Who Let the Dogs In? (46 page)

The news magazines invariably used to start profiles of Decca, “Born the daughter of an eccentric British peer . . .” as though she had done nothing else in her life. But it was a lulu of a life. To take it at a gallop, her eldest sister was the splendid comic novelist Nancy Mitford; her sister Diana married Sir Oswald Mosley, a leading British Fascist, and spent World War II in prison; her sister Unity fell in love with Hitler and shot herself at the outbreak of the war; her brother, Tom, was killed in Burma; her sister Pamela raised horses; and her sister Debo became the Duchess of Devonshire.

Decca Mitford sensibly decided to get out of the nest at an early age: She eloped with her cousin Esmond Romilly when she was nineteen and went off to fight for the Communists in the Spanish Civil War. Since both were scions of great families, a British destroyer was dispatched to bring them back. They married in France, but not until later:
quel scandale.

The Romillys immigrated to America in 1939, tended bar, sold stockings, what have you. All fodder for great stories later told by Decca. Romilly enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force (“I’ll probably find myself being commanded by one of your ghastly relations,” he observed) and was killed in action in 1941, leaving Decca with their baby daughter, Dinky. (So strong is the Mitford mania for nicknames that I never knew Dinky’s real name was Constancia until I read it in Decca’s obituary.) She went to work for the Office of Price Administration in Washington and moved in with those generous progressive Southern souls Clifford and Virginia Durr. Since Decca and Virginia both had the gift of making hardship into marvelous stories, tales of that household have become almost legendary.

In 1943, Decca married Robert Treuhaft, a calm, witty, radical, Harvard-trained lawyer. They were married for fifty-three years, and for fifty-three years she was in love with him. Thought he hung the moon, and all that other 1930s love-ballad stuff. Her dear friend Maya Angelou recalled, “My God, they had been married for two hundred years and every time she heard his car pull up in the driveway she’d say, ‘Bob’s here; it’s Bob!’ ”

Decca once said that she felt she had never really known her sister Nancy because she lived within an “armor of drollery.” Decca herself would make almost anything into a joke: When summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in San Francisco, she took the per diem expense check she got from the government and donated it to the Communist Party. She and her husband remained party members in Oakland, California, until 1958; their adventures are described in her political memoir,
A Fine Old Conflict.

A Decca story from the C.P. days: She had long since realized that fund-raisers and parties were part of “the struggle.” Some humorless party apparatchik had entrusted her with organizing a chicken dinner for the faithful, and was giving her instructions. When it came to procuring the main course, he wanted to direct Decca to politically correct poultry farmers. He looked left and looked right, apparently suspicious of FBI wiretaps. “There are certain comrades in—” he broke off. He scribbled a note and pushed it across his desk. “Petaluma,” it read. After further instruction, Decca said she had just one question. “Do you think the chickens should be—” she began. She looked left, looked right, checking for bugs, and scribbled, “broiled or fried?”

A not-so-funny Decca story: At the height of the McCarthy era, that great liberal Hubert H. Humphrey proposed that membership in the Communist Party be made a crime. Decca was trying to explain to Dinky, then eight, that all of them might be sent away to detention camp. “Camp?!” cried Dinky in delight, envisioning tennis and canoeing. Decca told it as a good story. Armored with drollery.

Decca Mitford was not fearless: She was brave. Much as she ridiculed those English public-school virtues, like spunk and pluck, she was herself guilty of one of them: She was gallant. Her gallantry was beyond simple courage. It sometimes takes courage to see injustice and then stand up and denounce it. Gallantry requires doing so without ever becoming bitter; gallantry requires humor and honor.

Decca and her friend Marge Frantz invented the “roar-o-meter” to measure how absurd the world could be. Much as she relished the world’s silliness, there is a true north in all her work—a passion for social justice and concern for those who are being beaten and battered.

I think some people who knew her only slightly assumed Decca Mitford glided through this world with the complete self-assurance that comes from an aristocratic background. She was not much given to regrets—I don’t think anyone ever heard her whine about anything, even though she lost two children and her first love—but she remained deeply aggrieved that she had never been allowed to have a formal education. Her mother, Lady Redesdale, reactionary even for her day, believed girls did not need school. To the end of her life, Decca earnestly made lists of books she thought she should have read and quizzed friends about what they were reading: Dinky says that when she was a child, her mother used to sail in to confront teachers and school administrators but later confessed she was terrified of them. The only time she remembers her mother being seriously angry with her was when she dropped out of Sarah Lawrence. Took Decca three days to get over it.

One of the best stories is about the time Decca was invited to become a distinguished professor at San Jose State University. She was deeply thrilled, but the position required her to take a loyalty oath. She refused to give the school her fingerprints, providing toe prints instead. A great and glorious uproar ensued, and, alas, it ended with her becoming, as she put it, “an extinguished professor.” She learned recently that plans were afoot at the University of California, Berkeley, to raise money for a chair in her name in investigative journalism. “I’m to be a chair, Bobby,” she marveled. “A chair.”

In her long life as a journalist-activist—interviewing prisoners, scouring the fringes of Oakland for her husband’s labor and civil rights cases, going to Mississippi, confronting police chiefs, taking on the medical profession—she never lost the sense that it was all a grand adventure. Shortly before her death, she said, “Well, I had a good run, didn’t I?”

August 1996

Erwin Knoll

T
HEY
CALLED FROM
Madison November 2 to tell me Erwin Knoll had died. That afternoon, when I went out to collect the mail, I found the familiar
Progressive
envelope with its familiar copy of the magazine and the familiar note from Erwin. As Johnny Faulk used to say, that jerked the stopper.

Such an un-farewell note: just one of Erwin’s kind, funny little verbal doodles and, for the first time ever, not a mention of my next deadline.

Knoll and I had a running joke: Ever since I’ve written a column for this magazine, I have been abysmal about deadlines. The first notice, the second notice, the telephoned plea from Madison, the this-time-we-really-mean-it call.

“Okay, okay, by four o’clock this afternoon, I promise.” But by four, the day is over, and the next morning is just as good, so what-the-hey! It’s always there by noon. Or so.

I told Erwin years ago, the most liberal thing about me is that I’m good at guilt and—except for newspaper columns, which I do on some kind of automatic pilot—the only way editors ever get pieces out of me is to guilt-trip me. Victor Navasky is a master at this. Erwin refused to play the game. Being an even better liberal than I, he was convinced he could get me to work by positive reinforcement alone. So every month came the wry note about how great the last column was, and by the way, here’s the next official deadline.

My boss, Liz Faulk, tapes Erwin’s notes to my computer screen when
The Progressive
’s deadline draws near. “What shall we do with this?” she asked about Erwin’s last note. “We don’t want to just put it in the files.”

“Save it,” say I, “and tape it to my computer screen with every new deadline date so Erwin can non-guilt-trip me from the grave. ‘Still useful, though dead.’ He’d love that.”

WHILE WE
were having a beer at the Cafe Montmartre in Madison in late October, I got stuck trying to explain my politics to some younger members of
The Progressive
staff.

“I don’t have an agenda, I don’t have a program,” I said. “I’m not a communist or a socialist. I guess I’m a left-libertarian and a populist, and I believe in the Bill of Rights the way some folks believe in the Bible. Hell. Erwin, do you have a political identity, I mean, can you describe yourself in programmatic terms?”

“Of course not,” said Erwin promptly. Erwin, the perfect anti-ideologue. What free mind would ever abandon its intellegence to someone else’s creed? “I have only two irreducible principles. One is nonviolence: I am a pacifist. I believe violence is never a solution. And the other is freedom of speech, the First Amendment.”

Sign me up for Erwin’s Party.

Adjectives never do as much as stories, I think. I can tell you Erwin Knoll was kind, gentle, thoughtful, and had an exceptionally large mind. It doesn’t mean near as much as telling real stories about him. Which he knew, too. The last evening we spent together, talking to young staffers on his magazine, was inspired by something Ben Sidran, the great jazz pianist from Madison, said about his tradition: that jazz is an art that has to be passed down by hand, for young musicians to just listen to the great recordings is not enough. They have to actually play with jazz musicians to get the sense of fun and improvisation.

Independent journalism in this country is likewise a rather endangered craft, or even art form, if you want to be pretentious. And it, too, has to be passed down from hand to hand. And so we sat there, the two of us, regaling the youngsters with tales of Izzy Stone and Andrew Kopkind, Bob Sherrill and Ronnie Dugger, Frosty Troy and William Brann.

If you are a younger journalist and no one ever tells you these stories, how are you to know that there’s another way to do it? A whole different tradition? That success is not becoming a talking-head celebrity, saying what everyone else says?

My own peculiar role at
The Progressive
is to provide regular instruction in the science of how to keep laughing, even though you’ve considered all the facts. And there never was such a magazine for making you consider all the facts as Erwin Knoll’s
Progressive.
And there was never anyone easier to make laugh than Erwin Knoll.

January 1995

Madonna

I
AM
WORRIED
about Madonna. Okay, actually I’m worried about Madonna and me. Because of this woman, I’m in danger of being consigned to premature Old Poophood.

On the subject of Madonna, I resemble the Senate Judiciary Committee—I just don’t get it. I achieve positively Bushian levels of not getting it.

I went along fine for quite a while with Madonna, feeling vaguely fond of her on the slender grounds that I understand her Fashion Statement. Although a lifelong fashion dropout, I have absorbed enough by reading
Harper’s Bazaar
while waiting at the dentist’s to have grasped that the purpose of fashion is to make A Statement. (My own modest Statement, discerned by true co-gnoscenti, is,
WOMAN WHO WEARS CLOTHES SO SHE WON’T BE NAKED
.) And Madonna’s Statement is as clear as a Hill Country spring. It is:
I’M A SLUT
! What’s more, it seems to be made with a great deal of energy and good cheer. I rather liked it.