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  Her natural leftward leanings were no doubt overstimulated by the “very lonely opposition” she recalled maintaining within her family’s feathered nest. That she was able to remain a Party member, well past Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing Stalin in 1956 and beyond the Soviet invasion of Hungary later that year, suggests a garish, surrogate penitence for the Mitfords’ Nazi sinnings. Her eventual resignation from the Party, in 1958, came about “not on any principled issue” but only because the CP had “got rather drab and useless.”

  A reader of her collected letters can only marvel at how such a lively spirit and instinctive debunker stayed so devoted to the commissars who kept plugging and torturing their way along in the USSR. Unity Mitford lasted several years in Nazi Germany before shooting herself when war broke out with England. It’s hard to imagine her mischievous sister surviving a month in Soviet Russia without being sent off somewhere cold for re-education. Mitford loved making fun of the Party’s American jargon and forever exhibited her difficulty with any form of piety or political correctness: “I should never have let you inveigle him to that Unitarian Sunday School,” she writes a friend in 1959, after her son has criticized her for generalizing about people. California’s Communist Party was known for being looser than other state affiliates, but Mitford’s joking still got her into trouble. And yet, at no point in her letters does she question the Party’s right to shun and chastise its members for the smallest deviations. Her ideological worst and self-mocking best are both on display, in annoyingly peaceful coexistence, in a letter written in 1958:

  Sat. night to Dobby’s, a long battle to the end over Dr. Zhivago (Pasternak) with Dobby taking the position the S. U. is completely justified [in ordering the book’s suppression], the rest of us agreeing with Laurent who pointed out that the Nobel Prize people baited a nice juicy trap for the S. U. into which they fell like a ton of bricks. Needless to say, no one had read the book …

  Most of her political activity was local, involving work for the East Bay Civil Rights Congress (CRC) on numerous cases of police brutality perpetrated by the Oakland police department. Despite subpoenas received and passports denied, Mitford sustained an overall feeling of comfort among Americans, whose “lack of bleakness” contrasted with so much of what remained back home in England. “Could it be,” she wrote her mother with some amazement in 1951, “that I am, after all, the only one who is really settled down, as they say?”

  Of all the sisters, she probably made the happiest marriage. Treuhaft, himself a fine wit, is “Darling Old Bob” in decades’ worth of salutations to her letters, whose domestic subject matter proceeds from pablum (“a kind of sawdust which they mix with water & feed to children here”) to housekeeping (four-year-old Dinky shows her how to clean the stove properly) to a phase in which the children are old enough to pass out leaflets and make do with sandwiches on days of heightened political activity. The Treuhafts’ worst sorrow—the death of their first son, run over by a bus in 1955—makes scant appearance in the letters; in Mitford’s memoirs she could not bear to write of it at all.

  Otherwise, death became her.

  Led to the subject by Treuhaft, who was doing legal work for a Bay area co-op promoting inexpensive burials, Mitford soon beheld the American funeral industry as a high-pressure game of grotesque profiteering, not to mention a paradise of macabre euphemism and fantastic technique: “If [the corpse] should be buck-toothed, his teeth are cleaned with Bon Ami and coated with colorless nail polish,” she wrote in what became the bestselling American Way of Death (1963). “His eyes, meanwhile, are closed with flesh-tinted eye caps and eye cement.”

  It all left her “roaring” (a favorite word). A muckraker had been born, one whose spirits would forever be as high as her dudgeon. Magazines began calling with story ideas, and she soon had “masses of things ½ cooking.” The tastiest results included her takedown of Elizabeth Arden’s exorbitantly ineffectual Maine Chance beauty spa in Arizona, and her assembled letters show that writing home was sometimes a way of making notes for her articles: “I have cased the visitors book,” she tells Treuhaft from Maine Chance in November of 1965. “Part of it reads like a list of products advertised in the daily press (Heinz, Ford, Fleishmann etc).” Retaining a sense of herself as a kind of lucky amateur, Mitford would always be surprised by her success in investigative journalism. She was particularly pleased when her 1970 exposé of the Famous Writers School, a mail-order fraud that had grown fat with promises to the aspirant scribbler, forced the operation out of business.

  The onetime revolutionary was actually a born meliorist, shining her gleeful light upon the venal and phony, even if she never again found quite so glorious a target as the funeral industry. Her largest other subject was the U.S. prison system, whose Advanced Han-Ball Tear Gas Grenade, seen by Mitford at a corrections convention, was a kind of counterpart to the embalmer’s Flextone preparation. But the prison book that she produced, Kind and Usual Punishment (1973), while full of fine stuff on matters like abusive medical experimentation, ends up feeling too much of a downer for the author’s natural talents. In The American Way of Death, the corpse, well out of it but all made up, seems often to be as amused as the reader; not so, of course, the wretched convict.

  The prologue to her memoir Daughters and Rebels includes the confession (odd in a memoirist) that “Looking backward is not much in my nature.” Even so, the second half of Mitford’s life was often spent coming to terms with the first. She traveled several times to Lady Redesdale’s home on Inch Kenneth, a Hebridean island in which Decca herself had received, from her only brother, a one-sixth share. (An attempt to donate her portion to the Communist Party of Great Britain proved unsuccessful.) By 1960, her gradual reconciliation with Muv had become a source of deep pleasure.

  Her sisters were a more intractable matter. Unity, who died in 1948 from the aftereffects of her suicide attempt, would come to Mitford in dreams that reflected Decca’s own enduring and horrified love: “well there’s no forgiveness possible (nor would it have been sought by that feckless, unregenerate soul).” In the 1970s, a willingness to help Unity’s biographer, David Pryce-Jones, get to the whole truth about his subject, nearly ended Mitford’s relationship with Debo, now the duchess of Devonshire.

  With Diana there had long since been nothing left to sunder. Mitford disliked not being on communicative terms—“writers” or “speakers”—with almost anyone, but at the close of a letter to Muv would send love to relations “with the usual exceptions.” She was prepared to go to great lengths to avoid seeing the Mosleys during a 1959 visit to Paris, where not only Nancy but Diana’s family would be: “We envisage scenes as in corny French bedroom farces, the Mosleys popping out of one room, down an oubliette, [the Treuhafts] hiding in the stove, etc. As I pointed out to Nancy, just their chosen place for us anyway.”

  Nancy Mitford—the most brilliant and personally cruel of the sisters—remained the one whose approval Decca most desired, the only one for whom she could become a “doormat” time and again. Lady Redesdale once pointed out that Nancy’s letters “usually contain a skillfully hidden dagger pointed straight at one’s heart,” but compared to Decca’s, the letters collected in Love from Nancy come across as grating little performances, falsely shrewd and oddly fluttering, self-congratulatory even when self-critical. The contentment they proclaim, over even Nancy’s long and manifestly unfulfilling affair with a married French colonel, isn’t the least bit convincing. If Decca, so badly teased and knocked off balance by her oldest sister, had been interested in the last laugh, she could have had it.

  Her own letters are so full of comic set pieces, vivid narrative and wonderfully replicated speech (a whole page of parodic Southern palaver written out during a 1961 visit to the Durrs) that one wonders why Mitford never tried writing a novel. Fear of imitating Nancy, already so successful in the genre, may have been a factor; Decca even worried that the British title of her first memoir, Hons and Rebels, might cause the older sister,
famous for her “U” and “non-U” speech distinctions, to “think it’s cashing in on her stuff.” One suspects, however, a more fundamental reason, namely, that the novel would have seemed too precious and artificial a form to such a lover of real-life rumpus and corrective action.

  Letter writing, by contrast, always retained its element of practical urgency, even as it allowed Mitford to roar and entertain and sketch verbal equivalents of the faces she liked to make at the lectern in front of flesh-and-blood crowds. If she sometimes overindulged tendencies toward the crude and the cute, these resulted only in small blots upon her contributions to a genre that was never—one has to remind oneself, Madame de Sévigné aside—designed for artistic perfection. Mitford’s letters are a smashing, buoyant accumulation; they ride what one hopes is not the last wave of a literary form soon to be as dead as one of her Flextoned corpses. During the fax’s brief moment between the post and e-mail, Mitford corresponded with Miss Manners over the etiquette governing the new machine and managed to adapt at least one old epistolary convention to the world’s new instantaneousness: “Yrs of 9:54 from Chatsworth just rec’d,” she informed Debo.

  Mitford preferred gadgets to greenery (“Nature, nature, how I hate yer”) and believed that keeping fit was only likely to prolong the miseries of whatever cancerous affliction got one in the end. Nursing homes would have been a marvelous subject for her, better than her late exploration of obstetrics; she described herself as going “from the Grave to the Cradle” with The American Way of Birth in 1992. She did, after a bad fall, give up drinking, but backslid from efforts to quit smoking, which included her husband’s attempt at aversion therapy: “Bob collected a ton of disgusting butts & ashes, & all I did was to breathe in deeply & say ‘HOW divine.’” Their marriage survived an affair of Treuhaft’s in the mid-1980s, and they soon returned to “all the old feelings of pleasantness & fun” between the two of them.

  As friends died off, Mitford realized that she missed the arrival of their letters more than the people themselves: “Oh for the writing on the env!” In the middle of the night, two weeks before she died, she wrote a splendidly matter-of-fact farewell to Treuhaft: “Bob—it’s so ODD to be dying, so I must just jot a few thoughts.” Those mostly concerned the good fortune they’d had together, but Mitford moved on to giving her husband some advice: “you’ll need someone—I mean you’ve got all those household skills, cooking etc., pity to waste don’t you agree? Be thinking of someone agreeable. You won’t have to as they’ll come flocking I bet. I do have some ideas but fear to mention for fear of annoying or being intrusive, none of my business you’ll say.” She concluded with an expression of avidity for the next simple thing: “By the way—do go to that film this evening [and] dinner … I long to hear all about it … Should be v. innaresting.” Once she was gone, on July 23, 1996, her cremation cost $475.

  Mitford assessed herself, accurately, as being “not a specially introspective type.” She “never felt ‘let down’” by anyone, and for all that she took to America, considered the “pursuit of happiness” to be “an absurd idea.” Nonetheless, she found it, in the knockabout company of enemies and friends alike. To those who had assured her that a week at Maine Chance spa would leave her feeling wonderful, she later reported: “As I always feel perfectly OK anyhow, I haven’t noted the difference.” A week spent with her letters makes everybody else seem a bore. One wonders how she stood it, and with such fine gusto.

  BUT WHAT OF THOSE who had Mitford’s nerve and still lacked money for the voyage of escape? Earlier emigrants from England, short even the price of steerage, ran into one of the crueler conundrums that face the penniless striver: it costs money to start alleviating one’s poverty. The enterprising poor of the nineteenth century needed someone to stake them toward a newer world, and in 1850, the Family Colonisation Loan Society set about raising money for just that purpose. Mrs. Caroline Chisholm (soon, alas, to be caricatured in Bleak House as Mrs. Jellyby) pressed Charles Dickens, that champion of the poor, into promoting the Society’s idea. She provided the novelist with emigrant success stories in the form of letters from Australia, hoping that, once Dickens worked them into an article for his new Household Words magazine, citizens would loosen their pursestrings to help more of the downtrodden find better lives away from home.

  In our own day, Dickens’s publicist might have given Mrs. Chisholm a slogan: AUSTRALIA—IT’S NOT JUST FOR CONVICTS ANYMORE! In the event, Dickens presented a brief selection of the letters with some supportive, if not quite impassioned, personal commentary. He imagined clusters of successful new Aussies reeling in poor souls who still suffered in smoky, overpopulated England. In one of the letters, a man from Sydney tells his brother: “Send me word in your next what progress you are making toward finding your way out here do not stop there to staarve [sic] for as bad as Sydney is no one that is willing to work need want.” Another writer marvels at how some ex-Londoners have taken to the farm-work Down Under more easily than emigrants from the English countryside have managed to. And yet, lest anyone think Australia a panacea, the writer informs his brother and sister that the drunkard wife who followed him here has not been able to mend her ways: “I gave her another trial and I expended about £20 but all to no purpose therefore I have left her about four months since.”

  The letters’ power comes in part, Dickens knows, from their originally having been “written for no eyes but those to which they were addressed.” Their unexpected second life gives a jolt to readers—the feeling of having blundered in on someone else’s private business—that not even Dickens’s novels can always provide.

  Half a century later, and half a world between England and Australia, a less powerful and famous voice put out her own call for emigration—of the pioneering, internal-American kind. “When I read of the hard times among the Denver poor,” writes Elinore Pruitt Stewart, from Wyoming, on January 23, 1913, “I feel like urging them every one to get out and file on land … To me, homesteading is the solution of all poverty’s problems, but I realize that temperament has much to do with success in any undertaking, and persons afraid of coyotes and work and loneliness had better let ranching alone.”

  She has found that ranching suits her own temperament down to the big open grassy ground. Raised in the Oklahoma Indian Territory and orphaned at fourteen, Elinore Pruitt Rupert moved to Denver in her early thirties, around 1908, with a baby daughter; scholarly opinion differs as to whether she was widowed or divorced from Harry Rupert. Either way, once in Denver she began fending for herself and her little girl, Jerrine, as a nurse and laundress. Then, in 1909, she took a job keeping house for Clyde Stewart in Burnt Fork, Wyoming, though what she really wanted to do was stake her own claim to some land close by his. Mr. Stewart seems to have been happy enough about that—even after their marriage, which took place shortly after Elinore’s arrival.

  Elinore Stewart imparts her adventures, most of them amusing, in letters to a Mrs. Coney, who had been one of her bosses back in Denver. In fact, she’ll sometimes sign herself “Your ex-Washlady,” with lighthearted pride in how far her gumption has now taken her. So keen is she on presenting her triumph that for some time she delays letting Mrs. Coney know about her marriage: “It was such an inconsistent thing to do that I was ashamed to tell you.” She would prefer to keep looking like the fearless single person she was when riding the stagecoach to Wyoming with a Mormon driver: He was “so handsome … I was not a bit offended when he insisted on making love all the way … But, of course, as I had no chaperone I looked very fierce (not that that was very difficult with the wind and mud as allies) and told him my actual opinion of Mormons in general and particular.”

  Once she files her claim, she presents herself as “a bloated landowner” whose new propertied status doesn’t save her from having to cut hay, milk seven cows and “put up thirty pints of jelly and the same amount of jam.” Still worried that her quick alliance with Mr. Stewart will make Mrs. Coney regard her as “a Becky Sharp of a pe
rson,” she reassures her correspondent with the news that “although I married in haste, I have no cause to repent. That is very fortunate because I have never had one bit of leisure to repent in.” So constant are the chores, at Mr. Stewart’s house and on her own piece of land, that she reports forgetting even to remove her apron before the justice of the peace began the wedding ceremony. Her husband—born in Pennsylvania, but quoted with a thick Scottish accent in the letters—is a fine fellow whom she won’t allow “to do anything toward improving my [own] place, for I want the fun and experience myself.” After a few years she can tell Mrs. Coney: “I have tried every kind of work this ranch affords, and I can do any of it.”

  Mrs. Stewart coats understandable self-regard with pleasing self-deprecation, and she knows the value of a little concealment too: “long ago I learned that the quickest way to get what I want is not to want it, outwardly, at least.” She usually does get what she wants, but her new contentment is hedged with risks and privations: “Out here where we can get no physician we have to dope ourselves,” and when both Mr. Stewart and Jerrine get the grippe, Elinore adds nursing to the rest of her tasks. “The magazines were much appreciated,” she writes Mrs. Coney. “They relieved some weary night-watches.”

  Still, she’s in no greater difficulty than her neighbors in this can-do, cooperative culture she’s joined. A reader learns how, in order to save a hired man from gangrene, her neighbor Mrs. O’Shaughnessy tricked him into putting “his finger on the chopping-block and before he could bat his eye she had chopped off the black, swollen finger.” Journeying toward a gathering of friends, Mr. and Mrs. Stewart and their companions reach a rock wall with the black-lettered legend: DICK FELL OFF THIS HERE CLIFT AND DIED. A snowslide then imperils the party, after they’ve gone twenty-five miles; they’ll be guided to safety by a bugler, a Mexican man who along with his wife offers them food and shelter. Such kindness requires no literary embellishment from Elinore: “Poor Carlota Juanita!” she writes. “Perhaps you think she was some slender, limpid-eyed, olive-cheeked beauty. She was fat and forty, but not fair.”