Irrepressible (30 page)

Then, after just twelve weeks, Decca was fired. She’d held the job so briefly nobody really had to explain why she’d lost it. Her manager implied that she simply wasn’t qualified. She suspected someone had gone back through old issues of the
Chronicle
, where she’d been reported over the years as an “alleged” Communist or the “red lawyer’s wife.” Eventually, her union confirmed that an FBI agent had visited management. Decca had the proof she needed that her manager had lied to her, and yet, “there remained a haunting suspicion that possibly I really was unqualified, in which case what was to become of me?”

CAST ADRIFT AFTER the
Chronicle
debacle, Decca faced “the blank, awful feeling—at 38, with 40 coming straight along, there you are middle-aged . . . and with no future . . . a sort of dead end.” Money was again a constant worry. The incipient civil rights movement would take as much energy as she and her friends could provide, but as a community, they were all battle-fatigued (thanks in large part to the unstinting work of the FBI). Among themselves, they were sometimes punch-drunk, feeling a sense of being rudderless. It was in this giddy state that Decca wrote and, with some friends, assembled
Lifeitselfmanship; or, How to Become a Precisely-Because Man: An Investigation into Current L (or Left-Wing) Usage
. This, her first book, was directly influenced by an immensely popular essay her sister Nancy had recently published titled “U and Non-U Language.”

Nancy Mitford was living a soufflé of a life in France, wearing marvelous clothes amid beautiful furnishings, taking off for a few weeks to the Riviera, to Venice for carnival. She’d worked hard for what she had, and earned it all by her writing. Her early novels gained respectable readerships, but
The Pursuit of Love
and
Love in a Cold Climate
, both fictionalized versions of the Mitford sisters’ youth and family life, had become best sellers. They had affirmed her role as the aristocratic socialite “lady” novelist whose novels were frothy with just enough bite and whose biographies and histories were original, perceptive, and as amusing as her fiction. From her perch in Paris, she was positioned to weigh in on the debate in midfifties Britain on class and language.

In the background of Nancy Mitford’s essay “U and Non-U Language” and Decca’s contrasting piece
Lifeitselfmanship
is Alan S. C. Ross, a linguist at Birmingham University, who labored to elucidate the vocabulary employed by the English aristocracy around the mid-twentieth century. According to Ross’s thesis, the spoken English language in Great Britain could be divided into two categories: U, which was proper, upper-class usage, and non-U, which was employed by the rest of the population. For instance, while upper-class types would say “vegetables,” non-U speakers might say “greens.” “Cycle” is non-U for “bike,” and “rich,” non-U for “wealthy.” In September 1955, when Nancy Mitford launched Ross’s findings into the greater world, she added more vocabulary to Ross’s lexicon, and some attitude:

Another indicator: “Any sign of undue haste, in fact, is apt to be non-U, and I go so far as preferring, except for business letters, not to use air mail.”

Decca had the same speech patterns, the same original vocabulary. She too had been bred to an innate U-ness, but by then had spent two decades repudiating those U codes, sometimes even wrangling them to her benefit. She recognized how funny the miscues between the English and Americans could be. Despite the somewhat rarified atmosphere of her Communist fellowship, she still lived in America. Her kids went to public schools, she shopped in supermarkets, watched American TV (not yet commonly broadcast in England), read American newspapers, understood California dreaming and the American way of life. She understood the texture of the protocol and social values of the U world in England. If she could just figure out why anyone would care, she was in a unique position to explain these contrasts and to translate the language of each for the other. She looked around again at the piles of laundry and unwashed dishes and wondered how to mine this raw metaphor.

Decca borrowed her title from the book by Stephen Potter,
One-Upmanship: Being Some Account of the Activities and Teaching of the Lifemanship Correspondence College of One-Upness and Gameslifemastery
, which Bob had read on the boat to Europe. After Nancy’s essay on “U and Non-U” was published in the United States, the
New Yorker
magazine picked up the thread, publishing a series of letters about quirky diction and syntactical oddities, which amused and inspired Decca. In her essay, she intended “a great send-up of the obscure, convoluted language of the Left,” and mocked the verbose, official patois of its bureaucracy.
Lifeitselfmanship
functioned as a glossary of a dying language (Marxism in America), as had Nancy’s lexicon of aristocratica. The essays of each sister were tongue-in-cheek with just enough sincerity to make them resonate among their
populations, students of the form, or curious outsiders (i.e., government agents in America and social climbers in England).

Among Decca’s friends and comrades, her booklet was deemed an immediate, hilarious success. It featured the artist Pele deLappe’s “Thurberish” illustrations, inflated Marxist rhetoric, and mock-studious matching quizzes. For instance, “What does one do with cadres?” Decca wrote. “One develops them, trains them and boldly promotes them, poor things.” Asked, “How do contradictions get started?” she answers, “They either
stem from
or
flow out
of situations. Sometimes
roots of problems
stem from
contradictions
, a botanical anomaly.”

Over two days, Decca and friends mimeographed and stapled together five hundred copies priced at fifty cents each. Decca turned all her considerable organizational abilities toward a promotional campaign. She sent copies to party members and the left-wing press. The project was framed as a benefit for the
People’s Daily World
, with all proceeds going to benefit the newspaper, although Marge thought the booklet was “welcomed as something that needed to be done.” Decca was still “a trifle apprehensive about its reception,” and she had a Plan B:

In October, she wrote to her mother: “The extraorder thing about
Lifeitselfmanship
is that the worst offenders love it best (some that is, there have also been a few violent reactions anti it).” In England,
Lifeitselfmanship
was positively reviewed in the
Observer
. Orders came from as far away as Australia. Benjy peddled copies on the local bus, and altogether, they sold over twenty-five hundred copies.

This was in contrast, of course, to her sister’s book
Noblesse Oblige
, which Decca presumed to be selling millions. However circumscribed, the
attention
Lifeitselfmanship
attracted gave Decca great satisfaction. She was making people laugh at the same time that they were taking her seriously. The most important response was Nancy’s, and although Decca had to wait for it by slow-boat mail (U-mail), it was a good one: “I’ve been
screaming
over your pamphlet it’s too lovely,” Nancy wrote.

Decca’s fortunes were changing. In further news from London, she discovered that she would indeed be inheriting money from the Romilly estate. Her first thought was to travel. The Treuhafts still had not been granted new documents, but a Supreme Court case in process contested the government’s right to withhold passports from its law-abiding citizens, regardless of their political beliefs. The Supreme Court had three new justices, so there was reason for cockeyed optimism.

Then, in late October 1956, Soviet forces crushed the Hungarian uprising, killing over thirty thousand people. Decca recognized that Stalinist repression had laid the groundwork for revolt. She acknowledged that the Hungarian revolt was “originated by workers and students with most justified grievances,” but at first her perceptions were colored by personal interests. Her Jewish relatives feared that an independent Hungary would be a fascist and anti-Semitic Hungary. They feared the rebels would be joined by fascists, and they wanted to believe that Russian forces entering Hungary did so to suppress a fascist coup. In 1956, opposing fascism, the enemy she’d been fighting since her youth, was still Decca’s primary political rationale. She realized how she had misjudged that geopolitical event, just as she had missed the nuance on their journey through Hungary the year before. In retrospect, she could imagine all too well the strains upon the Hungarians they had met. “One thing was dismally clear . . . Bob and I had entirely failed to perceive the widespread discontent that must have seethed beneath the surface.”

DECCA AND MANY of her friends viewed the Communist Party leadership in New York as a bunch of out-of-touch hard-liners whose enduring influence
gave the organization “something of the character of an ideological old folks’ home.” Leaders had not convened a national conference in seven years. Despite rank-and-file requests, they hadn’t called a national congress to address either the Hungarian revolt or the Khrushchev revelations—to look into the details of Stalin’s many atrocities and the horrors of the Gulag (which had rocked the U.S. party membership). To many members, the congress called for in February 1957 seemed promising, if not exactly the spring of reform.

There remained between five thousand and twenty thousand active American Communist Party members (only the FBI knew for sure). The California contingent to the New York convention elected Decca Treuhaft as one of its four delegates. She was delighted to escape the routine and eager to argue their reform position, which looked to her to be poised for success.

Decca arrived on the East Coast—like many Californians who experience winter only occasionally—with inadequate outer clothes. When a snowstorm threatened, Aranka insisted her daughter-in-law borrow her own mink coat against the cold. Although Decca cared not a whit for the judgmental looks of proletariat fashionistas, the heavy press coverage and phalanx of FBI agents surrounding the Communist Party Congress moved her to camouflage. In a nearby subway stop, she folded Aranka’s fur coat into a carrier bag and covered it with newspapers. This, no doubt to the accompaniment of unsolicited assistance and commentary provided by observant New Yorkers:
You’ll never get it in that paper bag . . . you’re covering that with a New York Herald Tribune?
. . .
You want ink on your beautiful fur?
Trimmed down to her California frock, bulky paper bag, pocketbook, and briefcase, Decca ran through the snow to the meeting.

The congress, like others of its ilk, opened with a few agitated speeches between endless procedural meetings, while the real meat-and-potato debates were scheduled for prime time. During the day, friends wandered off for reunions, drank coffee, caught up on gossip, and updated the various scandals. Right away, Decca discovered that
Lifeitselfmanship
had made her a minor celebrity. She “thrilled to the praise of comrades from all around the country.” This general goodwill toward Decca was a notable exception in the increasingly poisonous and polarized atmosphere. Once the real business of the congress got under way, the two main factions faced off. The California delegation and their supporters opposed the New York-based Old Guard, who defended the Stalinist hard line and status quo.