Irrepressible (33 page)

Back in London, Decca and Bob visited their old friend Paul Robeson, whom Benjy and Decca had recently seen in the role of Othello at Stratford. In mid-May, the Treuhafts rented an apartment in the same building where W. E. B. DuBois and his wife, Shirley, lived. Over the past year, there had been a signal shift. Now DuBois and the Treuhafts all had their passports again. DuBois was ninety-one years old. “Can you believe it?” Decca wrote to Aranka. “And absolutely chipper, not a bit deaf, delightfully amusing and conversational. We took them out to dinner last night and he had a martini, wine and cigarettes along with us!”

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:

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.

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.”

O
VER 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,

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 complimentary 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.”