Irrepressible (31 page)

One of her group’s symbolic successes was its motion to change the location of party headquarters from New York to Chicago. This effort to further decentralize the party passed unanimously. Everyone knew it would take more than a motion to move the Old Guard, but when Eugene Dennis, a longtime leader (just out of federal prison after serving a sentence as one of the original Smith defendants), threw his weight behind reform, Decca believed the platform would prevail. She hadn’t considered the firepower that the aging leaders could bring to bear on their home turf. They defended themselves aggressively and at every meeting; every panel was fragmented with attacks, counterattacks, accusations, and denunciations. When it was clear that the confused membership could not agree on a new direction, several of the young reformers resigned, leaving the Old Guard in place. The New York leadership response to the subsequent avalanche of resignations was “good riddance.”

 

DECCA LEFT THE convention feeling resolved to quit the party. She had made a fair attempt, but her faction had been defeated. The party had become “stagnant, ineffective.” It was “a bore,” and “leaving was no great trauma, because the trauma had all come earlier.”

For fifteen years, the character of their comrades had been tested. Their friends had survived the worst of the McCarthyism and, for years afterward, still parried spies and bullies. Decca stayed in the party until 1957, after others had left, and after she and Bob had stopped believing in the usefulness of the organization. As long as the witch hunts continued, they hated to think that their old comrades might feel abandoned; some of these friends
had been in the underground with its odd tensions and abnormalities, some had endured prosecution and imprisonment. Many had shown gallantry and resourcefulness. “Despite all evident drawbacks, I can hardly imagine living in America in those days and
not
being a member.” She would gleefully refer to herself and Bob as “ex-menaces.”

She and Bob wouldn’t make a big deal out of quitting; they would just occupy themselves with other things and, in the eventual drift, find themselves far away. There would be no speeches, no grandstanding or repudiation of what had been a driving influence for over half her life. She was already sure she wanted to write more (perhaps repeat the success surrounding
Lifeitselfmanship
), and she was toying with a new subject. Her friends were always telling her to write down all those Mitford stories. Returning to England in 1955, she had felt the force of that atmosphere, but she needed a point of entry. During a forced sabbatical after the New York Congress, with no job and no long-term political project on the horizon, she began to go through some of the boxes of papers and souvenirs that had piled up over the years. She found a box of Esmond’s letters (a relief, since she’d feared them lost), read through them, then wrote nineteen pages of prologue at a white-hot speed.

Decca attacked the idea of a book with serious intent. But how serious a book, she had no idea. Why write another version of something that had been thoroughly covered in Nancy’s novels? As it turned out, it was the kind of thing she absolutely loved doing. How would she have ever known if she hadn’t plunged in? She’d wake up early and write at the kitchen table before anyone was awake in the “wonderful moment between 5:30 and 7:30, of total calm and quiet.” Once the kids left for school, she’d write until lunch-time. When she had some pages, she’d show them to a few select friends whom she called her book committee: First among these was Bob, then Marge, Pele and Steve Murdock (now Pele’s husband), and other friends Barbara Kahn, Betty Bacon, and Dorothy Neville.

She had begun, she thought, so that Dinky could have a better sense of her father. Early on in the process, she realized there was another reason.
She had appeared as a character in Nancy’s novels and in Philip Toynbee’s memoir
Friends Apart
. She had been sketched adroitly by both authors, but what Decca wanted was to tell her own story.

N
INE MONTHS AFTER she had begun researching and writing her book, Decca had typical writerly apprehensions and always the same money woes. She had begun sending portions of the book out to editors and publishers with little encouragement on the literary front and none financially. Then one happy day, the promised check from the Romilly estate arrived, around eleven thousand pounds. Decca deposited a couple thousand dollars into what she would call her “frittering account” to indulge her family and her friends, who never had any spare money. She bought clothes for Bob and the kids, a dress for Pele, and an embroidered blouse for Marge. She splurged on a cocktail dress at a fancy dress salon, whose saleslady advised her regarding accessories, “If I were you I wouldn’t wear any jewelry with it,” to which Decca replied, “That won’t be difficult at all.” For sixteen years, she had been squirreling away the veteran benefits she had received from the Canadian Air Force to pay for Dinky’s education, and now, she had fewer worries on that account for either child. She lent some money to the Durrs, for their daughter Tilla’s college tuition. Then she put aside a nice bit for her eventual return to England, whenever that might happen. Sooner than later, perhaps, since the judicial tide looked to be turning, thanks in part to Justice Hugo Black and the new, more liberal constituency of the rest of the Supreme Court (which would eventually overturn a raft of red-scare convictions). When a reporter for the London
Evening Standard
phoned Decca that fall to interview the “American” Mitford sister, the interviewer had been aghast to hear that Decca’s passport was still being withheld (as if that kind of barbaric behavior was something you heard about only in connection with the most repressive regimes or in the distant past). Decca had welcomed the publicity; any type of social pressure would help the Treuhafts recover their passports.

After dozens of rejections from publishers Decca took a break from her book and turned her hand to freelance writing. The form flowed with surprising ease. Her first article, about a man in San Francisco falsely accused of rape, was accepted by the
Nation
magazine and, after considerable editing, was published under the title “Trial by Headline.” Decca clearly identified with the vulnerable and despised outsider, whose life was scrutinized unnecessarily. (The theme—under the surface—speaks to Decca’s own sense of mistreatment at the hands of a press corps that whipped up so many false attacks during the red scare.) As it was Decca’s first magazine publication, she was “inordinately proud of it,” and the seventy-five dollars she received for her article signaled a turning point that encouraged her for the first time to call herself a writer.

ON MARCH 17, 1958, Decca’s father died at Redesdale Cottage, where he had been living with Margaret Wright since his separation from Muv. He had just turned eighty. By that time, Decca and Farve hadn’t seen one another for almost twenty years. His death came just at the time she was writing about him, and in her memoir, he is the father of her childhood, bigger than life, eccentric, idiosyncratic, and adored. Nancy had written about their father earlier, as the barely disguised “Uncle Mathew,” the father of the Radlett clan. A Farve-like character was central to her novels
The Pursuit of Love
and
Love in a Cold Climate
, and his various quirks and comments would show up in subsequent books. In a letter written in 1950, Nancy noted that their father had an unexpected new interest: He “thinks of literally nothing now but cocktail parties.” She added that quirk to Uncle Mathew’s character in her later novels alongside this elegiac characterization:

After Farve’s death, Decca was worried about how her mother would manage and offered one possibility: “I will gladly share my Fortune with you. I don’t seem to be using it up much though I did get some fairly nice clothes.” (Muv wouldn’t need Decca’s fortune; the Redesdale estate would provide for her.) Decca had lived on such a tight budget for so long that her mother and friends were glad to hear that she was using some of the Romilly money to take a road trip around Mexico with Benjy, aged eleven; Dinky, seventeen; and two of Dinky’s friends. The travelers would drive around in Decca’s DeSoto, then meet Bob in July. Their trip would be an exercise in freedom. Although they would be as closely observed as any other American tourists with a “fortune” to dispose of, they would escape the constant scrutiny of FBI agents. The “tor,” as they called it, was a great success. Dinky and friends became amateur mechanics as the DeSoto frequently broke down in areas without service stations. Young Benjy started to seem like a “gay blade or roué” to his amused mother when he spent the twenty dollars Aranka had given him as mad money on high-heel shoes for the hotel maids at Ciprés.

At the end of June, the travelers arrived in Mexico City to discover the news about Decca’s Redesdale inheritance. Her father had cut her entirely out of his will by adding the words “except Jessica” after each clause. She answered calls at her pension from newspapers in the United States and Canada once this “non-legacy,” as Decca called it, made international news. What was her reaction? the reporters wanted to know. She hadn’t been “expecting anything,” she replied. The FBI clipped several articles for Decca’s file, including this interview with the
San Francisco Examiner
: “It seems a hundred years ago,” she said. “My father and I disagreed. I was against HITLER. So I ran away to Spain and joined the Spanish Loyalists. He was pretty bitter about this and we’ve had no contact since.”

Mary Lovell, a Mitford biographer, thought Lord Redesdale “had never recovered from her attempt to hand over part of Inch Kenneth to ‘the Bolshies’ and was fearful that anything he left her would be given away.” Years later, in an interview, Decca summarized her feelings:

IN 1958, WHILE she continued writing, Decca also continued to mail her unfinished manuscript to editors and agents in the hope that someone might recognize its potential and give her the professional endorsement she longed for. Eventually, she found a writer’s agent willing to represent the book. Barthold Fles had a small agency with distinguished clients, many of them European leftists, including Heinrich Mann, Ignazio Silone, and Cedric Belfrage. (He also represented Anaïs Nin.) Fles asked Decca to assemble the typical nonfiction proposal package of “two chapters and an outline.” He also discouraged her from showing her manuscript around anymore before it was finished. To Fles, it was “like parading around in your underwear.” Bob and the agent agreed. “To prove the point the other day,” Decca wrote to her daughter, who was in her first year at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, “Bob came in in his undershorts at breakfast time and I pointed out to him that he made me feel as though I were reading one of his briefs.”

The next greatest change in the Treuhafts’ daily life surrounded Bob’s increasing involvement with the Berkeley Co-Op and his appointment to a co-op committee investigating the formation of a low-cost funeral society. (Co-ops represented a counterculture perspective and spoke to those
discontented with orthodoxy or majority dominance. There were famous housing co-ops; later, food co-ops emerged. The funeral co-op was not a new idea, having had a successful run among immigrant groups earlier in the century.) In his work as a union lawyer, Bob had become suspicious of the way union death benefits almost inevitably covered the cost of a funeral, with little surplus. It seemed as if undertakers typically encouraged their vulnerable clients to exhaust their benefits on expensive funerals. A funeral society could offer an alternative service. A family would pay once for membership, and then the association could negotiate for less expensive burials.