca when they're writing to each other, you know, what is a trade union? And Deco saying, would you be awfully kind and ring up the Daily Worker and find out if there are any demonstrations going on? And she very gamely does this. And there's also a very funny moment when Constancia the daughter, writes to Granny Muff, as Lady Ruidsdale has known, a very bread and butter sort of birthday letter, but says at the end, would you like to come and see us? And puts the address. And Sidney sends a telegram immediately saying that she's coming. Everyone's totally horrified. And Decca says, well, you know, wouldn't it be against Communist Party etiquette for her to be talking to somebody like her mother? And the Communist Party very disobligingly says, no, no, if it's your mot, it's totally fine. And Sidney is very game, unlike Debo, who when she comes over, has to stay in a hotel and is completely horrified by everything Sidney just mucks in and does, as I say, come across as a much more attractive person than one might have imagined.

43:30

And is that sort of more attractively than she comes across in. In Haunted and rebels in Jessica's own description of her?

46:49

Yes. I mean, but I mean, I think your child. Everybody's childhood memory of their parents, even if their parents are not as bonkers as the Reedsdales, is slightly caricatured. You don't really see them as actual humans, they're just your parents. And so, yes, Marv is not the complicated three dimensional figure that she becomes in this biography.

46:56

Yeah. And then it was the episode of the scrapbook that you've already described that happened after Nancy had died. So Nancy wasn't one of the sisters involved in that argument.

47:24

No, she wasn't. But of course what happened because of their fame and because of Decca living on, was that like a kind of tidal wave behind her, the next generation of the Mitford industry is coming along. And Nancy's letters were edited and published by her niece, Charlotte Mosley. And so in that, Decca had this very upsetting experience of seeing what they'd all been saying about her. And so Nancy continues to sort of haunt her after her death. And it just. It seems as if she can never escape because Nancy is, of course, wonderfully articulate and wonderfully sharp and is responding to the other sisters saying, you know, how absolutely ghastly Decca's life is and how, you know. And in the end, Debo says, you know, she's had a tragic life. Well, it's very obvious from this biography that she didn't have a tragic life. There was a life in which tragic events occurred, as in many lives. But actually of them all, I think she. Well, she and Debo are the ones who perhaps made the most of their lives in very different ways. And Kaplan gives you this very good sense of a woman who managed to live her life. I mean, towards the end, yes, she wasn't very well. Yes, she did slightly take to the bottle. There's a wonderful. They would always say, witty, there's a very good letter when she's got. Her granddaughter's marriage has broken down, she's got the grandchildren staying with her, and she said, there's so much noise, I can hardly hear myself drink. By that stage, she was drinking quite a lot, but. And the marriage had its difficulties and so on and so on, but. So you get a very strong sense of a life that was really fully lived all the way through to the end. And it's a marvelous biography, even if you're not remotely interested in the Mitfords per se. It's a really wonderful account of a life.

47:39

And there's this amazing letter that she wrote, wrote to her husband that she was dying and sleeping downstairs. And she wrote a letter to her husband upstairs in which she says, it is so odd to be dying. I must just jot a few thoughts. I've so enjoyed life with you and that's. Yes, it's not bad.

49:45

It's very touching. It's very touching and. And at the same time, very dignified.

50:06

Rosemary Hill, thank you very much.

50:12

Thank you.

50:14

You can read Rosemary's piece in the fit of February issue of the lrb, along with Adam Schatz's winter lecture on Visions of America, Daisy Hay on Edmund Burke and Charles Fox, and me on Suetonius Lives of the Caesars, and you can listen to the first episode of Rosemary's series London Revisited on Roman London on the LRB's Close Readings podcast. The LRB podcast is produced by Anthony Wilkes and Zoe Kilbourne. The music is by Kieran Brunt. I'm Thomas Jones. Thank you for listening.

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