by Leslie Brody
Before leaving California, Decca and Pele had discussed the possibility of Pele’s designing the cover for her book, whenever it might be published. In early June, Decca reported back to the artist in California:James MacGibbon was absolutely amazed to hear that you had been commissioned to do the cover. He says this is unparalleled in the history of publishing (getting an outside artist) and specially in the history of Gollancz, as they have a definite and immutable cover style from which they’ve never been known to vary—title in big block letters, usually black on yellow. So he’s terribly impressed, both with you for doing one they liked and with me for having the temerity to put it over on them. I note they have upped the price to 15 gns. (45$) so I do hope you’ll go right ahead with it.
There were a few loose ends. First was the sticky subject of a title. She had wanted to call her book My Life & Red Times, then settled on Red Sheep. However, Red Sheep was entirely too ambiguous for the publishers. (The sheep in this case being of the wayward variety, as opposed to its more pejorative sister metaphor, lemming.) She parried with Revolting Daughters, but Gollancz settled on Hons and Rebels. It was not a popular choice. Her mother hated it so “violently,” that she wrote to Gollancz to object. Decca worried that emphasizing the aristocratic element more than the leftist one might make it seem too much like a Nancy Mitford production (“cashing in on her stuff”).
Finally, there was one more section that still had to be written, “the knotty last chapter.” The Treuhafts would spend the next month in France, where Benjy and Bob would enjoy a Riviera vacation while Decca would focus on writing an ending to her life before California. This would be both fanfare and valedictory address (but not an elegy) to “set the record straight.”
IN JULY 1959, Decca traveled to Bormes-les-Mimosas with Bob and Benjy. Decca had looked for a place in the South of France to make her final revisions and found the perfect writing retreat by “assiduously avoiding following Nancy’s advice,” which would have directed her to the more fashionable parts of the Riviera. Instead, in her Michelin Guide, she found the Hôtel Paradis on a street called Mont de Roses. The village of Borme-les-Mimosas, about a twenty-minute walk uphill from the hotel, dates back to the Renaissance. Its homes, perched on narrow, hilly slate streets, are still mostly made of stone or stucco faded yellow or gold-green, and with rust or pink or rose tiled roofs. Hydrangea, oleander, and pineapple palms, and plane trees fill the plazas; scarlet, rose, and purple bougainvillea drapes the stone terraces and springs from the many window boxes along the road that winds up to a chateau at the crest of the hill.
In the guesthouse where the Treuhafts stayed, starfish, fishing nets, and tridents decorated the walls. Decca was happy there. Her hosts were so kind and “all mad about Benj.” They couldn’t do enough to help her write her book, screening off the salon for her exclusive use and providing her with a typing table and desk. Madame had even surprised her with fresh sardines for dinner the very day she’d mentioned how she’d enjoyed them on previous visits to France.
Every day, Benjy and Bob would leave for the beach and Decca would settle down to write. She had been on the Mediterranean twenty years before with Esmond and pregnant with Julia when she’d first tasted those grilled sardines. In the quiet, the distant past and the recent past all came back. Esmond and Julia had both been gone almost two decades. She had absorbed it. Unity had died, and her father, and Nanny, all blows. And then in 1955, Nicholas’s death had come as close as anything ever would to breaking her. But here they were in the Hôtel Paradis, she, Bob, and Benjy (whose suffering at his older brother’s death had worried her the most). If some ghosts rose up to threaten, she learned how to suppress them. Her job was to shape this story her way, without soggy sentimentality. She might have felt supersensitive, perhaps seeing and feeling things more intensely; naturally she sometimes felt “gloomy about it,” but never for too long. “Life here is even-keelish to say the least,” she wrote to her friends the Kahns.
I get up pretty early (7:30) and stagger up to the terrace for café complet. Then return to our cottage, a private abode in the garden, to start work. Bob and Benj gradually wake up and go down to the beach, about 3 miles away, in our rented car. They bring back lovely salady things and pate for a picnic lunch, also a bottle of wine. By after lunch I am too tight from the wine to settle back to work for a while, so a nap is had. Then an hour or so of work, followed by the evening treat of an apéritif in a cafe near the beach before dinner. Doesn’t it sound rather peaceful and even constructive?
After a couple of weeks, Bob returned to his law practice in California. By July 9, the end of Decca’s work was in sight, and on July 10, she was able to say in a joint letter to Bob and Dinky: “THE BOOK IS FINISHED! I could scream with joy. Isn’t it amazing, I was so terrified it wouldn’t be done before time to go—or ever, for that matter—then suddenly everything fell into place and the last chapter is DONE . . . Oh how hard I wish you were both here to celebrate.”
CHAPTER 22
OVER THE PREVIOUS two years, Decca had been busy nearly every day with her memoir. By January 1960, the book was in her publisher’s hands, and she was restless and impatient. She craved a wider audience, to be remarked upon and influential. Such vicissitudes were still, for the moment, outside her control. Her reputation would be, for the near future, up to strangers, taste-makers, unknown reviewers, and that mysterious “word of mouth.” She longed to hear her friends’ and family’s responses, and felt especially anxious to know what Virginia Durr and Philip Toynbee would think of her portrait of Esmond. Sister Nancy had with characteristic sangfroid requested that Gollancz show her the page proofs, which they had refused to do. “Don’t you think that is one hell of a nerve? Honestly she is the living limit,” Decca wrote Dinky, who was then in her second year at Sarah Lawrence.
Dinky had returned to Sarah Lawrence, hoping things might improve. Generationally, she wasn’t alone in her malaise; the mood at the college remained resistant and slow to change. But elsewhere, the allure of the sophisticated tier of the “silent generation” (which had made a virtue of eschewing public passion) had begun to seem old-fashioned and unrewarding to a new class of students finding its voice, in universities and colleges across the nation.
Decca’s customary advice, “hard work . . . in contrast, for instance, to too much self-examination,” wasn’t the tonic to revive her daughter. As Dinky’s letters home became briefer, Decca thought anything worth a try—even introspection. “Darling Dinkydonk,” she wrote, One is only really inwardly comfortable, so to speak, after one’s life has assumed some sort of shape. Not just a routine, like studying or a job or being a housewife, but something more complete than all those, which would include goals set by oneself and a circle of life-time type friends. I think this is one of the hardest things to achieve, in fact often just trying doesn’t achieve it but rather it seems to develop almost by accident. (Clear as mud, dear, sorry, but I’m not very good at explaining all this. I do feel there’s some truth to it however.) Usually I don’t think one comes by all this at a very young age. Even after one has, all may be knocked out of shape, so one has to start over again to some extent—which happened to a lot of us when the Party and CRC etc. folded, and some of us . . . went through a lot of suffering perhaps a bit like what you are going through now.
Decca’s letter arrived at the end of January, just as Dinky felt she was “treading water—waiting for something to happen” to give her a raison d’être. Within weeks, something did. On February 1, 1960, four black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter. To Dinky and her friends, this event produced the radiant sense that their future wasn’t yet written. The change might not come immediately, but here were new signposts that their generation had a part to play, and heroes to lead them.
In March 1960, Hons and Rebels was published in the United States (retitled for its American audience as Daughters and Rebels). Decca received a compliment
ary letter from Virginia Durr. The People’s Daily World review embraced her for being “in the good company of those who have been investigated by our state Un-American Committee for her consistent devotion to the progress of mankind.” When the highly anticipated letter from Nancy finally arrived, it was brief and subtle. “I think it’s awfully good—easy to read & very funny in parts. A slightly cold wind to the heart perhaps—you don’t seem very fond of anybody, but I suppose the purpose is to make the Swinbrook world seem horrible, to explain why you ran away from it.” Decca deemed it a nice note, which could have been so much worse.
Nancy had more grievances, which she kept from Decca but rehearsed among her other correspondents. She didn’t think her sister’s book honest. Nancy considered it derivative and dependent on her own work. She wasn’t at all happy with the ad copy in the Observer that Hons and Rebels was “the real-life background to Nancy Mitford’s Pursuit of Love.” To Heywood Hill, Nancy said she thought Bob had “re written it or helped a good deal as it is his voice.”
To Evelyn Waugh, she confided a similar suspicion: “Clever of you to see the two voices. I am quite certain much of it was re-written by Treuhaft, who is a sharp little lawyer and who certainly made her write it in the first place. The words cash in are never off his lips. (I quite like him but oh Americans).”
Though she thought the book deeply flawed, Nancy unpredictably defended Decca against their other sisters, at least on literary terms. She said Decca probably didn’t mean to be “beastly” in her characterization of Derek Jackson, from whom Pam was amiably divorced. Jackson, a scientist who had been a daredevil flyer during the war, was, like all the Mitford brothers-in-law, an outsized character. In the book, Decca referred to Jackson, who spent some of his enormous fortune on racehorses, as a jockey. While the other sisters viewed this deliberate mischaracterization as virtual bomb-throwing class warfare, Nancy was amused. Such examples of selective recollection to Nancy were less important than the various sins of unoriginality, borrowing, and even secret collaboration.
The Mitford family circle had for the most part admired Nancy’s novels, which portrayed them as charming, a little daffy, but good-natured. If they hadn’t loved them earlier, they did particularly in contrast to Decca’s book, which seemed to be a product of nongranted license and overexposure. Decca and her family would read the reviews through different lenses. For instance, while Debo thought Lord Birkenhead’s Daily Telegraph review discerned the book’s “theme song” as dishonesty, Decca didn’t see that. She thought his review describing Hons and Rebels as a “shameless but most diverting book” was “much the best.”
As a writer, Decca was holding the reins to a carriage of skittering horses. While one side of her psyche was worrying about hurting her sisters and disturbed by her daughter’s ongoing depression, another side was dancing, leaping, and twirling in the attention and admiration. Far, far away in England, her family was vexed and chagrined. After a while, they would grow used to the book.
At forty, Decca was in demand for her accomplishment. She was granting interviews, being asked to lecture, and appearing on radio and television shows. Instead of simply recounting scandals of English aristocracy, as her hosts intended, she used these new opportunities to slam the FBI, HUAC, and the district attorney of Alameda County. Revenge was sweet. “I soon discovered that as a published author one could get away with almost anything,” she said. In New York, she enjoyed some of the perks of being a famous author, reuniting with old friends like Katharine Graham and traveling the writer’s interview circuit, where she was an ever-amiable celebrity always ready with a quip. She found that the American way of being interviewed went smoother when the event was preceded by a cocktail or two (or nine, as she reported in one letter to Pele). After a series of encounters with celebrity hosts like Dave Garroway, she took their measure: “all high-powered on the surface, but naive & pretty stupid right below the surface.”
At one authors’ luncheon in San Francisco, Decca was seated beside a well-heeled woman, her hostess for the occasion and a fan of her work. She had read Daughters and Rebels with such pleasure, her new fan gushed. Perhaps, since Decca lived across the bay, they might know some of the same people. The Coakleys, for instance? Decca would have relied on all her early training not to snort at the mention of Bob’s bête noir. By dessert and coffee, Decca had told her hostess of the time she had helped a Negro family buy a house on the Coakleys’ block, and how the Coakleys, refusing to accept integration in their own neighborhood, had quickly sold their home and moved away. Was that, Decca inquired, how a district attorney, elected to serve all the people, ought to behave?
“But my dear, don’t you think it’s more Kitty’s side of the family, than Frank’s?” her hostess asked.
“We are hardly on Kitty and Frank terms with them,” said Decca.
IT WAS SAN Francisco Chronicle Columnist Herb Caen who gave a suitable name to the influx of young fellow travelers following in the wake of the obscenity trial for Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. To the common Beat nomenclature, he added the latest popular suffix: Space had its Sputnik; Mad magazine had its nudniks; now San Francisco had beatniks, with their apparent political apathy and general “wiggly nihilism” (Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s term). In 1959, after the San Francisco police began staging “beatnik raids” in North Beach, the interests and attitudes of young rebels turned toward resistance and protest. Writing in Frontier Magazine, Ralph Tyler linked the raids in which “beards, sandals and interracial friendship were all treated as equal threats to the social fabric” to the radicalization of bohemians and beatniks previously apolitical.
That spring the House Committee on Un-American Activities announced that it would hold hearings again in San Francisco. The city had excellent food, beautiful scenery, and freewheeling mores—in all ways, the conventioneer’s ideal. For committee members and their supporters, the city also held a sufficiency of hospitable spectators to pack the courtroom seats, indignant Communists (and non-Communist unfriendlies) to parade and interrogate, and, perhaps most important, hungrily competitive newspapers and broadcasters. It was universally acknowledged that the committee had succeeded in doing what it had set out to do—destroy the American Communist party. Perhaps such triumph should have ensured HUAC’s position, but the members were realists and knew that to maintain funding and position, they had to keep Commie-hunting as front-page news.
Maybe it was timing, maybe people thought they had better ways to spend their money, or maybe it was boredom. But whatever it was, the increasing number of editorials, political cartoons, and satires in the once unquestioning media proved that the value of the committee’s service had been supplanted by its unsavory reputation as outdated and self-serving. (One Herblock political cartoon lampooned an unnamed committee member at a fancy restaurant, plying a blonde with champagne, expense account notebook flapping from his pocket, and “Committee on Un-American Activities” stamped on the hem of his soiled jacket. In the caption, he slurs drunkenly to the reporter interrupting his tryst, “You trying to underm’ne the American way of life?”) Abolish the Committee organizations had sprung up around the country, including in Oakland, where Decca and her old friends on the left were joining young people in a new coalition for civil rights. On Saturdays, Decca walked a picket line to protest segregated lunch counters at Woolworth’s and Kresge’s. Her companions were “Old Lefties” and kids in SLATE, a nascent political party formed on the University of California’s Berkeley campus to provide “a meaningful alternative to the status quo.” SLATE’s engagement in “matters of national and international policy—housing discrimination, the H-bomb threat, apartheid in Africa . . . actively repudiated the apathetic-conformist-silent tag associated with their generation.” Decca credited the group’s emergence with “a new tolerance for unorthodoxy” on campus.
HUAC sent subpoenas to forty-eight people, including schoolteachers, librarians, and union members. Decca’s friend Laurent Frantz was subpoenaed, as was
labor leader Archie Brown and Douglas Wachter, an eighteen-year-old Berkeley student and SLATE member. Wachter’s outraged friends formed an ad hoc committee to defend his civil liberties, starting with a petition and leafleting campaign around campus. This particular group of students was not going to let the dead hand of the past determine their future or destroy their momentum as they had seen it do to the “Old Left.” They were informed, indignant, and unafraid. Even faculty members on campuses were beginning to speak publicly again after years of intimidating loyalty oaths. The university’s newspaper, the Daily Californian, published transcripts of past HUAC hearings, the contents of which seemed straight out of some square medieval kangaroo court. In a matter of days, over a thousand people signed the petition to support Wachter and to oppose HUAC.
It was Decca’s habit to bring her kids along to the hearings. This time, she took her goddaughter Kathy Kahn. They set out that morning without the white cards that functioned as seat reservations and entrance tickets to the courtroom. All witnesses and members of the court always received a few extra white cards for their friends and family, and there were usually a few of these circulating. Decca expected to sail inside as she always had. She was as surprised as anyone that first morning of the hearings, May 11, to discover that the courtroom was already full to capacity. Students from the University of California Berkeley and San Francisco State College had begun lining up outside the City Hall at around 7:00 A.M. to sit in the courtroom area designated for the public. By 9:00 A.M., when the hearings were set to begin, there were at least two hundred people in a line that snaked through the corridor, down the building’s steep steps.