What might the modern progressive learn from Jessica Mitford? This intriguing question is posed by Troublemaker, a new biography of the writer known to friends and family more simply as “Decca”. (And if you’re struggling to remember which blonde, blue-eyed Mitford sister is which, just think of an aristo version of the Spice Girls. Nancy is Novelist Spice; Diana is Fash Spice; Pamela is Boring; Unity is Nazi; Decca is Communist; and Debo is Duchess-of-Devonshire Spice. Perhaps needless to say, they are all Posh.)
What Decca herself called the “Mitford industry” — an endless stream of books about the fascinating sisters — is still going strong, and anyone entering the scene needs a fresh angle. In the last few months alone, there’s been a collection of Mitford murder mysteries, a graphic novel, and a biography of “Muv”, aka family matriarch Lady Redesdale. The new biographer of the second-youngest Mitford is a Woman’s Studies Professor, Carla Kaplan; and she bravely opts for presenting her material as self-help for socialists. Her heroine is pictured as a model radical, rebelling against her fascist origin story. Or as Kaplan solemnly puts it in her introduction: “Those who seek to become good allies can learn a great deal from Decca’s ways of change.”
The premise is certainly entertaining. The Mitfords might even say it was extraorder, in their comically exaggerated, nursery-speak way. Perhaps in future it might be franchised for other family members too. Someone could write a book of tradwife inspiration based on Debo (marry alcoholic duke, inherit old castle, start making artisanal cheeses to pay for repairs); or of queer liberation, based on Pamela (be a devoted animal lover; eventually leave feckless bisexual husband for a Swiss-Italian horsewoman). There could even be a book of advice for Groypers based on Unity and Diana. But in the meantime, we have to make do with Troublemaker. It is a lot of fun — because the Mitfords are always fun, whatever else they are. But as a case study for contemporary progressives, it is not a wholly convincing read.
Kaplan tells us that, in moving from England to the States, Decca “transformed herself from isolated aristocrat into engaged, effective ally”. She did so “without the benefit of social media, affinity groups, or retreats” and “before widely circulated essays such as Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” or books such as Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist”. Just imagine. What Decca did possess, of course, is an elite contact list and a high-born English accent. This is presumably why, shortly after arriving in the US, she and her first husband Esmond Romilly almost immediately got offered a husband-and-wife column in the Washington Post. “It’s a distinct advantage to be English here,” Romilly noted. “That is if you continue repeating what a wonderful country America is.”
In the present, Decca surely would have been viewed with more suspicion by her comrades, if only for genetically induced guilt-by-association. Accusing your relatives of being literal Nazis may be overdone these days, but in Decca’s case it was perfectly true. And there would perhaps also have been less tolerance for the variable presence of her moral scruples. On the one hand, she was brave, determined, and effective in fighting injustice, working collaboratively with other communists and socialists in her new Californian home. On the other, stealing seems to have been her favourite form of economic redistribution, and not only from the rich. She took food from cafes, pilfered toiletries and household goods from kindly hosts and benefactors, and at one point snatched “a mattress from a nearby cabin” so she could get a comfortable night camping in a tent.
And she didn’t mind exploiting others’ labour either. During the war, she was employed as a typist at the Office of Price Administration, but couldn’t type, so — as she herself described it in her own memoir — she would wander into the typing pool and pretend to be a boss: “I want nine copies of this by noon, please, and be sure that it’s correctly proof-read.” Later, newly arrived in San Francisco with an inconvenient baby in tow, Decca persuaded her working-class landlady to babysit “and to charge her less than half the going rate”.
It’s not so clear, then, that Decca’s life functions as idealised woke inspo, for oblivious entitlement is never far enough away, even when she is poor. And she’s unlikely to win any posthumous awards for gentle parenting either. Going on honeymoon with her second husband, and faced with the problem of what to do with her two-year-old, the couple took a bus trip, “passing Constancia and her suitcase out the window to a family to whom they’d been given a letter of introduction”. And when her little boy had an inconvenient fever on the day of a house move, Decca simply deposited him at the hospital and rushed off, leaving the nurses “furious”. By the time Kaplan tells us that her subject was “never a helicopter parent”, the information is fairly superfluous. In 1953, she writes, Decca and her husband were both suddenly subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee for a week, and their children were “left to mostly fend for themselves”. What she doesn’t explain how anyone could tell the difference.
Thankfully, the biographer eventually drops the somewhat strained theme of progressive-flavoured canonisation, and the rest of the book unfolds as a standard issue cradle-to-grave romp. Much of the material is already covered elsewhere. Still, with a subject like this, you can’t really fail: an eccentric, jolly contrarian, improbably popping up like a posh “Where’s Wally?” character during seismic events in American 20th-century history.
For instance: a blazing row with Decca is the apparent reason for Churchill’s recorded bad mood in the White House on Christmas Day in 1941, or so Kaplan speculates. Twenty years later, she turns up in a church in Montgomery, Alabama, listening in solidarity to Martin Luther King preach while a white supremacist mob rages violently outside. Fast forward again, and her popular book about the funeral business, The American Way of Death, is the reason RFK rejects an expensive metal coffin sent for his brother in Dallas in favour of a cheaper one. And after Jonny Cash gives $10,000 to inmates at Folsom State Prison following his famous appearance there, it is Decca, doing investigative work on prison reform, who discovers that the donation had not been honoured, and who makes sure the inmates get the benefit.
There is certainly lots to admire about this life. Decca was staunchly anti-fascist, at a time when fascists were genuinely threatening; anti-racist, when racism really was systematic and institutional. In her work, she was clever, energetic, and irrepressibly droll, a combination which made her a highly effective activist-journalist — perhaps one of the very first. (“Objectivity: I’ve always had an objective,” she would joke, pouring scorn on “pathetic cabbages without opinions”.) Her comic talent is certainly something modern Leftists could usefully emulate. But whether she ever successfully managed what she called the “uphill work” of “escaping from the private Mitford cosmic joke… into the real world of activism, family, and writing” has never been clear to me; and especially not after reading Kaplan’s book.
For the psychological sources of Decca’s politics — first communism, then socialism — remain quite mysterious. It is never really explained why Left-wing thought originally gripped her, nor why it kept such a hold for the whole of her life. She clung to her communism for a while, even after Stalin’s atrocities were revealed. She stuck to her prison abolitionist stance even after a violent sexual assault by a stranger (which she also refused to report, as he was black).
Her relationship with communism doesn’t seem to have been an intellectual love affair. There are few references in the biography to Marxist ideas. And tender-hearted empathy for her fellow humans also seems unlikely. Kaplan notes that a close friend of Decca’s once remarked that she had “a tendency to laugh off one’s problems… not being sympathetic… it’s almost as if she would rather not get involved”.
“On the window of their shared bedroom, Unity carved swastikas with a diamond ring, while Decca carved hammers and sickles.”
What does seem clear is that Decca was “on fire about injustice” and could be intensely oppositional. In this last respect, she does not seem so very different to Unity, the obstreperous Hitler-loving sister to whom she was closest in childhood. Each was infatuated with a vague political ideal, initially neither knowing nor caring about the details. Each liked shocking their elders and causing trouble. Unity was going to join the British Union of Fascists, so Decca picked the communists to be different.
On the window of their shared bedroom, Unity carved swastikas with a diamond ring, while Decca carved hammers and sickles. Both put their adolescent fantasies into action: Unity running off to join Hitler, Decca going to “fight” the fascists in Spain, though she saw no action. Sisterly rivalries are weird and intense. If Unity had announced to the nursery that she loved Stalin first, might it all have been the other way round?
We are not going to get the answer from Decca herself. She hated introspection: “I don’t think I could ever take myself seriously enough to go grubbing about looking for my soul.” But maybe the real takeaway from Troublemaker is that political obsessions are often like this, no matter what their flavour. You can tell yourself it is simply because you are a noble, principled, Good Person. But maybe it is the expression of a secret personal struggle, one that began long before you even knew what politics were. Maybe it’s a good way of formalising the separation from the herd of your siblings. Maybe you are just really attached to the image of yourself, reflected back in your family’s outraged blue eyes.
